Dov Alfon - A Long Night in Paris: The Must-Read Thriller From the New Master of Spy Fiction

First published in the Hebrew language as ???? (Laila Aroch bParis) by Kinneret in 2016

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by MacLehose Press

An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd Carmelite House

An Hachette UK company

Copyright 2016 Dov Alfon & Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir Publishing House Ltd English translation copyright 2019 by Daniella Zamir The moral right of Dov Alfon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Daniella Zamir asserts her moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85705 882 9

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

www.quercusbooks.co.uk

To Adam Vital, Yigal Palmor and the rest of the soldiers
in the Apocalypse Department at the Yarkon Base.

A long night in Paris will cure us of all this

Napoleon Bonaparte, after the retreat from Moscow, in response to an officer asking how they could recover from the loss of eighteen thousand soldiers.

Nine people witnessed the abduction of Yaniv Meidan from Charles de Gaulle airport, not including the hundreds of thousands who watched the security camera footage once it had been posted online.

The initial French police report described him as an Israeli passenger, approximately twenty years old, although a week earlier he had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. His colleagues described him as mischievous, some calling him childish. They all agreed that he was fun-loving.

He disembarked, noticeably cheerful, from El Al flight 319. As he left the plane he tried his luck again with the flight attendants, and at passport control he played the fool with the French police officers, who regarded him with blatant hostility before stamping his passport and waving him on.

That is how it had always been. Ever since kindergarten, everyone had forgiven Meidan for everything. He had an exuberant, partly juvenile spontaneity about him which succeeded in charming every employer he had ever worked for, as well as winning over quite a few women, if only for a while. Its easy to forgive Yaniv, a teacher once said to his mother.

Nothing else distinguished him from the other two hundred Israelis who had come to Paris to participate in the CeBit Europe Expo. With a buzz cut and matching stubble, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of a previous years computer fair, he wore the uniform of all young men in a country self-described as a start-up nation. In the footage he was seen forever fiddling with his mobile.

He was in his second year as marketing manager of the software company B.O.R., and that made him the most senior member of the team sent to the event. There were six of them, including him a small team compared to the other, larger companies. What we lack in money, we make up for in talent, he called out to his colleagues, who viewed him with a mixture of amusement and affection.

The baggage claim was in a dimly lit, cramped hall. Meidan picked up the pace of his jokes. The longer they had to wait, the more bored he became, and he ambled to and fro, chatting, drumming against the motionless conveyor belt. He hated waiting. He hated being bored. His success as a marketing manager was directly linked to this quality, his need to inject interest into any given moment.

There was no sign of the suitcases. At one point he began photographing himself in different poses, and uploaded a picture of himself next to the billboard of the Galeries Lafayette department store sticking his tongue out at the nude model, having no thought that the photograph would appear the next day on the front page of the most popular Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

The marketing managers of the rival companies sat down with their laptops and made use of the time to work, rehearsing their presentations for the fair. Its all about connecting, Meidan told his team, and whipped out a Visa card to pull a funny face in front of an American Express billboard.

Suddenly suitcases were shuffling onto the conveyor belt, and their luggage was among the first to appear. Dont worry, guys, the fair will be there tomorrow too, Meidan jeered at the other passengers, and led his team towards the exit with a triumphant swagger.

They passed through the green customs line, he in the lead, his five colleagues in his wake. The automatic exit doors opened at once, and he was met with a row of a dozen greeters bearing signs, chauffeurs waiting for this or that passenger. Half of them looked like gangsters, but among them stood a breathtaking blonde in a red hotel uniform holding up her sign. Meidan at once approached her, sure that there was time for one last horsing around in front of the guys, just one more opportunity for tomfoolery, and that would be it.

It was 10.40 a.m., Monday, April 16.

Meanwhile, Oriana Talmor was being rushed into the special meeting.

It was the first time she had been asked to represent her unit at Camp Rabin, Tzahals headquarters in HaKirya. She looked around in wonder at the huge Israeli Defence Forces compound, while the athletic military policeman who had been assigned as her escort walked briskly ahead. Segen Talmor followed him through a labyrinth of brutalist concrete barracks and futurist glass towers, along roads bearing incongruous names like Iris Walk or Greenfields Lane, towards their destination.

It took twenty minutes and several security checks for them to reach the floor that houses the executive offices of Tzahals Chief of Intelligence. The lobby was already full of people. They spilled out into the corridor, and a heavy-set rav seren bearing a pile of folders sat himself on the receptionists desk, all the while ignoring her angry glares.

Oriana found a seat by a window overlooking Tel Aviv. In front of her, a mass of low-rise buildings, occasionally dotted with green, spilled towards the pale Mediterranean coast. The sea was nowhere to be seen, bleached by the sun and eclipsed by residential towers and hotel blocks.

Across the street from the huge military compound people were lining up at gourmet restaurants, riding stylish electric bikes, and exchanging greetings, confidential addresses, family news and vegan recipes. Closer to the gates, a few women dressed in black called for the end of military occupation in Palestinian territories and were politely ignored by the American tourists and Israeli generals disappearing into the shopping mall ahead. By the car park, dozens of stray cats hovered around the dustbins, waiting for the duty soldier to dump the military food waste.