A Long Night in Paris: The must-read thriller from the new master of spy fiction

by Dov Alfon

  1. Alerts: any information, as partial as it may be, regarding the intention to abduct soldiers via stolen military vehicles in the north of Samaria, as well as any information, as partial as it may be, regarding the possible abduction of an active or reserve Intelligence Corps soldier in Europe. Special attention to a possible abduction in Paris.

  2. Syria: any information based on irregular activity of the Al-Nusra Front along the border, including troop movements.

  3. Jordan: confirmation or refutation of rumours regarding King Abdullah’s physical health.

  Below them was a fourth item that, as far as Oriana could tell, had not been included in the previous night’s document:

  4. Iran: full or partial information regarding the Chinese government officials in charge of a possible sale of advanced nuclear equipment to Iran, including personal bribes or any other personal information.

  “Right,” Zorro continued energetically. “The first three items were sent to all agents, all operators and all departments in all our intelligence-gathering units, without exception.” He scrolled the cursor from one item to the next. “And this fourth item you see here, with more specific information, was sent only to the relevant elements in the intelligence community. But from now on this kind of item will also appear on the general The Most Wanted. OK, let’s have a quick brush-up on the protocols.”

  From that moment on, Zorro rapidly clicked from one slide to the next, like a bored weatherman in the middle of summer. Everyone feverishly took notes, like students in a dictation. On the screen appeared flow charts, organograms, command tree diagrams, info box templates and dozens of acronyms, as if the heads of Aman had been sent back to Intelligence Foundation Course 101. Zorro only stopped after thirty slides. “Any questions so far?” he said.

  There were two ways to conceal information, Oriana’s father had taught her. The first was to hide it, which was the usual approach. Locking drawers, encrypting files, using hidden safes – all these were ineffectual, because they exposed the very existence of concealed information. The other way was to present the information as if it was utterly unimportant, to bury it in a sea of additional information, the duller the better. Very few people can detect the problematic clause in a mortgage contract, or the crucial data in a corporation’s quarterly report to the stock market. Zorro’s presentation was suspiciously boring.

  Concentrate. She went into focus mode.

  2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23. Oriana counted in her head all the prime numbers up to her age on her next birthday before opting for a different exercise.

  “A time to get, and a time to lose,” Oriana heard her father’s voice, not her own. “A time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak . . . ”

  “Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate.” She looked again at her screen, this time transferring to her notes each instance of trivial repetitions, false claims or red herrings. She looked incredulously at what little remained, and questions popped up in her mind at an alarming rate.

  How could The Most Wanted, the official agenda of the Intelligence Corps, be distributed in several versions? Why would a possible abduction in a Palestinian territory be linked to a possible kidnapping in Paris, when evidently the relevant intelligence sources for each case would be different? Who received the fourth request and who didn’t? Why all the fuss about Tiriani’s presence at this meeting when Oriana couldn’t see any reason Special Section should be involved? How long had this exclusion of certain areas of the Intelligence Corps been going on? Why convene a special meeting to stop it? Why today?

  “If there are no questions, let’s move on to the second part of the presentation,” Rotelmann suggested.

  Stay out of it. Stay out of it. Stay out of it. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace . . .

  “I have a question,” said a voice from across the room. Oriana was so surprised that it had not originated from her own throat that it took her a little time to turn towards the enquirer. It was the second-highest ranking officer at the table, the head of the operations division, a young tat aluf. The hostility between him and the head of intelligence-gathering was common knowledge.

  “You can ask,” Zorro said, smiling. “But you might not get an answer.”

  “The Most Wanted is the only work document shared by all our units. It has always had just one definitive version, written by the Chief of Intelligence himself. When and why did that change?” he asked.

  Zorro shot Rotelmann a look Oriana could not decipher. Suddenly questions erupted from around the room.

  “Who received the fourth item and who did not?” one of the Mossad representatives wanted to know, while the heads of research asked how Iranian nuclear information could be restricted while a Jordanian health bulletin was not. Zorro raised his hand for calm.

  Rotelmann intervened with palpable reluctance. “All understandable questions. This item is based on highly sensitive material from Unit 8200, and it was therefore decided to restrict distribution. The truth is, Shlomo Tiriani, head of 8200’s Special Section, was supposed to present this and tie up any loose ends, but I don’t see him here.”

  All eyes turned to Oriana. Rotelmann noticed and his gaze travelled all the way to her, at the other end of the table. “Who is this young lady?” he asked without taking his eyes off her. “I’m pretty sure that’s not Tiriani.”

  His adjutant flinched in panic. “Commander, I understand Tiriani was discharged yesterday quite unexpectedly. We were not consulted. This lady,” he said, pointing at her, not unlike the telltale who had sat next to her in third grade, “was sent in his place to represent 8200 in this meeting. Perhaps, Segen –” and here he laced both syllables of Oriana’s rank with scorn – “you could explain how something like this could have happened?” His voice rose suddenly in the second half of the sentence, as if the annoying classmate had turned into the self-righteous teacher.

