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

by Dov Alfon

  “In a club on rue Saint-Benoît, not two minutes from here. What should I tell him?”

  “That we’re coming,” Léger said, suddenly true to himself.

  Chapter 109

  Oriana woke up in a panic, and several moments passed before she understood where she was and why. The bright lights in the airplane had been switched on, and the flight attendant announced over the loudspeaker that the plane would be landing at Charles de Gaulle airport in approximately half an hour, and the passengers were invited to make their final arrangements.

  She looked again at her notes, feeling lost. The name of the man Yerminski had tried to blackmail was Ming, that much was clear from the e-mails on his phone. Yerminski had added a Chinese mobile number to the requests of 8200 from the N.S.A. feed, so that was probably Ming’s personal number, from which these conversations were recorded. Yerminski landed with the infamous Uher reel, and the Chinese commando team had tried to kidnap him and search his suitcase. But where was the reel now, and where was Ming? The only answer from Central to her query was that in the past twenty-four hours no passenger with this phone number had flown from Macau to Paris, and no plane registered to anyone called Ming had landed in Paris.

  She tried to concoct a plan B but couldn’t find one that made sense. Through the window she could see only gloomy skies. She closed her eyes again.

  Chapter 110

  The Navran buzzed, and Abadi looked at the screen in despair. “Will you accept a call from Commissaire Léger?” it asked. He felt like refusing the call. It did not help that Yerminski’s alcohol-drenched gaze bordered on the amused.

  But what could he do?

  As if to confirm that it was all over, Yerminski slid off the bar stool and went to stand next to the blonde model who was alone on the dance floor. The police sirens had scared off the last few partygoers, and Abadi assumed that the floor above was deserted as well. Every now and then he heard noises emerging from the silence, perhaps club employees folding equipment, maybe stragglers seeking out a corner for one last snort.

  Abadi looked at the insistent Navran, then at Yerminski saying goodbye to the blonde in rapid Russian, then again at the screen. He pressed the green button.

  “We’re here in the basement,” Abadi said. “There’s a hatch on the floor next to the D.J. stand.”

  “I’m not even going to try to figure out what a D.J. stand looks like,” Léger said. “Tell your soldier to come up with his hands raised. The juge d’instruction will present him with the arrest warrant and we’ll take him to police headquarters. You can come with me if you like.”

  Léger’s voice was higher than usual, excited, almost elated. Abadi registered this as he noticed other details: the odd noises around him, the blonde moving slowly in the direction of the toilets, the wireless sound system and laser lights being switched off.

  Yerminski looked at him inquisitively, and Abadi repeated the order given by the Frenchman, pointing at the ladder. Yerminski shook Abadi’s hand theatrically and walked towards the ladder.

  It all happened at two parallel speeds, the slow pace of Yerminski’s steps on the silent dance floor and the fast pace of fate whose steps were harder to predict. Abadi waited several moments at the bar, making sure that Yerminski was indeed climbing the ladder. Once he had heard the hatch open and the police ordering Yerminski to hold out his wrists for handcuffs, he got off the stool and ran towards the door through which Ekaterina had disappeared.

  The door to the toilets was on the right, but Abadi did not believe she had gone there, just as he did not believe she had been taking photographs while draping herself all over Yerminski. He believed Yerminski had installed his Bitcoin key on her phone, with the account number and password, and that he had decided to turn himself in to the French only when he was sure the money from the Chinese had been transferred.

  On the left was a door marked “Employees Only”. Abadi pushed it open to find emergency stairs leading up to the street, and could hear the brisk tapping of high heels ascending. One of the things blondes learn faster than others is the location of the emergency staircase in nightclubs.

  Abadi took the stairs two at a time and within thirty seconds was right behind her. She kept moving towards her goal – heavy emergency doors bearing a sign that warned of penalties for improper use. Did fleeing an Israeli intelligence officer qualify as proper use? Ekaterina must have thought so. Flinging her heels in his direction – the spikes could certainly kill – she took advantage of the few seconds it won her to push open the right-hand door with all her might.

