by Allan Topol
“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now.”
“Do you know how I can reach him? This is an important contract.”
“It’s fortunate for you that he’s in Paris right now.”
“Oh, that is fortunate. Do you have his hotel? I could call him there.”
Batya looked at the note David had left her. In case of an emergency and “only an extreme emergency,” she could reach him at the Hotel Bristol. This certainly qualified as an emergency.
“Le Bristol,” she said eagerly.
She hung up the phone and went back to her linear algebra book. Minutes later, something began to bother her. The caller’s French had been perfect in terms of grammar, but he had an accent that she had rarely heard. Middle Eastern. Maybe Arabic or Iranian. And none of those people could ever get a top job at a French steel company. A jolt of fear shot through her body. She had made a mistake. A horrible mistake.
She ran out of the High-Tech Center to find Gideon.
* * *
After driving for fifty minutes, they arrived in Chantilly, dotted with thoroughbred racing farms. The black Mercedes turned off the road at a sign that read pdf world wide headquarters. A hundred yards down the way, they came to a stop at a shiny metal guardhouse with two uniformed men inside. David watched as one of the guards emerged with a clipboard in his hand. The other, with a pistol holstered at his waist, carefully studied the car through a bulletproof glass window.
As soon as the man with the clipboard recognized Victor, he nodded and waved them through. The long driveway was lined with pine trees. The grass on both sides was thick and manicured. All of the grounds were well tended, David noticed.
They pulled up to the front of an ornate marble and glass four-story structure with the company’s logo in gold above the front entrance. It was obvious that Madame Blanc had no desire to hide her company’s profitability.
As Victor leaned across the seat and opened the door on David’s side, he said, “You’re on your own, monsieur super spy. This is as far as I go. Work as late as you want today. Then ask whoever’s on the reception desk to call you a cab. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at the Bristol. Same time. You can give me a status report then. Any questions?”
Good riddance, David thought. He was sick of the French lawyer. “Nope, I’m all set.”
Victor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a card, which he handed to David.
“This has all of my phone numbers—office, home, cell phone and pager—to reach me any time. Call if you need me, but I trust that you won’t.”
* * *
Walking into the building, David thought about Sagit and their conversation yesterday. Minutes before he had boarded the plane for Paris, she had sternly lectured him in a small office at Ben Gurion Airport that the Mossad maintained. “Remember, David, you need to get two items of information for us and only two: the name of the Saudi ringleader of the coup, and why Madame Blanc isn’t worried about the Americans. You get those items, and you get out. We want you back here alive. We don’t want to have to rescue two hostages.”
He had responded, “Don’t forget that Madame Blanc offered me a lot of money to stick with her program for six months. I don’t hear you or your Washington friends coming close to matching that. But then again, maybe you’re hoping I’ll ask you to retire with me to Anguilla, where we can live happily ever after with Madame Blanc’s money.”
Her face had screwed up in anger. “That’s not funny. That bank account of yours in Geneva doesn’t do much for the comfort level in Jerusalem or Washington.”
“That’s precisely why it helped me establish credibility with Madame Blanc.”
The floor of the reception area was all shiny black marble except in the center, where the letters PDF were inset in white. David crossed them as he walked to the teak reception desk. A young woman with wire-framed glasses, dressed in a smartly tailored blue and gray plaid suit, sat behind the desk. Daniella was the name on the brass plate. Behind her on the wall hung an oil portrait of Madame Blanc, made about ten years earlier, David guessed. In two corners of the room stood armed guards watching him carefully.
Daniella asked for an ID, and when he showed her his Israeli passport, she asked him to sign the visitors log. As he did, she pointed to a sign on her desk that said Check all weapons, tape recorders, computers or similar hardware.
“Would you open your briefcase please?”
One of the guards moved in to help with the inspection. David saw that he would have to pass through a metal detector at the other end of the reception area, so he took the Beretta out of its holster and laid it on the reception desk. Neither the guard nor the receptionist showed any surprise.
