Obsession (Year of Fire) (24 page)

Juana, who was trying on Chanel sunglasses, caught her soaking the handkerchief in Al-Saud’s cologne. She smiled, accentuating the mischievousness in her dark eyes. Mat’s attempts to act as though she was over him were becoming amusing. Sometimes she wouldn’t be able to contain herself, coming out with apparently innocent comments such as, “It was so nice of Eliah to invite my cousin Fabrice to eat dinner with us!” or “Did you smell Francesca’s perfume?” or “Eliah really doesn’t drink any alcohol, does he? He didn’t even try any sake at the restaurant the other day” and “I wonder who that man who was trying to take pictures of Eliah was?” When Juana got home from her increasingly frequent outings with Shiloah, Mat would ask her, “Any news?” When she was feeling perverse, she would shrug and say, “Nope.”

“Let’s go, Mat. Shiloah is coming to pick me up soon and I want to have time to get ready.”

“You’re going out again?”

“Yes, but don’t get any ideas. We find each other entertaining and that’s it. We’re both too complicated to get involved. Did you know he’s a widower? His wife died in Tel Aviv when a Hamas terrorist blew himself up in a pizzeria.”

“Oh my God!”

“I don’t think the poor guy can forget her. And I’m not going to compete with a ghost. A wife, even a child, I can handle, but not a ghost.”

“A child neither,” Matilde retorted stubbornly and Juana stared at her. Her friend, this skinny little creature with the face of an angel, had an inner steeliness that came out occasionally, a steeliness that had scared off Eliah Al-Saud.

“Do you want to come with us?” she asked, grimacing. “I think Snickers is coming too.” This was her nickname for Alamán Al-Saud, who had burst out laughing when Matilde explained that Juana was comparing him to a candy bar.

“I’d rather stay home. I have to study for the mini-exam next Monday.”

The week before they had met in the headquarters of Healing Hands at number six Rue Breguet, a few blocks from the Bastille, where, for three days, they took the course called Preparation for First Destination. Matilde had immediately felt at home, and, after taking in the philosophy, activities and the projects of the organization, she was experiencing a happiness that was only darkened by the memory of Eliah. She was born for this, helping those who needed it most; she had found her place in the world. Healing Hands provided the structure and the resources to give meaning to her life. She couldn’t wait to get into the field, as they referred to the destination.

At the Healing Hands headquarters, they been given a letter of introduction to hand in at the Lycée des Langues Vivantes, which would authorize them to take a four-month intensive course, five days a week, from two thirty to six thirty in the evening. The institute was far from the Latin Quarter, on Rue Vitruve, and they had to take the subway there.

“You already studied for the mini-exam on Monday,” Juana pointed out. “You know more than the teacher. Did you hear what I said, that Snickers is coming? This is your chance, you can ask him all the things you’ve been dying to find out about the stud.”

“I don’t want to know anything about Eliah.”

“No, of course not. And I’m blonde with sky-blue eyes.”

The Learjet 45—his favorite, the Gulfstream V, was in Le Bourget, where the mechanics were checking the repairs made in Buenos Aires—would take off from Fergusson Island shortly. Al-Saud settled into his seat and asked Diana to bring him the encrypted telephone. The young woman quickly reappeared and handed it to him. Eliah put his thumb on a digital reader. A scanner read his fingerprint and authorized him to place a secure call.

“
Allô?
”

“Lefortovo, Horse of Fire speaking. I got your message. What did you find out?”

“I’ve got what you asked for, the name of the fourth passenger. Yarón Gobi. And here’s the most interesting part: he was an important scientist, employed by the Israeli Institution for Biological Research, in Ness-Ziona.”

“You and I know he’s dead, but what do the official records say?”

“One of Gobi’s friends, a colleague at the Institute, one Moshé Bouchiki, reported his disappearance. Weeks later, the newspapers said that he had sold secrets to the enemy for millions of dollars and that he had taken refuge in Libya. Interesting, no?”

“Extremely. Do you have Bouchiki’s address?”

“Write this down. It’s in Ness-Ziona, fifty-four Jabotinsky Street. His apartment is on the third floor.”

“Thank you, Lefortovo. As always, your work is impeccable.”

“Always at your service, boss.”

