The weather seemed perversely glorious for such an occasion: cool temperatures, a pale blue sky, a soft Judean breeze that plucked at his shirt-sleeves as he sped along the Jaffa Road. He switched on the radio. The mournful music that had saturated the airwaves in the hours after the attempt on Shamron’s life was now gone. A news bulletin came suddenly on the air. The prime minister had promised to do everything in his power to track down and punish those responsible for the attempt on Shamron’s life. He made no mention of the fact that he already knew who was responsible, or that he had granted Gabriel the authority to kill him.

Gabriel plunged down the Bab al-Wad toward the sea, weaving impatiently through the slower traffic, then raced the setting sun northward along the Coastal Plain. There was a security alert near Hadera—according to the radio, a suspected suicide bomber had managed to slip through a crossing in the Separation Fence near Tulkarm—and Gabriel was forced to wait by the side of the road for twenty minutes before heading into the Valley of Jezreel. Five miles from Afula a rounded hillock appeared on his left. In Hebrew it was known as Tel Megiddo, or the Mound of Megiddo. The rest of the world knew it as Armageddon, forecast in the Book of Revelation to be the site of the final earthly confrontation between the forces of good and evil. The battle had not yet begun, and the parking lot was empty except for a trio of dusty pickup trucks, a sign that the archaeological team was still at work.

Gabriel climbed out of his car and headed up the steep footpath to the summit. Tel Megiddo had been under periodic archaeological excavation for more than a century, and the top of the hill was cut by a maze of long, narrow trenches. Evidence of more than twenty cities had been discovered beneath the soil atop the tel, including one believed to have been built by King Solomon.

He stopped at the edge of a trench and peered down. Crouched on all fours was a small figure in a tan bush jacket, picking at the soil with a hand trowel. Gabriel thought of the last time he had stood over a man in an excavation pit and felt as though a lump of ice had been placed suddenly at the back of his neck. The archaeologist looked up and regarded him with a pair of clever brown eyes, then looked down again and resumed his work. “I’ve been waiting for you,” said Eli Lavon. “What took you so long?”