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

by Dov Alfon

  “So what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. She did actually try talking to him about the abduction, but he interrupted her and said they’d talk about it when he returned to the Unit.”

  “And when is he returning?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “So we have nothing?” Zorro said in disbelief.

  “We have nothing,” Oren repeated.

  Zorro fell silent. Aluf Rotelmann had to travel to Jerusalem after the Prime Minister summoned photographers to document an “urgent security consultation” about the abduction in Paris.

  “He left the embassy?”

  “Who?”

  “Abadi, that’s who.”

  “Yes, he left right after the conversation.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like we can have him followed there.”

  “And Segen Talmor? Did she collect his laundry?”

  “We don’t know,” the adjutant said.

  “And why not?” Zorro said. “It’s not like you can’t follow her there.”

  Chapter 33

  Ming’s second-in-command sat inside Breizh café. He Xiangu was named after the only goddess among eight gods, and while her mythological namesake had been immortalised after she had eaten powder from a jar carried to her by angels, He Xiangu knew all too well that she herself was mortal. She ordered sparkling water and a salad.

  She had chosen a spot with her back to the wall, facing the front, as was her regular habit. Through the glass door she could see her bodyguard switching posts on the pavement outside, and she observed him casting discreet glances at the elegant women coming and going from the surrounding boutiques. The character of the neighbourhood surprised her. Breizh café was located in the heart of the Jewish quarter, but so far she had seen no-one she thought looked like a Jew. She certainly hadn’t seen anyone who resembled the only Jew she cared about at the moment, Unit 8200 soldier Vladislav Yerminski, otherwise known as Yermi.

  She had brought seventeen men with her. Yesterday it had seemed excessive for the mission – monitoring the operational squad. But now that the mission had gone south, her commando unit felt cripplingly small. She had ordered ten men to search every hotel and hostel, a task that required prodigiously more manpower. Three men she allocated to a surveillance mission in front of the Israeli embassy, and three more she had sent to the El Al terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport.

  Now there was no-one left to send to help Erlang Shen. She had thought about ordering him to leave those two losers alone and bolt, but Ming did not like loose ends. There was no telling what damage the two could still cause.

  They had already damaged her standing within the organisation, this much she knew. Her employer had built a brilliant empire from the shadows and had chosen to remain there, a whisper behind the rumour. Members of the organisation delivered, or the odds were high that they would not live to learn from their failures.

  She studied the location of the execution on her screen. There could be a plausible explanation for their decision not to continue to the safe house; for instance, they might somehow have found out they had screwed up the mission and were afraid to carry on with the plan. But there could also be another – not entirely plausible – explanation: that the Israelis had been handling them from the start.

  Giving Erlang Shen the green light to execute a clean-up operation eliminated the need to investigate why the two had aborted the original plan. And there were other benefits: releasing Erlang Shen to the task of tracking down Yerminski would burn the French police’s only lead from the morning’s action. Oh, and it would also send a clear-cut message to the Israelis that she was not playing games.

  She considered the possible disadvantages of authorising the operation, and reached the conclusion that the damage would be minimal: the French police would suffer another insult, which might lead them to increase their efforts, but that nuisance would be negligible. What could they do? Erect more barriers? Stop more South East Asians for random security checks?

  In fact, the very opposite would probably happen. Taking out the assassins from the morning would be viewed by the French police as validation for not interfering too much with what would seem like a gang’s revenge killing. There was nothing people from that field liked more. It calmed the T.V. viewers, made them believe that the criminals were being punished without society’s intervention, like a divine decision.

  You can relax, my dear bourgeois, she said to herself and pressed the button, giving the green light. The order made its way to Erlang Shen, across the river. Perfect timing: at that moment, her salad arrived at the table.

  Chapter 34

  Oriana opened the door and found ten soldiers waiting for her. She tried to understand why all of the section’s investigators were huddled in Rachel’s room at this time of day, and recalled that in the morning, before she had learned of the appointment of a permanent head of section, she had summoned all the soldiers for a pep talk during the shift change. Rachel must have forgotten to cancel.

  Anyway, Abadi wanted an answer within an hour. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry about the delay. We’re in special investigation mode, all regular tasks are cancelled. Please, sit anywhere, even on the floor, take out your devices and log into the page Rachel is going to open for us. Rachel, I need a case number and an operation name.”

  Rachel looked at her commander, slack-jawed, but quickly came to her senses. “The running number is 54082866, Commander,” she said, and logged it into the file. “The generated code names currently start with “L”. The options are ‘Lingering Fog’, ‘Long Night’ or ‘Last Straw’.”

  “They all kind of work,” one of the soldiers said, and the others laughed. Since most of them were by now sitting on the floor looking up at her, she felt as though she was a new teacher on the first day of school. They did indeed look like children, and since she was in fact no older than they, she wondered if that was how she came across in their eyes as well.

  “In honour of the work still ahead of us, under the command of the new head of section, Aluf Mishne Zeev Abadi, Operation 54082866 will be named ‘Long Night’,” she said, and wrote the name on the whiteboard. “Questions?”

