The Fallen Angel

from the car requiring only eight. Now, alone in the Wannsee safe house, he listened as the team made the first vehicle change of the night and then watched the lights of their beacons streaking northward along the E51 Autobahn. Time was now a precious commodity. They needed every drop, every granule, they could find. A few seconds here and there could mean the difference between success and failure, between life and death. Gabriel could do nothing more. He had already set the city of his nightmares alight. Now all he could do was watch it burn.
    He sent a flash message to King Saul Boulevard confirming the first phase of the operation had gone as planned. Then he stepped outside and climbed into an Audi sedan. After driving past the haunted lakeside villa where the murder of his grandparents had been planned, he headed for the Autobahn. The Berlin police were still streaming toward the Europa Center. But for how long?
     
     
    On the top floor of the Hotel Adlon, Ari Shamron stood alone in his window, watching the blue police lights swirling beneath his feet. For the past several minutes, all had been streaking toward the same point in western Berlin. But at 8:36 p.m., he noticed a distinct change in the pattern. He didn’t bother to ask King Saul Boulevard for an explanation. The deception was over. Now it was a race for the border.

31
     
    BERLIN–NORTHERN DENMARK
     
    T HE I RANIAN L IBERATION A RMY , a previously unknown group dedicated to the overthrow of the country’s theocratic rulers, appeared for the first time on Western radar screens—or anywhere else, for that matter—late the following morning, when it claimed responsibility for the abduction of Massoud Rahimi, a senior Iranian intelligence agent based in the German capital of Berlin. It did so in a printed manifesto delivered clandestinely to the BBC in London, and on a Web site that popped up within hours of the abduction. Among its laundry list of demands were a cessation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the release of all those jailed for reasons of politics, religion, conscience, or sexuality. The mullahs had just seventy-two hours to comply; otherwise, the group vowed, it would grant Massoud the violent death he had given to so many innocent victims. As if to illustrate its seriousness, it posted a photo of the captive flanked by two men wearing balaclava helmets. Massoud was staring straight into the camera with his hands bound behind his back. His heavy face showed no signs of violence, though his eyes appeared somewhat groggy.
    The dramatic emergence of a new Iranian opposition movement caught many in the media by surprise, and during the first hours of the crisis, reporters in Europe and America were left with no choice but to speculate wildly as to the ILA’s origins and aims. Gradually, however, a portrait emerged of a small, tightly knit group of secular Iranian intellectuals and exiles who wished to drag their country from the Dark Ages into the modern world. By that evening, terrorism experts and foreign policy analysts on both sides of the Atlantic were talking about a new force that posed a clear threat to the Iranian regime’s grip on power. And not one realized that every shred of information they were imparting with such authority had been invented by a group of people working out of a basement office in Tel Aviv.
    A few of the better terrorism experts were familiar with the name Massoud Rahimi, while those old enough to recall the Iranian hostage crisis took a small measure of joy in his predicament. That was not the case, however, in Tehran, where the Iranians reacted with predictable fury. In an official statement, they denied the existence of a group called the Iranian Liberation Army, denied that Massoud Rahimi was an agent of Iranian intelligence, and denied he was in any way linked to terrorism. Furthermore, they accused Israel of creating the group out of whole cloth in order to cover up its involvement in the affair. The Israeli prime minister took to the floor of the Knesset to denounce the Iranian claims as the ravings of depraved zealots. Then he took a not-so-subtle poke at the Germans for allowing Massoud, a known murderer with the blood of hundreds of innocent people on his hands, to masquerade as a diplomatic functionary on German soil. The German chancellor called the remarks “unhelpful” and pleaded with the prime minister to take steps to lower the temperature. Privately, she told her