Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  “We have tickets on the eleven a.m. TGV to Charles de Gaulle, and a flight from there to Israel at three thirty,” she said at last. “I want to sleep in the little time we have.”

  The way she said “Israel” sounded jarring to me; the rest of us always used a codeword, or said “home”. It also bothered me that she took off only her top clothes, got under the covers and pulled them over her head.

  She never gave me an iota of information about what had come up during her session with Udi. He had probably instructed her to keep it all to herself but I felt I couldn’t endure that. I told her quietly that the events of the day, with Yuri at the station and now with Udi, were a little too much for me to take. She must have heard the frustration in my voice but no answer came from under the blanket.

  It wasn’t Niki who would have to choose between life with me on the squad and her own normal life in Toronto, and it wasn’t I who’d have to choose between life with her, as an artist, and the Mossad. The two of us would have to choose between life together and the squad. But between us, now, there was only silence.

  5.

  Artificial Respiration

  I DIDN’T GET into bed with her and instead dozed in the armchair. We hardly spoke while we were packing our things, or on the way to the station, or in the fast train to Charles de Gaulle airport. It wasn’t stress over whether we’d be caught. Niki could have been linked to Yuri, if investigators found out about their dinner together but the chances that would happen within a few hours were minimal. There was a sense of foreboding that our relationship was at a crossroads. I didn’t know if Niki had anything to hide about the hours she’d spent alone with Udi the night before, or about their relationship in general, and my worries on that score seemed too unfounded and childish for me to mention them. But although I said nothing further, the soul-destroying jealousy that was gnawing at my insides must have been evident to her. We tried to be nice to each other while waiting for our flight, in the few necessary interactions that occurred, like when I asked her if I could get her anything from the café at the departure gate, or if she wanted the window seat on the plane. I didn’t know if the cold I felt during the flight came from the air conditioning, the window, or from inside myself. The blanket that I requested from a stewardess didn’t make it any better.

  At night, in our apartment, I thought that if we made love, things might get back on track. Niki didn’t refuse but it was the worst sex we’d ever had. She was dry, and the rocket that usually sprang out of my groin was not as hard as it always had been. I came, but only with difficulty, and Niki was ice cold. This time there wasn’t even one “Yes” and the State of Israel didn’t arise. We didn’t speak about what was happening between us. When she turned her back towards me, I put my hand on her hip and remained awake after her quiet breathing indicated she was fast asleep.

  Only in the morning, while we were sipping our bitterer than usual coffee, did I ask Niki what had happened at her meeting with Udi. And I quickly asked if he’d given her a tongue-lashing.

  “No … Do you think he should have rebuked me? Do you think I developed some kind of special sympathy for Yuri? Or that I should have sparked off a gunfight in the railway station by acting myself or by speaking into my mike?”

  She was right of course, and she also knew exactly how to take accurate aim at my secret fears about her and Yuri and to try to allay them. And as she went on to talk about her meeting with Udi, she did so with the intent of stopping up that crack in my heart: only now did it transpire that there had been someone else present at the meeting, a member of another squad who was there to question Niki about Yuri’s office, the locks on the door, the location of the alarm control box, and of the cameras. She knew that this other team was going to work there, and she wasn’t supposed to say anything about it to me.

  Right after Niki’s initial description of the office was received, HQ had decided that we would continue working on Yuri and another squad would move in to handle the office. They’d landed in Brussels at the same time as Jerry and Yuri set out on their train journey northwards, and an hour and a half later, after Jerry reported “mission accomplished”, they were given one hour to get their job done. HQ estimated that it would take at least an hour before Yuri was identified and the Brussels police would get to his office.

  Because of the short time at their disposal, the break-in team decided not to photograph the material but simply to take it all with them. Yuri’s computer and several dozen files from his cabinet were duly packed and carried down to a waiting vehicle and from there shipped securely to Israel, that same night. They also dismantled the cameras that had transmitted to Yuri’s computer, and took them along too.

