“I wish you would have told us you were coming,” Mortensen said as he nodded Carter into a comfortable Danish Modern armchair. “We could have arranged for a proper reception. To what do we owe the honor?”

“I’m afraid we have something of a situation on our hands.” Carter’s careful tone was not lost on his Danish counterpart. “Our search for Elizabeth Halton has led us onto Danish soil. Well, not us, exactly. An intelligence service working on our behalf.”

“Which service?”

Carter answered the question truthfully. The look in Mortensen’s blue eyes turned from curiosity to anger.

“How long have they been in Denmark?”

“Twenty-four hours, give or take a few hours.”

“Why weren’t we informed?”

“I’m afraid it fell into the category of a hot pursuit.”

“Telephones work during hot pursuits,” Mortensen said. “So do fax machines and computers.”

“It was an oversight on our part,” Carter said, his tone conciliatory. “And the blame lies with me, not the Israelis.”

“What exactly are they doing here?” Mortensen narrowed his blue eyes. “And why are you coming to us now?”

The Danish security chief tapped a silver pen anxiously against his knee while he listened to Carter’s explanation.

“Exactly how many Israelis are now in Copenhagen?”

“I’m not sure, to be honest.”

“I want them on their way out of town in an hour.”

“I’m afraid at least one of them is going to have to stay.”

“What’s his name?”

Carter told him. Mortensen’s pen fell silent.

“I have to take this to the prime minister,” he said.

“Is it really necessary to involve the politicians?”

“Only if I want to keep my job,” Mortensen snapped. “Assuming the prime minister grants his approval-and I have no reason to think he won’t, given our past cooperation with your government-I want to be present tonight when Fawaz calls.”

“It’s likely to be unpleasant.”

“We Danes are tough people, Mr. Carter. I think I can handle it.”

“Then we would be pleased to have you there.”

“And tell your friend Allon to keep his Beretta in his holster. I don’t want any dead bodies turning up. If anyone dies anywhere in the country tonight, he’ll be our top suspect.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Carter.

The curiosity returned to Mortensen’s eyes. “What’s he like?”

“Allon?”

Mortensen nodded.

“He’s a rather serious chap and a bit rough around the edges.”

“They all are,” said Mortensen.

“Yes,” said Carter. “But, then, who can blame them?”

There are few ugly buildings in central Copenhagen. The glass-and-steel structure on the Dag Hammarskjölds Allé that houses the American embassy is one of them. The CIA station there is small and somewhat cramped-Copenhagen was an intelligence backwater during the Cold War and remains so today-but its secure conference room seats twenty comfortably, and its electronics are fully up-to-date. Carter thought they needed a code name, and Gabriel, after a brief deliberation, suggested Moriah, the hill in Jerusalem where God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his only son. Carter, whose father was an Episcopal minister, thought the choice inspired, and from that point forward they were referred to in all Agency communications as the Moriah Team and nothing else.

Ibrahim Fawaz arrived from Amsterdam at six that evening, accompanied by Oded and Yaakov. Lars Mortensen appeared at 6:15 and accepted Gabriel’s act of contrition for the sin of failing to obtain Danish authorization before barging onto Danish soil. Gabriel then requested permission for the rest of his team to remain in Denmark to see the operation through, and Mortensen, clearly starstruck to be in the presence of the legend, immediately agreed. Mordecai and Sarah joined them after breaking camp at the Hotel d’Angleterre, while Eli Lavon came gratefully in from the cold of Nørrebro, looking like a man who had been on near-constant surveillance duty for more than a week.

The hours of the early evening were the province of Mortensen and the Danes. At seven o’clock they disabled the phone line leading to the Nørrebro apartment and forwarded all calls to a number inside the CIA station. Fifteen minutes later two Danish agents-Mortensen wisely chose female agents to avoid a cultural confrontation-paid a quiet visit to the apartment for the expressed purpose of asking a few “routine” questions concerning the whereabouts of one Ishaq Fawaz. Mordecai’s original “glass” was still active and, much to Mortensen’s dismay, it was used by the Moriah Team to monitor the proceedings. They were fifteen minutes in duration and ended with the sound of Hanifah and Ahmed being taken into Danish custody for additional questioning. Hanifah was immediately relieved of her cell phone and the phone was ferried at high speed to the embassy, where Mordecai, with Carter and Mortensen looking over his shoulder, hastily mined it for any nuggets of useful intelligence.

