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

by Dov Alfon

  It was 9.40 p.m., Monday, April 16.

  Chapter 66

  It’s one of the best-known experiments in psychology.

  The premise is simple: people are invited to watch a video of students playing basketball, and are asked to count the number of passes made by the players in white shirts. About halfway through the recording, which lasts less than a minute, a gorilla enters the court (or rather, a student in a gorilla costume), stands in the middle of the screen, faces the camera and thumps its chest before departing the frame.

  Supposedly impossible to miss. But in the original experiment, more than half the participants did not notice the gorilla because they were focused solely on their counting. When they were shown the video a second time and the gorilla was pointed out to them, they found their omission hard to believe, and some even accused the researchers of switching the videos. Abadi was familiar with the experiment, which had come to be known as “the Invisible Gorilla” and he had participated in a replication of the experiment in his intelligence officers’ training course. Nevertheless, here in the lobby of Le Grand Hôtel, he had almost missed the gorilla.

  The premise here was simple as well: the lobby was huge, absolutely enormous. Abadi ignored the reproving stares of those around him as he ran across the width of the ground floor to reception; the two policemen charged with accompanying him struggled to keep up. He had identified the hotel security men at their posts around the lobby, and in larger numbers than he would have expected: three in uniform at the entrance, a fourth near the service lift and a fifth by the lift for the disabled. Two security men stood inside the lift area to the left, their plain clothes doing little to disguise them. The main entrance doors and lift access points were beyond the sight line of the staff on reception, which probably explained the whole excessive security set-up, he thought.

  With a firmer grasp of the surroundings he understood their particular security challenges: studded with entrances and exits, the lobby of Le Grand Hôtel was in effect a lavish hub, its opulent concourses connecting the place de l’Opéra, rue Auber, rue Scribe and boulevard des Capucines. A separate entrance from the street led to the hotel restaurant, its famed name displayed on a half-concealed sign, “Café de la Paix”. And as he reached reception, he noticed yet another entrance, revolving glass doors onto boulevard des Capucines.

  A long line of guests stood before the reception desk, but at the sight of Abadi and his coterie of uniformed policemen, they dispersed. In haste, the duty manager ushered the men aside. Dreadful things went on in hotels, especially in the more luxurious ones; and the crucial thing was to keep the guests in a cloud of insouciance. Abadi met the manager’s hauteur with impatience, and briefly considered tossing him back to his perch behind reception; instead he restrained himself and let the officers do the talking.

  As he listened, he took note of all the lobby’s competing sounds: the clinking scales of crystal from the restaurant; the printing of a credit card transaction slip; the clicking of high heels on cold tiles as a redhead in a dramatic evening gown glided by on her way to the cocktail bar. He listened as the duty manager explained that the head security officer had just gone up to the room of the guest in question, and they must wait for his return. Abadi absorbed the voices, his mind defragmenting the clatter. And the gorilla passed.

  He heard it first. He heard the gorilla tapping.

  Against the general commotion, a tack-tack-tack-tack-tack. A tapping, but a different kind of tapping from the heels, more cumbersome, heavier, more erratic. Abadi identified the sound a split second before his eyes followed the noise to its source: a heavy suitcase rolling down the marble staircase, tack-tack-tack-tack-tack, wheels rolling then slamming against each polished step.

  Abadi always carried his suitcase like a man, or at least like a man with a sense of tradition. There was something undignified about the sound of a rolling suitcase, certainly on a city street, but more particularly in a hotel lobby. A person rolling a suitcase draws attention to the fact of his arrival, he’s a newcomer at the threshold of comfort. Or worse: he’s just leaving it, abandoning the gardens of delight and returning to the humdrum of life.