  “This guy was the veritable tycoon of Iranian non-conventional weaponry acquisition,” said intelligence officer Moshik, who’d come to our facility straight from the technical department, where the contents of the computer and files were being scrutinized. “Meanwhile, links with dozens of other companies in most European countries have been discovered, almost all of them involved with equipment or materials used in the nuclear, missile and chemical industries. We don’t know yet what deals he’d done with them, but that’ll probably come out during the day.”

  The Dutch had conveyed Yuri’s details to Interpol the same day he was killed and the first hints of his true identity were emerging. His real name was Eddie McMurphy and he was an MI6 veteran who had crossed the lines and had been living under an assumed identity in Europe for a decade. Even the British had no idea what he’d been up to since he’d retired. While still in their service he’d specialized in setting up straw companies and money transfers, which he’d now turned into a business.

  “It may be that the Brussels operation was just the tip of the iceberg of what’s in store for us,” said Jack, deputy chief of the operations division, who’d come to congratulate our team. The chief himself was meeting with the break-in team, perhaps an implicit message that the Mossad saw their mission as more successful than ours. Jack said that Jerry’s one-on-one pursuit of Yuri had been a “citation or demotion” matter, and I had some trouble in explaining the expression to Niki and the kind of culture that it reflected: if necessary, you take risks against standing orders, and if it works you’re a hero, but if it fails you’re screwed.

  “We do not work like that,” Jack said. “It went against all the rules, of both safety and security. We’re not making a James Bond film and there were other ways to get the job done. Ronen’s attempt to catch up with Jerry and Yuri was a correct move, Jerry’s staying close to him was good but he should have stuck to his tail and aid should have been summoned from Holland. The job should not have been done by a lone operative. Yuri was a trained professional, and when he drew Jerry towards the toilet, it was a death trap. He already had his gun in his hand. Jerry beat him to it by a second, and that was pure luck.”

  But despite this, Jack praised us. “There’s no doubt that neutralizing Yuri dealt a blow to the Iranian procurement effort. There’s no sign that he had an assistant or that there’s anyone who can step in and take his place. We’re studying the material and trying to see if there are ways to get results by conferring with our counterparts in Europe, or if we’ll have to prioritize new ‘blue and white’ all-Israeli ops. We don’t have an infinite number of squads.” That was supposed to be a joke but not one of us knew how many operational squads like us there actually were. When we spoke about it, Ronen guesstimated there were perhaps ten, but Jerry thought less. I had no idea.

  The deputy chief wound up by saying that the mission had been accomplished only in part because the pictures of Udi and me, and perhaps of Niki, hadn’t been found on Yuri’s computer and could be flying around the world. There was no way of knowing who had them. It was also possible that the Dutch cops would get hold of the images of the man getting off the train at Breda and immediately taking the one back to Brussels, namely Jerry, and that they were doing the rounds at Interpol.

  After the
congratulatory part, we went on to our internal debriefing. I came out of it angry, because the reprimand I got for going into the train station without reporting and getting permission was at the same level as Niki’s reprimand for failing to radio that she had her eyes on Yuri. This was seen as a purely operational decision: she didn’t have approval for shooting him, and if she’d done so she’d have been caught; if she had reported in a manner that aroused his suspicion she might have been fired at by him, and in any case if she’d called us we wouldn’t have got there before the train pulled out.

  “I understand your reasons, but still I would have preferred you to have found a way to report and to leave it up to me to decide,” said Udi, but he didn’t indicate that he thought it was a grave error, especially after hearing her further explanations. In order to use her mike, she said, she’d have had to turn around, losing sight of the target, so we wouldn’t have known if he’d boarded the train or not. He could have hidden somewhere along the platform and, had we rushed in, there could have been a blood bath.

  I didn’t know whether she was just selling Udi made-up pretexts that sounded professional and keeping her real reason, her debt to the English gentleman, to herself, or whether it was all in my head. I didn’t ask her about it later, simply because we didn’t speak later.

