Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  So Udi was still here, and he knew we were back in the hotel. I didn’t know what he’d been doing, and I didn’t really care. He’d probably done whatever he could, but it hadn’t helped us.

  It was then that I remembered: Bassam al-Sultan! I still had an unfinished task and if I was flying out that evening, it would remain unfinished. But I did not want to let it go. All my hatred for the despicable interrogator of the night before was now channelled into that obscure figure up in the Casbah. It was unlikely that I’d be able to come back here in the future to do the job. But now the Mukhabarat would undoubtedly be shadowing us right up to the airport and it would be difficult for me to slip away from there as I’d planned, to execute the hit, and then to find another flight out. I needed time. Udi and Niki would have to leave without me.

  “I’d prefer to spend another day here,” I told Udi.

  From the silence on the other side of the line I could picture the shock on his face. What, has the guy gone nuts? he must have been thinking. But he had to keep up the act, because of the people who were undoubtedly listening in.

  “I don’t think that it would be possible to make the change but I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, please be ready to take this evening’s flight.”

  “I understand.”

  I looked at my watch. If my target were to come home a little earlier than he had when I’d seen him, I might yet manage to do the job and get to the airport at the last moment.

  “Who was that?” Niki brought me back to reality.

  “We fly out tonight, to Paris and then Toronto.”

  It was important for me to see how she reacted when she heard the destination. but all she did was close her eyes and pull me back into her embrace. She kissed me gently on my forehead, my eyes, my neck, and then she slithered down until she found the scar on my shoulder and kissed it and licked it and then she came back to my lips and I closed my eyes and surrendered all of myself to her mouth. Her tongue slid down my chest and belly and that was all that was needed to arouse me. But she went on loving and pampering me until I turned her onto her back and sucked at her inverted nipple and then tongued her little tattoo, and then between her thighs. We went on pleasuring each other until the very end, and the moment that this notion of “the very end” entered my mind, I was overcome by melancholy. This was perhaps the last time we’d be together.

  I had to go now, if I wanted to get al-Sultan off my conscience. Niki was looking at me. My tensed-up state had caught her attention.

  “What is it, my love?” she asked.

  I couldn’t lie. The night before, the interrogation, the last hour together, had created a new reality that I had to avoid ruining. I switched the bedside radio on loud and whispered into her ear.

  “The man responsible for the suicide bombing that killed Dolly is here, in the Casbah. I have found his house. I don’t want to go home before I’ve closed that chapter of my life.”

  Niki’s eyes opened wide in shocked dismay.

  “That means only one thing: that you haven’t begun the second chapter, the one with me,” said this so very wise woman of mine.

  Her words bowled me over. Here I was, already preoccupied with tactical considerations – getting to the Casbah by car, shaking off surveillance, waiting for al-Sultan by the jewellery centre, following him, stabbing him with the shabriyeh as he opened the gate, getting to the airport – without even considering what it meant for my relationship with Niki. Beyond the chance that I’d get caught, or that she wouldn’t forgive me, was it true that I had never devoted myself to Niki because I hadn’t achieved closure on the episode with Dolly? But it had been Dolly who was supposed to be closing the unfinished episode with Niki that had begun in Japan!

  The pointlessness of the act that I had planned was suddenly crystal clear: my inability to let go of the past and to devote myself to this wonderful part of my life that Niki had made possible, with all of her beauty, love, acceptance, and dedication.

  Niki was sitting on the bed, with her girlish body, lovely face and eyes full of hurt.

  “You have to choose, my love,” she said in a tone that could not have been more gentle. “I am not talking at all about the unreasonable risk you would be taking. I am saying that your very readiness to take a risk like that shows that you haven’t yet chosen me. That you haven’t yet fully entered this chapter, our chapter.”

  “I’ll be altogether free for our chapter if I manage to close that one,” I said, not entirely sure of what I was saying.

  “No.” Niki shook her head, and began whispering again. “That chapter isn’t the terrorist who killed Dolly. That chapter is Dolly. And if she did not die, for you, there, in that bombing, and also not after you found me again, she won’t be dead when that bad guy dies. Look, there was someone above him too, and someone alongside him. I have chosen you. For good – and there’s a lot of good – and for bad. That’s why I’m here, with you, and not back in Canada. But you are only now facing the choice between your past, and your present and future. Between your dead love, and your living love. I do not intend to influence your decision. Just that you know it’s all clear to me.”

  Her words were eating away at the state of operational alert that I’d worked myself into and that had almost blocked other voices from getting through to me. She was so right. How could I do it to her? Ask her to allow me to take an enormous risk that was all about my past, a past that had been shaped in order to help me get over the vacuum she herself had left when she vanished in Tokyo? And how could I do it, how could I give up on the once-in-a-lifetime love that Niki was for me?

  I flopped down next to her, my head drooping. I covered my face with my hands.

  “I don’t know how I could even have thought about it,” I muttered.

