The Bourne Sanction

One

WHO IS DAVID Webb?”

Moira Trevor, standing in front of his desk at Georgetown University, asked the question so seriously that Jason Bourne felt obliged to answer.

“Strange,” he said, “no one’s ever asked me that before. David Webb is a linguistics expert, a man with two children who are living happily with their grandparents”-Marie’s parents-“on a ranch in Canada.”

Moira frowned. “Don’t you miss them?”

“I miss them terribly,” Bourne said, “but the truth is they’re far better off where they are. What kind of life could I offer them? And then there’s the constant danger from my Bourne identity. Marie was kidnapped and threatened in order to force me to do something I had no intention of doing. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“But surely you see them from time to time.”

“As often as I can, but it’s difficult. I can’t afford to have anyone following me back to them.”

“My heart goes out to you,” Moira said, meaning it. She smiled. “I must say it’s odd seeing you here, on a university campus, behind a desk.” She laughed. “Shall I buy you a pipe and a jacket with elbow patches?”

Bourne smiled. “I’m content here, Moira. Really I am.”

“I’m happy for you. Martin’s death was difficult for both of us. My anodyne is going back to work full-bore. Yours is obviously here, in a new life.”

“An old life, really.” Bourne looked around the office. “Marie was happiest when I was teaching, when she could count on me being home every night in time to have dinner with her and the kids.”

“What about you?” Moira asked. “Were you happiest here?”

A cloud passed across Bourne’s face. “I was happy being with Marie.” He turned to her. “I can’t imagine being able to say that to anyone else but you.”

“A rare compliment from you, Jason.”

“Are my compliments so rare?”

“Like Martin, you’re a master at keeping secrets,” she said. “But I have doubts about how healthy that is.”

“I’m sure it’s not healthy at all,” Bourne said. “But it’s the life we chose.”

“Speaking of which.” She sat down on a chair opposite him. “I came early for our dinner date to talk to you about a work situation, but now, seeing how content you are here, I don’t know whether to continue.”

Bourne recalled the first time he had seen her, a slim, shapely figure in the mist, dark hair swirling about her face. She was standing at the parapet in the Cloisters, overlooking the Hudson River. The two of them had come there to say good-bye to their mutual friend Martin Lindros, whom Bourne had valiantly tried to save, only to fail.

Today Moira was dressed in a wool suit, a silk blouse open at the throat. Her face was strong, with a prominent nose, deep brown eyes wide apart, intelligent, curved slightly at their outer corners. Her hair fell to her shoulders in luxuriant waves. There was an uncommon serenity about her, a woman who knew what she was about, who wouldn’t be intimidated or bullied by anyone, woman or man.

Perhaps this last was what Bourne liked best about her. In that, though in no other way, she was like Marie. He had never pried into her relationship with Martin, but he assumed it had been romantic, since Martin had given Bourne standing orders to send her a dozen red roses should he ever die. This Bourne had done, with a sadness whose depth surprised even him.

Settled in her chair, one long, shapely leg crossed over her knee, she looked the model of a European businesswoman. She had told him that she was half French, half English, but her genes still carried the imprint of ancient Venetian and Turkish ancestors. She was proud of the fire in her mixed blood, the result of wars, invasions, fierce love.

“Go on.” He leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

She nodded. “All right. As I’ve told you, NextGen Energy Solutions has completed our new liquid natural gas terminal in Long Beach. Our first shipment is due in two weeks. I had this idea, which now seems utterly crazy, but here goes. I’d like you to head up the security procedures. My bosses are worried the terminal would make an awfully tempting target for any terrorist group, and I agree. Frankly, I can’t think of anyone who’d make it more secure than you.”

“I’m flattered, Moira. But I have obligations here. As you know, Professor Specter has installed me as the head of the Comparative Linguistics Department. I don’t want to disappoint him.”

“I like Dominic Specter, Jason, really I do. You’ve made it clear that he’s your mentor. Actually, he’s David Webb’s mentor, right? But it’s Jason Bourne I first met, it feels like it’s Jason Bourne I’ve been coming to know these last few months. Who is Jason Bourne’s mentor?”

Bourne’s face darkened, as it had at the mention of Marie. “Alex Conklin’s dead.”

Moira shifted in her chair. “If you come work with me there’s no baggage attached to it. Think about it. It’s a chance to leave your past lives behind-both David Webb’s and Jason Bourne’s. I’m flying to Munich shortly because a key element of the terminal is being manufactured there. I need an expert opinion on it when I check the specs.”

“Moira, there are any number of experts you can use.”

“But none whose opinion I trust as much as yours. This is crucial stuff, Jason. More than half the goods shipped into the United States come through the port at Long Beach, so our security measures have to be something special. The US government has already shown it has neither the time nor the inclination to secure commercial traffic, so we’re forced to police it ourselves. The danger to this terminal is real and it’s serious. I know how expert you are at bypassing even the most arcane security systems. You’re the perfect candidate to put nonconventional measures into place.”

Bourne stood. “Moira, listen to me. Marie was David Webb’s biggest cheerleader. Since her death, I’ve let go of him completely. But he’s not dead, he’s not an invalid. He lives on inside me. When I fall asleep I dream of his life as if it was someone else’s, and I wake up in a sweat. I feel as if a part of me has been sliced off. I don’t want to feel that way anymore. It’s time to give David Webb his due.”

Veronica Hart’s step was light and virtually carefree as she was admitted past checkpoint after checkpoint on her way into the bunker that was the West Wing of the White House. The job she was about to be handed-director of Central Intelligence-was a formidable one, especially in the aftermath of last year’s twin debacles of murder and gross breach of security. Nevertheless, she had never been happier. Having a sense of purpose was vital to her; being singled out for daunting responsibility was the ultimate validation of all the arduous work, setbacks, and threats she’d had to endure because of her gender.

There was also the matter of her age. At forty-six she was the youngest DCI in recent memory. Being the youngest at something was nothing new to her. Her astonishing intelligence combined with her fierce determination to ensure that she was the youngest to graduate from her college, youngest to be appointed to military intelligence, to central army command, to a highly lucrative Black River private intelligence position in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa where, to this day, not even the heads of the seven directorates within CI knew precisely where she had been posted, whom she commanded, or what her mission had been.

Now, at last, she was steps away from the apex, the top of the intelligence heap. She’d successfully leapt all the hurdles, sidestepped every trap, negotiated every maze, learned who to befriend and who to show her back to. She had endured relentless sexual innuendo, rumors of conduct unbecoming, stories of her reliance on her male inferiors who supposedly did her thinking for her. In each case she had triumphed, emphatically putting a stake through the heart of the lies and, in some instances, taking down their instigators.

She was, at this stage of her life, a force to be reckoned with, a fact in which she justifiably reveled. So it was with a light heart that she approached her meeting with the president. In her briefcase was a thick file detailing the changes she proposed to make in CI to clean up the unholy mess left behind by Karim al-Jamil and the subsequent murder of her predecessor. Not surprisingly, CI was in total disarray, morale had never been lower, and of course there was resentment across the board from the all-male directorate heads, each of whom felt he should have been elevated to DCI.

The chaos and low morale were about to change, and she had a raft of initiatives to ensure it. She was absolutely certain that the president would be delighted not only with her plans but also with the speed with which she would implement them. An intelligence organization as important and vital as CI could not long endure the despair into which it had sunk. Only the anti-terrorist black ops, Typhon, brainchild of Martin Lindros, was running normally, and for that she had its new director, Soraya Moore, to thank. Soraya’s assumption of command had been seamless. Her operatives loved her, would follow her into the fires of Hades should she ask it of them. As for the rest of CI, it was for herself to heal, energize, and give a refocused sense of purpose.

She was surprised-perhaps shocked wasn’t too strong a word-to find the Oval Office occupied not only by the president but also by Luther LaValle, the Pentagon’s intelligence czar, and his deputy, General Richard P. Kendall. Ignoring the others, she walked across the plush American blue carpet to shake the president’s hand. She was tall, long-necked, and slender. Her ash-blond hair was cut in a stylish fashion that fell short of being masculine but lent her a business-like air. She wore a midnight-blue suit, low-heeled pumps, small gold earrings, and a minimum of makeup. Her nails were cut square across.

“Please have a seat, Veronica,” the president said. “You know Luther LaValle and General Kendall.”

“Yes.” Veronica inclined her head fractionally. “Gentlemen, a pleasure to see you.” Though nothing could be farther from the truth.

She hated LaValle. In many ways he was the most dangerous man in American intelligence, not the least because he was backed by the immensely powerful E. R. “Bud” Halliday, the secretary of defense. LaValle was a power-hungry egotist who believed that he and his people should be running American intelligence, period. He fed on war the way other people fed on meat and potatoes. And though she had never been able to prove it, she suspected that he was behind several of the more lurid rumors that had circulated about her. He enjoyed ruining other people’s reputations, savored standing impudently on the skulls of his enemies.

Ever since Afghanistan and, subsequently, Iraq, LaValle had seized the initiative-under the typically wide-ranging and murky Pentagon rubric of “preparing the battlefield” for the troops to come-to expand the purview of the Pentagon’s intelligence-gathering initiatives until now they encroached uncomfortably on those of CI. It was an open secret within American intelligence circles that he coveted CI’s operatives and its long-established international networks. Now, with the Old Man and his anointed successor dead, it would fit LaValle’s MO to try to make a land grab in the most aggressive manner possible. This was why his presence and that of his lapdog set off the most serious warning bells inside Veronica’s mind.

There were three chairs ranged in a rough semicircle in front of the president’s desk. Two of them were, of course, filled. Veronica took the third chair, acutely aware that she was flanked by the two men, doubtless by design. She laughed inwardly. If these two thought to intimidate her by making her feel surrounded, they were sorely mistaken. But then as the president began to talk she hoped to God her laugh wouldn’t echo hollowly in her mind an hour from now.

Dominic Specter hurried around the corner as Bourne was locking the door to his office. The deep frown that creased his high forehead vanished the moment he saw Bourne.

“David, I’m so glad I caught you before you left!” he said with great enthusiasm. Then, turning his charm on Bourne’s companion, he added, “And with the magnificent Moira, no less.” As always the perfect gentleman, he bowed to her in the Old World European fashion.

He returned his attention to Bourne. He was a short man full of unbridled energy despite his seventy-odd years. His head seemed perfectly round, surmounted by a halo of hair that wound from ear to ear. His eyes were dark and inquisitive, his skin a deep bronze. His generous mouth made him look vaguely and amusingly like a frog about to spring from one lily pad to another. “A matter of some concern has come up and I need your opinion.” He smiled. “I see that this evening is out of the question. Would dinner tomorrow be inconvenient?”

Bourne discerned something behind Specter’s smile that gave him pause; something was troubling his old mentor. “Why don’t we meet for breakfast?”

“Are you certain I’m not putting you out, David?” But he couldn’t hide the relief that flooded his face.

“Actually, breakfast is better for me,” Bourne lied, to make things easier for Specter. “Eight o’clock?”

“Splendid! I look forward to it.” With a nod in Moira’s direction he was off.

