Page 53 of The Collector
“We think you should put her on a plane, boss.”
“Don’t worry, I intend to.”
The remaining rituals of his return to Office discipline were less contentious. The service doctors subjected him to a rigorous examination and, bullet wounds and fractured vertebrae notwithstanding, found him to be in remarkably good health. Identity supplied him with two new false passports—one Israeli, the other Canadian—and Technology gave him a new Solaris phone and a new laptop with the latest version of the Proteus hacking malware. Accounting did what it always did, which was implore him to hold down his operational expenses. He responded by giving Accounting a request for reimbursement for those expenses he had already incurred, and warned there was more to come.
Rimona offered him use of an empty office on the fifth floor, but to no one’s surprise he headed straight for Room 456C instead. Once a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out furniture, the windowless subterranean dungeon was now known throughout King Saul Boulevard only as Gabriel’s Lair. He arrived there to find Dina Sarid, the future head of Research, gazing at the chalkboard. It was covered with Gabriel’s impeccable script.
“I’m pretty good at spotting connections,” said Dina. “But I must admit, I’m totally stumped.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Who is Magnus Larsen?”
“The CEO of DanskOil.”
“And Lukas van Damme?”
“A former South African nuclear scientist who spent several years on our payroll.”
Dina placed a fingertip next to the name of the Russian president. “His name I recognize, of course. His, too.” It was the name of aDutch Golden Age painter from the town of Delft. “But how are they linked?”
“Is there any chance you can help me find the answer?”
“My plate is rather full at the moment.”
“But?”
Her dark eyes surveyed the names on the chalkboard. “Where should we begin?”
The headquartersof the Danish energy giant DanskOil was located in the Copenhagen district known as Frederiksstaden. The formidable building was among the most secure in Denmark—more secure, even, than most Danish government offices. Nevertheless, the company’s computer network was no match for the hackers of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence service. They slipped through the back door at dawn, and by midday they had the run of the place. Gabriel directed them toward the DanskOil–RuzNeft joint venture—and to the computer and telephones of the firm’s chief executive officer, Magnus Larsen.
It took nothing more than a simple Internet search, however, to produce a mountain of material on this most public of men. Magnus Larsen was a colossus, a titan, a setter of trends, a visionary. He was brilliant and erudite, he was impossibly handsome. In company promotional videos, he was a man of action, never in the boardroom, always astride a pipeline or atop a drilling platform. Magnus of the chiseled jaw and piercing blue eyes. Magnus of the windblown blond hair. There was nothing Magnus couldn’t do. There was no challenge Magnus hadn’t met.
When asked by a fawning journalist how he would describe himself, he replied, “A businessman with the soul of a poet.” A collector of rare books, he had somehow found time in his punishing scheduleto publish four of his own. His most recent,The Power of Tomorrow, had been a major Scandinavian bestseller and gave rise to speculation he might seek elective office. Magnus dismissed the chatter as laughable. He was above politics. He dwelled on a higher plane.
He was also extraordinarily rich. His most recent annual compensation package was the equivalent of $24 million. His sprawling home in Hellerup, Copenhagen’s most exclusive suburb, overlooked the Baltic Sea. His wife, Karoline, was a socialite and patron of the arts with a knack for getting her picture in the paper. His two boys, Thomas and Jeppe, were regarded as Denmark’s most eligible bachelors—and determined, it seemed, to stay that way.
He had his detractors, though, especially on the environmentally sensitive left. Publicly, he made appropriate noises about a warming planet and transitioning to renewable sources of energy. But in private settings he was known as a climate skeptic who joked about extracting every last drop of oil and gas from beneath Denmark’s territorial waters before it was too late. “A pipe dream” was how he described the Danish government’s much-heralded commitment to be carbon-neutral by 2050. “No pun intended.”
And then there were those who found fault with his seemingly inexplicable attraction to all things Russian. It was public knowledge that he spoke Russian fluently, that he was acquainted with the Russian president, and that he owned a large home in the moneyed Moscow suburb of Rublyovka, where he rubbed shoulders with the oligarchs and members of the Kremlin inner circle. Unlike most Western energy companies, which had unwound their Russian deals after the invasion of Ukraine, DanskOil had stubbornly refused to walk away from its joint venture with RuzNeft, which accounted for nearly a third of the company’s petroleum. Magnus claimed it was simply a question of the bottom line, that leaving Russia would resultin a $12 billion write-down. His detractors, however, wondered if there was something more.