  Abadi’s gaze shifted from the suitcase to its owner, a young man, thin and meticulously dressed, and there seemed to be no reason for him to roll his case down the stairs instead of using one of the lifts. And he was in a tremendous hurry. It was only when the man reached the bottom of the staircase and turned into the lobby, avoiding reception on his way to the exit, that Abadi’s mind finally caught up with his senses, and he realised this man was Chinese. Chinese and wearing a black business suit. Chinese, in a black business suit, and someone who had – this suddenly became clear – quite a few friends here in the lobby, all young South East Asian men in black suits who looked like replicas of that morning’s commando team.

  The lobby was suddenly awash with them: one standing by the entrance to the restaurant, pretending to peruse the menu; another by the lift area, next to the front entrance; two more sitting in armchairs next to the bar, opposite each other, so their combined fields of vision encompassed the room. And a young Asian man in a black suit was now standing by the revolving doors opening onto boulevard des Capucines. Abadi could not tell what was more unusual about him, the fact that he stood against the wall, behind the security man, or that he was wearing dark sunglasses.

  Profiling. Was there any act more typical of security officers around the world? Abadi swiftly calculated the odds. In a city visited by tens of millions of visitors each year, were six Chinese tourists in a single hotel lobby so out of the ordinary? And during a week in which Paris was hosting a large, international tech convention, was it so strange that these six should be businessmen in black suits? Abadi heard the policemen behind him asking for the room number, and he heard the manager’s response: “5508, but let’s just wait for him a little longer, the security officer will probably be back in a minute to update us.” Abadi heard this but his mind was now totally immersed in the rhythm of the scene.

  And no bad thing, because suddenly the rhythm broke. The two men seated in the lobby got up and walked towards the main exit to rue Scribe. The third man who had been reading the menu with such interest now marched through the restaurant, to an exit on rue Auber. The man standing by the lift area ran towards the main exit and disappeared from Abadi’s sight, while the fifth man, in sunglasses, pushed the heavy revolving doors, shoving one wing so that he was inside the drum while the next opened for a person behind him. The gesture was clearly intended for his friend with the suitcase, passing now, rapidly, behind the uniformed officers and in front of Abadi, who needed, swiftly, to make a decision.

  The gorilla experiment proves the limitations of memory and the illusion of eyewitness testimony, but it also reveals the extreme way in which human intuition corrects itself. From the moment the subjects’ attention was drawn to the existence of the gorilla they developed an obsession with the ape, and in subsequent viewings focused on it alone. Abadi’s gaze wandered back intuitively, almost involuntarily, from the young man who passed him to the suitcase which had stirred his thoughts in the first place. Blackish and heavy to the point of bursting at the seams, it was rather tatty compared to the streamlined elegance of the person rolling it. And then Abadi noticed the side handle. Wound around it, a white barcode sticker indicated a flight number with which he was very familiar: LY 319.

  “STOP!”

  Had he uttered the command himself before he lunged, or had the French police officers shouted it when they turned and saw him tackle a seemingly innocent hotel guest? It didn’t matter because as soon as the young man looked back and saw Abadi, he dropped the suitcase and made towards his friend, who pushed through the revolving doors and disappeared into the boulevard.

  The doors continued to turn, opening another wing into the lobby, but Abadi reached it a second too late. Protected by the glass partition, the man smiled back and made one final shove towards freedom.

 
; Instinctively, Abadi reached up towards the control panel located in the door beam above his head and pulled the emergency brake with all his strength. The door stopped, and the screech of its brake cut through the lobby, bringing everyone in it to a halt. The officers grabbed Abadi abruptly from behind, restraining their visitor before he committed yet another faux-pas that would require paperwork, but his quarry had been trapped, and was flailing only centimetres from the street outside.

  “That’s the Israeli’s suitcase,” Abadi managed to say, surprised by his own coherence, struggling to wrest himself free of his chaperones. “It has the El Al flight sticker on it. Look!” Apprised of their mistake, the officers loosened their grip while the Chinese man continued to plead for help to his friends outside.