  The two parallel speeds collided with violence. Bullets from an automatic weapon whistled above Abadi’s head, and he evaded the crossfire only because Ekaterina did not. Her red uniform was drenched in blood by the time her body fell onto Abadi.

  There was no point hoping she could be saved. As the assailants fled, he opened the little purse the model had carried, and found her mobile and a canister of pepper spray. He put them in his pocket before calling Léger.

  Chapter 111

  Commissaire Léger had been on his feet for the past twenty-four hours. His day had begun with a routine complaint in an area that was not, strictly speaking, under his jurisdiction, and continued, with rollercoaster speed, to a lethal criminal event of shocking proportions. He had almost fallen asleep at the helm, and yet, even in his state of utter exhaustion, physical and mental, the instant he heard the shots fired from the rear of the club, he understood he had to act. Although what he wanted to do was drop to the floor and lie flat, or check on Abadi, he summoned what little strength he had left to shout to his deputy, “Take Yerminski to the car. Now! Get him out of here! Now!”

  Yerminski, incredibly pale, handcuffed and surrounded by police officers, was being subjected to a lecture by the juge d’instruction. Breaking into the circle, Léger’s deputy instructed the officers to take him to police headquarters in the nearest squad car. The judge asked if what he had heard were gunshots and the deputy confirmed that it was so; Yerminski mumbled something, and Léger’s mobile rang. Abadi was on the line.

  “Get Yerminski out of here. It’s the Chinese commando unit, they’ve just shot the blonde. Send some men to the club’s rear exit.”

  “We’re removing Yerminski from the scene,” Léger said. “The squad car is taking him to police headquarters right now. Where are the commandos?”

  “I don’t know. I think they’re scattered throughout the area, maybe looking for Yerminski, or for me.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Léger saw the juge d’instruction get into the car with Yerminski and the car pull away, sirens wailing. To his surprise, his deputy had thought to surround the car with four police motorcycles.

  “That’s odd, I thought I let the motorcyclists go two hours ago,” he mumbled.

  “What did you say?” Abadi said. But Léger did not have time to answer. He stared with astonishment as the motorcyclists, riding down boulevard Saint-Germain, drew their weapons and sprayed the back seat of the car with four, ten, twenty bullets. The driver hit the brakes, and the car skidded in the direction of the métro station, smashing into the railing.

  The biker on the right drove up to the side window closest to him, which was completely shattered, and fired one more bullet into the car, right where the police had placed the key witness from Israel, Corporal Vladislav Yerminski. Like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the four bikers fell into line along the boulevard before one turned off in a different direction at the St Michel intersection, a pirouette from hell.

  It was 9.18 a.m., Tuesday, April 17.

  Chapter 112

  Abadi looked around him in the darkness. He tried focusing on possible escape routes, hidden exits, unpredictable solutions. Outside-the-box thinking, as especially conventional people called it.

  He was on death row. Not just because the Chinese were after Yerminski’s telephone – otherwise Abadi would have hurled it in the presumed direction of the assassins – and not just beca
use they might accurately suspect that Yerminski had talked to him. They wanted to add him to their list of victims because his death would be a nice decoration on their greeting card to Israeli intelligence, and to Israel in general.

  The emergency exit door still stood ajar to reveal a typical Parisian courtyard, three trees, a bin room, and the doors of neighbouring buildings. There was no sign of the assassins, but Abadi was sure they were out there.

  One option was simply to wait for a special unit of French police to organise his extraction from this basement. As someone who had followed the intelligence reports on the French forces’ response to terrorist attacks in Paris, Abadi was not eager to rely on them. And besides, from what he had heard in the background of his call with Léger, Yerminski’s death had dealt the final blow to the commissaire’s performance and he was the only one who knew where Abadi was right now.

