Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  A few days of routine in the training facility went by before Ronen and I were summoned to a briefing in Udi’s office. In the meantime, I’d made friends with Ronen and Jerry, the two members of our squad who’d been there longer than I had. We’d gone through some hand-to-hand combat drills with the trainer and they both turned out to be tough opponents, especially Ronen, a former naval commando. He was thin, but he had long powerful muscles and sinewy arms, and all the training had made his blood vessels stand out under his skin. He was supple and agile, and always managed to hit me with two quick blows before I could get in one. Jerry, a former attack helicopter navigator, was a smiley guy and, like me, not particularly physical. He did the training because he had to and not because he enjoyed it, like Ronen. We spent long hours pumping iron in the small gym, and my body mass proved critical in helping me lift a hundred kilograms, while Ronen eked out ninety, not bad for a lanky type like him, and Jerry smiled with satisfaction when he lifted eighty. The rest of the time we boned up on material that Moshik the intelligence officer compiled for us, mainly the history, politics and geography of Middle Eastern countries, as well as a course in spoken Arabic. We also had individual lessons in the Mossad HQ’s language laboratory, each in the dialect and accent appropriate to his cover story.

  Moshik and Avi were also at Udi’s briefing, along with Ronen and me. “There’s a job for you two,” Udi told us. “A case that’s cropped up in recent days, and you are leaving tomorrow morning to deal with it.” Even before he outlined the mission, I felt jitters of excitement fluttering around between my stomach and my loins. This was it. No more playing around.

  “Alex – that’s a codename – is an asset that our agent-recruitment and handling division, ‘Junction’, has in Russia’s missile directorate.” As Udi spoke, Moshik placed photographs of Alex in front of us. “Don’t study the pictures now, you’re going to spend a few hours with Moshik and he’ll give you all the intelligence you need. Listen to the big picture.” Moshik took the photos back and Udi continued.

  “Alex usually transmits material via a secret communication channel. In the last few days, he’s seen some Zil vans with antennae on top cruising around his place, and he’s worried that they’ve picked up his signals and are trying to triangulate them. He’s got some stuff he says is ‘top grade’ on a disc that he can’t transmit because of this. Our research people and his handlers in ‘Junction’ think it may be the answers to some queries they gave him on data the Russians have given Iran, to help them build their Shihab-3 missiles. These missiles can reach Israel, and our top priority is, of course, to prevent them from completing that project.”

  Udi looked at us. I squinted at Ronen. While I was tense and attentive, he was drumming on the table with his fingertips. Apparently he sensed this was a secondary assignment. He, too, was a long way from being sent on “very vital missions”, but couldn’t wait for that to happen.

  “In two days’ time,” Udi continued, “a delegation from Alex’s plant is going to Poland, and he has managed to get himself onto the list. There’ll be a lot of security men with them. That’s the big picture. Your job is to get to him, to get the disc, and to get it back here. The adversary is not only the security men but also the other delegation members, who will be briefed and alert and wary of strangers; the Polish guards who’ll be assigned to the delegation, and the hotel security staff, as well as local cops and, in the widest sense, every civilian in the vicinity.”

  I felt mounting apprehension. There was still so much we didn’t know. How would we locate the delegation? How would we make contact with Alex? How would we communicate with him to set up the hand-over of the disc? Would we have to break into his room? What happens if the security men confront us? What escape routes would we have?

  “Now you’ll go to the briefing room and Moshik will give all the intelligence we have on this assignment, and then Avi will go through the procedural matters. Meanwhile I’ll prepare your operational orders, and go to HQ to get the OK from the division chief and the Mossad’s director. When I get back, we’ll sit here as long as it takes until you’ve got every detail down pat, and if there’s anything left over we’ll take care of it on the way to the airport.”

  I felt a heaviness as I left for the briefing room. Although Poland was not a hostile “target” country, neither was it really a “base”. The security services there had probably not yet freed themselves from the ways of the communist regime.

