Niki gaped at me.
“I don’t mean actual sex. I mean that as the commander he does whatever he sees fit with you, without taking me into account at all.”
“And as the commander he does whatever he sees fit with you, without taking me into account at all,” Niki shot back. “Have you considered that when he put you in Vienna and me in Salzburg, he wasn’t only taking me away from you, but also you from me? So why don’t I feel the same way as you do? Why do I see it as part of a commander’s legitimate considerations, exactly the same as separating Ronen and Jerry?”
“How is that the same? They aren’t a couple.”
“We are a couple to Udi when he needs a couple. Not when he doesn’t.”
I drove around the streets of Tel Aviv, as the rain poured down. I didn’t want us to go home with empty hearts but there was also a gloomy silence in the car. When the rain died down, I stopped next to a small café.
We were alone there. I held my cup of latte tight in my hands as the rain started up again and rattled down onto the glass ceiling, and I told Niki what I knew about the Algiers mission.
“I know. Udi told me. And there are a few more under way, in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut.”
Again my mood plummeted. I’d had to prise it out of Moshik.
“How come he told you?”
“I remembered what the chief said about us operating as a couple, and I told Udi I wasn’t sure it would happen, because you’d walked out on me.”
“I walked out?”
“So what do you call it, when before that last op you slept on the couch, and when we got back you went to your parents and didn’t come home?”
“I still don’t understand why he told you.”
“Because I asked. I asked what I was missing because of it.”
“So it’s not me that you’re losing out on, but the Algiers gig?”
Niki sighed. “I really do not know you. And you really don’t get it. Algeria isn’t an enemy that I was raised hating. It’s all about you. It’s all you.”
We were not managing to get it together. This unfamiliar, unlikely tough-mindedness on Niki’s part, her refusal to say she’d leave the team – I tied it all in with the special relationship that had evolved between her and Udi. Perhaps the two of them were only waiting for us to get back from Algiers, and then Udi would send me packing and stay with Niki? How could I know?
Again, we put off going back to our apartment. We went to a film that was supposed to be a romantic action film about a couple of married agents ordered to kill each other, but whose love triumphs (as it had between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie when they made the picture). But it turned out to be an idiotic comedy full of scenes of impossible sharpshooting, and didn’t do anything to make happen what both of us wanted. It was close to midnight when we left the cinema. It was clear to me that anything I did now, apart from going home with Niki, would be a highly dramatic move and create a situation from which it would be difficult to retreat. We entered the apartment with empty hearts. We got into bed together, and we even held hands, but the mountain of problems dividing us and the memory of the terrible sex we’d had last time stopped us from going further.
Without becoming lovers again, we did decide one thing: we both wanted to go on the Algiers mission. To me it was very important, because it was perhaps the greatest contribution I could make, and to Niki – because it was so important to me. That, at least, was what she said, and I preferred not to think about the other possibilities. We’d work out the rest when the time came.
On Sunday, back at the base, we both lied to Udi.
“We want the mission,” I told Udi in her presence. “We are all set to do it.”
“I’ll accept what you are saying but not necessarily because I truly believe it,” Udi looked me in the eye first and then Niki, “but because I have no other option. Two other teams have already carried out similar jobs in Tehran and Damascus, with terrific results. A third team has been prepped for Beirut and they have been working on their cover for a long time: they are all set to go. Another team is also ready for Iran, and the Office needs all three to work together, in synchrony. I cannot lag behind.
“We have to reach a situation in which you’ll be able to keep an airstrip under observation day and night, at short notice. If we don’t tie up the loose ends, there can be no green light for hitting the weapons when they are unloaded, or being shipped in trucks out of Beirut airport. So I simply have to accept what you are telling me, even though the expressions on your faces are saying something else. But I will be able to assess the situation before the op, because I am going to be there with you.”
When he saw the astonishment on my face, he quickly added, with a wry smile, “Don’t worry, not in the same hotel room.”
Awareness of what we were to expect didn’t make our faltering relationship any better. Circumstances had forced us to be together, but it was no more than an unsuccessful attempt at artificial respiration. With each night that went by without sex, and mostly without even affectionate hugs, the realization grew in me that this was going to be not only our last joint mission but also the end of the great love we had shared. If I hadn’t known that leaving our home would mean cancellation of the operation, I would have walked out. Perhaps Niki felt the same. She was with me now only when she had to be, and for the rest of the time I didn’t know where she was. Once, when I noticed that both she and Udi were away from the base, and I asked her about it, she narrowed her eyes and said: “As I told you in Toronto, that was the last time you ask me and the last time I answer that question. I also told you not to expect me to wait for you, if you decide to leave. Physically or emotionally.”
And that’s the way I was left, with a host of questions and doubts, living under cover in my own country and in my own home, trying to deceive my own commander – but perhaps deceiving no one but myself. We soon entered the stage of intensive training, day and night, and we had almost no time alone together, especially not at our apartment, and no time to examine what was happening to our relationship.
