this how I want to spend the rest of my life, losing friends and—?” For a moment, she couldn’t go on. She had had strong, though conflicting, feelings for Amun. For a time, she had even thought she loved him but, in the end, she had been wrong. That revelation had only exacerbated her guilt. If she hadn’t asked him, if he hadn’t loved her, Amun would never have come to Paris. He’d be alive now.
Having lost her taste for food, she handed her coffee and the rest of her bun to a homeless man on a bench, who looked up, slightly stunned, and thanked her with a nod. When they were out of his earshot, she said softly, “Peter, I can’t stand myself.”
“You’re only human.”
“Oh, please.”
“You’ve never made a mistake before?”
“Only human, yes,” she echoed him, her head down. “But this was a grievous error in judgment that I am determined never to make again.”
The silence went on so long that Peter became alarmed. “You’re not thinking of quitting.”
“I’m considering returning to Paris.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded.
A sudden change came over Peter’s face. “You’ve met someone.”
“Possibly.”
“Not a Frenchman. Please don’t tell me it’s a Frenchman.”
Silent, she stared at the kite, rising higher and higher.
He laughed. “Go,” he said. “Don’t go. Please.”
“It’s not only that,” she said. “Over there, in Paris, I realized there’s more to life than clinging to the shadows like a spider to its web.”
Peter shook his head. “I wish I knew what to—”
All at once one leg buckled under her. She staggered and would have fallen had Peter not dropped his food, the coffee spilling like oil at their feet, and grabbed her under the arm to steady her. Concerned, he led her over to a bench, where she sat, bent over, her head in her hands.
“Breathe,” he said with one hand on her back. “Breathe.”
She nodded, did as he said.
“Soraya, what’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. Ever since I got out of the hospital I’ve been getting these dizzy spells.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“There was no need. They were getting less and less frequent. I haven’t had one for over two weeks.”
“And now this.” He moved his hand in a circular motion on her back in an attempt to soothe her. “I want you to make an appointment—”
“Stop treating me like a child.”
“Then stop acting like one.” His voice softened. “I’m concerned about you and I wonder why you aren’t.”
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
“Now you can’t go,” he said, only half in jest. “Not until—”
She laughed, and at last her head lifted. Tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. “That’s my dilemma precisely.” Then she shook her head. “I’ll never find peace, Peter.”
“What you mean is you don’t deserve to find peace.”
She looked at him and he shrugged, a wan smile on his face. “Maybe what we need to concentrate on is explaining to each other why we both deserve a bit of happiness.”
She rose, shaking off his help, and they turned back. The homeless man had finished the breakfast Soraya had provided and was curled on his side on a bench beneath sheets of The Washington Post.
As they passed him they could hear him snoring deeply, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. And maybe, she thought, he didn’t.
She shot Peter a sideways glance. “What would I do without you?”
His smile cleared, widening as he walked beside her. “You know, I ask myself that all the time.”
"Gone?” the Director said. “In what way gone?”
Above his head was engraved the current Mossad motto, excerpted from Proverbs 11:14: Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.
“She’s vanished off the grid,” Dani Amit, head of Collections, said. “Despite our most diligent efforts, we cannot locate her.”
“But we must locate her.” The Director shook his shaggy head, his livery lips pursed, a clear sign of his agitation. “Rebeka is the key to the mission. Without her, we’re dead in the water.”
“I understand that, sir. We all do.”
“Then—”
Dani Amit’s pale blue eyes seemed infinitely sad. “We are simply at a loss.”
“How can that be? She is one of us.”
“That is precisely the problem. We have trained her too well.”
“If that were the case, our people, trained as she was trained, could find her. The fact that up till now they haven’t would argue for the fact that she is something more, something better than they are.” The rebuke