My wife is sleeping with who?

She nodded in agreement. “Our people think the same thing. We believe ISIS wants some grand stroke, something on the scale of 9-11.”

“Okay, let’s say that they were able to knock down the tallest building in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. How would that help them re-establish the caliphate?” I asked.

“If they bombed the Knesset or caused some similar disaster,” she said, “it would certainly send shock waves throughout the nation. But that wouldn’t do anything to weaken the Israeli military, and ISIS has to know that we’d retaliate with everything we have. Surely those people wouldn’t want that.”

“I agree,” I said. “Another Mideast war would be disruptive, but so far none of them have turned out very well for the Arabs,” I said. “If I were them, my goal would be a knock-out blow, something that would take Israel out of the equation completely. Put yourself in their shoes: what could do that?”

Esther and I played “what-ifs” for a few minutes, then her face paled. “If I were ISIS, I know what my target would be: Dimona.”

“The nuclear site in the Negev desert?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said. “If they could manage to destroy it they could turn the State of Israel into another Chernobyl.”

That scenario was horrifying to me, but Esther seemed to regain her composure. “I can’t tell you the details,” she said, “but that place is as heavily defended as any location in Israel and possibly the world. There’s no way they could even get near it, much less destroy it.”

Just then the live feed from Sydney showed fireworks bursting over the iconic opera house as the Earth continued its inevitable march toward a new year. I started to look away, but then I stared again at the scene. The soaring fireworks gave me the answer. “The Patriots,” I yelled. “The virus is targeted at the Patriot missiles!”

I rushed to the door of our room and found our liaison outside. “We need someone from whoever manufactures the Patriot missile system,” I yelled. “Get them here fast – fly them in if you have to.”

While we waited, Esther got on the phone and called Tel Aviv. Most of her conversation was in Hebrew so I didn’t understand what she was saying, but the conversation got pretty heated at times.

Afterwards, I asked her what was going on. “The damned Israeli Defense Force is convinced that their system hasn’t been breached and there’s nothing wrong with Yaholom.”

“What’s Yaholom?” I asked.

“That’s our name for the Patriot system,” she said. “They think we’re chasing phantoms.”

I went online and tried to find information about the Patriot system. As I was scanning various links, the door opened and a young man wearing a jacket with a Raytheon logo came into the room. “We make the Patriot system,” he said breezily. “Whatcha got?” I quickly explained our hypothesis and showed him to the computer terminal and the virus we had found. He looked at it for a few minutes and the bored expression on his face disappeared. Quickly he pulled a laptop out of his carryall and began checking lines of code.

After a few minutes he looked up at us and said, “Oh, shit.”