“About half the file.”
“Stop now and leave. Something’s going on down here.”
“Should I take the file with me?” I asked.
“No. The orders haven’t changed,” he replied.
I put the file back, but before I could leave the room, Udi came on again: “They’re back with reinforcements. Go to the emergency staircase. When they get to the second floor, leave the building.”
In line with our contingency plans, I left a simple jammer behind in the room that would delay the camera transmissions until it was found, in principle giving us enough time to get clear of the facility. I locked the door behind me, inactivated the cameras in the corridor and hurried to the emergency stairs. I heard the guards climbing the main staircase to the second floor, and Udi radioed: “There’s a guard at the main entrance. Tell me when you approach, and I’ll deal with him.”
The man was lying face down on the ground when I left. We alerted Niki and Ronen, and Niki brought the car up. Her jammer had been working throughout the operation. Udi and I ran to the wall and climbed over where we’d cut the wire.
The moment our devices stopped jamming the cameras would transmit their backed-up contents to the control room: the car stopping, us climbing the fence, the break-in to the office building and into Room 205, me photographing a file – although they wouldn’t be able to know which one – and our getaway would be seen. We hoped we’d be far enough away before the police were notified and roadblocks were set up. In any event, Ronen was ready to block the guards’ vehicles if they gave chase. That didn’t happen in the next few minutes and we were already close to the city centre when Ronen radioed that the plant’s gates were opening and guards were inspecting the fence. Udi ordered him to join us.
Half an hour later, with our heads down again, Ronen drove us into the hotel garage, and five minutes later Niki and I were in bed in her room. The gadgets and work clothes we’d left in the Mercedes for Udi to get rid of. The hundreds of documents that I’d managed to photograph I sent to Tel Aviv on an encrypted line.
After dropping us, Ronen went to pick up Udi who’d parked the Mercedes – that had definitely been photographed and identified – in a residential area near his hotel. The paper trail would lead no further than Moshik’s phoney documentation but Moshik had already disembarked from a ferryboat in Latvia, and Avi, who’d rented the SUV, was about to do the same in Estonia. After checking out of their respective hotels in an orderly fashion, Udi and Ronen set out on the long drive to Norway. The assumption was that they would be on the other side of the border before Udi’s image was distributed to all remote border stations.
Later on, I worked out what had presumably happened after our getaway. After the plant’s grounds were searched and nothing was found, the Gimbers’ security staff saw that the CCTV cameras were now working and studied the images. They saw me and Udi doing what we had done, and they rushed with the material to the police, emphasizing that the photographs of the documents could harm national security and that the break-in had been a highly professional job. The unfortunate guard outside didn’t know what had hit him, but Udi was seen “dealing with him” on the footage. The police took a sample image from each series and enhanced the figures: It took their laboratories some extra time, but at the end Udi and I were visible and identifiable, despite our strong masks. The pictures were distributed to all stations, airport security and hotels.
The Best Western night receptionist didn’t know the guests well, and he showed the pictures to the bartender, who identified me at once, but said I couldn’t possibly be connected because I was just an artist selling his pictures in Stockholm. The clerk told the young Turk that no one had asked for his opinion, and called the police. When the cops found my room empty, the barman was questioned and he told them about the romance that had blossomed between me and Niki. Minutes later, at six a.m., there was a knock on Niki’s door.
We’d anticipated this visit, and discussed how Niki should react. Her performance was perfect. Naked under the hotel robe and her hair all tousled, she opened the door. The officers were embarrassed, and asked if Mr Ronald Friedlich, pictures of whom they showed her, happened to be in her room. Niki said she wasn’t sure as the picture was not clear enough, and then let loose with a string of curses that I was amazed to hear coming out of her mouth. I was “woken up” by the ruckus, put a towel around my waist, and went to see what the commotion was all about. The cops were even more embarrassed. I looked at the pictures.
“That guy looks a bit like me,” I said. “Where and when was this taken?”
“Tonight,” said the officer, who didn’t know many details.
“Here? In this hotel?” I asked. “Of course not.”
“Well then, it can’t be me, and you are disturbing us for nothing.”
“Please come with me,” the officer requested, but Niki yelled that she’d make a major scandal out of it.
“I intend to go back to bed,” I told him, “and at about nine I’ll go down to breakfast. We can talk later.” He requested that we not leave the hotel and I closed the door on him.
We couldn’t go back to sleep of course, or even make love, but we lay in each other’s arms, giving each other the warmth we both needed. The next stage was beyond our control, and that made for an unpleasant wait. The cops didn’t come back, we didn’t fall asleep, and we counted the minutes as time crawled by with infuriating slowness.
Just before nine, I went to my room, followed by an officer who had been standing guard outside all the time. I got dressed, took the last paintings I still had, and about which I had arranged in advance a meeting at a certain gallery at noon, and at the entrance to the dining room I met Niki, immaculately groomed and dressed in her best clothes. She had a meeting lined up with a young writer and his local publisher.
