The Red Sea was a mirror that morning, flat, gleaming, deceptively still. Below the surface, currents pulled quietly, shaping unseen paths in the salt and silt.
Alon stood at the edge of the dock behind the safehouse, one hand gripping the railing, the other holding a cigarette he hadn’t lit. He hadn’t smoked in years. But the ritual, the weight, the scent, the pause, brought back something useful.
Focus.
Inside, Nora worked at the kitchen table, her laptop open beside a half-empty mug of black coffee gone cold. She looked like she hadn’t slept. Truth was, neither of them had.
“Got something,” she called.
Alon stepped in.
She turned the screen toward him. On it, a schematic, a branching code tree overlayed with coordinates, marked pulses, and device handshakes.
“This is what the flash drive was hiding,” she said. “A coded log. One we didn’t see at first because it’s disguised as test data.”
“What kind of test?”
“Remote engagement. Someone launched a shadow command from a relay uplink inside Israel. Not just a ping, an actual transmission key.”
Alon leaned closer. “When?”
“Thirty-six hours ago. And this, ” she tapped the screen “, is the return pulse. Which means someone confirmed a successful handoff.”
“So it’s active.”
“It’s more than active,” Nora said. “It’s waiting.”
He exhaled slowly. “And the source?”
“I triangulated the origin. Military-grade antenna. Tel Aviv. Government sector. You’re not going to like it.”
She turned the laptop. On the screen was a photo of a gray building on Kaplan Street, Mossad’s civilian-facing cybersecurity hub. Windowless. Secure. Supposed to be off-grid.
“Access logs?” he asked.
“Scrubbed clean. Someone used internal credentials to log in remotely. Clearance level: red-black.”
Only a handful of people held that kind of access.
And one of them was Avi Dar.
By midday, they were on a flight back north.
No luggage. No record. Just shadows and silence between them.
They landed at Ramon Airport, grabbed a waiting sedan from a lock-up hangar, and drove straight to Tel Aviv.
The city didn’t feel like home anymore.
Alon kept his eyes on the traffic. Nora was watching him, even when he wasn’t watching her.
“You think it’s Avi,” she said.
“I think he’s covering something.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No. It’s worse.”
The meeting was quiet, unannounced. Avi Dar’s office sat three floors below the main nerve center of the Mossad compound, behind two keycard doors and one biometric lock. No windows. Just a desk, a shelf of old field manuals, and the man himself, tired, gray, and waiting.
“Close the door,” Avi said without looking up.
Alon stepped in. Nora stayed outside.
Avi folded his hands on the desk.
“You went to Eilat without authorization,” he said.
“You sent the signal,” Alon replied.
Avi raised an eyebrow. “You think I’d be that clumsy?”
“You’re not clumsy. You’re calculating. You didn’t expect her to be there.”
A pause.
“Who?”
Alon leaned forward. “Leah Matalon.”
That made Avi look up.
His expression didn’t shift, but something behind his eyes flickered.
“She’s dead,” he said, flatly.
“No,” Alon replied. “She was bait.”
Another pause. Then, quietly: “You were never meant to see her.”
They left the compound ten minutes later. No shouting. No fight.
But the silence in the car on the way back said everything.
“He knew,” Nora said.
“Of course he knew.”
“Why not kill us?”
“Because he doesn’t have to. Not yet.”
That night, they returned to the safehouse. Power was out. Generator dead.
Inside, the walls were scorched.
The listening equipment, laptops, uplinks, data drives, all burned.
Still smoldering.
Nora stepped toward the desk, her mouth slightly open. On top, untouched by the fire, sat a single envelope. Unmarked.
Inside: a photo. A body, charred, unrecognizable, laid on a concrete floor. Next to it, an Israeli passport, partially melted. The name had been burned away.
But Alon knew who it was.
It was Leah.
Or at least, that’s what they wanted him to believe.
“She’s gone,” Nora whispered.
“No,” Alon said. “This isn’t a burn. It’s a burial. They want us to stop.”
Nora picked up the photo, studied it. “They torched our data.”
“They torched our trust,” Alon said.
He turned toward the window. Outside, the horizon bled into the night.
“We’re past extraction now.”
She looked at him.
“We going dark?”
He nodded. “From now on, we follow our own signals.”