  Where was he, indeed? He took out the Navran and switched it to mapping mode. The location mapping put him, as he had assumed, on rue Saint-Benoît. It even indicated that he was one floor below street level, but it did not display further access routes to the rear exit apart from the stairs that had yielded the body of the blonde. He switched the device to X-ray mode. It did not detect any human presence in the courtyard itself, but several windows, roofs and balconies faced that courtyard; from how many convenient hiding places could a sniper hit him the moment he tried to leave? Dozens, at least. And this man had already proven that opportunity alone was sufficient.

  There was no choice but to go back and try the club’s main entrance, which faced rue Saint-Benoît, in the hope that the number of officers there would allow him to emerge without being shot. Running down the stairs and across the hallway, he found himself standing once again in front of three doors: the door to the toilets to the right, the kitchen door and, to the left, the door leading back to the bar.

  He turned left. Before he had pushed open the door, the Navran started to vibrate. Three green dots flashed on the screen. He held the Navran closer to the door and tried to decipher the findings. Three people in a line across the bar, the middle one leaning against the stool on which Abadi himself had sat only minutes ago. It was impossible to know if the red line near the dots signalled submachine guns, sniper rifles or R.P.G.s, but the men were definitely armed, and their weapons had been used less than a minute ago.

  He tried to understand the commando unit’s strange formation, and assumed that, as in the ambush of the model, they were going for crossfire – a method so non-Israeli in its extravagance that Abadi had never undergone training against it. The Navran ran a series of encrypted data, enabling Abadi to gain a better understanding of the squad’s positioning: the weapons were heat-seekers, some kind of Chinese advancement the Navran could not trace in the database. The reason for the lights having been turned off downstairs was much clearer now. They could dispense with sight and let the weapons – and Abadi’s body heat – do the work for them.

  Entering an ambush was one of the most foolish things an experienced soldier could do, unless he was doing it with full awareness and forethought; then it was considered a brilliant tactic, albeit insane. The advantage of insane moves was that they were not measured by the size of the enemy forces, but by the level of fear gripping you. Abadi took a deep, relaxing breath.

  He found the bottles resting in a giant fridge in the kitchenette. He chose carefully, forgoing the beer in favour of a dozen bottles of Perrier. He remembered to put aside the Navran while drenching himself in litres of ice-cold sparkling water. He waited thirty seconds for his body temperature to stabilise, then crawled along the conveyor belt designed to transport drinks to the customers at the bar.

  The dance floor, which had been so quiet when dozens of people had taken to it with their headphones, now shook from the force of the sirens and shouts penetrating the hatch. Abadi conjured up the counter’s structure to estimate the location of the middle shooter; he had no choice but to handle him first and then hope for the best. He saw him from the side, dressed in the dark rags of a pedlar, wearing goggles and equipped with electronic earmuffs, his right eye pressed against the thermal sights of his weapon.

  Abadi crawled, dripping freezing water. When he was within arm’s reach, he took out of his right pocket a can he had found in the fridge. Twisting the metal base, he waited a minute for the calcium oxide to combine with the water and create a “Hot When You Want!” Nescafé, as the label promised.

  When he had counted to sixty, Abadi opened the can and hurled it like a hand grenade in the direction of the door at which the guns were aimed. Heavy fire immediately opened from three directions. He leaped towards the shooter closest to him, pulling off his goggles with one hand and using his other to temporarily blind him with the dead model’s pepper spray. The Chinese pedlar jerked forward in pain, and Abadi kicked him from behind, sending the body shrouded in black rags toppling towards the bullet-riddled door. Another volley instantly sounded, and Erlang Shen’s body twitched in the air this way and that before finally striking the floor like a rock.

  On the counter, right next to where Erlang Shen had stood only moments ago, Abadi found a gun. He recognised the Chinese N.P.-30 but had no time to use it: the two other shooters, confused and blinded by the firefight, aimed their automatic weapons at him, tracing his rising body heat.