“A firecracker,” Moira said. “If only I’d had professors like him.”

Bourne looked at her. “Your college years must’ve been hell.”

She laughed. “Not quite as bad as all that, but then I only had two years of it before I fled to Berlin.”

“If you’d had professors like Dominic Specter, your experience would have been far different, believe me.” They sidestepped several knots of students gathered to gossip or to trade questions about their last classes.

They strode along the corridor, out the doors, descended the steps to the quad. He and Moira walked briskly across campus in the direction of the restaurant where they would have dinner. Students streamed past them, hurrying down the paths between trees and lawns. Somewhere a band was playing in the stolid, almost plodding rhythm endemic to colleges and universities. The sky was steeped in clouds, scudding overhead like clipper ships on the high seas. A dank winter wind came streaming in off the Potomac.

“There was a time when I was plunged deep in depression. I knew it but I wouldn’t accept it-you know what I mean. Professor Specter was the one who connected with me, who was able to crack the shell I was using to protect myself. To this day I have no idea how he did it or even why he persevered. He said he saw something of himself in me. In any event, he wanted to help.”

They passed the ivy-covered building where Specter, who was now the president of the School of International Studies at Georgetown, had his office. Men in tweed coats and corduroy jackets passed in and out of the doors, frowns of deep concentration on their faces.

“Professor Specter gave me a job teaching linguistics. It was like a life preserver to a drowning man. What I needed most then was a sense of order and stability. I honestly don’t know what would have happened to me if not for him. He alone understood that immersing myself in language makes me happy. No matter who I’ve been, the one constant is my proficiency with languages. Learning languages is like learning history from the inside out. It encompasses the battles of ethnicity, religion, compromise, politics. So much can be learned from language because it’s been shaped by history.”

By this time they had left campus and were walking down 36th Street, NW, toward 1789, a favorite restaurant of Moira’s, which was housed in a Federal town house. When they arrived, they were shown to a window table on the second floor in a dim, paneled, old-fashioned room with candles burning brightly on tables set with fine china and sparkling stemware. They sat down facing each other and ordered drinks.

Bourne leaned across the table, said in a low voice,”Listen to me, Moira, because I’m going to tell you something very few people know. The Bourne identity continues to haunt me. Marie used to worry that the decisions I was forced to make, the actions I had to take as Jason Bourne would eventually drain me of all feeling, that one day I’d come back to her and David Webb would be gone for good. I can’t let that happen.”

“Jason, you and I have spent quite a bit of time with each other since we met to scatter Martin’s ashes. I’ve never seen a hint that you’ve lost any part of your humanity.”

Both sat back, silent as the waiter set the drinks in front of them, handed them menus. As soon as he left, Bourne said, “That’s reassuring, believe me. In the short time I’ve known you I’ve come to value your opinions. You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever met.”

Moira took a sip of her drink, set it down, all without taking her eyes from his. “Thank you. Coming from you that’s quite a compliment, particularly because I know how special Marie was to you.”

Bourne stared down at his drink.

Moira reached across the starched white linen for his hand. “I’m sorry, now you’re drifting away.”

He glanced at her hand over his but didn’t pull away. When he looked up, he said, “I relied on her for many things. But I find now that those things are slipping away from me.”

“Is that a bad thing, or a good thing?”

“That’s just it,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Moira saw the anguish in his face, and her heart went out to him. It was only months ago that she’d seen him standing by the parapet in the Cloisters. He was clutching the bronze urn holding Martin’s ashes as if he never wanted to let it go. She’d known then, even if Martin hadn’t told her, what they’d meant to each other.

“Martin was your friend,” she said now. “You put yourself in terrible jeopardy to save him. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel anything for him. Besides, by your own admission, you’re not Jason Bourne now. You’re David Webb.”

He smiled. “You have me there.”

Her face clouded over. “I want to ask you a question, but I don’t know whether I have the right.”

At once, he responded to the seriousness of her expression. “Of course you can ask, Moira. Go on.”

She took a deep breath, let it go. “Jason, I know you’ve said that you’re content at the university, and if that’s so, fine. But I also know you blame yourself for not being able to save Martin. You must understand, though, if you couldn’t save him, no one could. You did your best; he knew that, I’m sure. And now I find myself wondering if you believe you failed him-that you’re not up to being Jason Bourne anymore. I wonder if you’ve ever considered the idea that you accepted Professor Specter’s offer at the university in order to turn away from Jason Bourne’s life.”

“Of course I’ve considered it.” After Martin’s death he’d once again decided to turn his back on Jason Bourne’s life, on the running, the deaths, a river that seemed to have as many bodies as the Ganges. Always, for him, memories lurked. The sad ones he remembered. The others, the shadowed ones that filled the halls of his mind, seemed to have shape until he neared them, when they flowed away like a tide at ebb. And what was left behind were the bleached bones of all those he’d killed or had been killed because of who he was. But he knew just as surely that as long as he drew breath, the Bourne identity wouldn’t die.

There was a tormented look in his eyes. “You have to understand how difficult it is having two personalities, always at war with each other. I wish with every fiber of my being that I could cut one of them out of me.”

Moira said, “Which one would it be?”

“That’s the damnable part,” Bourne said. “Every time I think I know, I realize that I don’t.”

Two

LUTHER LAVALLE WAS as telegenic as the president and two-thirds his age. He had straw-colored hair slicked back like a movie idol of the 1930s or 1940s and restless hands. By contrast, General Kendall was square-jawed and beady-eyed, the very essence of a ramrod officer. He was big and beefy; perhaps he’d been a fullback at Wisconsin or Ohio State. He looked to LaValle the way a running back looks to his quarterback for instructions.

“Luther,” the president said, “seeing as how you requested this meeting I think it appropriate that you begin.”

LaValle nodded, as if the president deferring to him was a fait accompli. “After the recent debacle of CI being infiltrated at its highest level, culminating with the murder of the former DCI, firmer security and controls need to be set in place. Only the Pentagon can do that.”

Veronica felt compelled to jump in before LaValle got too much of a head start. “I beg to differ, sir,” she said, aiming her remarks at the president. “Human intelligence gathering has always been the province of CI. Our on-the-ground networks are unparalleled, as are our armies of contacts, who have been cultivated for decades. The Pentagon’s expertise has always been in electronic surveillance. The two are separate, requiring altogether different methodologies and mind-sets.”

LaValle smiled as winningly as he did when appearing on Fox TV or Larry King Live. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the landscape of intelligence has changed radically since 2001. We’re at war. In my opinion this state of affairs is likely to last indefinitely, which is why the Pentagon has recently expanded its field of expertise, creating teams of clandestine DIA personnel and special-ops forces who are conducting successful counterintelligence ops in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“With all due respect, Mr. LaValle and his military machine are eager to fill any perceived vacuum or create one, if necessary. Mr. LaValle and General Kendall need us to believe that we’re in a perpetual state of war whether or not it’s the truth.” From her briefcase Veronica produced a file, which she opened and read from. “As this evidence makes clear, they have systematically directed the expansion of their human intelligence-gathering squads, outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, into other territories-CI’s territories-often with disastrous results. They’ve corrupted informers and, in at least one instance, they’ve jeopardized an ongoing CI deep-cover operation.”

After the president glanced at the pages Veronica handed him, he said, “While this is compelling, Veronica, Congress seems to be on Luther’s side. It has provided him with twenty-five million dollars a year to pay informants on the ground and to recruit mercenaries.”

“That’s part of the problem, not the solution,” Veronica said emphatically. “Theirs is a failed methodology, the same one they’ve used all the way back to the OSS in Berlin after World War Two. Our paid informants have had a history of turning on us-working for the other side, feeding us disinformation. As for the mercenaries we recruited-like the Taliban or various other Muslim insurgent groups-they, to a man, eventually turned against us to become our implacable enemies.”

“She’s got a point,” the president said.

“The past is the past,” General Kendall said angrily. His face had been darkening with every word Veronica had said. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that either our new informants or our mercenaries, both of which are vital to our victory in the Middle East, would ever turn on us. On the contrary, the intel they’ve provided has been of great help to our men on the field of battle.”

“Mercenaries, by definition, owe their allegiance to whoever pays them the most,” Veronica said. “Centuries of history from Roman times forward have proved this point over and over.”

“All this back-and-forth is of little moment.” LaValle shifted in his seat uncomfortably. Clearly he hadn’t counted on such a spirited defense. Kendall handed him a dossier, which he presented to the president. “General Kendall and I have spent the better part of two weeks putting together this proposal for how to restructure CI going forward. The Pentagon is prepared to implement this plan the moment we get your approval, Mr. President.”

To Veronica’s horror, the president looked over the proposal, then turned it over to her. “What do you say to this?”

Veronica felt suffused with rage. She was already being undermined. On the other hand, she observed, this was a good object lesson for her. Trust no one, not even seeming allies. Up until this moment she’d thought she had the full support of the president. The fact that LaValle, who was, after all, basically the mouthpiece for Defense Secretary Halliday, had the muscle to call this meeting shouldn’t have surprised her. But that the president was asking her to consider a takeover from the Pentagon was outrageous and, quite frankly, frightening.

Without even glancing at the toxic papers, she squared her shoulders. “Sir, this proposal is irrelevant, at best. I resent Mr. LaValle’s flagrant attempt to expand his intelligence empire at CI’s expense. For one thing, as I’ve detailed, the Pentagon is ill suited to direct, let alone win the trust of our vast array of agents in the field. For another, this coup would set a dangerous precedent for the entire intelligence community. Being under the control of the armed forces will not benefit our intelligence-gathering potential. On the contrary, the Pentagon’s history of flagrant disregard for human life, its legacy of illegal operations combined with well-documented fiscal profligacy, makes it an extremely poor candidate to poach on anyone else’s territory, especially CI’s.”

Only the presence of the president forced LaValle to keep his ire in check. “Sir, CI is in total disarray. It needs to be turned around ASAP. As I said, our plan can be implemented today.”

Veronica drew out the thick file detailing her plans for CI. She rose, placed it in the president’s hands. “Sir, I feel duty-bound to reiterate one of the main points of our last discussion. Though I’ve served in the military, I come from the private sector. CI is in need not only of a clean sweep but of a fresh perspective untainted by the monolithic thinking that got us into this insupportable situation in the first place.”

Jason Bourne smiled. “To be honest, tonight I don’t know who I am.” He leaned forward and said very softly, “Listen to me. I want you to take your cell phone out of your handbag without anyone seeing. I want you to call me. Can you do that?”

Moira kept her eyes on his as she found her cell in her handbag, hit the appropriate speed-dial key. His cell phone chimed. He sat back, answered the call. He spoke into the phone as if someone was on the other end of the line. Then he closed the phone, said, “I have to go. It’s an emergency. I’m sorry.”

She continued to stare at him. “Could you act even the least bit upset?” she whispered.

His mouth turned down.

“Do you really have to go?” she said in a normal tone of voice. “Now?”

“Now.” Bourne threw some bills on the table. “I’ll be in touch.”

She nodded a bit quizzically, wondering what he’d seen or heard.

