See How They Run (18 page)
WITH LOVE,
ALIX ROTHMAN
It was going to get worse, David understood now. It was going to get much, much worse.
Southwestern Moscow, Russia.
Across Marx Plaza, a flag moved like a graceful dancer in the breeze rushing up from the Moskva River.
Five wheels twisted against nacreous Siberian-winter white.
The flag of the Twenty-second Olympiad was whipping about, as proud as any of the great athletes who would participate in the upcoming sixteen-day event.
In the plaza itself, the Architect, Engineer, and Soldier sat together in one of the drab Russian Intourist cafés. The cafe was just wooden tables and cafeteria chairs set out on a section of wide Moscow sidewalk.
The other two were listening quietly to Colonel Essmann’s version of the air crash near Odessa. Of his finding Andrei Pavlov, and his journey in a cucumber truck up through the famous black-soil land between Odessa and Moscow. All typically Essmannesque heroics. All so very much like the Soldier, legendary Israeli commando and Intelligence operator, though still under thirty years of age.
“Odessa was one way to get the advance team and some weapons into Russia. So now we have no one to buy guns and explosives for us,” Ben Essmann complained. “No one to get us safe hotel rooms. Or to arrange for our escape. At least we don’t have our best people. We’re forced to double up.”
The Russian Architect eyed a café table crowded with local men, summer versions of Nanook of the North. A waiter came, nodded a few times, then trundled off toward the kitchen like a sleepy, easily distracted yak.
“So Colonel Essmann,” the Architect said in a low voice. “Tell us, tell me, what do you think of our Mother Russia? Of Moscow? The city of something or other glorious or sacred, Pushkin or someone else once said.”
Colonel Essmann usually had no time for such banter and small talk—such
testing
. He answered this question, how-ever. The Soldier badly needed the help of the Engineer and Architect now. With the advance team dead, he needed the others committed body and soul to him.
“Who was the poet who said”—his deep brown eyes searched the eyes of the two other men—“what a strange, wonderful pleasure there is sometimes … seeing exactly what one had expected.”
The other two men smiled. There was truth in what the surprising military man had just said. Moscow
was
exactly what one expected. Huge. Either solemn or insane in its architecture. Forever on the verge of a blizzard, it seemed, even in July. Rude, shabby crowds everywhere. The happiest, most loved children you would find anywhere in the world.
“It’s said that we Soviets matriculate three million engineers a year,” the Architect smiled. “Intelligent country, eh?”
Now the Israeli Soldier smiled. “With all those engineers it’s lucky that a dunce cap like you could find work in Olympic Village.”
“Not really. The Party bureaucracy makes forgery and other forms of paper deceit easy. If you’re willing to take a few elementary risks … Like death by exsanguination in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison.”
As a toast to the dark jest, the three conspirators touched their glasses together.
They drank up, and then the Engineer unrolled a pen-and-ink diagram. The drawing was of a twelve-story section of a building inside Olympic Village.
The map showed the building’s plumbing, air-conditioning, and electrical systems. It was all wonderfully elaborate, with at least a thousand minuscule numbers on a single page.
“This will truly be something,” the Soldier said as he looked down at the drawing. “I have goose bumps all over my body just seeing your diagram. Simply with the knowledge of what we have to do here. Of all the care and preparation that have gone into making this work.”
The three men all grew strangely quiet. They began to stare solemnly into the flashing faces of the crowd passing through Olympic Village.
Everything was finally coming together. Now it would begin. At the Olympiad.
Alix Rothschild
Russia, July 14.
The swaying, bumping Russian passenger train was a dull, proletarian moss green. The locomotive had a big Pompeian red star on its mammoth forehead. It had smoky, oyster-white portraits of Nikolai Lenin and Karl Marx painted on its caboose.
Inside a cramped passenger compartment, Alix let the palette of the Latvian countryside filter through tight-fitting wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
The silver-rimmed glasses, a brown costume wig, and small amounts of bulk putty in her cheeks made Alix look older and much different, though not necessarily less attractive.
Especially among the squat, broad-faced Russian women riding the train.
