Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Read online

  By the author of Duet in Beirut and Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg, Final Stop, Algiers is former Israeli intelligence agent Mishka Ben-David’s most exhilarating novel yet. A tale of international intrigue dripping with authentic details drawn from his life of espionage, Ben-David’s novel is a white-knuckled read that will grip readers until its final, harrowing pages.

  In Final Stop, Algiers, Mickey Simhoni, an artist whose life is violently disrupted by a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv, abandons his creative pursuits and instead allows himself to be recruited into the Mossad. Slowly, he learns the art of spycraft and begins the painstaking process of building a cover, taking on the identity of someone he resembles—a young Canadian man, presumed dead, whose passport was found in the sands of the Sinai desert.

  The role presents Mickey with unimaginable challenges, especially when his cover story takes him to Toronto and he meets an old flame—Niki, a girl he’d known a decade earlier. Torn between his loyalty to the Mossad, the desire to fulfill himself as an artist, and his complex romance with the wild Niki, Mickey prepares for a major operation in Algiers. But above all, Mickey is worried about the mysterious fate of his Canadian double. Who is he? And how is he linked to a book of poems found in his home describing the end of the State of Israel?

  Final Stop, Algiers is a thrilling spy novel, a moving personal drama, and the story of a great love that takes place against the backdrop of daring operations carried out worldwide by the Mossad—a must-read for anyone interested in a spy’s startling life of surveillance and subterfuge, told by someone who’s lived it.

  When a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv violently disrupts his life, Mickey Simhoni abandons his plans to become an artist and instead allows himself to be recruited into the Mossad. Slowly he learns the art of spycraft and the painstaking process of building a cover, becoming someone whom he resembles, who is presumed dead.

  His cover story takes him to Toronto where he meets an earlier flame – Niki, a girl he had hooked up with in Tokyo a decade earlier. Mickey is torn between loyalty to the Mossad and his intense feelings for Niki – which the ever-resourceful Niki partially resolves with an unusual decision.

  But still Mickey’s dilemma persists, as he oscillates between duty and love, his complex operations in the Mossad threatening to kill their love. When his final operation in Algiers goes badly wrong, the rage and hatred engendered, and the utter humiliation visited on them, leads to a traumatic conclusion.

  Mishka Ben-David served in the Mossad for twelve years, becoming a high-ranking officer. He is now a full-time novelist living outside Jerusalem. Duet in Beirut was his first novel to be translated into English, and received great media attention, which was followed by Forbidden Love in St Petersburg (both published by Halban Publishers).

  ALSO BY MISHKA BEN-DAVID

  Duet in Beirut

  Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2017 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the address above.

  Originally published in Hebrew under the title Tachana Sofit Algier by Miskal – Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, Tel-Aviv 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Mishka Ben-David

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Mishka Ben-David

  Published by arrangement with

  The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

  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 now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1562-2

  Contents

  Also By Mishka Ben-David

  Copyright

  Prologue: The Samurai from Toronto

  Part One: The Double

  1. An Exhibition in Tel Aviv

  2. A small house in the Kiryah

  3. First Stop, Limassol

  4. Toronto Debut

  5. Encounter at Trinity College

  6. The Morning After

  7. New Life

  8. Warsaw in the Winter

  9. Getting Ready to Go Solo

  10. Alone in Amman

  11. “A Love Story Needs an Ending”

  Part Two: Ruth and Boaz

  1. A Samurai in Tel Aviv

  2. Together and Apart

  3. A Couple in Stockholm

  4. The Gentleman in Brussels

  5. Artificial Respiration

  6. Algerian Nights

  7. A Sunken Nipple and a Tiny Tattoo

  8. Home Again

  Epilogue: Leo’s Story

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The Samurai from Toronto

  IT WAS A RELATIONSHIP that began with my spirits – and my eyes – cast down.

  Tired of getting lost in Tokyo, I had collapsed onto a bench in a little square outside the subway station in Shibuya. There I sat, focusing on my map when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a pair of feet. The toes turned inwards and the heels were slightly apart. Out of pointy black shoes arose two light-skinned legs, lean and shapely, and then my eyes took in her knees, squinting a little at each other. Above these came the thighs, also lean and shapely, but with a space between that made me wonder how they got together up there, under the tiny hot pants.

  As I looked up at her face, I guessed what I would see: a pretty Japanese girl. I’d been travelling around Japan for a while, and one of the things that surprised me and that I had grown to like, was the way women’s legs turned inwards to face each other. I didn’t have anyone to ask, but I assumed that this was prompted by some kind of modesty, and certainly had nothing to do with genetics. When they walk, these Japanese women, both their feet stay on the same narrow path, as if each step must touch a line drawn on the ground. When you stand and walk like that from childhood on, something apparently gets bent forever. But nevertheless, there was something captivating about these slim, utterly smooth legs, slightly muscular and slightly crooked. And now they were standing right in front of me, at a flagrantly un-Japanese distance of only one step away.

