by Nathan Ronen
“Who are you?” Rashid asked angrily in Maghreb Arabic. “Do you even know who you’re dealing with?”
“Let’s go inside and talk,” force commander Poselanitz suggested quietly in excellent French. “Can we offer you coffee?”
Rashid was led back inside the house, and from there to the cellar.
His head was covered with a black hood. He was seated in an unusually low chair, his hands and feet firmly cuffed to the chair’s lower frame. His posture was bent, the fat of his body impeding his breathing. The chair’s backrest was shorter than that of a regular chair. Three of its feet were identical in height, but the fourth had been sawed off and was shorter. Every movement caused the chair to rock, impaling the backrest into his back and causing a pain in its lower regions.
“How does it feel to sit in the torture seat that you invented yourself?” Joe Amar asked him in Moroccan.
“Maybe we can reach an arrangement. Are you looking for money? You must be Mad Francois’s people.”
The silence did not bode well.
Someone approached him and pushed a ping-pong ball into his mouth, securing it with gray industrial tape. His underwear was violently stripped from him. Someone drenched him with water from a hose, and the air conditioning was turned on at full power.
“Leave him here to stew in his own juice,” the force commander whispered, “and search the other rooms. Don’t leave a single mattress or pillow intact. And don’t touch his family.”
In Rashid’s room, the young girl with the willowy frame was standing and shyly holding a sheet covering her naked body, trembling in fear across from a massive, black-clad fighter who had his weapon trained on her. She couldn’t control the leak of urine dripping down her thigh.
“Don’t be afraid. We’re not going to hurt you,” Joe Amar told her in Moroccan Arabic, handing her her dress. He turned around in order to give her some privacy as she toweled off and dressed.
“Where is Rashid’s family?” he asked with paternal politeness.
“They’re not here. They’re visiting their home country,” she said in Moroccan Arabic characterized by a strong Berber dialect.
“And who are you? What’s your name?”
“I’m Aisha. I’m the family servant. I clean and cook and do whatever the master demands from me…” she said shyly.
“We’ll be out of here soon. If you yell, we’ll kill you. Do you understand?” Joe Amar asked.
She nodded. A rag was thrust in her mouth, she was cuffed, and a bag was placed over her head. Her fearful whimpering and uncontrollable trembling did not cease.
The professional crew began searching the house immediately, intending to find the safe in which Rashid hid incriminating material. Under Rashid’s bed, they found a “spy escape kit,” including stacks of dollars and euros in small denominations, blank SIM cards, cell phones, burglary tools, a first-aid kit including a morphine injection and a sterilization and sewing kit for gunshot wounds, small tracking devices, zip-ties, a Taser gun, a pepper spray canister, a Leatherneck commando knife, a powerful LED flashlight, an infrared signaling device, two plastic Steyr guns, silencers, ten loaded cartridges and additional ammunition.
Rashid sat in the cellar, cuffed to the low chair, which was thrusting into his tailbone, soaked to his very bones, naked and trembling with cold and rage. The invaders were obviously consummate professionals. Other than the Moroccan in which they addressed him once, they maintained their silence. He couldn’t hear a single sound from the upstairs floor, but he didn’t need to. He sensed them and knew they were overturning his house. It angered him to have them poking into his private affairs. He saw himself as a “super-predator” on the food chain. His fat, wimpy appearance was misleading, and he had taken advantage of this fact numerous times. He had never been hunted. He was the hunter. Now he hoped that he could track down the people who had raided his home. He knew they had no intention of eliminating him, not at this stage; otherwise, he would already have been dead a long time ago. He needed time to understand who they were and what they were after. Whoever had trained a crosshairs at his forehead had made a very serious mistake.
A few minutes later, the raiders found what they were looking for. A safe was concealed behind a fake wall made of plasterboard, covered by a heavy curtain, with a landscape painting of Marrakesh hanging over it as camouflage.
