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

by Dov Alfon

“His card was stolen?”

  “No. The money was withdrawn using a mobile, not a credit card. Which means the thief had to know the account number and access password, and he also had to type into the cashpoint the access code sent via text message by the bank.”

  “And was his mobile stolen?”

  Abadi was the one to reply. “Let me guess. The thief was connected to the same wi-fi network as the account holder, and he managed to connect to the phone without stealing it.”

  “Exactly,” the detective confirmed, and looked at Abadi with surprise.

  “And this gentleman was staying at Le Grand Hôtel and using the hotel’s wi-fi network?”

  “He was a guest at Le Grand Hôtel. But because he filed the complaint with his bank and not with the police. We don’t have more details.”

  “Is it possible that, apart from the money withdrawal, there were other transactions made from his account that he did not initiate?” Abadi said. “Payments, deposits, things like that?”

  “Probably,” the detective nodded, “but right now he’s on his way back to London. The fraud division’s only connection to him is through his bank. I can try to find out more tomorrow morning.”

  “You mean, this morning, in three or four hours.”

  “Yes. And now, please don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s late and I have a lot of work to do here,” he said.

  They returned to the underground maze. Abadi checked his Navran, but there was still no signal from Oriana. He reached for his personal mobile and glanced at the screen.

  His mother had called him two hours ago.

  He paused under the ancient chapel, his mind searching for a reason why she might have been calling so late. Failing to come up with anything plausible, he called her back. The phone at his parents’ house in Créteil rang and rang.

  Meanwhile Commissaire Léger and his deputy advanced in what they estimated to be the direction of the major crime division. Abadi looked at his watch. After a moment’s hesitation, he dialled his parents’ neighbour, Mme Zerbib.

  Chapter 93

  As she re-entered the dining hall, Oriana felt that something was different. Cohen was still sitting near the network intelligence officer, but Zorro now sat at the edge of the bench. She tried to turn up clues on her way to the table, and saw that Cohen’s mobile was still there. When she sat down she saw an additional mobile on the table – sleek, no camera, secure – which she assumed was Zorro’s. Whom had he called in the meantime? She did not need to wait long for the answer.

  “Segen Talmor, we’ve decided that you can’t write an inspection report about this affair. I spoke to Aluf Rotelmann and we’re in agreement that putting these things in writing, let alone distributing them, may compromise our intelligence sources.”

  What was it that Oriana detected in his voice? It certainly wasn’t triumph, but neither was it submissiveness. Zorro spoke with something approaching resignation, like a man leaving a casino after a string of bad hands.

  Who was he playing against?

  “You could say that about any intelligence report,” Oriana said. “Every time you document information, you’re placing the person who gave it to you at risk. Our primary goal isn’t protecting our sources but benefiting from them.”

  “Not every source is our source.” Zorro bit his lip and raised his voice, “You have four more minutes to question the soldier. Then you will deliver your conclusions to me verbally, and I will pass them on.”

  “I’ll have to consult tomorrow with Colonel Abadi,” Oriana said, trying in the meantime to make sense of Zorro’s statements.

  “Abadi isn’t going to be head of Special Section tomorrow,” Zorro said. “It was a failed experiment. You have three more minutes.”

  Oriana stood up and walked to the door, as if wanting to be at a safe distance before her final question. “Shlomo, why do you have two mobiles?”

  “I don’t have two mobiles.” Cohen awoke from his lethargy and pointed at the iPhone. “That’s my mobile.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought. So what’s a Samsung phone doing in your locker?”

  The implication of this revelation hit Zorro first, accompanied by a sense of helplessness and its cousin, injustice. He rose from the table, hesitant, almost swaying, and looked at her as if the lobster he had ordered at a fine restaurant had suddenly started moving on his plate.

  The network intelligence officer got up immediately, and set off towards the living quarters, bumping into the cook who had come to ask if he could admit the soldiers, they were starving. Zorro shouted unintelligible instructions towards the bunker while the network intelligence officer doubled back to try and decipher the order of the panicked head of intelligence-gathering as Cohen said, “It-isn’t-mine-this-is-my-phone, Yermi-asked-me-to-look-after-his.” Oriana did not bother to explain that the Samsung was already on its way to the encryption department of Unit 8200’s headquarters, saying only: “We’ll meet again, Zorro!”

  Chapter 94

  Uncle Saul dialled the operator and asked for an outside line.

  He had neither a mobile nor a direct line in his office. This decision originally stemmed from his desire to limit expenditure, but as time went by he became aware of all the additional benefits this seclusion afforded him. It was nearly impossible to monitor his phone conversations, and whenever the tax authorities got their hands on a warrant that would enable them to listen in on him, they were forced to record every incoming and outgoing phone call from his empire’s global switchboard, thousands of conversations each minute from every hotel room, casino hall and office building in Melbourne, Macau, Atlantic City and Milan – thousands of calls in a melange of languages, all transferred through the same main telephone number, swamping the calls he himself had made.

  What was the time in Israel? He did not bother to check. The middle of the night, maybe three or four in the morning. An ideal time to make such an important call, as it ensured a minimum of pleasantries, words of introduction, useless reports and evasive answers.