Bourne went down the stairs and out of the restaurant. Immediately he turned right, walked a quarter block, then entered a store selling handmade ceramics. Positioning himself so that he had a view of the street through the plate-glass window, he pretended to look at bowls and serving dishes.

Outside, people passed by-a young couple, an elderly man with a cane, three young women, laughing. But the man who’d been seated in the back corner of their room precisely ninety seconds after they sat down did not appear. Bourne had marked him the moment he’d come in, and when he’d asked for a table in back facing them, he’d had no doubt: Someone was following him. All of a sudden he’d felt that old anxiety that had roiled him when Marie and Martin had been threatened. He’d lost Martin, he wasn’t about to lose Moira as well.

Bourne, whose interior radar had swept the second-floor dining room every few minutes or so, hadn’t picked up anyone else of a suspicious nature, so he waited now inside the ceramics shop for the tail to amble by. When this didn’t occur after five minutes, Bourne went out the door and immediately strode across the street. Using streetlights and the reflective surfaces of windows and car mirrors, he spent another few minutes scrutinizing the area for any sign of the man at the table in back. After ascertaining he was nowhere to be found, Bourne returned to the restaurant.

He went up the stairs to the second floor, but paused in the dark hallway between the staircase and the dining room. There was the man at his rear table. To any casual observer he seemed to be reading the current issue of The Washingtonian, like any good tourist, but every once in a while his gaze flicked upward for a fraction of a second, focused on Moira.

Bourne felt a little chill go through him. This man wasn’t following him; he was following Moira.

As Veronica Hart emerged through the outermost checkpoint to the West Wing, Luther LaValle emerged from the shadows, fell into step beside her.

“Nicely done,” he said icily. “Next time I’ll be better prepared.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Veronica said.

“Secretary Halliday is confident there will be. So am I.”

They had reached the hushed vestibule with its dome and columns. Busy presidential aides strode purposefully past them in either direction. Like surgeons, they exuded an air of supreme confidence and exclusivity, as if theirs was a club you desperately wanted to belong to, but never would.

“Where’s your personal pit bull?” Veronica asked. “Sniffing out crotches, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“You’re terribly flip for someone whose job is hanging by a thread.”

“It’s foolish-not to mention dangerous, Mr. LaValle-to confuse confidence with being flip.”

They pushed through the doors, went down the steps to the grounds proper. Floodlights pushed back the darkness to the edges of the premises. Beyond, streetlights glittered.

“Of course, you’re right,” LaValle said. “I apologize.”

Veronica eyed him with no little skepticism.

LaValle gave her a small smile. “I sincerely regret that we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.”

What he really regrets, Veronica thought, is my pulling him and Kendall to pieces in front of the president.Understandable, really.

As she buttoned her coat, he said, “Perhaps both of us have been coming at this situation from the wrong angle.”

Veronica knotted her scarf at her throat outside her collar. “What situation?”

“The collapse of CI.”

In the near distance, beyond the flotilla of heavy reinforced concrete anti-terrorist barriers, tourists strolled by, chatting animatedly, paused briefly to take snapshots, then went on to their dinners at McDonald’s or Burger King.

“It seems to me that more can be gained by us joining forces than by being antagonists.”

Veronica turned to him. “Listen, buddy, you take care of your shop and I’ll take care of mine. I’ve been given a job to do and I’m going to do it without interference from you or Secretary Halliday. Personally, I’m sick and tired of you people extending the line in the sand farther and farther so your empire can grow bigger. CI is off limits to you now and forever, got it?”

LaValle made a face as if he were about to whistle. Then he said, very quietly, “I’d be a bit more careful if I were you. You’re walking across a knife-edge. One false step, one hesitation, and when you fall no one’s going to be there to catch you.”

Her voice turned steely. “I’ve had my fill of your threats, too, Mr. LaValle.”

He turned up his collar against the wind. “When you get to know me better, Veronica, you’ll realize I don’t make threats. I make predictions.”

Three

THE VIOLENCE of the Black Sea fit Leonid Arkadin down to his steel-tipped shoes. In a tumultuous rain, he drove into Sevastopol from Belbek Aerodrome. Sevastopol inhabited a coveted bit of territory on the southwestern edge of the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine. Because the area was blessed with subtropical weather, its seas never froze. From the time of its founding by Greek traders as Chersonesus in 422 BC, Sevastopol was a vital commercial and military outpost for fishing fleets and naval armadas alike. Following the decline of Chersonesus-“peninsula,” in Greek-the area fell into ruin until the modern-day Sevastopol was founded in 1783 as a naval base and fortress on the southern boundaries of the Russian Empire. Most of the city’s history was linked to its military glory-the name Sevastopol translated from Greek means “august, glorious.” The name seemed justified: The city survived two bloody sieges during the Crimean War of 1854-1855 and World War Two, when it withstood Axis bombing for 250 days. Although the city was destroyed on two different occasions, it had risen from the ashes both times. As a result, the inhabitants were tough, no-nonsense people. They despised the Cold War era, dating to roughly 1960 when, because of its naval base, the USSR ordered Sevastopol off limits to visitors of all kinds. In 1997 the Russians agreed to return the city to the Ukrainians, who opened it again.

It was late afternoon when Arkadin arrived on Primorskiy Boulevard. The sky was black, except for a thin red line along the western horizon. The port bulged with round-hulled fishing ships and sleek steel-hulled naval vessels. An angry sea lashed the Monument to Scuttled Ships, commemorating the 1855 last-ditch defense of the city against the combined forces of the British, French, Turks, and Sardinians. It rose from a bed of rough granite blocks in a Corinthian column three yards high, crowned by an eagle with wings spread wide, its proud head bent, a laurel wreath gripped in its beak. Facing it, embedded in the thick seawall, were the anchors of the Russian ships that were deliberately sunk to block the harbor from the invading enemy.

Arkadin checked into the Hotel Oblast where everything, including the walls, seemed to be made of paper. The furniture was covered in fabric of hideous patterns whose colors clashed like enemies on a battlefield. The place seemed a likely candidate to go up like a torch. He made a mental note not to smoke in bed.

Downstairs, in the space that passed for a lobby, he asked the rodent-like clerk for a recommendation for a hot meal, then requested a telephone book. Taking it, he retired to an understuffed upholstered chair by a window that overlooked Admiral Nakhimov Square. And there he was on a magnificent plinth, the hero of the first defense of Sevastopol, staring stonily at Arkadin, as if aware of what was to come. This was a city, like so many in the former Soviet Union, filled with monuments to the past.

With a last glance at slope-shouldered pedestrians hurrying through the driving rain, Arkadin turned his attention to the phone book. The name that Pyotr Zilber had given up just before he’d committed suicide was Oleg Shumenko. Arkadin dearly would have loved to have gotten more out of Zilber. Now Arkadin had to page through the phone book looking for Shumenko, assuming the man had a landline, which was always problematic outside Moscow or St. Petersburg. He made note of the five Oleg Shumenkos listed, handed the book back to the clerk, and went out into the windy false dusk.

The first three Oleg Shumenkos were of no help. Arkadin, posing as a close friend of Pyotr Zilber’s, told each of them that he had a message from Pyotr so urgent it had to be transmitted in person. They looked at him blankly, shook their heads. He could see in their eyes they had no idea who Pyotr Zilber was.

The fourth Shumenko worked at Yugreftransflot, which maintained the largest fleet of refrigerated ships in Ukraine. Since Yugreftransflot was a public corporation, it took Arkadin some time just to get in to see Shumenko, who was a transport manager. Like everywhere in the former USSR, the red tape was enough to grind all work to a near halt. How anything got done in the public sector was beyond Arkadin.

At length, Shumenko appeared, led Arkadin to his tiny office, apologizing for the delay. He was a small man with very dark hair and the small ears and low forehead of a Neanderthal. When Arkadin introduced himself, Shumenko said, “Obviously, you have the wrong man. I don’t know a Pyotr Zilber.”

Arkadin consulted his list. “I only have one more Oleg Shumenko left.”

“Let me see.” Shumenko consulted the list. “Pity you didn’t come to me first. These three are my cousins. And the fifth, the one you haven’t seen yet, won’t be of any use to you. He’s dead. Fishing accident six months ago.” He handed back the list. “But all isn’t lost. There’s one other Oleg Shumenko. Though we’re not related, people are always getting us confused because we have the same patronymic, Ivanovich. He doesn’t have a landline, which is why I’m constantly getting his calls.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

Oleg Ivanovich Shumenko checked his watch. “At this hour, yes, he’d be at work. He’s a winemaker, you see. Champagne. I understand the French say you’re not allowed to use that term for any wine not produced in their Champagne region.” He chuckled. “Still, the Sevastopol Winery turns out quite a fine champagne.”

He led Arkadin from his office out through dull corridors into the enormous main vestibule. “Are you familiar with the city, gospadin Arkadin? Sevastopol is divided into five districts. We’re in the Gagarinskiy district, named after the world’s first astronaut, Yuri Alexeevich Gagarin. This is the western section of the city. To the north is the Nakhimovskiy district, which is where the mammoth dry docks are. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. No? No matter. In the eastern section, away from the water, is the rural area of the city-pasturelands and vineyards, magnificent even at this time of the year.”

He crossed the marble floor to a long banc behind which sat half a dozen functionaries looking as if they’d had little to do in the past year. From one of them Shumenko received a city map, which he drew on. Then he handed it to Arkadin, pointing at a star he’d marked.

“There’s the winery.” He glanced outside. “The sky’s clearing. Who knows, by the time you get there, you may even see some sun.”

Bourne walked the streets of Georgetown securely hidden within the crowds of college and university kids prowling the cobbles, looking for beer, girls, and guys. He was discreetly shadowing the man in the restaurant, who was, in turn, following Moira.

Once he had determined that the man was her tail, he’d backed away and returned to the street, where he’d called Moira.

“Can you think of anyone who wants to keep tabs on you?”

“I guess several,” she said. “My own company, for one. I told you they’ve become paranoid ever since we started to build the LNG station in Long Beach. NoHold Energy might be another. They’ve been waving a vice president’s job at me for six months. I could see them wanting to know more about me so they can sweeten their offer.”

“Other than those two?”

“No.”

He’d told her what he wanted her to do, and now in the Georgetown night she was doing it. They always had habits, these watchers in the shadows, little peculiarities built up from all the boring hours spent at their lonely jobs. This one liked to be on the inside of the sidewalk so he could duck quickly into a doorway if need be.

Once he had the shadow’s idiosyncracies down, it was time to take him out. But as Bourne worked his way through the crowds, moving closer to the shadow, he saw something else. The man wasn’t alone. A second tail had taken up a parallel position on the opposite side of the street, which made sense. If Moira decided to cross the street in this throng, the first shadow might run into some difficulty keeping her in sight. These people, whoever they were, were leaving little to chance.

Bourne melted back, matching his pace to that of the crowd’s. At the same time, he called Moira. She’d put in her Bluetooth earpiece so she could take his call without being conspicuous. Bourne gave her detailed instructions, then broke off following her shadows.

