The alley behind the compound smelled of dust, oil, and heat-rotted garbage.
The air clung to their skin, heavy as wet cloth, humming with the low throb of distant traffic and the faint crackle of overhead transformers.
Alon crouched near a crumbling wall, one hand pressed against the hot concrete, the other gripping the silenced Glock resting low at his hip. Across from him, Nora knelt, her breath steady, her eyes hidden behind matte black lenses. In this light, she looked carved from iron and sun.
They didn’t speak.
Words weren’t needed.
Three minutes.
That was the window. No alarms. No reinforcements. Just precision and movement, one breath flowing into the next.
At precisely 01:04:00, Nora tapped once on the stone between them.
Go.
The back entrance was rusted, chained, padlocked through the middle. Nora dropped a thermal blade against the chain, silent melt, no spark, a hiss barely louder than breath. The door gave.
Inside: silence.
A narrow corridor, tiled in pale blue, peeling in long curls. A flickering fluorescent buzzed weakly overhead.
The building had once been a Ministry clinic, then repurposed, then forgotten.
Now it was a tomb waiting to remember what it once was.
First floor: empty. Broken filing cabinets. Water damage. Footsteps etched in dust. No cameras.
Second floor: motion sensor tripped, low beep from a corner. Not standard surveillance. Repurposed civilian tech.
They were improvising. Hiding.
Third floor: footsteps. Faint.
Alon signaled.
They moved.
He reached the landing first, pistol raised. The door at the end of the corridor was slightly ajar.
From within: breathing.
Shallow. Controlled.
He stepped in.
The room was windowless. A single chair. Fluorescent light humming above.
Dr. Lina Mansour sat motionless, hands bound in her lap, ankles zip-tied to the chair base. Her hair was matted. Her blouse stained.
But her eyes, her eyes were steel.
“Nora,” she said calmly, as if greeting her in a café.
Nora moved to her, crouched low.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
“None. Just isolation.”
Alon scanned the room. No signs of resistance. No traps.
“Anyone else in the building?” he asked.
“One,” Lina said. “Outside the elevator.”
Nora moved fast. Two steps. One shot.
Silenced.
A body dropped.
They left the compound as quickly as they came.
Back through the alley. Into the car. Onto the road before the building had a chance to realize it had been breached.
But the silence in the car wasn’t victory.
It was something else.
Alon drove. Eyes forward.
Nora sat in the back with Lina, pressing water to her hands, checking for tremors.
Lina didn’t shake.
She only whispered.
“I gave them the Accord.”
Alon didn’t turn. “Which version?”
She didn’t answer right away.
Then,
“The one no one is supposed to see.”
The air in the car shifted.
Nora leaned closer. “You mean the clause.”
“Yes,” Lina whispered. “The conditional compliance article.”
Alon’s grip on the wheel tightened.
Clause 14-B. The ghost clause. The one that required Israel to provide “deep-code transparency” of legacy Mossad operations in exchange for long-term economic guarantees.
It was never supposed to exist.
Let alone be signed.
“They have it?” Alon asked.
“They have it,” Lina replied. “And they’re planning to leak it.”
“To who?”
She turned her head, slowly.
“To him.”
Alon knew the name before she said it.
Eli Koren.
That night, the Cairo skyline shimmered like the aftermath of a slow fire.
Alon stood on the hotel balcony, watching the lights flicker across the Nile. The call to prayer echoed from the old city, distant and fractured by wind.
Inside, Lina slept. Nora sat at the table, eyes on a laptop, decrypting satellite logs.
But Alon just stood there, breathing in a city that had hosted peace talks before, and buried enough blood beneath them to know better.
This wasn’t a rescue.
It was a warning.
A knife, handed back with the blade first.