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

by Dov Alfon

  “A soldier in your department, Rav Turai Vladislav Yerminski, has gone missing during a trip abroad, and we believe that his life is in danger. We don’t have time for this kind of power game.”

  “This is not a power game. This is a matter of national security.”

  “And it’s precisely because of national security that I do, in fact, have to know his exact location in Paris. I have to understand what he does in El Dorado, and I have to speak to his friends in the department. So tell me, Eitan. What’s it going to be? The security of your ego or the security of your country?”

  “I’m not even going to confirm the existence of such a department, and I’m certainly not going to authorise you to speak to Yermi’s friends,” he said calmly.

  From his voice she knew he had the complete backing of someone above him, perhaps the base’s Chief Network Intelligence Officer or perhaps the man above him, the head of southern command. Above or below, people whose country entrusted them with the secrets of others supposed that they belonged to a superior race. The extreme caution with which the unit was required to protect intelligence sources played into the hands of swollen-headed, obnoxious officers. She switched tactics.

  “Your soldier left for Paris without leaving contact details. His disappearance corresponds with an alert on The Most Wanted, and you should have been aware of that. Do you need me to connect the dots for you, or can you do that by yourself?”

  “You can try to intimidate me. It might work for the Special Section in other places, but it won’t work with us. Go back to threatening your pot-smoking soldiers in Tel Aviv and stay out of things that are above your clearance level.”

  “Nothing is above my clearance level. Log in to your computer and take a look.”

  “I have no intention of wasting a single moment on you,” he said, and hung up.

  Her soldiers tried to avoid her gaze. She needed to send some of them home, if only so there would be someone to open the section the next morning. But under the present circumstances, she could not afford to let a single one of them go. Eventually she sent Rachel home. Rachel had opened the section early that morning and Oriana knew that she did not like to be on the base after dark.

  Left with ten soldiers, she divided them into teams of three and kept Tomer under her direct command, perhaps to give him positive reinforcement for successfully locating Yerminski in the database. She gave him her computer and within a second he had opened a new file named “Team Oriana”.

  The other soldiers placed a rapid succession of calls to every person listed on Vladislav Yerminski’s recruitment file. She was hoping to get some results before her conversation with Abadi, but the initial information they gathered was disappointing. Yerminski’s parents did not answer their phone, and no other family members were listed.

  “Well, it’s understandable,” Alma said, overcoming her usual lethargy.

  “Why is it understandable?” Oriana said.

  “What do you mean? Their son’s getting married. Seems obvious to me that they went to Paris with him. Not to mention that he’s an only child. If I got married right now, my mum would come with me, even to Timbuktu.”

  It was obvious. Oriana was surprised she had not thought of it herself.

  “They weren’t on the flight with him,” she said. “Yermi and his parents have the same surname, and the list included only people who travelled on their own. So we know that they didn’t go with him.”

  “Then maybe they flew in before him, or maybe they took a later flight today. At any rate, they aren’t picking up their telephone,” Alma said with a shrug.

  In the absence of other family members, they tried the references on Yerminski’s file, all teachers from his secondary school in Ashdod. They all recalled him very well, spoke about his remarkable academic achievements, but none of them could say whom he might be marrying. Even back then everyone called him Yermi, because he hated the name Vladislav and his surname was too complicated.

  Julie, the only investigator who knew French, also came back empty-handed: marriage application registries were confidential in Paris, which meant they were not published online.

  “Shouldn’t it be public information who he’s marrying?” Oriana said. “Isn’t there something like that? Like in the movies, I’d be able to know and go to the registry office or the church, and I’d be able to object because he’s actually married to me, or because he’s knocked me up or something?”

  “Yes, there’s that, but the privacy laws in France ban the digital distribution of personal details,” Julie said in an attempt to defend the principles of her former homeland. “The list hangs outside the mairie. You can read it there. But even then you would have to know which mairie, because every arrondissement has its own.”

  “How many arrondissements could there be?” Oriana said, and immediately regretted it because Julie looked at her as if she was not worthy of the officer rank Tzahal had awarded her.

  “Twenty,” she said. “But he might be getting married in a suburb, because people say they’re getting married in Paris even if, actually, the marriage is in the mairie of some suburb way outside the périphérique. There are large Jewish populations in the 9th, 16th and 17th, but most Jews live in the suburbs. The bride could be from a few cities – Sarcelles, Créteil or Vincennes – and if she’s rich then she’ll have many other options. If someone wanted to run around all those mairies, they’d need at least three days.”

  Yermi’s appearances in the government databases were few and far between, and predictable: a driver’s licence awarded after his first test, an application for a passport after his final exams in secondary school, and at one point he had left the country for South America. The mailing address was his parents’ apartment in Ashdod.