  A second later, the glass shattered. A torrent of blood covered the door and the suspect slowly collapsed in front of their eyes. “On the ground!” Abadi shouted in French to those in the vicinity. “Down on the ground, now!” And the lobby obliged, including the accompanying officers.

  He estimated he had fewer than two minutes before the hotel was swarming with the type of police presence that would be a great deal more rigorous than his two chaperones. “The guy was shot from outside with a silencer,” he whispered to the sergeant. “Wait for back-up,” he added, and started crawling towards the lifts.

  “Where are you going, Colonel?” the officer hissed from under his arm as he lay on the floor. “To see what’s waiting for me in room 5508,” he said.

  Chapter 67

  Oriana hovered above Paris. She knew it was Paris because she could see the Eiffel Tower below, and Abadi waving to her. She landed softly beside him, like Tinker Bell. She wore a short, peach-coloured dress but she was not cold; it was a beautiful day with as blue a sky as only a dream might conjure. She asked Abadi if they weren’t supposed to be in uniform. Abadi said no. He was wearing a three-piece suit but he had fins on his feet; he told her they were going to be diving into the Seine to find Rav Turai Yerminski’s body, and that she was dressed perfectly for the mission.

  Many people stood around them eating pineapple pizza: women in crinoline dresses and a firefighter’s marching band and Chinese men in black business suits prowling behind them. Abadi held Oriana’s hand and led her along the river, rushing ahead while everyone else walked behind them, the marching band playing “La Marseillaise”. They turned onto the bridge, and when they reached the middle, the weather suddenly changed, the sky turned grey with many black clouds, and the band stopped playing.

  The Chinese group followed them onto the bridge, but when she turned back to look at them they had disappeared, and in their place stood Zorro. He was wearing a Tzahal uniform with a black Zorro mask, and he was also riding Zorro’s black horse and whipping the marching band players with a long black whip. The horse ran amok and in the mayhem Oriana somehow got separated from Abadi. She cried out to him, “Abadi, Abadi,” and tried asking him what to do and where to go but it was too complicated and she could not understand him and then he was swallowed into the crowd.

  Now she was shivering in the cold in the middle of the bridge and Zorro tried pushing her over the parapet into the water, so she climbed onto the rail by herself and tried not to look down. She slipped and grabbed the steel beam at the bottom of the bridge; her strength was steadily dwindling and she thought that now was the time to wake up and for the dream to end, but she did not wake up, she could hear Tomer saying, “I’m not waking her up,” and Boris saying, “I’m certainly not waking her up,” and Alma saying, “If Rachel was here she would have woken her up already,” and then she fell into the Seine, and only at the very last moment, because her body had collided with the water, did she wake up with a start and look around her.

  “We didn’t want to wake you,” Tomer said. “You fell asleep, Commander,” Alma said. Only Boris was cool-headed and direct. “We woke you up because there was a call from the office. You need to go see the commander a.s.a.p.”

  “Which commander?” Oriana asked in confusion. She did not understand how Abadi already had an office.

  “The Unit 8200 commander,” Alma said softly. “They called from the office of the head of 8200.”

  That was more likely. Oriana stood up and stretched.

  “How long was I asleep?” she said.

  “A few minutes,” Tomer said.

  “An hour and a half,” Boris said. “And how much pizza did I eat?” she asked, staring at the empty box on her desk.

  “Barely one slice,” Alma said, and Boris said, “Three slices, Commander.”

  Oriana picked up her beret and left. It was already dark outside and the jungle of antennae glowed in all its splendour, as beautiful as a small sun. She covered the distance to the command building in a sprint, mostly because she was cold in her thin army shirt, but perhaps also to compensate for the pizza she had eaten. She picked up her pace the closer she got, and when she leaped from the dark trail into the square in front of the command building, the rookie on duty shot up and quickly saluted, knocking over his weapon which was perched against his chair.

  Oriana did not feel the need to reprimand him and returned his salute. She pushed open the heavy doors, and in front of her, engraved on the wall above the lift in golden letters, appeared the biblical motto of Unit 8200: “But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them – he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.”

