Obsession (Year of Fire)

by Florencia Bonelli

  “Neither do I.” She turned away from him and fled.

  She was so cold. All she wanted was to take a shower. Feeling more like herself after half an hour under the hot water, she came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and, as she slowly rubbed her hair dry, she stared into the distance without blinking. She had been in Paris for three days and her life was beginning to look like it might get out of control. How had it gotten to this point? If she reasoned it out calmly, the uncertainty had started right at the beginning of her trip, when by chance she had been assigned the seat next to Eliah. Now she knew his last name. Al-Saud. “Eliah Al-Saud,” she murmured quietly so that Juana wouldn’t hear, and trailed her fingers over her mouth. The surname sounded exotic. Eliah Al-Saud, she thought, and buried her nose in the elastic of the glove that still smelled of A*Men. That name went with his uncommon appearance. She doubted that Al-Saud could slip into a room unnoticed; it would be difficult to stop yourself from turning to admire him.

  Later that night, Francesca was removing her makeup at her dressing table. She looked at Kamal, who was reading the newspaper on the bed, in the mirror.

  “I think your son is in love.”

  “Alamán?” he asked without looking up from his reading.

  “No. Eliah.”

  Kamal looked up and took off his glasses.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes, today, at Sofía’s house. We met Matilde there, Sofía’s niece, Aldo’s youngest daughter. She and Eliah met on the plane when they were coming over from Buenos Aires. Can you believe that coincidence?”

  “What plane? Eliah’s?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have time to find out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Francesca dismissed the matter with a shrug. “I think this is the girl that was so sick a few years back. Cancer, if memory serves.”

  “She’s all right now?” Francesca nodded. “Why do you say Eliah is in love with her?”

  “The way he was looking at her.” Francesca stood up from the stool and lay facedown on the bed, cuddling her husband. “You know what, my love? Today our son reminded me so much of you. He looked at Matilde in the same way you looked at me on my first visit to the farm in Jeddah.”

  “Ah, then he’s crazy about her.”

  The next day, as they had planned, Eliah and Shiloah went to pick the girls up on Rue Toullier. Juana came down alone.

  “What about Matilde?” Al-Saud worried.

  “She’s not joining us today. She doesn’t feel well.”

  Juana held up her forearm to prevent Eliah from striding toward the door of the building.

  “Stud,” she said so seriously that Al-Saud was forced to pay attention to her. “I’m on your side, you know that. But right now I’m telling you to let her be. Matilde isn’t your everyday woman. Treat her as though she were made of glass.”

  Even though the sun was shining and the sky had turned a clear, cloudless blue, it was a gray, dreary day for him. He would have deserted his friend Shiloah, but seeing how well he was getting on with Juana, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to leave them without a ride; finding a taxi in Paris was like finding a needle in a haystack. So he spent the day playing the surly chauffeur. Anyway, how else was he going to spend his Sunday? Take refuge at the base or the George V to get some work done?

  In his efforts to make Juana’s every whim come true, Shiloah managed to get her up to the top floor of the Eiffel Tower. It had been years since Al-Saud had gone up; he had forgotten how magnificent Paris looked from a thousand feet in the air. The desire to have Matilde next to him, to be leaning over her as he pointed out the most important buildings in Paris, provoked a form of anxiety so foreign to his nature that he ended up taking the elevator back down to firm ground. At the base of the tower, he couldn’t stop himself from calling her on his cell phone.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded congested. She really wasn’t feeling well. She had caught a cold the night before. “Hello? Who’s there? Roy, is that you?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Oh, hello.”

  “I called to see how you are. Juana told me you weren’t feeling well.”

  “I’m feeling better. Thank you.”

  “I’m glad.” After a silence, he ventured, “I want to see you. I’m coming to your house.”

  “No, I look horrible. Plus, I could be contagious.”

  Another silence.

  “Fine. I won’t impose. I hope you get better.” And he hung up.