“Bring Fatty,” Daniel Poselanitz commanded gruffly.
Rashid was led like a blind man up the stairs, with the hood covering his head and the gag in his mouth. He had tried to ask them earlier, but they had not allowed him to use the bathroom. He had soiled himself, and despite being hosed down with ice-cold water, a terrible stench was emanating from him.
The raiders were wearing ski masks. The hood was removed from Rashid’s head, and the ping-pong ball taken out of his mouth. “Could I ask you politely to open the safe, or are you going to make us use the entire set of innovative persuasion devices you have here in your torture cellar?”
Rashid maintained a contemptuous silence.
“I could kill you here and now,” Daniel said. “I could crush your brain and leave your body to rot. Before that, I could cut off your dick and let you eat it, or alternately, shove my gun up your asshole and shoot up your guts from behind, which would make for a slow, painful death. I can do anything, and it’s important to me that you know it. Got it?”
Rashid did not react.
The commander picked up the large meat mallet, which Rashid had converted into a tool to shatter his victim’s knuckles, and began to toy with it. Rashid looked at the commander’s eyes through the slits of the black ski mask. They were steel-gray, and did not blink. Rashid knew the man had meant every word he said, and for the first time, an uncontrollable tremor went through him.
“Please open the safe and spare yourself some hours of unpleasantness,” the man encouraged him in an amiable voice, as if inviting Rashid to have a cup of coffee. He lit a cigarette and offered it to him. “After all, you know it’s going to be opened eventually. What kind of state will you be in? That’s solely up to you.”
Rashid hesitated briefly, sucked on the cigarette with great passion, and with hands shaking from the cold, typed in the combination. He moved aside and allowed the man in black to open the safe.
The commander nodded, and one of the fighters collected a substantial amount of cash, fake passports belonging to Rashid under various names, a computer disc, various accessories and numerous pornographic movies, storing them all in a large backpack.
“The guy’s a sex maniac,” one of the fighters said.
Daniel signaled one of the team commanders. They went out to the balcony, where Rashid could not hear them.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Arik Bar-Nathan, it’s that nothing is exactly what it seems. I think this is a brilliant camouflage tactic. Check those seemingly innocuous porno films very, very carefully. Italian intelligence has already caught an al-Qaeda cell that concealed messages and instructions in pornographic movies, embedding execution instructions for their murder and terror cells from their commanders. You can only see it when you play the films slower or faster than their normal speed. Don’t focus on the sex. They’re intentionally trying to get you to look only at what they want you to look at.”
The team commander nodded in comprehension. “Well, then, why don’t we give it to some gay analyst in our Intelligence Division who’s immune to it?” he asked jokingly.
Poselanitz held up some gay porn. “They’ve already thought of that, too. Never underestimate your enemy.”
The force acted quickly and efficiently to collect the rest of the various documents and photographs into an unmarked cloth bag. “All right, pack it up!” Daniel said in French, so that Rashid would hear and understand. “Take him to a warm shower and let him wash himself with soap and get dressed. If he does anything stupid, put
a bullet in his head.” He glanced at Rashid, who looked down, as if defeated.
Daniel didn’t know if Rashid was claustrophobic, and so, in order to keep him from struggling wildly, he popped up behind Rashid and pressed a rag soaked with a sweet-smelling liquid against his mouth. It was desflurane, an anesthetic. Rashid lost consciousness immediately and didn’t feel a thing. They wrapped his body in gray adhesive tape from head to foot, leaving him only an opening through which he could breathe. This was the ‘cocoon’ method used to transport hidden hostages inside innocuous items of furniture. They now put him inside a large, upholstered duffel bag.
Daniel signaled his men, who carried the heavy duffle bag and loaded it onto the large van that looked as if it was transporting office furniture. The large bag was placed inside a cabinet. The vehicle took off immediately, heading for the Mossad’s safe house in the French Alps.
