Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  “There are missions which from the operatives’ point of view are in the nature of ‘the cherry on the cake’. That means, I can send in only experienced, hardened operatives, with total cover. There are several such missions waiting for a couple, like you,” Eli said in a tired voice and in English, for Niki’s benefit. “A couple that can display intimacy, with everything that implies, and give it complete cover. We don’t usually send random pairings of male and female operatives on such missions for all kinds of reasons that I won’t go into now. I’m talking about operations that could provide answers in strategic places where it would otherwise be difficult for us to get to, and in the more difficult target countries. Damascus, Tehran, Beirut. Success in these missions provides the country with intelligence worth more than its weight in gold. It is a contribution that is greater than any other. We are relying on you two. Obviously, before this you will have to take part in simpler missions and acquire the necessary skills.”

  And Udi added, with a pinch of humour: “So that you’ll really look like a couple, we’re going to make sure that between missions you’ll have a little ‘married’ life together, and to fit in with your cover, it’ll be in Toronto.”

  “Really? Are you serious?” Niki jumped up.

  “Totally,” Udi replied offhandedly. “Actually, the plan is for you to go next week, after some briefings, to establish your cover as a couple, in Canada.”

  Niki didn’t hold back, and she hugged and kissed me, and then plunked a kiss on the cheek of an embarrassed Udi, who was sitting on her other side. The chief smiled. A scene like that had probably not taken place in his office in a long time, if at all.

  And so it came to pass, shortly before Christmas 2005, that we landed in a freezing Toronto and were greeted with enormous happiness by Niki’s parents, who were unaware as to what they owed this joyful reunion.

  With generous assistance from the Mossad, we rented a more spacious apartment, in the building next to the one where Niki had lived before. We loved the Old Town area and the outskirts of the centre, and had lovely memories from them and from the many cafés, pubs and restaurants that we knew and liked. I painted furiously, and distributed the pictures to various galleries. Niki told her mother that she wanted to work for another company for a while, so that she wouldn’t break the routine of the small family company again and again. Her mother was surprised, and perhaps a little hurt, but we didn’t want, and couldn’t allow, Niki’s cover story to lead to her parents’ home. She registered a literary agency in her own name and printed business cards.

  We’d been told to build a “marriage story”, and we did so with pleasure and found it quite exciting. We weren’t supposed to get married, and we didn’t; nobody would take the risk of registering Ron Friedlich for marriage in Toronto before all the necessary procedures had been checked out.

  Hand in hand, we went to City Hall, feeling like a bride and groom on their wedding day. In the circular entrance space, we went to the reception area to the left, and asked for the marriage application forms. A quick look at the form revealed that there were a few details that we’d have somehow to get hold of, such as the places of birth of the groom’s parents and his mother’s maiden name. These were items that I hadn’t discovered in my break-in at the Friedlichs’ and there was no way that I’d go there again. These things must be accessible in some data base, I thought. I was surprised to see that one of the spaces on the form was for religious affiliation. Niki was also surprised and said that in her entire life she’d never been in a situation where she’d been required to give that information.

  We wanted to see the place where we would have tied the knot, where we would say we had done it if we were ever asked. A sign pointed us to the “Wedding Chamber, East Tower, 3rd floor, Elevators 1, 3, 4 East.” From the elevator, a short corridor led us to a glass door with a black sign on it, giving the registrar of marriages’ office hours. We pressed an intercom and were buzzed in. We found ourselves in a little hall, the description “chamber” was quite apt because it was no larger than the living room at Niki’s parents’ house. To the right of the entrance stood a simple table, and on it there was a vase of artificial flowers. Facing the table were three rows of chairs, about five in each row. Apart from oil paintings of flowers and guitars on the walls, two pot plants at the corners of the grey carpet that covered the floor, and curtains, there were no ornaments or decorations in the room, but nevertheless, we felt quite festive.

  “Say hello to my parents,” I gestured at the first two chairs on the left in the front row. “And you kiss my mother and father,” Niki gestured at the chairs on the right, “and my sister Mila,” pointing at the chair in the middle. I turned to the second row, “OK, if so, then thank you Tzippi and Aliza, for coming all the way here and it’s a pity you left your husbands and the kids at home.”

  But then I was overwhelmed by a wave of sorrow. If we did get married here, my parents and my sisters wouldn’t come. Niki sensed my sorrow straightaway, understood what had caused it, and whispered, “We’ll have a big wedding in Tel Aviv …”

  A secretary came down from the floor above us and in a friendly manner explained the procedure. I was surprised that there wasn’t a place for refreshments or a little party, and she said that what happened there was a purely legal matter and everyone celebrated afterwards in their own way.

  The Mossad had given us one month. Niki didn’t need all this time but to establish cover as a couple we both needed it. We made sure to appear together at various events, to go to shows together and keep the tickets, walked around as much as the winter permitted, and took dozens of photographs of ourselves. It was the perfect honeymoon. It wasn’t easy to imagine that as soon as it was over we’d be thrown into a series of complicated and dangerous operations. On the night before we flew back, Niki asked me, “Do you think that when all this ends, in two or three years’ time, I don’t know how long, we’ll be able to go back to being what we really were meant to be? A painter and a literary agent?”

