SAID JOE AFTER LOWERING himself cautiously into the armchair. “I’ve spoken to the war room. They’re checking every airport in Europe, and soon they’ll start searching in hospitals. It’s a Herculean task, but there is a point to it. But I’m also thinking about something else, something that might have to do with the gulf between living under a borrowed identity and the real life she knew after she came back.” Ehud listened to him and sipped his tea. Rachel had been embedded in enemy territory for nearly four years, he reflected. There are people who marry and have children in that span of time, people start and finish their studies, others build up their careers. Those people are not working undercover, living two parallel lives. He tried to remember what he knew about the daily purchases she made, about her work in the school, about the tiresome days between special operations, and realized that he remembered very little. “We’ll start with the operations,”
