Page 59 of The Collector
“Really? Who?”
“Magnus Larsen.”
30
Berlin
The villa overlooked the Branitzer Platz in the leafy Berlin neighborhood known as Westend. It was solid and stately and hidden behind a high wall overgrown with ivy. Inside, there were two large drawing rooms, a formal dining room, and four bedrooms. Housekeeping, the Office division that acquired and administered safe properties, had put it on ice for a rainy day. Gabriel, before leaving King Saul Boulevard, informed Housekeeping that there was wet weather in the forecast.
Dina Sarid arrived a few minutes after nine o’clock the following morning, having caught the early El Al flight from Ben Gurion to Brandenburg. Bleary-eyed, she went into the kitchen in search of coffee. Ingrid was leaning against the counter, mug in hand, scrolling through the headlines on her phone.
Dina pointed toward the empty decanter resting on the warmer of the Krups automatic. “You’re supposed to make a new pot.”
“Says who?” asked Ingrid without lifting her eyes from the screen.
“It’s proper safe house etiquette. Everyone knows that.”
Ingrid took down a bag of Tchibo from the cabinet and placed iton the counter. “Just add water to the top of the machine and push the little button.”
Mikhail and Natalie were routed through Frankfurt and arrived in the early afternoon. Eli Lavon, after spending three hours on the tarmac in Geneva because of a faulty cockpit light, finally showed up at six in the evening. He tossed his bag into the last remaining bedroom—not surprisingly, it was the smallest and darkest in the villa—and introduced himself to the new recruit.
“You must be Ingrid,” he said.
“I must be,” she replied.
“Gabriel tells me you’re rather good at what you do.”
“He says the same about you.”
“He’d like me to show you some of our methods.”
“Actually, I prefer to do things my way.”
Over a dinner of takeaway Thai, they got to know one another a little better. Gabriel shared a few details of the team’s many operations together, all unclassified, and hinted at the horrors they had witnessed and the dangers they had faced. He made it clear that they did not judge Ingrid for the life she had chosen. The nature of their work oftentimes required them to break laws themselves and to occasionally utilize the services of professional criminals, including thieves.
“You possess a set of skills that make you uniquely suited to the task at hand. But you are part of an operational team now. A team that has slipped into Berlin without alerting the host service. Therefore, you have to follow certain rules.”
“Such as?”
“You are never to leave the safe house alone or without telling us where you’re going. And you must never drink the last cup of coffee without making another pot. There are some things,” said Gabriel with a smile, “that are simply beyond the pale.”
Ingrid turned to Dina. “Can you ever forgive me?”
“Bring us Magnus Larsen,” replied Dina. “And I’ll think about it.”
He remained at DanskOil HQ in Copenhagen until half past seven that evening, with his compromised iPhone never far from reach. It was a chauffeur-driven ride of fifteen minutes up the Baltic coast to his home in exclusive Hellerup. The dogs were pleased to see him, but his wife, Karoline, scarcely acknowledged his arrival. Their strained dinner conversation required little translation on Ingrid’s part. All was not well in the Larsen marriage.
He worked late into the night and sent and received numerous emails and text messages. Only one was related to Russia, a guided missile directed at DanskOil’s VP for communications to formulate a new strategy for fending off public and political pressure to dissolve the RuzNeft deal. He turned in at midnight—without so much as a word to Karoline—and was up again at 4:00 a.m. for his morning exercise regime. Fifteen minutes on the treadmill. Fifteen minutes on the rowing machine. Fifteen minutes of weight training. Fifteen minutes of walking the dogs.
By eight o’clock he was back at DanskOil HQ, where his day unfolded in perfect fifteen-minute increments, scripted and timed by the industrious Nina Søndergaard. Shortly before lunch she presented Magnus with a draft itinerary for his upcoming trip to the Berlin Energy Summit. He would be arriving Tuesday morning and departing Thursday evening, with his remarks and book signing scheduled for Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. Like many of the attendees, he would be staying at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in the Potsdamer Platz. He would be dining with his fellow energy executives on both nights and planned to conduct twelve one-on-one side meetings, each lasting exactly fifteen minutes.
Not surprisingly, there was not a single spare minute in the entire document. There was, however, a personal errand that Magnusintended to run during his brief stay in Berlin—a visit to Lehmann Antiquarian on Fasanenstrasse at 2:00 p.m. Wednesday. A search of the CEO’s private email account revealed that Herr Lehmann had recently come across a rare first edition ofDeath in Venice and Other Storiesby Thomas Mann, Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. Near fine condition, original dust jacket, light restoration to the crown of the spine.
The venue for the summit was the Berlin Congress Center in the Alexanderplatz, in what was once East Berlin. The price of admission was five thousand euros, which granted patrons access to all speeches and panel discussions, as well as the marketing pavilion on the lower level, which was where the real work of any such gathering took place. Three partners from LNT Consulting, a newly formed company based in Berlin, were late registrants. Technology built the company’s website, and Identity saw to the business cards. Mikhail would be posing as the firm’s Russian-born CEO, Natalie as his trusted lieutenant. Ingrid’s credentials and business card identified her as Eva Westergaard. Eva handled the IT.
She was also a professional thief who needed to be brought to heel before she could be dispatched into the field with a team of intelligence operatives. They subjected her to a crash course in the basics of their tradecraft, a tradecraft that had been perfected on the secret battlefields of the Middle East and Europe and handed down from generation to generation. They taught her how to walk and how to sit, how to speak and when to keep her peace, when to hold back and when to move in for the kill. She responded by telling them that everything they had told her was useless or, worse, mistaken. And when Mikhail objected, she stole the watch off his wrist. Eli Lavon would later describe it as one of the sweetest pieces of misdirection and sleight of hand he had seen in some time.
Leaving nothing to chance, Gabriel forced Ingrid to sit through several hours of dress rehearsals with her two colleagues from LNT Consulting. Afterward Eli Lavon took her into the streets of Berlin for a bit of pavement work. She dropped him on Friedrichstrasse in five minutes flat. Then, in violation of Gabriel’s edict, she vanished for the remainder of the afternoon. When she finally returned to the safe house, she was clutching several shopping bags filled with new clothing.
