Dillman lurched to run away, but Meir swung the ax, catching him in the torso. Dillman fell to the ground, gasping for air, the ax stuck in his side. The pain was so intense he couldn’t even scream. His mouth went agape, his eyes bulged, and blood gushed down his chest and side.

Dillman reached desperately at the ax handle.

Calmly, Meir knelt next to him.

“You like my ax?” asked Meir, smiling. “It’s for chopping the heads off traitors.”

Meir stood and placed a foot on Dillman’s chest then jerked up on the handle, pulling the steel ax head from the traitor’s body. Dillman whimpered in agony. He was bleeding out, drifting into shock, moments away from death.

Meir lifted the ax over his head. He swung down, burying the blade into Dillman’s skull.

A white van moved slowly around the corner of the school, crawling toward Meir. The van stopped a few feet from the corpse. Meir watched as the back of the van opened and two men in blue unibody suits climbed out.

The Mossad cleanup crew jogged forward, placing a stretcher next to Dillman’s blood-soaked corpse.

“One thing,” Meir said.

“Yes, commander.”

“Don’t touch the ax,” he ordered.

3

RESIDENCE OF THE PREMIER

ZHONGNANHAI

BEIJING, PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (PRC)

A small brown pony with a fluffy tan mane stood patiently in the large backyard of a simple red building with an ornately decorated roof. At least twenty school girls gathered in front of the pony, waiting their turn.

It was a balmy Saturday afternoon at the official residence of the premier of China, Qishan Li, who was elevated three years ago. Li’s face sported a large smile as he watched his granddaughter, Meixiu, climb atop the animal. Her friends all clapped loudly and screamed as Meixiu moved the pony away from the house.

The crowd in the backyard included Meixiu’s classmates from the private all-girls school she attended, their parents, and an assortment of other well-wishers, staff members, and sycophants. Li adored his granddaughter, and his annual birthday party for her was a well-known event. It was a chance not only for Meixiu and her friends and family to celebrate, but an opportunity for Chinese politicians and ministers to curry favor with the premier by giving the young girl elaborate gifts.

Meixiu had opened all of them, and the back terrace was cluttered with gifts: bright sweaters, jewelry, toys, shoes, flowers, and a hundred other items large and small, stacked on tables for the guests to admire.

A half mile away, a dark blue delivery van pulled up to Xinhua Gate. The driver lowered the window and handed his ID to one of the armed soldiers guarding the entrance.

The soldier inspected the identification. The driver was from the Ministry of State Security.

“Who is it for?”

“The girl,” said the driver. “A present from Minister Bhang.”

The soldier passed his ministry ID back to him and nodded to another soldier to let the van through the gates.

The van moved at a placid speed through the massive multibuilding compound that served as central headquarters for the Chinese government, including the Communist Party and the State Council. Pretty trees and manicured lawns separated the ancient, beautifully maintained buildings. Every few hundred yards stood an armed soldier or two. The van stopped outside Li’s residence. The driver climbed out of the van as a pair of armed soldiers in paramilitary gear crossed the front lawn of the house.

The driver opened the back of the van. All three men stood and stared inside. Sitting in the back was a lone object, a large brown shiny-new Louis Vuitton trunk with a pink ribbon wrapped garishly around it, then tied in a bow.

“It’s heavy,” said the driver. “Give me a hand, will you?”

The three men lifted the trunk and carried it across the lawn. Another guard, this one in plain clothes, opened the front door.

They carried the trunk through the house. At the door to the outside terrace, Li’s wife caught the sight of the three men, then let out a delighted laugh.

“What have we here?” she yelled in a high-pitched giggle.

“From Minister Bhang, madam,” said the driver.

“Oh, delightful,” she said, waving them toward the door. “Just delightful.”

They carried the trunk to the back lawn amid excited oohs and aahs. Meixiu, still atop the pony, let out a squeal as she suddenly saw the present being set down on the lawn. She practically jumped from the pony and ran across the grass to the trunk.

A bright yellow envelope was taped to the top of the trunk.

“To Meixiu,” said Meixiu, reading the note aloud as Li and his wife stood at the young girl’s side, surrounded by the rest of the children and adults. “On this, the happiest of days, happy birthday to you, from Minister Fao Bhang.”

Li glanced at his wife, a slightly confounded smile on his face.

“Who is that, Grandfather?” asked Meixiu.

“Just someone I work with,” said Li.

“What a kind gesture,” said Li’s wife.

“May I open it?” asked Meixiu, a huge smile of excitement on her face.

“Of course,” bellowed Li, gleefully.

The girl pulled one end of the ribbon and let it fall to the ground. She unclasped the two buckles on the front of the trunk, then lifted it up.

At first there were smiles and shouts of delight, as many people didn’t understand what it was they were seeing. Then came the silence, as smiles disappeared. Finally, there was the scream, the first one, from Meixiu herself, a piercing yelp of a scream that ripped the air. Her scream was soon joined by others from her grandmother, schoolmates, and everyone else within sight of the trunk.

Inside the trunk was the body of a dead man, stuffed unnaturally into the trunk, dressed in tennis shorts, a tennis shirt, covered in a flood of dried blood and mucus. In the middle of the man’s head was an ax, which had been hacked deep into the skull.

As Meixiu suddenly vomited and everyone else scrambled to leave amid a chorus of quiet hysteria, Li turned calmly to one of the plainclothed security men.

“Return this to the ministry,” said Li as he reached for his chest and tried to control his anger. “Then tell Fao Bhang I want to see him immediately.”

4

MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY

BEIJING

“Do you recognize him, sir?”

Fao Bhang, China’s minister of State Security, the top intelligence official in China, stared at the mangled corpse. It was stuffed like a side of beef into the Louis Vuitton trunk. The smell was overwhelming, but the pungent aroma didn’t stop Bhang from looking. The dead man had on tennis sneakers, shorts, and what had been a white tennis shirt. A long gash had been cleaved into the torso, at least a foot long and four inches wide. His ribs were visible. The skin around the gash was swelled up, septic and rotting. From the man’s skull, a large ax jutted out, the ax head embedded deep into the dead man’s forehead. At the nape of the neck, a silver Star of David lay still, attached to a thin necklace.

*   *   *

Bhang had met Dillman more than a decade before. Bhang had been sent to Israel to kill a Chinese dissident hiding out in a Jerusalem tenement. The operation had gone flawlessly; it would be a one-day hit; in and out, bragging rights back at the ministry. But it had gone awry at the airport. They’d stopped him; his cover had been blown somehow.

Within hours Bhang was tied up and sweating in a Mossad interrogation house, located in a quiet Tel Aviv suburb called Savyon. Dillman was his interrogator. He was Mossad’s deputy chief operating officer, and Bhang recognized him immediately.

“Welcome to Israel, Fao,” Dillman had said. “Did you finish the job on the old man? A seventy-four-year-old with arthritis. That must have been pretty hard, yes?”