Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  “What bothers us more,” said the Mossad head, without admitting anything, “is that those photographs are in Gimbers’ hands, and who knows if they won’t be passed on. We’d be very grateful if you dealt with this.”

  “No problem,” said the Swede. “We’ll forget the names the hotels gave us, and no one else knows them. I’ll immediately send people to confiscate all the CCTV pictures. We’ll pass your material to the public prosecution department, which is the only body that can act on it.”

  The heads of Gimbers were arrested within a few days, and a shipment ready for dispatch to Tehran was seized. “But,” Udi said, “there may still be a little problem. The cops didn’t find our photos, and we’re afraid that the bastards did pass them on, perhaps to the Iranians. We may be able to intercept them on the way. I’ll talk to you about it as soon as you get back from Eilat. And when will that be, by the way? Perhaps tomorrow?”

  4.

  The Gentleman in Brussels

  WE DECIDED TO give up our last day in Eilat, even though Niki was keen to have one more dive. Anything we could do to stop the Iranians from getting our pictures was far more valuable than another day of fun in the sun.

  When we arrived at our base outside Tel Aviv, we found that the rest of the team was already in Europe. The Mossad station head in Scandinavia had obtained, from his Swedish counterparts, the identity of the middleman through whom Gimbers dealt with the Iranians. If the images had been passed on, the Swedes said, it was through this man, Yuri Gladstone. An international businessman with a trading company registered in Luxembourg but who apparently lived in Brussels. Gladstone was the nominal purchaser of the equipment on behalf of Iran, and his name had come up in the Swedish cops’ grilling of the Gimbers’s executives but they didn’t know much more about him.

  The next day, in the early afternoon, we landed at Zaventem airport, Belgium. We were to meet Udi in Brussels at eight p.m., and until then wouldn’t know what our role in the operation would be or what our cover story was. For the time being, we decided to stay together and took a room at the Royal Windsor hotel in one of the narrow streets leading off the Grand Place. We spent the rest of the day wandering through the ancient side streets and in that magnificent square, one of the most beautiful in the world to my mind, surrounded as it is by palatial buildings, four or five storeys high, with pillared façades, ornate cornices and topped by steeply sloping roofs. The City Hall, at the centre of one side, was the most impressive of all, perhaps precisely because of a slight asymmetry in the number of pillars on either side of the façade, something which, legend has it, led the architect to take his own life.

  We didn’t want to stray too far from the square and its vicinity and in the time we had left walked around the nearby alleys full of seafood stalls and restaurants, and visited the famous Manneken Pis, the sculpture of a little boy peeing into a fountain, which surprised us by being so small, especially in relation to all the renown it enjoys. By sunset it was too cold to stay outside so we arrived early for the meeting with Udi. Our rendezvous turned out to be an elegant café, with its name in gilt lettering, with polished mahogany furnishings upholstered in green leather. Udi and Ronen were already there.

  “I recommend the moules,” said Udi, and then he took a look at Niki and said, “You’ve got a tan. The sun is good for you.”

  Ronen helped us get over the slight embarrassment over the personal compliment, so rare coming from Udi, and said, “And my recommendation is the oysters in white wine.”

  “Suits me,” said Niki, with a slight blush on her cheeks following the very unexpected compliment, and we laughed because her reply was a response to both Udi and Ronen. Once again, I had to remind myself that for Udi she wasn’t my sweetheart, but rather his operative. To gain time to sort my thoughts out, I ordered a coffee and asked for a menu.

  “I visited the Luxembourg address, and Dave checked the registry of companies,” Udi told us. “Yuri Gladstone’s set-up is a straw company. There’s an office services company at the address and from the mail we swiped from their box, we obtained two addresses in Brussels. We’ve done some recon around them, and one of them, the Place Louise, is a business address; the second in Avenue Molière is residential. Jerry’s watching the apartments and Dave’s on the offices.”

  “What’s our job?” I asked.

