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

by Dov Alfon

  She stood on the small hill, staring at the surprisingly modernist lighthouse, painted in cheerful red and white checkers. The beam it projected every six seconds imbued it with a childish and soothing charm, casting golden hues on the many boats that waited to be unloaded at the gates of the port, all laden with the goods and dreams of other people.

  She heard the jeep door slam behind her and Rachel’s heavy footsteps. Her favourite soldier reached the hilltop short of breath and sat at her feet, gazing out in the direction of the sea like her commander.

  “I’m sorry I woke you up,” Oriana said. She wasn’t really sorry. In fact, from the moment she opened that third envelope the unit commander had left her, her first thought was to send a car to Rachel’s house and bring her back to the base, because Oriana was not sure she would manage the preparations without her.

  The envelope contained permits for military equipment. The first form instructed Segen Talmor to report immediately to the unit’s technology centre “to receive special personal equipment for operative purposes”. The detail field contained one line: “Navran 012”.

  Rachel was still sleepy when she arrived at the section, but the form woke her up. “You’re going to get a Navran, Commander? That’s the hottest accessory in Tzahal, only thirty people have it. It’s like getting a Birkin bag, or a modified Kalashnikov. No-one knows how to get one.”

  “Then why did I?”

  “I guess Abadi needs to be with you during this raid he organised for us.” Thanks to the early wake-up call, signs of Rachel’s affection towards her new commander had disappeared from her voice.

  “How is he going to be with me during the raid?”

  “That’s what this device does, Commander. You initiate a conversation and you’ll be in video contact the whole time. You install the Navran on your shoulder and he can see and hear everything you see and hear. It’s like Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell. When you want him to, he appears on your shoulder, and it also works the other way around.”

  “I don’t need anyone on my shoulder,” Oriana said.

  “Maybe he needs you on his?” Rachel said.

  Oriana instinctively shrugged. Rachel removed two more forms from the envelope. The first ordered Segen Talmor to report immediately to the main garage to receive “vehicles for the operation as determined by the competent authority”. The second form instructed her to report to the duty officer at the centre for security information in order to receive an Eagle 24 drone. “The officer is requested to bring form no. 1004 with her”, someone had pencilled in. Oriana could not wrap her head around reporting simultaneously to three different places, but Rachel reassured her.

  “You get the Navran from technology, and I’ll take care of the rest, Commander,” she said; and so it was.

  Now she lay at Oriana’s feet and tried to nap by the sea. A deceptive tranquillity engulfed them both.

  “Why here?” Rachel asked.

  “I cracked my first case here. I had a bogus container parked down there, you can see the spot by the blue crane. I waited for the thieves to exit the naval base in their Mack truck to steal the cargo. And after forty-eight hours they showed – four turais and the samal who drove. They broke the secured seal by shooting at it with their M.-16s . . . The samal would be able to explain the missing ammo the next day by saying he’d taken the truck to the night shooting range.”

  “But how could you arrest them from here? They must have seen you when you ran down.”

  “I wasn’t up here, Rachel. I was inside the container. And they got one hell of a shock.”

  Rachel looked at her commander, bewildered.

  “When are they getting here?” Oriana said.

  “They’ll be here in thirty minutes,” Rachel mumbled.

  “All of them?”

  “Our soldiers will arrive first; they finished signing out their weapons and jeeps at the Ashdod intersection. Boris will arrive last with the listening vehicle, since he’s the only one with the appropriate licence. The military police will arrive with their sirens on in half an hour. Alma drove straight to the air intelligence at Beersheba and will work on the tapes from the drone. She and Boris are coordinated.”

  “How many people is that altogether?”

  “Including the jeep they gave you, you’re leading a convoy of forty-five people.” Oriana fell silent. “I’m sorry to say this, Commander, but it’s insane.”

  “It’s completely insane,” Oriana agreed, “but these are Abadi’s instructions.”

  “What does he want you to do with all these people?”

  “I don’t know. He was supposed to explain that by now, but he isn’t on the Navran and he isn’t answering my calls.”

  “Where could he be, the motherfucker?” Rachel said, directing her question at the sea.

  Chapter 73

  From above, place de l’Opéra looked like a birthday cake crawling with ants. People hurried into the métro or out of the métro or to dodge the métro-goers. Everyone was running in every direction. Those left standing were tourists trying to take perfectly angled photographs of avenue de l’Opéra while angry drivers drove around them blaring their horns. Abadi looked down from the balcony of Rav Turai Yerminski’s hotel room while Léger yelled contradictory instructions to the two unfortunate officers dangling and twisting between heaven and earth.

  The climbing rope was thin but proved strong enough. The buckles, loops, and draws were all professional, and even when Léger tugged on it to haul both his men back up onto the balcony, the rope remained steady and secure. That was not the problem.

  The problem was that from the moment the two officers tried to re-enact Yerminski’s abduction, one playing the presumed kidnapper and the other his Israeli victim, it set off a flurry of flashes from cameras and mobiles from the square below, and within fifteen seconds drivers were stopping to gawk at the spectacle and passersby were pointing up in wonder. Tourists, drivers, passengers emerging from the métro, employees in the office building opposite, opera-goers, hotel guests on adjacent balconies – everyone feasted their eyes on the re-enactment of the abduction, and it was not surprising that more than one person called the police.