  “Saul Wenger. Did I wake you?”

  The political advisor sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. He shot a panicked look at the alarm clock. Fucking four in the morning.

  “Can you hear me?”

  The political advisor tried to organise his thoughts. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “Did I wake you? Can you hear me?” As if it was possible not to. Uncle Saul had a loud booming voice at all hours and from all places around the globe, a monotonous bass that was accustomed to making demands, regardless of the hour.

  “Hello, sir, I’m glad you got back to me. I tried calling you, but the secretary wouldn’t put me through.”

  “What did you want to say? Say it now.”

  Yeah, right, the political advisor thought. I didn’t want to say anything, I only wanted to stall, and at four in the morning that’s not so easy.

  “I wanted to ask if you received the itinerary for the visit and if you could be kind enough to approve it.”

  “And what’s going on with the issue?”

  “It has become a little complicated,” the advisor said, trying desperately to remember the points he had jotted down for the conversation. He could only remember the first one: “Do not, under any circumstances, talk to Uncle Saul about the kidnapping in Paris.”

  “So when are you going back to standard procedure?”

  Even in his semi-conscious state, confused, suppressing yawns and searching in vain for a pen, the political advisor noticed the phrase Saul Wenger had chosen: “standard procedure”. An irresponsible act that had lasted barely three months and was now threatening to hinder seriously the co-operation between Israeli and American intelligence agencies had become “standard procedure”, a glorious, long-standing tradition that without warning had been betrayed, with no satisfactory explanation nor adequate compensation.

  “I’m confident, sir, that the Prime Minister would be glad to elaborate on all the available options when yo
u meet here in person.”

  “I have no need for all the available options. The option we already settled on is good enough for me.”

  “It’s difficult to explain over the telephone,” the advisor said. “That’s why a conversation in person would not only be more pleasant but also more productive.”

  “I’d like to believe that,” Wenger said and hung up. It was his classic closing gambit, explicit enough to raise concern, ambiguous enough to stir confusion. And he truly did want to believe it, despite having already guessed that things were much worse than he’d been told. He had bet on Israel’s Prime Minister long before he was elected, and this alliance had delivered immense benefits throughout the years. But past results were no guarantee of future success, and no-one understood that better than he did.

  Chapter 95

  It was raining again, torrents upon torrents, and Abadi found himself wiping the windscreen of Commissaire Léger’s car, polishing away the steam and peeking through the transparent circle he had created, like he used to do when his father drove him at dawn to Hebrew class.

  And just as he had done then, Abadi looked out of the window with both hope and sorrow. Thousands of kilometres away, on the shores of the Mediterranean, the antennae of Unit 8200 had probably by now deciphered millions of correspondences pertaining to the disappearance of Rav Turai Yerminski, and the technology section’s mysterious algorithms were churning out keywords, geographic locations and cross-references. There, in the familiar unit to which he had been summoned back, someone could by now determine who Yerminski had spoken to since landing in Paris, someone would be able to explain the connection between him and the blonde kidnapper, and the connection between her and the Chinese commando team, and who here had kidnapped whom.

  Whereas in Paris, cut off from his deputy, ostracised by his commanders and without access to known means of local intelligence, he was forced to peer out of a car window and lend his trust to sources that had as little to do with cutting-edge intelligence as one could imagine: a taxi driver and a concierge.

  “We’ll find him,” Léger said, reading his colleague’s grim thoughts. “The taxi driver’s testimony was unequivocal.”

  The testimony had come when hope was already lost, after a long night in which hundreds of police officers approached everyone working a night shift near Saint Lazare – the taxi drivers, the prostitutes, the transport service drivers, the waiters in the 24-hour restaurants – with one simple question: “Have you seen the man in this photograph?” No-one had seen Yerminski, and his face had not been caught on any one of the many cameras of the city’s public transport surveillance system.

  Finally they arrived at the taxi rank in place de la République, from where the night dispatcher reported that, earlier in the evening, one of the drivers had joked on the radio system that he had just driven a blonde who looked like a million dollars, and that neither she nor her partner had left a tip. The other drivers on the radio wanted to hear more details, but all he could add was that the girl was wearing a red suit.

  The driver finished his shift and went home to sleep. A team of investigators knocked on his door at one in the morning, waking up his wife. Having drunk a strong cup of coffee and checked his meter, the driver was able to confirm that the photograph was indeed of the guy he had driven with the blonde. He had picked them up at Saint Lazare and dropped them off at place de l’Odéon.

  Boulevard Saint-Germain was now awash with the blue lights of police vehicles, and buses filled with police jammed the intersection, their commanders waiting for the signal to let the forces out.

  The Odéon intersection was bigger than Abadi had remembered. Two main arteries crossed at the Odéon, boulevard Saint-Germaindes-Prés from east to west and rue de Seine from the river up to the Jardin du Luxembourg. From a distance, at the end of the southward rise, the French flag waved above the Senate building. Everything was still lit: the cinemas, two cafés, the display windows of stores and, in the middle, next to the stairs ascending from the métro, the statue of Danton surrounded by his loyal followers, calling out his desperate address on the eve of the Revolution, “We must dare, and dare again, and go on daring.”

