The Fallen Angel

was true to his word, and then some. Eli Lavon likened the treasure trove of intelligence to the discovery of a hill town from a previously unknown civilization. What made it all the more remarkable, he said, was that it had been supplied by a service that had always been profoundly hostile to Israel’s interests, even its very existence. “Perhaps we’re not alone after all,” he told the team over dinner that night. “If the Swiss can open their doors to us in our hour of need, anything is possible.”
    It seemed that David Girard, aka Daoud Ghandour, had popped up on the DAP’s internal radar not long after he was granted the bright red Swiss passport that allowed him to enter and leave the countries of the Middle East at will. Included in the material was the original memo from the chief of Onyx, Switzerland’s sophisticated electronic eavesdropping service, raising concerns about the phone and e-mail traffic of the Galleria Naxos, not to mention its financial transactions. The DAP was good enough to include the attached report, along with all subsequent updates from Onyx. When added to the intelligence already in the team’s possession, the material provided incontrovertible proof that Galleria Naxos had been little more than a fund-raising front for Hezbollah. Just as clear, however, was the link between the gallery and Carlo Marchese. The team was able to trace no fewer than fifty wire transfers that had flowed from David Girard, through the Lebanon Byzantine Bank, and eventually to accounts controlled by Carlo at the Vatican Bank. Here was the cordata that Gabriel had been looking for—the rope linking Carlo to the terrorists of Hezbollah. The Swiss had the proof all along. They simply didn’t possess the key to unlock the code.
    For the moment, however, Carlo was of secondary concern to the team, because with each passing day it became evident that David Girard had been involved in more than just fund-raising. There was the phone call he made, six months earlier, to a number in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon that the Office had linked to a local Hezbollah chieftain. And the one he made, two weeks after that, to a number in Cairo linked to one of the numerous Hezbollah cells that had taken root in chaotic postrevolutionary Egypt. And the two hundred thousand dollars he paid to a dealer of Thai antiquities in Bangkok, a hotbed of Hezbollah activity in Southeast Asia.
    “If I had to guess,” said Dina, “the late David Girard was a postman. He was using his job in the antiquities biz as cover to deliver secret mail to Hezbollah cells scattered around the world.”
    “So why would the Iranians want him dead?”
    “Maybe the mail he was carrying had something to do with the attack that’s coming. Or maybe . . .”
    “What, Dina?”
    “Maybe it had a Tehran postmark.”
    In the end, it was not Swiss high technology that would provide the answer, but a good old-fashioned surveillance photograph. Snapped with a concealed camera, it showed David Girard riding a streetcar in Zurich, apparently alone. For three days, it hung on a cluttered wall in Room 456C, more for decoration than anything else, until Dina passed by it on her way to the file rooms and froze suddenly in her tracks. Ripping the photo from the wall, she stared not at Girard but at the lightly bearded figure seated next to him. The man’s head was turned away from Girard, as were his powerfully built shoulders, and the sun streaming through the streetcar’s windows appeared to set fire to the crystal of the heavy dive watch he was wearing on his right wrist. As a result, it drew Dina’s eyes to the back of his hand, and it was then she noticed the bandage. “It’s him,” she whispered. “It’s none other than the devil himself.”
     
     
    They compared the photograph of the man on the Zurich streetcar to every known image they had of him in the library, but the computers said there was insufficient data to make a positive identification. Dina lifted her delicate chin resolutely and declared the computers mistaken. It was him; she was certain of it. She would stake her career on it. “Besides,” she added, “don’t look at the face. Look at the hand.” The hand that had been pierced by an Israeli round in Lebanon when he was helping to turn a ragtag bunch of Shiites into the world’s most formidable terrorist force. The hand that was drenched in blood. It was Massoud, she said. Massoud, the lucky one.
    And so Gabriel