Out of the corner of her eye she saw him. He was not looking at her, nor would he. He would have seen her sitting at the café table from a distance and now he would walk by her, on the other side of the street. Maintaining this same lack of open acknowledgement, she stood, finished her Turkish coffee in one swig, left some money for it, and started to walk in the same direction as him, the bitter taste of the thick coffee grinds still in her mouth. He walked for a while. She stayed on the other side of the street, but soon he crossed in front of her and walked down a side street to her left. She followed, pretending to dial a number on her cell phone and start a conversation. He turned into an alley about three doors down, and for the first time glanced back to check that she was there, only momentarily, but confirming she had followed him, he walked into the alley and disappeared from view.

She stopped by its entrance, still talking into her phone, and looked up and down the street like she was receiving directions from her fictional caller, then, comfortable that she had not been followed and that she recognized no face from the café where she had picked up his trail, she turned and followed the man. He was waiting in a deep-set doorway ten meters down the alley, its stone arch ample cover in the slim, dark space.

“Ayala Zubaideh, I didn’t really believe it was you until this moment.” said the man.

“Saul, how have you been?” She hugged the older man who had been her handler for the majority of her career. He was in his sixties now, but handlers tended to live much longer than agents, and retirement was rarely an option for them. There was simply no way to fully transition an asset from one to another without great risk to both parties.

But unlike him, Ayala had indeed retired, hoping that she would return to America to her husband and he would forgive her the lies she had told him. But she had not been completely surprised when he hadn’t. So she had gone into a kind of mental hibernation. Her days had consisted of running and writing, she had found she was very good at crosswords in any of the five languages she spoke fluently, and had even started to write them for a local newspaper in Denver. But now she had been reborn with a new purpose. She was her own handler now, but this man was still an important man in the Mossad, and a man who could be useful to her.