“I understand the greater good. I know sometimes you need to play a part. I just wish there wasn’t so much of it in the Mossad.”

“Unfortunately, it’s who we are. It was even in our motto.”

Nicole looked surprised. “What motto? The Proverbs motto on the Mossad seal?”

“That’s the one.”

Nicole shook her head. “I don’t think so. I memorized it in training. It’s Proverbs 11:14—‘Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.’”

“That’s what it is now, after they changed it. That’s why I said was. The first one came from Proverbs 24:6. I think your English translation says something like With wise counselors—or maybe it’s With wise guidance—you can wage war. An alternative translation of the Hebrew, though, says, ‘By way of deception you can wage war.’ In Israel, we’ve always known we can never be the strongest. So instead, we need to be the smartest.”

“‘Wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ is what Jesus said.”

“Yeah, I’m with Him, at least on the first part. We’ve got to be smarter than the rest. Another time Solomon, I think, talks about a city being under siege. The king and the warriors realize they can’t fight their way out. Then along comes this wise old man. He tells them what to do, and the city is saved. Not surprisingly, the old man is forgotten, but that’s okay because everyone survived.”

Understanding showed on Nicole’s face. “You’re saying we’re the old man. We use wisdom and trickery to defeat strength and weapons.”

“Exactly. And I have to say that for an old man, you’re looking pretty good.”

Now, as Nir sat at his desk, he could almost picture an old man in a raggedy robe walking up to the ramsad and saying, “You know, if you can convince ten scientists to smuggle in some explosives, you can blow up the nuclear plant’s power system and destroy all the centrifuges.” He smiled at the mental picture as he picked up the Russia memo again.

“Boss, you have to get in here now,” Yossi called from the workroom.

Chapter 44

CHAPTER 44

13:40 / 1:40 P.M. IDT

Yossi sat at his workstation. Liora and Dafna stood next to him looking at his computer screen. Lahav remained at his workstation wearing oversized headphones, manipulating the schematics of some sort of machine on his own computer.

As Nir looked at Lahav, Liora said, “Leave him. He thinks he’s discovered an exploitable weakness in the steerable warhead mechanism of Iran’s Khorramshahr 2 ballistic missile.”

“I understood about every third word of that sentence,” he said, walking toward Lahav.

No doubt rolling her eyes, Liora called after him. “Lahav maybe make big bad missile go crash-y boom into ground.”

“That much I got.” He tapped Lahav on the head, startling him.