Obsession (Year of Fire) Read online

  “Yes, the two-for-one offer,” André interrupted. “We’re making a big effort to push first class on our new Boeing 777.”

  “Yeah, it’s a great deal,” Al-Saud said sarcastically. “Two for one and now there’s no room in first class. I’m not going to fly in business class. I need to sleep. I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Eliah, it’s New Year’s Day tomorrow. You’re not thinking about going to work?”

  “André, Shiloah doesn’t care about New Year’s Day. Have you forgotten that he’s Jewish? He already celebrated Rosh Hashanah and now he’s about to ruin my first day of the year. Now, can you get me the damn first-class ticket, please?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You’re one of the directors of Air France!” He spun around, driven by impatience. “What do you mean you’ll…?” He checked himself.

  “Allô? Eliah?”

  The woman was just a few feet away, right in front of him. She was surrounded by a group of people. She was smiling, her cheekbones raised and eyes open wide, as though the very act of expansion surprised her. She’s beautiful.

  “Eliah?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here.”

  “Get yourself a seat in business class. I’ll have you upgraded to first class once you’re on the plane.”

  He called his contact in the Secretariat of Intelligence and asked him discreetly to help clear his path to the plane; he was armed and didn’t feel like arguing with some self-important civil servant about the propriety of boarding a commercial flight with a Sig Sauer nine millimeter strapped under his suit. Even though he was celebrating New Year’s Eve, the agent at the Secretariat of Intelligence was quick to comply with Eliah Al-Saud’s request. He was, after all, well paid for his services.

  He slipped the phone into his pocket and walked toward the Air France counter. The salesclerk spoke good French but he spoke to her in Spanish.

  “I’d like to buy that business-class ticket you just offered me.”

  “I’ll get that for you right away, sir.” She tapped at the keyboard, then asked, “Name?”

  “Eliah Al-Saud.” He spelled it out.

  “Passport number?” Eliah gave it to her.

  More typing.

  “That will be five thousand, eight hundred and thirty-four dollars, including taxes and fees.”

  Eliah reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. He removed a black card engraved with the silver head of a Roman centurion from his wallet. The salesclerk concealed her surprise. It was the new Centurion American Express card. Although she was aware they existed, she’d never seen or handled one. It was cold to the touch, confirming that it was indeed made of titanium rather than plastic. American Express only issued these cards to customers by special invitation, and if their expenses ran over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. This man, in his perfectly cut blue silk suit and Serengeti sunglasses, certainly fit the bill.

  “Señor Al-Saud, our airline can offer you a very comfortable lounge while you wait for your flight. Le Salon Air France.” She spread open a map of the airport and circled the lounge with a blue pen. “It’s here. Your American Express card also grants you access to the Centurion VIP room. Here.” She drew another circle with her pen. “The first- and business-class check-in desks are over there. I wish you a good trip.”

  Al-Saud just nodded without saying anything or even offering a smile. He was in a bad mood. This wasn’t unusual for him; his severe features accentuated the cold, reserved impression he made. Setbacks such as the problem with his state-of-the-art plane served to aggravate his reputation for being antisocial. He ran into the crew from the Gulfstream V on his way to the check-in desk.

  “The airport doesn’t have a hotel, sir. We’ll have to go back to Buenos Aires and spend a night or perhaps two there while the technicians check the aircraft,” the captain informed him.

  “Captain Paloméro,” Eliah said, “I know you think I was being overcautious in deciding not to fly.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Al-Saud!”

  The captain, a short Frenchman who barely reached Eliah’s chest, took off his hat and twisted it for emphasis. He wasn’t about to argue with Eliah Al-Saud, a decorated war pilot.

  Al-Saud made his farewells to the crew of the Gulfstream V, whom he left in charge of bringing it back to Le Bourget Airport, seven miles to the north of Paris, and headed to the business-class check-in desk, passing by the group with the blonde girl. He looked for a wall—he never rested with his back exposed, a habit he had acquired during his years in L’Agence—and leaned back to observe her. Another girl, with dark hair and skin and a slender frame, was resting her elbow on the blonde’s left shoulder. Also there were an older man, who had a certain resemblance to the tall brunette, a woman of about fifty, and two boys, who were obviously brothers. He wondered who was going on the trip; it was pretty clear that they were flying Air France; they were queuing at the economy check-in counter.