The cops waited patiently until we’d finished eating, and then they asked us to accompany them to the hotel manager’s office.
“I have a meeting at twelve noon, so you’ll have to finish your questioning by eleven. That’s all the time I can give you, and I think it’s more than enough, to question me about a stranger that looks a bit like me,” I told them. It was almost ten, and Niki said she’d have to leave in half an hour.
The interrogation was very professional. Within the time we’d given them, the investigators received confirmation that Niki had indeed been holding meetings with writers and literary agents and that I had sold paintings at a number of galleries. We also gave them the names of the galleries in Copenhagen and Oslo, and the literary agencies in Berlin and Helsinki where we’d been before coming to Stockholm. We answered every question they had about what each of us did in Canada omitting, of course, anything that could indicate we’d known each other there. Our supper order to Niki’s room came up on the computer and the room service waiter confirmed rather embarrassedly that Niki and I had been “in an intimate” situation when he brought us the late-night meal. Niki was allowed to leave but not before she repeated emphatically that I’d been with her all night.
I continued to answer their questions. The tape from the garage was played and we weren’t seen either going or coming back, although I did see our hunched-over shapes in Ronen’s SUV. The night receptionist testified that he, too, hadn’t seen us leaving or returning during his shift. Then it was the turn of the poor barman, who was called from his bed after his night shift, and he confirmed our story about how we had met.
The investigator, rather shamefacedly, informed me that despite the resemblance, he concluded that it was apparently a coincidence, and he apologized for the inconvenience. He even offered to take me in his police car to my meeting, but I passed and called a cab.
We counted the minutes that night too, which we spent together in Niki’s room to bolster our cover story, although there wasn’t any hot sex. Niki looked at the clock every half hour, dozing off for a few minutes and waking in a panic, and the next morning we took our separate flights out, accordi
ng to plan.
“The material is amazing,” said Avi when he met me at the exit from the boarding bridge at Ben Gurion airport. “The plan is to hand it to the Swedish secret service and, if they shut off this channel, Military Intelligence says there’ll be a delay of many months in the Iranian uranium enrichment project.”
“Until they find another supplier,” I said.
“Right, but that’s why we have you guys.”
At the preliminary debriefing in his office, Udi apologized to me for getting away that same night and sparing himself the grilling that we’d had to face. He assumed that the investigators had gone to his hotel as well and that he’d been recognized there. He and Ronen had crossed into Norway without a hitch, he said “but if we’d stopped for a coffee on the way we might have had to pay dearly if the pictures had turned up in the meantime. In the final analysis, we did all right. It was your combined cover that did it. I wouldn’t have got away with it as elegantly as you two. We’ll drink to our success here, with both of you and with the chief, when Niki gets back.”
Niki arrived in Israel a few hours after me, and I insisted on going to the airport to meet her. She was dead tired. Her legs were shaking, and all she wanted was home and bed. “Who can celebrate now?” she fumed when I told her they were waiting for us at the base. “It’s unbearable, this tension. How do people live their whole lives like this?”
I actually enjoyed the ceremony, which I’d gone through a few times now since joining the squad. For Niki it was new – and superfluous. To her, the toasts and the speech by the chief were part of an alien culture. She’d done what she’d been ordered to do, and she didn’t think she deserved to be thanked for it. I knew that she was motivated by her samurai loyalty to me, and my heart was brimming with gratitude and love for this small, courageous woman, whom everyone there, or so it seemed, idolized. Especially when I recounted at the debriefing how she had yelled at the cops at her hotel room door. Nobody knew about the hours of fear and suspense she had gone through and the other operatives, who’d undergone similar experiences, tended not to ask or to speak about it.
Udi sent us for a five-day break in Eilat, and we really needed it. Niki fell in love with the red hills spilling into the blue sea. She enjoyed the promenade, with all the junky paraphernalia sold there, and I found out that she couldn’t tell the difference between the common punks who congregate in Eilat and respectable kids. After she restored her hair to its original colour, she made herself fine plaits with coloured beads at the ends, although in a few days she’d have to unplait them again. She took a scuba diving lesson and loved swimming with the dolphins, we did a turn on a tandem paraglider high above the bay and Niki screeched with glee and waved like a little girl at the operator of the motor boat towing us. We swam in the cold sea and the heated pool, and more than anything else, we loved.
We almost didn’t speak about the mission we’d just been on, but we couldn’t help speaking about our future. “It felt like a dream, when we were playing at the real life we should be living,” Niki said sadly. “All of a sudden, the cover story was like what our real lives should be, and the operation was just an interruption.”
I didn’t say a thing, just hugged her tight, something I hadn’t been able to do when she’d said similar things in the hotel room in Stockholm and ran away crying. To be a samurai was a metaphor that wrapped loyalty in a certain ideology and in certain colours. But Niki was a young woman who certainly wanted to live a life of love, family and work uninterrupted by missions involving samurai loyalty.
How long would this loyalty endure? When would Niki say, “That’s it”, that as far as she was concerned the samurai chapter had ended, and now she wanted us to live like any other couple?
