“But now…” Nurin said in a hushed whisper, “Hamedi has disappeared. Slaton has ruined everything.”

Veron stiffened—ears that had been assaulted by the thunder of a hundred battles were still sharp enough. “Slaton? David Slaton?”

“You know him?”

“I know of him—the kidon. He was a legend. But he was rumored to have been killed in England.”

Nurin shook his head. “No, Oded. He lives.”

Veron looked up at the monitor and stared at the incredible scene of destruction. “Then God help us.”

“No,” Nurin countered. “God help Ibrahim Hamedi.”

*   *   *

As Gardien de la Paix, intern level, Daniel Kammerer had been with the Geneva gendarmerie for a mere eight months. As a consequence of his junior status on the force, he was without fail given the most tedious and uninteresting assignments. At soccer matches he was relegated to standing at turnstiles to usher away the most blatant hooligans. At the recent wine festival he’d been assigned latrine duty, making sure the tipsy crowds relieved themselves in an orderly Swiss manner—lines respected, and no men allowed to appropriate the women’s portable toilets. And tonight, with a calamity of unprecedented drama playing out less than a mile away, Kammerer was stuck playing traffic cop, or more succinctly, shunting traffic away from the cordoned Quai du General Guisan toward Rue du Rhone and the safety of central Geneva.

He was diverting a delivery truck toward a side street, and enduring no small amount of honking and fist-shaking, when the event that would keep him writing reports until early the next morning began. The first thing that drew his attention was a shout. The words made no sense to young Kammerer because they came in a language he did not understand. The strident tone and volume, however, were enough to warrant a look. He right away saw three men standing midway along the Pont des Bergues footbridge, the second of the numerous spans connecting the left and right banks of the Rhone, and just west of the troubled Pont du Mont Blanc crossing where, according to the captain on the radio, more senior officers were searching for a missing Iranian diplomat in the aftermath of the spectacular attack.

Kammerer watched for a moment and heard more shouting. Two of the men, one dressed in black, were standing close to the bridge’s eastern side, backed against the hip-high metal railing. The third was ten steps away, centered on the bridge’s width and pointing an accusing hand at the others. In his short tenure on the force Kammerer had already witnessed his share of altercations, most involving alcohol. Yet there was something about this scene that seemed very different. Something that troubled him.