“I’m going to find you one day, you bastard. I’m going to find you and kill you.”

“I guess that means you’re not interested in a deal. It’s been nice talking to you, Ishaq. If you happen to change your mind, you have ten minutes to call me back. Think about it carefully. Don’t make the wrong decision. Otherwise, your family is as good as dead. Ten minutes, Ishaq. Then the plane leaves for Cairo.”

Gabriel hung up the phone for a second time. Carter gave him a pat on the back. It was drenched in sweat.

Gabriel slipped from the conference room without a word and made his way to the toilets. He stood before the basin, hands braced on the edge of the cold porcelain, and gazed at his own reflection in the mirror. He saw himself not as he appeared now but as a boy of twenty-one, a gifted artist with the ashes of the Holocaust flowing in his veins. Shamron was standing over his shoulder, hard as an iron bar, urgent as a drumbeat. You will terrorize the terrorists, he was saying. You will be Israel’s avenging angel of death.

But Shamron had neglected to warn Gabriel of the price he would one day pay for climbing into the sewer with terrorists and murderers: a son buried in a hero’s grave on the Mount of Olives, a wife lost in a labyrinth of memory in an asylum on Mount Herzl. Having lost his own family to the terrorists, he had vowed to himself that he would never target the innocent in order to achieve his goals. Tonight, if only for the purposes of deception, he had broken that promise. He felt no guilt over his actions, only a profound sense of despair. The creed of the global jihadists was not just; it was a mental illness. One could not reason with those who massacred the innocent in the belief that they were doing God’s will on earth. One had to kill them before they killed you. And if one had to threaten the family of a murderer to save an innocent life, then so be it.

He splashed icy water on his face and stepped out into the corridor. Carter was leaning against the wall with the calm detachment of a man waiting for a long-delayed train.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I will be when this is over,” Gabriel said. “Did NSA get a fix on him?”

“It appears he was somewhere close to the interchange of the A3 and the A26.”

“Which means he could now be heading in any direction at considerable speed,” said Gabriel. “What about the phone itself?”

“It was different,” Carter said.

“I suppose it’s now off the air?”

Carter nodded.

“Anything else?”

“Washington is worried that you’re pushing him too hard.”

“What would they have me do? Ask him nicely to release her?”