Two a.m.
Ava slid her arm from beneath his pillow. Cautiously, she pulled back the duvet. She sat up and listened. Tariq breathed slowly, his face turned away from her. Next to him on his nightstand stood a bottle of mineral water. This was a special bottle, however, one that Ava had stealthily and surreptitiously supplemented with a draft of Valium and Xanax run up by the local compounding pharmacy at the request of Dr. Lutz. Nothing too strong, just a little something to nudge him into deep REM sleep. With luck, he’d awake feeling better and more refreshed than ever.
Ava slid off the bed and stood. The bedroom was cool, a humidifier running in one corner and an air purifier in another. She waited for Tariq to stir. She discerned no movement nor change in breathing. The drugs had done their work. She padded to the bathroom, where she took her phone from her clutch. She had no bathrobe or T-shirt to protect her modesty. She considered wrapping a towel around herself but decided it would be more trouble than it was worth. She returned to the bedroom and walked directly to the door. No more worrying about waking Tariq. She was operational. The handle turned silently. She drew a breath, ordering her heart to calm down, and meanwhile rehearsed the path to Tariq’s office. Downstairs, turn left, continue to the end ofthe hallway, last room on the left. She’d found a sales prospectus for the Chesa Grischuna on the net, with a detailed floor plan and pictures of every room. Clients interested in purchasing a 150-million-franc property preferred to learn as much about it as possible before visiting.
A last breath and go. She opened the door and peeked into the hall. One step and she froze. There, not ten feet away, sat Jerry, asleep in a high-backed chair, chin resting on his chest. She walked past him, heel to toe, on the plush carpeting. If he woke, she’d ask where the kitchen was. Look at her, she was famished. He’d know better than to ask why.
She found the stairs and descended two flights to the fifth floor, or the second above ground. Left down the hall. Last door. Her fingers closed around the handle. Please, let it be unlocked. She was so lousy with a pick. She turned the handle. Open.
Ava closed the door behind her. She pulled up the photo of TNT and Abbasi in her mind. The desk was against the far wall, beneath a window looking onto the hillside behind the chalet. There were two chairs in front of it and a low table carved from a tree trunk. It was dark. No matter how well her eyes adjusted, she needed light to see. She turned on her phone’s flashlight and took a step forward. Sconces on the walls came to life, illuminating the room. She gasped, turning toward the door behind her, expecting to find someone. The door remained closed. A motion sensor, she realized. There was a picture window to her right. For anyone looking in, she was as well lit as an actress on a Broadway stage. A mad search for a dimmer, but to no avail.
She crossed the room to Tariq’s desk. The furniture was spare and sleek, what she thought of as Scandinavian design. She needed less than a minute to find what she’d come for. The blueprint tube sat on the credenza behind the desk. Stenciled on it in bold, black lettering were the initials “NNF,” for Natanz Nuclear Facility.
Ava popped the endcap. Inside were twenty sheets of drawings, all standard engineering scale, thirty-four by twenty-two inches. One by one, she laid them flat on the desk and photographed them. Until now, everything she’d told Zvi Gelber was conjecture and hearsay. Theword of an interested observer. He said that. He said this. As for the meetings between TNT and Abbasi, first in Doha, then here yesterday in St. Moritz, there was no proof as to the subject of their discussions.
Until now.
The drawings meant nothing to her. She couldn’t tell a circuit from a resistor. She could, however, read the names of the engineers who’d drawn up the plans—written in that perfect blocky script in blue ink on the bottom right of each page—and the header identifying the subject:Binomial Transmitter.
The name provoked a shiver.
All those years ago, sometime in the weeks before Ava had been sent to retrieve the first weapon from the Golan Heights, she was called into a meeting with a general attached to the nuclear command. Once he’d been a professor of nuclear physics at a university in Germany. She remembered the general’s stony face and his flat, matter-of-fact voice as he’d described in horrific, skin-crawling detail what would happen when Samson detonated:
“We are talking about a one-kiloton device, maybe a little less. A chunk of enriched uranium the size of a golf ball. These things work in three ways. First, there is the blast; then, there is the heat; and finally, the radiation. One KT, that’s a thousand tons of dynamite. Two million pounds. Enough to fill a hundred dump trucks.
“So, you press the button. Boom. First thing is the blast. In a second, far less actually, shock waves travel two hundred meters in every direction, with a pressure of twenty pounds per square inch greater than normal atmospheric pressure—‘over pressure,’ it is called—flattening everything it comes in contact with. Wood, cement, steel: everything. At the same time, the plutonium ignites into a fireball with temperatures as high as the center of the sun. Anyone close by—one hundred meters, two hundred—is vaporized. Think about turning on the lights. On. Off. On. Off. There is nothing left. Not even ashes.
“Then there is the radiation. At the moment of detonation, the device releases an extraordinary burst of gamma and neutron radiationlethal to anyone directly exposed to it. Even if you survive the blast, you’ll be dead in an hour, your bones literally dissolving inside your body.
