“As you’ve probably guessed by now, the station is about to explode. By my calculation, you’ll have fifteen seconds. You have two choices. You can warn the people around you and try to save as many lives as possible, or you can selfishly save the life of your wife. But you cannot possibly do both, because if you warn the people, there will be pandemonium, and you’ll never be able to get your wife out of the station before the bombs go off. The only way to save her is to allow hundreds of other people to die—hundreds of deaths in order to save a wreck of a human being. Quite a moral dilemma, wouldn’t you say?”

“Where is she?”

“You tell me.”

“Track D,” Gabriel said. “Track Dalet.”

“Very good.”

“She’s not there. I don’t see her.”

“Look harder. Fifteen seconds, Gabriel. Fifteen seconds.”

And then the line went dead.

TIME SEEMED TO CRAWL to a stop. He saw it all as a streetscape, rendered in the vibrant palette of Renoir—the shaheeds, their eyes on the departure clock; the soldiers, their shoulders slung with submachine guns; Palestina, clutching the handbag that held a loaded Tanfolgio nine-millimeter. And in the center of it all he saw the pretty Arab girl walking away from a woman in a wheelchair. On the track stood a train bound for Marseilles, and five feet from the spot where the woman waited to die was an open door to the last carriage. Above him a clock read 6:59:50. Mimi had cheated him, but Gabriel knew better than most men that ten seconds was an eternity. In the span of ten seconds he had followed Khaled’s father into a Paris courtyard and filled his body with eleven bullets. In less than ten seconds, on a snowy night in Vienna, his son was murdered and his wife forever lost to him.

His first move was so compact and rapid that no one seemed to notice it—a blow to the left side of Palestina’s skull that landed with such force that Gabriel, when he pulled the handbag off her shoulder, was not sure whether she was still alive. As the girl collapsed at his feet, he reached inside the bag and wrapped his hand around the grip of the Tanfolgio. Tayyib, the shaheed closest to him at the snack bar, had seen none of it, for his eyes were fixed on the clock. Gabriel drew the weapon from the bag and leveled it, one-handed, at the bomber. He squeezed the trigger twice, tap-tap. Both shots struck the bomber high in the chest, flinging him backward, away from the explosive-laden suitcase.