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

by Dov Alfon

  “Le chaud lapin,” laughed the second woman.

  Oriana wasn’t sure of the translation. “Hot rabbit”? And she looked at the women.

  The helpful stewardess was quick to explain. “You’ll have to watch out for his wandering hands, particularly if he calls you to the cockpit. He has a reputation.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, I’ll be careful,” Oriana said. “So, the special bus, downstairs?”

  “Yes, the navette, it’s exit number 12. And have your badge ready when entering the departures zone, security is very tight now. We had a strange kidnapping here yesterday, so the security people are a bit edgy.”

  “I can see why,” Oriana said. She took the carry-on suitcase that the Unit 8200 commander had given her and proceeded to exit number 12, ready to meet Mr Ming.

  Chapter 114

  It was 7 p.m. in Melbourne. Uncle Saul’s flight was scheduled to take off in five hours, and he made use of the time to go over the numbers again and again, making sure his financial controller had not neglected any area in his forecast.

  The staff who would accompany him had gone home to prepare for the long journey and say goodbye to their families, perhaps even get some sleep. With age, he had come to need less and less; in any case, sleep had always seemed to him a waste of time, contributing nothing to the bottom line and doing nothing to loosen the noose tightening around his neck.

  The bottom line was remarkably clear, and unfortunately he had found no errors in the reports. His share in the casinos in Macau was a mere 10 per cent of the total gambling activity in the city but constituted 48 per cent of his global revenue. If the Chinese were going to pull him off the gravy train, he would have to double the number of casinos outside China in order not to go bankrupt.

  He already had the biggest market share in Canada, France, Holland and Russia. Las Vegas was too competitive. And while his investments in Eastern Europe were highly profitable, there simply was not enough money there to justify such a massive investment.

  His people had suggested Spain, a country of compulsive gamblers, with the highest number of significant lottery enterprises in the world and a clear lack of casinos relative to the demand. Very close to North Africa, and less intimidating than Monaco. According to the proposal they drafted, a city of a dozen hotels and a thirty-billion-dollar casino could earn them back their initial investment within four years, if their terms were met.

  During the past decade, three entrepreneurs had tried building a new gambling city in Spain, and each time the regulator had thwarted the project at the last minute. His offer would depend on the approval of no fewer than ten public officials, including the Director General of the Ministry of Health, who had had the audacity to refuse granting a special exemption to smoke in the casinos.

  Each time a gambler went outside for a cigarette break, Uncle Saul lost seventy dollars. Which is why it did not happen – in each of his casinos a gambler could smoke his lungs out if they so desired.

  Saul Wenger took a notepad and wrote down the names of the Spanish officials who stood between him and his project. His meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister was scheduled for tomorrow evening, at a big philanthropic gala at which he would announce the establishment of a fund to provide grants for single soldiers in Tzahal and a yearly trip for combat soldiers to the death camps in Poland. Saul Wenger believed there was no such thing as a free meal, and his philanthropic dinners were no exception.

  Chapter 115

  The navette to Le Bourget was full of pilots, flight attendants, flight engineers, medics, all types of air crews and all nationalities, some in full uniform and some not, some speaking French and some not, all with one visible point in common: a security tag with picture and electronic barcode, probably issued by the airport.

  Oriana clipped her investigator card to her left pocket, as if she was in Glilot. It wouldn’t get her past security, but it reassured casual onlookers with its authority: a logo; a photograph; the correct year; and foreign characters. She listened to the conversations around her to pick up the right intonations, accent and vibe.

  The bus travelled through charming small towns. As it approached Le Bourget the surroundings changed rapidly to include commercial centres, storage facilities and chain hotels. The streets bore the names of pilots and heroes, and when the bus turned from rue Antoine de Saint Exupéry to avenue du 8 Mai 1945, the driver signalled to her that this was her stop.

  Six people got off with her at the stop in front of the executive terminal, a large building connecting several concrete hangars. The four wearing flight uniforms crossed the road and went directly to the security booth for departures marked F.B.O. 01–20. The two others hurried to the main entrance.