It took Captain Paloméro some time to change the flight plan and get a new course. They wouldn’t fly to Charles de Gaulle in Paris but to Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. To enter Israel he would use the Italian passport that Vladimir Chevrikov had made him under the name Giovanni Albinoni.

After the Learjet took off, Al-Saud settled comfortably into his armchair and planned the visit to Moshé Bouchiki. According to the GPS map, Ness-Ziona was a few miles south of Tel Aviv. He would rent a car at the airport and go straight to his objective. Once he had analyzed the best strategy to get to Bouchiki, he stretched out on the couch, put his hands behind his head and thought about the order he had given to Alamán and Peter Ramsay the day before: to put microphones and cameras in the apartment on Rue Toullier. It had been a difficult decision to make, but in view of the information supplied by the SIDE agent in Buenos Aires, he judged it imperative: the previous Monday, January 12, Roy Blahetter had boarded an Iberia flight in Ezeiza. Final destination: Paris.

On Wednesday night, after French class, Matilde and Juana had dinner at Sofía’s house. Matilde’s heart raced when she ran into the Al-Saud patriarch in the living room, along with her sister Céline, who was laughing
and at ease. Her hand shook as she reached out to greet Prince Kamal. Had her uncle Nando said
prince
?

“Pay attention to the perfume she’s wearing,” she whispered to Juana, just before she said hello to Francesca.

“Diorissimo,” was the answer. “It’s older than sin, but so exquisite. Pure jasmine. A classic. You’re not thinking about wearing it, are you?”

“Why not?”

“So that Eliah will smell your neck and be reminded of his mother?”

Matilde’s features reddened.

“Why would Eliah smell my neck? Anyway, he’s forgotten we exist.”

Juana rolled her eyes and went to talk to Fabrice. The dinner was fairly relaxed in spite of Céline, whose attitude toward her younger sister became increasingly aggressive as she got into the Mosela Riesling. Matilde contemplated her and didn’t respond. Celia was so beautiful! You could see it at first glance. How tall was she? Five nine? Matilde was only five two. Though she had arrived at her aunt’s house proudly wearing one of the new outfits Ezequiel had bought for her the week before, she felt as though she was in rags when faced with her sister’s superlatively elegant dress with gray edges and blue buttons. Celia made sure that everyone knew that the outfit had been designed especially for her by Valentino. After lunch, when they were sitting comfortably in armchairs in the living room, she saw how avidly her sister chain-smoked and how her hand shook so much that she had trouble lining up the tips of her cigarettes with the flame of her lighter. “My poor sister,” she said to herself, feeling impotent in the knowledge that she would never be able to help her. The abyss between them was too great.

On the pretext of showing her a family photo, Sofía took Matilde’s arm and led her to a separate room, with bookshelves and a wood-burning stove. Céline watched them go, making no effort to conceal the disdain in her light-blue eyes. The curse of Matilde had followed her to Paris, where she was the queen, where she had won Sofía’s heart and was loved and spoiled by her. She wouldn’t let Matilde take away Sofía’s love, as she had that of her father, her aunt Enriqueta and her grandmother Celia. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that Eliah’s parents were friendly, almost affectionate toward her.

“Careful not to bite your tongue; you’d choke on your own poison,” Juana whispered at her provocatively.

“Shut up, you dirty Indian.”

Sofía picked up a picture frame and showed Matilde a photo of a group of black people surrounding a nun, in a tropical setting.

“This is Amélie,” Sofía said proudly.

“Aunt Enriqueta told me that she was a nun,” Matilde remembered.

“Enriqueta talked about me and my children?”

“Very little. Where was this photo taken?”

“In the Congo, in a very dangerous, conflict-ridden area called Kivu. Nando and I pray for her safety every day.”

Matilde looked up from the frame and stared at her aunt.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m stupefied. Juana and I are traveling to Bukavu in a few months, it’s the capital of South Kivu.” Sofía’s eyes filled with tears. “Just as I told you the last time we were here, we’re going with Healing Hands.”

“This can’t be a coincidence!” the woman said excitedly. “As soon as I saw you I knew something special would happen between us. And now you say that you’ll be close to my Amélie. You have to get in touch! You two can be friends when you get out there, she’ll be able to help you. I’ll write down her e-mail address for you!”