Moira, the back of her neck tingling as if she were in the crosshairs of an assassin’s rifle, crossed the street, walked over to M Street. The main thing for her to keep in mind, Jason said, was to move at a normal pace, neither fast nor slow. Jason had alarmed her with the news that she was being followed. She had merely maintained the illusion of being calm. There were many people from both present and past who might be following her-a number of whom she hadn’t mentioned when Jason had asked. Still, so close to the opening of the LNG terminal it was an ominous sign. She had desperately wanted to share with Jason the intel that had come to her today about the possibility of the terminal being a terrorist target, not in theory, but in reality. However, she couldn’t-not unless he was an employee of the company. She was bound by her ironclad contract not to tell anyone outside the firm any confidential information.

At 31st Street NW, she turned south, walking toward the Canal Towpath. A third of the way down the block, on her side, was a discreet plaque on which the word JEWEL was etched. She opened the ruby-colored door, entered the high-priced new restaurant. This was the kind of place where dishes were accessorized with kaffir lime foam, freeze-dried ginger, and ruby grapefruit pearls.

Smiling sweetly at the manager, she told him that she was looking for a friend. Before he could check his reservation book, she said her friend was with a man whose name she didn’t know. She’d been here several times, once with Jason, so she knew the layout. At the rear of the second room was a short corridor. Against the right-hand wall were two unisex bathrooms. If you kept on going, which she did, you came to the kitchen, all bright lights, stainless-steel pans, copper pots, huge stovetops raging at high heat. Young men and women moved around the room in what seemed to her like military precision-sous-chefs, line cooks, expediters, the pastry chef and her staff, all performing under the stern commands of the chef de cuisine.

They were all too concentrated on their respective tasks to give Moira much notice. By the time her figure did register she’d already disappeared out the rear door. In a back alley filled with Dumpsters, a White Top cab was waiting, its engine purring. She climbed in and the cab took off.

Arkadin drove through the hills of rural Nakhimovskiy district, lush even in winter. He passed checkered farmland, bounded by low forested areas. The sky was lightening, the dark, rain-laden clouds already disappearing, replaced by high cumulus that glowed like embers in the sunlight that broke through everywhere. A golden sheen covered the acres of vineyards as he approached the Sevastopol Winery. At this time of year there were no leaves or fruit, of course, but the twisted, stunted boles, like the trunks of elephants, bore a life of their own that gave the vineyard a certain mystery, a mythic aspect, as if these sleeping vines needed only the spell of a wizard to come awake.

A burly woman named Yetnikova introduced herself as Oleg Ivanovich Shumenko’s immediate supervisor-there was, apparently, no end to the tiers of supervisors in the winery. She had shoulders as wide as Arkadin’s, a red, round, vodka face with features as curiously small as those of a doll. She wore her hair tied up in a peasant babushka, but she was all bristling business.

When she demanded to know Arkadin’s business, he whipped out one of many false credentials he carried. This one identified him as a colonel in the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine. Upon seeing the SBU card, Yetnikova wilted like an unwatered plant and showed him where to find Shumenko.

Arkadin, following her direction, went down corridor after corridor. He opened each door he came to, peering inside offices, utility closets, storerooms, and the like, apologizing to the occupants as he did so.

Shumenko was working in the fermentation room when Arkadin found him. He was a reed-thin man, much younger than Arkadin had imagined-no more than thirty or so. He had thick hair the color of goldenrod that stood up from his scalp like a series of cockscombs. Music spilled out from a portable player-a British band, the Cure. Arkadin had heard the song many times in Moscow clubs, but it seemed startling here in the hind end of the Crimea.

Shumenko stood on a catwalk four yards in the air, bent over a stainless-steel apparatus as large as a blue whale. He seemed to be sniffing something, possibly the latest batch of champagne he was concocting. Rather than turn down the music, Shumenko gestured for Arkadin to join him.

Without hesitation Arkadin mounted the vertical ladder, climbed swiftly up to the catwalk. The yeasty, slightly sweet odors of fermentation tickled his nostrils, causing him to rub the end of his nose vigorously to stave off a sneezing fit. His practiced gaze swept the immediate vicinity taking in every last detail, no matter how minute.

“Oleg Ivanovich Shumenko?”

The reedy young man put aside a clipboard on which he was taking notes. “At your service.” He wore a badly fitting suit. He placed the pen he had been using in his breast pocket, where it joined a line of others. “And you would be?”

“A friend of Pyotr Zilber’s.”

“Never heard of him.”

But his eyes had already betrayed him. Arkadin reached out, turned up the music. “He’s heard of you, Oleg Ivanovich. In fact, you’re quite important to him.”

Shumenko plastered a simulated smile on his face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“There was a grave mistake made. He needs the document back.”

Shumenko, smiling still, jammed his hands in his pockets. “Once again, I must tell you-”

Arkadin made a grab for him, but Shumenko’s right hand reappeared, gripping a GSh-18 semi-automatic that was pointed at Arkadin’s heart.

“Hmm. The sights are acceptable at best,” Arkadin said.

“Please don’t move. Whoever you are-and don’t bother to give me a name that in any case will be false-you’re no friend of Pyotr’s. He must be dead. Perhaps even by your hand.”

“But the trigger pull is relatively heavy,” Arkadin continued, as if he hadn’t been listening, “so that’ll give me an extra tenth of a second.”

“A tenth of a second is nothing.”

“It’s all I need.”

Shumenko backed up, as Arkadin wanted him to, toward the curved side of a container to keep a safer distance. “Even while I mourn Pyotr’s death I will defend our network with my life.”

He backed up farther as Arkadin took another step toward him.

“It’s a long fall from here so I suggest you turn around, climb back down the ladder, and disappear into whatever sewer you crawled out of.”

As Shumenko retreated, his right foot skidded on a bit of yeast paste Arkadin had noted earlier. Shumenko’s right knee went out from under him, the hand holding the GSh-18 raised in an instinctive gesture to help keep him from falling.

In one long stride Arkadin was inside the perimeter of his defense. He made a grab for the gun, missed. His fist struck Shumenko on the right cheek, sending the reedy man lurching back into the side of the container in the space between two protruding levers. Shumenko slashed his arm in a horizontal arc, the sight on the barrel of the GSh-18 raking across the bridge of Arkadin ’s nose, drawing blood.

Arkadin made another lunge at the semi-automatic and, bent back against the curved sheet of stainless steel, the two men grappled. Shumenko was surprisingly strong for a thin man, and he was proficient in hand-to-hand combat. He had the proper counter for every attack Arkadin threw at him. They were very close now, not a hand’s span separating them. Their limbs worked quickly, hands, elbows, forearms, even shoulders used to produce pain or, in blocking, minimize it.

Gradually, Arkadin seemed to be getting the better of his adversary, but with a double feint Shumenko managed to get the butt of the GSh-18 lodged against Arkadin’s throat. He pressed in, using leverage in an attempt to crush Arkadin’s windpipe. One of Arkadin’s hands was trapped between their bodies. With the other, he pounded Shumenko’s side, but he lacked Shumenko’s leverage, and his blows did no damage. When he tried for Shumenko’s kidney, the other man twisted his hips away, so his hand glanced off the hip bone.

Shumenko pressed his advantage, bending Arkadin over the railing, trying with the butt of his gun and his upper body to shove Arkadin off the catwalk. Ribbons of darkness flowed across Arkadin’s vision, a sign that his brain was becoming oxygen-starved. He had underestimated Shumenko, and now he was about to pay the price.

He coughed, then gagged, trying to breathe. Then he moved his free hand up against the front of Shumenko’s jacket. It would seem to Shumenko-concentrating on killing the interloper-as if Arkadin was making one last futile attempt to free his trapped hand. He was taken completely off guard when Arkadin slipped a pen out of his breast pocket, stabbed it into his left eye.

Immediately Shumenko reared back. Arkadin caught the GSh-18 as it dropped from the stricken man’s nerveless hand. As Shumenko slid to the catwalk, Arkadin grabbed him by the shirtfront, knelt to be on the same level with him.

“The document,” he said. And when Shumenko’s head began to loll, “Oleg Ivanovich, listen to me. Where is the document?”

The man’s good eye glistened, running with tears. His mouth worked. Arkadin shook him until he moaned with pain.

“Where?”

“Gone.”

Arkadin had to bend his head to hear Shumenko’s whisper over the loud music. The Cure had been replaced by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

“What d’you mean gone?”

“Down the pipeline.” Shumenko’s mouth curled in the semblance of a smile. “Not what you wanted to hear, ‘friend of Pyotr Zilber,’ is it?” He blinked tears out of his good eye. “Since this is the end of the line for you, bend closer and I’ll tell you a secret.” He licked his lips as Arkadin complied, then lunged forward and bit into the lobe of Arkadin’s right ear.

Arkadin reacted without thinking. He jammed the muzzle of the GSh-18 into Shumenko’s mouth, pulled the trigger. Almost at the same instant, he realized his mistake, said “Shit!” in six different languages.

Four

BOURNE, sunk deep into the shadows opposite the restaurant Jewel, saw the two men emerge. By the annoyed expressions on their faces he knew they’d lost Moira. He kept them in sight as they moved off together. One of them began to speak into a cell phone. He paused for a moment to ask his colleague a question, then returned to his conversation on the phone. By this time the two had reached M Street, NW. Finished with his call, the man put his cell phone away. They waited on the corner, watching the nubile young girls slipping by. They didn’t slouch, Bourne noted, but stood ramrod-straight, their hands in view, at their sides. It appeared that they were waiting to be picked up; a good call on a night like this when parking was at a premium and traffic on M Street, as thick as molasses.

Bourne, without a vehicle, looked around, saw a bicyclist coming up 31st Street, NW, from the towpath. He was cycling along the gutter to avoid the traffic. Bourne walked smartly toward him and stepped in front of him. The cyclist stopped short, uttering a sharp exclamation.

“I need your bike,” Bourne said.

“Well, you bloody well can’t have it, mate,” the cyclist said with a heavy British accent.

At the corner of 31st and M, a black GMC SUV was pulling into the curb in front of the two men.

Bourne pressed four hundred dollars into the cyclist’s hand. “Like I said, right now.”

The young man stared down at the money for a moment. Then he swung off, said, “Be my guest.”

As Bourne mounted up, he handed over his helmet. “You’ll be wanting this, mate.”

The two men had already vanished into the GMC’s interior, the SUV was pulling out into the thick traffic flow. Bourne took off, leaving the cyclist to shrug behind him as he climbed onto the sidewalk.

Reaching the corner, Bourne turned right onto M Street. The GMC was three cars ahead of him. Bourne wove his way around the traffic, moving into position to keep up with the SUV. At 30th Street, NW, they all hit a red light. Bourne was forced to put one foot down, which was why he got a late start when the GMC jumped the light just before it turned green. The SUV roared ahead of the other vehicles, and Bourne launched himself forward. A white Toyota was coming from 30th into the intersection, heading right for him at a ninety-degree angle. Bourne put on a burst of speed, swerved up onto the corner sidewalk, backing a clutch of pedestrians into those behind them, to a round of curses. The Toyota, horn blaring angrily, just missed him as it jounced across M Street.

