Nicole listened to Nir’s stoic response, and she struggled to maintain the same sort of composure. Inside, though, she was anything but calm. She wanted to get in Nir’s face and yell, “Don’t do this! You’ll get yourself killed. And I couldn’t live with myself if I let that happen.” But she knew he needed to do it. The country needed him to do it. And he needed her help so he could do it.

“Keep going, Lahav,” Nicole said as matter-of-factly as she could.

“So we put the first one where it will be found and the second where it won’t.”

Liora pointed at Lahav. “And for the second, we won’t plant the same kind. We’ll do a passive beacon, one that won’t transmit. You know, the ones that can only be pinged by us.”

Nir agreed to the plan, and Nicole had come up with putting the first one on his chest. Picturing herself in that interrogation room, she knew the torso was the logical beginning point for their harsh activities. The fact that the tracker was now gone proved her assumption correct.

Now the thought of someone taking some rusty knife and digging around in Nir’s chest brought bile into her throat. She swallowed hard and took a long drink from her water bottle, giving a quiet gargle to clear the taste.

Protect him, Lord. Give him strength to endure. Don’t let them take his life. Show Yourself to him.

It was Nir who came up with the insertion site for the passive chip. He had one of the Mossad’s medical staff come in, then instructed him to open the scar on the side of his head from where he’d been shot in Syria. “Below the skin and against the skull” was the order he’d given for inserting the thin piece of coded foil. The doctor then stapled the wound back together so that if anyone took a wand to Nir looking for metal, they would think the staples had triggered the device.

Brilliant, but horrific as well. This was not normal. None but a small handful of people in this world would say, “Oh sure, it’s a great idea to cut open your head and insert some coded metal so we can still follow you after you’re kidnapped and tortured and your first tracker is torn from your body.”

But that was the operation, and so far the operation was going as planned. For the past 45 minutes, she’d been trying to hack into a Chinese satellite. But it was giving her fits. Maybe because her mind was in Doha instead of in Tel Aviv.