“Give me your answer, Radek.”
“How can I trust you, a Jew, to live up to your end of the bargain?”
“Have you been readingDer Stürmer again? You’ll trust me because you have no other choice.”
“And what good will it do? Will it bring back even one person who died in this place?”
“No,” Gabriel conceded, “but the world will know the truth, and you’ll spend the last years of your life where you belong. Take the deal, Radek. Take it for your son. Think of it as one last escape.”
“It won’t stay secret forever. Someday, the truth of this affair will come out.”
“Eventually,” Gabriel said. “I suppose you can’t hide the truth forever.”
Radek’s head pivoted slowly around and he stared at Gabriel contemptuously. “If you were a real man, you’d do it yourself.” He managed a mocking smile. “As for the truth, no one cared while this place was in operation, and no one will care now.”
He turned and looked into the pit. Gabriel pocketed the Beretta and walked away. Oded, Zalman, and Navot stood motionless on the footpath behind him. Gabriel brushed past them without a word and headed down through the camp to the rail platform. Before turning into the trees, he paused briefly to look over his shoulder and saw Radek, clinging to the arm of Oded, rising slowly to his feet.
PART FOUR. THE PRISONER OF ABU KABIR
39 JAFFA, ISRAEL
THERE WAS CONSIDERABLE debate over where to put him. Lev thought him a security risk and wanted him kept permanently under Office care. Shamron, as usual, took the opposite position, if for no other reason than he did not want his beloved service in the business of running jails. The prime minister, only half-jokingly, suggested that Radek be force-marched into the Negev to be picked over by the scorpions and the vultures. It was Gabriel, eventually, who carried the day. The worst punishment for a man like Radek, Gabriel argued, was to be treated like a common criminal. They searched for a suitable place to lock him away and settled on a police detention facility, originally built by the British during the Mandate, in a seedy quarter of Jaffa still known by its Arab name, Abu Kabir.
A period of seventy-two hours passed before Radek’s capture was made public. The prime minister’s communiqué was terse and deliberately misleading. Great care was taken to avoid needlessly embarrassing the Austrians. Radek, the prime minister said, was discovered living under a false identity in an unspecified country. After a period of negotiation, he had consented to come to Israel voluntarily. Under the terms of the agreement, he would not face trial, since, under Israeli law, the only possible sentence was death. Instead he would remain under permanent administrative detention and would effectively “plead guilty” to his crimes against humanity by working with a team of historians at Yad Vashem and Hebrew University to produce a definitive history of Aktion 1005.
There was little fanfare and none of the excitement that accompanied news of Eichmann’s kidnapping. Indeed, word of Radek’s capture was overshadowed within hours by a suicide bomber who murdered twenty-five people in a Jerusalem market. Lev derived a certain crude satisfaction from the development, for it seemed to prove his point that the State had more important things to worry about than chasing down old Nazis. He began referring to the affair as “Shamron’s folly,” though he quickly found himself out of step with the rank and file of his own service. Within King Saul Boulevard, Radek’s capture seemed to rekindle old fires. Lev adjusted his stance to meet the prevailing mood, but it was too late. Everyone knew that Radek’s apprehension had been engineered by theMemuneh and Gabriel, and that Lev had tried to block it at every turn. Lev’s standing among the foot soldiers fell to dangerously low levels.
The half-hearted attempt to keep secret Radek’s Austrian identity was undone by the videotape of his arrival at Abu Kabir. The Vienna press quickly and correctly identified the prisoner as Ludwig Vogel, an Austrian businessman of some note. Did he truly agree to leave Vienna voluntarily? Or was he in fact kidnapped from his fortresslike home in the First District? In the days that followed, the newspapers were filled with speculative accounts of Vogel’s mystifying career and political connections. The press investigations strayed perilously close to Peter Metzler. Renate Hoffmann of the Coalition for a Better Austria called for an official inquiry into the affair and suggested that Radek may have been linked to the bombing of Wartime Claims and Inquiries and the mysterious death of an elderly Jew named Max Klein. Her demands fell largely on deaf ears. The bombing was the work of Islamic terrorists, the government said. And as for the unfortunate death of Max Klein, it was a suicide. Further investigation, said the minister of justice, was pointless.
The next chapter in the Radek affair would take place not in Vienna but in Paris, where a mossy former KGB man popped up on French television to suggest Radek was Moscow ’s man in Vienna. A former Stasi spymaster who’d become something of a literary sensation in the new Germany laid claim to Radek as well. Shamron first suspected the claims were part of a coordinated campaign of disinformation designed to inoculate the CIA from the Radek virus-which is exactly how he would have played it had he been in their shoes. Then he learned that inside the Agency, the suggestions that Radek may have been plying his trade on both sides of the street had caused something of a panic. Files were being hauled out of the deep freeze; a team of elderly Soviet hands was being hastily assembled. Shamron secretly reveled in the anxiety of his colleagues from Langley. Were it to turn out that Radek was a double agent, Shamron said, it would be profoundly just. Adrian Carter requested permission to put Radek under the lights when the Israeli historians were finished with him. Shamron promised to give the matter thorough consideration.
THE PRISONER OF Abu Kabir was largely oblivious to the storm swirling around him. His confinement was solitary, though not unduly harsh. He kept his cell and his clothing neat, he took food and complained little. His guards, though they longed to hate him, could not. He was a policeman at his core, and his jailors seemed to see something in him they recognized. He treated them courteously and was treated courteously in return. He was something of a curiosity. They had read about men like him at school, and they wandered past his cell at all hours just to have a look. Radek began to feel increasingly as though he were an exhibit in a museum.
He made only one request, that he be granted a newspaper each day so he could keep abreast of current affairs. The question was taken all the way to Shamron, who gave his consent, so long as it was an Israeli newspaper and not some German publication. Each morning, aJerusalem Post arrived with his breakfast tray. He usually skipped the stories about himself-they were largely inaccurate in any case-and turned straight to the foreign news section to read about developments in the Austrian election.
Moshe Rivlin paid Radek several visits to prepare for his upcoming testimony. It was decided that the sessions would be videotaped and broadcast nightly on Israeli television. Radek seemed to grow more agitated as the day of his first public appearance drew nearer. Rivlin quietly asked the chief of the detention facility to keep the prisoner under a suicide watch. A guard was posted in the corridor, just beyond the bars of Radek’s cell. Radek chafed under the added surveillance at first, but was soon glad for the company.
On the day before Radek’s testimony, Rivlin came one final time. They spent an hour together; Radek was preoccupied and, for the first time, largely uncooperative. Rivlin packed away his documents and notes and asked the guard to open the cell door.