‘Yeah, I know where it is, but what’s on Hevrat Mishnayot? Are we looking for a house, a business, a shop, or what?’

A few hours before, I’d been a fraction of a millimetre away from killing him. Now he was leading me across a city he’d never set foot in – a one-eyed king in a foreign land with a single blind subject. I had no choice but to go with it, with him, if I wanted to do anything other than stare out to sea at the hotel.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Anticipating my exasperation, he added quickly: ‘He didn’t say, OK? It’s on a junction. With another street. Through the traitor’s gate.’

‘The what?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s what he said. “Through the traitor’s gate.”’

I stopped walking and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Is there anything else?’ He looked at me blankly. ‘Did Ezra say anything else to you? Anything at all?’

He shook his head.

We kept walking.

Whatever kind of ‘traitor’ we were going to meet, the fact that Ezra hadn’t wanted the Israeli authorities – at least not the internal security team that had been put on our case – to know he’d introduced us would be significant. Either his source wasn’t legit as far as the Shabak was concerned, or he was trying to protect Talia from blowback.

My reading of the meeting – interrogation, frankly – I’d had in Rachel’s office was that I’d been given carte blanche to do whatever I needed in my search for their missing scientist. They knew I was there for her, and they’d done nothing to stop me. We were on the same side in that respect, after all – and no one gives a pistol to an assassin unless they’re prepared for him to use it.

There would be limits, though. Step off the path and the consequences would be unpredictable. Contractor, consultant, mercenary: whatever Ezra called himself, I’d never known whom he really worked for. My best guess was military intelligence and the Mossad. And despite his faith in Talia, if the Mossad and the Shabak got on as well with each other in the Holy Land as MI6 and MI5 did back in Blighty, then Baaz and I would end up being the filling for a shit sandwich faster than you could say ‘secret military tribunal’ should we piss anyone off in Israel, apart from each other.