  “Seize the day, put very little trust in tomorrow” – her father used to quote the Romans to her. And she could recite much of Horace by heart as a result. Horace had been right, no-one was about to give her till tomorrow. She heard herself replying, “That I can explain, if necessary. What I can’t explain is why, for the past twenty minutes, you have been holding a report sealed with a ‘Top Secret Black’ clearance instead of handing it immediately to its recipient, the Chief of Intelligence, Aluf Rotelmann, who is sitting right here in front of you.”

  Oriana heard whispers and the scraping of chairs. Zorro looked anxiously at Rotelmann, who, in turn, looked at Oriana, his face an unreadable mask. The adjutant began stammering an answer, but Oriana would not let him proceed.

  “According to the instructions of Tzahal’s Chief of Defence Staff, a security officer must intervene at once in severe offences regarding security information, whatever the offender’s rank. I’m sorry, Seren, but if you don’t hand Aluf Rotelmann that envelope immediately, I’ll have to detain you on suspicion of gross negligence in securing a classified document.”

  The room became as silent as a graveyard. Oren looked at his commander and then approached him with the envelope in his hand, a scolded expression on his face, the very same expression the telltale used to have when she beat the shit out of him.

  Chapter 12

  The oddest thing, at least in Abadi’s mind, was not that a passenger had disappeared soon after landing in Paris; the oddest thing was the fact that throughout the entire mess – while barriers were at last being erected around the terminal, while helicopters hovered above like mosquitos, and while at the scene itself three dogs barked incessantly as they tracked the scent of blood – an alluring female voice continued to invite passengers over the loudspeakers to smoke only in the designated areas.

  Evidently, Commissaire Léger was hearing different voices. He lit another cigarette in front of the chemical toilet cabin from which the police officers had extracted not only a blonde wig but also
a red hotel uniform and a matching bra and panties. The strong chemicals had coloured everything a single shade of blue, but on the blouse could be seen darker blotches that suggested blood.

  “We’ve gone over the footage from the lifts a thousand times,” the inspector said in despair. “Neither Yaniv Meidan nor your blonde kidnapper is to be seen in it.”

  Meidan, it was already pretty clear to Abadi, had indeed not come down in the lift. His body had in all likelihood been tossed into the shaft, God knows how. And only God knew where the body had ended up, along with the chemical waste from every building in the airport.

  The abductor, on the other hand, could only have taken the lift. The officers who checked the video footage had been asked to locate a blonde in a red uniform, but by the time the woman had taken the lift down, she would have borne no resemblance to the hotel greeter who had taken it up.

  Much to Abadi’s surprise, Léger understood all this intuitively. “We need to analyse the footage again,” he said to the inspector, and Abadi heard the suppressed rage in his voice. “We need photographs of every person who exited the lifts on the ground floor between 10.45 and 11.15. Women with heels are high priority. She left her wig and uniform here, but no shoes, so it’s very possible she didn’t change them.”

  “The camera angle doesn’t show feet,” the inspector said. “That’s hundreds of women, hundreds. And we have no idea what she looks like. The dogs can’t pick up her scent because of the chemical toxins that have penetrated her clothes.”

  “Let’s try taking them back to the area with the containers,” Abadi suggested for the second time, and this time, out of desperation, the French agreed.

  The storage containers were sealed like vaults. It did not look as if anyone had tried breaking into them, and the sniffer dogs lost interest in them and started barking towards the shaft.

  “Why are they even locked?” Abadi said. “Don’t the workers need to go in and out all the time?”

  “They belong to the airport, not to the contractor,” the inspector said. “Airlines use the containers during periods of construction because their offices here are closed.”

  “So there’s an El Al container here?” Abadi said, his gaze searching for identifying marks.

  “I don’t know. If they fly out of this terminal, then one of these could be El Al’s, yes. But what does it matter now?”

  “We don’t discriminate against El Al,” Léger said, trying to regain his composure. “We’ve been practising equal rights here since 1789.”

  Yeah, tell me about it, Abadi thought, but refrained from rising to the bait of the Frenchman’s sarcasm. Instead, he turned to Chico and said in Hebrew, “Check as quickly as possible with El Al’s security officer whether he installed a camera to monitor their container. If he did, get him to hand over to the police this morning’s tapes right away.”

  “I know him,” Chico said hesitantly. “He’s a hard-ass. I’m sure that if he did install a camera, he’ll refuse to co-operate with the French.”

  “They’re going to find out, come what may, in the next few hours,” Abadi said. “The problem is that I’m not sure we have a few hours.”

  Chapter 13

  On the surface, Time had stopped doing what it was supposed to do, and just stood still. Everyone was waiting; no-one moved.

  But in fact, everything advanced at blinding speed behind the fictitious display of a well-organised and managed reality, the one visible to the public from the windows of houses, the screens, the formal announcements, the sanitised reports.

  From the windows of Meidan’s parents’ home in Ramat Gan, for instance, you could not see the press photographers who had politely settled in the café on the corner, waiting for a signal.

