He saw she was serious, and they locked eyes as she expertly jabbed him and depressed the needle. “Now, once again I will stress that if I wanted to hurt you I would have to come to you in the night and done what I wished to do. You now live, as you always have, at 55 Kersiliya Street.” Why had he thought for even a moment that she did not know as much about him as he did about her? He thought about it and concluded that it was, indeed, highly unlikely that this was just some method of hurting him. Good, he thought, as he watched the plunger go down, forcing the thick grey liquid into his muscle.

“Now,” she said, still holding his gaze, “there are ten more doses of this drug in my bag. You are going to distribute these doses widely around the country. If you don’t, then everyone in Israel will, most likely, die quickly and ignominiously in a few months. I also have forty more doses that you are going to administer as soon as possible to agents of ours deployed in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iran. Do you understand?”

“I imagine you are saying that this will spread the immunity in their countries as well. I cannot help but think …”

“Do not think that, Saul. Do not for one moment entertain the thought of keeping this antidote within our borders. If that happens, I will know, and I will find you, Saul. Know that your fate and that of all you hold dear rests on whether you get this drug spread to all the countries in this region. I will be working on getting it out to surrounding areas as well, but do not doubt that I will be able to tell whether you have done as I have asked today. This is not a time for Zionism, old friend, this is a time for practicality. If Israel survives the coming attack and all around her die, they will say we did it, even though we were in fact the intended target. How do you think the world would react to such a genocidal act?”