Nurin turned and saw Veron still squeezed into a narrow chair at the back of the room—the wood looked like it might splinter under his bulk. Thirty minutes ago the shooter from his DA team in Geneva had been fighting off an Iranian counterattack. When Veron tried to send in the rest of his team to support their comrade, Nurin immediately countermanded the order. Now the director would have to defend his actions, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. They had all been listening to the tactical channel audio. They’d heard the shooter as he engaged the Iranians, his dialogue cool in the chaos of a gunfight. Then he went down, pleading for help. Other voices picked up, the rest of the handpicked DA unit screaming for permission to engage. Nurin had ordered them to stand down.

Now the tactical channel was quiet, and Veron sat sulking at the back of the room. He looked like a human balloon that might burst at any moment. Nurin walked over and sank heavily into the chair next to Veron.

“Tell me, Oded,” he began in a quiet voice. “Through all your years of command in the field … was there ever a time when you sent a man into a bad situation, one you knew he wouldn’t come back from, in order to get a vital mission done?”

Veron didn’t answer directly. Instead, he asked, “The others this summer? Tehran and outside Qom? They were sacrificed as well?”

Nurin braced, not sure how a type-A soldier like Veron would handle that answer. But he gave it anyway. “Yes. I sent six men into situations that were guaranteed to fail. Six men, Oded. I know that number exactly, and their names and faces are burned into my mind. You don’t know how this has weighed on me.” When Veron turned to stare at him, Nurin added, “Or maybe you do.”

“But why?”

“Hamedi is one of us, Oded.” Nurin finally broke his secrecy, explaining Hamedi’s plan to ruin Iran’s nuclear program in a single moment.

Veron considered it for some time. “Yes, then I see why Hamedi must survive. But was it necessary to throw away so many lives?”

“In our limited contact, Hamedi told us that Farzad Behrouz had become suspicious of his background. He was raiding synagogues and interrogating old friends to find proof. The entire plan was at risk. To the world’s eye, Hamedi had become the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we did not make attempts against him? That would have fed the suspicions Behrouz was harboring.”

They both watched the three video screens, the most impressive being a feed from one of the local Geneva television stations. In a segment that had been running repeatedly for twenty minutes, Entrepreneur lay broken in the water, the lake boiling around her like a frothing fire. Thick smoke, black in the city’s footlights, swirled wildly into the sky.