“It’ll be returned to you when you leave,” Daniella said as she put it in a desk drawer.
“Do I get a claim check?” he asked.
Without cracking a smile, she replied, “I doubt we’ll get any other guns today.”
Minutes later, accompanied by an armed guard, he was in a richly wood-paneled elevator riding to the top floor. The guard accompanied him along a marble corridor lined with oriental carpets until they reached a closed steel door.
With a small remote-control device, the guard opened the door. Another armed guard stood on the other side, and he now became David’s escort.
He deposited David in a small office where a matronly woman, in her late fifties David estimated, with neatly coifed gray hair, wearing a navy skirt and cream-colored blouse, was typing on a computer. The walls were adorned with prints of two Monet flower paintings. On her desk there was a picture of her family—including two grandchildren about three and five years old. There was also, curiously enough a wooden model of a guillotine.
When she heard the footsteps, she turned off her computer and swiveled around in her chair. “Welcome to the Task Force, Mr. Ben Aaron,” she said. “I’m Colette Martique, the chief administrator.”
And chief baby-sitter, he thought.
She stood up and stuck out her hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Colette,” he said, shaking it.
Colette deposited him in an adjacent windowless office, equipped with a PC. The walls were bare. She pointed at the gray metal box on the desk. “It has everything you ordered,” she said, and quickly departed.
David booted up the computer and selected the top disc from the box. It had the system for defense of the royal palace in Riyadh, which looked precisely the same as the one he had installed seven years ago. As he evaluated the data and descriptions on the computer screen, he kept thinking about the two items of information Sagit told him he needed. They might be stored somewhere in the information system for what Colette had called “the Task Force.” Somehow, he would have to gain access to the computer system for the Task Force, but as long as Colette was next door, he couldn’t risk trying. He wasn’t at all fooled by her grandmotherly look. Given the rest of the security in the building, he had to assume that she had been instructed to keep tabs on him. His only chance would be to work late into the evening, and hope she left before then. In the meantime, he would work on developing a plan for the attack.
Two hours into his work, Colette walked into the office without knocking. “The Task Force eats lunch together in the company restaurant, but I was told you’re supposed to be isolated. So I’ll take you myself.”
“Aren’t you wondering what I did to deserve such treatment?”
She looked at him with a cold, dour expression. “Not particularly. I’m happy to follow instructions.”
Accompanied by an armed guard, she led him to the restaurant downstairs. An isolated table in the corner must have been set aside for them because she went directly to it. They were served salad, grilled filet of sole and crème brûlée. “What do you do for the Task Force?” he asked her.
She looked around nervously. “It’s probably best if we don’t discuss business at lunch.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?” She didn’t
respond. “Okay, Colette, can you talk about yourself?”
She was from Bordeaux, in the south. Her husband, a petroleum engineer and a longtime employee of PDF, was presently in Russia, where PDF had exploration contracts. She eagerly talked about her family, while gracefully deflecting his repeated efforts to slip in questions about the Task Force. Now he decided, she was friendly, but she was no fool.
* * *
Back upstairs, David went to work again with intensity, continually looking at the clock on the wall, hoping Colette would leave. At six o’clock, she popped into his office, wearing a blue raincoat and carrying an umbrella.
“I’m going home,” she told him. “They said you can work as late as you want. Tell one of the guards in the hall when you’ve finished for the day, or if you need to use the rest room. He’ll escort you.”
The implication was clear: Don’t leave this office by yourself.
“Will you be back tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’ll need at least one more day.”
He waited a full thirty minutes after she left before trying to gain access to the Task Force computer system. He needed a password, and he tried every possibility he could think of: Saudi Arabia, Middle East, Arabs, Saudis, Task Force, oil, Saudi oil, Paris, Riyadh, and on and on, but nothing worked. “Dammit,” he cursed, and slapped the side of the machine, but nothing happened. After an hour he gave up. He was totally shut out.
