His first action after returning to the service had been to remove the pompous Scandinavian furnishings of his predecessor and donate them to a charity for Russian émigrés. Now the office looked like the battlefield headquarters of a fighting general. It stressed mobility and function over style and grace. For his desk Shamron used a large, scarred library table. Along the wall opposite the window was a row of gunmetal file cabinets. On the shelf behind his desk was a thirty-year-old German-made shortwave radio. Shamron had no need for the daily summaries of the Office radio-monitoring department, because he spoke a half-dozen languages fluently and understood a half-dozen more. He could also repair the radio himself when it broke down. In fact, he could fix almost anything electronic. Once his senior staff had arrived for a weekly planning meeting to find Shamron peering into the entrails of Queen Esther’s videocassette player.

The only hint of modernity in the office was the row of large television sets opposite his desk. Using his remote controls, he switched them on one by one. He had lost the hearing in one ear, so he turned up the volume quite loud, until it sounded as if three men-a Frenchman, an Englishman, and an American-were having a violent row in his office.

Outside, in the chamber between Esther’s office and his own, Shamron’s senior staff had gathered like anxious acolytes awaiting an audience with their master. There was the whippetlike Eli from Planning and the Talmudic Mordecai, the service’s executive officer. There was Yossi, the genius from the Europe Desk who had read the Greats at Oxford, and Lev, the highly flammable chief of Operations, who filled his precious empty hours by collecting predatory insects. Only Lev seemed to have no physical fear of Shamron. Every few minutes he would thrust his angular head through the doorway and shout, “For God’s sake, Ari! When? Sometime tonight, I hope!”