Bourne was able to make good headway, as the GMC had been slowed by the sludgy traffic up ahead, splitting off where M Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, intersected at 29th Street. Just as he neared the light he saw the GMC take off and knew he had been spotted. The problem with a bicycle, especially one that had caused a minor uproar lunging through a red light, was that the cyclist became conspicuous, exactly the opposite of what was intended.

Making the best of a worsening situation, Bourne threw caution to the wind, following the accelerating GMC into the fork as it took Pennsylvania Avenue. The good news was that the congestion prevented the GMC from keeping up speed. More good news: Another red light loomed. This time Bourne was ready for the GMC to plow right through. Swerving in and out between vehicles, he put on another burst of speed, running the red light with the big SUV. But just as he was coming abreast of the far crosswalk, a gaggle of drunk teenagers stumbled off the curb on their way across the avenue. They closed off the lane behind the GMC and were so raucous they either didn’t hear Bourne’s warning shout or didn’t care. He was forced to swerve sharply to the right. His front tire struck the curb, the bike lifted up. People scattered out of its way as it became, in effect, a missile. Bourne was able to keep it going after it landed, but there was simply nowhere for him to steer it without plowing into another group of kids. He applied the brakes without enough effect. Leaning to the right, he forced the bike down on its side, ripping his right trouser leg as it skidded along the cement.

“Are you all right?”

“What were you trying to do?”

“Didn’t you see the red light?”

“You could have killed yourself-or someone else!”

A welter of voices as pedestrians surrounded him, trying to help him out from under the bicycle. Bourne thanked them as he scrambled to his feet. He ran several hundred yards down the avenue, but as he feared the GMC was long gone.

Expelling a string of bawdily colorful curses, Arkadin rummaged through the pockets of Oleg Ivanovich Shumenko, who lay twitching in the bloodstained catwalk deep inside the Sevastopol Winery. As he did so, he wondered how he could have been such a fool. He’d done precisely what Shumenko had wanted him to do, which was to kill him. He’d rather have died than divulge the name of the next man in Pyotr Zilber’s network.

Still, there was a chance that something he had on his person would lead Arkadin farther along. Arkadin had already made a small pile of coins, bills, toothpicks, and the like. He unfolded each scrap of paper he came across, but none of them contained either a name or an address, just lists of chemicals, presumably those the winery required for fermentation or the periodic cleaning of its vats.

Shumenko’s wallet was a sad affair-sliver-thin, containing a faded photo of an older couple smiling into the sun and the camera Arkadin took to be Shumenko’s parents, a condom in a worn foil pouch, a driver’s license, car registration, ID badge for a sailing club, an IOU chit for ten thousand hryvnia-just under two thousand American dollars-two receipts, one for a restaurant, the other for a nightclub, an old photo of a young girl smiling into the camera.

In pocketing the receipts, the only reasonable leads he’d found, he inadvertently flipped over the IOU. On the reverse was the name DEVRA, written in a sharp, spiky feminine hand. Arkadin wanted to look for more, but he heard an electronic squawk, then the bawl of Yetnikova’s voice. He looked around, saw an old-fashioned walkie-talkie hanging by its strap from the railing. Stuffing the papers into his pocket, he hurried along the catwalk, slid down the ladder, made his way out of the champagne fermentation room.

Shumenko’s boss, Yetnikova, marched toward him down the labyrinthine corridors as if she were in the forefront of the Red Army entering Warsaw. Even at this distance, he could see the scowl on her face. Unlike his Russian credentials, his Ukrainian ones were paper-thin. They’d pass a cursory test, but after any kind of checking he’d be busted.

“I called the SBU office in Kiev. They did some digging on you, Colonel.” Yetnikova’s voice had turned from servile to hostile. “Or whoever you are.” She puffed herself up like a porcupine about to do battle. “They never heard of-”

She gave a little squeak as he jammed one hand over her mouth while he punched her hard in the solar plexus. She collapsed into his arms like a rag doll, and he dragged her along the corridor until he came to the utility closet. Opening the door, he shoved her in, went in after her.

Sprawled on the floor, Yetnikova slowly came to her senses. Immediately she began her bluster-cursing and promising dire consequences for the outrages perpetrated on her person. Arkadin didn’t hear her; he didn’t even see her. He attempted to block out the past, but as always the memories flattened him. They took possession of him, taking him out of himself, producing like a drug a dream-like state that over the years had become as familiar as a twin brother.

Kneeling over Yetnikova, he dodged her kicks, the snapping of her jaws. He withdrew a switchblade from a sheath strapped to the side of his right calf. When he snikked open its long, thin blade, fear finally twisted Yetnikova’s face. Her eyes opened wide and she gasped, raising her hands instinctively.

“Why are you doing this?” she cried. “Why?”

“Because of what you’ve done.”

“What? What did I do? I don’t even know you!”

“But I know you.” Slapping her hands aside, Arkadin went to work on her.

When, moments later, he was done, his vision came back into focus. He took a long, shuddering breath as if shaking off the effects of an anesthetic. He stared down at the headless corpse. Then, remembering, he kicked the head into a corner filled with filthy rags. For a moment, it rocked like a ship on the ocean. The eyes seemed to him gray with age, but they were only filmed with dust, and the release he sought eluded him once again.

Who were they?” Moira asked.

“That’s the difficulty,” Bourne told her. “I wasn’t able to find out. It would help if you could tell me why they’re following you.”

Moira frowned. “I have to assume it has something to do with the security on the LNG terminal.”

They were sitting side by side in Moira’s living room, a small, cozy space in a Georgetown town house of red-brown brick on Cambridge Place, NW, near Dumbarton Oaks. A fire was crackling and licking in the brick hearth; espresso and brandy sat on the coffee table in front of them. The chenille-covered sofa was deep enough for Moira to curl up on. It had big roll arms and a neck-high back.

“One thing I can tell you,” Bourne said, “these people are professionals.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “Any rival of my firm would hire the best people available. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m in any danger.”

Nevertheless, Bourne felt another sharp pang at the loss of Marie, then carefully, almost reverently, put the feeling aside.

“More espresso?” Moira asked.

“Please.”

Bourne handed her his cup. As she bent forward, the light V-neck sweater revealed the tops of her firm breasts. At that moment, she raised her gaze to his. There was a mischievous glint in her eyes.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Probably the same thing you are.” He rose, looked around for his coat. “I think I’d better go.”

“Jason…”

He paused. Lamplight gave her face a golden glow. “Don’t,” she said. “Stay. Please.”

He shook his head. “You and I both know that’s not a good idea.”

“Just for tonight. I don’t want to be alone, not after what you discovered.” She gave a little shiver. “I was being brave before, but I’m not you. Being followed gives me the willies.”

She offered the cup of espresso. “If it makes you feel any better, I’d prefer you sleep out here. This sofa’s quite comfortable.”

Bourne looked around at the warm chestnut walls, the dark wooden blinds, the jewel-toned accents here and there in the form of vases and bowls of flowers. An agate box with gold legs sat on a mahogany sideboard. A small brass ship’s clock ticked away beside it. The photos of the French countryside in summer and autumn made him feel both mournful and nostalgic. For precisely what, he couldn’t say. Though his mind fished for memories, none surfaced. His past was a lake of black ice. “Yes, it is.” He took the cup, sat down beside her.

She pulled a pillow against her breast. “Shall we talk about what we’ve been avoiding saying all evening?”

“I’m not big on talking.”

Her wide lips curved in a smile. “Which one of you isn’t big on talking, David Webb or Jason Bourne?”

Bourne laughed, sipped his espresso. “What if I said both of us?”

“I’d have to call you a liar.”

“We can’t have that, can we?”

“It wouldn’t be my choice.” She rested one cheek on her hand, waiting. When he said nothing further, she continued. “Please, Jason. Just talk to me.”

The old fear of getting close to someone reared its head again, but at the same time he felt a kind of melting inside him, as if his frozen heart were beginning to thaw. For some years, he’d made it an ironclad rule to keep his distance from other people. Alex Conklin had been murdered, Marie had died, Martin Lindros hadn’t made it out of Miran Shah. All gone, his only friends and first love. With a start, he realized that he hadn’t felt attracted to anyone except Marie. He hadn’t allowed himself to feel, but now he couldn’t help himself. Was that a function of the David Webb personality or of Moira herself? She was strong, self-assured. In her he recognized a kindred spirit, someone who viewed the world as he did-as an outsider.

He looked into her face, said what was in his mind. “Everyone I get close to dies.”

She sighed, put a hand briefly over his. “I’m not going to die.” Her dark brown eyes glimmered in the lamplight. “Anyway, it’s not your job to protect me.”

This was another reason he was drawn to her. She was fierce, a warrior, in her own way.

“Tell me the truth, then. Are you really happy at the university?”

Bourne thought a moment, the conflict inside him becoming an unholy din. “I think I am.” After a slight pause, he added: “I thought I was.”

There’d been a golden glow to his life with Marie, but Marie was gone, that life was in the past. With her gone, he was forced to confront the terrifying question: What was David Webb without her? He was no longer a family man. He’d been able to raise his children, he saw now, only with her love and help. And for the first time he realized what his retreat into the university really meant. He’d been trying to regain that golden life he’d had with Marie. It wasn’t only Professor Specter he didn’t want to disappoint, it was Marie.

“What are you thinking?” Moira said softly.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

She studied him for a moment. Then she nodded. “All right, then.” She rose, leaned over, kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll make up the sofa.”

“That’s all right, just tell me where the linen closet is.”

She pointed. “Over there.”

He nodded.

“Good night, Jason.”

“See you in the morning. But early. I’ve got-”

“I know. Breakfast with Dominic Specter.”

Bourne lay on his back, one arm behind his head. He was tired; he was sure he’d fall asleep immediately. But an hour after he’d turned off the lights, sleep seemed a thousand miles away. Now and again, the red-and-black remnants of the fire snapped and softly fell in on themselves. He stared at the stripes of light seeping in through the wide wooden blinds, hoping they’d take him to far-off places, which, in his case, meant his past. In some ways he was like an amputee who still felt his arm even though it had been sawed off. The sense of memories just beyond his ability to recall was maddening, an itch he couldn’t scratch. He often wished he would remember nothing at all, which was one reason Moira’s offer was so compelling. The thought of starting fresh, without the baggage of sadness and loss, was a powerful draw. This conflict was always with him, a major part of his life, whether he was David Webb or Jason Bourne. And yet, whether he liked it or not, his past was there, waiting for him like a wolf at night, if only he could reach through the mysterious barrier his brain had raised. Not for the first time, he wondered what other terrible traumas had befallen him in the past to cause his mind to protect itself from it. The fact that the answer lurked within his own mind turned his blood cold because it represented his own personal demon.

“Jason?”

The door to Moira’s bedroom was open. Despite the dimness, his keen eyes could make out her form moving slowly toward him on bare feet.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said in a throaty voice. She stopped several paces from where he lay. She was wearing a silk paisley bathrobe, belted at the waist. The lush curves of her body were unmistakable.

For a moment, they remained in silence.