  “My father,” the blonde was saying, “promised he would come. I don’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”

  Eliah drew several conclusions from this statement. First: the girl was from Córdoba, a province in Argentina. He could tell from her distinctive accent. His mother, his aunt Sofía and, especially, his uncle Nando all spoke that way. He would never have noticed it had he not also had dealings in the horse trade with porteños, as the inhabitants of the city of Buenos Aires were called. Second: she was the one who was going to take the Air France flight. Third: he found her voice captivating. He always noticed voices; it was almost an obsession, maybe because he was a music lover, maybe because his sensei had assured him that voices revealed the interior music of human beings. “There are voices,” his mentor had explained, “that are out of tune. Sharp as blades, they make you want to cover your ears. There are those who raise their voices too much, who shout instead of speaking. This reveals their desperation, their anxiety. Their interior harmony is upset by extremely negative energy vibrations. However, when the spirit is in harmony, the voice flows forth like a gently absorbed caress, to soothe us.” The girl’s words had certainly caressed him. Their sound was crystalline and cultured.

  “Mat,” said the young brunette, “trusting your dad is worse than trusting a politician.”

  Mat? That wasn’t a Spanish name.

  “Juanita, for goodness’ sake!” The older woman admonished her.

  “Mama, you know it’s true.”

  “Yes, it’s true,” “Mat” admitted, honestly but serenely, “but he’s my father, Juana, and I want to believe that if he promised me he would come, he will.”

  “Speak of the devil…” interrupted one of the boys, and pointed to the entrance of the airport.

  “Well, well,” Juana said, “it seems that, for once, Don Aldo is as good as his word. Oh, no!” she blurted out. “I don’t believe it. What the hell has he brought him for?”

  “Juana!” her mother interjected. “He’s her husband!”

  Eliah looked beyond the group and saw two men walking toward them: one was older, around sixty, maybe a little more, quite handsome and well dressed, with a neat but bushy reddish-gray beard. The other was younger, blond, tall and very thin. He strode toward them, his eyes fixed on “Mat.” Eliah turned his gaze on the girl. A strange feeling came over him as he watched her reaction. Her fear was evident; she shrank behind Juana, as if seeking her protection. As he studied the girl’s behavior, Al-Saud struggled to understand the meaning of the emotion that seized him, the urge to rush over and wrap her in his arms.

  “Monsieur Al-Saud?”

  Eliah turned to find a woman dressed in the Air France uniform standing next to him. She smiled at him anxiously. Annoyed, he looked down at her with contempt. Realizing that he was not at all aware of his surroundings and had just been startled by an ordinary airline employee didn’t help his mood.

  “My name is Esther and I’m the manager in charge of boarding.” Al-Saud put down his small suitcase and
shook her hand. “We regret the delay, but I would like you to know that we will do everything possible to upgrade you to first class.”

  “Merci,” he answered. André’s work behind the scenes was starting to take effect.

  “Please come with me to the check-in counter. An employee is waiting to complete your check-in. It won’t take long. Window or aisle?”

  “Window.”

  Before following the woman, Eliah turned back to the group. The girl must really love her father, considering how she was hugging him. He almost scooped her up off the floor, kissing her on the temple. He looked at the blond man next to them. He seemed familiar. Where had he seen that face?

  Matilde accepted her father’s kisses, not minding how his beard tickled her. Aldo had worn his beard long like this for years, one of the many things that had changed about him while he was in prison. Matilde suspected that the years of his sentence had changed Aldo more profoundly than she knew. He had become enigmatic; she knew little about what he did or how he lived. Sometimes he was in São Paulo, others in Marbella. One day he would call her from Johannesburg and the next from Damascus.

  “Pa, thank you for coming.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “Of course we thought you wouldn’t, Don Aldo!” Juana interjected.

  “Matilde,” said Aldo, “here I am. I wasn’t going to let you down, sweetie. Plus, I wanted to wish you a happy new year. Say hello to Roy. He found out you were leaving and came to say good-bye.” Aldo let go of Matilde and took a moment to greet Juana’s parents and brothers.

