And then he finally put that puzzle together too. One step too late, as always.

“No dumb blondes and rented Ferraris for you,” Didi murmured.

“For you I only send the real thing.”

Gavi held his hands away from his body and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. They were trembling.

“You’re going to push too hard,” he told Didi. “And then I’m going to break, and you’ll have nothing. I’m not complaining or threatening. I’m just reporting as objectively as I can on the status of an agent in place.”

“I can’t back off now, Gavi. I’m sorry it’s been so hard, and I’m sorry it took so long. But we’ve reached the crossroads. If we do it right, then we can all go home. If not…”

Gavi sighed deeply and stretched out on the sofa with one arm over his eyes. He thought of the horror he’d seen in the King David Hotel security chief’s office, then forced his mind away from the thought.

“Can’t you take Osnat back and send in Yoni?” he asked. “Or anyone, for that matter. Please?”

“I’m going to write that off as kvetching. Unless you actually want to make it official. In which case the answer is no.”

Hard to argue with that; it was the answer Gavi himself would have given in Didi’s place.

“I can’t tell you how desperately I regret these years.” Didi spoke softly. “But they have not been wasted. Only a little longer, Gavi. Only one last night out in the cold. Then we bring you home.”

Down in the street a bus pulled up to the intersection with a whine of brakes, and a moment later Gavi heard the chuttering roar of its acceleration. He was sticky with sweat, and the light that seeped through his eyelids was as red as lung blood.

“Meanwhile,” Didi continued, “a curious piece of news has been leaked across the Line to us. It seems the Palestinians have managed to get Korchow to send Arkasha to Earth.”

Gavi’s eyes flew open. “My God. And the Palestinians have him? What are they going to do with him?”

“Give him to Turner, apparently.”

“Why the hell would they want to do that?”

“Not all of them do. Safik’s office seems to have been responsible for getting Arkasha here. Then Sheik Yassin horned in and brokered the deal with Turner over Safik’s protests.”

“So you think the leak comes from Safik? You think he’s trying to sabotage the exchange?”

Didi shrugged.

“I still don’t get it. What could Turner have that Yassin wants enough to get and trade Arkasha for?”

“I was wondering when you were going to stumble around to that question. Turner’s promised to give Yassin Arkady.”

Gavi rolled over on his side to look at Didi, the sofa’s springs protesting at the movement. “But Turner doesn’t have Arkady.”

“Not yet.”

“What the hell is he up to?”

“I don’t know. But I’d watch my back if I were you. And Arkady’s back.”

“Didi.”

“What?”

“Please tell me you’re not getting ready to burn Li and Arkady in order to catch Absalom. I don’t want to be part of another operation like that. I’ve lost the stomach for it.”

“I’m sorry, Gavi. I’ve completely forgotten to make you tea. And I always make you tea. What a brute I am.”

“Water’s fine. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“Really just water? How about I make you a little tea, and you can see if you want it?”

“Didi—”

“Jasmine or Ceylon, which do you prefer?”

When Didi came back he brought not only tea but also a slim file folder with the familiar black band across its front.

A testing, questioning silence filtered through the room. Gavi sat up. He could feel the old reflexes kicking in. His breath slowing. Time itself slowing. His eyes cataloging details that would have utterly eluded him in normal life. His muscles taking the measure of the room’s distances with a precision that still scared him just as much as it had all those years ago at Midrash when he first discovered that he had these horrible talents…he who had always thought of himself as an intellectual, an idealist, a bit of a peacenik even.

“Are you going to show me what’s in there,” he asked Didi, “or are you going to make me guess?”

Instead of answering, Didi opened the file and scanned it, as if refreshing his memory of its contents. Then he removed a paper clip, set it neatly aside for subsequent retrieval, and handed Gavi the photograph that had been pinned beneath it.

A young man, slim, graceful even in freeze-frame, handsome in a way that made one wonder if he wouldn’t perhaps be a bit too pretty in person. Something about the curve of his mouth and jaw that Gavi knew from his own bathroom mirror. And those vivid green crusader’s eyes.

Leila’s eyes.

“And just who is this supposed to be?” he asked icily.

“That’s beneath you, Gavi.”

The two men looked at each other. Gavi’s heart was pounding so loudly in his ears that he thought Didi must be able to hear it on the other side of the room.

“Yusuf Safik,” Didi said in the dull tone of a bureaucrat reading a routine report. “Only son—only child, actually—of Brigadier General Walid Safik. There’s no official record of the adoption. Yusuf attended private school in Bethlehem, and then in the SaudiArc Ring-side, then—this is interesting, Gavi, listen up—a stint on KnowlesSyndicate. Then back to Palestine for security service training. He graduated fourth in his class.” Didi pursed his lips, a taster evaluating a fine wine. “I like that fourth. It’s subtle. Your sort of instinct, I’d almost say.”

“You’re assuming the fourth was by choice, not merit.”

“I’m assuming nothing. One of our agents had a fling with a classmate of Yusuf’s who was posted to the Palestinian Authority’s HQ in the International Zone. It seems that the consensus among their fellow students was that Yusuf purposely fluffed the finals. Now why would he do that, I wonder?”

Gavi felt dizzy. The world had rearranged itself while he wasn’t looking, and now it was barreling on toward God knew what kind of damage without even giving him time to figure out where he stood or what he ought to do about it.

“And now he turns up smack in the middle of my hunt for Absalom.”

“Coincidence,” Gavi said. But he was hanging on by his fingernails and they both knew it.

He had laid the photograph across his knees, and not only to hide his shaking hands. Now he looked down at it and wondered how the photographer had stolen the unguarded shot. He touched the image of the familiar stranger’s face, knowing that Didi was watching him and not giving a damn what it looked like, and then felt a searing pang of regret when he realized he’d smudged the photograph.

“You’re surprised.” Didi sounded like a man probing at a sore tooth and wondering how long he could afford to wait before he called the dentist.

Gavi looked up at him, doing his best to keep his eyes steady and level. “You expected me not to be?”

“Oh, I expected surprise. I just wasn’t sure if you’d be surprised by the news, or surprised that I knew about it.”

A child’s voice rang out somewhere in the sun beyond the windows, and both men instinctively looked toward it. The glass, Gavi noticed, was caked with yellow khamsindust. He thought idly that you could probably make a decent map of Tel Aviv’s safe houses by just looking for unwashed windows and unswept doorsteps. He told himself that he was sick, sick to death of streaked windows and grimy walkup flats with garage sale furnishings. That all the other times he’d sat in identical rooms and thought identical thoughts had just been leading up to this time. And that this time it was well and truly over.

He knew better.

More to the point, Didi knew better.

“So why are you showing me this now? The file’s not exactly empty. You must have been holding this ace for a while now.”

“I wasn’t, actually. We had the file, yes, but I only figured out last week that he wasn’t Safik’s natural child. And I’m telling you now because I want you to have time to think about it in cold blood. Here. With me to talk to. I trust your second thoughts, and your third and fourth thoughts. It’s that first passionate impulse that terrifies me.”