The Devil's Banker

Chapter 17

To be alone was to stand out.

To be alone was to be vulnerable.

To be alone was to be a target.

He had left Athens an hour ago. The bustling, chaotic city lay behind him like the memory of a warm bed. The coast highway had narrowed to two lanes. He followed its undulant, graceful curves halfway up a steep mountainside. Whitewashed villages crouched among copses of pine and thistle to his left. The endless expanse of the Aegean spread to his right. The water was coursing with activity, ferries, tugs, and fishing boats scratching white trails across the azure surface. The bigger vessels, the cruise liners packed with sun-starved tourists, the supertankers that belonged to the scions of Onassis and Niarchos, the mile-long cargo ships loaded with the East’s bounty of cars, televisions, stereos, and computers, had docked at Piraeus. He was patrolling the old Greece, the territory of the partisans, the hills of Pan and Apollo, and the invasion route of the Huns.

For the moment, he saw no other cars on the highway. His rearview yawned empty. The road ahead beckoned, an untrammeled pathway to a glorious future. At the wheel of his sparkling gold BMW 750iL, he was just another transnational tourist trawling Europe’s unmatched highways. He drove the speed limit-no slower, no faster-though the muscular automobile begged to be given its reins, like a racehorse on an early morning run.

By now, the efforts to track him would have gathered a critical mass. He was sure they’d worked up a good story, something urgent, but hardly an emergency. Something along the lines of a Palestinian spy who’d escaped with some marginally important data about troop strength on the West Bank. They’d confine their inquiries to the local level. They liked to work quietly and would not wish to attract undue attention. If they contacted the state police, if the whole affair went federal, it would be only a matter of hours until the Americans started asking questions.

America: the world’s policeman.

Mordecai Kahn allowed himself a rare smile, a raspy, mean-spirited laugh.

There was no way the Americans could be allowed to know. Not about this.

The Unit would be in charge. They always got the messy stuff: the operations that were either too politically sensitive or too difficult to execute for anybody else. Their official name was Unit 269 of the Sayeret Matkal, or the general reconnaissance staff. They’d made their name at Entebbe and in Beirut. Their history was colored with the blood of their adversaries, rarely their own.

By now, they’d questioned his wife, searched his offices at school and the lab, grilled his coworkers, his secretaries, his teaching assistants. They’d braced the base security officer, Colonel Ephraim Bar-Gera, with a view toward how a theft of this magnitude could occur. There’d be no general’s stars for Ephraim. They’d checked and double-checked their sensors. They’d changed the codes. They’d convinced themselves it would never happen again.

But Kahn was by nature a cautious man, if not made paranoid by his work. He had no intention of being caught, or in fact, ever heard from again. He had taken care to modify his appearance. His skin was darker by three shades. His hair was dyed an inoffensive brown and his beard shaved off altogether. He wore a businessman’s natty suit and had even remembered to snip the stitching holding his jacket pockets closed. He was nothing if not detail-oriented. He liked the horn-rimmed glasses best: Alain Mikli of Paris, slim, stylish, sophisticated. Either they took ten years off his age or they made him look like a queer clerk, he wasn’t sure which. He was only sure that he looked nothing like Dr. Mordecai Kahn, of late distinguished professor of Physics at David Ben-Gurion University, director of Quantum Research at Ha’aretz National Laboratories, and consultant to certain unnamed divisions in the Israeli Defense Force, too secret to mention, if, in fact, they even existed. The camouflage was complete down to the lifts in his Bruno Magli loafers.

While part of his mind occupied itself with the chore of driving, another spent its time constructing his pursuer’s investigation. His altered appearance would only go so far to shield him. The men seeking him out were determined and crafty. He did not know all their secrets.

He was certain that by now they had found the abandoned skiff and tracked his presence aboard the ferry to Cyprus. They would have had a harder time figuring which boat he’d taken from Larnaca, but through persistence, and maybe a break here and there, they would have learned that he’d boarded the tramp steamer Eleni bound for Athens. The locus of possible destinations multiplied at each point. And from Athens where? By train to Berlin? Budapest? By bus to Sofia? Another ferry to Crete or Italy? At each spot, the possibilities multiplied, the matrices grew more complex.

They knew only that with the package he could not fly.

The infinite array of his choices comforted him. If he kept to plan, if he followed the groundwork he had meticulously laid these last six months, he would be invisible. They would not catch him. The numbers did not permit it. Europe was too large a place, and the Unit too poorly staffed.

Yet, even as he drove, he could not rid his mind of the suspicion that somewhere or someplace during his rigorous preparation, he’d slipped up. He’d left a clue. It was a fear that kept him checking the rearview mirror when he should be looking ahead, the fear that had kept him awake all the night on the rough transit to Athens, the fear that even now, traveling at 100 kilometers an hour on a sunny summer day, laid a track of goose bumps along his arms.

He would be safe once he reached Vienna. It was a twenty-hour drive through the underbelly of Europe-Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Across isolated roads and deserted countryside.

Until then he was alone.

He was vulnerable.

He was a target.