Eilat woke slowly, the city blinking under a gauze of pre-dawn haze.
The Red Sea was still, colored in bruises, violet, charcoal, a streak of blood where the light caught the water just right.
Alon sat on the edge of a crumbling cliff above the beach, watching it all unfold. The wind pushed at him in dry gusts, carrying salt, grit, and the faint scent of diesel from the docks below.
He hadn’t slept.
The files on the satellite drive, what they’d found in the trapdoor outpost, were burned into his mind. Not just the footage of Leah, or the image of Koren standing behind her like a phantom from a grave. It was the structure of it all. The language in the code. Familiar. Precise.
He hadn’t just recognized it.
He had written some of it.
Nora approached from behind, holding two paper cups of bitter gas station coffee. She handed him one and sat beside him, pulling her knees in close.
“He was always two moves ahead,” she said.
Alon didn’t answer.
Nora sipped and winced. “You think he’s working alone?”
“No. Eli was never a lone operator. He needs systems to infect.”
She looked at him. “And you think Mossad’s compromised?”
“I think it already was. I think he’s just accelerating the collapse.”
A silence settled between them. Not the heavy kind, but the resigned kind. The silence of people who’ve stepped beyond the edge, and know they won’t be turning back.
Alon finally stood, dusting sand from his hands.
“We’re not taking this up the chain,” he said. “No reports. No debriefs. Not yet.”
Nora arched an eyebrow. “You’re asking me to falsify an entire mission.”
“I’m asking you to disappear with me. Just long enough to see the next move before it’s played.”
She was quiet for a moment.
Then: “Where?”
“North,” he said. “We follow the money. The drop in Cyprus. The encrypted sale. It wasn’t just about Barak Echo, it was about the architecture behind it. The funding.”
“Eli has backers,” she said.
“He always did.”
By midday, they were back at the safehouse, packing what was left, stripping IDs, wiping devices.
They moved like ghosts preparing to vanish.
Outside, a rental car idled under the sun, a different make, a different license, no history. Just forward motion.
Nora zipped her field bag and looked around the room.
“This was supposed to be a two-day intercept,” she said. “Quick in, quick out.”
Alon didn’t respond. He was holding something, an old field coin. Bronze, dented. The kind agents received after certain kinds of missions. Ones that left you changed.
He slid it into his pocket.
Then turned to the table, and left something behind: the burnt photo of Leah, the one meant to scare them off. He placed it face-down, quietly.
A statement.
They drove through Eilat without speaking. Past the beaches, the tourist shops, the falafel stands and scuba ads. Past the hotel they once used as a drop point. Past the checkpoint they bypassed on the way in.
At the last traffic circle before the highway, Nora finally asked, “What if she’s already dead?”
Alon kept his eyes on the road.
“She’s not,” he said. “Not yet.”
The desert opened before them like a question waiting for its answer.
They didn’t look back.
They never would.