  The car stopped across the street from a large wooden door whose pointed arch sported a blue ceramic plaque with the number thirty-six painted in white. The familiarity of the door, the plaque, the way the thirty-six looked, the rosettes; everything provoked a nervousness that would lead to tears and anxiety if he didn’t control it, and probably an attack of porphyria. The past came back to him in a rush whenever he visited the Rostein mansion. Berta’s family home, located at thirty-six Quai de Béthune, on Île Saint-Louis, where he and Shiloah had grown up in a hostile environment, full of scowls and shadows. He only kept and returned to the old house for one reason: his Columba livia, better known as carrier pigeons. On the terrace, in a dovecote that Berta had had built for him, he kept fifty birds, ten of which belonged to Anuar Al-Muzara. For years the family’s old caretaker, Antoine, had cared for them, and he passed all his knowledge on to his son, the young Antoine, who understood the pigeons as if they were the same species.

  His friendship with Anuar Al-Muzara, whom he had known since childhood, would never have flourished if, as teenagers, they hadn’t discovered that they were both pigeon lovers. Pigeons were all Al-Muzara, a surly, rebellious young man, seemed to love. His parents had died in Nablus at the hands of the Tsahal, the Israeli army, after which the Al-Sauds had become their guardians and brought him and his siblings, Sabir and Samara, to live in the house on Avenue Foch. Prince Kamal had allowed him to continue his hobby, and set aside a space in the garden for his dovecote.

  “Antoine, when did Pélerin get back?” Gérard Moses wanted to know, stroking a male pigeon’s back.

  “Yesterday, at five past three. Here’s the message.” Antoine handed him the little slip of paper that the bird had transported in a little metal tube tied to its foot.

  “Good boy,” Gérard said, and kissed the pigeon’s head. “Get Coquille ready.” Meaning one of Al-Muzara’s pigeons. “I’ll release it at five in the morning.”

  He went down to the study to read Anuar’s message. There was no risk of Antoine understanding it, because it was written in code. He and Gérard had developed the code when they were fifteen. They never imagined that an adolescent game would become a means of communication between an arms designer and one of Mossad’s number-one targets.

  In fact, Mossad hadn’t yet been able to catch Al-Muzara precisely because he didn’t use technology. He forbade the use of computers, GPS systems, cell phones, fax machines and radios. Instead, he communicated with his people via ancient methods. “If they were good enough for the Romans and the Egyptians, why not us?” he would argue. He had created a highly efficient web of messengers. An encoded message on a slip of paper sent from Limassol, Cyprus, at six in the morning would arrive at the Gaza Strip by midday. Only in extreme emergencies—Al-Muzara and his deputy lieutenant, Abdel Qader Salameh, decided when a situation should be deemed an emergency—would he resort to a military-encrypted cell phone whose system prevented the calls from being intercepted. Another reason Al-Muzara distrusted technology and used it as little as possible was because he never knew when new technology would make the technology he possessed obsolete. The Americans and Israelis were capable of coming up with incredible inventions to defend themselves and neutralize their enemies. With the North American AWACS, Boeing 707s with a huge dome-shaped radar system, circling around the planet, and the ECHELON system, which was capable of intercepting three billion communications a day, no form of security was ever likely to
last very long.

  Gérard Moses unrolled the little piece of paper to decode the message. In the city of the man born in Quercy, where he expelled the Ottomans, on the day when the heir of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry came into this world, at eight at night, in the house of those who escaped from Atabiria to become Hospitallers. That day, I will give you my columbae liviae and you, yours. Al-Muzara wanted to see him, and he had told him the day, place and time in this paragraph. In the last sentence he indicated that they would exchange carrier pigeons. He smiled; his friend still showed a passion for riddles.

  The heir of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: that was how they referred to Eliah Al-Saud, a pilot like the writer, whose birthday was on the seventh of February. The place: St. John’s Concathedral in La Valeta, the capital of the island of Malta, built by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, who first occupied Rhodes, formerly known as Atabiria, before going to Malta, where they were called the Hospitallers. La Valeta, the island’s capital, took its name from Grand Master of the Order Jean Parisot de la Valette, born in Quercy, France. No one could deny that he was dealing with a very educated terrorist.