Recalling what Sagit had said after her return from Washington, he began to worry. If he couldn’t obtain either of the items the Americans and Israelis wanted, would General Chambers be able to convince Ed Simpson that he had failed to cooperate, and would he be extradited to the United States? Suddenly, the availability of Madame Blanc’s money in a Swiss bank account began to look good as an insurance policy.
The armed guard took him back to the reception area, where a hard-looking young man, with a pugilist’s nose that had been broken and poorly set, was on duty. He called David a cab. When it came, he returned David’s Beretta before being asked. “You better be careful with that thing,” he said.
* * *
As soon as she had gotten Moshe’s call passing on Gideon’s information about the mysterious phone call to the kibbutz, Sagit had telephoned the Bristol and asked for David’s room. There was no answer. When she went outside, she found it was raining lightly. Mindful of Moshe’s admonition, “Don’t use a gun and don’t get arrested,” she stopped at nearby shops and bought an umbrella and a can of pepper spray. “It’s not a gun, Moshe,” she said to herself, “but I have to find a way to protect him.” Then she took a cab to the Bristol and walked up and down rue St. Honore, close to the hotel, pretending to window-shop, but watching for anything suspicious, and making certain she wasn’t being followed.
About eight in the evening, she saw two men approach the hotel on foot. They took positions flanking the front entrance. One man was tall and thin; the other short and stocky. Both were wearing black leather jackets and were bare headed. Their faces were olive-skinned and swarthy.
They could be waiting for David to come back to the hotel, she decided. Each man had a hand in his jacket pocket, clutching a weapon, she guessed. They would set a trap. Now she was certain of it. She had to decide where to position herself, but she didn’t know if David would arrive on foot, and if so, from which direction? Or whether he’d be in a taxi or other vehicle. At least the street was one-way for vehicular traffic. That helped a little.
The rain had turned to a raw and chilly fine mist. There were very few people on the sidewalk. Even the hotel doorman waited inside until someone approached the Bristol.
Sagit decided to walk across the street from the hotel, still pretending to be window-shopping. Immediately across from the Bristol was the prestigious fashion house of Christian La Croix, composed of two boutiques separated by a narrow path that ran back to a courtyard and then to the gray stone building that housed the company’s headquarters and haute couture collection.
With her umbrella up, she turned unobtrusively into the narrow path toward the courtyard, pretending to look at the shoes in the side window.
Quietly she slipped around a corner of the building, where the two men could no longer see her. From that vantage point, she could still peek out and watch the scene in front of the hotel.
She waited like that for a half hour. To avoid being seen by the two men, she closed up her umbrella. The rain began coming down harder, and it was cold as well as damp, soaking her through her clothes. Several cabs pulled up in front of the Bristol, but there was no sign of David in a car or on foot.
Another cab approached from her left. As it slowed to a stop, she recognized David’s face through the half-open rear window. Instinctively, she ran from the courtyard onto the sidewalk and shouted in Hebrew, “David, careful. They’re trying to kill you.”
As soon as she got the words out, the tall man raced toward the cab, with a gun in his hand.
David yanked the Beretta out of its shoulder holster and kicked open the back door of the cab, on the hotel side. When he spotted the tall figure rushing at him, David ducked. The attacker shot through the back of the cab, shattering the window on the other side. The cabby screamed, while David aimed and fired. He thought he struck his assailant, but he didn’t wait to find out. He sprang out of the door of the cab, hitting the ground and rolling along the cold hard cement and cobblestones in the direction of the back of the cab. The sharp edges of the stones cut into his legs and arms, but he disregarded the pain and continued to roll. He heard bullets ricochet off the street, as his assailant, wailing in pain, with blood gushing from his right eye where David had shot him, couldn’t get a clear shot. Suddenly, David stopped rolling. In an abrupt motion he raised his head and steadied his gun hand, aiming at the heart of the tall man coming toward him. He fired. It was a direct hit, and the man went down.