  Oriana went to the departures entrance, walking slowly to observe the routine. As she had suspected, the identity check was performed by the traveller scanning his or her badge while the security personnel concentrated on the X-ray detector screen. No human eyes were on the identity of the person going through X-ray: if the badge had the barcode and if it hadn’t been reported in the system as stolen, the scan produced a short, happy sound, and that was it.

  Oriana fought the urge to alert the guards to the shortcomings of their method. It was strange to be on the other side, but it worked just the same, the only difference being that she was about to exploit the holes she identified in security instead of fixing them. To enter F.B.O. 05 and board Ming’s plane, all she needed was someone’s badge, and she needed the person who owned the badge to be incapable of reporting its disappearance.

  Black limousines arrived, stopped and left in an incessant ballet of opulence and comfort. The sky had grown bright, ready to host the intercontinental journey of yet another triumphant casino mogul. Now was the final chance to stop that from happening, otherwise Oriana risked imminent failure. She checked her Navran. Abadi had not called, and according to his location was still dancing or drinking or both. “Screw him,” she said out loud. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the cold air, and charged towards the main entrance.

  The main Aéroports de Paris desk appeared to be exactly like its counterpart at Charles de Gaulle, but the two receptionists were more formal, and their body language conveyed severity, if not outright hostility. It suited Oriana just fine.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Ming wants to know where on earth that pilot of yours, Menard, is? Monsieur Ming’s patience has limits, you realise?” she opened without any other introduction, her fingertips drumming a beat of feigned tension on the counter. The younger receptionist tried to decipher Oriana’s badge, but her older colleague did not bother.

  “Ah oui, vraiment? ” she said, the exasperation in her voice growing more pronounced as she warmed to her subject. “Let me tell you something, Madame, I am fed up with your Monsieur Ming and I pity you for having to work for such an odious man. Despite the short notice, Capitaine Menard has just arrived, almost on time, in fact. He’s currently making his final preparations before departure, as he is entitled to do.”

  Final preparations, then, like on the El Al flight. What a strange choice of words, thought Oriana. Her response was cold. “Monsieur Ming saw crew members entering the terminal in civilian clothing. He wanted me to make sure your pilot Menard will be in full uniform.”

  “Does your Monsieur Ming want to tell me how to do my job? Some pilots change into their uniforms at the last minute – they get them straight from the crew laundry upstairs – and this is the way we have done it for more than a hundred years now.”

  Not another laundry facility, Oriana thought. She thanked the receptionist and proceeded to the exit on the left, ostensibly making her way to the hangars. When she was certain she could no longer be seen from the desk, she walked rapidly to the door bearing a green sign, escalier de secours. The staircase was wide and well lit, and on the second floor Oriana found what she was looking for, a detailed emergency plan of the building. She studied it for a minute, and then pushed the exit door.

&nbs
p; The laundry service was supposed to be at the end of the corridor on the right, beyond the bathrooms and the cafeteria. She found the door closed. No-one answered her knock.

  She retraced her steps along the same corridor, and as she was about to try her luck in the crowded cafeteria, a pilot in full uniform and an impressive peaked cap left the showers and turned in her direction.

  “Are you searching for something, Mademoiselle?” he said, very obviously looking at her breasts.

  He was big, with a fake smile, a fake tan, fake teeth and probably fake hair, but his security badge certainly looked real.

  “I’m looking for a way to kill twenty minutes before my flight, Capitaine . . . –” she stopped and held his badge between her fingers, reading his name – “Capitaine Menard. Do you know if there’s a bar here somewhere?” He looked so satisfied with himself she almost laughed.

  “Mais Mademoiselle, even if I don’t have twenty minutes before my flight, I’m sure you’ll be able to help me forget prior engagements.” He looked hastily around before continuing, “I’m afraid we don’t have a bar and the cafeteria is overrun. I could offer you a drink in a modest but discreet office down this corridor?” Without waiting for an answer, he took her by the shoulder and walked her towards the laundry. “I have the entry code. It’s very clean in here, it’s where we pilots collect our uniforms before we take to the skies.”