  The material from Yuri’s office, after it was sifted, pointed to fewer questionable companies than the experts had suspected. In order to disguise his illicit activities, he had also done a lot of legitimate deals, using only his fax and computer. But there were plenty of companies from which he’d purchased forbidden items, transferring them via his straw companies to Iran. Apart from the Norwegian and the Russian companies, there were also two companies in Austria and one each in Switzerland, Germany, Ukraine and Latvia. “As you see, it’s easy to enlist the old anti-Semites, like the various German-speakers, Ukraine and Latvia, as well as the new anti-Semites who pose as anti-Israeli, and won’t let themselves be outdone,” Udi commented. Our team had been assigned to deal with the two Austrian companies. Other teams had been dispatched to the other countries where dialogue with the local services couldn’t produce results.

  I was pleased to work in Austria, a country that had not in any way paid for its hasty and eager identification with Nazi Germany. The Austrians managed to make the world forget the referendum that had shown almost unanimous support for the annexation of their country by Hitler and, since I was a boy, I had believed that their attempts to exonerate themselves and present themselves as victims were pathetic.

  “Initial intelligence indicates that these are fairly easy assignments. Businesses that are ostensibly legitimate, with security precautions that are apparently nothing out of the ordinary,” Udi said. “So we’ll act simultaneously, with Ruth, Jerry and me in Salzburg and Boaz, Philip and Dave in Vienna.”

  There’s no need to describe what I felt when I heard that Udi was separating Niki and me, and was taking her with him. I thought that at least I deserved to be informed in advance, before the whole team was told. Was he aware of what was happening between us? Had he told Niki in advance?

  A kaleidoscope of different scenes and suspicions buzzed around in my head. Niki’s admiration for Udi after their meeting in the little house in the Kiryah, her enthusing about him during her training, the way Udi excluded me from knowing anything about her, his hand on her shoulder as we left the car in Stockholm, the intimacy they must have experienced when he cut her thigh, the many hours she’d spent with him on our last night in Brussels, even if there was someone else there for some of the time. And now he was putting her on his team for Salzburg, and sending me hundreds of miles away, to Vienna. Why did he have to do that? What relationship would develop between them there? Would he send Jerry to one hotel and stay with Niki in another? I felt as if, under the surface, something was happening that I had no control over, and also no way of preventing, if I didn’t want to look like an idiot. But in conditions like these, I didn’t want to share the same apartment and the same bed with her.

  Niki cried when I told her. She reiterated that she was doing everything for my sake, for my country and if I thought differently then, despite my overgrown physique, I had the mind of a foolish teenager. Even though I knew she was right, I couldn’t overcome the jealousy pumping through my veins which was all the more frustrating because I didn’t know if there was any real basis for it. I hoped, somehow, that Niki herself would take the matter up with Udi, that she would object to going with him instead of with me, but she was too disciplined a soldier. Or perhaps she wanted it that way.

  I spent the night before the flight on the couch, stewing in my jealousy and unable to fall asleep. Niki, downcast, said nothing in the morning, but apparently she told Udi. When he called me to his office and tried to talk to me I cut him off with a rudeness that, once again, surprised me: “You’re the last one who can open his mouth about this. What you’ve done to us is total ‘divide and rule’ – putting her in your crew, not bothering to explain why, and presenting me with a fait accompli, so now I’m saying that what happens between us is not your business, and I’m not prepared to discuss it with you.”

  “We’ll talk when we get back,” said Udi. “You two haven’t yet honoured the promissory notes that you’ve signed.”

  I knew what he was talking about. In casual conversations over recent months, we’d heard over and over again references to what the chief and Udi had said at the outset: Niki and I were destined to carry out some assignment as a couple, in a dangerous target country. But right now, the “couple” part of that was something I could not really identify with. “Maybe you’ll honour the note, with her,” I blurted out. I really should not have said that, but couldn’t help myself.