  Moshik showed us the pictures of Alex. “They are not up to date,” he warned. “They were taken when the ‘Junction’ guys were still following him, before he was recruited. He’s about five years older now.” He gave us some details about the man’s habits and character. Then he spoke about the nature of the delegation, what the schedule of such groups usually was, and the places where it was expected to be. Some of the time, they’d be at the visitors’ facility of the plant that they were heading for, about an hour away from Warsaw, “and you’ll stay away from there”. Later on they would be at a hotel in Warsaw. He had a list of the hotels where such delegations had stayed in the past, and he gave them to us in detail, projecting pictures of them, inside and outside, onto the briefing room screen: corridors, doors, locks, housekeepers’ rooms and security officer’s uniforms. To wind up, he gave us a comprehensive briefing on the Polish security forces, and screened pictures of their uniforms. “You’ll have to memorize this stuff because you won’t have the files on you there,” he warned.

  After three hours, Moshik left us with the thick files to study and we went to grab a quick bite, for which I didn’t really have much of an appetite, but Ronen wolfed the food down hungrily. Then came Avi’s briefing. We were told we’d be flying into Warsaw together, after a stopover in Vienna, but staying at different hotels close to each other, “And in another hotel across the road,” Avi told us, “will be Udi.”

  It’s hard to describe the feeling of relief that overcame me when I heard Udi would be there. All at once, my frozen insides thawed, my heavy heart felt lighter and I knew everything would be all right. I saw no change in Ronen’s expression, as if it was obvious and he’d known it all along or it made no difference to him, but he didn’t miss the glow on my face.

  “What are you so pleased about?” he muttered. “All it means is that we’ll have to get his OK for everything and to keep him posted all the time.”

  Ronen, together with Jerry, had already been on three “base” operations, and he wasn’t as excited as I was. It was also easier for him to tell Avi his cover story for each of the phases of the mission: What he’d say at the airport, in the hotel, and so on. Avi worked on my cover stories with me until I felt comfortable with them, and he also coached me on how to reply to questions immigration officials or hotel security officers might ask me.

  When Udi came back from HQ, he told us the plan had the green light. He let us read the operational order which went into minute detail, defined the goal precisely, the limits of what was allowed and what forbidden, and also gave examples of problems we were liable to run into and suggested possible solutions.

  “And that’s exactly what we are going to talk about now,” said Udi, referring to the “incidents and responses” section of the order. What could go wrong, and how we were to react. When we were finished, late that evening, we had a real live operation before us. I said as much and Udi looked me straight in the eye and spoke in utter gravity:

  “You’re living now in an operation that we’ve built here, in the briefing room. There, in Warsaw, you are going to come up against an entirely different operation. It’s reasonable to assume that nothing will happen the way we’ve planned it, and that things we haven’t dreamed of will crop up. What we’ve been doing here is no more than warming up our ways of thinking about how to handle such occurrences.”

  We were sent off to say goodbye to our families and, because we were due to take off early next morning, we were ordered to return to the facility for the night. Ronen lived with
his girlfriend, and he said he’d be back sometime before we were due to leave. I prepared for a quick trip to Haifa, about an hour’s drive away. Jerry left with me, after spending a long day learning about some African states where he was due to go on an assignment which I knew nothing about. He was married and the father of twins, but he was a conscientious man, and had kept on studying until late in the evening.

  “You’re in good hands,” he said when we parted. “Your own,” and he laughed and gave me a surprisingly limp handshake. I was astonished at how different the three of us – Jerry, Ronen and myself – were from each other, although it was also easy to pick out common personality traits.

  The visit to my parents was a brief one as they were already on the way to bed. I didn’t want to tell them that a new exhibition had been arranged for me, in Europe this time. My failure to call them from Canada and the way I’d avoided mentioning my exhibition since returning had seemed very odd to them, and I didn’t want them to worry. This time, the trip was going to be short and I didn’t need to tell them a complicated cover story or make a dramatic farewell. This was just a visit, not a goodbye.

