Nir felt like he’d walked into a steampunk lover’s dream. Although the names on the signs were all modern and high-end, the store façades made it look as though they were walking down the streets of old town Milan. Covering them from high overhead was an intricate dome and vault system of iron and glass. “This place is amazing.”

“It is. It makes me feel like I should be wearing a long dress with a bustle and carrying a parasol.”

“Speaking of your last fashion show, are you ready to tell me what happened?”

She gripped his arm a little tighter. “Not funny. You know, it’s not a big deal. The other model was probably having a bad day, and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Suddenly, she had a little bounce to her step. “But now I’m in the right place at the right time, right here next to you.”

“You sure you don’t want me to flush her goldfish or make her disappear?”

“Wow, those are my two options? Fish-i-cide or homicide?”

“I have a very limited skill set.”

Nicole laughed, then stopped to look up at the canopy. “I love walking through here. It’s hard not to feel transported back a century and a half. More innocent times. Less evil in the world.”

Nir shook his head. “I don’t know about that. Every era has its own evil. It just comes in different forms.”

“Well, aren’t you a little ray of sunshine?”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that this last op has got me thinking. What are we really accomplishing? We take a guy out of Iran’s nuclear program, but with the kind of money they’re paying, a hundred more are waiting to jump into his place.”

“Kind of like Whac-A-Mole. Every time you hit one head, another pops up.”

“Exactly. I don’t know, Nicole. I’m getting tired of feeling like I’m just playing a dumb arcade game that gets us nowhere. The stakes are too high. The danger is too real. I feel like if we’re going to do something, we need to do something big.”

“What about what happened in Natanz?”

Back at the beginning of July, an explosion had ripped through the Iran Centre for Advanced Centrifuges in Natanz, Iran. This facility was there to calibrate the centrifuges used to enrich the uranium needed to create a nuclear weapon.

“No doubt, Natanz was brilliant. First, they fill construction materials with explosives, then they pose as wholesalers of those same construction supplies. They get the Iranians to purchase the stuff, the Iranians install the explosives into their own centrifuge hall, and then a year later—boom! If it hadn’t really happened, nobody would believe it.”

“Exactly, and that was a huge setback for their nuclear program.”