Sofía scribbled it on a piece of paper and handed it to Matilde on their way back to the living room, where she announced the good news to the group. Céline couldn’t understand all the admiration directed at Juana and Matilde—So what if they were pediatricians, off to the Congo to pick the fleas off a bunch of black people?—and she flounced out of her aunt’s house, a place where she had always been the center of attention, with her fame, her glamour and beauty. When she got outside, she called Eliah. Of course, the call went straight to the answering machine.

Claude Masséna found a photograph of Dr. Moshé Bouchiki at a biotechnology symposium in Brussels, in ’95, and sent it to Al-Saud’s phone.

After three days in Ness-Ziona, Diana and Al-Saud knew the scientist’s routines. He was surprised that Bouchiki had aged so much in just a few years, although, as Diana pointed out, he looked more run-down than older, with bags under his eyes, deep wrinkles and a bitter grimace.
They suspected that Mossad was watching him, so they moved carefully. A conversation Diana had with Bouchiki’s doorman—in a stroke of luck it turned out that he was a Jew from Sarajevo—had made it clear that Yarón Gobi and Bouchiki had been more than friends.

Al-Saud went into the bar where the man always stopped to have a whiskey, sometimes two, after finishing his working day at the Institute of Biological Research. He sat at the bar, next to the stool where the scientist always sat. He was wearing headphones connected to a small recorder and, although he wasn’t listening to music, he tapped his fingers on the bar and shook his knee up and down. Diana’s voice came in through the tiny microphone hidden in the right headphone.

“Bouchiki’s about to come in. He’s going toward you. The katsa following him hasn’t gotten out of his car. Wait, now he’s getting out.”

Bouchiki sat down to Al-Saud’s right and said something in Hebrew to the waiter, who spoke to him familiarly and served him the drink.

“The katsa has just entered and is sitting at the table at five o’clock.” After a silence, she added, “He’s pretending to read a newspaper.”

Once the waiter had gone off toward the kitchen, Al-Saud, still tapping and jiggling his knee, whispered in English, “Don’t move, don’t look at me, don’t change your expression. Don’t do anything. Just listen to me.” He waited a few seconds to make sure that Bouchiki was paying attention. “I want to talk to you about Dr. Gobi. I know the truth and I’m not one of them.”

Bouchiki handled it well; he sipped his whiskey casually.

“I’ll wait for you tonight on the terrace of your building at eleven at night.”

Bouchiki assented with a movement of the eyelids. Al-Saud drained the last of his mineral water and left the bar. As he passed the katsa, he softly sang a few stanzas of “Comfortably Numb,” by Pink Floyd.

After nine o’ clock at night, this residential neighborhood in Ness-Ziona had a desolate look. Al-Saud, wearing a black Lycra suit, pulled on a balaclava and, over that, his night-vision goggles with image-enhancing technology; his surroundings suddenly went green. He adjusted the microphone next to his mouth.

“Anything new?” he asked Diana, who was camouflaged in the foliage of an oak tree, opposite Bouchiki’s building.

“Nothing. The van is still parked in the same spot.” She focused her binoculars and confirmed, “There are no suspicious movements.”

Al-Saud studied Bouchiki’s building across the complex’s dark courtyard from the terrace of an adjacent construction site. He looked down and checked the crossbow in his hand. Fortunately, he had brought it with him from Fergusson Island, where they used it to train new recruits. He couldn’t miss, he had just one shot at this. He aimed and fired the titanium arrow, which embedded itself in the masonry. He tied the end of the steel wire around a concrete column and adjusted it until he had a secure line to Bouchiki’s building. He put on steel chain-mail gloves and, over these, a covering for his fingers, a type of polyurethane mitten that allowed them as much flexibility as possible while still providing protection. He sat on the edge of the half-finished building with his legs dangling in the air, took the cable in both hands and dropped into space. In a smooth movement, he lifted up his legs until they were coiled around the wire. He worked his way across the courtyard. It took just over fifteen minutes to get to the roof of Bouchiki’s building. Worked up by his exertions and the tension in his body, he closed his eyes and practiced a few breathing exercises. Then he sat down to wait, hidden behind the support frame for the water tank.

Al-Saud checked his Breitling Emergency. Bouchiki appeared a few minutes before eleven. The nocturnal breeze transmitted the scientist’s alcoholic scent. He watched him light a cigarette and drag hard, as though his life depended on it. He emerged slowly; dressed the way he was, it was almost impossible to see him.

“Bouchiki.”

“Who are you?”