The Shadow Coup

The enemy of my enemy isn't my friend. He's something worse.

It's 2:17 a.m. in Tehran. Iranian missiles are climbing toward Israel, and a Mossad surveillance team is watching a bomb wait for the Supreme Leader's convoy. Their orders are simple: record, don't interfere. Mojtaba Khamenei is Israel's sworn enemy, and nobody in Jerusalem would mourn him.

Then the bomb goes off six seconds late, and the convoy drives through untouched.

The failed hit leads to General Farhad Vaziri, a regime insider who thinks the old tyranny was too restrained. Behind him is the Shadow Table, a secret network of money and killers run by a figure known only as the Steward. Behind them is the Forty Nights: forty armed and funded cells waiting for Iran to change hands. When they wake, some of them will already be inside Israel.

Mossad can live with the devil it knows. It can't survive the madman who wants his chair.

So Eitan Barak turns to Vigil, an off-the-books alliance of six intelligence services that have spent decades spying on one another. They're given a mission none of their governments will ever admit to: keep the Supreme Leader of Iran alive.

The chase runs from Tehran to Doha to a peace summit on the shores of the Dead Sea. Along the way, the most hated man in the Middle East picks up the unlikeliest bodyguards on earth.

Talk about strange bedfellows.