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before they’d taken their seats, I started pouring out everything that had happened. My voice broke here and there, but I managed to get through it without crying. They watched me with solemn expressions as I spoke, never interrupting.
    When I’d signalled I was done, Oren looked at me and said, “I know all about it. I was in the next room while you were being interrogated. So was Elan. You were always within range of one of our cameras.”
    I froze. Then I flashed back to my cell and the odd wall coverings placed throughout the room: the oil painting of a cornfield and the travel posters—one of Greece, the other of Croatia—opposite one another on the far sides of the rectangular room. I started thinking about that stock scene from a hundred TV dramas, in which a team of cops work over some poor sap while men in suits, casually drinking coffee and exchanging jaded wisecracks, watch from behind one-way glass. The roles were clear: these were the men in suits and I was the sap.
    By this time, I was six months into my training as a Mossad agent. When I’d been arrested by narcs a few days before, I thought I’d stumbled into some sort of random snafu—an embarrassing screw-up that might get me labelled a druggie and kicked out of my training program. Now I realized this was my training program. The cell, the interrogation, this seaside debriefing—they were all part of a test to see if I could maintain my cover under duress.
    Up until this point, I’d put up with everything that had been thrown at me. But arresting a guy, putting him in jail, knocking him around until he resembled a barely continent lowlife—this was too weird, too demeaning. My reaction to Oren’s cool confession was that I wanted out.
    â€œI don’t think I’m cut out for this sort of thing,” I told him. “I’d like to go home.”
    The journey to this moment began three years earlier, shortly after I’d finished reserve service in the Israeli Defense Forces. At the time, I was living with my wife and infant son on the kibbutz. Between working the land and taking care of my family, the kibbutz was my world. This was the era before the Internet or cheap international phone calls, so my communication with family and old friends was restricted to the blue aerograms that occasionally made it from Canada.
    Then, one day, I received an odd piece of mail from the Israeli government. The brief letter was typewritten, unsigned, and composed in the formal style that typifies Israeli official correspondence. (Since I began learning Hebrew, I had observed that it is almost two separate languages, one spoken and one written. The written form is very formal, and uses words that are never used in the spoken form.) Yet something about the document stood out: the phrasing was cryptic and obfuscated by bureaucratic jargon. The upshot was that I’d been selected to interview for a vaguely defined job in the domain of “international co-operation.”
    At the time, I was working on the kibbutz’s cotton plantation. The job had its benefits—namely, tear-assing through the fields of the Bet Shean Valley on a dirt bike or in a dusty Jeep. My most vivid memory of life in the field was whiling away the hours spotting Dorcas gazelle, striped hyena, and the dreaded tsepha , or Palestinian viper, a snake so feared that it’s used as a symbol for one of the IDF’s paratroop battalions. On one occasion, I killed a tsepha in the field. When I proudly brought its carcass back to the plantation’s offices, I was scolded for killing such an effective rodent hunter.
    Notwithstanding such pleasures, however, I was beginning to realize that irrigation, fertilization, and pest control were not where my heart lay. I considered taking a leave of absence from the kibbutz and heading back to British Columbia with my wife and son, so that they could meet my family and experience life in