“He may choose a different hotel.”

“He might,” Fineberg acknowledged, “but he is a creature of habit. One suspects it will be the same hotel, the same suite.”

“He had four bodyguards,” the general mused, “and they were armed. We allowed them their weapons as a courtesy.”

“Of course.”

“How many of you will there be?”

“Four,” said Hyman Fineberg. “We have the money to purchase only one chance, so we must prepare for it wisely and use it well.”

The general smiled and ran his left hand over the top of the attaché cases. “You may not wear uniforms. Civilian clothes only.”

“Of course.”

“No one else must be harmed.”

“I understand,” said Hyman Fineberg. He pushed the button on his left armrest to lower his window an inch, then removed a pack of cigarettes from a pocket. He offered one to the general, who refused, then lit one for himself.

They discussed the murder as if it were a magazine photo op and agreed that whenever another visit was announced, Fineberg would again make contact.

General Syafi’i Darma was philosophical. “No one lives forever,” he muttered. “Life must go on.”

Dag Mosher’s office in downtown Tel Aviv was in a drab, nondescript building a few blocks from the sun-washed Mediterranean. His guest today, Jake Grafton, got the only padded chair in front of his desk. The two technicians who joined Mosher and Grafton sat in metal folding chairs and held their graphs and reports on their knees. They talked for ten minutes. Summing up, the senior tech, a woman in a print dress with iron gray hair that she pulled back in a bun, held a graph where Grafton and Mosher could see it and said, “There was no increase in Syrian electronic activity immediately before or during the attack. This graph shows activity in ten major wavelengths, and as you can see, the lines are essentially flat.”

Mosher nodded.

The junior tech, a man wearing eyeglasses so thick they distorted other people’s view of his eyes, said, “The ECM tapes from the planes show nothing but routine search radar scans were detected. The pilots reported no antiair activity. No interceptors were scrambled by the Syrians. The conclusion is inescapable; the Syrians never detected our planes.”