  Her social media investigators, among the best in the Intelligence Corps, narrowed in on that South American trip without result. Yerminski did not have an account on any social network. He appeared in other people’s Facebook albums and Instagram accounts, usually those of girls, his blue eyes slipping away from the camera, his long fingers holding a drink or a slice of watermelon. They sent messages and located mobile numbers and even got some replies. None of the girls in the photographs had kept in touch with him, none of them knew who he was marrying, and none could recall a French female tourist from that trip.

  Only close friends remained. She assigned Boris, the most experienced samal in the section to the task. He was the only native Russian speaker. Special Section had a chronic shortage of foreign-language speakers because the unit’s technology and intelligence centres took priority. After his course, Boris had been stationed as an intelligence signaller up north. One night, after three months of wearisome listening shifts, he had broken a chair over the network intelligence officer’s shoulders and, after a stint in prison, had turned up in her section.

  Boris was a disciplined soldier, nonetheless, a thorough researcher who never took special notice of her. Other soldiers either blindly worshipped Oriana or were scared to death of her, but according to the irregular updates Rachel made sure to present to her commander, Boris never talked about Oriana behind her back.

  Which is why she was surprised when he suddenly looked up from the other end of the room and raised his voice. “We’re dicking around,” he said.

  “No, we’re not. We’re trying to save a soldier who’s an abduction target.” She really had no time for a tug of war.

  “No, no we’re not,” Boris said. “We’re sitting in the heart of a technological empire and you’re sending me to make calls to the abduction target’s pals. And you’re allowing his commander to kick you down the stairs over the telephone. You could have gone around his entire fucking department. You could have drafted an urgent order, to route all his text messages sent from Paris this morning from the moment he was kidnapped. You could have asked the police for the soldier’s telephone records, for movements in his bank account . . . You could have asked the building next door to screen every
telephone call in every hotel across France. With the push of a button you could have redirected to this section every e-mail ever sent that even mentioned Vladislav Yerminski. It isn’t such a common name. You could have had every soldier in this unit on his feet – thousands of soldiers, tens of thousands of robots and millions of antennae. But instead, you’re making us ask favours on the telephone from people who don’t understand what’s so urgent about a repeat background check of someone they barely remember. So, we’re dicking around.”

  Oriana agreed with him. But she could hardly come out and say so. Abadi had ordered a covert investigation, not that she knew why. As the manager, how could she explain that she was not really managing anything, that she too was a mere pawn in an invisible power game that could shift any second?

  “Instructions from the unit commander,” she lied through her teeth, once again. “We’re playing a game of chess, here, against an unknown enemy that seems to have managed to penetrate the manpower structure of one of the unit’s most secret departments. It’s only natural that the commander prefers we operate alone.”

  She hated herself for the cheap adulation, the inflation of the enemy, the self-aggrandisement and also the chess metaphor. All of it made her sick – but all of it worked. Boris nodded and went back to making calls. She nodded and gathered the skimpy material they had collected. She knew it would not be enough for Abadi to locate Rav Turai Yerminski in the city of lights, but it was all she had, and with that he would need to go to war, and with that he would have to win. She took a few jamming instruments out of the safe and ran towards the laundry shed.

  Chapter 42

  The name of the game was “hot potato”, and they were the best pair of players in Paris, i.e. in France, i.e. in the world.

  They started playing together against the rest of the world during their studies at the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, where the French Republic trains its loyal civil servants. A lot of water had flowed down the Seine since then. Today, one of them was the minister of the interior, and the other was head of the counter-intelligence agency, which operated under the minister of the interior’s jurisdiction. On their path to the lavish chambers in which they now sat, they had overcome many obstacles, crushed enemies and dodged investigations and lawsuits, scandals and nosy journalists.

  They had their eyes set on the Élysée, which they could see from the windows of the minister’s chambers. And the closer they got to their target, the more frequently they had to play the game. In fact, they passed another hot potato almost every day now, tossing it as far as they could from the minister.

  One brief meeting was usually enough to settle the identity of the victim. They always planned their moves in a one-on-one meeting, and the meetings never appeared in the appointment books managed by their secretaries. The first secret of succeeding in the game was never to leave your tracks.

  The minister’s chambers occupied the top floor of the Hôtel de Beauveau, named after the Marquis who had acquired it for his mistress in 1768. The Marquis’ son, the Prince de Beauvau, brought a young, orphaned African girl back from his travels and shared the home with her after his father’s death. He was one of very few noblemen to remain unscathed during the Revolution – an omen perhaps of the building’s political immunity.

  For decades, the State had tried to take over the property, succeeding only in the middle of the nineteenth century, after which it served as the headquarters of every French intelligence service, immediately below the minister’s chambers. The minister’s capabilities for spying on citizens were unrivalled in the Western world, and the law granted him powers that would make the President of the United States envious.

  The various units of the intelligence services were spread across every building in place Beauvau, which were connnected underground by passages, and the secrets flowed accordingly – who was writing to whom, who was sleeping with whom, who was paying whom. This mighty machine operated without judicial oversight, without, in fact, any oversight at all. Theoretically, it was designed to maintain civilian security. In reality, it worked night and day to bolster the minister’s position.

