Nir took a seat on one side of the conference table and nodded to the two men already there. They were leaders of Kidon teams like his, and that told him who would likely be filling the two empty chairs to his left.

“Got any idea what this is about?” he asked the man to his right.

“Not a clue.” Lavie Bensoussan, a late-forties operative, was missing his right ear, lost to a knife thrown by a Palestinian in a tunnel under the border wall with Gaza. Nir had served under Lavie when he was first brought into Kidon. “But I’m guessing one of those five chairs across this table is for the ramsad.”

Nir had flown home to Antwerp a couple of days after that disappointing discussion with Nicole. She’d already left Tel Aviv, off to a show in Lisbon. They hadn’t spoken again, and Nir wasn’t exactly sure where their relationship stood now. Were they still friends? Had they fallen back to how it was after the Iran vault operation?

He would find out soon enough. She’d flown in this morning, and he would see her in CARL once this meeting was over.

The other two Kidon leaders entered and took their places. Nir fist bumped the man who took the chair on the other side of him, the only one besides himself still in his mid-thirties.

Moments later, a door opened opposite them, and Nir and his fellow Kidon leaders stood. The first person out was Efraim Cohen. He was followed by Assistant Deputy Director of Mossad Karin Friedman, Deputy Director Asher Porush, and Ira Katz, the ramsad.

Then came a surprise guest, Prime Minister Oren Geller, who had been in office for only a month and a half. So far, Nir was unimpressed with him.

The leaders sat.

“Sit,” said the ramsad. “Prime Minister Geller, I’d like to introduce you to the leaders of my five Kidon teams, Ravid Efrat, Irin Ehrlich, Lavie Bensoussan, Nir Tavor, and Zakai Abelman.”

“Gentlemen,” Geller said.

“Ha’mefaked,” they answered.

Geller continued. “Only three weeks after I took office, Ira came to tell me that one of you—”

“Agent Tavor,” said Katz.

Geller waved him off. “Had come to him with evidence that Iran was training militias for suitcase nukes. As much as I had hoped that one of our allies would be able to reason with the regime in Tehran, this information proved to me otherwise. It appears there will not be a political intervention to stop the Iranian nuclear program. And there is one truth that all of our intel over the years has made quite clear—when Iran goes nuclear, they will use it.”