“I lied to you before,” she said quietly. “I don’t want you to sleep out here.”

Bourne rose on one elbow. “I lied, too. I was thinking about what I once had and how I’ve been desperate to hang on to it. But it’s gone, Moira. All gone forever.” He drew up one leg. “I don’t want to lose you.”

She moved minutely, and a bar of light picked out the glitter of tears in her eyes. “You won’t, Jason. I promise.”

Another silence engulfed them, this one so profound they seemed to be the only two people left in the world.

At last, he held out his hand, and she came toward him. He rose from the sofa, took her in his arms. She smelled of lime and geranium. He ran his hands through her thick hair, grabbed it. Her face tilted up to him and their lips came together, and his heart shivered off another coating of ice. After a long time, he felt her hands at her waist and he stepped back.

She undid the belt and the robe parted, slid off her shoulders. Her naked flesh shone a dusky gold. She had wide hips and a deep navel; there seemed nothing about her body he didn’t love. Now it was she who took his hand, leading him to her bed, where they fell upon each other like half-starved animals.

Bourne dreamed he was standing at the window of Moira’s bedroom, peering through the wooden blinds. The streetlight fell across the sidewalk and street, casting long, oblique shadows. As he watched, one of the shadows rose up from the cobbles, walked directly toward him as if it were alive and could somehow see him through the wide wooden slats.

Bourne opened his eyes, the demarcation between sleep and consciousness instantaneous and complete. His mind was filled with the dream; he could feel his heart working in his chest harder than it should have been at this moment.

Moira’s arm was draped over his hip. He moved it to her side, rolled silently out of bed. Naked, he padded into the living room. Ashes lay in a cold, gray heap in the hearth. The ship’s clock ticked toward the fourth hour of the night. He went straight toward the bars of streetlight, peered out just as he had in his dream. As in his dream the light cast oblique shadows across the sidewalk and street. No traffic passed. All was quiet and still. It took a minute or two, but he found the movement, minute, fleeting, as if someone standing had begun to shift from one foot to the other, then changed his mind. He waited to see if the movement would continue. Instead a small puff of exhaled breath flared into the light, then almost immediately vanished.

He dressed quickly. Bypassing both the front and rear doors, he slipped out of the house via a side window. It was very cold. He held his breath so it wouldn’t steam up and betray his presence, as it had the watcher.

He stopped just before he reached the corner of the building, peered cautiously around the brick wall. He could see the curve of a shoulder, but it was at the wrong height, so low Bourne might have taken the watcher for a child. In any event, he hadn’t moved. Melting back into the shadows, he went down 30th Street, NW, turned left onto Dent Place, which paralleled Cambridge Place. When he reached the end of the block, he turned left onto Cambridge, on Moira’s block. Now he could see just where the watcher was situated, crouched between two parked cars almost directly across the street from Moira’s house.

A gust of humid wind caused the watcher to huddle down, sink his head between his shoulders, like a turtle. Bourne seized the moment to cross the street to the watcher’s side. Without pausing, he advanced down the block swiftly and silently. The watcher became aware of him far too late. He was still turning his head when Bourne grabbed him by the back of his jacket, slammed him back across the hood of the parked car.

This threw him into the light. Bourne saw his black face, recognized the features all in a split second. At once he hauled the young man up, hustled him back into the shadows, where he was certain they wouldn’t be seen by other prying eyes.

“Jesus Christ, Tyrone,” he said, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“Can’t say.” Tyrone was sullen, possibly from having been discovered.

“What d’you mean, you can’t say?”

“I signed a confidentiality agreement is why.”

Bourne frowned. “Deron wouldn’t make you sign something like that.” Deron was the art forger Bourne used for all his documents and, sometimes, unique new technologies or weapons Deron was experimenting with.

“Doan work fo Deron no more.”

“Who made you sign the agreement, Tyrone?” Bourne grabbed him by his jacket front. “Who are you working for? I don’t have time to play games with you. Answer me!”

“Can’t.” Tyrone could be damn stubborn when he wanted to be, a by-product of growing up on the streets of the northeast Washington slums. “But, okay, I guess I can take yo where yo can see fo yoself.”

He led Bourne around to the unnamed alley behind Moira’s house, stopped at an anonymous-looking black Chevy. Leaving Bourne, he used his knuckle to knock on the driver’s window. The window lowered. As he bent down to speak to whoever was inside, Bourne came up, pulled him aside so he could look in. What he saw astonished even him. The person sitting behind the wheel was Soraya Moore.

Five

WE’VE BEEN SURVEILLING her for close to ten days now,” Soraya said.

“CI?” Bourne said. “Why?”

They were sitting in the Chevy. Soraya had turned on the engine to get some heat up. She’d sent Tyrone home, even though it was clear he wanted to be her protector. According to Soraya, he was now working for her in a strictly off-the-record capacity-a kind of personal black-ops unit of one.

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“No, Tyrone can’t tell me. You can.”

Bourne had worked with Soraya when he’d put together his mission to rescue Martin Lindros, the founder and director of Typhon. She was one of the few people with whom he’d worked in the field, both times in Odessa.

“I suppose I could,” Soraya admitted, “but I won’t, because it appears that you and Moira Trevor are intimate.”

She sat staring out the window at the blank sheen of the street. Her large, deep blue eyes and her aggressive nose were the centerpieces of a bold Arabian face the color of cinnamon.

When she turned back, Bourne could see that she wasn’t happy at being forced to reveal CI intel.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” Soraya said. “Her name is Veronica Hart.”

“You ever hear of her?”

“No, and neither have any of the others.” She shrugged. “I’m quite sure that was the point. She comes from the private sector: Black River. The president decided on a new broom to sweep out the hash we’d all made of the events leading up to the Old Man’s murder.”

“What’s she like?”

“Too soon to tell, but one thing I’m willing to bet on: She’s going to be a whole helluva lot better than the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Secretary of Defense Halliday has been trying to expand his domain for years now. He’s moving through Luther LaValle, the Pentagon’s intel czar. Rumor has it that LaValle tried to pry away the DCI job from Veronica Hart.”

“And she won.” Bourne nodded. “That says something about her.”

Soraya produced a packet of Lambert amp; Butler cigarettes, knocked one out, lit up.

“When did that begin?” Bourne said.

Soraya rolled down her window partway, blew the smoke into the waning night. “The day I was promoted to director of Typhon.”

“Congratulations.” He sat back, impressed. “But now we have even more of a mystery. Why is the director of Typhon on a surveillance team at four in the morning? I would’ve thought that would be a job for someone farther down the CI food chain.”

“It would be, in other circumstances.” Soraya inhaled, blew smoke out the window again. What was left of the cigarette followed. Then she turned her body toward Bourne. “My new boss told me to handle this myself. That’s what I’m doing.”

“What does all this clandestine work have to do with Moira? She’s a civilian.”

“Maybe she is,” Soraya said, “and maybe she isn’t.” Her large eyes studied Bourne’s for a reaction. “I’ve been digging through the masses of interoffice e-mails and cell phone records going back over the last two years. I came upon some irregularities and handed them over to the new DCI.” She paused for a moment, as if unsure whether to continue. “The thing is, the irregularities concern Martin’s private communications with Moira.”

“You mean he told her CI classified secrets?”

“Frankly, we’re not sure. The communications weren’t intact; they had to be pieced together and enhanced electronically. Some words were garbled, others were out of order. It was clear, however, that they were collaborating on something that bypassed the normal CI channels.” She sighed. “It’s possible he was merely helping her with security issues for NextGen Energy Solutions. But especially after the multiple security breaches CI recently suffered, Hart has make it clear that we can’t afford to overlook the possibility that she’s working clandestinely for some other entity Martin knew nothing about.”

“You mean she was milking him for intel. I find that hard to believe.”

“Right. Now you know why I didn’t want to tell you about it.”

“I’d like to see these communications for myself.”

“For that you’ll have to see the DCI, which, quite honestly, I wouldn’t recommend. There are still high-level operatives in CI who blame you for the Old Man’s death.”

“That’s absurd,” Bourne said. “I had nothing to do with his death.”

Soraya ran a hand through her thick hair. “It was you who brought Karim al-Jamil back to CI thinking he was Martin Lindros.”

“He looked exactly like Martin, spoke exactly like him.”

“You vouched for him.”

“So did a phalanx of CI shrinks.”

“You’re an easy target around CI. Rob Batt, who’s just been promoted to deputy director, is the ringleader of a group who are convinced you’re a schizophrenic, unreliable rogue agent. I’m just saying.”

Bourne closed his eyes for a moment. He’d heard these allegations leveled against him time and again. “You’ve left off another reason why I’m an easy target. I’m a legacy left over from the Alex Conklin era. He had the Old Man’s confidence but hardly anyone else’s, mainly because no one knew what he was doing, especially with the program that created me.”

“All the more reason for you to stay in the shadows.”

Bourne glanced out the window. “I’ve got an early breakfast meeting.”

As he was about to get out of the car, Soraya put a hand on his arm. “Stay out of this, Jason. That’s my advice.”

“And I appreciate the concern.” He leaned toward her, kissed her lightly on the cheek. Then he was crossing the street. A moment later he’d vanished into shadow.

As soon as he was out of her sight, Bourne flipped open the cell phone he’d lifted from her when he’d leaned in to kiss her. Quickly he scrolled through to Veronica Hart’s number, connected with it. He wondered if he’d be pulling her out of sleep, but when she answered she sounded wide awake.

“How’s the surveillance going?” She had a rich, mellow voice.

“That’s what I want to talk with you about.”

There was the briefest of silences before she answered. “Who is this?”

“Jason Bourne.”

“Where is Soraya Moore?”

“Soraya is fine, Director. I simply needed a way to contact you once I’d broken the surveillance, and I was quite certain Soraya wouldn’t give it to me willingly.”

“So you stole her phone.”

“I want to meet with you,” Bourne said. He didn’t have much time. At any moment, Soraya might reach for her phone, would know he’d hijacked it and come after him. “I want to see the evidence that led you to order the surveillance on Moira Trevor.”

“I don’t take kindly to being told what to do, especially by a rogue agent.”

“But you will meet with me, Director, because I’m the only one with access to Moira. I’m your fast track to finding out if she’s really rotten or whether you’re on a wild goose chase.”

I think I’ll stick to the proven way.” Veronica Hart, sitting in her new office with Rob Batt, mouthed the words Jason Bourne to her DDCI.

“But you can’t,” Bourne said in her ear. “Now that I’ve broken the surveillance I can ensure that Moira vanishes off your grid.”

Hart stood up. “I also don’t respond well to threats.”

“I have no need to threaten you, Director. I’m simply telling you the facts.”

Batt studied her expression as well as her responses, trying to get a reading of the conversation. They had been working nonstop since she’d returned from her meeting with the president. He was exhausted, on the point of leaving, but this call interested him intensely.

“Look,” Bourne said, “Martin was my friend. He was a hero. I don’t want his reputation tarnished.”

“All right,” Hart said, “come to my office later this morning, say around eleven.”

“I’m not setting foot inside CI headquarters,” Bourne said. “We’ll meet this evening at five at the entrance to the Freer Gallery.”

