by Dov Alfon
“Rachel, please don’t call me, or any other woman, ‘eye candy’. Can we get on with the update? We don’t have much time.”
“See how it affects everything? Me being ugly? I didn’t mean to offend, it’s just that, well, I anticipate a decline in my performance when he arrives, so I wanted to warn you in advance. I might get so flustered that I stutter and forget what I wanted to say.”
“I doubt that’ll ever happen,” Oriana said and switched on her screen.
“Wait, don’t read it yet, I’m the one who’s supposed to update you, it’s important.”
“Go ahead. The first message was from the unit commander, announcing that Zeev Abadi is assuming his new position. What’s the second one?”
“The second message is from Aluf Rotelmann, saying that you’re not allowed to work with Zeev Abadi.”
“What?”
“It’s in your inbox, an official letter. He’s suspending Zeev Abadi’s appointment because the announcement was not released according to protocol, so Special Section is requested, in the meantime, not to co-operate with the new head of section until we receive word from Aluf Rotelmann that the appointment has been approved.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No. His adjutant even called to make sure I got the letter. He said he tried contacting you but you weren’t answering. I explained that you turn off your devices when you drive, and that it drives me crazy too because sometimes I have an urgent message and I have to wait until you stop at a petrol station or something.”
“Rachel?”
“Yes, Commander?”
“You said you’re reading me the messages according to the order in which they came or by the sender’s rank?”
“I told you, Commander, in this case it’s the same thing.”
“Rachel, the third message came from someone higher-ranking than the Rosh Aman?” Oriana knew the samelet was reliable, but someone higher than the head of Israeli Defence Intelligence? Higher than Rotelmann?
“Yes. The third message arrived fifteen minutes ago, from Tzahal’s Vice Chief of Defence Staff.”
“What?”
“Yes. He said that you do have to work with the silver fox and that you should ignore Aluf Rotelmann’s letter because the Vice Chief of Defence Staff for the entire Tzahal is the man who decided to replace the head of Special Section and appoint Abadi, in accordance with standard General Staff orders or something like that, there was a whole list of detailed jurisdictions. In short, the appointment is on. By the way, Aluf Rotelmann is also cc’d on the letter, which is pretty embarrassing for him.”
“Pretty embarrassing,” Oriana repeated, partly because she was experiencing a temporary lack of focus in light of recent events, and partly because Rachel’s remark was spot on.
“His order also came in an official letter, including the sender’s secure seal. It really did come from the Vice Chief of Defence Staff’s office. But it wasn’t his adjutant who called.”
“No?”
“No. The call came from him. Well, a secretary put him on.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. From Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Noam Zeel, himself. He asked who I was, and I told him I was the duty sergeant of Unit 8200’s Special Section. He asked when you would be in the office, and I told him you had just left general headquarters and that you’d get in just before four, in time for a video call. He asked if I had received the e-mail and I said yes, and then he asked that I make sure to show it to you the moment you arrived. I told him, sure, Chief, you can count on me, Chief.”
“Rachel?”
“Yes, Commander?”
“You spoke to Tzahal’s Vice Chief of Defence Staff?”
“I know, isn’t it insane? No telling what more the day will bring!”
“No telling what more the day will bring,” Oriana absentmindedly repeated after her sergeant.
A secure call appeared on her screen. The caller was Aluf Mishne Zeev Abadi, the new head of section, a special appointment by Tzahal’s Vice Chief of Defence Staff, so it turned out, and, according to Rachel, a silver fox. “Do you accept the call?” the computer asked her.
Oriana now regretted not having asked for coffee. She sat up straight in her chair, looked into the camera lens and clicked ‘yes’.
Chapter 22
The rue Rabelais is one of the smallest streets in Paris, containing only four buildings and located in one of Europe’s most expensive real estate areas, close to the Champs-Élysées.
“The first building, 1 rue Rabelais, was once owned by Gustave Eiffel,” the letting agent said to his visitors, aiming for name recognition but receiving none. He thought he understood, perhaps. “Eiffel did live there until the day he died, but, as you can see, the original structure was torn down, and the rather dull office building you passed took its place.
“However, the second building was one of those hôtels particuliers once owned by the Baroness Gérard,” he said, the emphasis on “particuliers” and“Baroness”. His visitors remained unimpressed and he hurried to supply more illustrious context. “She was the niece of François Gérard, the official painter of both Napoleon and King Louis XVIII.” Silence again. The agent began to feel unnerved, but he rallied to fill the void – they were paying for every gem of historical knowledge that he had in his possession.
“With the death of the Baroness, her daughters discovered that she had bequeathed them the mansion and nothing more. Of course, they sold it,” he told them, “and the current building was erected on the grounds. Due to its size, it is now listed as two buildings: 2–4 rue Rabelais.” Not the slightest interest. He concluded nonetheless with his pièce de résistance. “Since 1925, it has housed the aristocratic ‘Le Jockey Club’, one of the hotbeds in France of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. And opposite it, in number 3 – call it divine punishment – is the Israeli embassy.” Had he discerned the slightest trace of a response to that?