  Niki’s face was pale. “I am glad that this is what you have decided,” she said, her eyes still expressionless. But inside me elation sprouted and spread and I surrendered to it joyfully. I had cast off a heavy burden, not only the burden of the solo operation which I had just forsaken, but the burden of all these years. The need to avenge Dolly had melted away and I had paid my debt to my country and to the Mossad. I am a free man, all of my being was cheering.

  Niki put her arms around me. For the first time I was like a little boy with her. For the first time I was ready to devote myself to her alone, to give up all the bonds that had tied me to my life so far.

  We stayed in bed for a long time, during which I shed all the episodes of the past, and my heart opened up to love and to the future and to this wonderful woman next to me, who would be woven into that future. She wasn’t there with me in order to join with my past. She wasn’t there with me to help me defend my homeland. She was there with me because she had chosen me. And now it was my turn to choose her, and not only because she was gorgeous, enchanting and unique. Nor because she had been prepared to accompany me back to my country and my people, this Ruth the Moabite of mine. I had to choose her, because that is what a man does when he finds his woman. And I had found her. And lost her and found her again. And I wasn’t prepared to lose her again.

  This insight had reached the roots of my being, and I was completely at peace with it.

  On the way to the airport, Niki began shivering, whether because she was recalling the horror of the detention and the ordeal of the interrogation, about which she had still said nothing, or because she was anxious that our departure would go wrong. My stomach was also fluttering over that possibility. It would only have been that morning that the major and the Mukhabarat investigator would have filed their reports and only today that the details would have been analyzed in various departments by officials who had had a good night’s sleep and had come to work fresh with clear heads. It was entirely likely that someone had said that the idiots who grilled us had been half-asleep, and that our story didn’t hold water, not even a drop. And if there had been such a serious person, he might hold up our departure until everything was cleared up. It wouldn’t n
eed a bloodhound to sniff out the stuff we’d dumped at our picnic spot and lead investigators right to the night vision and radio devices.

  Our arrest and detention were, from my point of view, over and done with but back in Israel we would certainly have to go very thoroughly into how we had gone into the operation without taking all contingencies into account. As for the interrogation, the slap I’d taken was no big deal but Niki’s ordeal was still an open sore for me, and I had to know what had happened there. I cuddled her but her shivering didn’t stop.

  When we went up to the Air France counter, I saw Udi sitting on a bench, chewing on a roll. He acknowledged me with a slight nod of the head. That one intelligence agency had followed us when we were together did not mean that another service, the one that had interrogated Niki and me, knew about that. If they’d been following us, there was no reason to get Udi involved with us.

  “Udi’s here,” I informed Niki, but she didn’t turn her head to look for him.

  At border control our passports were scanned and stamped. “I hope you had a nice stay in Algeria,” said the woman officer who, surprisingly, knew at least that one sentence in English.

  Niki’s eyes met mine. What does one say in this situation?

  “It was OK,” I said and we moved on.

  We had half an hour to get to the departure gate and take off was set for forty minutes later.

  There wasn’t much to do in the departure hall of the old Algiers international airport. There weren’t even enough seats for waiting passengers. Everything had been put into the new terminal which was to be opened in the near future. Some passengers stood gazing out of the large windows while others sat either on the available seats or on the floor, around the broad pillars supporting the high roof.

  I was hoping Udi wouldn’t be on our flight. I hadn’t yet digested the events of the previous night, nor the decision I had taken in the last few hours, and before I had done so I did not want to be either friendly or nasty to him. I sat next to one of the pillars, my back against it, and invited Niki to sit on my lap. She did, resting her head on my shoulder, and I held her body which had stopped shivering. Our smooth passage through border control had apparently allayed her last anxieties.

  My Niki. Everything was now open before us, or so it seemed. Here, in the airport in Algiers, after a night of operational activity, detention and interrogation, I felt light, alert and free, more so than I had for years.

  “I was worried that you would end up like Udi,” she said suddenly and quietly, and I tensed up again. She sensed it. “Didn’t you know?” she asked.

  “Didn’t I know what?” I asked, almost impatiently.

  “Udi’s wife left him, with their son. They are living in England and they are not in touch with each other. He has lost them.”

  “What … when … and how do you …?” I responded in utter confusion.

  “Sorry. I thought you knew.”

  “No, but it makes no difference. How …?”

  “Udi told me. When I told him you’d left our home, and he was trying to persuade me not to give up.”

  “Not to give up on what?”

  “Not to give up on you, not to give you up, and not to give us up, because there are moments when this job of yours – he called it this ‘malignant job’ – is stronger than the things that are really important in life and sometimes, before you can get them into focus, it’s too late.”

  As if spoken by my own lips. Here and there I’d heard hints about things that had to do with Udi’s family life and his past, but no one spoke about it openly. Was it thanks to Udi, of all people, that Niki had remained faithful to me?

  “He wasn’t there when his son was born, or at his first two birthdays, and when the boy turned three Udi’s wife threatened that if he wasn’t there, she’d leave. And that’s what happened. He was on some mission and when he got back they had already gone.”

  “And that was it? He gave up?”

