With that, Gabriel walked her downstairs and helped her into the back of an MI5 Rover. As usual, Zoe immediately switched on her mobile phone to conduct a bit of work during the short drive home to Hampstead. Because the device had spent a few minutes in the capable hands of Mordecai earlier that evening, the team now knew Zoe’s altitude, latitude, longitude, and the speed at which she was traveling. They were also able to hear everything she was saying to her MI5 minder and were able to monitor both ends of a call she placed to her editor in chief, Jason Turnbury. Within five minutes of the call’s termination, they had downloaded her e-mail, text messages, and several months’ worth of Internet activity. They also downloaded several dozen photographs, including one she snapped six months earlier of a shirtless Martin Landesmann sunning himself on the deck of his chalet in Gstaad.

The presence of the photograph on Zoe’s telephone provoked a fierce debate among Gabriel’s team, which they conducted in a terse form of colloquial Hebrew no MI5 listener would ever be able to translate. Yaakov, a man with a complicated personal life of his own, moved for immediate termination of the entire operation. “There’s just one reason why a woman would keep a picture like that. She’s still in love with him. And if you send her into his apartment tomorrow night, she’ll sink us all.” But it was Dina—Dina of the much-broken heart—who talked Yaakov down from his ledge. “Sometimes a woman likes to stare at a man she hates just as much as one she loves. Zoe Reed hates Martin more than she’s ever hated anyone in her life. And she wants to bring him down just as much as we do.”

Oddly enough, it was Zoe herself who settled the dispute an hour later, when Martin phoned from Geneva to say how much he was looking forward to seeing her in Paris. The call was brief; Zoe’s performance, exemplary. After severing the connection, she immediately dialed Highgate to report the call, then settled into bed for a few hours of sleep. As she switched off her bedside lamp, they overheard a single word that left little doubt about her true feelings for Martin Landesmann.

“Bastard…”

The following morning when Gabriel arrived at Thames House, it seemed the whole of Whitehall was waiting in the ninth-floor conference room. After enduring an hour of rigorous questioning, he was made to swear a blood oath that, if caught on French soil, he would say nothing of British or American involvement in the affair. Seeing no papers to sign, Gabriel raised his right hand, then slipped quickly out the door. Much to his surprise, Graham Seymour insisted on driving him to St. Pancras Station.

“To what do I owe the honor?” Gabriel asked as the car pulled into Horseferry Road.

“I wanted a word in private.”

“About?”