“No! I have to settle this before I leave for Oslo tomorrow. There is no need to go inside, but I must see the room to be sure.” Slaton leaned in conspiratorially. “And ask an exorbitant price. Our father is footing the bill, but he will not even attend—too busy on his yacht in the Caribbean with his third wife. If the bastard won’t sit through a full Catholic mass at his eldest daughter’s wedding, he is due some kind of pain.”

Henri cocked his head deferentially, perhaps a man who knew better than to become involved in family discord. Or perhaps a man who worked on commission. “I think I might have seen Madame Dupre enter the restaurant just a few moments ago.”

Slaton grinned approvingly.

They went to the elevator, the manager with a key card in hand. As they waited for a car to arrive, a contingent of three swarthy men stepped into the lobby from the street. Slaton knew immediately that they were Iranians. Indeed, he knew they were part of Ibrahim Hamedi’s security detail. He knew because he recognized the smallest of the three—as would anyone employed by Mossad in the last five years. Slaton was looking across the lobby at Farzad Behrouz, minister of intelligence and national security for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

*   *   *

Raymond Nurin stood at a fourth-floor window with his arms crossed, the smoke from his cigarette curling upward unbroken in the room’s stagnant air. The office, in a little used corner of the administration wing, had been vacant since Nurin’s directive to downsize the department last spring. He’d quietly seen to it that the room was left unused, an order that had generally been adhered to, notwithstanding the leopard-print thong he’d found wadded under a desk last July. There was nothing special about the room itself, a testimonial to particleboard office furniture and dry-erase markers, but the view was first rate. The windows here were the largest in the building, and a welcome relief from the bunker below with its artificial light and charcoal-filtered air. In the distance Nurin could see scalloped beaches, and blue-green waves rolling in from the Mediterranean. The day was unseasonably warm, and the masses of Tel Aviv had descended for a last fling with the sun before winter stole it away. Nurin imagined the carefree throngs. Crawling, splashing, flaunting, ogling—all a matter of where one was in life’s sequence.

He turned away.