  But what if the watchman does not realise that what he’s seeing is a sword? Oriana thought. And what if the watchman blows the trumpet and is summoned to the Shabak for questioning because he was interrupting an afternoon nap? What if it wasn’t clear who posed a greater danger, the sword or the watchman? Then what, whose blood should be required in that case? She pressed the lift button, then changed her mind and started up the stairs.

  Chapter 68

  Four thousand kilometres away, Abadi ran through the endless corridors of Le Grand Hôtel. In such an urban warfare setting, he was supposed to advance slowly and methodically, from one corner to the next, until he reached Yerminski’s room, relying on his colleagues’ covering fire before moving into a new position. But he was unarmed and did not have any colleagues, so he simply ran all the way to room 5508.

  The door was closed, and a “Do Not Disturb” sign hung from the doorknob. Abadi had every intention of disturbing. He took out the Navran and directed it at the room. The radar’s sensors detected, pressed against the opposite side of the door, a large object, registering the temperature given off by a human body.

  Not good.

  Ear-splitting police sirens blared outside. If that was Rav Turai Vladislav Yerminski’s body on the other side of the door, Abadi preferred to examine it before the French police raided the place. The hotel door lock system used an encrypted key card. The Navran had no trouble deciphering the series of characters, a 32-bit key. The lock system made a cheerful sound and the door opened.

  Had there been an earthquake, the room might have been in a state of less disarray than its current one. Signs of a struggle were visible in every corner of the ransacked room. The bed was a mess and the mattress torn up. The T.V. was shattered, along with the vase and the fruit bowl, and the drawers wrenched from the dresser. The minibar was wide open, its contents scattered across the rug. Some of the bottles were broken, and the liquid had left a dark, wet line along the carpet, which merged in the middle with the blood that oozed out of the body leaning against the door.

  It was the body of an approximately sixty-year-old man, wearing a blazer similar to those worn by the security men he had seen in the lobby, the hotel logo embroidered on the upper pocket. Georges Lucas will not be giving tips to the local police station anymore. Abadi checked for vital signs and was not surprised when he did not find any, seeing that the man in charge of security at Le Grand Hôtel had been shot point-blank between the eyes wit
h an automatic weapon. His hand still clutched the master key card that had allowed him to enter the room.

  Abadi assumed the shooter had waited inside, then pulled the trigger after making sure it was not the Israeli. But where was the Israeli? If the Chinese had taken him from the room, why stay in the hotel? Their hasty retreat made it rather clear they had not planned on assassinating the security manager. And if they did not have Rav Turai Yerminski, and they were waiting in the room in the hope of capturing him, then who had him?

  From the corridor he heard the sound of running footsteps and orders in French. The officers were presumably advancing from corner to corner as in the manual, which gave Abadi about thirty seconds. Scanning the room, he came across only more destruction. Yermi was not hiding under the bed, and there were no signs that he had even been there at all. The footsteps in the hallway were getting closer.

  “Vite, une ambulance!” Abadi yelled in the direction of the hallway. An ambulance would not be much use, but neither would shooting at someone who had just yelled for an ambulance. Four men in black uniforms carrying submachine guns entered the room. Behind them, and affecting insouciance, Commissaire Léger provided the rearguard. A swift professional glance took in the body, the name tag, and the blood on Abadi’s shirt.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, Commissaire, I arrived too late to save him,” Abadi said without looking up. “But we can still save Vladislav Yerminski. He’s our key.” Without turning his head, Abadi waved his arm behind him in the direction of the room. “Judging from this, I think we’re close.”

  “I don’t hold out much hope for our chances,” Léger said, stepping aside for the forensic technicians. He recognised the faces of his antagonists from the previous round at the airport, and nodded with exaggerated deference as they passed. “Tell me, what do you think they were looking for?” he said.