“In the blink of an eye, a city block is leveled. Maybe a few stronger buildings remain, maybe not. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people dead. The others wish they were. The blast wave continues to expand. The wall of fire and heat ignites materials far away. There’s flying glass, debris, fallout. The electromagnetic pulse wipes out all computers, phones, anything with electrical insides. Gas lines explode. In short, devastation.
“These devices are designed to be detonated at ground level. Think of a crater one hundred feet deep, ten times as wide. All that dirt or concrete and anything nearby is shot into the sky, coated with radioactive atoms, coming back to earth who knows where.”
“Stop,” said Ava.
“And of course the secondary effects—”
“Stop, I said!”
“I’m sorry,” said the general. “I get carried away. But you get the picture.”
Yes, Ava had gotten the picture. It was not one she would ever forget.
No one seeing the plans for the transmitter could mistake them for anything other than what they were. Nor could they deny who had produced them and on whose orders. Every photograph carried a GPS location. The plans were in Tariq al-Sabah’s residence in St. Moritz. Emails between TNT and Abbasi confirmed a million-dollar payment for work done. The drawings, combined with Ava’s firsthand testimony of Tariq’s enmity toward his brother and his fury about a rapprochement between the major Gulf countries and Israel, painted a damning picture. The “where” and “when” of a coming attack might be unknown, but the “who” and the “why” were firmly established.
Tariq al-Sabah intended to use Samson, an Israeli-manufactured one-kiloton nuclear device, to end all hopes of a Greater Gulf Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Then in a flash of insight, Ava understood why TNT had secretly met with Yehudi Rosenfeld—or perhaps, Itmar Ben-Gold himself.Ben-Gold and his Kach Party despised the idea of rapprochement as much as Tariq did. Once Israel allied itself with progressive Arab interests, it became, by definition, progressive itself. If a spirit of “All for one and one for all” was to prevail, Ben-Gold and his Kach Party, who preached isolation and colonialism, would not have a seat at the table. Like the tiny but rich state of Qatar, Ben-Gold and Kach would be bypassed—not middlemen, not influencers, but outsiders. Israel had spoken, and it had decided on the path of peace, prosperity, and inclusivity. It went without saying that a fanatic like Ben-Gold would do everything within his power to prevent any such thing from coming to pass.
Ava recalled Zvi Gelber’s remarks about TNT’s involvement in the peace negotiations between Hamas and Israel. It must have been there that he’d met Ben-Gold. The two bonded over their mutual dislike of Crown Prince of Qatar Jabr al-Sabah’s plan for the Greater Gulf Co-Prosperity Sphere. She would never know who approached whom first. It was probably an offhand comment. “Can you believe this nonsense?” or “This is ridiculous.” A look of shared dislike, mutual hatred even. Nothing more was needed to plant the seeds of an alliance. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The final iteration in her cascade of insights proved the most chilling. TNT possessed Samson. TNT also possessed plans to build the transmitter necessary to detonate it. Only one thing was missing. The code needed to detonate the warhead. In fact, there were two. One code to deactivate the safety. The second to blow the thing up. Who had the codes? The Israeli minister of defense. Itmar Ben-Gold. It was too perfect.
Ava returned the plans to the blueprint tube and placed it where she’d found it, the initials “NNF” facing up. It was the dead of night. She had a bottle of wine sloshing through her veins, and she felt as amped as if she were under live fire. She knew too much while the rest of the world knew nothing. It was a terrible responsibility.
With haste, Ava emailed the pictures of the engineering plans to Zvi Gelber. She had no time to wait for a confirmation of receipt. At any moment, TNT or Jerry or another unseen member of his security team might throw open the door and discover her trespassing. She could no longer say she was searching for the kitchen. A naked woman with a cell phone in her hand painted an incriminating picture. She could feel the executioner’s blade brushing her neck. One after the other, she deleted the photographs. All the while, she rehearsed new explanations for why she might be prowling through the house at 2:27 in the morning. None held a tablespoon of water. When she’d finished erasing the pictures, she crept to the door and peeked out. Look and listen. She neither saw nor heard a soul. The house was asleep.
Ava scurried from the office and dashed up the stairs two at a time, halting at the seventh-floor landing. The chair was empty. Jerry was no longer at his post. She didn’t bother looking for him. Sometimes the best defense is offense. Eyes to the fore, she crossed the landing and reentered the bedroom. The curtains were open. By the moon’s half light, she could see that TNT hadn’t moved. Keeping up her unapologetic, forthright bearing, she went to the bathroom and left the door ajar. She turned on the lights. She used the facilities and flushed afterward. She washed her hands. She coughed. Sometimes noise was quieter than silence. When she returned to bed, she drew herself up next to Tariq and held him. He shifted, mumbling a few words, and was still.
