“The bodies have started piling up.” She lifted her phone from her purse, swiped around a little bit, then showed the screen to Nir.

“He’s ugly. Who is he?”

“This was one of the Baloch engineers who helped assemble the gun.”

“Was?”

“He was found dead in a hotel room, tortured and then eviscerated alongside his mistress, who happened to be a Kurd. Our Baloch friends tell us he was the one who tampered with the explosives so the charge was directed away from the gun. Why? you might ask.” Nicole paused, obviously enjoying the reveal.

Nir waited, then realized action was required on his part. “Why?”

“Here. You may need this so you can follow me.” She swapped her mostly full mug with his empty one. “Okay, the Baloch engineer liked to pillow talk his mistress about his secret projects. You know, show how important he was. Little did he know she was connected into the Kurdish resistance. She told the Kurds about the robotic gun, and they decided they really wanted the technology.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“The problem was that the head of the engineers was very protective of the plans, allowing each person to see only their part of them. Since the bad-egg engineer couldn’t just abscond with the plans, the Kurds went to Plan B. They had some compromising information on a Persian guy in the weapons analysis department for the Iranian military. If this guy could just see the weapon, he could lay out plans to replicate it. Still with me?”

“Barely.”

“Try to keep up, old man. The Kurdish mistress lovey-doveyed her Baloch engineer into tampering with the explosives so the gun wouldn’t be destroyed. Then she promised him a ton of money from the Kurds if he could use the information from their weapons analysis guy to recreate the robotic gun.”

“That was a lot of words. I think I get it, though. So was it the Baloch or the Kurds who then wanted the IRGC to kill us in the truck?”

“Neither.”

Nir threw up his hands. “Okay, I need another latte.”

Nicole laughed. “That second incident was about both bodies and money and was totally separate from the first.”

“Oy vavoy, I might actually need a little something from my uncle’s secret cabinet to pour into my coffee.”

Nicole rolled her eyes. “The leader of the Arab community next to where your Kurdish driver and son lived had been trying to ingratiate himself to the IRGC, because when you have the big bullies on your side, you can be a bully too.”

“It’s called being a toady. The kids I learned English from on the kibbutz taught me that word.”