We went through almost two weeks of training, working on details of our cover, and on how to use my camera’s telescopic lens and the night vision device to make identifications of ships and planes in daylight and in the dark. We put a lot of time into learning the various types of cargo planes according to their shape and colour by day and their lights by night. We studied material on the city of Algiers, which I discovered was a metropolis with over two million inhabitants, and from the pictures and films Moshik showed us, it also looked like quite an exciting place. The old part, high on the hills, made up of steep narrow streets and antiquated buildings, known as the Casbah, was where Bassam al-Sultan had taken refuge. The lower part of the city which had been built by the French after they conquered the country in 1830 was more modern.
Situated in the middle of Algeria’s long and jagged coastline – over 600 miles, between the borders with Tunisia and Morocco – the city boasted two ports. Because of the hilly range running parallel and close to the shore, the airfields were some distance away. According to Moshik’s intelligence, the military cargo planes from Iran didn’t land at the civilian Houari Boumediene airport, about twelve miles to the east of the city, but at a military airfield located in a sheltered valley in the hills to the west. We would be able to watch the port where the cargo ship could be expected to dock, but not the airfield. To do that we would have to scout out a good lookout position in the surrounding hills which had nice names like Mont Plaisant, and Djebel Koukou.
After we were well acquainted with the theoretical material, we drove out to the hills outside Jerusalem where Moshik had scouted locations as similar as possible to what we would encounter on the outskirts of Algiers, from the points of view of topography, terrain, and distance from the landing strip. We practised navigating up the slopes of the hills, keeping watch with the telescopic lens and night vision device, and retreating back down. On the last evening, when
we had the technical stuff down pat, the HQ staffers began to stage troublesome situations, such as the arrival of a military patrol, or a bunch of ruffians showing up to harass us. There was no problem at all with anything to do with my painting but when it came to acting out our cover as lovers, things were awkward. If we were to be caught just after sundown, we could explain with the help of paintings that I would do in advance and finish off in Algiers, and say we were having a picnic supper. But if we had to wait for a landing or take-off later in the night, or in the early morning hours, the only reasonable explanation would be for us to have been making love, and deciding to spend the rest of the night there in each other’s arms.
Our awkwardness was understood by the HQ people as embarrassment, unwillingness to perform a love scene just for their benefit. It was only on Udi’s face that I saw doubt and dissatisfaction. He did not believe our relationship had returned to normal, but he drew the line at interfering.
All the prepping didn’t leave us much time for sleep, and when we came home just before daybreak, we dropped exhausted into bed, almost without saying anything, and certainly without touching one another.
Moshik summoned me to his office where there was a large optical machine through which aerial photographs were spooled and could be seen in 3D through a special eyepiece. The intention was for me to memorize the terrain as well as possible, including the point where we’d go off the road, how to navigate to the lookout position, and the places on the way where I could set up an easel and where we could lay out our picnic. Niki was supposed to take my place at the eyepiece when I was finished.
After I’d been there about an hour, Moshik announced that he was going to eat, but I said I wanted to keep going, and found myself alone in the intelligence officer’s room. As had often happened in the past, I realized that there was a plan in my head even before I was conscious of it: I quickly went through the files in an open cabinet and discovered one labelled “Algiers – Casbah – Activists”. I found Bassam al-Sultan’s name in the index and on the page indicated, there was a photograph of the man and a description of his place of residence, as reported by an agent whose reliability was classified as “unknown”; a sketch of the way to get there, and an enlarged detail from an aerial photo on which his house was marked.
I knew I didn’t have much time. I took a sheet of paper from the printer, and made a quick sketch of the aerial photo, trying to memorize the details I wouldn’t manage to draw. The diagonal angle of the shot made it possible to see the façade of the little house, and I drew it, as well as some of the salient structures at the entrance to the alley and near the house, and then, rapidly, the man’s face.
After I’d replaced the file and folded and pocketed the sketches, I knew the die had been cast. I would do what the state wanted me to do, but I would also do what my conscience compelled me to do.
In the remaining days, I studied the field files Moshik left with us and, as well as memorizing the ways of getting to the observation points, I worked out how to navigate through the alleys inside the Casbah. The maps, aerial photographs and reports of operatives who had been there enabled me to construct a reasonably good route to al-Sultan’s house. On a tourist map I found that there was a pottery centre at one end of his street, and a jewellery centre at the other. That would give me an excuse for moving along the street and back again, and perhaps I could even order something and return the next day to pick it up.
When Udi notified us that we were leaving in two days’ time, I was taken aback. There were still big holes in our cover story and we’d hardly spoken at all about contingencies and responses. Dozens of things could go wrong between the moment we landed in Algiers and the time we left, and especially during the time we were in the hills observing the landing strip. We were liable to be challenged at any given moment, but we had few alternative cover stories. Clearly, being discovered at night with the night vision device in our possession would demand one response, while being stopped on the road, with Udi a short distance away, would demand another. A different pretext would be needed for each set of circumstances, and my painting, or making out with Niki – the only options that had been prepared – would not be relevant or logical in all of them.
