Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

On the rare occasions when we did sleep together all the despair and hope, love and hate, passion and rejection, erupted. These were times when we made love at length, our bodies refusing to part from each other, refusing to be satiated. We imagined ourselves growing old together in the place we knew so well, where we’d taken our first joint steps in learning, with each other’s help, the magic of love.

Even in the frustrating moments of masturbation in the shower, in those periods when Orit didn’t want me, it was her I visualized. I didn’t imagine myself with another woman. I didn’t want to imagine another woman.

On the Island of Mahé, I’d seen the plumpish Micha going into his room with a Naomi Campbell look-alike and Levanon with a Halle Berry clone–hugely sexy local prostitutes. When I indicated that I was not comfortable with this behaviour, Levanon said to me, Loosen up, man. We’re married too. We’ve already been here a week and it will be another three days before the next flight. Let us unwind.

In practically every hotel in the big cities, beautiful prostitutes approached me. When my stored-up sperm began to do my head in, I almost said ‘yes’ but somehow held back, and came in my hotel shower. If nothing else, I wanted the purity of the love Orit and I shared to remain intact.

When for a third time there was yet another call to arms, I insisted on talking to Rafi before the trip.

He heard me out and it seemed that this time I had succeeded in making clear to him the extent of our distress. Orit’s and mine.

If you decide to break the contract and resign I won’t stand in your way, he said. And if you want a job at HQ I’ll take care of that as well. But now we have an urgent operation on our hands. If you end up deciding to quit this will be your last.

My last, I said.

HIS NAME WAS Wolfgang Schultz. The intelligence officer showed us a picture of a tall, heavyset man of about fifty, with reddish cheeks and slickly combed-back thinning, blond hair. This picture is ten years old, he said, and presented a number of computer-generated images showing how Schultz’s appearance might have altered in the intervening decade. He was seen getting fatter, getting thinner, shedding more hair, wearing a wig and glasses. We all remember how, despite his wig and glasses, Shkaki, the leader of Islamic Jihad, was identified, and have to be prepared for every possible disguise that Schultz may have opted for.

The man is Austrian, but over the past ten years he has rarely set foot outside of Syria. He organizes most of the sensitive purchases made by the Syrian Institute for the Development of Weapons and the Syrian arms industry. Of late he has also begun to arrange the shipment of advanced equipment to Hezbollah. Practically their entire surveillance system, which includes long-range field-glasses for daytime use and night-vision goggles, and all their eavesdropping equipment, was purchased through him.

The intelligence officer spread out a map with red circles around the places where Schultz had companies, and a diagram explaining the structure of the firms and his subsidiary companies. This is virtually the only channel through which banned components continue to reach Syria, and this is its gateway to the next generation of weaponry. Most of the companies are legitimate. We have made numerous attempts to stir the EU and the Americans into action to block his activities but without success. In the meantime the head of this pyramid lives like a king in a villa on the coast near Latakia and has a luxury apartment in Damascus.

Then Rafi took to the floor. A year ago his grandson was born in Vienna and Schultz has decided to go and see him. He also has a connection with a woman in Salzburg whom he intends to meet first. He is leaving tomorrow for Austria and plans to return in a week’s time. We don’t want him to come back.

I rehashed the same old questions. What about frightening him, exposing him to the authorities, even beating him up?

We’ve already threatened him and twice sent him small parcels of explosives, Rafi replied. The man is a born anti-Semite, the son of an SS officer, an Austrian of the worst kind. That sort of thing won’t deter him in the slightest.

Udi, now the division’s deputy, and about to succeed Rafi as its head, turned towards me. Speaking gently, he said: I have known about your reservations, Yogev, from as far back as the operation in Hong Kong. They are reasonable and we respect them. But as you’ll remember, and as has been your experience in the more than ten years that you have been in our division, a great deal of thought goes into the various operational options. We are not trigger happy and the long line of authority goes all the way up to the prime minister.

This may perhaps sound racist, I said, but up till now we have only killed Arabs with whom we have a clear-cut account to settle. Now we’re talking about an Austrian.

What’s the difference between Schultz and that man, the head of the Syrian Institute, what’s his name? Rafi wondered out loud. Muhammad Zaif, now I remember, he said as he continued. They cause the same kind of damage, both are addicted in the same way to waging war against us. The only real difference between them is their nationality.

And if we’re already talking about it, Udi added, I’m not at all sure which of them is worse.

So let’s get on with it, I said.

We arrived in Vienna carrying Israeli passports and continued our journey on a domestic flight to Salzburg where we landed only moments before Wolfgang Schultz’s incoming flight from Damascus. Our team, hurriedly brought in from various nearby locations in Europe, took up positions at all the exit points and approaches to the small airfield just in time.

At passport control Ayala, a young, European-looking woman who was new to my team, stood in the line for Austrian and EU citizens where she was able to clearly identify Schultz. From a distance it was easy to slip up; he had shed at least ten kilos, coloured the little hair he had left black, and grown a goatee beard giving his large, rounded head a slightly elongated look. He was wearing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and looked altogether different from the photo we had.

From that moment until he departed this earth, Schultz was never out of our sight. From a distance we kept tabs on him on his way to the baggage carousel, to customs, and from there to the exit.

Schultz scanned the welcoming crowd. A woman waved to him, left the barrier where people were waiting, and rushed towards him. They then walked together to the car park.

I switched on my mini communications device and told the team they’d be tailing a private vehicle. Those keeping watch on trains, bus stations, and taxis withdrew. The two cars in the car park that were to follow him and his companion had their engines turned on, and my team and I got into a third vehicle. We all set off in the direction of the city centre.

Despite the tension of the operation, I could not but enjoy the wooded mountains overlooking the city, and the squares and their fountains which we crawled past in the noisy traffic.

The woman dropped Schultz off at the Palace Hotel in the centre of town. Ayala, carrying a small suitcase, entered the lobby immediately after him. One lookout was left at the entrance to the building and I instructed the two pursuing cars to continue tailing the woman. Her home would undoubtedly be a kind of trap–either because he might go there and we would get him, or because from there his friend might lead us to him. Levanon and I substituted our travel documents with foreign ones and booked in at a nearby hotel.

From our room’s window we had a view of Salzburg’s ancient citadel and, across the street, could see the gently flowing river that divides the old city from the new. I breathed deeply. In a short while the mission would be pumping adrenalin into my system, bringing the target into sharp focus, not allowing me to see anything else. Meanwhile, I still hoped that we would manage a visit to the seventeenth-century cathedral in Mozart Square, and perhaps get to one of the stunning vantage points overlooking the city from a height of one thousand metres. But that wasn’t to be.