  “There’s no way that’s what happened,” Abadi said to Léger while the latter was busy complimenting his men on their performance.

  “A climbing rope is strong enough for a commando to descend with his victim on his back,” Léger protested.

  “Indeed. But even the best secret agent in the world could not kidnap someone that way without being noticed. The Opéra is one of the most photographed buildings in Paris. It’s completely implausible.”

  Commissaire Léger gave Abadi a meaningful look.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Abadi said.

  “I can’t help it,” Léger said. “This is the kind of situation you learn about in elementary school. In the morning a man disappears inside a lift and you tell me it can’t be. Then in the evening you’re the one who’s saying that a man disappeared inside a locked hotel room, and I’m the one telling you it cannot be.”

  “In what elementary school do they teach about that?” Abadi said, genuinely curious.

  “What’s important here is the reversal of roles. Let me enjoy my little revenge and admit that even as your man Meidan was not swallowed by a closed lift but got out of it on a different floor, your man Yerminski did not disappear inside a closed room, but left it through the window.”

  “Commissaire, I’m inviting you to check with dispatch how many civilians have called the police over the last minute to report this re-enactment, authentic and professional as it might have been. I wager more than ten.” The investigator standing next to the Commissaire nodded almost imperceptibly, pointing at his screen. “And I have no problem if you want to ask an officer to climb out of the window every hour throughout the day, not just during the evening rush hour,” Abadi said. “There has to be another explanation.”

  “But there is no other explanation!” Lég
er was exasperated. “You watched the footage yourself, you saw the findings.”

  “When the only explanation to a problem makes no sense, it’s a sign that an element is missing in the definition of the problem,” Abadi said peaceably. “Anyway, that’s what they teach at the elementary school I went to.”

  “Then let’s go over the definition of the problem again,” Léger said, sighing with the resignation of a parent who is tired of denying the whims of a particularly difficult child.

  They walked the length of the hotel’s marathon hallways. Room service trays lay on the floor outside the rooms, empty champagne bottles, shoes awaiting polishing, now and then an empty designer shopping bag – mute testament to the fact that the world would keep spinning even without Vladislav Yerminski. They took the lift down to the security room, which had been temporarily converted into Léger’s headquarters. For people whose boss had just been shot on the job, the security staff functioned rather impressively. The morning shift manager was summoned as liaison, and at Léger’s request presented the updated findings. Léger’s technicians had already connected the giant screen on the wall, and one could not help but be reminded of the footage from the airport. Once again flickering images, once again an attempt to interpret what you see by what you cannot see. Sometimes Abadi missed the era before digital evidence, the time when the story relied on the human factor alone: the memory of the witness, the pathologist’s report, the police officer’s rigorous work, the investigator’s experience and the inflated sense of self-confidence of all these combined.

  “The software identified seven accomplices to the kidnapping, all with South East Asian features,” the morning security officer said in a weary voice and started presenting the photographs on the screen. “They were seen on the external cameras gathering in the place de l’Opéra at 21:00, clearly pointing in the direction of the victim’s room.” The photographic layout had already been edited, as if for presentation in court. All that was missing was background music.

  “According to the system, the abductee was in the room at the time. The six assailants entered the hotel via four different entrances. The cameras caught them positioned across the ground floor by the doors; three then went up to Yerminski’s floor, two by lift, one using the stairs.”

  “Isn’t the software supposed to report any unusual movements?” Abadi said.

  “At this point it did not report any unusual movements on the cameras because they had done nothing unusual. They came into the hotel separately, and even if the whole group had walked in together through the same entrance, I doubt the software would have reported it. But a report was triggered when three of them arrived at his floor and stood in front of his room. They were seen knocking on his door for a whole minute. Then, at 21:13, the software reported abnormal activity in front of room 5508.”

  Every time someone entered the lens’ field of view, it took the cameras between a second and a second and a half to focus, which turned the footage into a jumble of mysterious flashes and made things harder for the identification software. But the results were nevertheless conclusive, clear and irrefutable.

  21:14 – three Chinese men are seen trying different cards until they manage to open the door. The “Do Not Disturb” sign on the handle is clearly visible.

  21:18 – two Chinese men are seen leaving the room and walking towards the stairs. They take up positions across the lobby with the others.

  21:20 – Georges Lucas, the hotel security officer, crosses the same hallway in the direction of the room.

  21:21 – Lucas arrives at the room. He appears to take stock of the “Do Not Disturb” sign, but decides to knock on the door. He knocks, on and off, for thirty seconds.

  21:23 – Lucas unlocks the door with his security key. He leaves the door open.

  21:24 – the door is slammed shut from the inside.

  21:27 – the third perpetrator comes out of the room with Vladislav Yerminski’s suitcase. He pulls it down the hallway towards the stairs.

  21:29 – dispersed across the lobby, the commandos initiate a retreat through the different exits, except for one who remains by the revolving door.

  21:30 – Colonel Abadi notices the man with the suitcase.