  “Hi,” Matilde murmured.

  Roy bent down and put his lips on her cheek, where they lingered a little too long.

  “That’s enough, Roy!” Juana exclaimed. “Don’t get all romantic on us now.”

  “You’re unbearable,” he hissed.

  “Only to idiots.”

  “Enough,” Aldo interrupted. “You’re acting like children. So have you checked in yet?” They said that they hadn’t. “Good. I was afraid you might have already. Since I belong to the Air France membership program,” he explained, taking a silver card marked Flying Blue out of his wallet, “I’m due some upgrades. I’ll get you bumped up to business class.”

  “No, Pa, don’t worry.”

  “Of course he should worry!” Juana contradicted her friend. “Don’t listen to her, Don Aldo, get us those upgrades. It’ll be great, Mat! Our first time in business class.”

  Matilde didn’t want to argue with Juana given how excited she was, but it troubled her to have anything to do with her father’s money. She didn’t know where Aldo’s sudden fortune had come from, and although it hurt her to doubt him, she suspected that it wasn’t from legitimate sources. “I’m a broker, sweetie,” he would tell her when she asked him about it. “I buy and sell things all over the world.” Hence his frequent trips and the Platinum card from the Flying Blue program.

  Eliah was the first passenger on the plane. No one else, even those in first and business classes, had been allowed to board. Earlier, Esther and a federal policeman, who had presented himself at the opportune moment, had escorted him through security and immigration with a minimum of fuss. As he had decided to wait in the American Express VIP lounge, for Centurion cardholders only, Esther had led him to a large, empty room where the waitresses offered him all manner of luxuries. He accepted a freshly squeezed orange juice. Half an hour later, the head of the Air France office at the airport arrived at the VIP room to escort him to the Boeing 777. On the plane Eliah handed her his jacket and, once out of his field of view, she put her nose to the collar and inhaled the cologne. Exquisite, she thought. She checked the garment’s label: Ermenegildo Zegna, Tailor-made. Who was this impressive man in a Zegna suit who had turned Air France’s Ezeiza office upside down with a single phone call?

  In his business-class window seat, calmed by the silence of the plane, Eliah looked out at the runway and thought about Roy Blahetter. He had realized why the thirty-three-year-old—at least that was the age on the report supplied by his contact in the SIDE, the Argentinean Secretariat of Intelligence—had seemed familiar.

  Had the woman said, “He’s her husband”? His heart sank. Why? Why should he care if she was married? Why had he felt that urge to protect her? She was pretty, but no more so than plenty of women he knew, such as, for example, the model Céline, whom he sometimes slept with. He wasn’t proud of that relationship; he was unsettled by the turbulent memories it brought back, upsetting his peace of mind. Nonetheless, Céline’s frenzied, aggressive sexuality attracted him like a moth to a flame. Sometimes he hated her for what she embodied: betrayal, his basest instincts, superficiality, frivolity; occasionally, depending on his mood, he couldn’t bear to look at her after they had had sex.

  He tried to concentrate on Roy Blahetter, the blonde girl’s husband, although the way she had reacted to him made him seem more like her worst enemy. Maybe they were separated? This notion momentarily brightened his dark mood, but it clouded over again as he chastised himself for the thought. What the hell do I care?

  His contact at the SIDE had done his job well; the photograph of Blahetter attached to the document was recent. He started to read the report, which was dripping with irony. “Argentina,” his informant had written, “is known throughout the world for four things: Diego Armando Maradona; beef; Techint’s seamless steel pipes; and Blahetter Chemicals’ pesticides.”

  The elderly Wilhelm Blahetter, founder of the laboratory and a diverse empire that included metallurgy, construction, financial companies and train and subway operators, was still the head of the family business, which the eighty-six-year-old ran with an iron fist. A nonpracticing Jew, he was a fervent Zionist and often spoke passionately about the greatness of Israel.

  The empire had been born in Córdoba, which Blahetter saw as the perfect launching pad for his business. He would bring his knowledge of pesticides, learned while working in Germany as an assistant to Professor Gerhard Schrader, a genius with chemicals, and apply it in Córdoba where waves of pests, especially locusts, devastated the region, ruining thousands of families. His pesticides would sell like hotcakes in a country where the industry was in its infancy.