  From the Military Censor’s office windows on Kaplan Street in HaKirya, Tzahal headquarters appeared calm, almost sleepy. The duty officer stood firm in his refusal to lift the gag order, and his soldiers obsessively scanned the news sites to make sure no-one was sidestepping the injunction without his knowledge.

  Within a half-mile radius, each of the four editors of the major news websites separately debated whether to direct readers to the rumour mill that had evolved on social networks and been spreading through online communities for a good hour. They eagerly checked each other’s coverage, ready at the click of a button to announce the abduction of Meidan, if any one of the others made the first move.

  In the U.S. embassy in Israel, the N.S.A.’s head of security looked at his screen with disbelief. He reread the audit report, then asked for a secure line to Washington.

  In the room next to the Prime Minister’s chambers, in the government compound in Jerusalem, the Military Secretary had finished his review. He did not present it to the Prime Minister himself, who had announced he would be late and they should start without him, but to four of his advisors, who, in spite of their different titles, were all communications advisors. He gave his presentation in English, because one of the four was an American strategic advisor who did not speak Hebrew.

  The American advisor complained that he lacked sufficient data to reach a decision. But the Military Secretary had no more information. “It looks as though he was the victim of mistaken identity,” he said patiently, not for the first time. “He has no connection to any state official in Israel. He’s just an employee of a small start-up. It’s possible that the kidnapper did not even know he was Israeli. The military intelligence liaison unit with the N.S.A. has even raised the possibility that this whole affair is criminal in nature, whether the abduction was linked to his Israeli nationality or not.”

  “But is he alive or dead?” said the youngest in the group, an advertising executive who was on loan to the office as a strategic advisor.

  “We don’t know.”

  “And what do we know?”

  The Military Secretary shifted uneasily in his chair. “In the past few minutes it seems to have become more likely that he was murdered in the airport itself, and that his body was dumped there in a chemical toilet disposal pit.”

  The American advisor grimaced. “That’s not good. That’s not a good image at all.”

  “He may not have been murdered. We won’t know for sure for a few hours, and there’s no point waiting.”

  “I agree,” said the advisor in charge of social media. “According to the latest report, the story’s going viral. There are hundreds of questions surrounding the fate of Meidan, friends from the delegation are posting like crazy, people are sharing his photo, asking for help in finding out what happened to him. Right now, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is prohibited from answering these questions, and if we wait another hour or two, they won’t be able to suppress it anymore, it’ll blow up.”

  “On the one hand, it could deflect from the usual trouble, get the security agenda back in focus,” the American advisor said. The Prime Minister served as defence minister and minister of communications, and it was not always clear to which of the many troubles under his various jurisdictions his advisor was referring. “On the other hand, there are a lot of things here we don’t know yet, and I don’t like turning the spotlight on something I’m not sure about and then finding out the facts at the same time as the public at large.”

  The Prime Minister’s political advisor, a former publicist now in charge of donor relations, added that he had received a telephone call from a senior official at El Al, asking them to cool the flames. “The company itself had nothing to do with the abduction, so it’s not appropriate that El Al’s image as a safe airline be libelled over such nonsense,” he said. “But if we carry on with the gag order, the story will only gain momentum. The French are with us on this, they have no interest in letting their main airport take a bad rap. It’s important that we put out this small fire before it spreads.”

  The Military Secretary was a veteran. He remembered different times and different offices. In the past he would have refused to present classified military information to publicists. But he had sinc
e learned – the hard way – that resistance was futile. He was three years from retirement; he preferred going with the flow.

  The American advisor likewise had no intention of launching a revolution. Most of his political clients hired him close to election day, but in Israel that distinction was meaningless. It was always election season for his client, and a young Israeli dumped into a pit of shit on his way to a high-tech convention was sure as hell not a campaign booster.

  “I suggest we play it down as much as we can,” he said. “We lift the injunction but brief the media not to turn it into something more than it is. It’s a criminal matter. The police are on it. If they come to us, we refer them to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If they go to the army, the military spokesperson refers them to the police. We’ll call the senior editors and explain that it would be irresponsible to overplay it. It’s not a significant event.”

  They picked up their mobiles and went to work.

  It was 1.45 p.m., Monday, April 16.

  Chapter 14

  Scores of commuters got off the Réseau Express Régional at Châtelet station in the centre of Paris. The blonde was still a blonde, but her hair was now short and like a boy’s. She wore a long beige raincoat that veered towards the masculine yet matched her red high heels. She took a hesitant step onto the platform, crowded with police officers, but no-one thought to stop her for a background check.

  Leaving the station, she turned right and walked as quickly as possible along the neighbouring street, rue du Renard. Just short of the river was her next port of call, the art deco building that housed the municipal sports centre, where a change of clothing awaited her. She negotiated the slippery stone steps, took out a keycard and made her way to the pool’s changing rooms. There she retrieved a nylon rucksack from her locker. She took off those damn heels and turned on her mobile.

  It took forever to locate the network. Three new messages appeared, all sent by Wasim. First: “Corinne, did it go well?”, then “Is everything O.K.?” and finally “Corinne, call me as soon as you can.”