  Oriana did not need to flirt back because Menard was already punching numbers into the keypad. He opened the door to let her through, and she let her suitcase trail at arm’s length behind her as she passed, creating distance should he attempt to jump her from behind.

  French laundries were certainly different from the facilities with which she was familiar. A bright, natural light filtered through huge windows that had replaced the original rooftop, and the uniforms had been hung according to colour, from bright white to black and gold. A deep leather sofa and a square table filled with airline magazines completed the look of an interior waiting more for design photographers than for crew members with dirty laundry. Behind a counter there was a huge washing machine, which enhanced the pre-war nostalgia.

  She heard him close the door behind them and as he tried to seize her from behind she managed to turn and face him. “I think I have changed my mind,” she said, taking a step back.

  “Ah non, petite salope,” he said breathing into her face as his hands grabbed her by the hair. He continued to mutter, “petite salope, petite salope” as he pushed her face-down on the counter.

  At the end of the day, what Oriana really loved about krav maga, the self-defence technique taught at Tzahal, was its absolute simplicity. No Japanese etiquette, no Thai greetings, no Chinese complexity, no American dogma. The one key concept was “??????? ???”, “effectiveness continuity”. And effective it was, as her first kick smashed his right kneecap.

  “When a woman says she has changed her mind, it means she has changed her mind,” Oriana said by way of simple explanation as Menard screamed in pain, grimacing in disbelief at his folded leg.

  Krav maga is all about continuity; only a combination of moves produces true effectiveness. What good would an overweight victim with a broken knee do her, even if he did get the message? Oriana formed a shell with the palm of her left hand and slapped the side of his head as rapidly as she could, sending compacted air into the inner canal of his left ear. Menard’s body jolted as it might under an electric shock and he collapsed on the counter. She kicked his huge rear, sending him over to the other side. Then jumped over the counter to slam his right ear.

  Blackout: the pinnacle of krav maga’s effectiveness continuity. Oriana tore off his security badge and rapidly checked the room. She wouldn’t need much time, but she still preferred to delay the alarm. In a drawer she found a printed “Fermeture exceptionelle” sign, the least exceptional apology in French commerce, and hung it on the door. The keypad for the electronic lock had a neat post-it near it, conveniently displaying the password. Oriana entered it and changed the combination.

  Only then did she go and choose a uniform from the racks of clean laundry. A red uniform would probably suit Monsieur Ming’s preferences, which is why she chose an immaculate white.

  It was 11.05 a.m., Tuesday, April 17.

  Chapter 116

  The Military Secretary tried to gauge his interlocutor’s level of anger by standard diplomatic codes. First, there was the simple fact that upon arrival at the U.S. embassy he had been subjected to every humiliating security check possible despite his rank. Second, he had been held in the security department’s waiting room in the basement for twenty minutes before they called him. Third, despite the hour, there was no lunch waiting for him, not even an offer of coffee, and had he sipped from the water served to him in the flimsy plastic cup he would have discovered it to be tepid – which would have been perfectly fine if the room were in a dim, ancient castle in Burgundy, but on the coast of Tel Aviv it was not the ideal temperature for any refreshment.

  In England you could scold an employee while strolling leisurely through St James’s Park; a British gentleman would feed the ducks and express restrained dismay. In France there would probably be furious shouts, but at least the wine would be the proper temperature. In Italy he would have been served food. And in Germany, no Israeli military man would have been summoned for a reprimand, not even in this case.

  “Do you know how you cure a plague?” the American said.

  The Military Secretary tried to shake off the wave of self-pity that had overcome him, and failed to rally the social skills required for the mission on which he had been sent.

