A Long Night in Paris: The must-read thriller from the new master of spy fiction
Page 1
A Long Night
in Paris
Dov Alfon
Translated from the Hebrew by
Daniella Zamir
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
About the Author
First published in the Hebrew language as ???? (Laila Aroch b’Paris) by Kinneret in 2016
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2016 Dov Alfon & Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir Publishing House Ltd English translation copyright © 2019 by Daniella Zamir The moral right of Dov Alfon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Daniella Zamir asserts her moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85705 882 9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
To Adam Vital, Yigal Palmor and the rest of the soldiers
in the Apocalypse Department at the Yarkon Base.
“A long night in Paris will cure us of all this”
Napoleon Bonaparte, after the retreat from Moscow, in response to an officer asking how they could recover from the loss of eighteen thousand soldiers.
Chapter 1
Nine people witnessed the abduction of Yaniv Meidan from Charles de Gaulle airport, not including the hundreds of thousands who watched the security camera footage once it had been posted online.
The initial French police report described him as “an Israeli passenger, approximately twenty years old”, although a week earlier he had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. His colleagues described him as “mischievous”, some calling him “childish”. They all agreed that he was “fun-loving”.
He disembarked, noticeably cheerful, from El Al flight 319. As he left the plane he tried his luck again with the flight attendants, and at passport control he played the fool with the French police officers, who regarded him with blatant hostility before stamping his passport and waving him on.
That is how it had always been. Ever since kindergarten, everyone had forgiven Meidan for everything. He had an exuberant, partly juvenile spontaneity about him which succeeded in charming every employer he had ever worked for, as well as winning over quite a few women, if only for a while. “It’s easy to forgive Yaniv,” a teacher once said to his mother.
Nothing else distinguished him from the other two hundred Israelis who had come to Paris to participate in the CeBit Europe Expo. With a buzz cut and matching stubble, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of a previous year’s computer fair, he wore the uniform of all young men in a country self-described as a “start-up nation”. In the footage he was seen forever fiddling with his mobile.
He was in his second year as marketing manager of the software company B.O.R., and that made him the most senior member of the team sent to the event. There were six of them, including him – a small team compared to the other, larger companies. “What we lack in money, we make up for in talent,” he called out to his colleagues, who viewed him with a mixture of amusement and affection.
The baggage claim was in a dimly lit, cramped hall. Meidan picked up the pace of his jokes. The longer they had to wait, the more bored he became, and he ambled to and fro, chatting, drumming against the motionless conveyor belt. He hated waiting. He hated being bored. His success as a marketing manager was directly linked to this quality, his need to inject interest into any given moment.
There
was no sign of the suitcases. At one point he began photographing himself in different poses, and uploaded a picture of himself next to the billboard of the Galeries Lafayette department store sticking his tongue out at the nude model, having no thought that the photograph would appear the next day on the front page of the most popular Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.
The marketing managers of the rival companies sat down with their laptops and made use of the time to work, rehearsing their presentations for the fair. “It’s all about connecting,” Meidan told his team, and whipped out a Visa card to pull a funny face in front of an American Express billboard.
Suddenly suitcases were shuffling onto the conveyor belt, and their luggage was among the first to appear. “Don’t worry, guys, the fair will be there tomorrow too,” Meidan jeered at the other passengers, and led his team towards the exit with a triumphant swagger.
They passed through the green customs line, he in the lead, his five colleagues in his wake. The automatic exit doors opened at once, and he was met with a row of a dozen greeters bearing signs, chauffeurs waiting for this or that passenger. Half of them looked like gangsters, but among them stood a breathtaking blonde in a red hotel uniform holding up her sign. Meidan at once approached her, sure that there was time for one last horsing around in front of the guys, just one more opportunity for tomfoolery, and that would be it.
It was 10.40 a.m., Monday, April 16.
Chapter 2
Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, Segen* Oriana Talmor was being rushed into the special meeting.
It was the first time she had been asked to represent her unit at Camp Rabin, Tzahal’s headquarters in HaKirya. She looked around in wonder at the huge Israeli Defence Forces compound, while the athletic military policeman who had been assigned as her escort walked briskly ahead. Segen Talmor followed him through a labyrinth of brutalist concrete barracks and futurist glass towers, along roads bearing incongruous names like “Iris Walk” or “Greenfields Lane”, towards their destination.
It took twenty minutes and several security checks for them to reach the floor that houses the executive offices of Tzahal’s Chief of Intelligence. The lobby was already full of people. They spilled out into the corridor, and a heavy-set rav seren bearing a pile of folders sat himself on the receptionist’s desk, all the while ignoring her angry glares.
Oriana found a seat by a window overlooking Tel Aviv. In front of her, a mass of low-rise buildings, occasionally dotted with green, spilled towards the pale Mediterranean coast. The sea was nowhere to be seen, bleached by the sun and eclipsed by residential towers and hotel blocks.
Across the street from the huge military compound people were lining up at gourmet restaurants, riding stylish electric bikes, and exchanging greetings, confidential addresses, family news and vegan recipes. Closer to the gates, a few women dressed in black called for the end of military occupation in Palestinian territories and were politely ignored by the American tourists and Israeli generals disappearing into the shopping mall ahead. By the car park, dozens of stray cats hovered around the dustbins, waiting for the duty soldier to dump the military food waste.
Although she was so high up, Oriana could sense the intensity of it all. Tel Aviv was celebrated now as the coolest city on earth. It was also the only place in Israel she had never really liked.
She moved away from the window and lingered in front of the strange objects displayed on the walls: a cowboy hat, a gift from the then head of the C.I.A.; a sword of pure silver, a present from Zimbabwe’s head of security services; a vintage Toblerone poster from the head of Swiss counter-intelligence. She tried to guess what gifts the Israeli Chief of Intelligence had given in return.