“What if I-?”

But Bourne had already severed the connection.

Moira was up, clad in her paisley robe, when Bourne returned. She was in the kitchen, making fresh coffee. She glanced at him without comment. She had more sense than to ask about his comings and goings.

Bourne took off his coat. “Just checking the area for tails.”

She paused. “And did you find any?”

“Quiet as the grave.” He didn’t believe that Moira had been pumping Martin for CI intel, but the inordinate sense of security-of secretiveness-instilled in him by Conklin warned him not to tell her the truth.

She relaxed visibly. “That’s a relief.” Setting the pot on the flame, she said, “Do we have time for a cup together?”

Gray light filtered through the blinds, brightening by the minute. An engine coughed, traffic started up on the street. Voices rose briefly, and a dog barked. The morning had begun.

They stood side by side in the kitchen. Between them on the wall was a Kit-Cat Klock, its raffish kitty eyes and tail moving back and forth as time passed.

“Jason, tell me it wasn’t just mutual loneliness and sorrow that motivated us.”

When he took her in his arms he felt a tiny shiver work its way through her. “One-night stands are not in my vocabulary, Moira.”

She put her head against his chest.

He pulled her hair back from her cheek. “I don’t feel like coffee right now.”

She moved against him. “Neither do I.”

Professor Dominic Specter was stirring sugar into the strong Turkish tea he always carried with him when David Webb walked into the Wonderlake diner on 36th Street, NW. The place was lined with wooden boards, the tables reclaimed wooden slabs, the mismatched chairs found objects. Photographs of loggers and Pacific Northwest vistas were ranged around the walls, interspersed with real logging tools: peaveys, cant hooks, pulp hooks, and timberjacks. The place was a perennial student favorite because of its hours, the inexpensive food, and the inescapable associations with Monty Python’s “The Lumberjack Song.”

Bourne ordered coffee as soon as he sat down.

“Good morning, David.” Specter cocked his head like a bird on a wire. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

The coffee was just the way Bourne liked it: strong, black, sugarless. “I had a lot to think about.”

Specter cocked his head. “David, what is it? Anything I can help with? My door is always open.”

“I appreciate that. I always have.”

“I can see something’s troubling you. Whatever it is, together we can work it out.”

The waiter, dressed in red-checked flannel shirt, jeans, and Timberland boots, set the menus down on the table and left.

“It’s about my job.”

“Is it wrong for you?” The professor spread his hands. “You miss teaching, I imagine. All right, we’ll put you back in the classroom.”

“I’m afraid it’s more serious than that.”

When he didn’t continue, Professor Specter cleared his throat. “I’ve noticed a certain restlessness in you over the past few weeks. Could it have anything to do with that?”

Bourne nodded. “I’ve think I’ve been trying to recapture something that can’t be caught.”

“Are you worried about disappointing me, my boy?” Specter rubbed his chin. “You know, years ago when you told me about the Bourne identity, I counseled you to seek professional help. Such a serious mental schism inevitably builds up pressure in the individual.”

“I’ve had help before. So I know how to handle the pressure.”

“I’m not questioning that, David.” Specter paused. “Or should I be calling you Jason?”

Bourne continued to sip his coffee, said nothing.

“I’d love you to stay, Jason, but only if it’s the right thing for you.”

Specter’s cell phone buzzed but he ignored it. “Understand, I only want what’s best for you. But your life’s been in upheaval. First, Marie’s death, then the demise of your best friends.” His phone buzzed again. “I thought you needed sanctuary, which you always have here. But if you’ve made up your mind to leave…” He looked at the number lit up on his phone. “Excuse me a moment.”

He took the call, listening.

“The deal can’t be closed without it?”

He nodded, held the phone, away from his ear, said to Bourne. “I need to get something from my car. Please order for me. Scrambled eggs and dark toast.”

He rose, went out of the restaurant. His Honda was parked directly across 36th Street. He was in the middle of the street when two men came out of nowhere. One grabbed him while the other struck him several times about the head. As a black Cadillac screeched to a halt beside the three men, Bourne was up and running. The man struck Specter again, yanked open the rear door of the car.

Bourne grabbed a pulp hook off the wall, sprinted out of the restaurant. The man bundled Specter into the backseat of the Cadillac and jumped in beside him, while the first man ducked into the front passenger’s seat. The Cadillac took off just as Bourne reached it. He barely had time to swing the pulp hook into the car before he was jerked off his feet. He’d been aiming for the roof, but the Cadillac’s sudden acceleration had caused it to pierce the rear window instead. The pointed end managed to embed itself in the top of the backseat. Bourne swung his trailing legs onto the trunk.

The rear pane of safety glass was completely crazed, but the thin film of plastic sandwiched between the glass layers kept it basically intact. As the car began to swerve insanely back and forth, the driver trying to dislodge him, chips of the safety glass came away, giving Bourne an increasingly tenuous hold on the Cadillac.

The car accelerated ever more dangerously through building traffic. Then, so abruptly it took his breath away, it whipped around a corner and he slid off the trunk, his body now banging against the driver’s-side fender. His shoes struck the tarmac with such force, one of them was ripped off. Sock and skin were flayed off his heel before he could regain a semblance of balance. Using the fulcrum of the pulp hook’s turned wooden handle, he levered his legs back up onto the trunk, only to have the driver slew the Cadillac so that he was almost thrown completely clear of the car. His feet struck a trash can, sending it barreling down the sidewalk as shocked pedestrians scattered helter-skelter. Pain shot through him and he might have been finished, but the driver could not keep the Cadillac in its spin any longer. Traffic forced him to straighten out the car’s trajectory. Bourne took advantage to swing himself back up onto the trunk. His right fist plunged through the shattered rear window, seeking a second, more secure hold. The car was accelerating again as it bypassed the last of the bunched-up local traffic, gained the ramp onto Whitehurst Freeway. Bourne tucked his legs up under him, braced on his knees.

As they passed into shadow beneath the Francis Scott Key Bridge the man who had shoved Specter into the backseat thrust a Taurus PT140 through the gap in the broken glass. The handgun’s muzzle turned toward Bourne as the man prepared to fire. Bourne let go with his right hand, gripped the man’s wrist, and jerked hard, bringing the entire forearm into the open air. The motion pushed back the sleeve of the man’s coat and shirt. He saw a peculiar tattoo on the inside of the forearm: three horses’ heads joined by a central skull. He slammed his right knee into the inside of the man’s elbow, at the same time pushed it back against the frame of the car. With a satisfying crack, it broke, the hand opened, the Taurus fell away. Bourne made a grab for it, but missed.

The Cadillac swerved into the left lane and the pulp hook, ripping through the fabric of the backseat, was forced out of Bourne’s hand. He gripped the gunman’s broken arm with both hands, used it to lever himself through the ruined rear window feetfirst.

He landed between the man with the broken arm and Specter, who was huddled against the left-hand door. The man in the front passenger’s seat was kneeling on the seat, turned toward him. He also had a Taurus, which he aimed at Bourne. Bourne grabbed the body of the man beside him, shifted him so that the shot plowed into the man’s chest, killing him instantly. At once Bourne heaved the corpse against the gunman in the front bench seat. The gunman swiped the corpse in the shoulder in an attempt to move him away, but this only brought the corpse in contact with the driver, who had put on a burst of speed and who seemed to be focused solely on weaving in and out of the traffic.

Bourne punched the gunman in the nose. Blood spattered as the gunman was thrown off his knees, jolted back against the dashboard. As Bourne moved to follow up his advantage, the gunman aimed the Taurus at Specter.

“Get back,” he shouted, “or I’ll kill him.”

Bourne judged the moment. If the men had wanted to kill Specter they’d have gunned him down in the street. Since they grabbed him, they must need him alive.

“All right.” Unseen by the gunman, his right hand scraped along the cushion of the backseat. As he raised his hands, he flicked a palmful of glass chips into the gunman’s face. As the man’s hands instinctively went up, Bourne chopped him twice with the edge of his hand. The gunman drew out a push dagger, the wicked-looking blade protruding from between his second and third knuckles. He jabbed it directly at Bourne’s face. Bourne ducked; the blade followed him, moving closer until Bourne slammed his fist into the side of the gunman’s head, which snapped back against the rear doorpost. Bourne heard the crack as his neck broke. The gunman’s eyes rolled up and he slumped against the door.

Bourne locked his crooked arm around the driver’s neck, pulled back hard. The driver began to choke. He whipped his head back and forth, trying to free himself. As he did so, the car swerved from one lane to another. The car began to swerve dangerously as he lost consciousness. Bourne climbed over the seat, pushing the driver off, down into the passenger’s-side foot well, so that he could slide behind the wheel. The trouble was though Bourne could steer, the driver’s body was blocking the pedals.

The Cadillac was now out of control. It hit a car in the left lane, bounced off to the right. Instead of fighting against the resulting spin, Bourne turned into it. At the same time, he shifted the car into neutral. Instantly the transmission disengaged; the engine was no longer being fed gas. Now its immediate momentum was the issue. Bourne, struggling to gain control, found his foot blocked from the brake by part of a leg. He steered right, jouncing over the divider and into an enormous parking lot that lay between the freeway and the Potomac.

The Cadillac sideswiped a parked SUV, careened farther to the right toward the water. Bourne kicked the unconscious driver’s inert body with his bare left foot, at last finding the brake pedal. The car finally slowed, but not enough-they were still heading toward the Potomac. Whipping the wheel hard to the right caused the Cadillac’s tires to shriek as Bourne tried to turn the car away from the low barrier that separated the lot from the water. As the front end of the Cadillac went up over the barrier, Bourne jammed the brake pedal to the floor, and the car came to a halt partway over the side. It teetered precariously back and forth. Specter, still huddled in the backseat behind Bourne, moaned a little, the right sleeve of his Harris Tweed jacket spattered with blood from his captor’s broken nose.

Bourne, trying to keep the Cadillac out of the Potomac, sensed that the front wheels were still on the top of the barrier. He threw the car into reverse. The Cadillac shot backward, slamming into another parked car before Bourne had a chance to shift back into neutral.

From far away he could hear the seesaw wail of sirens.

“Professor, are you all right?”

Specter groaned, but at least his voice was more distinct. “We have to get out of here.”

Bourne was freeing the pedals from the strangled man’s legs. “That tattoo I saw on the gunman’s arm-”

“No police,” Specter managed to croak. “There’s a place we can go. I’ll tell you.”

Bourne got out of the Caddy, then helped Specter out. Limping over to another car, Bourne smashed the window with his elbow. The police sirens were coming closer. Bourne got in, hot-wired the ignition, and the car’s engine coughed to life. He unlocked the doors. The instant the professor slid into the passenger’s seat Bourne took off, heading east on the freeway. As quickly as he could he moved into the left-hand lane. Then he turned abruptly to his left. The car jumped the central divider and he accelerated, heading west now, in the opposite direction the sirens were coming from.