  “Don’t squander the credit that you’ve earned with me, Mickey,” Udi said, using my real name, responding to my having shifted things onto the personal level. Instead of kicking me out he rose ponderously from his chair and walked out of his office, leaving me standing there.

  Our missions in Austria were straightforward and were over quickly. Udi decided we’d been working around the clock for too long, and he didn’t want to take on complicated break-ins. Because they had been defined as “intimidation” and “alarm-bell” missions, meant to scare the companies in question and make the authorities aware of what was going on there, he decided that we’d suffice with placing incendiary devices in their premises, and with time fuses that gave us plenty of time to get away. We spent only one night on gathering pre-operational intelligence about night-time routines, their security arrangements and the frequency of police patrols, and the next night we executed. In Salzburg, Udi’s crew broke into the grounds of the plant, put their firebombs at the entrances to the warehouse, the offices and the production facility. In Vienna, we set the devices in the office building and as “dessert” also in a number of trucks parked in the yard. At both places, we left press cuttings of news stories describing Yuri’s demise.

  The guards at the Salzburg plant called the fire brigade as soon as the warehouse bomb went off, earlier than it should have. When the other device exploded, the firemen were already on site, and it was extinguished immediately. The damage wasn’t great but the police sealed off the area, not allowing even the company executives to enter, and confiscated hundreds of files and documents, leading to a cessation of the company’s deals with Iran.

  In Vienna, the offices were destroyed almost completely, something that we hadn’t meant to happen. The fire brigade came across the blazing trucks first and decided to deal with them, summoning another unit to fight the office building fire.

  The company got the message and here too the Iranian game was over, or at least that’s what they said in an email to one of Yuri’s firms, a message that elicited a cheer when it appeared on that firm’s computer, which was now located in an office of the intelligence division of the Mossad in Tel Aviv.

  Udi made sure that Niki and I would fly back to Israel together. He had app
arently realized that his attempt to relate to us as two regular operatives and to ignore our relationship had harmed our common purpose. But it was too late. We checked in separately, sat a few rows away from one another, and didn’t exchange a word.

  Niki threw a glance at me every now and then but I had a block of ice lodged in my chest. She’d spent the previous night with Udi and Jerry. With Udi, as I saw it. The implications that this had for me were indelible and undeniable. I knew that jealousy was irrational and insane. Somewhere deep down inside me, inside all males, there were genes that made the possibility that someone else would impregnate their mate the equivalent of a death sentence: it was not their own genes which would pass on to the next generation, but the genes of another male. All the will in the world, all the common sense in the world, could not overcome the lunacy of jealousy, once it had been aroused.

  When we landed in Tel Aviv, we were met by an Office driver who’d been instructed to take us to our apartment but I told him I was going to my parents in Haifa and he didn’t have to bother about me. I’d take the direct train from the airport.

  Niki gazed at me with an enormous sadness. Tears began running down her cheeks and she made no effort to hide them. Small and upright, she stood by the open door of the vehicle with her coat collar turned up, watching me without moving, without speaking.

  Perhaps it was those tears that began to melt the block of ice jammed between my groin and my throat, while I was on my way to the station. They trickled and trickled in my mind, and a little while after the train was on its way, they reached the part of me that hadn’t yet hardened, activated a secret mechanism there, and I felt that the block was melting. It began filling my throat and I needed to take deep breaths to stop it from bursting through to my eyes. How alone she had looked there, how miserable, and how very dear to me, still. After all there wasn’t even an iota of blame that I could level at her, idiot that I was. All she had done was obey Udi’s orders, and the whole situation could have been hurting her as much as it was hurting me. But she, and not I, was the one who knew whether anything had happened between them, and what. I felt helpless. All the things that I’d been afraid of were still there. Not as facts, but as possibilities, and no denial could simply wipe them away. In a certain sense, my woman had been taken away from me. But perhaps I was hallucinating? Perhaps jealousy was making me lose my mind? After all, she was here, in Israel and in the Mossad, for me. What else was there for her here, apart from me?