The best description Alix could think of for her journey thus far—the only description that made any emotional sense—was petrifying. Petrifying, and unreal. As if she were once removed from her own body, and able to observe herself from an uncomfortable distance.
The interior of Soviet Russia!
Alix’s mind drifted with the scenes flashing past her window. Grand, dust-brown bowls and plains. Herculean blond boys and bulky girls riding tractors and looking like Nebraska circa 1932. Two hundred and sixty million people, one-sixth of the world’s landmass. A hundred and forty thousand kilometers of Soviet railroad track, for God’s sake!
The spectacular, endless birch and pine forests were now falling under a heavy four-o’clock shadow. Great eagles were soaring overhead like small airplanes. The clumsy train itself burrowed onward like a wood mole in tall grass.
Once again, Alix couldn’t help wondering to herself exactly what she was doing in the middle of all this.
She wondered if her murdered parents would have understood and approved.
She wondered what David was thinking of her—then quickly pushed that thought completely from her mind.
If someone had asked her, if an interviewer had been able to ask Alix how it had all come to be, she wasn’t certain that she could have given a satisfactory answer. Three and a half years earlier, Alix remembered, as the train lumbered along, she had indeed been the Actress. “The great American perfume saleswoman,” Colonel Ben Essmann had called her when they’d first met in Jerusalem’s Hilton Hotel.
At that time, the spring of 1976, Colonel Essmann had been a noisy, living legend throughout Israel. At twenty-three a war hem and saboteur. Embarrassingly blustery and cocky, he’d informed Alix of a top-secret Mossad GAQ plot during their first casual meeting in the Hilton.
The secret was that he was about to lead a crack search-and-destroy team into Europe, where they would track down one of the Black September technicians who had engineered the Olympic massacre at Munich. Ben Essmann would then execute the
fellah
himself, he said. Perhaps right on Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Honoré More likely in the Marais, though, where the bastard lived with his Arab whore.
“It is a prohibitively dangerous mission,” Essmann told the American actress. “Probably I’ll be shot. Would you be so sympathetic as to go bed with me tonight before I leave?”
Alix had slapped the Israeli hard across his sunburned face.
“Why have you told me all of these secrets? You should be taken out on the street and shot for your brazen behavior. Or is it simply animal stupidity in your case? Too much exposure to the desert heat! Too much sleeping with camels and asses!”
At that, Ben Essmann gave forth a rare, good-natured, and somewhat winning laugh.
“Actually, my dear sexy-eyed Mix Rothschild—my mission is just yesterday finished.” The commando’s smile grew even wider. “Actually, my dear girl, Ali Jahir has just been shot eleven times in his head and black heart. By myself and a few others. Now what shall we staunch Israeli patriots do to celebrate such a feat of daring, eh?”
Alix took her purse off the bar. “I think I’ll go upstairs, and go to bed. Alone,” she emphasized. “I believe a hero such as yourself will surely pick up some other
patriot
to go to bed with tonight. After all, isn’t that what Jewish women have been put on this earth for? To bed down with great heroes and providers such as yourself. I’m very happy that the
fellah is
dead. I wish the same luck for you very soon.”
Not that evening, but shortly afterward, Colonel Ben Essmann began to pursue Alix fervently.
Eventually, Alix allowed Colonel Essmann a single “date”—chaperoned by a Jewish hero of another sort—her friend Michael Ben-Iban, who had met Alix at a conference of Jewish survivors in 1973, and who had first convinced Alix to help solicit funds for the continuing effort against Nazi war criminals.
When Ben-Iban had eventually suggested to Colonel Essmann an idea for a modern, expanded, Jewish counterterrorist group—a
modernized successor to the Jewish Avengers and DIN
—the Israeli military man had jumped in the air to show his enthusiasm. It had been exactly the kind of bold stroke Ben Essmann had been trying to sell to Mossad since he’d first come to Intelligence from the Israeli Army. It was a necessary deterrent both to the Arabs and to the still-influential Reich. Very soon, in fact, Colonel Essmann was calling the radical group his own idea.