Thoroughly unnerved at this point, the agent was not about to share the final detail that the owners of the last structure, 6 rue Rabelais, the glass office building in which they now stood, had a hell of a time renting out space here because, among other reasons, access to the street was blocked day and night by the Israeli embassy’s security. From the window in front of him, the agent had a clear view of the embassy that caused him so much grief. But his attention was now on a detailed review of the contract in his hands.
He could not believe his good fortune.
The renters were the Chinese representatives of a major mobile network company from Hong Kong. Owing to the increase in Chinese tourists to Paris, they had to boost their network’s coverage in the French capital. He had tried to interest them in additional assets in the 8th arrondissement, but they had wanted to start with the office on rue Rabelais.
In his profession, careful consideration of attire was critical. To work, he always wore inconspicuous grey suits – even if they were tailored to his form by an excellent man – so his clients would not feel outdressed. But with these clients, he ran no such risk.
The woman, maybe fifty, wore a vintage Chanel suit. She did not speak French; in fact, she did not speak at all. Even when she shook his hand, she did not bother to remove her giant sunglasses, and the gold logo twinkled at him each time she nodded.
The men were younger. One of them, head to toe in black Armani, did not take an interest in the negotiation, and remained by the open door throughout the conversation. The other two wore dark suits that accentuated the whiteness of their shirts. They were both relatively tall. The senior Chinese representative, who spoke excellent French, wore a rather conservative suit, black with thin white stripes. The other one wore a slim-fit double-breasted black suit, as in a gangster movie from the 1930s. Every few minutes he took a pack of cigarettes from his inside pocket with a theatrical gesture that suggested this time it was going to be a gun.
They were willing to pay the asking price, 2,000 euros per square met
re, double what he had anticipated. They were planning to install only micro-antennae in the office, equipment that did not require him to obtain permits from the Ministry of Communications or city hall. And they had agreed to a year’s rent up-front!
Their only requirement was that they be allowed to move in immediately. Installing the antennae, against the dark windows but without damaging the facade, was expected to take approximately four hours. He promised to speak with the concierge so the neighbours would not complain about the noise, but it hardly mattered, since at that hour no self-respecting Frenchman would still be in his office. After signing first, he offered them the fountain pen he used on special occasions, a Montblanc.
The woman glanced at his pen with disdain and took out of her purse a black Omas platinum pen. She used it also to fill out the cheque, drawn on a bank in Hong Kong. He looked at the sum before handing her the two sets of keys. She did not respond to his civilities, but the man who spoke French cordially accompanied him to the door.
As he left the building he remembered to talk to the concierge, and then found himself on the street. His commission from this last hour of work amounted to 100,000 euros. He passed in front of the Israeli embassy, for the first time without feeling vexed. The police officers at the entrance of rue Rabelais opened the gate for him, and he saluted cheerfully. Only out of fear that the Chinese might be watching from the window did he stop himself from bursting into a dance of pure delight.
Chapter 23
The coffee the secretary had brought him was too weak, but Aluf Rotelmann did not care. He was probably the only major general in Tzahal whose coffee preferences were unknown even within his own chambers.
In fact, he had no preferences. He could take it with sugar or without, he could work with his office door open or closed, he could drive his car himself or summon the driver; and even in the officers’ dining hall, the duty soldiers knew there was no point asking him which dish he preferred that day. As an intelligence man, perhaps the best of his generation, he had trained himself to cope with shifting realities. He believed that a man with preferences was a man with weaknesses.
For instance, until that morning he had favoured his head of intelligence-gathering, Zorro, over his other deputies. And now, reading the reports on his screen and drinking coffee that was too weak, even that preference seemed worth reconsidering.
The enforced appointment of Abadi had been by far the most surprising event of the morning. The man was thought to be finished, his contract terminated, his honour tarnished forever. A year had gone by, and yet here he was again.
Elusiveness happened to be a subject about which Rotelmann knew a thing or two. He searched on his computer for the folder and located it in the archives. The scandal had broken out in 2014, an eternity ago in the world of intelligence. “We, officers and soldiers of Unit 8200, past and present, declare that we refuse to allow the use of the unit’s technology and human resources in spying operations against the Palestinians, most of them illegal and all of them immoral,” the open letter began.
Refuseniks in Tzahal were nothing new, but it was the first time that conscientious objectors had come from within Intelligence. For most international media who carried the news, it was also the first time they had heard about 8200, “a semi-clandestine organisation”, “Israel’s most secretive unit”, “a very secretive Israeli military organisation”, as they presented it. Wishful thinking, that.
The investigation had been swift, legal charges prepared, military trials held. Rotelmann had been out of the loop that year, commanding an infantry unit in the north.
