She looked at Carter, who was gazing at his own hands. “I guess I know who’s running this endeavor of yours.” She looked back at the man with gray temples and green eyes. “You’re Israeli.”

“Guilty as charged. Shall we continue, Sarah, or would you like me to leave now?”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Do I get a name, or are names forbidden?”

He gave her one. It was vaguely familiar. And then she remembered where she had seen it before. The Israeli agent who was involved in the bombing of the Gare de Lyon in Paris…

“You’re the one who—”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m the one.”

He looked down at the open file again and turned to a new page. “But let’s get back to you, shall we? We have a lot of ground to cover and very little time.”

HE STARTED SLOWLY, a climber plodding his way through the foothills, conserving his strength for the unseen perils that lay ahead. His questions were short and efficient and methodically posed, as though he were reading them from a prepared list, which he wasn’t. He devoted the first hour to her family. Her father, the high-flying Citicorp executive who’d had no time for his children but plenty of time for other women. Her mother, whose life had crumbled after the divorce and who was now living like a hermit in her classic-eight Manhattan apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her older sister, whom Sarah described as “the one who got all the brains and beauty.” Her little brother, who had checked out of life early and, much to her father’s disappointment, was now working for pennies in a ski-rental shop somewhere in Colorado.

After family came another hour devoted solely to her expensive European schooling. The American in St. John’s Wood, where she’d done her elementary years. The international middle school in Paris, where she’d learned how to speak French and get into trouble. The all-girls boarding school outside Geneva, where she’d been incarcerated by her father for the purpose of “sorting herself out.” It was in Switzerland, she volunteered, where she discovered her passion for art. Each of her answers was greeted by the scratching of his pen. He wrote in red ink on a legal pad the color of sunflowers. At first she thought he was scribbling in shorthand or some form of hieroglyphics. Then she realized he was making notes in Hebrew. The fact that it was written right to left—and that he could write with equal speed with either hand—served to reinforce her impression that she had passed through the looking glass.