  “Firstly, to stop the pictures of you and me, and perhaps also of Ruth, getting to the Iranians. But in this matter, I’m afraid we’re trying to close the stable door after the horses have bolted. It’s been a week since our break-in and if he wanted to send them, it stands to reason he’s already done so, by e-mail. Just to be sure, I’ve started growing a beard,” and he rubbed his unshaven jaw. “Boaz, you’ll grow a moustache, and Ruth will dye her hair darker.”

  Udi went on to tell us that our team’s first task was to pinpoint the man and his business, because he was apparently the key figure in Iran’s non-conventional weaponry acquisition efforts. Enquiries about his company had already led to other firms in Europe that manufactured tools and materials for the nuclear industry which he purchased and transported to Iran. Two other teams were already engaged in handling these leads, one in Norway and another in Russia.

  “And once we’ve found him, what, specifically, are our orders?”

  “When we’ve got more details, a decision will be made in Israel as to how to deal with him. It could be anything, from setting fire to his office to beating him up or intimidating him, right up to elimination. Whatever they decide.”

  “And at the same time to get our pictures back.”

  “If they’re still there,” Udi affirmed. “All signs are that Yuri’s here in Brussels. But almost nothing is known about him. We’ll have to link whoever uses the office with whoever lives at the apartment, make sure he’s our man, and only then, as I’ve said, will the decision be made on what to do with him.”

  Udi had requested, but did not receive, permission for a break-in at the office and the flat. After the Stockholm episode, the man must have known there was a skilled burglary team after him, and he could easily booby trap either or both sites.

  I found Place Louise to be a large square at the city end of the fashionable Avenue Louise, which leads from the square to the woods abutting the Uckle neighbourhood. The large buildings around the square provided us with several good observation posts. Niki chose the Häagen Dazs ice cream parlour, with its endless selection of flavours, while I preferred Quick on the opposite corner with its hamburgers swathed in mayonnaise, like everything else in Brussels.

  Before or after her shift, Niki liked popping into the nearby Galeries Louise, an elegant mall of upmarket stores, or other shopping choices in the adjoining streets leading off the square. At the end of the Avenue Louise stood the vast and imposing Palais de Justice and opposite it, a memorial “To the glory of the Infantrymen who died for the country”. I learned here that Belgium had throughout history been the main killing fields in the wars between Germany, France and Holland, and was actually established to serve as a buffer between them.

  I spent the hours between my shifts paying quick visits to the major museums which are located on or near Rue Royal, which forks off the end of Avenue Louise. Some of the splendid treasures of Flemish art are exhibited in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, but I enjoyed myself more in the Comics Art Museum in Rue des Sables. I had loved Belgian comics ever since the days I had tried to understand how Tintin and the Smurfs were made, and I borrowed some of their techniques for my Israman. Niki came with me on one visit, and when I told her about Israman, she was thrilled. “And I thought I knew all about you,” she said, almost scolding me.

  Uckle was the neighbourhood of choice for the European Union bureaucrats, perhaps because it offered a combination of quiet in the side streets, and the big city in the broad avenues which led to the centre and were lined with every sort of shop one could need. The neighbourhood was too expensive for many of its original inhabitants, some of whom rented th
eir apartments out to EU people and, of course, it was well out of reach of the hundreds of thousands of migrants from North Africa who had taken over other areas, especially around the railway stations in the north and south of the city.

  Avenue Molière, where we suspected Yuri Gladstone lived, was one of the quieter streets in Uckle, with typical Belgian residential buildings, each in a different architectural style and four to six storeys high, built up against each other, with common side walls. I soon learned that the only evident danger of keeping watch here was the many piles of poop deposited by dogs, which the locals preferred to raise rather than children, and whose droppings they didn’t bother to pick up off the pavement.

  My encounters with Belgians convinced me there was more than an iota of truth in the stories about their thick-headedness. There were, for example, salespeople who wouldn’t sell me one package containing various kinds of chocolate cookies, although they were all priced the same, and insisted on weighing and packaging each kind separately. Perhaps there was something in the joke about the Belgian stuck in a lift with a tourist and telling him not to worry, because a few days before he’d been stuck for hours on an escalator that had stopped working.