He was known to be something of a fanatic when it came to his schedule, which was laid out for him in fifteen-minute intervals by his longtime personal assistant, Nina Søndergaard. Unit 8200 located the schedule on her computer, along with numbers for Magnus’s six mobile phones. His primary device was an iPhone. Gabriel attacked it with Proteus, and by midafternoon it was exporting the entirety of the data stored in its memory—emails, text messages, Internet browsing history, telephone metadata, GPS location data. It was also acting as both an audio and video transmitter, which allowed Gabriel and Dina to be remote participants in a meeting of DanskOil’s senior staff.
Like most modern executives, Magnus Larsen was a dedicated user of encrypted email and text message services—namely, ProtonMail and Signal. He was also something of a shutterbug. Gabriel found numerous snapshots of Moscow and the Russian countryside. There were also photos of Russian business elites and Kremlin celebrities taken in casual social settings. Mad Maxim Simonov, the nickel king of Russia. Oleg Lebedev, otherwise known as Mr. Aluminum. Yevgeny Nazarov, the Kremlin’s silver-tongued if mendacious spokesman. Arkady Akimov, the wildly wealthy oil trader who had recently fallen to his death from the window of an apartment on Baskov Lane in Saint Petersburg.
Gabriel likewise breached the mobile device of the late Copenhagen antiquarian book dealer Peter Nielsen, which produced a similar geyser of data. He appealed to Rimona for additional staff, and she reluctantly gave him Mikhail and his wife, Natalie Mizrahi, the only Western intelligence officer to have penetrated the insular ranks of the Islamic State. They were soon overwhelmed, however, by thearrival of nearly one hundred thousand pages of DanskOil files, leaving Gabriel no choice but to take emergency measures. He needed someone who knew how to read a balance sheet, how to distinguish a clean transaction from a dirty one, how to follow the money. It was for that reason, and many others, that he picked up his phone and called his old friend Eli Lavon.
No one was sure exactly when he arrived—or even how he managed to get into the building—but then that was his special talent. He was a ghost of a man, easily overlooked, soon forgotten. Ari Shamron once said of Lavon that he could disappear while shaking your hand. It was only a slight exaggeration.
Like Gabriel, Lavon was a veteran of Wrath of God, the secret Office operation to hunt down and assassinate the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, he had been anayin, a tracker and surveillance specialist. When the unit finally disbanded, Lavon was afflicted with numerous stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach. He settled in Vienna, where he opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets and played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland.
Against all better judgment, Lavon agreed to serve as chief of Neviot, the Office’s physical-and-electronic surveillance division, during the five operationally intense years of Gabriel’s term as director-general. And on the day of Gabriel’s retirement, Lavon had retired, too. An archaeologist by training, he had planned to spend the final years of his life sifting through the soil of Israel’s ancient past. “And now,” he said, lighting a cigarette in spite of his old friend’swell-known aversion to tobacco, “I am once again in this dreadful broom closet, staring at a mountain of documents.”
The woman responsible for Eli Lavon’s sudden recall to duty spent that day alone at Narkiss Street, as outsiders were strictly forbidden to enter King Saul Boulevard. During the next forty-eight hours, Gabriel saw little of her—a few minutes early in the morning, a few minutes late at night. He came and went from King Saul Boulevard as quietly as possible, but word of his return ricocheted through the building. Naturally, speculation abounded. Did he regret relinquishing the throne so soon? Was his chosen successor in trouble? Did she require his helping hand on the tiller? Was Shamron somehow involved?
Long ago, perhaps, when he recruited a wayward South African nuclear scientist named Lukas van Damme. Gabriel was convinced that the solution to the puzzle could be found somewhere in Van Damme’s past. Dina found evidence to support his hypothesis on the third day of their investigation, in the location data stored in Magnus Larsen’s phone—and in saved copies of his meticulous daily schedule. Evidently, Larsen had spent nearly a week in Johannesburg in August exploring the purchase by DanskOil of a South African mining company. He had flown there on a chartered aircraft and stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel. No other company executives had accompanied him.
Upon his return to Copenhagen, Magnus headed not for DanskOil headquarters but to Nielsen Antiquarian, where he remained for nearly two hours. Reason enough, thought Gabriel, to pull the CEO aside for an off-the-record chat. But where? Once again, they found the answer in Magnus’s schedule. It seemed the DanskOil CEO would attend the Berlin Energy Summit in ten days’ time. In fact, he was planning to deliver an address on Europe’s energy future in the post-Ukraine world, with a book signing to follow.
