A woman hides near a West Bank checkpoint, waiting for an Israeli fighter, knowing he may trust her… or shoot her, because he is Israeli and she is the enemy.
She is Helena Green, a carefully built identity masking a far more dangerous truth: Helena is a high-value asset caught between Iran’s ruthless machinery and the country that has become her home. Her life is split down the middle—between her son in Israel (Eitan) and her daughter in Iran (Zarin). When the regime tightens its grip through her family, Helena is forced into a plan that could ignite a national catastrophe.
Running parallel to Guy. He is an Israeli field operative, trained for overseas shadows and impossible decisions.
His investigation points to a security breach connected to a strategic facility (“the reactor”), with a painstaking search for the single anomaly that exposes an embedded threat.
Helena’s tragedy is that she is not a zealot—she tries to engineer her mission to avoid casualties, timing it for an empty dining hall because these are her coworkers, people with children in the army too.
But the operation escalates: a convoy is on the move, and the clock is unforgiving.
At the breaking point, Helena chooses life over ideology. She reveals the critical details: liquid explosive soaked into the tarpaulin of the largest truck, with the trigger system hidden beneath the right seat.
The blast is designed to hit as the convoy reaches Be’er Sheva, forcing Guy’s team into a high-risk interception before the convoy becomes a moving massacre.
The climax becomes a dual race: stopping the convoy and deciding what Helena is willing to sacrifice. Guy refuses to abandon her even after the primary target is neutralized; he cannot leave Helena now.
In the aftermath, the mission closes with a chilling line of tradecraft: the cleanup operation ends; the cleaner stays behind.
The team disperses across the globe, but the emotional residue remains—one woman’s love for her children colliding with geopolitics, and the haunting cost of a “hope for peace” that turns ordinary people into collateral.
In spring 2015, a woman steps out from the scrub beside a West Bank checkpoint and surrenders herself to Israeli soldiers. She is unarmed. She is not begging for asylum. She demands a ride immediately because a covert convoy is already moving under strict radio silence, and a device she helped plant is on a countdown that could turn southern Israel into an inferno. A helicopter extraction is impossible: a no-fly order covers the convoy, and anything approaching from above would be shot down. The only way forward is a motorcycle and a man who would rather kill her than save her, except that she is the only person who can neutralize what is coming.
That woman is Helena Green, known in some circles only as the blue-eyed asset. In Israel, she seems ordinary: mid-40s, divorced, the mother of a twenty-year-old son named Eitan, living a carefully maintained civilian life. But life is just a shell. Her true past starts elsewhere, and it has never stopped chasing her.
Months earlier, in December 2014, Helena posted cheerful photos from a party celebrating the end of the year and Eitan’s twentieth birthday. The event should have been safe, with friends around her, music, and normality. Then a single comment appears under her post. It comes from a fake profile, but it is unmistakably written by the man who owns her secrets. Its meaning is simple: her family is still within reach. Helena doesn’t need a direct threat; the reminder is enough to snap her back into the role she thought she had escaped – an instrument in someone else’s hand.
The handler’s next step is operational. Through an online channel designed to appear like casual chatter, he demands proof of loyalty, then suddenly raises the stakes: he instructs Helena to travel to Turkey, Turkey, and to notify him immediately upon her arrival. Helena had not planned to go anywhere. But coercion, for her, has never required a gun at her head, only the right names, memories, and leverage.
Running in parallel is Guy, an Israeli operative shaped by grief and discipline. At the novel’s outset, he is in the water, swimming until his body gives out, using relentless training to outrun the loneliness of a hollowed-out life and the loss of the woman he could not keep. The physical routine is not vanity; it is survival.
Guy’s professional world is equally punishing. He has spent years under deep cover in Marseille, cultivating a persona close to Europe’s extremist ecosystems, appearing publicly among dubious figures, and building a false trail—refugee work, radical proximity, even an Interpol file flagged for surveillance—to keep adversaries convinced he is what they need him to be. The cover is so complete that it can be fed back to Iranian intelligence as apparent proof.
When Guy is pulled back into a new mission set, the threat is framed in geopolitical terms: Iran’s external operations machinery, its long-range planning, and a clandestine apparatus known as Unit 400—an organization that targets Israelis abroad and other high-profile nationals, using networks that can reach from the Middle East to Europe and the United States. At the center of the briefing stands a notorious strategist, Ardeshir Zahedi, credited with building capabilities long before the modern structure solidified. The sense inside the room is clear: this is not a one-off plot; it is an architecture.