  I had just completed a walk through the streets around the square, which in no way that I could fathom corresponded to the streets on the map. I was tired of getting lost in Tokyo. When I had first decided to go to Japan after getting out of the army, it hadn’t seemed like a very complicated prospect. In fact, in some cases I even managed to reach the places described in my Lonely Planet guidebook. The punctual hi-tech train system carried me all over the central island, wherever I wanted to go, and most of the places I visited were small enough to find my way around with relative ease. The problem was this enormous city of Tokyo, especially when I left the subway stations via a different exit than the one the guidebook writers had meant me to use. At these gigantic stations, this could be hundreds of yards from the exit I was supposed to take, in entirely another section of the neighbourhood, so it was difficult to work out where I was.

  That is what I was trying to do now and, not for the first time, unsuccessfully. The huge glass and stone buildings around me looked the same: the names of the shops, even the brand names in English, were not the names of the shops in the book and, furthermore, the n
arrow alleys full of food stalls and clothes stores that branched away from the square seemed identical. Only a compass would have helped me to find out where I was. But I had no compass, and no more energy.

  The Japanese people that I asked at the corners of the alleys and the square, pointing on the map at the place I wanted to get to, were either terrified if they didn’t understand my question at all, or very embarrassed if they did understand it and didn’t know how to help. I could tell when they were gesticulating in a complicated pantomime instead of simply saying they didn’t know. There were also some who just ran away from me to avoid the embarrassment.

  As I sat in the square, I wondered whether to give up on my plan and just stroll through the alleys, which looked inviting behind the tall buildings that surrounded the square. I looked at the small statue of a sad dog standing in the centre of the square, a dog that waited for its master every day outside the station, so went the story, and when the master never came back from his daily commute, stayed there waiting until the day it died. And the Japanese, as we know, really admire such loyalty unto death. Around me, a kaleidoscope of a thousand people at any given moment hurried to and from the station, and there was no point in asking them because the chance of finding someone who spoke English was almost zero. Once again I gazed at the map, which for all the good it did me could have been an outline map, one with all the names left out, when my eyes dropped down and those pointy black shoes came into view.

  My humbling had just begun. Before I managed to look up, intentionally avoiding lingering on the slim body and small breasts, I heard a stern voice in impeccable English:

  “May I help you? You seem to be lost.”

  The impish look came from a face that could almost have been innately Japanese: sharp chin, thin lips, tiny nose, high cheekbones – but then, the eyes, instead of being dark and almond-shaped, were green, thoroughly western, and smiling cheerfully. The smile spread at the sight of the dumb expression on my face.

  The girl before me was, by any standards, very good-looking. Enough in itself to unnerve me, even if she hadn’t seen I was lost, and even without her chivalrous desire to rescue me. I had already noticed that there were a number of different tribes or peoples in Japan, some that look a little like Mongols, some that are a little like Indians or Filipinos, some that are reminiscent of the drawings of the Edo period, with long, sharp noses, and others who have delicate, beautiful facial features. But no green eyes.

  She grasped my confusion even before she realized how embarrassed I was but how could she have known that I was an Israeli ex-officer who didn’t relish getting help in orientation from a passerby? She resolved the confusion at once: “I’m Canadian,” she said, explaining the faultless accent. This of course raised further questions, which for the time being I refrained from asking. She offered me her hand, and in a friendly, unaffected way, introduced herself, “Niki. A kind of compromise that my Japanese father and Canadian mother found for their daughter’s name.”

  I told her my name, Mickey Simhoni, and showed her the place I was looking for on the map – that turned out to have been upside down, because Japanese looked the same to me from all directions – and she said it was on her way and she’d be happy to take me there. That place was a specialized bicycle shop where I wanted to buy some accessories not yet available in Israel, like the instrument that measures your blood pressure and pulse while you’re riding and a flashing light that fits onto the back of the bike. I’d taken up cycling as a hobby after my discharge. I wasn’t fit enough for long distance running, and didn’t like it; I was too heavy. But my combat-veteran friends were in the grip of some kind of a fitness craze, and I thought that cycling would put me in the picture too.

  Niki led me through a maze of pretty alleys, between restaurants and shops, and I had to make an effort to keep abreast of her. I don’t know if it was my screwed-up military training or my no-less screwed-up male hormones, but trailing behind a woman bothered me. I told her in a jokey kind of way about the bizarre things that had happened to me here in Japan, and she responded with a clear, loud laugh. But it seemed as if Niki felt shy about speaking to me and she smiled pleasantly enough but also aloofly when it was her turn to say something. She did it with lips that were almost pursed, something that made her look irresistibly cute. All of a sudden, with a captivating smile that spread from her lips to her eyes, she pointed at a three-storey structure devoted totally to bicycles and bicycle accessories.

