by Dov Alfon
Now it was their turn to try to conceal their surprise, and they were very bad at it. Oriana read aloud the terminal number from her mobile as slowly as possible. They did not write it down because they knew that at that very moment someone on the other side of the wall was hurrying off to verify her claim, and they also instinctively understood that it was true, and that she was slipping between their fingers.
“How is that possible?” Hardy finally said. “All terminals are protected by the main server.”
“I believe that takes us back to your earlier question, ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’”
“What was that?”
“Who will guard the guards,” she said.
Chapter 59
Georges Lucas arrived at Le Grand Hôtel two minutes before his evening shift, as he had done every working day for the past twenty years. He shook the hand of his colleague from the morning shift, who as usual was in a hurry to make it to the R.E.R. before rush hour. They had been working together for more than a decade, and had never exchanged more than brisk pleasantries during shift rotation.
The security room was a presidential suite that had been converted into a surveillance centre. On all four walls hung the screens of the dozens of cameras scattered around the hotel, though no-one actually monitored them in the hotel itself anymore; that was the job of global headquarters, which hired employees for that purpose from less expensive countries than France. Lucas set his rucksack down on the bed, which would be used by the employee who would replace him at midnight. He took out his reading glasses and a bottle of mineral water before turning to the main computer.
He went through the list of messages. A warning had been sent from the chain’s American headquarters regarding a con artist posing as an Italian duke who had already managed to pull one over on three of the chain’s hotels in Brussels, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. There was also a query from another of the chain’s Paris hotels about an English guest who had stayed at Le Grand Hôtel in the past and was arousing suspicion by having, among other things, ordered since yesterday twenty-four bottles of champagne from room service.
In the hotel itself quite a few incidents had been registered in the course of the morning shift, which was generally the most troubled: a couple from Australia forgot their baby at reception when they checked into their room after a 24-hour flight, then squabbled over who would go back down to get him; a guest from Spain was injured in a car accident while photographing the Arc de Triomphe; and a guest from Germany insisted that an expensive ring had been stolen from her nightstand, even though the sensor logs clearly showed that the door to her room had not been opened since she entered it the previous evening.
Three messages awaited from Paris police headquarters. The first reported the early release from jail of a burglar who specialised in hotel room thefts, targeting the large chains; the second warned of road blocks in the Opéra district next week due to a movie shoot; the third was about the abduction of an Israeli passenger from Charles de Gaulle airport that morning, who had booked a room in a business hotel near the CeBit Fair in south Paris.
Lucas checked the reservations from Israel. A hundred and fourteen new guests had checked into the hotel today, and three of those rooms had been booked from Israel. An additional Israeli guest showed up at reception without a reservation, standard behaviour when Lucas had first started working in the hotel industry, but which nowadays was regarded as suspicious. The guest’s name sounded Russian – a red flag for any hotel in the city of lights.
There was no particular reason for linking the guest with the abduction that had taken place in the airport that morning, but just as hotel guests came to find excitement in the French capital, Lucas always held out hope that one of them would interrupt the boredom of his job. Picking up the house telephone, he asked reception for the passport photograph and credit card of Yerminski, the guest with no reservation.
Chapter 60
In another historic Parisian hotel, He Xiangu stood up and stared at Tarzan. At first she did not recognise him because he was very young in the photo, but there was no mistaking those muscles. Wearing a white bathing suit he flashed his teeth at the camera.
“Why do they have a poster of Tarzan in this conference room?” she said.
“The hotel conference rooms are named after him,” the leader of Team Three said. “I mean, not after Tarzan, but after the actor who played him in the movies, Johnny Weissmuller.”
“But why?” He Xiangu persisted. From the corner of the table, one of the older men raised his hand. It was the French translator who had been brought in half an hour earlier to assist the translators from Hebrew.
“It says here that the swimming pool at Hôtel Molitor was inaugurated in 1929 by the Olympic champion Johnny Weissmuller, who later became famous as the actor who played Tarzan,” he said. “He broke a record here.”
He Xiangu’s nostrils flared with indignation. She wanted to get back into the pool to challenge the dead man’s record. Instead she said, “Tarzan would have killed the Israeli by now while you’re still standing here waiting for him to appear,” and she returned to reading the transcripts.
However, her people had done a fine job summoning a French translator to clarify obscure points from the intercepted conversation and cross-referencing the main database to provide the background. It was not their fault that they were still a long way away from an adequate explanation.
Speaker A: They found him. They will take him to the light at police headquarters. He was at his mother’s, in a Jewish suburb south-east of Paris.
Speaker B: You mean this Abadi?
Speaker A: I correct you, Colonel Abadi.
Speaker B: [Swearing] I knew from beginning he was up to something. What will they do to him?
Speaker A: I do not know, but they were anxious to find him. I was afraid they would want to arrest me too, but they were only after him.
Speaker B: He still believes they intended to abduct a different Israeli?
Speaker A: I think so. He got the list from the El Al security officer without my knowledge.
