Ignoring what Bloch had told her, she turned it on. Nothing happened—the shattered screen didn’t even flicker.

Her spirits crumbled. “Oh, David,” she murmured breathlessly. “Now what do I do?”

The two men on the pier were still watching, but getting smaller as the boat pulled away. Looking ahead, over the bowsprit of the boat and across the waterway, Christine saw a maze of city streets and seawalls. Beyond that, in the distance, the urban canals gave way to a more natural flow. Evergreen islands and winding channels. And just like that, the answer came.

Exactly as David had said it would.

Chapter 5

FIVE

Nineteen hours later, a Scandinavian Airlines A-340 touched down smoothly at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, the last act of a four-thousand-mile journey. The big jet taxied in, took its place at the terminal, and three hundred and twelve passengers began the customary odyssey, steering through jet bridges, corridors, and crowd-control stanchions toward the human repository marked ARRIVALS.

Among them, fixed in the middle of the pack, was a tall and slightly disheveled man. He was tan and fit, but clearly fatigued. Wearing an untucked polo shirt and wrinkled cotton slacks, he had the look of a man returning from a well-spent vacation. His tousled, sun-bleached hair merged into the unshaven roughage of a few days’ beard. His casual shoes were untied, thin laces dragging across the polished stone floor. Everything in between these ends corresponded, weary and beaten, all easily attributable to a nine-hour red-eye flight. At a glance, he was a nondescript traveler among a sea of the same. Yet were anyone to look more closely—and no one did—certain marks might have distinguished him from the crowd. He moved quietly, with no wasted motion. He carried a bag in one hand, his left, yet there was no hint of awkwardness or imbalance. His stride was easy and controlled, even precise, and he neatly avoided contact with those around him, never bumping shoulders or locking glances. Most telling of all, his eyes were discreetly active.

The queue came to a stop at the roadblock that was immigration, and David Slaton stood patiently behind fifty other souls in the NON-EU line. For the second time since landing he checked his phone. There was still nothing from Christine. He called up the message he’d received yesterday and stared at it: Help! Only one word, yet that very simplicity made it ring even louder. Since then, she had not answer his calls, nor had she sent any texts or emails. For what seemed the hundredth time, Slaton tried to imagine what had happened. Any number of dire scenarios came to mind, but they all distilled to one source—his former life with Mossad had come back with a vengeance.