  I stopped off at my apartment in Tel Aviv and picked up some items I thought I’d need in wintery Warsaw, including woollen socks and the thermal long-johns I’d acquired in Toronto. There were also some that had the Hebrew letter tsadi, for “Tsahal”, the Israel Defence Forces, printed on them, and those I left behind. Who would have thought that instead of needing such things for a reserve stint in Lebanon or the Samarian hills, I’d be wearing similar clothes on an espionage operation in Warsaw. I didn’t stay in my apartment longer than necessary. Tonight, more than other nights, I preferred not to reminisce about Dolly or Niki, and I headed for the base camp.

  Udi had been there when I left and he was still there when I returned, perusing a sheaf of papers which may have been our orders, or the contingency plans. It didn’t look as if he was planning to go anywhere.

  “Get some sleep,” he told me when he saw me sit down in front of the TV in the dining room, which also served as a mini-clubroom. “Better to be awake on the flight and not half asleep when you get to Polish border control. Apart from that, in future make sure that you have all the clothes you need in your room here, and a suitcase and carry-on bag, in case you have to scramble. This time we had a twenty-four hour advance notice. We don’t always have such a luxury.”

  “Udi, I know this isn’t the time, but it never is. We have to talk about Niki,” I said. “You gave me permission to call her when I’m abroad, and that’s about to happen, but I want to know if I can give her – and myself – any hope. The way I left her was lousy, and I feel lousy. It has to be solved one way or another, before she decides that it’s over for her. I want to explain why I disappeared.”

  “We’ll do it, but not now,” Udi replied. “Now I only want you to tell me precisely what you are going to say to her. It has to be brief. It can’t be a long conversation between lovers. You’ll be in the middle of a mission.”

  “That I decided to enlist in a government organization and I couldn’t stay in Canada?” I ventured.

  Udi looked at me in amazement. “Why not just tell her you’re Mossad?”

  “I’m not going to tell her my grandmother passed away suddenly,” I said, with some anger.

  “Kill off whoever you want to, only not your cover.”

  “I’ll say that something happened that I can’t explain, and that I am very sorry.”

  “That’s OK from my point of view. But you can’t give any explanations beyond that, and no promises or timetables.”

  He went back to his papers, signalling an end to our talk. I thought about what he’d said. Did he really not get how much this mattered to me? Or did he think that my inner struggle had been decided at our last meeting in the Town Inn Suites and that everything that followed was merely the death throes, like a fish flapping on the beach?

  Avi woke me at five a.m. When I was dressed he told me to change my tie, and then he fixed the knot and said I had to learn to do one properly. I had been told some general stuff about my team-mates – family status, military service, etc – but not about Udi, Moshik, or Avi. I knew absolutely nothing about them or about what they had done in the Mossad before their present postings. As Avi was our squad’s liaison with Mossad HQ, I had been told not to fall off my chair if he suddenly turned up at my hotel, something a case officer may do if orders have been changed or more intelligence has come to light.

  When we were due to leave, we heard a motorbike roar and Ronen appeared out of the slanting rain that had begun to fall. Without speaking he took off his biker’s garb and gave it to Avi. Underneath he was wearing his travelling clothes and all he had to do was go to his room to get his bag which was already packed. He remained silent and seemed upset, but Avi whispered to me not to worry: Ronen’s partings with his girlfriend were always difficult.

  We climbed into an Office mini-bus. All the way to the airport I was thinking about Niki. How was I supposed to live in total separation from her without showing the strong emotion that Ronen was showing over this brief separation from his woman? I couldn’t believe that he simply loved her more. I didn’t believe that was possible but somehow this short break seemed to be affecting him more than my long break from Niki was affecting me.

