He should have been enjoying the conversation. He wasn’t.

At some point he realized that he’d dropped the conversational ball, and that Cohen had fallen oddly silent. He looked up to find the AI staring intently at him.

“So, Gavi. How are Arkady and Osnat doing?”

“How should I know?”

“That’s funny. I wouldn’t have thought Yad Vashem was crowded enough these days that you wouldn’t notice you were sharing the place with them.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since they arrived.”

“Then you know they went to you first. Why the hell didn’t you help them?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Li! Osnat went to her for help before she brought Arkady to me. And she almost ended up on the police blotter because of it.”

Cohen blinked. “Li’s been MIA for two days now. So I think we can assume that whoever came after your little lost lambs bagged her too.”

“Or,” Gavi pointed out in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “we can assume that they want us to think so.”

“You’re off the mark there. Li wouldn’t do that.”

“You know her well enough to be sure of that?”

“I know her well enough to know she wouldn’t sell me out.”

“Everyone has their dumb blonde and their red Ferrari, Cohen.”

“Don’t spoon-feed me Didi’s proverbs!”

“Okay, maybe I spoke out of turn there. Maybe it’s not like that. But…people are who they are. You can’t imagine how angry I was at Leila after she died. I kept telling myself that if she’d really loved me, she would have come across the Line when we still had the chance. But it isn’t that simple, is it? I mean, you can love someone completely and still be bound by who you are, by what you believe in, by the other things and people you care about…by life, I suppose.”

“I know what you’re trying to tell me,” Cohen said. “You want to see UNSec behind this. You think Li’s gone back to working for Nguyen, and that Nguyen either ordered the bombing or pressured Didi into ordering it. Well, you’re talking out of turn. You don’t know Catherine. You don’t know what they did to her. You don’t know anything about her.”

But his eyes fell away from Gavi’s as he said the words.

The package arrived just as Gavi was about to leave.

“What do you mean you don’t know who it’s from?” Cohen asked the desperately nervous kid who showed up at the door of his suite to tell him about it. “Has security checked it?”

“Yes. Er. I really…perhaps you’d better come see for yourself.”

Gavi noticed with a first shiver of foreboding that the scared youngster was no mere bellhop. Someone had seen fit to draft management to deliver this particular package.

“Should I come with you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cohen said.

They both knew he would have argued in normal circumstances.

The package—a gift box, actually, wrapped in rather tasteful gold foil and bound up with a red satin ribbon—was sitting on the head security officer’s desk in the middle of a sea of nervous uniforms.

Cohen went over to the desk, peered at it for a moment, standing completely still, and slumped limply into the nearest chair.

Gavi realized no one was taking the slightest notice of him, and stepped close enough to see over the top of the wrapping paper and into the box’s interior.

The box was lined with more gold foil, as if whoever packed it had considered its contents fragile and in need of extra padding. It took Gavi some time to see what the object carefully nested in the golden foil actually was. Part of the trouble was the normal difficulty of recognizing even the most familiar objects seen out of context. But mostly it was the glistening, razor-sharp halo of ceramsteel filament that veiled the object. It was only the smell that finally roused his old battlefield memories and made him retch reflexively.

“Is it Li’s?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cohen said dully. He was jackknifed over in the chair, his face buried in his hands, but he spoke with the same crisp, elegant precision Gavi had heard from the lips of a dozen different faces.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s the left hand, the one with the Schengen implant. Now do you trust her?”

When he left Cohen, Gavi walked halfway across town, then doubled back toward the Old City. He passed through the Damascus Gate into the International Zone at eight minutes to two, carefully avoiding the telltale times of the hour, and the half hour and the quarter hour.

Then he began to wander aimlessly, trying to mimic an idling, strolling interest in his surroundings that he was very far from feeling.

He kept clear of passersby and kept a sharp eye on his pockets. More than one courier had ducked into the crowded alleys of the Old City to shake a tail, only to find that he’d lost his package to a stray pickpocket. And though Gavi wasn’t nearly foolish enough to be carrying anything incriminating, he didn’t need the aggravation of a lost wallet and a futile attempt to explain to the Foreign Legion gatekeepers that he was an Israeli citizen and not simply one more in the endless flood of paperless anonymous Arab males caught up in the International Zone’s endlessly repeating bureaucratic feedback loops.

It took a lot of practice to make a convincing show of just stumbling on a place. In this case, the rendezvous was located in a run-down café in the Arab Quarter. Gavi walked in, looked around, took a seat at a back table, and downed three cups of strong black coffee, ordering a new one every time the waiter started to look impatient with him.

He was making a hash of it, of course. He should have done his business and left after the first cup. He knew he was attracting attention. He knew that attracting attention, any kind of attention at all, was a major failing in tradecraft. But still he sat there, sipping the execrable coffee, gripped by an indecision more savage than any he could remember in a long career fraught with life-and-death decisions.

Cohen’s certainty about Li shook him. The whole conversation had shaken him. Every minute of every day since Osnat and Arkady had fetched up on his doorstep four days ago had shaken him.

The waiter was staring at him, he realized, examining him surreptitiously. His field instincts began to sound the old alerts, but then he saw the sickened and fascinated look on the man’s face and realized that it wasn’t his presence that the man was concerned with but his leg’s absence.

Pretty is as pretty does, my friend.

How many millions of times had his mother told him that when he was growing up? She’d been terrified, old kibbutznik that she was, that her too-pretty boy would grow up to be one of the frivolous and useless people she so despised. And he’d internalized the message, just as he’d internalized her ardently idealistic Zionism. He’d fallen in love with and married a woman who was intelligent and cultured but by no stretch of the imagination beautiful. And he’d always faintly despised the people who would glance back and forth between them on the first meeting, toting up the all-too-obvious aesthetic calculus and wondering: Why him? Why her?

Arithmetic of the body, he’d called it. Implying (God, how egotistical he’d been!) that he cared only for the arithmetic of the soul.

But now he was doing that same arithmetic in reverse. Hanging on Osnat’s faintest nod or smile. Watching the eyes that were so wary when she spoke to him, and the strong hands that were so carefully impersonal when she so much as passed a plate to him. Inventorying his broken body and his broken reputation, and wondering what he could possibly offer to a woman whose body and honor were so vibrantly whole.

He had to get her out of his home and out of this operation. If there’d been any question about that, his demeaning little tantrum of the other night had answered it. He was acting like an idiot. And he was too old and shopworn for the young-pup-in-love routine to be anything but ridiculous.