  Commissaire Léger stood before his men and looked like someone who could use some daring. “The taxi driver dropped them off here, at the taxi rank in front of this statue. That was eight hours ago. You can see how they were dressed in the photograph we gave you. I’m reminding you that we already have eight fatalities on our hands. You’re the ones who can stop this massacre. Go out there, and good luck!”

  The police officers rushed out, some to the bourgeois streets ascending to the Luxembourg, others to the alleyways descending to the Seine.

  As an orator, Léger certainly did not threaten the eminence of Churchill or Shakespeare’s Henry V, but at least his speech had been focused and well reasoned. Abadi listened from the sidelines, struggling to understand the logic behind spreading his troops along the many streets surrounding the intersection. “There are seventeen thousand doormen in Paris who meet the professional definition of concierge,” Léger’s deputy said, while clinging to Abadi like a leech. “They’re unionised nationally, and enjoy free lodging in the buildings they watch over, as well as a salary that includes every possible social benefit. Their duties include emptying the rubbish bins, cleaning the stairwells, summoning the lift technician, operating the central heating and, most of all, serving as unofficial informants for the French police.”

  It was clearly a favourite topic, and Abadi chose not to interrupt him.

  “We don’t know anything about this kidnapper,” the deputy said. “She may be connected to the Chinese commando team or she may not be. She may be connected to the first blonde, the poor girl we found at the fountain at Pompidou, or she may not be. She may already have killed Yerminski or she may not have.

  “But there’s one thing we know for sure: she and Yerminski got out of the taxi here, at this intersection, and in a historic area like this, there’s a concierge in every building. That’s our lead. The patrol officers from the 6th arrondisement know each and every concierge personally, and over the next hour they’ll be knocking on every door and waking up every concierge until they find one who can identify her,” he announced with almost contagious conviction.

  In the meantime, Léger had finished dividing up the teams and entered Le Danton café, which was about to close for the night. Joining him at the bar, Abadi ordered coffee and Léger an omelette. Patiently and wordlessly, they waited.

  Chapter 96

  Ming looked at the screen. He had known many such nights in which hours were spent waiting for a miracle to appear with dawn, and the miracle never came. He had known downfalls and defeats, had seen his meticulous plans scatter to the winds, had known vicious partings and bitter surprises. And his vast experience of riding the crazy dragon of life had taught him one thing: empires always look invulnerable until the very last moment.

  But the last moment always arrives, and always when least expected, invariably in a different guise than in previous last moments. One is granted a brief opportunity to save oneself from ruin, to jump from the roof of the empire to the nearby building, or to the helicopter circling above, or to the narrow, almost invisible opening reserved for those who leave everything behind and make the leap. Ming had seen friends and foe alike swallowed into the bowels of the earth with the empires they had founded, blinded by hubris, deafened by pride. And now he gazed at the screen, powerless, following the transfer order of twenty million dollars making its way towards the enemy lurking behind the obscure number 13uEbM8unu0ShB4TewXjtqbBv5MndwfX6b, and he asked himself whether this was a sign that he should leave Paris, Erlang Shen and the rest of Team Four. Should he make a hasty retreat before the house of cards collapsed on top of him?

  He carried on because the alternative to this shame was even greater shame. He could not believe that his millions were making their way to this unexpected blackmailer, a one-man hustler whose ope
ration was about to cost him dearly: in money, xiake, and face. He could not believe that his meticulous plan to catch this nobody had failed. “I have fallen victim to my own perfection,” Ming said to himself. Team One, with the blonde honeytrap at the El Al arrivals hall, falling for the wrong Israeli’s stupid approach; Team Two, on surveillance in front of the station locker being recalled by He Xiangu because she was sure Yerminski had been executed. And now he was chasing his own tail, looking for Yerminski’s phone or computer or whatever machine would give him access to the Israeli’s bitcoin account.

  As if guessing that he was waiting for a clue, the bitcoin software on his mobile sent a push notification to his screen: “Estimated transaction completion time: 55 minutes.”

  Ming waited for another indication, a more explicit sign. He looked at his mobile. No sign appeared.

  Chapter 97

  They were close, they were far. The lead soon appeared in the image of the concierge of the building next to the medical school, on the eastern side of the Odéon. But she had seen only the blonde stewardess and not Yerminski, the Israeli who kept slipping through everyone’s fingers.

  The building was massive and grand, with a classic courtyard complete with small fountain, a bicycle storage shed and a large garbage room, to which the concierge pointed.

  She was an older woman, with a slight Spanish or perhaps Portuguese accent, dressed in a heavy red dressing gown and scarf over a sweater, as if allergic to the night air. “I’m completely sure it was the girl from your photograph. She was wearing a red uniform. At first I thought she was going to the tourism company on the third floor. I pressed the buzzer to let her in and returned to the courtyard to feed the cats. And then I saw her, from behind. She didn’t go upstairs but walked directly to the garbage room, where she threw something away.”

  Léger’s voice was cold, almost hostile. “What did she throw away? Something big? Something small?”