A Long Night in Paris: The must-read thriller from the new master of spy fiction

by Dov Alfon

  His French was slow but precise, almost poetic. “Un peu par hasard,” Léger thought, and it was only his headache that prevented him from remembering if it was borrowed from a poem. He wanted to ask Colonel Abadi – if that was indeed his name – how an investigator could stumble partly by chance upon a crime scene thousands of miles from his office, but instead he turned to the airport inspector. “Let’s get them over to their witnesses.”

  Chapter 4

  It was soon after midday in Tel Aviv, but you would not have guessed it from inside. There were no windows in the giant hall, which was illuminated day and night by white neon bulbs. The hands of a dozen conflicting clocks, each bearing the name of a distant city, advanced on the main wall. It was seriously cold. Even at the height of summer the soldiers sat huddled in coats, and spent entire shifts rubbing each other’s shoulders. Over the years, numerous complaints had been submitted to the ombudsman, but the air-conditioning units kept rattling on: in the central nervous system of Israeli military intelligence, the welfare of the computers came before the welfare of people.

  The reports poured in at a dizzying pace, dozens every minute, from every military intelligence unit. In 99 per cent of the cases, the algorithms distributed the reports to the relevant sections without the need for human intervention. In other cases the report appeared on one of the screens, and the soldier had to decide within seconds whether it warranted the shift manager’s attention.

  The volume of data was enormous. The computers were capable not only of screening the reports but also of determining their level of importance according to the credibility of the source and sensitivity to keywords. They also identified similar reports and linked them, so that at 12.14 p.m., the screens lit up in concert in front of the soldier at Station 23.

  To: CENTRAL

  From: HATZAV OSINT Europe

  Priority: Very Urgent/Unclassified Passengers at Charles de Gaulle airport currently reporting on social media police forces sweeping Terminal 2A (El Al terminal, duty officer’s comment).

  To: CENTRAL

  From: El Al/Security/Chief Security Office Priority: Immediate/Restricted

  El Al chief security officer Paris reports possible abduction of Israeli citizen from Charles de Gaulle airport. Further details tk.

  To: CENTRAL

  From: Police/National Headquarters/Foreign Intelligence Priority: Immediate/Secret

  Israeli police representative in Europe reports Israeli citizen described as missing person by Paris police. Circumstances unclear. Police representative at location with military attaché’s representative. Further information as available.

  To: CENTRAL

  From: Aman/Central Intelligence-Gathering Unit/U.S. Intelligence Liaison Unit

  Priority: Immediate/Top Secret

  Clearance level: Code Black

  French Police canvassing Terminal 2A Charles de Gaulle airport in search of Israeli passenger Yaniv Meidan, approx. 20 y/o, visiting Paris to attend CeBit Expo. Disappeared disembarking El Al flight 319. (Initial lead is criminal, duty officer’s note.)

  The soldier in front of the screen did not take unnecessary risks, and pressed the forward button. Ten feet behind him, on an elevated podium, the shift manager sat in front of a giant screen that covered the entire wall. That day it happened to be a sergeant only days from her release date whose thoughts were fixed on her upcoming trip to the beaches of Sri Lanka.

  “It seems criminal to me,” she said.

  “Why would a techie be involved in criminal activity?” the soldier said. “The U.S. liaison guys automatically label as ‘criminal’ any event that isn’t Palestinian-related. Does their source even exist, and at that clearance level?”

  Most of the reports from the U.S. intelligence liaison unit arrived from American listening posts, usually managed by the N.S.A. How could their duty officer even know whether it was a criminal or security event? The soldier’s question was certainly apt, even if the sergeant would gladly have done without apt questions at that moment. The only questions she longed to hear were: “Would you like a special meal on your flight?” or “Would you like anything from the duty-free cart?”

  “What do I need this shit for, forty-eight hours before my discharge?” she said to the soldier, who was sweet and understanding. She smiled at him and pressed the button.

  “Executive office, this is Central,” she said into the microphone. “We have a Code Black report for the chief, immediate urgency.” On the top floor of the general headquarters building next door, two soldiers sprang up from their bench and raced downstairs.

  Chapter 5

  “Did you notice him on the flight?” Chico said to Abadi. “Is this Meidan guy the reason you’re here?” The two men had detached themselves from the investigation team at Charles de Gaulle and were walking through the arrivals hall of Terminal 2.

  “I’m not here,” Abadi said, turning to face the Israeli police representative, who stopped in his tracks.

  Unsure how to react, Chico ran his hand through his red hair. “Of course, of course,” he apologised. “I completely understand if you prefer not to talk about your mission. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I’m not,” Abadi said.

  “This kidnapping is just so strange,” Chico said. He continued in a whisper, “France has the highest rate of unsolved crimes in the Western world. This investigation isn’t looking too good. We may have to intervene.”

  Abadi did not bother to answer, instead turning and walking back towards Léger. What missing persons investigation did look good in the first few hours? The facts were unclear, there was no apparent motive, the witnesses contradicted themselves, and any shred of evidence had disappeared. The Israeli police probably would not have done a better job.