  Three frustrating days of lookouts in the Place Louise and Avenue Molière went by before we had a possible “target”. He was a tall, handsome man of about forty, who wore a well-cut suit and left the apartment building every morning. It was only after scrutinizing the photographs taken by a camera we’d placed in a car opposite the office building, that we saw that he arrived there a little while later.

  We’d noticed him from the outset, but because he didn’t take the tram in the direction of Place Louise, we didn’t follow him. Once we’d seen him entering the office building, we stuck to his tail for the next two days. It was clear that he was wary, performing an elementary kind of drill for detecting surveillance, and trying to shake off anyone who might be on his tracks. He got into a tram heading for the city centre, and there he changed to another tram that dropped him near the office building. He didn’t go anywhere apart from his office and his home. It could be presumed that he wouldn’t swallow any bait and he’d be suspicious of anyone approaching him. Phillip and Dave, who had accumulated dozens of hours of lookout duty near the two locations and were the least well-trained in our team, felt that they were already “cooked” by the curious glances they’d received from passersby, so Udi decided to move on to the next stage.

  The plan was for Niki to establish contact with the target and try to dig up any details she could, and, if possible, to get invited into his office or his apartment. She’d then try to spot any alarm systems, identify the types of locks, and plant a miniature microphone-transmitter wherever possible.

  The next two mornings, Niki was on Yuri’s tram. After getting a message that he had left home, she boarded the tram at the stop on the cobbled Chausée d’Alsemberg, one stop before Avenue Molière, and stayed on when he got off. She sat facing the seat where he generally sat. But Yuri was completely indifferent to her presence, hid behind his Guardian and never exchanged either a word or even a glance with her. Elementary spycraft, of course, forbade her to take the initiative.

  “A whole week’s gone by,” said an exasperated Udi, “and HQ is still ruling out a break-in, as long as we don’t have more info. And we don’t even have proof that he’s our man, and not some British EU bureaucrat. Meanwhile, the two other teams have broken into plants in Oslo and Moscow and downloaded tons of material. They’re working on it at HQ, and we shall see – perhaps it’ll lead to a change in their thinking. At any rate, we have to be more aggressive, and Ruth, that’s going to cost you a sterile cut on your thigh.”

  I wasn’t even asked for my opinion, Niki didn’t object, and that’s how the next stage of our operation got started.

  On the designated morning, I was on lookout outside Yuri’s residence. I was standing in the doorway of a small clinic close to the corner of Molière and Alsemberg when I saw him leave and walk in my direction. I reported this and Niki left Udi’s car, where she was being prepped, and stood in line at the tram stop.

  Yuri ignored her again when he sat down facing her. A few stops later, close to the Gare du Midi and the Moroccan and Algerian neighbourhoods, a noisy group of four Middle-Eastern-looking youngsters boarded the tram. They left no doubts as to their origins, speaking in a mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic. One of them noticed Niki and made a remark about her semi-oriental appearance. They laughed and moved close to her.

  One of them asked the “Voulez vous …” question. Niki looked down and didn’t reply. This made them mad.

  “Good fuck for good money,” one of them said, in English, and they laughed again. Again not obtaining any reaction from her, he said, “You give me good fuck, I give you fifty euro, OK?”

  Niki tried to shrink into her seat. None of the other passengers intervened, including Yuri, who went on reading his newspaper.

  Niki’s lack of response was driving the ruffian out of his mind, and he nudged her shoulder with his elbow.

  “Why you no answer me? Arab not good? Arab good fuck!” And saying this he pushed his groin forwards and grabbed his crotch. This was too much for Yuri. He looked up from his paper, glared at the youngsters and demanded, “Leave the lady alone!”

  Now the four turned on him in a mixture of Arabic and French, and the “English-speaker” among them said, “You want I fuck you instead?”

  Yuri took a deep breath, folded his paper deliberately, and stood up. “Leave the tram now!” he commanded.

  “Sit, old man,” said the punk and tried to push him back into his seat.

