Her papers were in perfect order, and her Hebrew, though no longer her primary language, was still native, so she and her carry-on bag passed quickly through customs. She caught a cab outside the terminal and headed directly downtown. She needed to get to the Crowne Plaza on Hayarkon, a nice, anonymous business hotel and the site of the meeting to which she had been directed. The participants would arrive and depart separately to keep her affiliation sterile, and they wouldn’t use the same hotel for months. After the meeting, she would call her parents and go see them, then spend the night at their house in Jaffa. She never announced these visits; they understood that her work, whatever it was, precluded notice. But business first.

She changed cabs several times and used a variety of other techniques to ensure that she wasn’t being followed. When she was satisfied, she made her way to the hotel. She took the elevator directly to the fourth floor and headed toward room 416. She didn’t have to look hard-there were two crew-cut men outside it, each with an earpiece and an Uzi. The obvious security was unusual. Something was definitely up.

One of the men examined her ID. Apparently satisfied, he opened the door and then immediately closed it behind her. Inside, three men were sitting around a table. Two she recognized-Boaz and Gil. The third was older by perhaps two decades, and it took her a moment to place him. She had met him only once.

Good God. The director. What was going on here?

“Delilah, shalom,” the older man said, getting up from his chair. He walked over and shook her hand, then continued in Hebrew, “Or should I say, bonjour? Would you prefer to use French?”

She liked that he asked. Moving in and out of cover, out of two separate identities, was stressful. She shook her head and answered him in Hebrew. “No. She’s not supposed to be here. Let’s let her sleep. She’ll wake up when she’s back in Paris.”

He nodded and smiled. “And then this will all seem like a dream.” He gestured to the other men. “You know Boaz? Gil?”

“We’ve worked together, yes,” she said. They stood, and the three of them shook hands.

Boaz was one of their best IED-improvised explosive devices-experts. She liked him a lot, as everybody did. He was serious when the situation called for it, but his default persona was boyish, at times mischievous, and he had an easy laugh that could almost be a giggle. He never came on to her, and in fact treated her as much like a sister as a colleague, which made him rare in the organization and, had the director not been present, deserving of a hug.

Gil was different-gaunt, moody, and intense. People admired Gil, but he also made them uncomfortable, and both for the same reason: he was extremely good at what he did. On two of Delilah’s assignments, Gil had been the shooter. In both instances, he had emerged from the dark to put a.22 round through the target’s eye and then disappeared without a ripple. He worked with others when he had to, but at heart, Delilah knew, he was a loner, and never more in his element than when he was silently stalking his prey.

Once, in a safe room in Vienna, he had made a pass at her. His move had been crudely direct, and Delilah hadn’t liked the underlying assumption of entitlement and expectation of fulfillment. She knew the sex would have given him a kind of power over her-that in fact this was part of the reason he wanted it-and she wasn’t about to surrender one of her few mysteries, her few levers of influence, with a colleague. Her rebuff had been as unambiguous as his proposition. It shouldn’t have been a big deal-he was hardly the first-but on the few occasions on which she’d seen him since then, he always looked as though he was remembering, and not without resentment. There was a breed of man that was inclined to feel humiliated by a woman’s demurral, and she suspected that Gil was such a specimen.

The table was set up for four, which told her they weren’t expecting anyone else. They all sat down. The director gestured to the sandwiches. “A little something to eat?” he asked.

She shook her head, not yet comfortable. “They served dinner on the plane.”

Gil took a sandwich and bit into it. Boaz picked up the teapot and smiled at her. “Tea, then?” he asked.

She smiled back and extended him her cup. “Thank you.”

Boaz poured for everyone. They all sat silently for a few moments, sipping. Then the director said, “Delilah, let me explain why you’ve been called in. You may have been wondering, eh?”

She nodded. “A bit, yes.”

“We’ve had a problem in Manila. We think you can help solve it.”

We’ve had a problem, she thought. Wasn’t that what those Apollo 13 astronauts had said as their spaceship was breaking apart? And his use of the inclusive pronoun, that was interesting, and vaguely worrisome, too.

“All right,” she said, wondering what was coming.

“Recently we used a contractor for a job in Manila. A part-Japanese fellow named John Rain.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I brokered that introduction.”

She wondered for a moment why the director was playing dumb with her. If the problem were serious enough to warrant his presence at this meeting, he would have been fully briefed on all the details, including Delilah’s early involvement. He must have been testing her, looking for opportunities to gauge her reactions.

“Yes, of course,” he went on. “You met Rain in Macau. The Belghazi op.”

“Yes.”

“Everything we were able to learn about this man, including your own evaluation, indicated that he was extremely reliable.”

Including your own evaluation. Something had gone wrong, and she was going to take some heat for it.

“Yes,” she said again, sensing that it would be better to say less.

He paused to take a sip of tea, and she recognized that he was attempting to draw her out with his silence. She resisted the urge to speak and instead took a sip of tea herself. After a moment, he went on.

“The man Rain was hired to remove is named Manheim Lavi. He goes by ‘Manny.’ An Israeli national, currently residing in South Africa. He has contacts in the Philippines, and, it now seems, a second family there. Recently we learned that he had turned traitor. He has been sharing bomb-making expertise-extensive expertise-with our enemies.”

The director wouldn’t be telling her any of this if she didn’t need to know. Nothing formal was being said, but she was being brought in on the op. He had mentioned her “evaluation” to let her know she was partly to blame for whatever the problem was; the information he was now sharing was to inform her she would be responsible for the problem’s resolution.

She looked at Gil. “Why did you use a contractor? Why outsource the operation?”

“Manny is connected,” Gil replied. “We believe he’s a CIA asset. The CIA doesn’t take kindly to ‘friendly’ intelligence services erasing its people.”

“So instead you brought in a contractor who screwed something up?”

Gil’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she smiled at him to let him know he had definitely just received a “Fuck you” for talking down to her. And her response served another purpose: it indicated to the director that, although she knew Rain, she had no interest in downplaying whatever his screwup had been or in otherwise protecting him.

“You told us he would be reliable,” Gil said, and she was gratified by the touch of petulance in his voice.

The director waved a hand like a father dismissing a squabble among children at the dinner table. “It doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is what we do next.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment, and the director continued. “Rain tried to hit Manny in a restroom in a Manila shopping mall. Manny got away, but Rain killed three other people. A bodyguard.” He paused and looked at her. “And two CIA officers.”