  Which is why he was not surprised by the results, as presented by the airport police inspector, when they reached him. The bottom line was clear. Clear – and completely bewildering.

  “We have a missing Israeli passenger, Yaniv Meidan, twenty-five years old, a marketing manager, who disappeared from the terminal as if he’d vanished off the face of the earth. The witnesses claim he was abducted in the arrivals hall by a woman he could not possibly have known, a tall blonde in a red hotel uniform.”

  “What do you mean when you say she abducted him? By force?” Chico said.

  Léger motioned towards the airport inspector with a large, circular gesture that probably meant, “Explain it to them again, more slowly.” Abadi had yet to decide whether the commissaire was ill or if his sombre silence was his way of expressing dissatisfaction.

  “As far as we’re concerned, this is for now a missing persons case,” the airport police inspector said. “The woman was captured by the security cameras entering the terminal in a hotel uniform, and was here waiting for the passengers to arrive, standing next to the chauffeurs and greeters, all holding signs with the names of passengers. She waited for about half an hour with a sign. We couldn’t read the name on it, but when the doors opened and the passengers started coming out, the missing person, and this is a fact, approached her. He is seen on camera accompanying her quite willingly to the lifts leading to the underground car park.”

  “So why are you searching the terminal?” Abadi said. “What makes you think he may have been abducted?”

  “First of all, we’re on alert because of intelligence reports about the possible abduction of an Israeli citizen in France. I mean, you’re here, aren’t you?” he said, looking at Chico for confirmation, before continuing. “And the second reason . . .”

  “The second reason?” Abadi said, because the inspector had paused and seemed to be struggling to find the right words.

  “The second reason is because they disappeared,” he said at last. “They disappeared. I wanted to check if this guy walked out with the blonde of his own free will, so I asked for the footage from the surveillance cameras. They can be seen entering the lift together, but there’s no sight of them exiting. That’s why I sa
id it was as if they’d vanished off the face of the earth. Given the situation, I updated Commissaire Léger, and we decided to launch an investigation.”

  Chico cleared his throat dramatically and asked, “Commissaire Léger, could you perhaps clarify this for Colonel Abadi, who as a military man and not a police investigator is perhaps finding it difficult to comprehend these findings?”

  Abadi did not have a chance to intervene before Léger said, “I don’t know in what capacity Colonel Abadi is here. I assume the witnesses called the Israeli embassy, which is their right. I’m cooperating with you as a matter of courtesy. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, you are welcome to return to the Israeli embassy and wait for our report through the customary channels.”

  “I meant no offence,” Abadi said. “We just want to understand what evidence made you suspect he didn’t leave the airport of his own volition.”

  Once again Léger motioned towards his deputy, who said: “There are three lifts that lead to the underground car park. There are no cameras inside the lifts, but we have one on each door, one on the ground floor and one at car park level. We cross-referenced the footage, ten minutes back and ten minutes forward. They entered the lift together on the ground floor, but they did not take the exit on the parking level. Both Yaniv Meidan and the hotel greeter disappeared as if they’d been swallowed up by the lift.”

  Commissaire Léger shot Abadi a questioning, almost defiant look. “I understand you’re here to interrogate the witnesses. I’m willing to permit that, and perhaps you’ll be able to draw information that will contradict the footage.” He gestured magnanimously towards the other room, in which voices shouting angrily in Hebrew could be heard.

  It was 11.30 a.m., Monday, April 16.

  Chapter 6

  As far as the adjutant was concerned, the report could not have come at a less convenient time.

  Oren kept flipping the envelope between his fingers. It was marked and sealed in accordance with protocol. “Clearance Black,” the stamp cautioned. Black was the only colour on the intelligence security scale that did not indicate the sensitivity of the source but of the report itself. It might contain information obtained by illegal means or with a direct connection to a specific Israeli citizen. In any case, it was too sensitive to be widely distributed. Since the days of telex and fax machines, intelligence reports had been transferred electronically; only reports with black clearance were delivered to the Chief of Intelligence in a secure envelope with a wax seal, by hand, as in the Middle Ages.

  The special meeting had begun half an hour ago, which meant that Rotelmann was about to get to the heart of the presentation. On the one hand, the instructions were “do not disturb”. But on the other hand . . . On the other hand, the report from Charles de Gaulle was connected to the alert that had triggered the meeting in the first place, in a direct, odd and almost prophetic way. Oren bounced the envelope between his hands like a hot potato. He asked the secretary again, “Are we sure he didn’t serve in Unit 8200?”

  “Yaniv Meidan, personnel number 8531272, enlisted in the armoured corps and was discharged with the rank of samal four years ago, after which he had his medical profile lowered due to back pain. He has since been serving his reserve duty in the food supply centre. He has not served a single day in the Intelligence Corps, let alone in Unit 8200.”

  She spoke to him in her habitual, almost insolent tone, pronouncing the sergeant’s rank with contempt, but it was not the right day for a confrontation. He glanced at the clock. The meeting would be over in half an hour, and the temptation to wait until its end to present Aluf Rotelmann with the envelope was overwhelming.