  There was another sad parting from her parents, and another silent ride to the airport, and flight to Israel. This time, Udi himself came to meet us at the arrivals gate and lead us through a side door. On the way to the base, he gave us a brief survey: After 232 deaths in terror attacks in 2002, the year I enlisted, and 140 in 2003, the number had gone down in 2004 to 55. The Intifada by the Palestinians seemed to be on the wane and we would be able to devote ourselves to dealing with the Iranian nuclear weapons programme, which was looming larger all the time. This was now the number one task of the Mossad in general, and of our squad in particular.

  I felt a certain regret, almost unnoticeable even to myself, at having to give up waging the war on terrorism, without having satisfied my dormant urge for vengeance. However, the new peril facing Israel was clear to me, and I was ready to make the switch in my mind to the Iranian menace, which was now more concrete than the various terrorism threats.

  I could see from Niki’s face that she was still upset by the separation from her parents who repeatedly phoned us. Contrary to Udi’s optimistic predictions, there was a terrorist attack on the Stage Club on Tel Aviv’s promenade, and five people were killed. Emily and Yoshima, as well as Mila, had heard so much from Niki about that wonderful esplanade which was close to where we lived and where we spent a lot of time strolling, jogging and dining out. They were totally hysterical and insisted that she come home immediately. Nothing she said could have calmed them, and I had nothing to say. We tried to build a new routine, with the knowledge that terror was still alive and killing.

  In one of the briefings with Moshik, I also learned that my own personal circle, or spiral, was still alive: the man who had headed the apparatus that ended up in the murder of Dolly, and that included Rumana, Sharitakh and Raddad, was a functionary by the name of Bassam al-Sultan, and he had left Hamas when it became primarily political, to join the ranks of the more militant Islamic Jihad. He had crossed into Jordan and from there to S
yria, where he was building, from a distance, a military force in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as an alternative to Hamas. “After Sheqaqi, Head of Islamic Jihad, was sent to join the virgins in Paradise, al-Sultan is the only one of the Jihad gang in Damascus who really understands how to recruit and train fighters, how to plan attacks, and how to transport weapons. And when Ramadan Shallah, Sheqaqi’s successor, decides it’s time for an attack, he’s the one who plans it and issues the orders,” Moshik told us. “He’s someone we’d like to get our hands on sometime.” He left me with musings that I knew I should not even fantasize about. But they cropped up on their own. If I was ever to be assigned to a mission in Damascus, I’d have my own private one to carry out while I was there.

  Our neighbours in the building on Rehov Ruppin probably thought we were an ordinary couple. We left our apartment before eight a.m., sometimes in an embrace and still feeling the afterglow of our early morning sex, went down to the underground garage, where, on clear days we mounted our motorbike and on rainy days got into our car. We headed for our base near the city. In the late evening we came home together, and never went out. On dry nights, we’d take our coffee and sit on the balcony and gaze at the sea, or what we could see of it between the apartment buildings facing us. On wet nights, we sat in our little living room. Niki spoke to her family and her friends on Skype and answered the emails that had come in to her literary agency from young writers who wanted to submit manuscripts. I watched TV, painted – the pictures I didn’t like I signed RF and shipped them to the galleries in Toronto – and we’d go to bed.

  The need to keep Niki’s enlistment in our service a secret, and the desire to avoid her having to tell a cover story to my friends, led me almost completely to cut off my relations with the limited social circles to which I’d been connected. For the same reasons, we didn’t visit my family very often, and they also hardly ever came down from Haifa to see us. The members of Udi’s squad became the only people we saw regularly, apart from each other. I was worried about how this would affect Niki. I had known new immigrants who settled in kibbutzim when they arrived here, and when the kibbutz dream failed them for whatever reason, the whole Israeli dream was also lost for them. Niki, however, from the very beginning never had an Israeli dream, she just had me.

  I never managed to explain to myself the mixture of serenity and arousal that spending time together with her during the day caused me. When we were prepped for the same mission, we were briefed together. Because each of us also had separate operations to perform, some briefings were separate too. But we were together in the dining room and the gym at the base, and when we had free time there, we went about our cover activities – Niki reading manuscripts and I painting. The distinction between professional and private life was completely blurred, and it all seemed unreal.

  There were days when the other guys were on operations, and Niki and I were the only participants in the weekly hand-to-hand combat practice, and we had to fight each other. I knew that at home we would have ended up in bed, but when the instructor called an end to our fight, all we could do was bow to each other and move over to the edge of the mat. On some occasions the sexual tension was so unusually heightened that we didn’t wait until we got home and instead we released it in our room at the base. Once when there were too many people at the facility, we made love in the car, at the far end of the car park.

  It was worse when Niki was the opponent of another member of the squad. I already felt very close to Jerry and Ronen, but two new operatives had joined us, Dave and Philip, young and charming flirty types, very irritating. Neither did I like it when she was closeted in a briefing with an instructor or in a one-to-one meeting with Udi. I often had the notion that in another incarnation Niki could have been the partner of any one of them. Were it not for me, Niki’s selection mechanism, which had apparently been programmed to home in on strong foreign types, would have zeroed in on someone else.

