“Are you all right?” Amal asked.

Mustafa fingered the bandage on his neck. “I still need a bit of rest, I guess.”

“Here he comes!” Samir said.

Amal turned to look, and Mustafa, imagining he saw something in her expression, said, “Ah, you’ve been talking to Umm Dabir.” Umm Dabir was Farouk’s secretary. She’d met Sinbad during one of his visits and developed a not-so-secret crush.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Amal said.

“I understand many of the women in the office are in love with him.”

“Not just the women, apparently.” Amal nodded towards Samir, who’d already run up to embrace Sinbad and was now walking alongside him with an arm slung over his shoulders.

“Hey, man, good to see you!” Samir was saying. “But what’s this about you already being in town and not calling us?”

“No time to party this trip,” Sinbad said. “I’m due on a redeye to Berlin tonight . . . Hello, Mustafa.” He flashed a smile at Amal. “And you must be Mustafa’s new bodyguard.”

“Yes, she protects me from Christians, and the lions of my own foolishness,” Mustafa said. “Amal bint Shamal, meet David Cohen. Sinbad to his many admirers.” As they shook hands, Mustafa took note of the attaché tucked under Sinbad’s arm. “You have something for us?”

“I do,” Sinbad said.

“Let’s find a place to sit, then. I’m feeling a little lightheaded today.”

They went to a tea shop around the corner from the embassy. The proprietor greeted Sinbad as warmly as Samir had, and Mustafa felt his vertigo flaring again. But he felt better once he was seated with a steaming glass of tea in front of him, listening to Sinbad explain that Samir had been right—the two blond men in the photograph were German.

“Peter and Martin Hoffman, of the Lutheran National Socialist Brotherhood,” Sinbad said, producing two Interpol files from his attaché. “Both alumni of the Munich Polytechnic. Peter is a chemist, Martin an engineer—but their main occupation, since graduating, has been organizing attacks on Jewish settlements in the Rhineland. Last year Peter was captured at a car-bomb assembly site in Koblenz. He killed a soldier and escaped. We think he and his brother fled to Turkey on forged guest-worker visas. From there . . .”

From there, sneaking into the UAS would have been a relatively trivial exercise. Despite millions of riyals spent to secure the Turkish-Syrian border, it remained a popular route for undocumented European immigrants.

“This is helpful,” Mustafa said. “But if they are in the country illegally, finding them won’t be easy.”

“Ah, but there’s more,” Sinbad said. “I also ran a check on your dead suicide bomber, James Travis . . .”

“Interpol has nothing on him.”

“No, but Mossad does. Two summers ago, Travis was part of a humanitarian mission in the Rhineland that was detained, briefly, on suspicion of providing aid and comfort to terrorists.”

“What sort of humanitarian mission?” Amal said.

“Medical,” Mustafa guessed. “He was a student doctor, remember?”

“Yes,” Sinbad said. “And one of the other doctors detained with Travis was an American named Gabriel Costello.” He opened up his attaché again. “I think you’ll recognize him.”

The photo attached to the new file he handed them was full-face rather than profile, and the subject looked somber rather than angry, but there was no mistaking the red hair.

“This is an ICE file,” Mustafa noted. “How did you get—”

“It’s not important,” Sinbad said. “What matters is, Dr. Costello has a green card . . . and a Baghdad address. I looked it up, it’s an apartment in the western suburbs, near the airport.”

Directly beneath Costello’s home address, the file listed his current occupation and place of employment. “I don’t believe this,” Mustafa said. “He’s a trauma surgeon at Karkh General Hospital.” He explained to Sinbad: “That’s where I got patched up the other night. It’s just minutes from here. We should go over, see if Costello is working now . . .”

“He’s not,” Sinbad said. “I checked that too. The receptionist I spoke with said Dr. Costello’s next shift starts at two p.m. So you have time to finish your tea.”

Samir was beaming again.

“You know, David,” Mustafa said, “if you wanted to skip that flight to Berlin tonight, I’m sure we have some other cases you could solve.”

“Let’s see how this goes, first. I’m not interested in Costello, but if we can find the Hoffman brothers, maybe I’ll stick around.”

By quarter to two they had plainclothes agents in place inside and outside the hospital. Half a dozen Baghdad police units, a bomb-disposal team, and a Hazmat crew were all on standby.

Mustafa, Samir, and Sinbad were parked across the street from the hospital’s ambulance bay. Sinbad had offered the use of his embassy car as a mobile command post and Mustafa had accepted, thinking it would be more comfortable than the black van. Also—and this was somewhat embarrassing—the Israeli diplomatic corps, at least that part of it that was actually Mossad, had better communications gear than Arab Homeland Security did. Instead of juggling two sets of radios, Mustafa could use Sinbad’s dash-mounted system to monitor and transmit on both the AHS and local police frequencies.

Amal was in the parking structure adjacent to the hospital, posing as a booth attendant. Mustafa had hoped that an unfamiliar woman in the booth would be less likely to raise suspicion, but this part of the plan was working too well: The doctors and male nurses arriving for the 2 p.m. shift were stopping to chat Amal up, creating a small traffic jam at the garage entrance. Some of the other agents began teasing Amal about her “new boyfriends”; then Abd al Rasheed, an older agent who’d re-embraced Islam in a big way after 11/9, came on air to berate them for the crudeness of their comments.

“Enough!” Mustafa said, breaking into the transmission. “Peace be unto all of you, and knock it off! It’s almost two. Does anyone see our target?”

“Mustafa?” a voice answered almost immediately. “This is Hamdan. I think we may have him. You said Costello drives a white motorcycle?”

Mustafa glanced at Sinbad. “That’s our information, yes.” He recited a license plate number.

“That’s the one. He’s here.”

“Is he headed for the parking garage?”

“He was. He just pulled over to the curb and checked his pager. Now he’s making a cell phone call . . .”

Mustafa looked at Sinbad again and nodded hopefully towards the radio scanner. Sinbad shook his head.

“Mustafa?” Hamdan said. “Do you want us to grab him?”

Before Mustafa could answer, Abdullah clicked in from the hospital switchboard: “Mustafa, Costello’s on the line right now . . . He says he’s going to be late to work.”

“Does he say why?”

“Family emergency.”

Mustafa took his finger off the transmit button. “Did I miss something in Costello’s file about relatives in Baghdad?”

“No,” Sinbad said. “He’s got no family here. Nearest thing is a fiancée who got killed in Gaza City a few years back.”

“So who paged him?”

“Two guesses,” Samir said from the back seat.

Hamdan: “Mustafa? The guy is on the move again. What do you want us to do?”

“Follow him,” Mustafa said, making a decision. “Keep him in sight but don’t take him yet. He may be on his way to meet with the Hoffmans . . . Hamdan, do you copy?”

An oath accompanied by the blare of a car horn erupted from the radio.

“Hamdan?”

“Ah, we’re stuck behind some idiot who won’t move . . . Costello was able to squeeze around. He’s turning south onto Union Boulevard.”

Sinbad already had the car in motion. Thirty seconds later they too were on the boulevard, the white motorcycle visible a block ahead of them.

“Everyone please pay attention,” Mustafa said into the radio. “Costello is southbound, approaching the July 14th Bridge. We want to see where he’s going, so I’d ask my friends in the Baghdad PD to please stay back with your sirens off. Anyone not driving a marked car, we could use your help with the pursuit. And can I get a helicopter overhead in case we lose him?”