  The centre of the empire presided over by the head of the counter-intelligence agency was a giant underground structure on boulevard Mortier in the east of the city, because the historical buildings in place Beauvau were deemed unfit to support the necessary computers. At any given moment, more than a billion items were recorded and decrypted within the structure on boulevard Mortier: telephone calls, text messages, video calls, e-mails. The unit was the only one of its kind in the Western world that collected more information on its own citizens than on the rest of the world’s population combined. There was no heating in the building, because the computers emitted more than enough energy to warm it.

  The minister himself never issued a formal request to spy on his political enemies. Years ago, a scandal broke out when it was revealed that President Mitterrand had ordered the tapping of the phone of a famous actress who had caught his eye in her role as a Bond girl. Ever since then, French politicians had been careful not to get too close to the listening unit, and, officially, the minister never visited it.

  Nor did he need to; that’s why he had appointed his good friend from his university days as its commander, and if they happened to meet every day, sometimes twice a day, those were simply private meetings between old friends.

  “We have to keep this away from me,” the minister said, half an eye on the Élysée Palace.

  “We don’t yet know for certain this is not a criminal matter,” the head of counter-intelligence replied. “Can’t we claim it’s just another gang war, the Chinese mafia for example?”

  “Anything’s possible,” his friend said. The ministers always liked options that were open to any interpretation. “But run-of-the-mill criminals don’t murder with microdrones that even our department has never seen before.” He could not suppress the admiration in his voice.

  “And why is a senior Israeli officer suddenly here? Who is he?”

  The head of counter-intelligence took out his mobile and read off the screen: “Colonel Zeev Abadi, former deputy commander of Unit 8200 in the Israeli Intelligence Corps, commanded the unit’s training course at the Intelligence Academy, founded the unit’s big data centre and, until recently, as I mentioned, served as deputy commander. He led their work with the N.S.A. after the Snowden leaks.”

  “So he’s no longer in post?”

  “We can’t be clear about that. A year ago he testified in support of the unit’s conscientious objectors in a military trial, and shortly after that the news of his retirement was published. On the other hand, he’s certainly acting as though he’s still on the job. He’s the one who discovered the hidden camera in Charles de Gaulle.”

  “Who’s leading the investigation from our end?”

  “Commissaire Léger, from major crimes. He has responsibility at Charles de Gaulle as a temporary replacement.”

  “So he belongs to the Préfecture de Police de Paris?”

  “He belongs to Paris.”

  There was no need to say more, because everything was understood. A double homicide in the very centre of Paris, on the bridge over the Seine leading to the national library, was a humiliation for France. The minister must not be connected to the affair in any way, which was why his security services could not be connected to it.

  It was clear that the scandal and indeed also its investigation would prove a national humiliation. You could not expect the French police to crack such a case, with a mysterious Chinese commando unit on one side and Israel’s Unit 8200 on the other. It was better to roll the two cases into one and sacrifice a police commissaire who had already been involved in an unsatisfactory investigation since the morning.

  The head of the counter-intelligence agency picked up his mobile once more. Another hot potato was being passed.

  Chapter 43

  As Oriana prepared to leave the section at a run, Tomer
did not dare ask his commander if he could join her. In her absence, he was head of “Team Oriana”; it should have been a source of pride, but the more he looked at the results of his work on her computer, the gloomier he felt.

  In the course at the Intelligence Academy he was taught to focus, in each investigation, on no more than three open questions at one time. He had many more than three, but first he tried to do it by the book. Why would China, or any Chinese, have an interest in Rav Turai Yerminski?

  How had they located him, when his digital footprint gave no indication that he served in the Intelligence Corps?

  How could they have known that he was travelling to Paris and when?

  Soon enough he had twenty questions. He was supposed to answer each one and move on to writing the case’s probable scenario, but he could not come up with even one answer, and every scenario seemed improbable.

  So he proceeded to search for the answer to the question that actually interested him: did Oriana have a boyfriend?

  It was not the first time he had tried to glean information about his commander’s personal life. Her enigmatic beauty was in perfect sync with her secretive nature, which is why his attempts to know more about her had always failed. Nor did her computer come with much personal information: her user window was locked and the shared folders included only military documents. He had located her browser cache, but the history was empty, in accordance with the guidelines and as befitting an outstanding officer of information security.

  The photo album contained only one file, a headshot of Oriana in uniform, probably the picture she used for official documents. She was so beautiful he did not dare meet her eyes, even if, obviously, the siren on the screen could not actually stare back, just like he felt she did not actually see him when he moved around her in real life.

  In this state of distraction he clicked ‘Save’ on the photograph, and confirmed when asked if he was certain. A split second later he recalled in horror that he had logged into her computer with his own username. In terror, he clicked ‘Cancel’, but the computer had already registered the command and begun downloading the image.