Incendiary materials including fire accelerants were taken out of the van, which was parked behind the café. The fighters poured them throughout the house, while a demolitions expert planted explosives in the house. The gas knobs on the range were turned on, and a sharp smell of gas filled the house. Less than an hour from the time the Mossad team entered the area, they disappeared without leaving a trace. As commercial traffic in the market area was only beginning to filter in, an explosion ignited the entire structure, which burned with a massive force. Later, the explosion and the fire would be attributed to a leak in the gas canisters.
In Place des Capucins, next to the Noailles Market, a confused young woman was found in the morning hours, wearing a black jellabiya, wrapped up in a patchwork quilt, and mumbling incomprehensible words to herself about jinns and jnuns—demons and spirits dressed in black that had invaded her home in the middle of the night, scaring her to death.
* * *
27 Semtex is a plastic explosive.
Chapter 50
The Mossad Station in Paris
In Paris’s exclusive Eighth Arrondissement, near the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, is Rabelais Street, one of the shortest streets in Paris, comprised of only four buildings. Number 3, a sprawling aristocratic structure, housed the Israeli Embassy in France, which had been given as a gift to the Jewish nation by the French branch of the Rothschild banking family.
Seven hours after the events, in the Mossad station on the building’s top floor, Arik met the commander of the operational force that had raided Rashid’s terrorist headquarters in Marseille.
“What did you bring me?” he asked Daniel Poselanitz, the force commander.
“This,” the commander told him, presenting him with the contents of the safe. “Transport it to Israel immediately using a special courier, by diplomatic pouch. I want the guys in the Technology Division to give us a meticulous analysis. And tell them to watch out for deletion software that Rashid might have planted in his discs and flash drives.”
“Have our guys dispersed safely?” Arik asked, immediately feeling that the question was redundant.
“Each crew took off in a different direction. We’re being debriefed by Jonathan Arieli, head of Special Operations, at the Office, tomorrow afternoon,” the force commander said.
“Is Fatty already in the apartment?” Arik said.
“He is. We had to give him another Ketamine injection for a few hours. We switched cars. We just put him on a private ambulance currently on its way to the safe house in the Alps. He won’t remember anything other than a slight headache.”
“I’m on my way there. Joe Amar, you’re joining me, right?”
From a payphone booth at Gare de Lyon train station, Arik called Louis-Pierre, his friend at the DGSE, asking if he wanted to join him for Rashid’s interrogation.
“You have him? Have you lost your mind? You’re committing an illegal action on French soil, failing to update us, and now you want me to give it legitimacy by participating in the interrogation as a representative of the French security administration?”
“Louis-Pierre, first of all, it’s not an action targeting French citizens. Also, you know the DGSE better than I do. It’s full of Arab-loving clerks, some of whom might be feeding off Arab funds, overtly or covertly. And if you had actually asked for permission to raid a Moroccan intelligence agency substation, I’m sure your legal department would veto it and pile on the prohibitions, right?”
“I might or might not agree. But this doesn’t smell good to me. I have to ask my new boss, head of the Special Operations Divisions. On second thought, maybe it’s better if I don’t say a word. Let’s pretend this conversation never took place,” Louis-Pierre concluded.
“That’s entirely up to you, my friend. I’m going over there to talk to Rashid up close and personal. He’s the only one who can provide us with real information about the site of the terrorist attack in Morocco, the planned time, and how it’s going to go down. As far as I’m concerned, the man’s a ticking time bomb.”
“Best of luck. Keep me posted through my private email. But use fairly basic encryption software, so it looks like a totally innocuous email. I think I can crack it… I hope,” Louis-Pierre requested. In his heart of hearts, he knew that Arik Bar-Nathan was right.
Arik and Joe Amar boarded the high-speed TGV train to the city of Lyon, nearly 300 miles away. Two hours later, Arik’s people were waiting for him, and together, they drove southeast, toward the snowy peaks of the French Alps on the horizon.