Ben-Iban had subsequently established necessary connections with the larger, older Council, the worldwide Jewish association that closely watched over the globe with an eye to
any
situation potentially dangerous to the Jewish nation. Its sacred pledge was
to remember the terrible Holocaust every last detail of it, and to protect against another unholy conflagration with their lives if need be
.
The important financiers, the select Israeli generals and politicians who controlled the Council very reluctantly agreed that the radical counterterrorist group was needed during these dangerous times. The Council thus began to help under-write the subgroup’s activities.
For her part, Alix Rothschild had become one of the Council’s very best money-raisers. Not only did Alix contribute from her own considerable earnings, but she also had entrée and credibility at the homes of wealthy and important Jews all over the world.
At an emotion-packed meeting of the Council in the fall of 1978, a new leader was appointed to head up the previously defense-minded subgroup. Soon afterward, this new leader—the Führer—had conceived the idea for a controversial and dramatic strike that would prove to be one of the most important statements ever made about the Nazis.
A cataclysmic action that would finally reveal secrets about the Nazis even the most paranoid Zionist had never dreamed of. Terrible old Nazi secrets that pertained to life and death in the 1980s.
The long-awaited revenge for the Holocaust.
Walking on almost any main Moscow boulevard made the Soldier feel physically small, painfully insignificant in the grand scheme of Russia’s past and present.
The mauve, gray, and gold buildings were as large as czarist palaces. The heroic Communist Party statues reached up as high as two thousand feet into the skyline. The ten- and twelve-lane main thoroughfares made Fifth Avenue and Oxford Street seem like side streets in comparison.
Now the Soldier ambled along Razin Street. He walked at a leisurely pace, appropriate for a tourist.
A large Intourist group, either British or American, passed by. The Russian tour leader was speaking comically stilted, noncolloquial English: “The wondrous construction of this our present Communist society … the gentle peace-loving nature of these, our good Soviet people.”
It was such preposterous nonsense, the Soldier didn’t know how the Russian guide could possibly keep a straight face. The peace-loving nature of the Soviet people was like the peace-loving nature of the wolverine.
Within sight of the behemoth Rossiya Hotel with its more than thirty-two hundred rooms, the largest hotel in Europe, Colonel Ben Essmann finally stopped at a convenient sidewalk stand. He bought a tiny cup of champagne, sold on the Razin Street curb like pretzels or hot dogs in America.
Surrounded by touches of old Moscow, large, onion-domed churches, gold Korsun crosses, and the Kremlin, Ben Essmann then sat on a bench and sipped his drink.
As he’d been instructed, he sat directly under a glaring red sign crammed full of Cyrillic letters.
The Soldier was acting as his own advance team now.
In the past few days, he’d arranged for thirteen hotel or apartment-building rooms within commuting distance of Olympic Village. He’d arranged for costumes to get his people inside the Village. He’d personally scouted the VIP hotels and the major sports complexes.
Two Russian men dressed in absurdly dowdy street clothes finally sat down on either side of Ben Essmann. The Russian men smelled of cabbage and raw fish. They each wore floppy refugee hats and baggy suits with excess shoulder stuffing.
In very poor, English, they began to explain the conditions under which they would sell the Soldier Soviet Army rifles, pistols,
plastique
explosives. The details of the sale and final exchange of goods were worked out.
Another very public site was selected for the important transfer of goods.
Before he would give the Russians half of the agreed-upon sum, however, the Soldier insisted on the early delivery of a single firearm. After more debate and haggling a second agreement was reached.
Before he left Moscow that afternoon, the Soldier would have one Soviet Army Dragunov sniper’s rifle in his possession.
As the tall, muscular Soldier retraced his steps back down Razin Street, he was feeling much larger and important. He was thinking that the Russian capital wasn’t so impressive after all.
Shortly after 4:00
P.M
., Alix’s train from Moscow lurched into the busy railroad depot in the Latvian city of Riga, birth-place of the ballet master Mikhail Baryshnikov, and an unlikely place to imagine dancers, Alix thought.