  But Yuri was tougher than the young roughneck thought and the resounding slap he delivered in return for the push was fast, hard, and perfectly accurate – a blow with a large open palm that hit the side of the young man’s head with a force that must have torn his eardrum. He staggered in shock and crumpled to the floor, with a wail. It was a clear declaration of war. One of his friends leaned over to hold him, and the two others jumped on Yuri.

  But Yuri defended himself and drove them off with a well-executed series of parries and punches. Then one of the hoodlums pulled a knife.

  Now Niki got up to help. There was a flurry of punches and curses when all of a sudden the tram jerked to a halt. Everyone lost their balance and Niki let out a short yelp of pain.

  The doors opened and the gang yelled to each other that the police were coming and ran away.

  Niki and Yuri found their feet. Niki thanked him effusively, and Yuri said quietly, “You are bleeding,” and pointed at her knee. Blood was trickling down her leg from under her dress. She instinctively pulled her skirt up, exposing a bleeding cut on her thigh.

  The tram was moving again. Yuri collected from the driver a first-aid kit and Niki put a patch of gauze on the wound and bandaged it in a rather careless way.

  At the next stop, she said, “I think I’ll get off here, and take a cab to the hospital.”

  “My office is quite near,” said our target. “If you wish I can bandage you properly there. I don’t think it’s a very serious cut. It’s not worth the hundreds of euros you’ll have to pay at the hospital.”

  Niki accepted gratefully.

  She was surprised when he stopped a cab. “I usually change trams here, but I don’t want to waste time now,” he explained.

  “Bingo!” said Udi when we saw, through the window of his car, the two alighting and then entering the cab. Since he’d picked me up and as we followed the tram in case something went wrong, neither of us had uttered a word.

  A CCTV camera over the door to Yuri’s office covered the whole hallway. He used two large Spyder keys to open the two separate locks and once inside he immediately reached behind the coat rack to turn off the alarm. His office suite comprised an entrance room with a kitchenette, a toilet and a simply furnished room with a desk, two arm chairs, a locked filing cabinet, a desktop computer, a fax machine and a telephone. On the
wall was a thin plasma screen.

  While Yuri was putting the kettle on and getting the first-aid kit, Niki surveyed the office. Two cameras were watching her from two opposite corners. She scoured all around her for a suitable place to plant the microphone she had in her bag without being filmed by the cameras. In the end she quickly pushed it into the space between the back of the chair and the cushion she was sitting on. Not ideal, but that was all she could do without being caught on camera.

  Yuri came back with a cup of tea, a bandage and antibiotic ointment.

  “It’s stopped bleeding, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea to open it up now,” said Niki.

  “Yes, although it bled a lot, the cut looks shallow and clean,” he agreed. “You were lucky.”

  His guard was apparently down by now: Niki’s charm was working. They arranged to meet later at a restaurant where, she said, she’d have more time to thank him for saving her from “those Arab hooligans”.

  When she told us all this, an hour later in Udi’s hotel room, she agreed with Udi that the incision he’d made in her leg wasn’t deep enough, and the capsule of the blood-like liquid that she’d popped when removing the plaster over the cut during the brawl was too big.

  “That’s why I insisted on bandaging myself in the tram and why I didn’t want to change the bandage in his office,” she said.

  As for the “hooligans”, they showed up a little later at a pre-arranged café. They were smartly dressed now and on their way to the airport. For them it was a two-day break from the Mossad cadet course. They were full of spirits, except for the poor guy who had taken Yuri’s slap and was still in pain and hearing bells. “I hope you gave it to him good,” he muttered to Udi as they left.

  Then Udi gave us the arrangements for the evening. Niki would wear a wire to transmit her conversation with Yuri. Udi and I would be keeping an eye on them in the restaurant, and Ronen and Jerry would be in a car in the car park ready to replace us if we aroused Yuri’s suspicions. Dave would be waiting at the nearby taxi rank and Philip would be at the wheel of another car on the other side of the street, facing the direction which could not be taken from the restaurant.