I stubbed out the cigarette and closed my eyes and tried to calculate the size of the void in my knowledge that yawned in front of me. Colonel Ellard had trained us to measure the dimensions of the things we didn’t know with reconnaissance and intelligence – narrowing the parameters of any operation as far as we could, remembering always that spooks could set you up and your eyes could deceive. But however much he tried to make us soldiers, he tried harder to make us gamblers – to accept that we would not, could not, ever know everything. ‘In the end,’ he told us, ‘you will always roll the dice.’ And no one – but no one – knew when they would throw a seven.

I surrendered to the rhythm of the engines and the Scotch worked its magic. I closed my eyes and felt myself slipping into sleep. But the darkness was confounded by a thousand fragments of wars gone by; of Frank leaving Doherty’s pub in Ballina; and of my mother, sinking, as the faintest trace of a smile played about her lips.

As I went under, the Challenger reached cruising altitude, steady on a course set first towards the Alps, then over the heads of the bankers handling Baaz’s profits – and then beyond, across the Balkans and the Aegean, above the eastern Mediterranean and onwards, until its tyres left a little rubber on the landing strip of the Promised Land.

20

The flight landed at half-past three in the afternoon, local time. Ezra’s man was waiting for me airside: a security statue in dark glasses, suited and booted, arms folded across a barrel chest, standing stock-still on the apron. He took my passport, led me through security and drove me to the Hilton – a modern concrete block that loomed above the seafront, forty-five minutes’ walk south-west of the main university campus. I checked in, went briefly up to the room – a well-appointed business box on the fifth floor paid for by Ezra’s company – unmade the bed, dropped a towel on the bathroom floor and left immediately, hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door handle.

Then I walked north along the promenade – a narrow walkway sandwiched between the reddening sea and the winter-shabby dun of Independence Park. At least I knew my way around. I’d been in and out of Tel Aviv a dozen times or more over the last decade. I liked being there, the feeling that anything might happen – and that, when it did, it was never quite as advertised. It was an edgy but oddly relaxing place – foreign in almost every respect and yet, somehow, it always reminded me of Dublin: great bars and pretty girls and every shade of weapons-grade nutter on God’s green earth.