“He is going abroad?”

Nurin nodded.

“Where?”

“That is something only Slaton and I should know, Anton. I’m sure you understand. It will be public knowledge soon enough. But I can tell you that our chance will come in just over three weeks.”

“Three weeks? Not much time to plan a mission.”

Nurin gave him a plaintive look.

Bloch met his gaze, then turned away to look across the park. “That is the very same look I used to get from the prime minister. I am a fountain of the negative, am I not?”

“You are—at least that’s what everyone on the third floor tells me.”

“And what else do they say?”

“They say you will always do what is best for Israel.”

Bloch said nothing.

“There is a way to bring Slaton back, Anton.”

For twenty minutes Bloch listened. At the end, he wished he had not.

“So it begins in Stockholm?” Bloch asked.

Nurin nodded.

“And Slaton? Where will he be?”

Like a good spy chief, Nurin had that answer as well.

Chapter 2

TWO

Two weeks later
Clifton, Virginia

Earl Long steered his Ford F-150 up the service path to the estate, wet gravel crunching under the truck’s tires. On the trailer behind him was the morning’s third pallet of rock, which was considerable headway for having a work crew of one. The big new home came into view, a colonial monstrosity. It sat high on a manicured hill, framed by rows of freshly plugged chestnut and elm saplings. Long wasn’t a landscaper, but he imagined the trees must have set the owners back two or three times the fifteen thousand they were blowing on his hundred-foot retaining wall. It would all look stately in about fifty years, he thought. Some people just pissed it away.

The job site was on the far side of the house, and Long kept to the service road as long as he could, not wanting to damage the new lawn that had to be soft after last night’s rain. He spotted his lone employee at the base of the hill hauling an eighty-pound block of cut granite. Just as he’d been doing all summer.