The intruder knew where the sonic traps were buried in the ground, and he skirted them. He silently glided through the areas of the grounds that the television cameras did not cover, and in less than two minutes after he had gone over the wall, he was at the back door of the villa.
As he reached for the handle of the door, he was caught in the sudden glare of floodlights. A voice called out, “Freeze! Drop your gun and raise your hands.”
The figure in black carefully dropped his gun and looked up. There were half a dozen men spread out on the roof, with a variety of weapons pointed at him.
The man in black growled, “What the fuck took you so long? I never should have gotten this far.”
“You didn’t,” the head guard informed him. “We started tracking you before you got over the wall.”
Lev Pasternak was not mollified. “Then you should have stopped me sooner. I could have been on a suicide mission with a load of grenades or a goddamn mortar. I want a meeting of the entire staff tomorrow morning, eight o’clock sharp. The dogs have been stunned. Have someone keep an eye on them until they wake up.”
Lev Pasternak prided himself on being the best security guard in the world. He had been a pilot in the Israeli Six-Day War, and after the war had become a top agent in Mossad, one of Israel’s five secret services.
He would never forget the morning, two years earlier, when his colonel had called him into his office.
“Lev, someone wants to borrow you for a few weeks.”
“I hope it’s a blonde,” Lev quipped.
“It’s Marin Groza.”
Mossad had a complete file on the Romanian dissident. Groza had been the leader of a popular Romanian movement to depose Alexandros Ionescu and was about to stage a coup when he was betrayed by one of his men. More than two dozen underground fighters had been executed, and Groza had barely escaped the country with his life. France had given him sanctuary. Ionescu denounced Marin Groza as a traitor to his country and put a price on his head. So far half a dozen attempts to assassinate Groza had failed, but he had been wounded in the latest attack.
“What does he want with me?” Pasternak asked. “He has government protection.”
“Not good enough. He needs someone to set up a foolproof security system. He came to us. I recommended you.”
“I’d have to go to France?”
“It will only take you a few weeks.”
“I don’t—”
“Lev, we’re talking about a mensch. He’s the guy in the white hat. Our information is that he has enough popular support in his home country to knock over Ionescu. When the timing is right, he’ll make his move. Meanwhile, we have to keep the man alive.”
Lev Pasternak thought about it. “A few weeks, you said?”
“That’s all.”
The colonel had been wrong about the time, but he had been right about Marin Groza. He was a thin, fragile-looking man with an ascetic air about him and a face etched with sorrow. He had an aquiline nose, a firm chin, and a broad forehead, topped by a spray of white hair. He had deep black eyes, and when he spoke, they blazed with passion.
“I don’t give a damn whether I live or die,” he told Lev at their first meeting. “We’re all going to die. It’s the when that I’m concerned about. I have to stay alive for another year or two. That’s all the time I need to drive Ionescu out of my country.” He ran his hand absently across a livid scar on his cheek. “No man has the right to enslave a country. We have to free Romania and let the people decide their own fate.”
Lev Pasternak went to work on the security system at the villa in Neuilly. He used some of his own men, and the outsiders he hired were checked out thoroughly. Every single piece of equipment was state of the art.
Pasternak saw the Romanian rebel leader every day, and the more time he spent with him, the more he came to admire him. When Marin Groza asked Pasternak to stay on as his security chief, Pasternak did not hesitate.