Fast forward a few years, and everything had changed. The commander of Unit 8200 had been replaced, a new law forbidding the publication of his name had been ratified; the internal security section of the not-so-secretive unit had been placed under the direct command of the Vice Chief of Defence, with a vastly improved budget and a new, bombastic name, “Special Section”; and Tzahal’s Rosh HaMateh HaKlalli, its Chief of Defence Staff, had officially announced that the new Rosh Aman, the new Chief of Intelligence, would be none other than Aluf Rotelmann himself, “a brilliant officer with an independent mind and a clear ethical voice”.
Wishful thinking, that, too. He’d been too busy to notice and had been caught off-guard when Abadi, in his later capacity as head of 8200’s Big Data project, had popped up to testify on behalf of the treacherous soldiers at their appeal. The man had talked about “mistakes”, “honesty”, “conscience” and other nonsense.
Rotelmann remembered signing the termination letter himself; it had been January. He found a copy in the archived folder and clicked. He regretted that Aluf Mishne Abadi had “chosen the wrong way” and “put himself above his unit”.
For Rotelmann, having an enemy inside the corps was problematic; having an enemy working closely with the daughter of another man whose career he’d sidelined was dangerous. The thought that his own adjutant had summoned her to his chambers that morning, and that Zorro had let her humiliate them, vexed him.
But he could not hold Zorro alone responsible for today. There had to be another explanation. A rundown of recent events: his deputy had given a catastrophic presentation in his chambers before all the intelligence representatives, among them the daughter of one of the adversaries; a special investigator from the N.S.A. had arrived in Israel to audit a possible violation of the intelligence co-operation agreement between the two countries; the Prime Minister’s office had decided to impose a security alert surrounding an event that Rotelmann decreed was unrelated to security matters; and Tzahal’s Vice Chief of Defence had forced an appointment that Rotelmann had instructed Zorro to thwart.
And the day was far from over.
He called his wife to say he would not be able to join her at their son’s school concert. She made him apologise to the boy right then on the telephone, and it was probably the only conversation in the world where he came close to fear. He had no choice, he said to his child, and as the screen in front of him confirmed.
The results of the disorder in the system were evident. Queries about the abduction in Paris came in from all units, seemingly without any co-ordination. The intelligence-gathering units had flooded Central with so many reports – from the Mossad’s European informers, from Unit 504’s Arab agents, from Hatzav Osint’s ferretings, and inevitably from 8200’s huge apparatus – that the computers were at risk of crashing.
The secretary had left his door open, and for the past fifteen minutes he had been able to hear the hysterical reports on television. “A clear oversight by the French security units . . . a remarkable kidnapping . . . special forces are now searching for the kidnapper . . . the Prime Minister has spoken to the Chief of Defence Intelligence, Aluf Rotelmann . . . the possibility the victim was selected at random has still not been ruled out . . . Israel, however, will have to investigate whether a higher state of alert should have been in order . . . prayers for the victim, and with us on the line we have one of the members of his delegation, who was witness to the abduction.”
He got up to ask the secretaries to lower the volume, but once he reached the desk he changed his mind. “I need the code for secure contact with the Israeli embassy in Paris,” he told the secretaries, who could barely drag their eyes away from the T.V. screen.
“It’s 340-98 on the blue one.” The swift response came from the secretary sitting to the left, who was usually the least efficient. His curiosity was piqued.
“You remember the codes of all the embassies by heart?”
“No, Commander, I have been asked for the code twice today. It started with your adjutant when the envelope with the black clearance material arrived.”
“And then it was the adjutant again?”
“No, the second time it was for that female officer who was in the meeting earlier. When everyone went on their break she asked me to identify the number in the database.”
“The one from the navy corps?” he said, although he had already guesse
d the answer.
“No, the one in the green uniform. From 8200.”
He nodded, absorbing the information. The secretary waited several seconds, then said: “Should I get you the embassy in Paris?”
“No, no need,” he said. “Bring Zorro to my office as soon as possible.”
Chapter 24
For a long time, Yermi saw nothing but fields.
Half an hour later, the view expanded into dull office buildings and ugly shopping centres. It was only when the bus finally came off the autoroute that he saw residential quartiers; they were just as he had imagined them, beautiful and unvarying in their sophistication. Yermi guessed they had finally entered Paris.
It started to rain heavily. Real French people appeared on the pavements, men in long raincoats, slender girls in high heels, stylish elderly women, some with poodles, all with umbrellas, as if some divine order had ensured their protection even from the first drops of rain.
He had no idea where the bus was taking him. He had boarded it at the exit of Terminal 2A, instinctively putting a distance between himself and the police activity he had observed in the arrivals hall. The bus with the airport’s logo was white. Many passengers boarded, and Yermi followed suit. It seemed that he was the only Israeli. He paid the driver like everyone else, lifted his suitcase onto the special rack like everyone else, and sat by the window like everyone else. The knot in his stomach was his alone.
The rain was now drilling against the bus windows. Pedestrians ran towards the cafés, which were large and well lit. Yermi started noticing tourists, singles and couples, looking as lost as he felt. The bus entered the small streets of the city, and he now saw businessmen as well, sporting light spring suits in cheerful colours. The taxis were white, the buses green, and the car lights spread a yellow glow. His thoughts remained grey.