  “That’s what I asked. He said he was angry that she didn’t appreciate how important what he was doing was. And then he had to take international legal action to get her or the boy back, and” – here Niki’s voice dropped to a whisper – “the Office told him that would mean public exposure and the end to his operational career. And that in any case as long as he remained operational no court would ever give him the boy back.”

  “And he chose the Office,” I also whispered, stating the obvious.

  “Évidemment,” Niki replied in the French that she’d been forced to refresh not long ago with her interrogators. “It happened ten years ago. For ten years he hasn’t seen his kid because, for all kinds of reasons, Udi can’t go to England. His wife knows this and that’s why she went there.”

  Some of the loose ends in Udi’s personality, and in our relationship, were beginning to tie themselves up, but I wasn’t in a hurry to buy this new Udi, and I couldn’t stop myself from saying: “And despite everything he’s been through, he didn’t go out of his way to help us, until the talk with you. One could have expected a little more understanding and support from him.”

  “Right, but it was only after you left home that he got it, and that’s also what he told me. You reminded him too much of himself, when he was starting off, and at times he found it was hard to see your happiness. He came to his senses only when he grasped that he’d gone too far with his envy of you and when he saw that our relationship was breaking down.”

  I couldn’t restrain myself. “And you? Didn’t you have any part in it?”

  Niki sneaked a tiny smile. “There was not even a hint of that. But my feminine intuition did tell me that he was ever so slightly in love with me.”

  “He was in love with you, but nonetheless he tried to get us back together?”

  “You are strange, you samurais of the Middle East. There’s something you are loyal to more than to yourselves. Just like us, the samurais of the Far East.”

  Almost willy-nilly I turned my head towards that embittered, wise, cruel and complicated man. If he hadn’t said what he’d said to Niki and given us the chance to rebuild our relationship through the mission, it is likely that I would have become exactly the same as him.

  A man in uniform approached Udi. He had a piece of paper in his hand and was apparently ordering Udi to accompany him. They walked towards the offices at the other end of the departures hall.

  “I think Udi’s in trouble,” I said to Niki. “Whatever happens, you get onto the plane.”

  Anxiety leaped into her eyes but I felt a surge of adrenalin, and walked along the hall, towards the door Udi and the man had passed through.

  Once I was inside the anteroom, empty of people but full of closed circuit TV monitors, it wasn’t difficult to deduce that this was the Mukhabarat’s airport office. I heard Udi’s voice arguing with someone through one of the doors. They were talking about some picture and I heard Udi saying something about “my friend”. It did not sound good but, if he was speaking about me, I had nowhere to run to. I decided to go in.

  Inside was none other than the moustached Mukhabarat investigator of the night before, and his colleague, the one who had led Udi to the room. Both of them wore pistols in holsters. It took me no more than a second to recognize the faces in the two pictures they were holding. They were of Udi and me – our recently scanned passport photos and the ones taken at Gimbers in Stockholm.

  My entrance made both the Algerian officers turn away from Udi and when the one who had spent the night with Niki and me saw me, his jaw dropped. He had been hunting for me but I had found him.

  The moment that he turned away was enough for Udi to deliver a not very stylish but accurate and powerful flying kick to the airport officer’s ribs. I heard the crack of breaking bones and the air wheezing out of his lungs. My man didn’t have time to close his mouth or realize what was happening before my fist crashed into his jaw. I felt his teeth breaking with the impact, and my fingers too, as I hadn’t clenched my fist properly. With all my str
ength, I aimed a kick at his crotch and he emitted a sound as if his testicles were stuck in his throat, then he lost his balance and fell backwards. At the same time, Udi grabbed his victim’s head and wrenched it sideways. The man dropped to the ground like a rag doll.

  I still had my job to finish. I stood over the tormentor of Niki and me. His eyes were glued to me, expressing infinite anxiety as I raised my foot and brought it down, with all my weight, onto his throat, the way a Jewish bridegroom during a wedding ceremony smashes a glass with his shoe in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem, but this was in memory of what he’d done to Niki. And from the look in his eye a moment before he gave up the ghost, I knew that he knew. His Adam’s apple crackled loudly under the impact, as did the vertebrae of his neck.

  We dragged the two men behind the desk. Udi picked up the photographs that they’d dropped, gathered up a sheaf of papers and photographs from a fax machine and fed them into a shredder nearby. Then he straightened his tie, signalled to me to leave, removed the key from the inside of the door, locked it from the outside and dropped the key into his pocket.

  It was pretty clear what had happened. When our passports were scanned at passport control and routinely transmitted to the Mukhabarat airport office, our interrogator had been on duty. Our hasty departure must have aroused his suspicion and he had decided to do some crosschecking. He sent our photos to his head office, which quickly identified me as the man photographed during the Gimbers break-in. The Iranians apparently had received the pictures and distributed them to their allies. The Mukhabarat HQ then sent the picture of Udi to the airport as well, and the officer saw that he too had just been through passport control. My moustache and Udi’s goatee hadn’t done what was expected of them. The man who went out to look for us spotted Udi first. What a surprise they got when I walked in of my own accord.