“I’ll tell you, but you have to understand, you aren’t going to like what you hear.”

Court closed his eyes. “Who . . . was . . . he?”

Catherine hesitated again. Just before Court asked her a third time, she said, “I got this from Alvey, who got it from the head of the Mossad. The Israelis did a multi-year investigation into the affair, piecing it together from primary evidence and interviews with survivors. They are absolutely certain of their findings.”

Despair grew in the pit of Court’s stomach. Softly, he said, “Tell me who I killed, Catherine.”

And she did.

Six Years Earlier

Hawthorn sat quietly in his room in the Italian villa just outside of Trieste, but inside he was raging against Mossad and Manny, furious with himself for believing he would be kept safe.

Manny Aurbach had promised his agent Hawthorn he would protect him, but like other things the old Jew had told him, that had been a lie.

He wondered if he was really mad, or if he was just terrified, diverting his fear into action, as he had been trained to do long ago.

Hawthorn was a spy, and he spied for the Mossad, which was an immediate death sentence to any Arab. Compounding this fact was that he had penetrated al Qaeda in Iraq and now served as a logistics operative for the organization, and he knew it would just take one small piece of evidence to convict him. If anyone in his organization thought he was working for the Jews, he would be killed, likely in a most horrible fashion.

He’d not wanted to come to Italy to meet with the al Qaeda operatives from Pakistan, but he’d seen no way out of it. The danger for him was that he had cultivated his legend among the AQ leadership, and they trusted him, but exposing himself to an entire new group of individuals, individuals with contacts and intelligence networks who could check his backstory with their own resources, or poke holes in his legend, meant this trip could put him in front of the wrong person at the wrong time.

And just as he had feared, so had it come to pass. When he and his colleague stepped off the launch this afternoon at the dock they’d been met by a small contingent of AQ men from the Tribal Areas, and a larger group of Serbs. Soon after Hawthorn greeted the men from Pakistan, he knew he was in serious trouble.

In the driveway of the villa everyone climbed out of the vans to begin carrying luggage inside. As Hawthorn started to leave the vehicle, he felt a hand clutch his arm. One of the al Qaeda men from Pakistan sat next to him. He whispered, “I know who you are. If you try to run, I will alert them. They will tear you to pieces and enjoy it.”