At 12 p.m. on the dot, the heavy wooden door opened and everyone filed into the conference room, where the air-conditioning unit was on full blast. Oriana took a seat at the corner of the table close to the door.
A commotion erupted when representatives of intelligence-gathering units moved to take the chairs at the head of the table, while the research department staff loudly exclaimed that seating was pre-assigned. In his early twenties, Oren was the ambitious adjutant to the Chief of Intelligence. Clearly under pressure, he reprimanded both sides indiscriminately. The representative of the naval intelligence division, the only other woman in the room, casually sat down next to the seat reserved for the chairman of the meeting, her white uniform lending her the appearance of a bride on her wedding day. Slipping in through a side door, the head of research, less than impressed, demanded she move aside. From their row of portraits on the walls, the intelligence chiefs of generations past gazed down at the ruckus, secure in their black and white stateliness.
When everyone was finally seated, the adjutant opened with a roll call, a classroom ritual that only added to the childish atmosphere.
“Information security?”
“Here.”
“Air intelligence group?”
“Here.”
“Naval intelligence department?”
“Here.”
The research divisions were called out by number, followed by the intelligence-gathering units, including two that Oriana had not even known existed. No fewer than three representatives from the Mossad were in attendance.
“504?”
“Here.”
“8200?”
He pronounced the name of the unit like a rookie: “eight thousand two hundred” instead of “eight two hundred”.
“Here.”
All eyes turned to her with what felt like overly appreciative glances, some ogling unabashedly. Oren had a different problem.
“This is a meeting summoned by the Chief of Military Intelligence, Aluf Rotelmann. He explicitly asked that the head of 8200’s Special Section be here today.”
“There is no head of section at the moment, Seren. I am the deputy and acting head,” Oriana said. The general’s adjutant was a seren, only one rank above her, but his position conferred on him much more power. Running through her mind was the advice she gave herself at moments like these: “Do not smile apologetically. Do not repeat what you have already said. If they are waiting for you to elaborate, let them wait.”
The adjutant was the first to break. “Sgan Aluf Shlomo Tiriani is head of Unit 8200’s Special Section,” Oren said, his eyes scanning the room for the sgan aluf. “Are you saying he’s on leave?”
“He was released from duty yesterday,” Oriana said. “His replacement is currently on a training tour abroad. He is expected to take up his duties when he returns,” she said.
“We understood that Tiriani was coming,” the young man said. He had big eyes and lips that formed the shape of an “O” even when they weren’t moving, as if still hungry for the maternal breast. The paratrooper’s wings on his chest completed the image of a child in fancy dress for Purim.
“I regret the disappointment my presence has caused you,” Oriana said. Laughter erupted across the room, but Oren was quick to silence it. He completed the roll call, got up to open an inner door, and called out, “We’re ready.”
Chapter 3
The scene at Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2 was becoming unmanageable, and Commissaire Jules Léger of the Police Judiciaire wanted the day to be over and done.
His head hurt. Not a muffled headache, not the kind that stays politely in the background; not a hangover type of headache, the kind that’s accompanied by comforting memories of the previous night. Not a headache that derives from hunger, heralding hope for a heartening and healing meal. And certainly not a headache that disappears of its own accord within a short while, like after drinking a granita in the summer. No, this was a genuine headache, verging on a migraine, and there were many reasons for it, which Commissaire Léger now tried to articulate to himself.
First, there was the simple and indisputable fact that a passenger had disappeared from one of the most secure locations in France, not half an hour after his flight had landed.
Second, and this was sheer injustice, the sce
ne of the event had fallen under his domain completely by chance. The airport’s chief of police was on a week’s holiday, and Commissaire Léger had received an order that in the chief’s absence he was to preside over investigations at the airport as well. He did not know the investigators around him, and he was not familiar with the scene either. His attempts to organise a semblance of police activity exacerbated his headache: the wail of police sirens outside competed with the noise of the radios inside, and together they pounded mercilessly against his aching temples.
Third, and high on the list of reasons for his headache, two Israeli officials, who without warning had appeared on the scene, were now demanding to be allowed to participate in questioning the witnesses.
Léger vaguely recognised the one named Chico, an older man with a mop of red hair, not necessarily natural, who was the representative of the Israeli police in Europe. Léger had met him in meetings to discuss the security of Israeli institutions in Paris, but to the best of his recollection he had never requested to be involved in an investigation before.
The other Israeli did not look like a policeman at all. He was tall, in tight black jeans and a white shirt whose price Léger estimated to be more than his monthly salary. Blue eyes gazed out beneath a shock of black hair dashed with white, offset by a horizontal scar on his chin which prevented his face from appearing altogether too gentle for a man. He stared straight past Léger. The commissaire had encountered several of his kind throughout his career, usually in fraud investigations. He was familiar with the Israeli’s obscure I.D., a laminated card with a photograph that looked too recent, this one bearing a foreign name and military rank. If Léger chose to believe the card, he was Colonel Zeev Abadi. Léger’s urologist was named Abadi too, a fact that did not alleviate his concerns. The emblem of the state of Israel was proudly displayed on the back of the card, with the request, in English and French, that all law authorities across the globe “aid in any way the carrier of this card”, whom it defined simply as “Investigator”.
“Anyone could make a card like this at home,” Léger said, looking up to meet Abadi’s eyes. Military, he thought. Intelligence?
“I’m in Paris partly by chance,” said the mysterious Israeli, and put the card back in his wallet, as if by doing so he had replied to Léger’s comment.