As someone who grew up on the fault lines of the Cold War, I love a good spy thriller as much as the next man. I don’t mind a James Bond spoof with fancy gadgets and gorgeous babes, but I truly thrive on the more real-life plots of John le Carré, full of bumbling agents, bureaucratic squabbles, complexities of human existence, and the fog of (the Cold) war. For falling asleep on airplanes, though, I rely on the outlandish Cold War tales of the heroic exploits of muscular hulks with stratospheric IQs who are being chased by a couple of tank divisions and a squad of world-class torturers. Usually taking place in palinka-soaked Budapest or slivovitz-flooded Bratislava, they are mostly written by people who could not tell the difference between either the drinks or the cities. As I sign off, I sometimes dream about the author being run over by a tank.

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These days pulp fiction is much harder to come by. The next obvious topic—the conspiracies of sadistic bankers thwarted and unmasked by poorly paid yet honest treasury agents—is still getting written up, I suppose. So one has to make do with real life, or what passes for it.

Amid the news of a sluggish global economic recovery and frustrated electorates in Iraq and elsewhere, the story of the assassination in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh—a member, by some accounts a founder, of the military wing of Hamas—by a squad of professional killers late January 19 or early January 20 (even that is not quite clear) has provided an element of suspense in this coldest of the climate-change era winters. To date, the number of spies who invaded Dubai's Al Bustan Rotana Hotel with tennis rackets in their hands, stalked and killed their prey, and then came out of the duty-free is 27 and counting.

The suspicion fell as it had to on the one country, which is both an enemy of Hamas and admits to having targeted killings in its repertoire. Israeli diplomats were invited to the ministries of several countries and given thinly veiled warnings about the wisdom of forging other countries’ passports. The media had fewer compunctions and declared the Israeli foreign intelligence arm, the Mossad, as “almost certainly” behind the operation. The Israelis, as usual, winked and smirked, which many people took as a tacit admission of guilt.

In my classification of thrillers above, the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh would definitely fall within my above-mentioned airborne category. Israelis with tennis rackets in Dubai are not something unheard of (Shahar Peer reached the semifinals there last year), yet to send perhaps as many as 30 Double-O agents into an Arab country to kill one arms smuggler sounds like so much of an overkill. The elaborate MO with men in drag, electronic door openers and muscle relaxants to dress up the murder as a natural death does not quite square with the same identity-stealing, fingerprints-borrowing, and strictly cash-paying rogues posing for security cameras and obligingly leaving behind imprints of their credit cards. Most people who met Meir Dagan would agree he is not stupid.

The reactions in the region itself were strangely subdued. Dubai's police chief mildly suggested that Israelis would do better to wage their wars at home rather than export them to the duty-free paradise. There were no outbursts of anger in the Arab street. Three suspects were in custody in Dubai—all Palestinians. Another three allegedly escaped to Iran. One would fear for their safety there.

So, could it in fact have been a le Carré story of boxes within boxes and mirrors reflecting the fleeting reflections in other mirrors? Could all the ill-covered tracks pointing to Israelis have been planted to draw the attention away from the real culprits? Or more explosively still, could the truly unspeakable have happened—Israelis and Palestinians working together to stop a common enemy? If it was the last, we will never know.