With two plastic bags in hand, Slaton divided his worldly possessions. In one he put the cell phones and clinical supplies, and in the other went a torn and bloody shirt. He flushed the old bandage down the toilet, and buried the plastic bag with the shirt deep into a repulsive trash bin. Seconds later he was climbing the stairs back to the street, taking two at a time, the beaten restroom door swinging loosely behind him.

Chapter 13

THIRTEEN

Raymond Nurin sat in his bunker an unhappy man. He lived, or so it seemed, deep in the bowels of Mossad headquarters. He kept a proper office, of course, one with heavy furniture and a decent view, but that was a place for formal occasions—meetings with Knesset members and the issuance of citations to the rank and file. The bunker was where Nurin’s real work was done.

The room had been designed under his exacting eye. There was a single workstation to display information, data that had already been sorted and scrubbed by the army of technicians one floor above. There was also a modest conference table with six chairs, this being the number of opinions at which Nurin drew a line—any more, in his view, generated a level of noise that was no more than static.

He was sitting alone at the conference table when the knock came, forceful and impatient. The kind of knock that would come if the building was on fire.

“Come.”

Two men appeared. Rolling in the lead, predictably, was the tanklike form of Oded Veron. Though a man of average height, Veron exceeded the human mean in every other dimension. His hulking shoulders and massive head were fitted over a thick base, all of it advancing with an air of unstoppable momentum. Sharply pressed desert fatigues, sans insignia, covered chain-mail skin that paraded forty years of sun, sand, and scar tissue. Bringing up the rear was Nurin’s second in command, Mossad’s director of operations, Ezra Zacharias. Zacharias had been promoted only recently, after the previous operations chief, a known tyrant who openly aspired to Nurin’s post, was forced to retire in the face of a life-threatening illness. Nurin had chosen Zacharias for his softer, more malleable countenance, not to mention his loyalty. Physically he was Veron’s counterpoint—small, round, and nearsighted—yet what he lacked in physical presence was more than compensated for by an unbending work ethic.

“Well?” Nurin prodded, his voice raised in a rare display of temper. “What the hell happened in Stockholm?”

Veron remained stoic. He silently set a stack of papers on the conference table and spread them out like a poker dealer fanning a deck of cards.

Zacharias filled the void, his voice measured as always, “There hasn’t been much information through our usual channels, at least not yet. It appears the target became violent. He attacked our team.”