They had just gotten a call from Hendricks, calling for a crash briefing an hour from now, so, while they had the time, the two of them by silent mutual consent grabbed their coats.
“Field assessment meeting in forty minutes,” the chubby blonde named Tricia said to Peter as they pushed out the door. Peter grunted, his mind elsewhere.
They left the offices, went out of the building and across the street where, at the edge of a park, they bought coffees and cinnamon buns from their favorite cart and, with hunched shoulders, strolled beneath the inconstant shelter of the bare-branched trees. They kept their backs to the Treadstone building.
“The really cruel thing,” she said, “is that Richards is a sharp cookie. We could use his expertise.”
“If only we could trust him.”
Soraya took a sip of her coffee, warming her insides. “We could try to turn him.”
“We’d be going up against the president.”
She shrugged. “So what else is new?”
He laughed and hugged her. “I missed you.”
She frowned as she ripped off a hunk of cinnamon bun and chewed it reflectively. “I stayed in Paris a long time.”
“Hardly surprising. It’s a city that’s hard to get out of your system.”
“It was a shock losing Amun.”
Peter had the grace to keep his own counsel. They walked for a while in silence. A child stood with his father, paying out the string on a kite in the shape of the Bat-Signal. They laughed together. The father put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. The kite rose higher.
Soraya stared at them, her gaze rising to watch the kite’s flight. At length, she said, “While I was recovering, I thought, What am I doing? Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life, losing friends and—?” For a moment, she couldn’t go on. She had had strong, though conflicting, feelings for Amun. For a time, she had even thought she loved him but, in the end, she had been wrong. That revelation had only exacerbated her guilt. If she hadn’t asked him, if he hadn’t loved her, Amun would never have come to Paris. He’d be alive now.
Having lost her taste for food, she handed her coffee and the rest of her bun to a homeless man on a bench, who looked up, slightly stunned, and thanked her with a nod. When they were out of his earshot, she said softly, “Peter, I can’t stand myself.”
“You’re only human.”
“Oh, please.”
“You’ve never made a mistake before?”
“Only human, yes,” she echoed him, her head down. “But this was a grievous error in judgment that I am determined never to make again.”
The silence went on so long that Peter became alarmed. “You’re not thinking of quitting.”
“I’m considering returning to Paris.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded.
A sudden change came over Peter’s face. “You’ve met someone.”
“Possibly.”
“Not a Frenchman. Please don’t tell me it’s a Frenchman.”
Silent, she stared at the kite, rising higher and higher.
He laughed. “Go,” he said. “Don’t go. Please.”
“It’s not only that,” she said. “Over there, in Paris, I realized there’s more to life than clinging to the shadows like a spider to its web.”
Peter shook his head. “I wish I knew what to—”
All at once one leg buckled under her. She staggered and would have fallen had Peter not dropped his food, the coffee spilling like oil at their feet, and grabbed her under the arm to steady her. Concerned, he led her over to a bench, where she sat, bent over, her head in her hands.
“Breathe,” he said with one hand on her back. “Breathe.”
She nodded, did as he said.
“Soraya, what’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. Ever since I got out of the hospital I’ve been getting these dizzy spells.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“There was no need. They were getting less and less frequent. I haven’t had one for over two weeks.”
“And now this.” He moved his hand in a circular motion on her back in an attempt to soothe her. “I want you to make an appointment—”
“Stop treating me like a child.”
“Then stop acting like one.” His voice softened. “I’m concerned about you and I wonder why you aren’t.”
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
“Now you can’t go,” he said, only half in jest. “Not until—”
She laughed, and at last her head lifted. Tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. “That’s my dilemma precisely.” Then she shook her head. “I’ll never find peace, Peter.”
“What you mean is you don’t deserve to find peace.”
She looked at him and he shrugged, a wan smile on his face. “Maybe what we need to concentrate on is explaining to each other why we both deserve a bit of happiness.”
She rose, shaking off his help, and they turned back. The homeless man had finished the breakfast Soraya had provided and was curled on his side on a bench beneath sheets of The Washington Post.
As they passed him they could hear him snoring deeply, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. And maybe, she thought, he didn’t.
She shot Peter a sideways glance. “What would I do without you?”
His smile cleared, widening as he walked beside her. “You know, I ask myself that all the time.”
"Gone?” the Director said. “In what way gone?”
Above his head was engraved the current Mossad motto, excerpted from Proverbs 11:14: Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.
“She’s vanished off the grid,” Dani Amit, head of Collections, said. “Despite our most diligent efforts, we cannot locate her.”
“But we must locate her.” The Director shook his shaggy head, his livery lips pursed, a clear sign of his agitation. “Rebeka is the key to the mission. Without her, we’re dead in the water.”
“I understand that, sir. We all do.”
“Then—”
Dani Amit’s pale blue eyes seemed infinitely sad. “We are simply at a loss.”
“How can that be? She is one of us.”
“That is precisely the problem. We have trained her too well.”
“If that were the case, our people, trained as she was trained, could find her. The fact that up till now they haven’t would argue for the fact that she is something more, something better than they are.” The rebuke was as clear as it was sharp.
“I’m afraid—”
“I cannot abide that phrase,” the Director said shortly. “Her job at the airline?”
“Dead end. Her supervisor has had no contact with her since the incident in Damascus six weeks ago. I am convinced he does not know where she is.”
“What about her phone?”
“She’s either thrown it away or disabled its GPS.”
“Friends, relatives.”
“Have been interviewed. One thing I know for certain is that Rebeka told no one about us.”
“To break protocol like this—”
There was no need to finish that sentence. Mossad rules were strictly enforced. Rebeka had violated the prime rule.
The Director turned, stared broodingly out the window of his satellite office on the top floor of a curving glass-faced structure in Herzliya. On the other side of the city were the Mossad training center and the summer residence of the prime minister. The Director often came here when he grew melancholy and found the Mossad’s ant-colony central HQ in downtown Tel Aviv oppressive and enervating. Here, there was a fountain in the middle of the circular driveway and fragrant flower beds all year round, not to mention the nearby harbor with its fleet of sailboats rocking gently in their slips. There was something reassuring about that forest of masts, even to Amit, as if their presence spoke of a certain permanence in a world where everything could change in the space of a heartbeat.
The Director loved sailing. Whenever he lost a man, which was, thankfully, not all that often, he went out on his boat, alone with the sea and the wind and the plaintive cry of the gulls. Without turning back, he said rather harshly, “Find her, Dani. Find out why she has disobeyed us. Find out what she knows.”