Sagit yelled, “There’s another one!”
With that, the short stocky man, clutching a knife in his left hand and a gun in his right, ran across the street toward Sagit. David, his arms and legs bloodied from the cobblestones, jumped up and chased them.
She raced back into the Christian La Croix courtyard, clutching the can of pepper spray in her hand. Around the corner of the building, she crouched down in a dirt patch that held a small tree and some bushes. When the attacker entered the courtyard, he ground to a sudden halt, looking around for her. Once he saw her, he cut sharply toward the dirt patch. That was when she sprung to her feet and let go with a hard push down on the spray can. The cloud of pepper spray struck the man in the face. He cried out in pain, then dropped his knife and fell to his knees on the muddy ground in a corner of the courtyard, screaming and holding his face with his hand.
Sagit kicked the gun out of his other hand, then shouted to David, “Let’s go before the police come.”
“I have to find out who sent them.”
“Don’t be a fool, David. We’ll be arrested.”
“You go, then. You’re Mossad. I’m private. I can take the heat.” She hesitated. “Please, Sagit, I’ll call you on your cell phone.”
Remembering Moshe’s instructions, she reluctantly acceded, running out of the courtyard and along the sidewalk until she hit the avenue Matignon, where she turned left. From there it was only a short distance to the Champs Elysées, where there was always a crowd to blend into, no matter how bad the weather.
Back in the courtyard, David knelt and tried to push the short stocky assailant down on his back, but the man thrashed wildly, scratching David’s face with sharp, clawlike fingernails and narrowly missing his eyes. David could taste his own blood in his mouth. He punched the man hard in the stomach again and again, and finally the thrashing stopped.
David pushed him back flat on the ground and straddled the man, using his knees to pin the man’s thick arms to the ground. David gripped his assailant’s throat with both of his hands and shouted, “Who sent you?”
“God is great!” was t
he response. David picked up the man’s head, then slammed it hard against the muddy ground.
The assailant strained with all of his might to throw David off. David could feel his control weaken, but he pushed down hard and barely kept the man tight against the ground. The man raised his knees and tried to kick, but David tightened his grip on the man’s throat, draining his strength.
“Who sent you, you bastard?”
“God is great.”
With his hands tight against the man’s throat, David pounded the man’s head mercilessly against the wet ground.
“Talk, or I’ll kill you... Talk or I’ll kill you.”
Suddenly, light burst in the courtyard. A busload of the security forces routinely stationed at the nearby Palais de Elysées had arrived at the scene. Two of them ran into the courtyard with their pistols drawn. Immediately, they went for David.
“Get him,” someone called. “Get that man.”
Powerful hands pulled David off, yanking his arms back until he had to release his grip on the man’s throat. A hard rubber club smashed into the side of his head and, semiconscious, he lost the will to resist.
Roughly, they slapped handcuffs on him and dragged him back to their bus.
* * *
For Victor, it had been a perfect evening thus far. The kind of evening that dreams are made of. His wife was out of town, visiting her ill mother in Avignon. He had taken Françoise, the newest French film blond bombshell, to Verdi’s La Traviata, where her low-cut sequined magenta dress turned every set of male eyes in the grandiose opera hall. They dined at the Crillon after the opera, and she invited him back to her apartment for a night-cap. Lest he have any doubt about her intentions, she disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned carrying two snifters of cognac, dressed only in a white terry-cloth robe that she made no effort to tie in the front. He was bursting with excitement. For months he had been dying to get inside that gorgeous golden bush, and he was almost there. He hadn’t touched her yet, and already he had a giant erection.
Then the pager in his jacket pocket began beeping. Oh Christ, not now, he thought. He pulled out the pager and looked at the phone number from which the call had been made. It wasn’t one of Madame Blanc’s numbers, and only one other person had the pager number. Not even his wife had it. I’ll kill that damn Israeli, he thought.