  He leaped under the bar while their sophisticated tracking systems locked on their own body heat at the same time. The barrages were as rich and dense as a swarm of bees. The two Chinese had shot at least eight bullets at each other before collapsing. Shells flew in every direction and Abadi felt a burning in his right shoulder. He tried crawling back inside on his left elbow, but his body refused to comply and his mind was spinning on its axis. At least that’s how it felt before darkness descended.

  Chapter 113

  Avoiding the line of fellow passengers waiting for their luggage, Oriana took her carry-on suitcase and went straight to passport control. She switched on her Navran while the queue for non-E.U. passport-holders moved at a snail’s pace, only to learn that her commander was not waiting for her at the airport. Careful not to pique the curiosity of the French police or gadget-loving Israeli passengers she checked the map again. No matter how much she pinched the screen, zooming in and out, the blue dot indicated his location was a nightclub on the Left Bank.

  Oriana had not really expected that her boss would be joining her in the hopeless search for a Chinese person called Ming and an unmarked magnetic reel and yet she still felt a pang of disappointment. What was he doing at a club when she had complied with his request and had flown all the way to the city of lights?

  The officer held her passport above the biometric scanner and asked the purpose of her visit to France. “Looking for someone,” she said, distracted. “If you can’t find him, I’ll be here tomorrow too,” the officer mentioned with a flourish of hope, but at her contempt-filled gaze he returned to his cautious formality.

  She found herself in the arrivals hall of Terminal 2A, about which she had read so many reports over the course of this long day, and she went straight to the information desk. A sceptical clerk listened to her speech and showed her the way to the executive Aéroports de Paris counter on the departures level. By the time she stepped up to the desk, where two Charles de Gaulle airport receptionists in pale blue uniforms were busy discussing the previous day’s drama, she had composed her story.

  “Bonjour, excusez-moi,” she began, then quickly switched to English. “I’m the flight attendant for a private flight to Macau, but I can’t find the correct terminal and I’m worried I’m going to be late. The flight is for a Chinese V.I.P., his name is Ming.”

  “I don’t see any flight to Macau listed here,” the first stewardess said, clicking on her computer terminal. Her voice was friendly, although her demeanour registered disapproval at such unprofessionalism. “Where is the refuel? At which airport?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” Oriana admitted.

&nb
sp; “Do you know which company chartered the plane? Who called you?”

  “I don’t think it’s through a company. My only contact is Mr Ming himself,” Oriana said.

  “If it’s his own plane, it won’t be here,” said the receptionist, who seemed relieved to be able to pass the problem to someone else. “The take-off would be from the private terminal of Le Bourget. Let me check there.” Her fingers moved much more calmly now, as if in a piano recital. And the answer appeared almost immediately.

  “I apologise. There is a direct flight to Macau registered and it is, yes, a private plane, but the name of the owner is not Ming. I’m not allowed to say more.”

  Oriana implored with her eyes, and the woman behind the desk gave in to a small compromise. “Let me check if they asked to hire a flight attendant. Your name might be on the request.”

  There are two chances for that, Oriana thought, and two chances only: slim and none.

  But the French attendant made a very French sound, something like “Ah voilà, là, là, là,” and then turned to face Oriana, all smiles. “O.K., it’s a small misunderstanding. Your Mister Ming is not the owner of the plane, he is the pilot. They registered him an hour ago, and he was probably asked to bring a flight attendant. It happens all the time. I see he has also requested another pilot, so it fits. You’re good.”

  “I’m good?” asked Oriana.

  “You’re good to go. Take the special navette to the executive area of Le Bourget, there’s one downstairs which leaves in four minutes and you’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Your plane is parked on F.B.O. 05, you’ll see the signs in front of the bus stop. And you’re lucky. You’re not late because the second pilot has yet to arrive.”

  She turned to her colleague, her voice dropping in register for the exchange of the shared confidence, “C’est Menard.”