  “I’m going back into the meeting, slip me a note if there’s any development,” he said in the most authoritative voice he could muster. In the hallway between the chambers and the conference room, he placed his mobile in the secure box, straightened out his shirt in front of the mirror, and considered for a moment kissing the mezuzah for divine protection. He entered with rapid steps and sat back in his chair. His absence had not excited any particular attention. All eyes were on the presentation. All eyes – except for the beautiful eyes of the new 8200 officer, which lit upon the envelope he was holding. Her gaze lingered upon the black seal and then settled on him with quizzical suspicion.

  Everything was going according to plan, he reassured himself, all in all. Everything, that is, apart from the unexplained disappearance of a citizen at the centre of the scene, and the simultaneously unexplained replacement of the head of the relevant section by an overly inquisitive officer. The sweat on his forehead was not part of the plan either.

  Chapter 7

  The police post at the terminal was larger than one would imagine from the outside, its narrow door leading to an entire suite of offices. In the first, technicians were busy printing photographs of Meidan from the security footage. They would not at this stage be distributed to every office in the port, and certainly not to the border police, the inspector explained to them. This was an investigation of a passenger who had gone missing under unclear circumstances – circumstances that included the possibility that the passenger had disappeared of his own volition.

  The group was invited to watch clips of footage from the security cameras. Abadi did so merely out of courtesy, then asked to speak to the missing person’s travel companions.

  “The answer will not come from the witnesses either,” Léger said, offended, but he led them back to the adjacent hall.

  There were in fact two groups of witnesses: in addition to Meidan’s frantic travelling companions, the French police had identified three of the drivers who had been waiting at the arrivals gate. All three, Léger informed his guests, were former Israelis without proper French work permits. As unlicensed taxi drivers hoping to attract tourists to their unmarked vehicles, they were paying more attention to the arriving passengers than to what was happening around them in the hall.

  But all three remembered the girl. Long blonde hair, tall, red uniform – those were the descriptions that kept resurfacing in the witness statements. Like them, she was apparently waiting for passengers, and they had assumed she was working for one of the big hotel chains. They remembered Meidan, too, because he was among the first to emerge from the customs area. One of the drivers testified that he had said in a low voice, in Hebrew, “Want a cheap ride to Paris?” But Meidan had immediately approached the blonde, apparently trying to make out the sign she was holding, and the driver abandoned his efforts. None of the three knew what happened afterwards.

  The interrogation proceeded in some disorder, without note-taking. Chico asked his questions in Hebrew and then translated the answers into English. Léger’s deputy followed suit in French. It was a circus, but it hardly mattered; their testimonies were of no value.

  “Alors, Colonel Abadi?” the commissaire asked in a tone that could have been patronising but verged on empathic. The room fell quiet.

  “I don’t like blondes,” Abadi said at last.

  “I believe you’re in the minority there,” Léger said, struggling to follow his guest’s train of thought.

  “And in a short red uniform, no less. That’s all the witnesses are going to remember.”

  “She’s a hotel greeter. Most of them are blonde, and all have some sort of uniform. We are questioning all the major hotels in Paris about her. I could share your opinion of blondes with them.”

  “Don’t waste your time, no hotel will have heard of her,” Abadi said, and turned to the second group of witnesses.

  There were five of them, all members of Meidan’s delegation, waiting impatiently for their interrogation and not without anger. “How long are these bastards going to keep us here?” one of them said after being introduced to the Israeli investigators. They looked tired and nervous, turning over in their minds the main question: where to go from here? Some wanted to stay in the airport until their colleague turned up; others wanted to leave for the fair without further delay.


  A bald man named Assaf spoke on behalf of the group, since they had all had the same vantage point: they had seen Meidan leaving the baggage hall with his suitcase. Several greeters had been standing in front of him, some holding signs. Meidan had gone straight to the blonde in the red uniform.

  “He was trying to flirt with her,” Assaf said, at which Dubi, the oldest in the group, corrected him: “He was just trying to give us a laugh. It wasn’t as if he thought he had a chance with her.”

  They agreed that he had gone straight to her, on the pretence of trying to read the name on her sign. Assaf said that Meidan “just wanted to get a look at her boobs”. He saw them exchanging some words, then Meidan turned round and called out to them, “Guys, don’t wait, I’ve found me a better ride!” He laughed and followed the blonde to the lifts to the underground car park. That was the last they had seen of him.

  All eyes turned to Abadi, who chose to ask in French, if only to try out the simultaneous interpreting in the opposite direction, “Est-ce que l’ascenseur montait ou descendait?”

  Chico, at first surprised by the switch of language, translated for the five members of the group. “He wants to know if the lift went up or down.”

  “Why would it go up?” Assaf said. “They were going to the car park.” But then a scrawny, bespectacled man who said his name was Uri, and who turned out to be the company’s security manager, said, “From what I saw, the lift did go up. The girl led him towards the lift, they went in, the doors shut. No floor number lit up, but I definitely saw a flashing arrow pointing upwards.”

  Commissaire Léger looked like someone who was enjoying a particularly refined moment in a concert. “This is, of course, an interesting turn of events,” he said. “Unfortunately, it makes no sense at all.”