  La Valeta was a clever choice. More tourists had been going there in recent years. No one would suspect him if he visited the main city with a camera around his neck.

  However, he was disappointed that the message didn’t mention the strike that Anuar’s group was planning in Paris. He had expected it as a way of paying him back for introducing them to a valuable contact: the arms dealer Rauf Al-Abiyia, better known as the Prince of Marbella. Al-Abiyia wouldn’t have sold him anything without his intervention. Rani Dar Salem, holed up in his hovel in the Dix-Neuvième Arrondissement, was similarly in the dark and awaiting instructions.

  Anuar had already failed once. He had wasted the information Gérard had passed on about his brother Shiloah’s whereabouts. That afternoon in Tel Aviv, the idiotic suicide bomber had sacrificed himself in Barro’s pizzeria, pressing the detonator without realizing that the main target, the son of the famous Zionist Gérard Moses, had gone to the bathroom.

  He was surprised to hear his cell phone ring. Only one person knew this number.

  “Talk to me, Udo.”

  “The man, Rani Dar Salem, has just received his first instructions.”

  “Go on,” Gérard Moses ordered impatiently.

  “A vacancy has opened up at the George V. A few days ago they fired a bellboy for an indiscretion. Everything has already been arranged for Dar Salem to take his place.”

  The high-speed Thalys train entered the Parisian Gare du Nord station at the stipulated hour, eleven thirty in the morning, after leaving Centraal station in Amsterdam at eight fifteen that same morning. The katsa Ariel Bergman stepped down from one of the first-class cars, with nothing but a sports bag for luggage. Two men came over and shook hands with him. They didn’t exchange a single word as they walked to the Range Rover parked on Rue Dunkerque, and the silence persisted as the four-by-four headed toward the Israeli Embassy located at number three Rue Rabelais. The truck braked at the entrance to the building, and the driver showed his credentials to the guard, who studied them before lifting the barrier.

  As in all the Israeli embassies, Mossad’s French base was located in the reinforced basements of the headquarters in Paris. The agents could express themselves freely there; the site was a refuge protected by high-technology alarms and electronic countermeasures, and was set up so that one could pass the time comfortably.

  Ariel Bergman went to the bathroom and returned to the meeting room feeling refreshed. His men, Diuna Kimcha and Mila Cibin, took the opportunity to congratulate him. Bergman’s rapid response to the Bijlmer disaster two years before, which had prevented a catastrophe of international proportions, had eventually led to his promotion to the headquarters of Mossad in Europe, located in The Hague.

  Though Diuna and Mila were his old friends—they had trained together to become katsas—Bergman listened coldly to their greetings and congratulations and got straight to the point.

  “What can you tell me about Eliah Al-Saud?”

  “Very little,” Diuna Kimcha admitted. “He’s the majority shareholder in a security and information services business. Apart from that, nothing.”

  “It was easier to find information about his family, the Al-Sauds,” Mila Cibin informed him, and reeled off biographical facts about Prince Kamal and Eliah’s older brother, the civil engineer Shariar Al-Saud.

  “Why are we investigating him?” Diuna was curious.

  “He’s not a problem for now,” Berman admitted, “but we can’t take our eyes off him. He could become a very serious issue. Yesterday, our sayan at SIDE, the intelligence services of Argentina, told me that Al-Saud traveled to Buenos Aires to investigate one of our most important sayanim: Guillermo Blahetter.”

  “The one with the laboratories,” Mila contributed.

  “That’s the one. Anyway, the information he was able to obtain wasn’t worth much.”

  “Any theories about why he wanted to investigate Blahetter?”

  “The Bijlmer disaster,” was all Bergman said.

  “Al-Saud’s brother’s hotel,” Diuna Kimcha said, “the George V, will hold the convention on the two-nation state that we were telling you about, the one Shiloah Moses is organizing. It starts on January twenty-sixth.”

