Now, twenty minutes after falling into each other’s arms, Zacharias lay spent next to her on the bed, their usual wine-laden courtship having been discarded in a frenzy of ripped buttons and tangled elastic.

Afraid he might drift to sleep—he usually did—Evita said, “You seem stressed tonight, my dear. More than usual.”

“Yes, yes,” he said with a heavy sigh. “But tomorrow it will all be over.”

“The assassin you spoke of? He is going to strike?”

He nodded drowsily.

“How so?” she prompted.

Zacharias told her.

When he was done she massaged his hairy shoulders, soft, gentle circles that kept up until he was fast asleep. Evita dressed quickly, but took the time to leave a salacious note on hotel stationery, ending with her lipstick-pressed signature of a full kiss. She was then quickly out the door.

Shortly after, a phone rang in a decrepit hotel on the south side of Saida, Lebanon. After a brief conversation, a relieved Rafi hung up and immediately dialed a second number.

*   *   *

Just after midnight in Geneva, Farzad Behrouz stood on the balcony of his suite pulling a French cigarette to its bitter end. The view was impressive—best if one stood at the outer left edge—but nothing like that of the connecting suite. The balcony to his left gave a sweeping panorama of the city, a million-dollar vista that on this weekend was going completely to waste. He saw the French doors shut tight, drawn curtains backlit by a bulb burning over the desk. Does the man ever do anything but work? Behrouz wondered. He tried to recall if he had ever seen Hamedi when he wasn’t hunched over a computer or shuffling through papers. Behrouz, of course, was often consumed by his own undertakings. Yet Ibrahim Hamedi seemed different. And Behrouz, in a long-honed instinct, did not trust men who were different.

He knew a great deal about the scientist. He knew Hamedi was heterosexual, although he had not dated since returning to Iran. He wore a size ten shoe, spoke fluent German and English, and had a scar on his left hip from a scooter accident when he was a teenager. This was all in the records. Yet there was something else that escaped Behrouz, a hidden force that drove the man. He thought he might know what it was, but had been unable to find proof. Indeed, proof of such a thing might not even exist. How to substantiate the blackness of a man’s soul?

Behrouz shifted his gaze toward the city, the ominous shadows that were the Alps looming over pitched rooftops in the moonlight. He stabbed the butt of his cigarette into a tumbler just emptied of a sharp twelve-year-old Scotch, and was skimming his eyes over the lake when his phone vibrated.

“Yes?”

“She has done it!” came the eager voice of Rafi.

“Where will it happen?”