  At the airport we split up. Udi said goodbye to us, with a pat on the shoulder for me and a few light slaps and a pinch on the cheek for Ronen, like a well-known Israeli rabbi-politician, Ovadia Yosef, used to give his disciples. “Come on. She’ll get over it, and on Friday night you’ll be back to fulfil your duties,” he said, managing to raise a thin smile on Ronen’s lips. The two of us checked in for our flight to Vienna, and Udi went to stand in line for the flight to Frankfurt.

  When I called Niki from Vienna, it was two a.m. in Toronto. I was prepared to apologize for the late hour, but Niki didn’t pick up. I felt a chill at the thought that my beloved was out enjoying herself, perhaps with another man. In an icy voice, I left a brief message on her machine, saying just that I was sorry I had to leave so abruptly and sorry I could not explain.

  I felt dejected until the moment we passed immigration control and went to the boarding gate for the flight to Warsaw, when a blessed calm overwhelmed me. The calm of an operation, with which I was familiar from my military service. In my seat on the plane, I remained absolutely calm. Ronen misinterpreted my silence and said, “An operation is like a pickup. You find a girl, observe her, approach her carefully, pay her a compliment, chat with her, invite her to a meal, dance with her, and after a few days and nights of that, you get into bed with her, a quarter of an hour passes, and it’s all over.” But these words only brought back the heartsickness that I’d managed to overcome, and it quickly gripped my soul with frozen fingers. Everything about Niki and me was the exact opposite of what Ronen was saying.

  8.

  Warsaw in the Winter

  WE LANDED IN Warsaw at around the same time as the Russians, but they continued on to their first destination so we had two or three days to get to know the city and the hotels the Russians were likely to stay at. Our orders specified exactly what we had to do. Each one of us had to check everything there was to be checked at his hotel, and we arranged to meet for coffee and meals at the others on the list. Both our hotels were on a street designated for conservation: the buildings were all four storeys high, with chimneys that had been repainted, each in a different colour, introducing a cheerful element into the otherwise rather drab scene. At the other hotels, which were scattered around an area not far from the city centre, we watched each other’s backs as we did our scouting. Nothing much had changed since the intelligence files we’d been shown were made, but it was good that we were seeing it all with our own eyes. We spent the remaining time getting to know the city, driving around in a car Ronen had rented, and plotting escape routes for use if anything went wrong.

  Ronald Friedlich, if he didn’t want to proclaim his Jewish
ancestry, had no reason to visit the site of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, but I didn’t want to forgo the historical route, studded with memorial plaques and monuments to the Jews who were concentrated there before being dispatched to their deaths, and to the young men and women who rose up to battle the Nazi army. Ronen didn’t accompany me, preferring to take a look at other parts of the city in his car. I took the subway to the start of the route, walked along Zamenhof Street, and at the park in the middle of what had been the ghetto, I crossed the snow-covered lawn and came to a large monument. The figures sculpted on it looked familiar. When I read the name of the sculptor, Nathan Rapoport, I realized why. They reminded me of his statue of Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the ghetto uprising, at kibbutz Yad Mordechai in southern Israel, as well as the memorial to the defenders in 1948 of Kibbutz Negba not far from there. On one side of the monument were heroic figures, and on the other Jews being led with bowed heads, holding Torah scrolls, and behind them, helmets of German troops. The bronze sculpture was framed in a massive rectangle of stone blocks. Across the road, a few dozen yards away were nondescript apartment buildings which now probably housed the children and grandchildren of the men and women who had watched the ghetto in flames two generations before. Watched and, in all likelihood, didn’t shed a tear.

  I continued on to the other memorials, stopping to read the plaques dotting the route. At one point, to escape the cold, I entered a small courtyard, surrounded by some of the few buildings left standing after the ghetto was razed. Dismal, cramped five-storey buildings: it was easy for me to picture the way Jews lived there, crowded together, drawing strength from each other, turning their backs on the storm raging outside. Less tangible but far more terrible than the actual snow storm swirling around me, blowing flakes into my eyes, making it hard to breathe.