78

KING DAVID HOTEL, JERUSALEM —10 DECEMBER

A full day had gone by, and there was no sign of Haqqani.

Marcus’s wake-up call came at 5 a.m. But he was already awake. He had been for more than an hour, trying to think of some way out of this mess and coming up with nothing. He rolled out of bed, threw on running shorts, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt, and met Tomer Ben Ami, deputy director of the Shin Bet, in the lobby of the five-star hotel. No other guests were present, only the front desk staff and an older man mopping and polishing the floors of the grand vestibule. The rains had stopped, but the sky remained threatening, and it was cold and getting colder. Marcus wasn’t particularly looking forward to a run, but he was glad the police agency veteran had offered to work out with him.

“So where are we headed?” Marcus asked.

“Ever done ‘Murph’?” Tomer replied.

“Yeah, a million years ago.”

“Welcome back.” The Israeli smiled.

Marcus did not return the smile. “You’re kidding,” he said.

Tomer wasn’t. “Murph” was a fairly grueling workout and one of the few things Marcus didn’t miss about his Secret Service days. Designed in honor of Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy, a Navy SEAL who was killed in action in Afghanistan back in 2005, the CrossFit routine had become a favorite of U.S. Special Forces operators and the country’s most elite law enforcement officers, who performed it as a way of honoring the memory of this heroic American warrior. Marcus was familiar with the workout but hadn’t known its popularity had crossed the ocean or that a man nearly twenty years his senior could do it and wanted to.

They began by running a mile through the streets of Jerusalem. That was the easy part. Next, they did a hundred pull-ups, side by side, followed by two hundred push-ups, followed by three hundred air squats. By the end, Marcus was desperately sucking in oxygen. Tomer was drenched in sweat but beaming from ear to ear.

“Come on, Ryker, get the lead out,” the Israeli shouted, swatting him on the butt as they headed out on another one-mile run.

As Marcus’s feet pounded the pavement, trying to keep up, he realized he was hurting in joints and muscles he didn’t remember having. Ever since joining the CIA under the guise of working for DSS, he’d been working out far more regularly than he had since his wife and son were killed. But not nearly this hard, and only that frigid Wednesday morning did he realize just how out of shape he still was. The one saving grace of the entire ordeal was that they hadn’t done the hour-long workout wearing twenty pounds of body armor, as Marcus had back in the Secret Service.

They wound up at the Shin Bet’s Jerusalem office. There, Tomer took him down to the agency’s basement gun range. They toweled off, downed several bottles of water, and did target practice for an hour with handguns and submachine guns. Afterward Tomer drove Marcus back to the King David in his Range Rover.

After he showered, shaved, and dressed in a freshly pressed suit, Marcus found Secret Service deputy director Carl Roseboro waiting for him in the lobby. A few minutes later, Tomer pulled up out front, also showered and dressed for the day. Roseboro and Ryker climbed in, and they headed to the Old City.

“Anything on this Haqqani guy?” Roseboro asked.

“Not yet,” said Tomer.

With just one week before Air Force One was wheels down in Tel Aviv, the Israeli prime minister’s office was ecstatic, Tomer told them. The visit of the Saudi monarch was a huge diplomatic breakthrough, arguably bigger than Anwar Sadat’s arrival in 1977. But Israeli security services were growing more nervous by the day.

“That’s not exactly reassuring,” Roseboro said.

“It’s not supposed to be,” Tomer replied.

“I want you to tell me you guys have this all under control.”

“I wish I could.”

“Israel has never lost a visiting head of state, right?”

“Right.”

“And Rabin was the only Israeli prime minister ever assassinated, right?”

“Right again.”

“And that was a long time ago.”

“1995.”

“And you guys have tightened up your protocols since then, right?” Roseboro pressed.

“Of course, but you don’t understand,” Tomer explained as they found a place to park and headed up to the Temple Mount. “The stakes are much higher now. Can you even begin to imagine how catastrophic it would be to Israel’s reputation if a Muslim king gets popped while visiting our capital?”