“You seem to be getting a lot of bad intelligence lately.”

“Some bad, some good.”

“That Palestinian school? Was that good or bad?”

“Hmm. Taken in isolation, that was a disaster. But you have to understand, there is more to the picture….”

“I saw the part of the picture with the forty-eight dead children. It would take a lot of puppies and rainbows in the rest of the picture to balance that out.”

“Christine,” Isaakson said quietly. It was the first time he had used her first name. “Christine, I like you. You have a good soul. That is why I’m telling you this, not because you’re a reporter, or because you work for Harry Giddings. I feel that you need to know, because I believe in what I’m doing here, and I want you to be able to say, after I’m gone, that I was a brave man who believed in what he was doing. Understand?”

“I do,” said Christine, but she suspected that this display had very little to do with his concern for her opinion and very much to do with the fact that she worked for Harry Giddings. Perhaps she was being cynical, but the idea that this battle-hardened general was suddenly opening up to her of his own accord was difficult to swallow.

“We’ve been getting a lot of intelligence lately,” the general said. “I can’t tell you the source, but this intelligence, these tips, they seem to come in threes.”

“Three tips at a time,” Christine repeated, impatient with the game. “About what? Enemy positions? Munitions locations? Getting red wine out of cashmere?”

“Various tactical considerations,” Isaakson said. “The thing is, one of the tips is inevitably wrong. As a result of this sort of misinformation – and I’m not necessarily saying this is what happened – we might end up bombing a school full of children or….”

“Attacking a strategically irrelevant city in southern Syria.”

“Hypothetically, although Imtan may yet prove to have some importance,” Isaakson said. “In any case, we have no choice because two of the three tips are always correct, and their value outweighs the cost of pursuing the other one.”

“‘Outweighs?’ To whom? Because I think you’d be surprised at the screwed up priorities of Palestinian schoolchildren.”

The general’s eyes closed. Christine couldn’t be certain, but it seemed as if he was struggling to maintain his stolid demeanor. When his eyes opened, they were cold and distant. Was this also part of the performance? “That,” he said, “was undeniably a tragedy. I regret having to… I regret doing that. In fact, it’s primarily because of that… miscalculation that I have….”

There was another blast, closer than the previous one. Louder shouts this time. Christine could almost make out what the men were saying.

“Are we safe here?” Christine asked.

The general waved his hand vaguely. “These rockets,” he said dismissively. “Like children’s toys. They go up in the air and fall onto a street, or a house, or a park. The odds of them hitting anything of importance….”