But Shamron was in no particular hurry to see them, for he was quite certain he knew more about the terrible events that evening in Paris than they ever would.

For one hour Shamron sat in his chair, stone-faced, smoking one cigarette after another, watching CNN International on one television, the BBC on another, French state television on the third. He didn’t particularly care what the correspondents had to say-they knew next to nothing at this point, and Shamron knew he could put words in their mouths with one five-minute phone call. He wanted to hear from the witnesses, the people who had seen the assassination with their own eyes. They would tell him what he wanted to know.

A German girl, interviewed on CNN, described the auto accident that preceded the assault: “There were two vehicles, a van of some sort, and a sedan. Maybe it was a Peugeot, but I can’t be sure. Traffic on the bridge came to a standstill in a matter of seconds.”

Shamron used his remote to mute CNN and turn up the volume on the BBC. A taxi driver from the Ivory Coast described the killer: dark hair, well dressed, good-looking, cool. The killer had been with a girl on the bridge when the accident occurred: “A blond girl, a little heavy, a foreigner, definitely not French.” But the taxi driver saw nothing else, because he took cover beneath the dashboard when the bomb went off and didn’t look up again until the shooting stopped.

Shamron removed a scuffed leather-bound notebook from his shirt pocket, laid it carefully on the desk, and opened it to a blank page. In his small precise hand he wrote a single word.