  “The convention will go almost unnoticed if, as we anticipate, the press doesn’t pay any attention,” Bergman opined. “No major North American or French media outlets will send correspondents. Anyway, we should infiltrate it with a couple of our men to gather as much information as possible.”

  “We’ve already sent a request to Tel Aviv for forged credentials so we can pass Greta and Jäel off as members of Peace Now,” Diuna commented.

  “They say that the Silent One will open the event,” Mila Cibin noted. “Maybe his presence will attract the media. You know he hasn’t given any interviews, and the media are dying to talk to him.”

  “Perhaps,” Bergman said and suddenly changed the subject. “What did you find out about Udo Jürkens?”

  “He’s in Paris. We know that he rented a car. We’re thinking about following him through the rental-car system. Why do we have to follow him?”

  Bergman opened a folder and took out a few photographs, some old, black and white, and others more recent, of a Caucasian man with short blond hair and a noticeably square jaw.

  “These,” he said, pointing at the new photographs, “were taken a few months ago at Ben Gurion Airport by one of our agents, who thought he was seeing a ghost from the past: Ulrich Wendorff.”

  Diuna Kimcha and Mila Cibin were young, but they had still heard of Ulrich Wendorff, a legendary Marxist guerrilla who caused havoc in the seventies as an active member of the Red Army Faction. This German terrorist group was better known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. Its activities and alliances with extreme left-wing Palestinian groups became a nightmare for many countries, including Israel. Wendorff’s cruelty and fanaticism were notorious. It was said that he had a tattoo of the Red Army Faction’s logo, a red star with an MP5 rifle and the letters RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) in the foreground, on his bicep.

  “On that occasion,” Bergman continued, “immigration records showed that the passenger was using an Austrian passport under the name Udo Jürkens. If this Udo Jürkens was actually Ulrich Wendorff,” Bergman went on, “it would be a real stroke of luck. Several different intelligence services have been trying to catch him for years. Some time back he was known to be in Baghdad, in the service of Abu Nidal.” Bergman referred to the man many considered to be the bloodiest Palestinian terrorist of them all. “As was to be expected, the relationship didn’t end well. The last thing we heard was that Abu Nidal had ordered his assassination. Now with this Udo Jürkens wandering around Europe, there seems to be some doubt about that.”

  * * *

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  * * *

  Fergusson Isl
and, part of the D’Entrecasteaux Island group, Papua New Guinea. January 8, 1988.

  Eliah Al-Saud was in his small office at the training camp that Mercure ran in the southeast region of Fergusson Island. He had asked to be put through to Medes, his chauffeur, who was in Paris. Impatiently, he strode over to the window. It was a pleasure for him to reflect on what he and his partners had built in so little time. He spotted one of his men encouraging a group of recruits who were going to spend a few days in the dense rainforest, the majority of them Russian or from Eastern European countries that had previously been part of the Communist bloc. The collapse of the Iron Curtain had meant the downfall of the Red Army, leaving thousands of officers and soldiers without work—a ready supply of cheap and highly qualified labor. Likewise, the market had been flooded with weapons and artillery, some of which were stockpiled in Mercure Inc.’s warehouse, yards from his office, in climate-controlled conditions to protect them from the corrosive jungle air.

  He stepped a few feet to the right to peer at the nose of Mercure’s latest acquisition, one of the most important investments the business had made in the last year: an old Boeing 747-100 that had belonged to his uncle Fahd, the king of Saudi Arabia, who had sold it to them in exchange for services: guarding pipelines, training a group of air force pilots and making the Mukhabarat, the Saudi intelligence service, worthy of the name. “Nephew,” Fahd had said to him, “I want to put the Jordanian services to shame.” Though the market price of such an old jumbo jet, which would carry military supplies and men to conflict zones, would end up being less than the cost of the services Uncle Fahd demanded, Al-Saud and his partners calculated that winning the king of Saudi Arabia’s favor would reap profits in the future.