  I did not want to part from her yet. Facing the store was a little Italian restaurant, and I asked her if she felt like a slice of pizza.

  “All the way to Japan for pizza?” she laughed, and said, “OK”.

  There were other restaurants nearby but I didn’t want to expose my inferiority again, by having to eat with chopsticks. With Japanese food itself, I got along fairly well. There were pictures of the dishes on the menus, and plastic models near the door that gave a pretty good idea of what you’d be getting. Because there were never menus in English, and no one who could speak the language, I would point at the picture or the plastic dish of the food I wanted, and usually I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t know what kind of meat I was eating, but some of the seafood was identifiable, and I always knew that underneath there was a satisfying helping of rice or noodles. I’d never learned to use chopsticks, so I’d ask for a fork, one of the only words in Japanese that I knew, and it wasn’t difficult: forku. Straight from the English, with the soft “r” and the Japanese “u” suffix.

  I wanted to draw out my time with this lovely Canadian-Japanese girl. For the first time in many days I was conversing freely and at length with someone, and there was something about Niki that I did not want to part with. I hadn’t yet put it into words, except for the obvious “good-looker”, but later on, when she had vanished out of my life, I defined it for myself: the warmth and the sympathy that she radiated, the grace with which she spoke and moved, the shy smile that never left her lips or her eyes, the combination of openness and modesty that was new to me – all of these gave her a kind of mischievousness that hinted at hidden treasures within.

  Over a mound of spaghetti that she sucked in eagerly – my amazement at this made her laugh out loud – Niki asked me about my past and expressed admiration for my having been in the army for so long.

  “Like my grandpa when he was young,” she said. “He was the descendant of a long line of samurai.”

  I had more than an inkling of what she was talking about, having visited the castle of a shogun, a military governor of the country in past centuries, as well as homes of his warriors, the samurai. Some of these homes were large feudal mansions and others were small cottages, depending on how close the samurai were to the shogun and the degree of gratitude the shogun owed the warriors. They were built out of wood, with wooden floors and the inside walls were made of rice paper stretched across wooden frameworks. The roofs were constructed from grey tiles, engraved at the ends. Although I didn’t enter most of them, because guests were required to remove their shoes and I was tired of unlacing and lacing my trekking boots, I was impressed by their monastic cleanliness and harmonious architecture. These were some of the few structures earmarked for preservation in the building boom that was under way in every city I visited.

  This intriguing mixture of old customs preserved in the midst of stepped-up modernization enthralled me. Dignity and respect were evident everywhere. For example, the two lines of people waiting for a train on either side of a stripe painted on the platform to indicate where the car door would be when the train stopped. It draws up exactly there, to the centimetre. No one moves before all the exiting passengers are out, and then they all file in, to the right and to the left, with exemplary order. The blank faces of all the passengers, some of whom are busy playing computer games, ensure that no one will penetrate the private space of anyone else. When the conductor enters each car of the fast train – the last word in fast trains – he bows deeply, and after checking all the
tickets and reaching the other end of the car, he turns around and bows again before moving on.

  I’d read quite a bit about the samurai codes and their endless loyalty, and I was surprised when Niki told me that her grandfather had emigrated to Canada after what she called “the B”. I didn’t get it so, dropping her eyes, she explained: “The bomb.” When the emperor announced both Japan’s surrender as the Americans demanded, and that he was no longer a god, everything her granddad had believed in collapsed. He could not endure the humiliation of the American occupation and decided to desert, not to the ranks of the enemy, but to their close neighbour, Canada, which obliged by granting him a visa, and he settled with his family in Toronto. She tried to explain how harsh the crisis was for her grandfather, and for much of his generation, when their faith in their strength, their religion and their ruler all crumbled away.

  Her father, she told me, grew up in Toronto with mixed feelings of belonging and rejection, full of anger at his father’s defection, but he had calmed down after he fell in love with her mother. Niki, however, had grown up as a Canadian girl in every sense, particularly under the influence of her mother, “a fifth generation Torontonian”.

  “On my mother’s side, I’m fourth generation Jerusalem and on my father’s – third generation Auschwitz,” I told her, but I don’t think she got it.

  From the time she was in kindergarten, she said, she grasped that she was a mixture of her father and her mother, of East and West, and the more she realized that her identity was Canadian, the more she took an interest in her father’s heritage, and she asked him to speak Japanese to her. Her elderly grandfather even managed to teach her quite a few samurai sword drills. After he died, her father kept it up, to the chagrin of her mother who hoped that the ties that bound her husband to his faraway homeland would dissipate with time. Now, after graduating from college, Niki had decided to come for an open-ended stay. She wanted to be as Japanese as she was Canadian. She was studying calligraphy, the tea ceremony and flower arrangement. And she was also learning some of the samurai arts: swordplay, karate and judo, and she wondered who would end up on top in unarmed combat: me or her.