Back in Israel, a domestic alarm begins to pulse through the security system: something is wrong at a strategic nuclear site. The response is both modern and primitive—technology can be compromised, so human eyes must do the work. Teams are assigned to print and manually examine thousands of payroll slips, searching for a single recurring line item that might reveal a planted mechanism, a hidden financial conduit, or a cyber signature masked as routine bureaucracy.
In that same industrial ecosystem, a name surfaces: Helena, a contractor-side figure associated with a facility dining hall. She is labeled by rumor as beautiful, which makes the professionals wary rather than impressed. A photograph confirms the basics: Helena Green, 46, divorced, mother of a twenty-year-old, with striking blue eyes and a face that can be transformed with the right choices. Guy orders image manipulations and asks security to begin connecting the dots, because in his line of work beauty is never just beauty—it is an operational tool.
Helena’s chapters reveal how the trap closes. She is forced to build, step by step, a device designed to ignite a concealed payload. The method is chillingly improvised: GPS activation via a mobile phone, a flash spark, a prepared mixture, and a delivery system engineered to blend into the machinery of a truck. The explosive medium is not a simple package; it is liquid, absorbed into a tarpaulin so that the very covering becomes the weapon. Her challenge is not only engineering—it is invisibility.
Her moral conflict is equally sharp. Helena is not written as a fanatic. She calculates timing and placement to reduce casualties, weighing every step against the knowledge that the people around her are ordinary workers with families of their own. Yet the mission is bigger than her conscience; it is designed by men who do not care whether she becomes a murderer, a martyr, or simply a discarded component.
The story widens to international ground. A key phase unfolds in New York, where proximity to the United Nations raises the cost of any misstep. The team’s target footprint includes the Plaza Hotel, chosen for strategic convenience but crowded with diplomats and sensitive guests. A suite is booked under Ardeshir Zahedi’s name, turning a luxury setting into a high-wire arena. Guy and Helena must move as if they are lovers: close in the taxi, in public, at every glance, because surveillance is not just technical, it is human. Their performance is a shield that forces intimacy where neither can afford it.
As operations escalate, Helena’s past surfaces in fragments that explain why she is so vulnerable to coercion. In Iran, she grew up with a mother, Nahid, navigating a collapsing society and a revolution that policed women’s bodies and punished perceived transgression. In formative memories of Tehran’s gold market and the new ideological street, fear becomes routine: fear of crowds, of soldiers with rifles, of zealots who hate on sight. Those early pressures shape Helena into someone who understands, from childhood, that survival can depend on obedience and appearances.
Another memory adds a more personal wound: Helena is told she inherited her mother’s beauty and the blue eyes of a Jewish man. This detail functions as both identity and danger in the society around her. It foreshadows what she becomes—someone whose body and face are treated as assets, whose lineage can be weaponized against her, and whose choices are continually reframed as sins requiring punishment.
The deepest leverage, however, is not ideological—it is maternal. Helena’s life is split between Eitan in Israel and her daughter Zarin in Iran. A relationship from her past, Pajam, becomes entangled in the struggle over Zarin’s fate. Helena believes rescue is still possible, but she learns the most devastating truth of exile: time has moved on without her. Zarin has a life, a marriage, children, and her own will. Helena’s insistence becomes both love and grief—an attempt to reverse years that cannot be reversed.
All roads return to the opening crisis. At the checkpoint, the Israelis keep Helena alive for one reason: she knows where the trigger is. Under pressure, she finally gives the critical specifications. The explosive medium is in the tarpaulin of the largest truck. The activation system is hidden in a box beneath the right seat, toward the rear. The detonation is timed for the convoy’s arrival near Be’er Sheva. With those facts, Guy’s team can stop guessing and begin the only thing that matters—intercept.
The final movement is a race along Highway 40 toward the south, with Guy driving hard and Helena clinging to him, both aware that the same hands that built the device may be needed to dismantle it. Guy’s anger at Helena—his certainty that she tried to strike at the country’s most sensitive core—never disappears. But operational reality overrides vengeance. The convoy must be stopped. The mechanism must be neutralized. And Helena, asset or traitor, becomes the thin line between catastrophe and containment.
By the end, the novel leaves the reader in the true terrain of espionage fiction: not triumph, but consequence. A mission can be closed while a human being remains stranded inside it. Helena may help prevent disaster, but she cannot undo the architecture that made her. Guy may complete the operation, but he cannot erase what it cost him to keep moving. The blue-eyed asset is not a symbol of seduction; she is the living aftermath of coercion, divided loyalties, and the brutal arithmetic of saving one life without destroying another.