I remarked upon this to Udi. And to myself I observed that I had not prepared a contingency and response plan for my own private mission, or even the means of carrying out the kill and making a getaway.
“The new team is already on the way to Tehran, the Beirut team leaves tomorrow, and there is no alternative here – we leave the day after tomorrow. Whatever hasn’t been tied up, we’ll tie up in the field,” he replied. I didn’t like either his answer or the whole situation, and I didn’t understand why they couldn’t hold up the other teams, who’d been training for a long time, until we were also ready. I said so.
“The shipments are getting from Tehran to Beirut via Algiers at the rate of one plane a day. Every day’s delay means another few hundred missiles that will drop on our country in the next war. The entire defence establishment is waiting for our information. There’s no way that a suspicious aircraft, or an airfield, or a convoy can be attacked if there’s a risk that we’ll discover afterwards that we made a mistake. It can be done only if there is one hundred per cent solid info. And we can’t wait any longer. We’ve held everyone up long enough.”
I saw this as a personal reprimand and kept quiet but I felt a sense of foreboding, especially when I learned that only Udi would have a weapon concealed in his luggage. In my mind, I pictured all kinds of things that could go wrong that we hadn’t even discussed, and then there was my own personal plan, for which I would need a weapon.
“I don’t like the idea of us being on the hill without a weapon,” I ventured.
“A handgun could not save you from an army patrol, only a good cover story, and having a gun would ruin that,” Udi replied.
Niki listened to the argument with eyes wide-open and frightened.
I said: “You know as well as I do that if three or four soldiers come across us without suspecting that we are armed, I could take them all out in a matter of seconds.”
“And then we’d have to try to make an insane getaway, with no chance at all of success. And if they come at you with loaded rifles at the ready, you may be able to kill one or even two, but then they’d mow both of you down. Argument over.”
“I want to take it up with the chief. It’s my ass – and Niki’s – that you’re putting on that hilltop without protection.”
“These are the chief’s own orders,” said Udi. “Have no doubt, it’s been discussed in depth, we’ve presented him with all the different possibilities, and this was the conclusion. But nevertheless, I’ll pass your objections on.”
6.
Algerian Nights
AS WE BOARDED the plane, and again as we approached our destination, I pulled Niki towards me and hugged her. She looked like a stranger, with her hair cut differently and dyed darker, and I probably seemed like a stranger to her, with the moustache I had grown. I didn’t know if she was also experiencing the horrible wrenching feeling that I had, a feeling that wasn’t quite fear and not quite excitement but an unpalatable cocktail of both, plus a whole lot of other emotions I couldn’t define. The chief and Udi had said that the sense of adventure dies as you are about to board a plane for Tehran or Damascus, and what keeps you going is patriotism only. It was true, I found, even when the destination was marginally less perilous, like Algiers. Niki’s face gave nothing away, but her response to my hug was immediate. I don’t know which one of us needed it more. I think we were both pleased that the hug was even part of the operational orders. “At the departure point, on the flight and upon landing, you are to behave like a pair of lovers, without attracting too much attention.” Someone was apparently worried that we’d stage a hot French kiss. That clearly wasn’t going to happen.
As the Algerian shoreline emerged, we both tensed up. From a distance, the coast looked jagged, with green mo
untains rising nearby, and beyond them a brownish landscape. But when the plane circled before landing, I saw the picture that Moshik had described: a vast brown and white city that spread out along the shore extending to the north and east, and ascended into the green hills. To the west of the city, the hills became mountains, also green, with scattered neighbourhoods climbing up their slopes. We tried to spot the military landing strip hidden in a valley but couldn’t. Our plane continued its descent, banked to the east and the city below thinned out, giving way to cultivated fields. Just before touching down we saw, to our left, the buildings of Dar El Beida, the white suburb on whose outskirts lies the international airport, with the sea beyond it, and fields stretching to the south, and the desert beyond.
The new terminal of the Houari Boumediene airport was still under construction, but we got an impression of a cluster of interconnected round structures, with boarding bridges protruding from them. Most were still raw concrete, but some had been faced in white stone, and green glass towers, apparently extensions of the stairwells and elevator shafts, rose above them.
My stomach wrenching intensified as we headed for passport control. At the security briefing before we left, Moshik and Udi had repeated the warning that the enemy had pictures of Udi and me, “and perhaps of Niki too”. Which enemy wasn’t clear but it was very likely that Yuri had received them from Gimbers and passed them on to the Iranians. What the Iranians had done with them, no one knew. They could have distributed them to their intelligence stations in Europe and to their allies in the “Axis of Evil”, particularly the Syrian and Hezbollah intelligence agencies, and if the assessments of a new Iranian-Algerian connection were correct, the pictures could also be here.
“So why are you sending the three of us out there together?” I’d asked, although I was tempted not to do so, for fear of appearing overly anxious.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 35
