“In Atlantic City. I’m pretty sure they mentioned the place.” She reached into her bag and fumbled around for something. “Listen, she once sent me a text by mistake that I think was intended for Lizzie. If I haven’t deleted it, then I will have the name… his name.”
I waited patiently while she scrolled through the hundreds of messages on her phone. I looked around me. Their room was tidy, as was appropriate for two young and talented women. Two future scientists. Leaving the nest had freed my sister. She’d shed the chains that tied her to the past and to our family. This wasn’t the stereotypical escape of a girl leaving the protective embrace of her home. It was as if she were breaking out of jail, out of the claws of those who held her against her will. The university had given her a new start where she could be herself.
I knew the feeling. I’d left the house after three years, five months and three days. The feeling that I was no longer under his patronage had been powerful and liberating. Suddenly I could do whatever I felt like doing, but whatever I felt like doing turned out to be devastating. All at once, life had hit me hard in the stomach, the opportunities, the experiences. Through them I’d discovered all the ways in which one could die, because that was what I’d felt like doing. What had saved me from death or drugs? Her. I had to hang onto life for her. Her and the fencing, which had helped me focus on something apart from the pain. I had substituted the will to die with the will to win.
“Here, I found it.” The voice of her roommate sounded in my ears as if from another dimension. I leaned over her phone.
Lizzie I am at Murat’s. Come through. A laconic message, but to me it held so much.
“It really is an unusual name,” I stated. “Where can I find Lizzie? Where does she live? Do you remember?”
The girl looked frightened and maybe a little sad for me as she answered, “You don’t know? The whole campus is talking about it. It happened a few days ago. Some people in suits came and packed up all her things.”
“Why?”
“The rumor is that it was an overdose. She’s dead.”
Guy Niava,
Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 10:18 p.m.
I missed his first phone call because I was speaking with his father. This time was meant to be a period of decompression and reconsideration of my next steps. I’d been reassigned to an office job, something I considered a soul-crushing punishment and the complete antithesis of what I reluctantly considered my destiny: training the next generation to perform their duties perfectly. So I left the Mossad. No more life-threatening situations and their accompanying adrenaline addiction. I will eventually return home to a quiet, drama-free life.
In France, while undercover, I trained young boys, immigrants from Arab countries. For a long period of time, it was an excellent source of information for the Mossad, and also a way for me to get to know myself. I felt that I was bonding with the kids. I slept well knowing that I was giving of myself no less than I was receiving. I had realized that this was my calling in life, my future. Once I returned home, I intended to do something similar. I wanted to take up training again, and who better to support my decision than the professor? This was my older brother by 10 years, my father’s son from his first marriage. He had abandoned the family trade of agriculture to bury his head in books. He was the one I was speaking with when the first call came through.
I heard the second call, but didn’t answer because I was brushing my teeth. I remember checking my watch and automatically calculating the time in Tel Aviv and the time in Paris. Those were the two most likely places I could receive an unexpected call from, as the last two places where I had lived. Here in Philadelphia, I was on vacation, touring the country by motorbike and car. I’d been using this time to solidify my future plans. The Mossad had left me an unappealing open door, in the form of an office job. There were those that had said I had lost my cool reserve, that my trigger finger wasn’t as stable as it used to be, that I was burned out. They didn’t know how right they were. I was burned out. It had been so for quite some time. Burned from the inside, burned from the outside, burned in my former position. Burned so much that I had no choice but to change direction.
As I finished brushing my teeth, I heard the beep of an incoming text message, which was smart of him. It read, “Guy, I’m in trouble and you have to save me.”
He was supposedly in the adjacent room, watching television, maybe playing a computer game. At this hour, he may also be tucked away in bed under his thick duvet, but by the sound of the message, he was clearly somewhere else. I asked the obvious question in my response text: “Where are you?”
“Atlantic City.”
I wanted to ask how he had managed to get there. Dinner had ended so late, how had he found the time? Instead, I texted, “What happened?”
“I drove with friends to a casino. I didn’t feel like gambling, so I sat with my laptop and hacked into something I wasn’t supposed to see. I am being chased now.”
“So where are you?”
“Hiding in some woman’s closet.”
I definitely didn’t expect an answer like that from a good boy like Jonathan, so I just said “I am coming. Send the address,” then added, “Stay hidden.” I could see raindrops through the window and knew that, despite the urgency, I would need to take the car. I grabbed my keys from