  “As you can see for yourself, they did not take him out of the room through the door. The suitcase has been examined. I told you that there were some interesting things inside it, from Israeli military equipment to the shirt you’re now wearing, but trust me, it did not contain a body,” Léger said triumphantly.

  “It seems clear to me: the three overpower the Israeli, lower him from the balcony into the hands of their partners below, two return to the lobby and the third stays in the room to gather the Israeli’s belongings in the suitcase. Then, following my instructions over the telephone, Lucas knocks on the door and the Chinese man still in the room shoots him the moment he enters. That’s what happened, that’s the only possibility.”

  “That’s the only possibility if Yerminski was in the room,” Abadi said.

  “He was in the room the entire evening. The system knows when a guest leaves, that’s what enables the hotel to know when to clean certain rooms and when not to, for instance.”

  “How does the system know? Are there cameras in the rooms? Sensors?”

  “It can tell by the magnetic card. You can’t turn on the electricity in the room without the guest inserting his magnetic card into the electronic wall slot. When you take the card out of the slot, the system registers that the guest is no longer in the room. According to the system, Yerminski was in his room during the entire kidnapping, the whole evening, in fact.”

  “What keeps him from leaving the room without removing the card?”

  “You can’t. When the door opens and the card is still in the slot, the lock sensors flicker to remind the guest to take the card.”

  “And what if the guest ignores it?”

  “Why would he ignore it?” Léger said, drawing a blank in his own mind.

  “Because right now he’s being kidnapped so he isn’t really thinking about whether he left the card in the room.”

  The morning shift manager sounded exhausted, but still maintained a polite tone. “It’s impossible, because we’ve gone over every camera on this floor from the moment the Chinese entered the hotel, at 21:02. Yerminski was nowhere in sight. Had they taken him through the door, we would have seen them with him on one of the cameras. All they took from this room was the suitcase.”

  “What if they kidnapped him an hour earlier? Two hours earlier?”

  “Then why would they come back, why break into the room again? Just so that you could prove that your theory is better?” Léger was angry.

  “I don’t know,” Abadi said. “But it’s the only possibility. Let’s quickly look at just the camera in the hallway by the room. It will only take fifteen minutes, and then maybe we’ll be calmer afterwards.”

  “I am perfectly calm.” Léger articulated each word with care.

  “That’s a pity, Commissaire, because in our profession, success requires vigilance against any false sense of ease,” Abadi said. He pressed the play button.

  Chapter 74

  Mme Abadi was watching the evening news on two screens. She watched the news from Israel each evening on the small T.V. set; on the big screen, their normal T.V., she watched the main French station, T.F.1, despite the fact that her favourite presenter, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, had been replaced almost a decade ago.

  She felt the need for two televisions after she gave up trying to discover through the French media what the Israelis were going through during the war in Gaza. She had seen at her neighbour’s, her good friend Mme Zerbib, a cable box that picked up the news from Israel, and had asked her son for something similar as a birthday present. He installed the double screen that enabled her to switch from one screen to the other as she chose.

  But tonight, with the two sources broadcasting at the same time, she found it hard to follow. While the French ed
ition kept replaying the same images of a terrifying attack on a bridge in Paris, with the commentator somehow linking it to a kidnapping of an Israeli businessman that same morning, the Israeli channel focused on an event at the airport and security footage of an Israeli boy being led to his death, with the event on the bridge portrayed as a response to the Israeli angle of the abduction. A silver-haired commentator whose name Mme Abadi could not remember said in an authoritative tone that there were things he was not at liberty to reveal during the bulletin, but it had been conveyed to him by security sources that Israel could not afford to sit on its hands, a message intended for both the terrorists and the French.

  “We have Chinese terrorists now?” she said to her husband. Her husband, who was dozing in his armchair, mumbled that she was talking nonsense and headed for the bedroom. Mme Abadi knew he was angry with himself about their son’s visit, and thought it best to wait until tomorrow to raise the subject with him.

  While her husband was in the bathroom, she pressed the remote and switched back to the French screen, where they had already moved on to another Chinese killing, this time at a hotel next to the Opéra. Mme Abadi remembered President de Gaulle’s warning that “when China wakes up, it will shake the world”, but at the time she did not suppose it would involve a series of murders in Paris. She missed de Gaulle, even if towards the end he was not as great a friend of the Jewish state as he had been at the beginning.

  She reverted to the Israeli channel, but the young anchorwoman had moved on to the upcoming visit of a Swiss billionaire and the biggest donor of the Israeli Prime Minister, may God bless him and keep him safe. The image on the screen switched to the Prime Minister’s wife. Mme Abadi did not care for her as much. The anchorwoman said that the government’s legal counsel had decided she would not be prosecuted for some sort of expenditure in Monaco, and a lawyer in the studio explained to the anchorwoman that a witch-hunt was under way against the Prime Minister’s wife.

  Mme Abadi switched off both screens and began turning off all the lights in the apartment. As she was switching off the kitchen light she took a quick look through the window in the direction of the lake. Below, along the walkway, two Chinese dressed in suits were talking on their mobiles.