Storm Front

that. And sometimes, when things like this happen, I think, the Europeans don’t like Israelis so much.”
    “Annoying.” And delaying, Virgil thought.
Mossad.
    “At least I’m not so jet-lagged as if I came straight through. Going west is easier than going east.” She looked past him to the luggage carousel. “My suitcase is going around.”
    Virgil retrieved the bag, which was extremely light. “You travel light—doesn’t feel like there’s much in here.”
    “Not yet,” she said. “Do you know this place . . . Sam’s Club?”
    —
    Y AEL -2 HAD a room reservation at the Holiday Inn Express in Mankato, which was out of the town center, and not the same one housing either the Turks or the Texan. On the way down to Mankato, Yael-2 told Virgil almost exactly the same story that Yael-1 had, of the theft, the flight, and the importance of the stone.
    She did not try to hide the fact that the stone had been translated, and gave Virgil about the same information that he’d eventually squeezed from Yael-1.
    Yael-1, he thought, had been very well briefed.
    At Mankato, he told Yael-2, “We have to stop at my house for a moment. We need a private conversation, which I will explain when we get there. I need to look at my laptop while we’re doing it.”
    She was mystified. “Have I done something?”
    “Probably not, but somebody else has,” Virgil said.
    Virgil parked in his driveway, took Yael-2 in through the kitchen, paused to water his cactus, which appeared to be dying of thirst, and then asked her if she’d like anything to eat. She inquired about the possibility of fruit. Virgil opened the refrigerator, looked inside, and said, “Apples, oranges, green grapes, a few bing cherries, and an unopened tub of cantaloupe slices.”
    She took some grapes and cherries, and they moved to the living room. Virgil opened his computer, apologized insincerely about the test, and asked her to identify the people whose names he’d taken from the IAA website. He ran through twenty names, and she nailed them all.
    He shut the computer and said, “All right. I believe you. I believed you before, but better safe than sorry. The reason I had to ask is that two nights ago, a woman arrived here in Minnesota and identified herself as Yael Aronov from the Israel Antiquities Authority. She’s been working with me for two days, trying to find the stone. There’s some reason to think that she might be Mossad.”
    “Why would you think that?”
    “Because everybody who has seen her said so—Turks, Arabs, Texans.”
    “Texans?”
    “One, anyway,” Virgil said.
    Yael-2 sat for a moment, looking down at her hands, but her eyes flicked back and forth as though she were working down a pathway, and then she said, “This fucking Mossad. This is why I had trouble in Amsterdam. Not because the Dutch hate Israelis.”
    “But why would they do it?” Virgil asked.
    “Because only three things can happen with this stone,” Yael said. “One, we prove it is authentic, which it appears to be, and we rewrite the history of Israel. Or, anyway, we rewrite the Bible. Two, we prove it is a fake, but many people don’t believe us, especially not the Arabs. Then we engage in another propaganda war about whether Jews have land rights in Israel, and the French again call us a shitty little country. Three, we drop it in the sea and the issue does not come up.
They think.
This would be very tempting for the large brains at the Mossad—to simply destroy the issue.”
    “And your organization would not approve?”
    “Of course not,” Yael-2 said. “Throwing it in the sea? This would be a sin. And since there are already photographs, it would not kill the legend of the stone anyway. It might even make things worse—if the Mossad is found to have thrown the stone in the sea, then our enemies would say we did it to cover up.”
    “Which you would have.”
    “Yes, and maybe unnecessarily,” she said. “It still could prove to be a fake.”
    “Nobody seems to think that,” Virgil said. “Except, maybe, me.”
    “You think it’s a fake?”
    “I can’t make any sense out of Jones’s run out of Israel. It all seemed like a con job.”
    “I don’t understand this phrase,” she said.
    “It seemed too . . . contrived to me,” Virgil said. “Like he knew the stone was going to appear, and he was prepared for it.”
    “I see. Interesting. This has been mooted at my agency,” Yael-2 said.
    “In any case, we need to