Sarah stood for a moment in the bright sunlight, looking dazed. But when she spotted Keller running toward her, her face broke into a wide smile.

“Sorry about standing you up for dinner last night, but I’m afraid it couldn’t be helped.”

Keller touched her bruised cheek.

“Our friend from the hotel did that. His name is Nikolai, by the way. Perhaps one day you can return the favor.”

Keller helped her into the backseat of the car. She watched a row of pretty little cottages flow past her window as Mikhail followed Gabriel and Eli Lavon from the town.

“I used to like Holland. Now I can’t get out of here fast enough.”

“We have a plane in Rotterdam.”

“Where’s it taking us?”

“Home,” said Keller.

Sarah leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. “I am home.”

Part Five

Vengeance

80

London–Jerusalem

It began in a room at the InterContinental Hotel in Budapest. From there, it hopscotched its way from the back of a taxi, to Seat 14A of a Boeing 737 operated by Ryanair, to the lounge of an Irish ferry called Ulysses, to a Toyota Corolla, and to the Bedford House Hotel in the Essex resort town of Frinton-on-Sea. High levels of radiation were also found in the ransacked office of a marina on the river Twizzle, in an abandoned Jaguar F-Type motorcar, and in the salon of a Bavaria 27 Sport that had run aground off the Dutch beach community of Renesse. Later, Dutch authorities would also find contamination in a holiday bungalow in the dunes near Ouddorp.

Ground zero, however, was a pair of neighboring houses in Eaton Square. There the story of what had transpired was written indelibly in a trail of radiation stretching from a bathroom on the uppermost floor of Number 71 to the drawing room and kitchen of Number 70. In the rubbish bin, the Metropolitan Police found the murder weapons—an empty glass vial, a Pasteur pipette dropper, a crystal champagne flute, a maid’s apron. All registered readings of thirty thousand counts per second. Too dangerous to store in the Met’s evidence rooms, they were sent for safekeeping to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the British government’s nuclear facility.

The woman who wielded the weapons had been the first to die. Her corpse was so radioactive it had been stored in a nuclear-safe casket—and the driver’s seat of her car, a Renault Clio, was so saturated with radiation it was sent to Aldermaston. So, too, was a lounge chair from the London Jet Centre. The source of the chair’s contamination, one Konstantin Dragunov, had been allowed to leave Britain aboard his private jet after suffering symptoms of acute radiation sickness. The Russian government, in its first official statement, attributed Dragunov’s ill health on the night of the incident to a simple case of food poisoning. As for the contamination inside Dragunov’s home, the Kremlin said it had been planted by the British Secret Intelligence Service in a bid to discredit Russia and harm its standing in the Arab world.

The Russian line of defense collapsed the next day when Commissioner Stella McEwan of the Metropolitan Police took the unusual step of releasing a portion of the videotaped statement Dragunov made before boarding his plane. The Kremlin dismissed the recording as a fraud, as did Dragunov himself. He was said to be recovering at his mansion in the Moscow district of Rublyovka. In truth, he was under heavy guard at the Central Clinical Hospital in Kuntsevo, the facility reserved for senior government officials and Russian business elites. The doctors struggling to save his life did so in vain. There was no medication, no emergency treatment, that could forestall the inevitable destruction of Dragunov’s cells and organs. For all intents and purposes, he was already dead.

He would linger, however, for three dreadful weeks, as Moscow’s standing in the world plunged to depths not seen since the downing of Korea Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. Anti-Russia demonstrations swept the Arab and Muslim world. A bomb exploded outside the Russian Embassy in Cairo. Protesters stormed the embassy in Pakistan.

In the West the response was peaceful, but devastating to Russia’s diplomatic and financial interests. Meetings were canceled, bank accounts were frozen, ambassadors were recalled, known operatives of the SVR were sent packing. London was selective in its expulsions, for it wished to send a message. Only Dmitri Mentov and Yevgeny Teplov, two SVR officers operating under diplomatic cover, were declared persona non grata and ordered to leave. That same evening a senior MI6 officer named Charles Bennett was quietly taken into custody while attempting to board a Paris-bound Eurostar at St. Pancras. The British public would never be informed of the arrest.

Much else was kept from them, all in the name of national security. They were not told, for example, precisely how or when the intelligence services learned a Russian hit team was on British soil. Nor were they given a satisfactory explanation as to why Konstantin Dragunov had been allowed to leave the country after admitting his role in the operation.

Under the relentless glare of the media, cracks soon appeared in the official account. Eventually, Downing Street acknowledged that the order came directly from the prime minister himself, though it said little regarding the PM’s motives. A respected investigative reporter from the Guardian suggested that Dragunov had been released in exchange for a hostage after first being subjected to a harsh interrogation. Stella McEwan’s cautious statement, that no officer of the Metropolitan Police Service had mistreated the oligarch, left open the possibility that someone else had.

Nearly forgotten amid the swirl of controversy was Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. According to Al Arabiya, the Saudi state broadcaster, he died nine days after his return from London, at 4:37 in the morning. Among those at his bedside was his beloved nephew, Prince Khalid bin Mohammed.

But why had the Russians poisoned the crown prince in the first place? Was the Kremlin not actively courting new friends in the Arab world? Was Russia not in the process of replacing the retreating Americans as the region’s dominant power? From Riyadh, there was only silence. From Moscow, denials and misdirection. The rented television experts speculated. The investigative reporters burrowed and sifted. None strayed remotely close to the truth.

There were clues everywhere, however—in a consulate in Istanbul, at a private school in Geneva, and in a field in southwest France. But like the trail of radiation, the evidence was invisible to the naked eye. One journalist knew much more than most, but for reasons she did not share with her colleagues, she chose to remain silent.

On the evening the Kremlin belatedly announced the death of Konstantin Dragunov, she emerged from her office in Berlin and, as was her custom, scanned the street in both directions before making her way to a café on Friedrichstrasse near the old Checkpoint Charlie. They were following her, she was certain of it. One day they would come for her. And she would be ready.

There was one final trail of radiation, the existence of which would never be revealed. It stretched from London City Airport, to a beach café in the Netherlands, to an apartment in Jerusalem, and to the top floor of an anonymous office block in Tel Aviv. It was, declared Uzi Navot, yet another milestone in Gabriel’s already-distinguished tenure as chief. He was the only director-general to have killed in the field, and the only one to have been injured in a bombing. Now he had earned the dubious distinction of being the first to have been contaminated by radiation, Russian or otherwise. Navot jokingly bemoaned his rival’s good fortune. “Perhaps,” he told Gabriel upon his return to King Saul Boulevard, “you should quit while you’re ahead.”