By the time a bend in the road brought the shattered ruin of the towers into view, the procession numbered in the hundreds. When the mayor raised a defiant fist into the air, the multitudes behind her did the same, and the cry went up: “God is great!” That moment, captured on camera and published in newspapers across the country, became known as The Moment: The Moment we got to our feet; The Moment we began to fight back; The Moment we said, we will never be broken.

The Moment, as well, that Anmar al Maysani was transformed from a failed one-term mayor into a politician of national standing.

Amal had seen the picture many times, of course. People liked to show it to her, and to describe, often through tears, what it meant to them. These outpourings of emotion could be difficult to listen to, and while Amal did her best to be courteous, she was always a bit on guard around new acquaintances, never knowing when they might spring The Moment on her.

Today she was spared that. The tea conversation focused on Amal’s own heroism—a novel topic, but not an unpleasant one—and when Abu Mustafa inquired about her family, he showed more interest in her father than her famous mother. Amal’s father had been a police union official, murdered in the line of duty, so the subject was not without pain, but Amal was grateful to anyone who remembered that her dad, too, had once been a hero.

“I’m sure he would be very proud of you,” Abu Mustafa said.

“I would like to think so,” Amal said. “Did you ever meet him, Abu Mustafa?”

“Once,” Abu Mustafa said. “At a Baath function, a union fundraiser held on the university grounds. It was not a great evening—there were some unsavory characters there, I’m afraid—but your father impressed me. A good and decent man . . . We’re fortunate you follow in his footsteps.”

Amal blushed.

“Well,” said Abu Mustafa. “I will thank you once more for saving my son’s life and remind you that you are always welcome in my home, and then I will leave you to your official business.”

“You’re going out?” Mustafa said, as Abu Mustafa stood up.

“Just downstairs, to see your uncle Tamir. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Mustafa lied.

With a smile and a nod to Amal, Abu Mustafa turned and left. After the apartment door clicked shut behind him, Mustafa sat quietly for a moment. Amal did too, thinking of her own father. Samir poured more tea.

“All right,” Mustafa said. “Tell me where we’re at.”

Amal went first. The search of James Travis’s hotel room, she said, had turned up nothing of interest, other than the tools he’d used to assemble the suicide vest. “The bomb-disposal guys say it was a decent job. He’d been well trained by somebody.”

“So it definitely would have gone off?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do we have any idea what his target was?”

“The Abu Nuwas Street Mall,” Samir said. “Travis had a tourist map of the waterfront. The mall complex was circled.”

“And what’s Riyadh saying? Do they have any new intel for us? Preferably something more in line with reality?”

“They’re ‘reevaluating their sources, in light of recent events,’ ” Amal said. “The good news is, we may have caught a break in Kufah . . .” For the past few weeks, Travis had rented a room at a guest workers’ hostel not far from the Kufah army base. “My old Bureau partner Rafi has been working down there on a different investigation, so I asked him to tag along when ABI swept the hostel yesterday. The room was clean—Travis threw out everything he didn’t take with him—and according to the manager, garbage pickup was yesterday morning. So at first it seemed like a dead end . . .”

“What did they do, search the garbage dump?”

“There was some discussion of doing that. But then Rafi got suspicious and made a phone call.”

“Turns out the manager was lying,” Samir said. “Garbage pickup in that part of Kufah is actually on Mondays—if you’ve paid your garbage bill. But the manager discontinued the service over a year ago, without telling his boss. He was pocketing the money for himself and having whichever tenants were behind on their rent help him haul the trash to bins on other people’s property. So, long story short, ABI had the guy out dumpster-diving all night.”

“They found Travis’s garbage around three o’clock this morning,” Amal said. “They’re still sifting it for clues, but one of the first things they found was a camera—”

“A broken camera,” said Samir. “Smashed, like Travis took a hammer to it. Only he must have been asleep the day they taught destroying evidence in terror school, because he screwed up and left the memory card intact . . .”

Amal switched on her cell phone. “Rafi emailed me the pictures. Take a look at this.”

The scene was of four men seated at a long wooden table, indoors, in a close and poorly lit space. Travis, the picture-taker, was in the foreground, holding the camera at arm’s length, the flash highlighting the pinkness of his cheeks. He’d evidently consumed a large quantity of alcohol—Mustafa could make out the tops of several foam-flecked glasses on the table in front of him. Behind Travis, holding glasses of their own, were two blond men; their features were hard to discern on the small screen, but an enlargement might provide enough detail for computer identification. The fourth man, a surly red-haired fellow, had been caught in profile jabbing a finger at Travis, his mouth open to deliver a rebuke.

“What do you think?” Amal said.

“I think this redhead may be the one who smashed the camera. And if I’m counting empty glasses correctly, I think I know why he overlooked the memory card.”

“But do you think these are our guys? The rest of the cell?”

“It’s possible,” Mustafa said. “Though I’m frankly stunned that even drunk crusaders would be this stupid. This room that they’re in . . .”

“A rat cellar,” Amal said. “Rafi’s checking with Halal to see if they can identify it.”

A rat cellar: an illegal bar catering to foreign guest workers, primarily Europeans. There’d be home-brewed beer, misappropriated Sabbath and communion wine, and probably hard liquor as well, though not the good stuff. As for the location, it might be a literal cellar or an aboveground structure like a warehouse—any place the local cops could be bribed to turn a blind eye to.

“Those blond guys in the back,” said Samir. “They look like Germans, don’t they?”

Mustafa smiled. “I suppose they might be German, or Austrian. But I don’t know, Samir—they could be Scandinavian.”

“Scandinavian terrorists? Mustafa, please!”

“As long as their faces are clear enough for a computer match, what difference does it make whether they’re German or Scandinavian?” Amal asked. “Shouldn’t ICE have them in the system either way?”

“ICE should, which doesn’t mean ICE will,” said Mustafa. “But if they’re German, Samir has an excuse to call in our friend Sinbad.”

“And who is Sinbad? Naval intelligence?”

“Mossad,” Samir told her.

“There’s an Israeli named Sinbad?”

“It’ll make sense once you’ve met him,” said Mustafa.

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The modern State of Israel is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered on the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea, to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic, and to the west, in part, by the Netherlands. The rest of its western and southern borders are officially defined by the courses of the Rhine and Main rivers, but since the 1967 Six-Day War Israel has occupied most of Bavaria, Swabia, and the West Bank of the Middle Rhine. Israel’s capital is Berlin . . .