"This village is getting too crowded."

The car stopped twenty feet away. Villagers watched suspiciously from open doors. The driver shut off the engine. Something wheezed beneath the hood. A man got out. He was six feet tall, thin, his shoulders bent slightly forward. He wore a rumpled suit, the top button of his shirt open, his tie hanging loose. He had a mustache, a receding hairline.

Saul guessed that he was in his late thirties, and sensed that his thinness was due to enormous energy held in check, constantly burning calories even when sitting at a desk, a position suggested by the stoop of his shoulders. Grinning, the man approached. Saul had never seen him before, but the delight in the stranger's eyes made it clear that the stranger knew him. In a moment, Saul realized his mistake. It isn't me he knows. It's Erika. Her eyes glinted with the same delight as the stranger's. She smiled broadly, ecstatically, her voice an incredulous whisper. "Misha?"

"Erika." She rushed forward, hugging him. "Misha!" she whooped. Saul relaxed when he heard the name. If his guess was right, the last name would be Pletz. He'd never met the man, but he remained grateful for favors that Misha--at Erika's request--had done for his foster brother and himself three years ago. He waited respectfully until Erika stopped hugging Misha. Then stepping forward, holding Christopher in his left arm, he extended his right. "Welcome. Are you hungry? Would you like some soup?"

Misha's grip was strong. "No, thanks. I ate two bagels in the car.

They gave me heartburn."

"I often wondered what you look like."

"As I did you. About your brother--I'm sorry." Saul nodded, retreating from painful emotion. "Misha, why aren't you in Washington?" Erika asked.

"Two years ago, I was transferred back to Tel Aviv. To be honest, I wanted it I missed my homeland, my parents. And the transfer involved a promotion. I can't complain."

"What's your assignment now?" she asked. Misha reached for

Christopher's hand. "How are you, boy?"

Christopher giggled. But Misha's avoidance of Erika's question made Saul uneasy. "He's a fine-looking child." Misha surveyed the ruined building behind the small fire. "Renovations?"

"The interior decorators came today," she said. "So I heard."

"Their work wasn't to our liking. They had to be fired."

"I heard that as well."

"Is that why you're here?" Saul asked. Misha studied him. "Maybe I'll have some soup, after all." They sat around the fire. Now that the sun was almost gone, (he desert had cooled. The fire's heat was soothing.

Misha ate only three spoonfuls of soup. "Even while I was in

Washington," he told Erika, "I knew that you'd come here. When I went back to Tel Aviv, I kept up with what you were doing."

"So you're the source of the rumors the captain heard," Saul said. He pointed toward the officer who stood at a sentry post on the outskirts of the village, talking to a soldier. "I thought it was prudent to tell him he could depend on both of you. I said he should leave you alone, but if you got in touch with him, to pay attention to what you said. I wasn't trying to interfere." Saul watched him steadily. "After what happened here today," Misha said, "it was natural for him to get back to me, especially since the raid had its troubling aspects. Not just the pointlessness of attacking a village so far from the border, one with no military or geographic value." Saul anticipated. "You mean their fingernails." Misha raised his eyebrows. "Then you noticed? Why didn't you mention it to the captain?"

"Before I decided how much to depend on him, I wanted to see how good he was."

"Well, he's very good," Misha said. "Dependable enough to share his suspicions only with me until I decided how to deal with this."

"We might as well stop talking around it," Saul said. "The men who attacked this village weren't typical guerrillas. Never mind that their rifles still had traces of grease from the packing crate, or that their clothes were tattered but their boots were brand-new. I could explain all that by pretending to believe they'd recently been reequipped. But their fingernails. They'd smeared dirt over their hands. The trouble is, it hadn't gotten under their nails. Stupid pride. Did they figure none of them would be killed? Did they think we wouldn't notice their twenty-dollar manicures? They weren't terrorists. They were assassins.

Imported. Chosen because they were Arabs. But their usual territory isn't the desert. It's Athens, Rome," Paris, or London."

Misha nodded. "Three years out here, and you haven't lost your skills."

Saul pointed toward the ruined building behind him. "And it's pretty obvious, the attack wasn't directed against the whole village. Our home took most of the damage. The objective was us." Erika stood, walked behind Misha, and put her hands on his shoulders. "Old friend, why are you here?" Misha peered up sadly. "What is it? What's wrong?" she asked. "Erika, your father's disappeared.

The stability of the past three years had now been destroyed. The sense of peace seemed irretrievable. The constants of his former life had replaced it--tension, suspicion, guardedness. Escape was apparently impossible. Even here, the world intruded, and attitudes he'd been desperate to smother returned as strong as ever. In the night, with

Christopher asleep at a neighbor's house and Misha asleep in his car,

Saul sat with Erika by the fire outside the ruin of their home. "If we were the target," he said, "and I don't think there's any doubt that we were, we have to assume other teams will come for us." Erika repeatedly jabbed a stick at the fire. "It wouldn't be fair to allow our presence to threaten the village," he added. "So what do we do? Put up a sign--the people you want don't live here anymore?" The blaze of the fire reflected off her eyes. "They'll find out we've gone the same way they found out we were here."

"But why did they come at all?" Saul shook his head. "Three years is a long time for the past to catch up to us. And my understanding with the

Agency was if I stayed out of sight they'd pretend I didn't exist."

"That's one thing we did, all right," she said bitterly. "We stayed out of sight."

"So I don't think this has anything to do with the past."

"Then whatever the reason for the attack, it's new."

"That still doesn't tell us why."

"You think it's coincidence?" The reference was vague, but he knew what she meant

"Your father's disappearance?"

"Yesterday."

"And today the attack?"

"Bad news always seems to come in twos and threes," she said, "but..."

"I don't believe in coincidence. The obvious shouldn't be ignored. If a pattern stares you in the face, don't turn away from it"

"So let's not turn away," she said. "You know what it means." She poked the stick harder at the fire. "It's another reason to abandon our home.

What's left of our home." Saul thought about the irrigation ditches he'd worked three years to construct and improve. "It makes me angry."

"Good. This wasn't worth having if we give it up easily."

"And we don't have a chance against whoever we'll be hunting if we go after them indifferently."

"I'm not indifferent about my father. One of the sacrifices of living out here was not seeing him." The fire crackled. Erika suddenly stood.

"We'd better get ready. The men who attacked us did a us backhanded favor. What's left of our possessions we can literally carry." 'To find out what happened to your father."

"And pay back whoever drove us from our home."

"It's been three years." Saul hesitated. "Regardless of Misha's compliments, are we still good enough?"

"Good enough? Hey, for the past three years, I've just been resting.

The people who took my father will wish to God they'd never messed with us when they find out exactly how good we are." the penitent