  Soon after arriving in Córdoba, he met a Jewish girl whose fortune came from her father’s agricultural businesses. His new father-in-law was very grateful to the young and brilliant Guillermo (he had Hispanicized his name by this time) for having solved the two problems that kept him up at night: insects and his daughter’s spinsterhood. Guillermo Blahetter and Roberta Lozinsky were married in 1940. Their first and only son was born at the end of the same year: they named him Ernesto. He was followed by four girls. Ernesto, Guillermo’s great hope, had started to disappoint him almost immediately after he was born with his easygoing, if somewhat melancholy nature and strong artistic inclinations. He liked to paint and draw—Guillermo had to admit that he was good at it at least—and shape the dough that Roberta kneaded. He was so kindhearted that he used to feel sorry for the insects that were gassed to death in the fields. His father would have hit him if his mother hadn’t intervened. Finally, at sixteen he expressed his desire to study art.

  “You’ll study chemical engineering in Santa Fe. End of discussion.”

  However, Ernesto showed that German blood ran in his veins after all. He abandoned the paternal household and ran off to Buenos Aires to study fine art. In the bohemian environment that surrounded the painter Quinquela Martín, Ernesto had room to develop his talent. There, he met a woman who, in time, would become the most famous painter in Argentina, Enriqueta Martínez Olazábal, whose paintings generally sold in the showrooms at Sotheby’s and Christie’s for around a hundred thousand dollars. He was still good friends with Enriqueta. Though Ernesto didn’t become famous, his religiously themed works had a good reputation in the local market, and he made a comfortable living; of course, every year he also received his portion of the dividends from his father’s businesses.

&nbs
p; In Don Guillermo’s opinion, the only masterwork Ernesto ever created was his son Roy, the most brilliant young man the German had ever met. He saw himself reflected in his grandson: the same slender appearance, stature, penetrating and attentive blue eyes, and the same keen intelligence. From an early age, he had shown an affinity for science. Roy, his pride and joy, would carry on the Blahetter name.

  The beloved grandchild didn’t study any of the subjects that his grandfather might have chosen for him: chemical engineering, law or business. Instead, he decided upon physics, so, at the age of sixteen (he had already finished high school), he majored in physics at IMAF (the Institute of Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics) in Córdoba. But his real goal was located several miles farther south, in the city of San Carlos de Bariloche: the Balseiro Institute. Two years later, once he had taken and passed the Balseiro’s entrance exams, he started to study nuclear engineering, eventually graduating with honors. Immediately afterward, he traveled to the United States to continue his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Somewhat bored of reading about the academic achievements of the blonde girl’s husband, Al-Saud returned to his real subject: Blahetter the elder and his empire. The laboratories had affiliates in several major American and European countries; they were currently in negotiations to open an office in Shanghai. The document ended with the affirmation: “It is thought that Guillermo Blahetter has cooperated with Mossad in the past.” Al-Saud knew the name that The Institute gave to its Jewish collaborators in the Diaspora: sayanim in plural, sayan in singular. “He actively participated in one of the first of the Israeli agency’s operations, Operation Garibaldi, in 1960.” This was the famous operation in which Rafi Eitan, a legendary figure in the world of espionage, hunted down the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of Hitler’s “final solution,” in Buenos Aires and took him to Israel, where he was tried and executed. “It is believed that, after the attack on the Israeli embassy and the bombing of the AMIA building in Argentina, Blahetter has begun to collaborate with Mossad again.” Eliah had little doubt about the nature of this collaboration. The question was whether he could find proof. Blahetter’s laboratories in Córdoba and Pilar, in the province of Buenos Aires, were built to be impregnable fortresses. Of course for Eliah and his men, nothing was impregnable. With just 10 percent of its airspace protected by radar, Argentina was extremely vulnerable. Entering in secret would be child’s play. Breaking into the laboratories, gathering evidence and getting out again was what they were trained for. Nonetheless, he would exhaust the other alternatives before taking such an extreme measure. Roy Blahetter’s recent appearance could not be considered a coincidence.