The Fallen Angel

enemies. Besides, he said, no piece of video could capture the perfection of the maneuver. It was a piece of epic poetry, a fable to be told to successive generations by the glow of a desert campfire.
    It began with an almost imperceptible movement of two vehicles—one driven by Rimona, the other by Eli Lavon. Simultaneously, both slowed and moved slightly to the right, leaving Yossi a clear pathway to the rear bumper of the Mercedes. He took it with a twist of his throttle and within a few seconds was staring over the devil’s left shoulder. Carefully, he reached into his coat pocket and flipped the activation toggle on the magnetic grenade. Then he stared straight ahead and waited for the girl to step into the street.
    She was wearing a neon-green jacket with reflective stripes on the sleeves and pushing a bicycle with a lamp aglow on the handlebars. An hour earlier, she had been carrying the canvas rucksack that had caused so much distress in central Berlin. Now, as she entered a well-lit pedestrian crosswalk, limping slightly, she carried nothing but a false passport and a boundless hatred for the man riding in the backseat of the approaching Mercedes sedan.
    For an instant, they all feared that Massoud’s driver intended to use his diplomatic immunity to run her down. But finally, he slammed on the brakes, and the big black car came skidding to a halt amid a cloud of blue-gray smoke. Yossi swerved to his left to avoid the car’s rear bumper and then shouted a few obscenities through the driver’s-side window before covertly attaching the grenade inside the front wheel well. By now, the girl had safely reached the other side of the street. Massoud’s driver actually gave her a small wave of apology as he drove off. The girl accepted it with a smile, all the while moving away with what seemed to be inordinate haste.
    Six seconds later, the device exploded. Its carefully shaped and calibrated charge sent the entire force of the detonation inward, leaving no chance of collateral damage or casualties. Its bark was definitely worse than its bite, though the blast was powerful enough to shred the car’s left-front tire and blow open its hood. Now blinded and confused, the driver lurched the car instinctively to the right. It bounded over the curb and smashed through an iron fence before beaching itself in the Hagenplatz, a small triangle of green that the team affectionately referred to as Ice Cream Square.
    If the plan had a weakness, it was the bus shelter located a few feet away from the intersection. On that evening, five people waited there—an elderly German couple, two young men of Turkish descent, and a woman in her twenties who was so thin and pale she might have just stumbled from a building that had been bombed by the Allies. What they saw next appeared to be nothing more than an act of kindness carried out by three good Samaritans who just happened upon the scene. One of the men, a tall, slender motorcyclist, immediately rushed to the aid of the stricken driver—or so it seemed to the witnesses in the bus shelter. They did not notice, however, that the motorcyclist quickly removed a pistol from the driver’s shoulder holster. Nor did they notice that he injected a dose of powerful sedative into the driver’s left thigh.
    The other good Samaritans focused their attention on the man riding in the backseat of the Mercedes. Owing to the fact that he was not wearing a seat belt, he was left heavily dazed by the force of the collision. An injection of sedative worsened his condition, though the witnesses did not see that, either. What they would remember was the sight of the two men lifting the injured passenger from his ruined car and placing him tenderly in their own. Instantly, the car shot forward and turned left toward the wilds of the Grunewald—odd, since the nearest hospital was to the right. The motorcyclist followed, as did a Passat station wagon driven by a meek-looking soul who appeared oblivious to the entire episode. Later, when questioned by police, the witnesses would realize that the operation had been carried out in near silence. In fact, only one of the good Samaritans, a man with dark hair and pockmarks on his cheeks, had spoken to the injured passenger. “Come with us,” he had told him. “We will protect you from the Jews.”
     
     
    As Gabriel predicted, the snatch had taken less time than expected—just thirteen seconds from beginning to end, with the extraction of Massoud