  There were no questions.

  “This morning, at 10 a.m., as you must have heard on the news, an Israeli passenger named Yaniv Meidan was abducted from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The event corresponds with an alert that appeared on The Most Wanted list about the intention to abduct a soldier from the Intelligence Corps in Paris, but Yaniv Meidan had no connection to the corps. Intelligence-gathering Operation Long Night, grade 7 precedence and top-secret clearance, is designed to examine whether the kidnappers intended to abduct a different Israeli and took Meidan accidentally. The purpose of the investigation is to find out whether there was a soldier from Unit 8200 on the flight who arrived in Paris and may be unaware of the threat to him. Questions so far?”

  The first to raise his hand was Tomer, the newest, most junior investigator in the section, who looked more like a soldier from the technology unit than a security investigator in Special Section. “Is this an overt investigation?”

  Excellent question. Just what Oriana needed right now – to reveal Abadi’s request in front of the entire Intelligence Corps, not to mention Zorro.

  “No, at this stage this is a covert investigation. We keep the noise to a minimum so we don’t attract the kidnappers’ attention,” Oriana lied through her teeth, and went on before follow-up questions could be raised. “We have the names of thirty-three Israelis who were on that plane. We need to cross-check them against the personnel database to see if any of them belong to the unit. If there are no hits, it means the kidnappers were targeting a non-Israeli passenger from a different flight to the same terminal. If you get a hit, you log it into the secure page and call me immediately.”

  “The regular service database or the general database?” Alma, a languorous blonde who looked half-
asleep, asked apprehensively. Someone behind her grumbled, “What do you think?”

  “You check the database that includes reserve soldiers, but limit the search to those who were discharged less than five years ago,” Oriana said. There was not much intelligence value in old information from 8200; the unit and its operational field were changed beyond recognition. “Pay close attention. For some we don’t have first names, and all the spelling is in English, so we’ll have to try different versions of names.”

  There were no questions. “You’re ten and we have thirty-three names. Who can guess how many names each of you will get? Let’s go. Rachel will divide you into groups. Bring me an answer, fast.”

  An answer of “no hits” would be welcome, Oriana thought. I don’t need a commander who’s pleased with himself on his first day.

  Chapter 35

  At last, Zhulong saw the river.

  It took them longer to reach it than he had calculated. Twice they saw police patrols and had to change direction. When they were already very close, they crisscrossed the national library complex and could not find the stairs leading to the banks of the Seine.

  His subordinate suspected nothing. Even now, standing in front of the bridge, waiting for orders. Oddly, it was Zhulong who hesitated. He gazed at the river, as if the answer would appear in the water.

  He had imagined a narrow yet powerful river; he had imagined ancient steps descending sharply to a deserted bank where two or three Parisian beggars would be slouching about, dazed by alcohol, minding their own business. He had imagined a massive stone bridge crowded with the noisy traffic of vehicles. He had imagined what he had wanted to find.

  Instead, he found a very long footbridge, modern, built of wood, designed in the shape of rising and falling waves. Under the bridge a wide river ran sluggishly, many bateaux mouches steaming up and down it. The riverbanks were also crowded – tourists, hikers, couples.

  He could see no beggars, but in the middle of the bridge stood a pedlar dressed in rags. The pedlar sent flying into the sky laser toys that drew a greenish line in their flight before looping back into his hand. Enthralled children gathered around him, demanding a toy from their parents at the top of their lungs.

  Clearly, you could not dispose of someone on this bridge.

  He considered going down to the riverbank, but at that exact moment he saw two policemen patrolling on bicycles and had to look for another solution. Across the bridge was a large park; surely he could find a corner there in which to recover his dignity, as well as that of the organisation.

  He started walking over the bridge, his subordinate trailing mutely behind him. The odd wavy design of the deck made for a slow pace. After two minutes of walking, they started going up again, and they found themselves directly above the middle of the river. From up close, he observed that the pedlar was Chinese like them, and even looked familiar. The children’s excited shrieks blended with the whistles of the soaring toys, and Zhulong felt such a heaviness in his chest that it was a struggle to breathe.

  Turning in his tracks, he rushed back in the direction of the national library buildings, towards the bank from which they had come, and a few moments later, once his brain had caught up with his feelings, he broke into a run. He heard the abbreviated yelp of his young colleague, but he did not care.

  The small laser toys spun in the sky above him, splashing their menacing abstract art above his head. By now he was very close to the road, and the angle of the slope changed again; with giant strides he climbed towards the edge of the bridge, like a messenger in Chinese mythology ascending towards the palaces of the gods.

  He heard the sharp whistle, looked up and saw the green object flying towards his neck at a dazzling speed; only then was the explosion heard. As his head was severed by the blast, a flame burst out, sketching, in the last instant of his life, the mythological creature after whom he was named, the dragon with the human face.

  Chapter 36

  Abadi pulled back the curtain and let the sunlight flood the room that had once been his. The bed was narrower than he had remembered, the desk smaller. Stacked on the shelves were his comics, which he would probably reread at some point, perhaps after retirement.