Speaker B: You also did not know he would leave the code room in the Israeli embassy in Paris a minute after making a call.
Speaker A: It is not my job to handle these sorts of things. It is your job.
Speaker B: We are not supposed to talk about this outside the embassy.
“I don’t understand where they’re taking him,” she said. “What is ‘the light’?”
The French translator rushed to reply. “We believe the word ‘léger’ in the recording is not the French word for ‘light’, because it doesn’t add up with the rest of the sentence, and there’s no reason why the Israelis would suddenly use a regular French word in the middle of a Hebrew conversation. It’s more likely to be someone’s name. Léger.”
The team leader loaded a photograph onto the screen. “Given the context, it’s clear to us that they’re talking about this man, Commissaire Jules Léger, the senior criminal investigator in charge, according to the French press, of solving the abduction that took place at the airport this morning.”
“And where is he? Where is this police headquarters they’re talking about?”
“The police here have many buildings and many headquarters,” the team leader said, “but from what we have found out, the department headed by Léger is located in the historic building on the Île de la Cité, in the centre of Paris. The formal address is 36 quai des Orfèvres, but it’s a giant building with many entrances and underground passages, including from the adjacent courthouse and even the church next to it, which is called Sainte-Chapelle.”
“So Colonel Abadi, who was meeting the Head of Unit 8200 at the airport a short time ago, is now on his way to that building?”
“That’s what we deduce from the conversation,” the team leader said cautiously.
He Xiangu requested an update from the leader of the team at the airport.
The reply confirmed Team Tw
o’s findings. “John Doe 24, currently identified as Colonel Zeev Abadi, left the terminal with a tinfoil-wrapped package on his way to the taxi stand. A police car pulled over next to him and he entered the vehicle without protest. The squad car left in the direction of Paris with its siren on, and the Team Four xiake in charge of surveillance lost John Doe 24’s trail.”
If so, complete confirmation. The head of Unit 8200’s Special Section suspected that the Chinese commandos had wanted to kidnap a different Israeli that morning, and it stood to reason that by now he knew the name of the correct Israeli. He might even know how to locate Vladislav Yerminski. And to help him succeed in the very mission that she, He Xiangu, had been bungling since this morning, he had managed to enlist the French police.
How? Why? It was not very important. He Xiangu recalled an ancient lullaby, “The mouse was so confused, he went to the cat for love.” But who was feeling confused here other than her? Not Colonel Abadi, it seemed. She looked at the map and the photographs of the police headquarters, which were next to the river. It was obvious by now that any attempt to reach Abadi was doomed. She read the transcripts of the conversation again.
“What’s this thing with his mother?” she said.
“It seems that his mother lives in a Paris suburb,” the translator told her.
“So we can get to her?”
“Yes,” the team leader said confidently. “There are fewer than ten people by the name of Abadi in that area. But I’m not sure she knows anything.”
“She will certainly know how to contact her son,” He Xiangu replied with a blank expression. “I have heard that Mediterranean men are very attached to their mothers.”
Chapter 61
Erlang Shen breathed in the night air. Standing on the roof of the building in Saint-Ouen, he gazed wide-eyed across the skyline towards Belleville in the distance, a war zone in every respect, an enclave of madness within the French capital. There was considerable commotion on the neighbours’ rooftops and it spread to the look-outs posted across the many balconies. Below, small groups gathered along the paths connecting the buildings, wandering in a seemingly aimless manner, but in fact marking territory like military patrols. Erlang Shen was not sure he understood the scene he had stumbled upon, but he knew he needed to remove himself from it as swiftly as possible.
He arranged the two bodies in the only lit corner of the roof. He had brought the body of Wasim, the man who had recruited the blonde, using the freight lift from the parking garage. The second body belonged to a black teenager who had the misfortune of manning a look-out post on the same roof. He was young, perhaps only fourteen. A large plastic container with home-cooked food lay next to the chair in which his body now lay. Erlang Shen reckoned it was a meal prepared for him by his mother.
He took the strange knife he had found in Wasim’s pocket, turned the boy over and thrust it into his back, if not to mislead the police investigators, then at least to throw off the gangs just long enough to make himself scarce before they gave chase. He took out his camera and photographed the bodies and the contents of Wasim’s many pockets for the report.
He liked Commander He Xiangu, but he would have no alternative but to describe the chain of blunders that had led to this situation. Not only had the man employed by the squad turned out to be a drug dealer, but he, Erlang Shen, Ming’s own xiake, had been sent to complete internal damage control independent of the mission to capture Vladislav Yerminski. It was a task whose only objective was to conceal the extent of the incompetence with which this operation had been managed. No, he would have no choice but to file a detailed report directly to Ming.
But first he had to complete the mission on which he had been sent.
He studied Wasim’s delivery list. He was supposed to be relieved of the largest amount at the end of his route, at a stop described as “the funny fountain”. The rate was not mentioned. He was struck by this anomaly, but needed further confirmation.