  “I have no idea, Commander,” he admitted. He did not know how he was supposed to address him. By his name? Director? General? Lieutenant General? His interlocutor’s title was a formidable enough distraction – DIR.N.S.A., Director of the National Security Agency, concurrently serving as Chief of the Central Security Service and as Commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

  “The classic mistake in the event of a plague is to concentrate on people who already have it,” the Director of the National Security Agency said. “What you need to do is examine people who should have contracted it but did not.”

  The Military Secretary nodded enthusiastically while trying to understand the allegory. “That sounds wise,” he said eventually.

  “What isn’t wise is not realising there is a plague.”

  “There is no plague,” the Military Secretary said. He started to divine where all this was heading.

  “Over the past twenty-four hours we’ve been witnessing the unfolding of an espionage affair in Paris that might hinder our work protocols due to a mistake made here, in the southern base of Unit 8200, a mistake that apparently had not been investigated until this very moment,” the general said. The Israeli had to fight the sudden and terrible thirst that overcame him and not reach for the glass of water in front of him.

  “General, I can assure you that this grave oversight has been investigated and we know exactly what happened.”

  “So what did happen?” the American general asked in an almost conciliatory tone.

  “The soldier in this event, a problematic young man who should not have been drafted to a unit like 8200 and who certainly should not have been transferred to a sensitive department like El Dorado, was exposed to valuable intelligence which gave him the idea to extort payment from one of the officials the department listened in on, a regulator in Macau who was taking bribes from a Chinese crime organisation.”

  “This intelligence came from our end, right?”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “So it was not only valuable intelligence but valuable U.S. intelligence. There was no supervision of what this soldier could listen in on?”

  “The systems were not properly in place,” the Military Secretary said, careful to stick to the text that Aluf Rotelmann had sent him that morning. “The head of 8200 has already removed the head of Special Section from his post, Lieutenant Colon
el Shlomo Tiriani, because he was in charge of supervision, and we may have to remove his replacement, Colonel Zeev Abadi, as well. The two messed up, there’s no question about it.”

  The Military Secretary tried desperately to concentrate on his interlocutor’s shiny medals so as to avoid his unblinking glare. The reply came immediately.

  “This is yet another issue, I must say. The Commander of 8200, a unit we’ve had an excellent working relationship with for decades, had replaced the previous head of Special Section and appointed in his place Colonel Zeev Abadi, who arrived in Paris just in time to prevent this soldier of yours from causing unbelievable damage to American intelligence. We’re under the impression that his superiors, including you and the Prime Minister’s office, did not really aid him in any way.”

  If so, the power struggle was clear. The head of 8200 was backed not only by Tzahal’s Vice Chief of Defence Staff but also had the support of American intelligence, if not someone even higher up in Washington D.C. To “aid in any way” the Commander of 8200, the Prime Minister’s Office would have to return to the rebel unit the control of intelligence and its independence.

  The Military Secretary failed to find a reasonable escape route. The choice was either to stop or come up against a wall.

  “We’ve all learned from this affair. I’m convinced that Aluf Rotelmann and the Prime Minister’s Office will draw the necessary conclusions.”

  But that was not enough for the DIR.N.S.A.

  “Perhaps you could explain why Unit 8200 was listening through us to a Chinese official in charge of Macau?”

  It was the question the Military Secretary had been waiting for since the meeting began. There were two possible answers. The first was direct. For example, “You need to understand, General, that our Prime Minister has an important benefactor in Switzerland who’s interested in those kinds of things, like who is bribing whom to win the tenders for the blackjack and roulette tables, and so on. And that’s why the Prime Minister asked Aluf Rotelmann to help, and it was working perfectly fine. In fact, you would never have heard about it if it weren’t for some bored soldier who did not understand why he was being asked to translate conversations in Chinese that had nothing to do with the Iranian nuclear programme. And during those long nights in the desert, alone with an unsupervised recording device, it occurred to him that he too could take advantage of the U.S. intelligence machine to get rich. So he decided to blackmail the Macau official. And who here can blame him? Isn’t that the entrepreneurial spirit America wishes to encourage?”