  The view from the window had not changed. Three windsurfers were competing across the artificial lake, and beyond the lake he saw the other architectural whimsies this city had known over the years – cauliflower-shaped buildings, a residential tower built like a steeple, a fire station in neon blue, and in front of these, opposite the small synagogue, right beside the last station of métro line 8, stood the Créteil-Préfecture shopping centre, once the biggest in Europe.

  “No nostalgia. No nostalgia. No no-stal-gia,” he repeated to himself, maybe out of doubt, perhaps out of sorrow.

  On the street below, two police cars were parked, their engines idling. That had not been a rare sight in his childhood either: Créteil, the huge suburb south-east of Paris where he grew up, was a violent place even before its current swell of anti-Semitic incidents. A group of teenagers defiantly surrounded the policemen, who remained in their vehicles. The kids soon got bored and dispersed.

  “Do you prefer to start with crescent briks with egg or triangle briks with mashed potato and harissa?” his mother called from the kitchen. She had already updated him on the family news, including the wedding of his niece who had married an Ashkenazi, “but a very nice man”, as she always said when trying to alleviate the misfortune of all those poor people who had not been born Tunisian Jews.

  The table was set. The artichoke, marmuma and méchouia salads were very spicy, which forced him to temper them with tirshi, in which the carrots and turnips were seasoned with nothing but kosher salt and lemon. From the aromas he could tell that the main course was couscous boulettes, and he asked himself whether he would be able to meet the challenge of such a meal. As a kid, he never had such problems.

  His mother joined him at the table, carrying two different trays of briks, her usual solution to food dilemmas. He started with the classic brik. The egg was almost poached, trapped inside the thin shell. He ate carefully, from the centre out, scooping up the bursting yolk with the fried pastry.

  “I can’t find the old-fashioned brik sheets here anymore, they’re too thick, almost like filo. They say the Jews here no longer know what brik is, they make Chinese eggrolls with it, or something like that. I got these from the Arab around the corner, he imports them from Tunisia.”

  “I did feel that they’re thinner,” he said with his mouth full. “And where’s the harissa from? It’s spicier than usual.”

  “I made it myself. The kosher harissa is bland now, and the Arab only stocks tins.” He moved on to the second tray, in which the brik was folded into a perfect triangle and filled with coarsely mashed potato, flakes of tuna, parsley and something else he could not identify. He could not stop eating from the tray, and anyway he was not about to insult his mother on what was too rare a visit.

  “Maman, what are those tiny, salty pieces inside? It isn’t capers.”

  “No, ya omri, it’s bottarga. The real thing, the fish seller brings it from Italy especially for me. They don’t even have this kind in Tunisia.”

  “That reminds me, I brought you something,” he said and took out of his bag of seedless grapes, fresh moist dates and a kilo of cucumbers.

  “Bel’Hout ââlik,” she blessed him, “we can’t get any of this here. Nothing is better than the fruit and vegetables from Israel, it fills me with joy. I’m so sorry we don’t live there. Sometimes I miss the time we spent there.”

  “When you were there, you missed being here.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t like that,” his mother said, hastily rewriting family history. “It’s just that after what they did to your grandfather I could not continue living there.”

  He fell silent. She changed the subject. “Your father apologises for not being here, he has a meeting in town he could not reschedule.”

  The excuse was so im
plausible, it begged further discussion. His father was eighty years old and had not boarded the métro to Paris in months, if not years.

  “He’s still angry with me?”

  His mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and out of embarrassment took the last brik for herself.

  “It’s difficult for him, what you did, with the publicity and all that,” she said at last. “‘What the devil were you doing in that galley?’”

  Quoting Molière was a habit of hers. Abadi had transferred out of the French education system at the age of eleven, and had never fully integrated into the Israeli system. He had never mastered the art of literary allusions.

  “What is it with you and this Ashkenazi leftist thing? Would these people testify in court for your trial?” she said. “You might have thought about the impact on your father. The Jewish newspapers here dedicated entire pages to it, and some called you a traitor. In the synagogue they moved your father to a pew at the back. It has not been easy.” She shivered, as if seeking to dispel the impression her words made. “But it will soon pass. I’m bringing the couscous.”

  “I’ll help you,” he said, but she refused to let him near the kitchen. He called after her, in an attempt to lift her spirits, “I’ve gone back to the army, Maman.”

  She stopped in her tracks and returned to the table, excited. “The Israeli army? Tzahal?”

  “No, Maman, the Venezuelan army. Of course Tzahal.”

  “And they agreed?”

  “They’re the ones who asked,” he said without elaborating. There was no point in upsetting his mother with descriptions of how things worked in Tzahal, or in organisations in general.

  “I’m so happy!” she exclaimed. “I knew that it all had to be a misunderstanding. It’s a great honour for us that you’re such a high-ranking officer in Tzahal. I’ll call your father right after this. He’ll be so happy. He keeps complaining that the army is weak and doesn’t know how to handle the Arabs.”