Page 61 of The Collector
“His father was a wealthy industrialist. Viktor chose journalism to atone for his father’s sins.”
They all four headed up the garden walk to the entrance of the villa. Ingrid opened the door to them and, kissing Katje’s cheek, drew her inside. The man she knew as Viktor Frankel waited in the drawing room. He was accompanied by a crumpled little figure who looked as though he was wearing all his clothing at once.
The little man averted his gaze as his companion rose slowly to his feet. His eyes were shockingly green. Katje hadn’t noticed that the other night when they were parked along the beach on Helnæs island. His accent, when at last he spoke, was no longer German. It was something vague and indistinct that Katje couldn’t place.
“Forgive me,” he began. “But I’m afraid I’ve misled you. My name isn’t Viktor Frankel, it’s Gabriel Allon. And my friends and I need your help.”
The name meant nothing to Katje. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
He explained.
“Are you sure he’s the one?”
“I have a feeling we’ll know the instant he walks through the door.”
Katje ran a hand through her magenta-colored hair. “But I don’t look like Rikke anymore.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Your friend Ingrid will take care of that.”
It was Katje who had given the police the photograph they used for the missing person bulletin. She had snapped it, quite on impulse, on the day she saw her sister for the last time. Rikke was standing in the entranceway of her apartment in Nørrebro. Her smile was artificial and did not extend to her eyes; she was clearly annoyed with the person behind the camera. That was the image that had been plasteredon billboards and lampposts around Denmark. That was how Katje recalled her sister’s face.
A printout of the photograph was adhered to the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. Ingrid returned Katje’s hair to its normal color, jet black, and trimmed it to the approximate style worn by her sister. Undoing the changes to her face required nothing more than removing her heavy eye makeup. Ten long years had passed, but the resemblance was startling nevertheless. She was the girl Magnus Larsen had spotted one night at Noma. The dead girl in Magnus Larsen’s past.
That evening the girl shared a pleasant meal with Ingrid and her friends from Israeli intelligence. Their quiet laughter and easy camaraderie stood in stark contrast to the mood at Magnus Larsen’s dinner table 450 kilometers to the north in the wealthy Copenhagen suburb of Hellerup. He worked late into the night and was up again at 4:00 a.m. for his usual morning workout. Five hours later he was seated comfortably aboard a chartered business jet, hurtling blindly toward his own undoing.
The protesters set out in a column from the Brandenburg Gate, led by the Swedish adolescent who was the new mascot of their movement. By the time they reached the Alexanderplatz, they were fifty thousand strong. The gods of oil and gas, their bank accounts swollen, their stock prices in the stratosphere, flowed past them in their petrol-powered limousines, unseeing. They were in the midst of the most profitable year in the history of their industry, a stroke of good fortune brought about by the war in not-so-distant Ukraine. As was often the case, human misery had been good for their bottom line.
The Americans came in force, the French in style. The Saudis worewestern garb, the British were cloaked in gray. There were Canadians and Brazilians, Mexicans and Iraqis, but not a single Russian. For the first time since the summit’s inception, there were no representatives from Russia’s state-owned oil and gas companies. All were in agreement the gathering was better off for it.
But admission was not limited to the giants of the industry like Chevron and Shell. There were also delegations from hundreds of oil services firms, the drillers and explorers and manufacturers of platforms and pipelines. And then there were the smallest fish in the sea, the advisory firms that marketed themselves as spotters of trends and solvers of problems—firms like LNT Consulting of Berlin, a boutique outfit that advised legacy oil producers on how to transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
Their delegation was three in number, confident in demeanor, and striking in appearance—a tall gray-eyed man of Russian heritage, a woman who might or might not have been an Arab, and a beautiful Dane named Eva Westergaard. She dazzled at the morning coffee, lit up the booths in the marketing pavilion, and was the only thing anyone was talking about after the opening remarks by Germany’s energy minister. “Westergaard,” she said, pressing a business card into the outstretched paw of the chrome-haired Exxonite who approached her after the speech. “Have a look at our website. Let us know if you think we can help.”
Lunch was served in the glassy atrium. While making her way down the buffet line, she passed within a meter or two of Magnus Larsen, the highly regarded CEO of DanskOil. Magnus, it seemed, was the only person in the room who hadn’t noticed her. He was engaged in an unpleasant conversation with the CEO of BP PLC, who was wondering why DanskOil hadn’t had the decency to walk away from its joint venture with RuzNeft.
“And spare me the drivel about your responsibilities to yourshareholders,” said the man from BP. “We lost twenty-five billion when we threw in the towel in Russia.”
“But you made out rather well on the deal, didn’t you, Roger? That was quite a bonus you gave yourself.”
“Sod off, Magnus.”
The highlight of the afternoon session was an altogether alarming speech on the global economic outlook by a former American treasury secretary. The team from LNT Consulting sat in the fifth row, two rows behind the CEO of DanskOil. At the conclusion of the program, they filed out of the auditorium and went their separate ways. The CEO of DanskOil headed off to a cocktail party at the historic Hotel Adlon; the team from LNT Consulting, to a stately villa overlooking the Branitzer Platz in the Berlin neighborhood known as Westend.
There they passed a quiet evening with the dead girl in the CEO’s past. And they debated once again how best to make their approach. The woman called Eva Westergaard renewed her request to do it at 2:00 p.m. at Lehmann Antiquarian on Fasanenstrasse. Her colleagues, however, insisted she adhere to the plan that they, with their many decades of operational experience, had put in place. The CEO would be pressed for time at the bookstore and no doubt distracted by the volume of Thomas Mann. The book signing following his remarks was the better bet.
And so the woman called Eva Westergaard spent the remainder of that evening reading the CEO’s most recent book, which, she had to admit, wasn’t half bad. It was in her handbag, pages flagged with sticky tabs, as she followed her colleagues into the Berlin Energy Summit at nine the following morning. She sat stone-faced through a panel discussion called “Oil as a Force for Global Change,” turned heads at the midmorning coffee, and listened with interest to a presentation regarding the efficacy of carbon capture.
Lunch commenced in the atrium at one o’clock. The chrome-haired Exxonite invited the woman to join him, but she dined with her colleagues from LNT Consulting instead. At approximately one fifteen, she excused herself and set off unaccompanied toward the restrooms. It was nearly half past when her two colleagues, both veteran intelligence operatives, realized their mistake. They immediately rang the stately villa in the Branitzer Platz and explained the situation.
“What do you mean, youlosther?”
“I mean she is not among those present. Missing without a trace.”
“She didn’t.”
“I think she did, boss.”
A series of frantic calls to her mobile phone received no answer, but at 2:04 p.m. her whereabouts became clear. Eli Lavon would later call it one of the sweetest recruitments he had heard in some time.
