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knowing. Surely you fed versions of the camera to satellite studios, so they could break them apart and reverse engineer them. I find it quite a stretch to believe he somehow found and destroyed all of those.”
    She tapped her armrest for a few minutes. “None of them work,” she finally admitted.
    “You copied the designs exactly?”
    “Yes, but we got nothing from it. We asked Razon, and he said that there were still bugs. He always had an excuse, and Razon did have trouble with his own prototypes, after all. This is an area of science nobody has breached before. We’re the pioneers. Things are bound to have bugs.”
    “All true statements,” I said. “None of which you believe.”
    “He was doing something to those cameras,” she said. “Something to make them stop functioning when he wasn’t around. He could make any of the prototypes work, given enough time to fiddle. If we swapped in one of our copies during the night, he could make it function. Then we’d swap it back, and it wouldn’t work for us.”
    “Could other people use the cameras in his presence?”
    She nodded. “They could even use them for a little while when he wasn’t there. Each camera would always stop working after a short time, and we’d have to bring him back in to fix it. You must understand, Mister Leeds. We only had a few months during which the cameras were working at all. For the majority of his career at Azari, he was considered a complete quack by most.”
    “Not by you, I assume.”
    She said nothing.
    “Without him, without that camera, your career is nothing,” I said. “You funded him. You championed him. And then, when it finally started working . . .”
    “He betrayed me,” she whispered.
    The look in her eyes was far from pleasant. It occurred to me that if we did find Mr. Razon, I might want to let J.C. at him first. J.C. would probably want to shoot the guy, but Monica wanted to rip him clean apart.

 
    S ix
        “ W ell,” Ivy said, “it’s a good thing we picked an out-of-the-way city. If we had to find Razon in a large urban center—home to three major world religions, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world—this would be really tough.”
    I smiled as we walked out of the airport. One of Monica’s two security goons went to track down the cars her company had ordered for us.
    My smile didn’t do much more than crack the corner of my lips. I hadn’t gotten much study done on Arabic during the second half of the flight. I’d spent the time thinking about Sandra. That was never productive.
    Ivy watched me from concerned eyes. She could be motherly sometimes. Kalyani strolled over to listen in on some people speaking in Hebrew nearby.
    “Ah, Israel,” J.C. said, stepping up to us. “I’ve always wanted to come over here, just to see if I could slip through security. They have the best in the world, you know.”
    He carried a black duffle on his back that I didn’t recognize. “What’s that?”
    “M4A1 carbine,” J.C. said. “With attached advanced combat optical gunsight and M203 grenade launcher.”
    “But—”
    “I have contacts over here,” he said softly. “Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.”
    The cars arrived, though the drivers seemed bemused at why four people insisted on two cars. As it was, they’d barely fit us all. I got into the second one, with Monica, Tobias, and Ivy—who sat between Monica and me in the back.
    “Do you want to talk about it?” Ivy asked softly as she did up her seat belt.
    “I don’t think we’ll find her, even with this,” I said. “Sandra is good at avoiding attention, and the trail is too cold.”
    Monica looked at me, a question on her lips, obviously thinking I’d been talking to her. It died as she remembered whom she was accompanying.
    “There might be a good reason why she left, you know,” Ivy said. “We don’t have the entire story.”
    “A good reason? One that explains why, in ten years, she’s never contacted