With one last stroke, she reached the stern of the boat and backed away to appraise her work. The detailing was awful, edges smeared and uneven, and a dozen drip marks ran down to the waterline. It hardly mattered. She was following David’s instructions to the letter. Do what you can to make it look different. Think large scale, so that no one looking from a mile away will recognize it. Christine dropped the brush into the paint bucket and used her wrist to wipe a strand of hair from her face. She regarded the stern, where she’d worked for thirty minutes with a barnacle scraper to take off the old name, a Swedish word that meant nothing to her. After scratching right down to bare fiberglass, she had christened the boat with its new name, struck in bold blue lettering: Bricklayer.

Noticing an uneven C, Christine reached out to perform a touchup. At that moment, three feet underwater, the rock she was standing on wobbled. She nearly tumbled into the sea, but caught herself at the expense of a wayward paintbrush. When she regained her balance Christine was staring at a fresh streak of blue that snaked nearly to the waterline. Between the block letters K and L was what looked like a drunken S.

Brickslayer.

At that moment, Dr. Christine Palmer was struck by the absurdity of her situation. This was what her life had come to—standing in the Baltic Sea to paint a new name on the boat she’d stolen so it wouldn’t be recognized by Israeli spies.

“What the hell am I doing?”

She smacked the transom with the wet brush, paint splattering across the deck like the droppings of some massive blue bird. She climbed up the boarding steps, and dropped the bucket and brush as cool air bit into her exposed legs and hips—she had stripped down to her panties to go into the sea, the only option for a sailor with one set of dry clothes. Mercifully, the owner kept a tall stack of towels on board.