I knew that in Japanese culture, “no” did not exist. By means of “yes” they also express the negative, so as not to offend the person they are talking to. I had encountered it many times, when Japanese people couldn’t answer my questions, even if I was simply asking for directions. Niki, so far, hadn’t said no, but she told me about the wonderful meetings she’d had with young writers and their agents and publishers. Her eyes shone and I saw how happy this occupation made her. I knew that in these meetings she felt the same satisfaction that I felt when I had meetings in galleries, especially when they’d agreed to purchase my works.
Back in Canada, when she was working as an editor, she’d told me of the excitement of discovering an outstanding manuscript, that without her, a young writer might not be able to publish, and about the job of editing, during which she turned into a silent partner in the writing process, trying to be the optimal reader of the work, and very delicately directing the writer towards what in her eyes was missing from the story. “And what is more difficult, towards what is unnecessary in it, because a writer is in love with what he has written, and doesn’t see the reader.” And now, as a literary agent, she was happy with every discovery of a good book that without her would never be discovered by readers in the English language. She loved what she was doing, but she was being forced into doing it in a completely secondary way.
And what would I do when she said “No”?
In the meantime, all I permitted myself was to hint again at the deep place from where my commitment to Israel and the Jewish people sprang. When she talked about how much she had liked the young German writers, I told her that I still felt a barrier that made it difficult for me to look at a German and see only his nice side.
Miscomprehension was discernible in Niki’s eyes.
“Let’s try and see it from the way the brain works,” I said, because I knew that any other explanation would come up against words I’d heard often before: but these are the grandchildren of the Nazis, and they’ve learned from history, and not all of their grandfathers were part of the Nazi war machine.
“Since I was a small child, whenever I heard the word ‘German’ it was in a negative context. The neurons in my brain ran from the word ‘German’ to the word ‘Nazi’ and created hardwiring between Germans and roundups, transports, concentration camps, death camps and the murder of millions of my fellow Jews. In my brain, very rigid patterns were formed that connect Germans to very negative feelings.”
“But the people I met were really nice, and polite, and gentle!” Niki objected.
“I’ve also met Germans like that. I’m not blind, deaf or stupid,” I replied in near anger. “That’s why I’m talking to you about what goes on in my brain, involuntarily, subconsciously. Every meeting with a ‘positive’ German creates new connections, which are countered by fixed neural patterns. The brain’s plasticity makes it possible for new connections, with new meanings, to be formed at every such meeting. But there would have to be thousands of meetings for the general pattern in me to change.”
“So do you think that such patterns link you to the past, of your family and of your nation?”
Steel-trap smart, she had grasped precisely what I had wanted to tell her.
“I think so. I think that my consciousness, or my will, are not free of very powerful associations that link me to the history of my people in general, and of my family in particular.”
“Do you mean that when your father’s family was not in Israel it had no protection, and that the right place for Jews, as you have told me, is in Israel?”
“Yes, but that’s only half the picture. Being here isn’t enough.”
“You mean that you have to be prepared to fight for this country.”
“That’s right, that’s what I did in the army and what I’m doing now.”
“How long for?”
“Just as many Christians continue to have a neural connection that leads from the word ‘Jews’ to the words ‘crucifiers of Jesus,’ and to negative stereotypes, so in the minds of many Muslims and Arabs we do not belong here. There is great hatred towards us and willingness to drive us away, to launch a Jihad against us. As long as this lasts, my commitment will last.”
Niki pulled away fro
m my embrace. “You have to understand. I do not have any such associations that connect me to your past and your country. I am connected only to you.”
I reflected on her words for a moment. I had known that this was the way it was when we arrived in Israel together but I was not convinced this was still the case, after her long months of training, close to Udi and the other instructors, and after her brief time with our team. It seemed to me that Niki was beginning to feel at home, with the team and perhaps even without me.
Nevertheless, I tried to ease the situation. “But I am a package deal. I am all of these patterns that link me to my people and my country, and also to my great love for you, and each moment with you creates new connections that are becoming the most important pattern of my life.”
“As long as I am here,” said my wise Niki, “as long as the patterns in your brain elicited by the word ‘Israel’ and those that arise from the word ‘Niki’ dovetail with each other …” And she left it at that.
I also remained silent. What would I do if she forced me to choose? Was it at all possible to separate the two things without feeling like a person who had an arm amputated?
The meeting with the Swedish secret service took place while we were in Eilat, and Udi phoned us to give us a report of what was said. The head of the Mossad station covering Scandinavia, and the HQ officer responsible for the efforts to derail Iran’s nuclear weapons project, showed the Swedes a few dozen of the documents I’d photographed which proved beyond doubt that Gimbers was supplying the Iranians with both uranium enrichment centrifuges and computers, in violation of the international boycott.
“So, I understand that it was your people who broke into Gimbers last week.” The head of the Swedish service added, “You know, we are aware of their identities.” He described what had happened after we made our getaway.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 30