The sun was already high by the time Alon and Nora reached the outskirts of Limassol, where Cyprus flattened into industry, dry ports, warehouses, truck routes baked into the earth like scars.
The ocean to the south looked too calm, as if it knew better than to speak.
Their target was a storage depot owned by a shell company with no visible board, no online presence, and an address linked to two known false identities, both former Israeli intelligence contractors declared dead over a decade ago.
Yael Rimon was one of them.
Nora parked beside a shipping container bleached white by the sun. They both stepped out, armed but casual. The kind of casual that knows exactly how long it takes to reach for the weapon at your back.
“She was supposed to be burned,” Nora said as they walked. “I read the file myself. Double-tap to the chest, one to the head. Vienna extraction went sideways. The agent who confirmed it was, ”
“Eli Koren,” Alon finished.
Nora looked at him. “Of course.”
The warehouse was quiet. Locked, chained, but not alarmed. Real security doesn’t always beep.
Alon produced a slim set of picks and knelt at the chain. Two clicks. Then silence.
They stepped inside.
Rows of crates stretched into the dark, some stacked three-high, others marked with shipping codes that meant nothing. The air smelled of dust, rubber, and chemical insulation. No sound but their breath and the dull creak of metal as the door eased shut behind them.
Nora activated a handheld scanner. The screen flickered once. Then twice.
“There’s a relay here,” she whispered. “Transmitting low-frequency pulses. Tight beam. Not broadcasting. Receiving.”
She turned, moved between the crates like a ghost herself. Found the source: a small case, bolted to the underside of a packing table. She cracked it open.
Inside: a comms unit, encrypted. Active.
And beside it, an ID card. Mossad issue.
Yael Rimon.
Alive. Present.
Still in the game.
They left quickly, wiping prints, disabling the signal. Not erasing. Just watching.
Back in the car, Alon stared at the ID.
“It’s real,” he said. “The scan data’s too clean to be a clone. It was reissued. Someone signed off on this.”
Nora took it from him, held it up to the light.
“She wasn’t just part of Barak Echo,” she said. “She built the backdoor. If she’s back in play…”
“She’s the key,” Alon finished. “She knows how to trigger it without detection.”
“And if Koren’s running this show, he’s using her to bypass our own firewalls.”
Nora turned toward him, her voice low.
“If he’s using her, Alon, then why did she show herself? Why leave footprints?”
He didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a tiny slip of paper, one he hadn’t shown her before. It had been tucked inside the envelope with Leah’s photograph, back at the safehouse in Eilat.
Just two words.
“Find Yael.”
Nora stared.
“Leah left this?”
Alon nodded.
“She knew Yael wasn’t dead,” he said. “She knew something was coming.”
Nora exhaled. “Then this isn’t just about Echo. It’s about the people who were buried with it.”
That night, they returned to Larnaca, to the same narrow apartment with blackout curtains and no questions.
Nora sat at the table, typing lines of code, bouncing through digital shadows. Alon watched her in the reflection of the window, his mind working differently, less binary, more instinct.
“She’s not working for Koren,” he said finally.
Nora stopped typing. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because she’s leading us somewhere. If she wanted to disappear, she could have.”
“And if she’s leading us into a trap?”
Alon turned away from the glass.
“Then we walk in eyes open.”
Downstairs, in a parked delivery van that hadn’t moved in three days, someone watched the window of their apartment.
A camera clicked.
A transmission fired.
And thousands of kilometers away, a voice in a dark room whispered:
“They’ve taken the bait.”