He turned the laptop towards me. The screen was filled with the image of a painting by Viktor Vasnetsov, a Russian artist, reproductions of whose pictures my mother had adorned our house in Ireland with. In it the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ran amok. They were led by a white horse and its mounted archer; a swordsman followed on a brown steed; and in the hands of a third horseman, astride a black stallion, a set of scales dipped menacingly. But at the back, slightly distant from the others and carrying a spear, a fourth figure rode a sickly, pale mare: staring down over the land he’d laid waste to, sat the shroud-wrapped skeleton of Death himself.

Baaz closed the screen.

‘Man,’ he said, blowing out hard through puffed cheeks, ‘you Christians are, like, totally nuts.’

27

‘More coffee, please.’

It was a bright, breezy morning – already nearly twenty degrees. There was a stiff wind from the south that cut across the hotel terrace, carrying with it the harsh, flinty taste of the city. In Jerusalem it always felt as if I was on the edge, caught between the ideal of the city and the reality of the desert that surrounded it. I preferred Tel Aviv. The sea was constant, the horizon fixed. Just like home, I thought to myself. But the truth was that home, like the Holy City, was just an idea. It could mean anything you wanted it to. The waitress cleared away the remains of breakfast.

‘And for your friend?’

I shrugged. There was no sign of Baaz. She smiled and headed back inside. There was no sign, either, that shaking down Moshe had stirred up trouble. I looked at the date on the copy of Haaretz I’d brought with me from my room. Thursday 18 January.

Shit.

Ten days ago I’d blown the top of Amos Stein’s head off. He might have lived as a mathematician, but he’d died as a courier. I worked backwards and pieced the dates together. His run from Tel Aviv to Donegal had taken him two days, via Moscow. Ellard was right: A rabbit never bolts straight for the burrow – Stein included. If Avilov was on to him, then Stein’s forged passport slowed his pursuit. If Baaz and I could work out that Doc Levy owned the cottage, so could Avilov – too late to intercept Stein at the cottage, but in time to intercept me by the shore of Lough Conn. Talia said Stein had arrived in the UK on the thirtieth, so he must have left Israel on the twenty-eighth. That put him in the cottage two days before I showed up to do the recce – which tallied with the date Frank had given me.