Chapter 51
The French Alps, near Annecy
The Mossad’s Citroën Grand Picasso climbed effortlessly up the twisty roads of the French Alps. It crossed the gray granite-paved streets in the beautiful city of Annecy, whose pastoral views were in stark contrast to the brutal but necessary actions Arik had to take in regard to the “ticking time bomb.”
After driving about three miles west up the mountain, through the Col de la Forclaz mountain pass, overlooking Lake Annecy, the vehicle turned off the road and down a dirt path. A silent alarm was activated in the security booth hidden beyond the curve. Their path was blocked by an electronic barrier, bearing a sign reading, “Private Road—No Entry.” A guard with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun appeared, peering into the vehicle. Once he recognized the passengers, the barrier was raised, and the vehicle bounced upon the gravel on the dirt road leading to an ancient log cabin that had once served as a hunting lodge.
“Where is he?” Arik asked as he entered the cabin.
“Waiting for you downstairs, in the skinning cellar,” one of the employees of the Mossad’s French station replied.
That’s a really good place to put someone in the right mood… Arik thought.
The cellar had once been used by hunters to hang the carcasses of deer or wild boars on hooks in order to skin them, preserve the meat and distribute it. The walls were covered with white ceramic tiles that had been stained by the animals’ blood, while the floor contained pits to absorb the blood, covered with moss and mildew.
Rashid was sitting naked, cuffed to a chair, trembling in the chill produced by the air conditioning, working at full power. On his head was a black hood. He had a headache as a result of the Ketamine that had been injected in his neck while he was being transported, causing a paralysis in his body. The drug also made him nauseous. An unseen hand removed the hood from his head, and a powerful flashlight blinded his eyes. As far as he could see, he was faced by three people in ski masks.
“Rashid, my dear, we want you to tell us about the Islamic Jihad cell that traveled to Casablanca to carry out a terrorist attack in the Grand Mosque. Who? When? How many? And how?”
Rashid was silent. “Water!” he asked, throat parched, shaking with cold.
“Help us and you’ll get everything.”
Rashid stayed silent.
“We know everything about you. After all, you’re an expert on torture,” Arik Bar-Nathan said gruffly, “and we’re not amateurs, e
ither, and we know all the techniques, from using cables to connect your testicles to a car battery, drowning you by placing a wet rag on your face and soaking you with a hose, breaking every joint in your fingers and toes, as well as shooting you in the kneecap, and all the way to injecting chemicals into your veins.”
“I own an internet café in Marseilles. I don’t know what you want from me,” Rashid said.
“Okay, so you want to play games with us, and see how much we can get out of you, and how long it takes? We both know you’re a professional. A sadist known by those who had the misfortune to fall into your hands as ‘the Hangman of Casablanca.’ You enjoy hurting people, and you think you’re good at it, but you’ll soon find out you still have a lot to learn.”
Rashid’s mouth was parched, but he still spat contemptuously at the floor.
Arik laughed, whispering in his ear in Arabic: “I’m your angel of death. I’ll take you to hell. That’s where you belong.”
Rashid didn’t bat an eyelash.
“Way to go, macho man. You’re definitely a brave person. But after all, you know that everyone breaks down in the end. The only question is what the price will be, and what kind of condition you’ll find yourself in after we’re done with you.”
Rashid looked at the French-speaking man sitting across from him, wearing a ski mask, and said, “You’re not French, and your Arabic is Mediterranean, too. Who are you? You’re Israeli, right?”
Arik ignored him. He had no intention of letting the man control the conversation. “Look around you, ya habibi, Rashid al-Dulaimi. Do you see these posts, and the hooks embedded in them? Soon, we’ll take you and hang you up, upside down, on a hook that’ll be digging deep into your testicles. We’ll skin you slowly with a sharp hunting knife, and you’ll be screaming in fear from here to Casablanca, and no one will be able to hear your voice.”
Rashid’s eyes scanned the walls, covered with clotted blood, with obvious terror.