His dinner with Krueger had been a blur after the bombshell, but Slaton had not completely lost his focus. On leaving Il Dolce, in an awkward moment, the newly minted billionaire explained to his banker that he had lost his wallet. Krueger had given him a hundred Swiss francs and arranged for a room at a nearby hotel. Slaton suspected that Krueger would have bought him a hotel if he’d asked—whatever it took to maintain a long-term lock on a ten-digit investment account. At the usurious percentages Krueger charged, he would never need another client.

“Another for you?”

Slaton looked up at a smiling waitress. He snapped back his head, downed the last of his beer, and found himself saying, “Yes, please.”

Slaton rarely drank, typically only to remain in character, but tonight he wanted another. He’d been consumed by a singular thought as he walked here from the restaurant, stumbling through the chilled autumn air without a trace of countersurveillance—he likely wouldn’t have noticed if Iran’s black-robed clerics themselves had been parading up Bahnhofstrasse. The distraction was still with him as he sat drinking alone, watching the moneyed crowds brush past on newly paved streets and spotless sidewalks.

What if I just kept it? With that kind of money, Christine and I could disappear forever.

The logistics would be simple. Slaton could arrange the details with Krueger tomorrow—have the money distributed to numbered accounts, and then spread far and wide. The Caymans, Aruba, Switzerland. The moral question was even easier. Grossman had been a criminal, but also a Jew, and in the end his conscience had pushed him to leave his wealth to Israel—the country Slaton had nearly died for, but that now betrayed him in the purest sense.

And not for the first time.

Long ago, during his recruitment, Slaton had lost the first woman he’d loved and their child in the most banal of tragedies—killed in a random traffic accident. Yet Mossad had misrepresented that catastrophe, twisting the facts to meet its own ends. They had turned grief into hate, hoping to bias Slaton’s psyche in order to channel his physical gifts. In order to create the perfect kidon. That had been another regime in Mossad, but the essential manipulation was unchanged. So Slaton would feel no angst in keeping the windfall from Grossman, not today and probably not tomorrow. The only thing left would be to retrieve Christine. Within a month they could be established in a new life in some warm and faraway place. And soon, the three of them, no attachments whatsoever to their old lives. A perpetual deception.