  “How can you say such a thing,” Niki remonstrated when I told her about this one evening. “You of all people, who claim that since meeting me in Tokyo you couldn’t fall in love with anyone else? And I know that since that meeting, I also haven’t been able to find anyone else! You really are infuriating!”

  She’s right, I thought, and that is indeed the way it is with us. Perhaps every pair of lovers believes they are unique but I know too many people who simply chose someone suitable from those who were available. I felt that ultimately I was a very lucky guy.

  3.

  A Couple in Stockholm

  AT LAST WE were assigned our first mission together. A Swedish electronics manufacturer was clandestinely selling the Iranians components for its nuclear programme. Our team had to furnish the proof. In his briefing Moshik informed us solemnly that it was impossible to get into the tightly secured premises of the company, Gimbers, without being discovered. The lab area was out of bounds to everyone who didn’t work there and over the last two years all efforts to get an agent inside or to recruit one of the workers had failed. This dovetailed with the suspicions that Gimbers was supplying Iran with computers for their uranium enrichment centrifuges, and perhaps even the centrifuges as well. However, an employee of the security firm that had fitted the Gimbers plant with its alarms and closed circuit TV had been recruited, and the information he’d provided wasn’t particularly encouraging: the alarm system was highly advanced, with complete coverage of every last corner, and it worked in tandem with the CCTV, which transmitted a new image every five seconds. Anyone breaking in would both trigger the alarm and be photographed. “There is no other facility today that has a more efficient security system,” said Moshik. The company knew it was breaking the international embargo, and didn’t want to get caught.

  With the help of this agent and the information he supplied, our tech branch had developed a jammer that would silence the alarm in any room it was taken into. Another device would delay, but not prevent, the transmission of CCTV images to the control centre. When it was taken out of range, the delayed images would be sent in a single burst.

  “Of course we asked if the control centre personnel would notice that there was a delay but we didn’t get an unequivocal reply,” said Moshik. “It depends on the alertness and the intelligence of the operators. Every five seconds, when a new picture is relayed, there’s a split-second flicker to which the brain generally grows accustomed and doesn’t notice. But it’s like when there’s suddenly an unusual silence and it alerts you, so the lack of the flicker may alert an operator.”

  Udi made it clear that, “If they are very alert, they’ll see there’s a delay in transmission from the cameras next to the outer wall, outside the office building and inside the specific room where the break-in is to be carried out. The question is, will they realize that it’s a break-in or think it’s a technical glitch. That’s something we won’t know until they respond. We do know that they don’t have a large force there but even if we can get in and out they’ll still have images of us.”

  “OK, so this is why the ski-mask was invented,” I said.

  “That won’t help with these systems,” said Moshik. “We’ve obtained some of the data from the cameras, and our techies ran some tests with them. They have the same resolution as airport cameras, and they can undress you completely. Even if you wear wigs and sunglasses, moustaches and beards, their electronic identification technology will come up with pictures of you underneath all the accessories.”

  “You have to take into account that they’ll reach you,” said Avi, “and the answer to that situation must be found in your cover story.”

  Udi summed up the chances and the risks: “With the gadgets we have, the chances that we’ll get the job done, fully or partially, are good. The chances that we’ll manage to get clear of the place without being caught are reasonable. But the chance that we won’t leave tracks behind is very low, and there’s a risk that our faces will be exposed. I’ve taken this assessment to our Division chief, and he took it high
er up, to the director, and we have a tentative approval. As the Mossad’s director put it, exposing Gimbers’s link with the Iranians and ending the transfer of the centrifuge components is at the moment more vital than preventing an operative or two getting burned. But because of this risk, we’ll use the smallest possible crew.”

  “Are you saying that we may find the mission has succeeded, but we’ll be burned? Out of the game?” I objected.

  “The alternative is not to execute, and that’s a non-starter with the director, as you know,” Udi replied. “Certainly not when it comes to anything connected with the Iranian nukes.”

  We located a security installation with a similar layout to the Gimbers plant and made a lot of practice runs, climbing the wall and breaking into the office building and the inside rooms. Based on more info from the agent, the Mossad’s stations in northern Europe acquired a number of the same type of locks as those used at Gimbers and the relevant tech team devised ways of opening them. We spent hours practising in both the light and the dark, until we could complete the job in seconds.

  We then began practising the operational model, with the entire squad participating. Ronen and I were the break-in detail, Udi and Jerry the lookouts inside the facility, Niki was at the wheel of the getaway car, Dave was the lookout outside the wall, and Philip was driving the interference car that would block attempts to follow us. As we practised, it emerged that the job could and should be done with fewer operatives in order to reduce the number in danger of being burned. First to be dropped was Jerry – Udi would have to manage on his own if a security patrol turned up. Then came Dave and Philip. Ronen would drive the second car, because of his greater experience, and I would do the break-in by myself. If I were surprised, Udi would come to my assistance.