He arranged the S.I.M. cards and the two mobiles on the floor. As he expected, access to the devices was protected by fingerprint scanners. He took the mobile closer to Wasim’s lifeless hand and pressed his dead thumb against the activation button until the main screen appeared.
He located the texts at the third attempt. The S.I.M. cards were no doubt switched at fixed times and the text messages were sent that morning, around the same time as the botched abduction.
“Did it go well?”
“Is everything O.K.?”
“Call me as soon as you can.”
“Call, I have a big, grade A gift for you.”
The reply arrived an hour later. “It was horrible. A lot more dangerous than you said. I’ll be waiting for you at the fountain at midnight. Don’t you dare come without at least double the amount.”
The time stamp corresponded with Wasim’s last scheduled delivery. Perhaps he had taken the organisation’s money for himself and was planning to pay the bait he recruited in weed. The sheer unprofessionalism of this business made his skin crawl.
He did not know what fountain they were talking about. He searched for the word “fontaine” in the S.I.M. card and found a saved location on the maps app. Zooming in on the point with the star, he arrived at Fontaine Stravinsky. The app explained that the fountain’s design had been inspired by Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring”, and that its spirit aligned with the adjacent music centre and the museum of modern art in the nearby Pompidou Centre. Whimsical, but not for much longer.
Chapter 62
Taxis were waiting outside the hotel. Her driver said he was hoping for a tourist who wanted to go to the holy sites in Jerusalem, or at least a fare that would be substantial enough to justify the wait, but if a sweet girl like her needed to get to Glilot, then fine, he was willing to do a mitzvah.
Oriana did not reply. She wondered what Abadi was doing, and whether her soldiers had left her any pizza.
It had been a narrow escape. She had left the Shabak’s agents too puzzled to keep their vague promise to return her to the base, too baffled to order her to report her next steps. Oddly, she did not feel relieved but frustrated. Who was she supposed to report this to, the head of Unit 8200? To Abadi? Excessive loyalty, indeed! She would inform the head of 8200’s bureau chief, whom she knew personally. She had no contact with Abadi anyhow.
The Mediterranean music on the radio switched to commercials, and then to the nine o’clock news. The broadcast opened with the Paris airport abduction.
“The search for Yaniv Meidan continues . . . Israeli sources close to the investigation say it was a drug deal gone sour.”
Oriana wondered whether all the news she heard was fabricated, or whether the truth was missing only from the news that she happened to know something about.
The taxi trailed along a traffic jam in front of the large interchange in Herzliya, part of it caused by middle-class suburbians driving home from work in Tel Aviv, part of it by officers from her beloved 8200 base driving to the pubs downtown after their shifts. The broadcast moved on to the Iranian threat, and then elaborated on the dangers of illegal immigration.
“Tzahal is investigating another case of arson attacks by settlers on homes of Palestinians in Samaria . . . In Tel Aviv roads will be blocked tonight due to the light rail construction . . . In Jaffa a teacher from the bilingual school was attacked by a masked assailant.” In the foreign news segment, the presenter detailed a series of anti-Semitic incidents that had taken place that week across Europe. Swastikas were spray-painted in a Jewish cemetery in Belgium, and in Strasbourg a Jew wearing a kippah was attacked on his way back from synagogue. “Europe is not a good place to be a Jew,” the driver observed.
They reached the turn. Oriana asked to be dropped off by the memorial, since she did not want the guards seeing her arriving in a taxi. The driver pulled over and refused to take her money, which made her regret that she had not been more friendly in conversation. Before walking towards the guard post, she took a long look at t
he lit jungle of antennae, trying to draw strength from them, or at least magic inspiration.
Chapter 63
At Le Flamboire in Paris, He Xiangu finished ordering the chef’s signature dish, beef ribs à la Flamboire. The impudent waiter tried to talk her out of it, claiming it was a dish meant to be shared by two, and recommended the faux-filet Chateaubriand instead. He Xiangu never understood why people ordered filet, and certainly was not going to settle for a cut whose only saving grace was that it resembled filet. She liked meat that bit back.
Mesmerised, she stared at the flames that rose from the giant grill. And then her mobile beeped. One message. Two messages. Three messages. By what miracle had these messages landed before her dish arrived at the table? She decided it was a sign from the gods that she would come out stronger from this wretched operation.
The first message was a confirmation request from the leader of Team Four asking to send back to the homeland the agent who had been detained by the French police next to the El Al area. She considered sending her bodyguard with him on the flight, before one of her enemies in the organisation caught wind of the versatile uses she made of him. But she was still in need of distraction tonight, and he was the ideal candidate – approachable, discreet and obedient.
The second message was from the leader of Team One, the biggest team: by 8.00 p.m. they had checked 70 per cent of the cheap hotels in Paris, and the soldier Yerminski was not staying at any one of them. He estimated they would have finished checking all the lower-grade hotels in the next two hours, and would then move on to the mid-level ones.
Grim tidings. She was about to send him a harsh reply, but opened the third message before responding.