relaxed, the sunglasses hiding his eyes.
“Do my back,” she asked, extending the bottle of lotion toward him. Gideon stood and walked over to her, suddenly alert at her use of the prearranged code. She handed him the bottle of lotion and sat up, leaning forward on the lounge chair.
“Where?”Gideon asked, his mouth close to her ear.
“Ten o’clock,” Sarah whispered back. “Moving this way.”
“Coming in early?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“That would be Nichols,” Gideon admitted with a wry smile. He wiped his hands on the front of his khaki shorts and turned back to his chair, deliberately not looking in Nichols’s direction.
Sarah capped the bottle of lotion and reached down, unzipping the pack beside her chair and dropping the bottle in, right beside her 9mm Glock.
She had no sooner finished zipping up the pack than a shadow fell across her chair and she looked up into the startlingly blue eyes of the American.
“Good morning,” Harry said, flashing a quick smile at the
“As always,” was the reply. “Still looking for the Messiah, Gideon?”
Gideon laughed. “Tell you what, Harry. If He shows up and says ‘This place looks familiar’, put in a good word for me. On the other hand, if He hasn’t been here before, I’ll tell him you’re a
A chuckle escaped Harry’s lips as he pulled up a lounge chair and sat down across from the couple. What had started as a joke before their mission into the Bekaa four years previous had become their own personal code. The meeting was cleared to proceed.
“I’m glad you could make it,” Gideon said with a smile, sitting up in the chair. It was only then that he realized he no longer had Harry’s attention.
Sarah looked up to meet the American’s gaze, suddenly aware of just why Nichols was not wearing sunglasses. His eyes were weapons.
She found the expression on his face as difficult to place as it was unsettling. It was not the sort of look a man might typically give a woman. She knew that look all too well. Rather it carried an air of cool, detached confidence. A threat assessment, she realized with a start.
He broke the stare after a long, awkward moment and when he next spoke, it was to address Gideon. “Would you tell your lady friend to get rid of the wire?”
Laner just stared back at him for a moment, a look of disbelief on his face. Then he started laughing. “Take it off, Sarah.”
Harry held out a hand as the woman removed a tiny earbud headset from her right ear. She shot a look at Gideon as though awaiting orders. He nodded, and she placed the small headset in Harry’s palm.
“May I ask how you noticed?” Gideon asked, still chuckling.
“You may,” Harry replied, placing the earbud on the concrete of the courtyard and casually crushing it with a downward thrust of his foot, “but I’m not going to tell you.”
“Fair enough,” Gideon agreed, glancing over at Sarah. Her attention was still focused on Nichols, the expression on her face somewhere between anger and annoyance.
“Now, let’s get down to business,” Harry continued, “why did you ask to meet with me?”
“I think we have something you want. And you have something we need.” Gideon paused for a moment, well aware of the ambiguity of his statement. It was only the opening dance.
“Is that so?”
“Do we have two? I know, I know-but we need two,” Farouk protested, the cellphone tight against his ear as he moved along the promenade.
“Hold off a few more minutes-maybe the other American will show up. Yes, we must get both of them. No, you may not. Move on my command only.”
“And what would be the nature of this exchange you speak of?”
Gideon looked across at Harry, aware that he must answer the question, and quickly. This was poker- sometimes you needed to play it close to the vest, sometimes you needed to bluff-let the other fellow believe you were holding a full house.
Time to bluff. “Five days ago, you took a CIA strike team into the Alborz Mountains of Iran. Your mission: to rescue an international team of archaeologists.”
The American’s expression didn’t change. For a moment Gideon wondered if he had even heard the statement.
“That a fact?” Harry asked, his face slowly breaking into a grin. “It’s always fascinating to hear the stories of what I’ve not done.”
He leaned forward in his chair, staring intently into Gideon’s face. “Listen, you need something, so why don’t you cut the bull and tell me what it is?”
Harry watched the Israeli’s eyes, clearly reading the struggle there. A child ran between their chairs, chasing an over-sized beach ball, and the conversation fell silent for a moment.
A few hundred meters down the street, a Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled out of traffic and parked near the entrance to the resort, almost seeming incongruous among the expensive European cars that swarmed the waterfront. Harry took note and logged it away before turning his attention back to the matters at hand.
“Dr. Moshe Tal,” Gideon began slowly. “He was the leader of the team of archaeologists I mentioned.”
Harry nodded, his face betraying no signs of recognition.
“Tal was an archaeologist, but he was also a patriot. And a Mossad agent.”
“Was?” Harry asked, moving with caution. “Tal has died?”
Laner shook his head. “No. He was sent into Iran to excavate the ancient city of Rhodaspes. That was his cover. In reality, he was in communication with the Ayatollah Isfahani, helping subvert the Shirazi government.”
“The Supreme Leader?”
“The same. There are-there were rifts to be exploited. The potential for actionable intelligence, if not regime change on a massive scale.”
The Jeep was still parked in the same place, Harry noticed, a sense of disquiet growing inside him. Something didn’t seem right. From where he sat, he could see the driver out of the corner of his eye, still seated behind the wheel. He hadn’t moved.
There were no passengers.
“May I ask why it had to be Tal?” he asked. “Why did he need to be in-country?”
“Isfahani has a passion for archaeology that is only surpassed by his love of Persia. It was necessary to place Dr. Tal inside Iran so that they would have a reason for communication.”
“Code, I take it?”
“To be sure. And something went wrong,” Laner added.
“I see.”
“We lost all contact with the archaeologists on the 13th, after an odd distress call was received from Tal. As you know, satellite imagery showed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards setting up a base camp on the plateau near