At eight o’clock a scene commenced that Carter would later liken to a deathwatch. They crowded around the rectangular table in the conference room, Americans at one end, Gabriel’s field warriors at the other, and Sarah perched uneasily between them. Mortensen placed himself directly in front of the speaker. Ibrahim sat to his right, nervously working the beads of his tasbih . Only Gabriel was in motion. He was pacing the length of the room like an actor on opening night, with one hand pressed firmly to his chin and his eyes boring into the telephone as though willing it to ring. Sarah tried to assure him that the call would come soon, but Gabriel seemed not to hear her. He was listening to other voices-the voice of Ishaq promising his wife that he would call at 9:30, and the voice of Hanifah warning that if he was one minute late she would refuse to answer. At 9:29, Gabriel ceased pacing and stood over the telephone. Ten seconds later it rang with the harshness of a fire alarm in a night ward. Gabriel reached for the receiver and lifted it slowly to his ear.

G abriel listened for several seconds without speaking. Traffic rushing at speed along wet pavement. The distant blare of a car horn, like a warning of trouble to come.

“Good evening, Ishaq,” he said calmly in Arabic. “I want you to listen very carefully, because I’m only going to say this once. Are you listening, Ishaq?”

“Who is this?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. I have your father, Ishaq. I also have Hanifah and Ahmed. We’re going to make a deal, Ishaq. Just you and me. You’re going to give me Elizabeth Halton, I’m going to give you back your family. If you don’t give me Elizabeth, I’m going to put your family on a plane to Egypt and hand them over to the SSI for questioning. And you know what happens in the interrogation chambers of the SSI, don’t you, Ishaq?”

“Where’s my father?”

“I’m going to give you a telephone number, Ishaq. It’s a number no one else has but me. I want you to write it down, because it’s important you don’t forget it. Are you ready, Ishaq?”

Silence, then: “I’m ready.”

Gabriel recited the number, then said, “Call me on that number in ten minutes, Ishaq. It’s now nine thirty-one. At nine forty-two, I stop answering the phone. Do you understand me, Ishaq? Don’t test my patience. And don’t make the wrong choice.”

Gabriel hung up the phone and looked at Ibrahim.

“Was it him?”

Ibrahim closed his eyes and fingered the beads of his tasbih .

“Yes,” said Ibrahim. “That was my son.”

Carter and Mortensen reached for separate telephones and quickly dialed. Mortensen called one of his men who was inside the offices of Tele Danmark, the Danish telecom company, while Carter dialed a CIA liaison officer at the Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the NSA. Five minutes later they hung up simultaneously and eyed each other like poker players across the table. Mortensen laid down his hand first.

“According to Tele Danmark, the call was placed from a mobile phone in Belgium,” he said. “If we contact our brethren in Brussels, we should be able to find out where he was when he made the call.”

“Don’t bother,” Carter said. “He was east of Liège, probably on the A3. It was a different phone than the one he used last night. And it’s no longer on the air.”

He called Hanifah’s mobile, then dialed the apartment again. Gabriel let the phones ring unanswered. Finally, with the deadline hard approaching, he called the number Gabriel had given him. The Agency technicians had patched the line into the recorders and it was being fed live to Washington. Much to the irritation of all those listening, Gabriel allowed the phone to ring four times before answering. His tone, when finally he brought the receiver to his ear, was brisk and businesslike.

“You cut it rather close, Ishaq. I wouldn’t make a habit of it.”

“Where are my wife and son?”

“As of this moment they are sitting aboard a private plane on an airfield outside Copenhagen. What happens to them next depends entirely on you.”

“What about my father?”

“You father is here with me.”

“Where is here ?”

“Where I am at the moment is completely unimportant, Ishaq. The only thing that matters now is Elizabeth Halton. You have her, I want her back. We’re going to make it happen, just you and me. No one else needs to be involved. Not your controller. Not your mastermind. Just us.”

“Who do you work for?”

“I can be whoever you want me to be: CIA, FBI, DIA, an agency so fucking secret you’ve never heard of it before. But just be sure of one thing. I’m not bluffing. I made your father disappear from the al-Hijrah Mosque in Amsterdam, and I made your wife and son vanish from Nørrebro. And if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do, I’ll put them all on a plane to Egypt. And you know what happens there, don’t you? I know what happened to your sister, Ishaq. Jihan was her name, right? Your father told me about Jihan. Your father told me everything.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible at the moment. Your father has suffered enough because of the Egyptian secret police. Don’t make him suffer again. Have you seen the scars on his arms? Have you seen the scars on his back? Don’t put him through another night in the torture chambers of Egypt.”