“No, Ibrahim, not when innocent human lives are at stake. More than three hundred people are dead because of you and your son. If you had told me the truth—the entire truth—we could have stopped the attack together. Instead you gave me crumbs, the same bread crumbs you gave the SSI twenty-five years ago when you tried to save your daughter’s life.”

“And if I’d told you more that night? Where would I have ended up? The Americans would have assumed I was a terrorist. They would have placed me on a plane and shipped me back to Egypt to be tortured again.”

“Did you know London was the target? Did you know they were planning to kidnap Elizabeth Halton and ransom her for your friend, Sheikh Abdullah?”

“I knew nothing of their plans. These boys are extremely well trained. Someone highly skilled is pulling the strings.”

“Someone is.” Gabriel hesitated. “Maybe that someone is you, Ibrahim. Maybe you’re the one who masterminded the entire operation. Maybe you’re the one they call the Sphinx.”

“The willingness to believe outlandish things is an Arab disease, Mr. Allon, not a Zionist one. The more time you waste pursuing silly notions like that, the less time we have to find the ambassador’s daughter and bring her home alive.”

Gabriel seized on a single word of Ibrahim’s last answer, the word we.

“And how are we going to do that?”

“I believe Ishaq is one of the terrorists holding the American woman hostage.”

Gabriel leaned forward in his chair. “Why would you think that?”

“Ishaq left Copenhagen two weeks ago. He told Hanifah that he was going to the Middle East for a research trip on behalf of the Islamic Affairs Council. In order to maintain that fiction, he telephones the apartment every evening at Ahmed’s bedtime.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Hanifah has told me so.”

“Have you spoken to him yourself?”

“I’ve left messages for him, but he never calls me.”

Gabriel placed a notepad and pen on the table and slid them toward Ibrahim.

“I need the address of the apartment in Copenhagen. And I need the telephone number.”

“Hanifah and Ahmed have nothing to do with this.”

“Then they have nothing to fear.”

“I want you to promise me that no harm will come to them.”

“You’re in no position to ask for anything, Ibrahim.”

“Promise me, Mr. Allon. Promise me you won’t harm them.”

Gabriel nodded once. Ibrahim wrote down the information, then pushed the pad toward Gabriel and recited two lines from the twenty-second chapter of Genesis:

“‘So early the next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him.’”