Six

ARKADIN TOOK his evening meal at Tractir on Bolshaya Morsekay, halfway up the steep hill, a typically unlovely place with roughly varnished wooden tables and chairs. Almost one entire wall was taken up by a painting of three-masted ships in Sevastopol harbor circa 1900. The food was unremarkable, but that wasn’t why Arkadin was here. Tractir was the restaurant whose name he’d found in Oleg Ivanovich Shumenko’s wallet. No one here knew anyone named Devra, so after the borscht and the blini, he moved on.

Along the coast was a section called Omega, filled with cafйs and restaurants. As the hub of the city’s nightlife culture, it featured every variety of club one could want. Calla was a club a short stroll from the open-air car park. The night was clear and brisk. Pinpoints dotted the Black Sea as well as the sky, making for a dizzying vista. Sea and sky seemed to be virtually interchangeable.

Calla was several steps down from the sidewalk, a place filled with the sweet scent of marijuana and an unearthly din. A roughly square room was divided between a jam-packed dance floor and a raised section filled with minuscule round tables and metal cafй chairs. A grid of colored lights pulsed in time with the house music the straw-thin female DJ was spinning. She stood behind a small stand on which was set an iPod hooked up to a number of digital mixing machines.

The dance floor was packed with men and women. Bumping hips and elbows was part of the scene. Arkadin picked his way over to the bar, which ran along the front of the right wall. Twice he was intercepted by young, busty blondes who wanted his attention and, he assumed, his money. He brushed past them, made a beeline for the harried bartender. Three tiers of glass shelves filled with liquor bottles were attached to a mirror on the wall behind the bar so patrons could check out the action or admire themselves while getting polluted.

Arkadin was obliged to wade through a phalanx of revelers before he could order a Stoli on the rocks. When, some time later, the bartender returned with his drink, Arkadin asked him if he knew a Devra.

“Yah, sure. Over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of the straw-thin DJ.

It was 1 AM before Devra took a break. There were other people waiting for her to finish-fans, Arkadin presumed. He intended to get to her first. He used the force of his personality rather than his false credentials. Not that the rabble here would challenge them, but after the incident at the winery, he didn’t want to leave any trail for the real SBU to follow. The state police alias he’d used there was now dangerous to him.

Devra was blond, almost as tall as he was. He couldn’t believe how thin her arms were. They had no definition at all. Her hips were no wider than a young boy’s, and he could see the bones of her scapulae when she moved. She had large eyes and dead-white skin, as if she rarely saw the light of day. Her black jumpsuit with its white skull and crossbones across the stomach was drenched in sweat. Perhaps because of her DJing, her hands were in constant motion even if the rest of her stayed relatively still.

She eyed him up and down while he introduced himself. “You don’t look like a friend of Oleg’s,” she said.

But when he dangled the IOU in front of her face her skepticism evaporated. Thus is it ever, Arkadin thought as she led him backstage. The venality of the human race cannot be overestimated.

The green room where she relaxed between sets was better off left to the wharf rats that were no doubt shuttered behind the walls, but right now that couldn’t be helped. He tried not to think of the rats; he wouldn’t be here long anyway. There were no windows; the walls and ceiling were painted black, no doubt to cover up a multitude of sins.

Devra turned on a lamp with a mean forty-watt bulb and sat down on a wooden chair damaged by knife scars and cigarette burns. The difference between the green room and an interrogation cell was negligible. There were no other chairs or furniture, save for a narrow wooden table against one wall on which was a jumble of makeup, CDs, cigarettes, matches, gloves, and other piles of debris Arkadin didn’t bother to identify.

Devra leaned back, lit a cigarette she nimbly swiped from the table without offering him one. “So you’re here to pay off Oleg’s debt.”

“In a sense.”

Her eyes narrowed, making her look a lot like a stoat Arkadin had once shot outside St. Petersburg.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

Arkadin produced the bills. “I have the money he owes you right here.” As she reached out for it, he pulled it away. “In return I’d like some information.”

Devra laughed. “What do I look like, the phone operator?”

Arkadin hit her hard with the back of his hand, so that she crashed into the table. Tubes of lipstick and mascara went rolling and tumbling. Devra put a hand out to steady herself, fingers clutching through the morass.

When she pulled out a small handgun Arkadin was ready. His fist hammered her delicate wrist and he plucked the handgun from her numb fingers.

“Now,” he said, setting her back on the chair, “are you ready to continue?”

Devra looked at him sullenly. “I knew this was too good to be true.” She spat. “Shit! No good deed goes unpunished.”

Arkadin took a moment to process what she was really saying. Then he said, “Why did Shumenko need the ten thousand hryvnia?”

“So I was right. You’re not a friend of his.”

“Does it matter?” Arkadin emptied the handgun, broke it down without taking his eyes off her, tossed the pieces onto the table. “This is between you and me now.”

“I think not,” a deep male voice said from behind him.

“Filya,” Devra breathed. “What took you so long?”

Arkadin did not turn around. He’d heard the click of the switchblade, knew what he was up against. He eyeballed the mess on the table, and when he saw the double half-moon grips of scissors peeping out from under a small pyramid of CD cases, he fixed their location in his mind, then turned around.

As if startled by the big man with heavily pocked cheeks and new hair plugs, he retreated up against the edge of the table.

“Who the hell’re you? This is a private discussion.” Arkadin spoke more to distract Filya from his left hand moving behind him along the tabletop.

“Devra is mine.” Filya brandished the long, cruel blade of the handmade switchblade. “No one talks to her without my permission.”

Arkadin smiled thinly. “I wasn’t talking to her so much as threatening her.”

The idea was to antagonize Filya to the point that he’d do something precipitous and, therefore, stupid, and Arkadin succeeded admirably. With a growl, Filya rushed him, knife blade extended, tilted slightly upward.

With only one shot at a surprise maneuver, Arkadin had to make the most of it. The fingers of his left hand had gripped the scissors. They were small, which was just as well; he had no intention of again killing someone who might provide useful information. He lifted them, calculating their weight. Then as he brought the scissors around the side of his body, he flicked his wrist, a deceptively small gesture that was nevertheless all power. Released from his grip, the scissors flew through the air, embedding in the soft spot just below Filya’s sternum.

Filya’s eyes opened wide as his headlong rush faltered two paces from Arkadin, then he resumed his advance, brandishing the knife. Arkadin ducked away from the sweeping arc of the blade. He grappled with Filya, wanting only to wear him out, let the wound in his chest sap his strength, but Filya wasn’t having any. Being stabbed had only enraged him. With superhuman strength he broke Arkadin’s grip on the wrist that held the switchblade, swung it from a low point upward, breaking through Arkadin’s defense. The point of the blade blurred toward Arkadin’s face. Too late to stop the attack, Arkadin reacted instinctively, managing to deflect the stab at the last instant, so that the point drove through Filya’s own throat.

An arcing veil of blood caused Devra to scream. As she stumbled backward, Arkadin reached for her. Clamping one hand over her mouth, he shook his head. Her ashen cheeks and forehead were spattered with blood. Arkadin supported Filya in the crook of one arm. The man was dying. Arkadin had never meant this to happen. First Shumenko, now Filya. If he had believed in such things, he would have said that the assignment was cursed.

“Filya!” He slapped the man, whose eyes had turned glassy. Blood leaked out of the side of Filya’s slack mouth. “The package. Where is it?”

For a moment, Filya’s eyes focused on him. When Arkadin repeated his question a curious smile took Filya down into death. Arkadin held him for a moment more before propping him up against a wall.

As he returned his attention to Devra he saw a rat glowering from a corner, and his gorge rose. It took all his willpower not to abandon the girl to go after it, rip it limb from limb.

“Now,” he said, “it’s just you and me.”

Making certain he wasn’t being followed, Rob Batt pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the Tysons Corner Baptist Church. He sat waiting in his car. From time to time, he checked his watch.

Under the late DCI, he had been chief of operations, the most influential of CI’s seven directorate heads. He was of the Beltway old school with connections that ran directly back to Yale’s legendary Skull amp; Bones Club, of which he’d been an officer during his college days. Just how many Skull amp; Bones men had been recruited into America’s clandestine services was one of those secrets its keepers would kill to protect. Suffice it to say it was many, and Batt was one of them. It was particularly galling for him to play second fiddle to an outsider-and a female, at that. The Old Man would never have tolerated such an outrage, but the Old Man was gone, murdered in his own home reportedly by his traitorous assistant, Anne Held. Though Batt-and others of his brethren-had his doubts about that.

What a difference three months made. Had the Old Man still been alive he’d never have considered even consenting to this meet. Batt was a loyal man, but his loyalty, he realized, extended to the man who had reached out to him in grad school, recruited him to CI. Those were the old days, though. The new order was in place, and it wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been part of the problem caused by Martin Lindros and Jason Bourne-he’d been part of the solution. He’d even been suspicious of the man who’d turned out to be an impostor. He would have exposed him had Bourne not interfered. That coup, Batt knew, would have scored him the inside track with the Old Man.

But with the Old Man gone, his lobbying for the directorship had been to no avail. Instead, the president had opted for Veronica Hart. God alone knew why. It was such a colossal mistake; she’d just run CI into the ground. A woman wasn’t constructed to make the kinds of decisions necessary to captain the CI ship. The priorities and ways of approaching problems were different with women. The hounds of the NSA were circling CI, and he couldn’t bear watching this woman turn them all, the entire company, into carrion for the feast. At least Batt could join the people who would inevitably take over when Hart fucked up. Even so, it pained him to be here, to embark upon this unknown sea.

At 10:30 AM the doors to the church swung open, the parishioners came down the stairs, stood in the wan sunshine, turning their heads up like sunflowers at dawn. The ministers appeared, walking side by side with Luther LaValle. LaValle was accompanied by his wife and teenage son. The two men stood chatting while the family grouped loosely around. LaValle’s wife seemed interested in the conversation, but the son was busy ogling a girl more or less his age who was prancing down the stairs. She was a beauty, Batt had to admit. Then, with a start, he realized that she was one of General Kendall’s three daughters, because here Kendall was with his arm around his stubby wife. How the two of them could have produced a trio of such handsome girls was anyone’s guess. Even Darwin couldn’t have figured it out, Batt thought.

The two families-the LaValles and the Kendalls-gathered in a loose huddle as if they were a football team. Then the kids went their own ways, some in cars, others on bicycles because the church wasn’t far from their homes. The two wives chastely kissed their husbands, piled into a Cadillac Escalade, and took off.

That left the two men, who stood for a moment in front of the church before coming around to the parking lot. Not a word had been exchanged between them. Batt heard a heavyweight engine cough to life.

A long black armored limousine came cruising down the aisle like a sleek shark. It stopped briefly while LaValle and Kendall climbed inside. Its engine, idling, sent small puffs of exhaust into the cool, crisp air. Batt counted to thirty and, as he’d been instructed, got out of his car. As he did so, the rear door of the limo popped open. Ducking his head, he climbed into the dim, plush interior. The door closed behind him.

“Gentlemen,” he said, folding himself onto the bench seat opposite them. The two men sat side by side in the limo’s backseat: Luther LaValle, the Pentagon’s intel czar, and his second, General Richard P. Kendall.

“So kind of you to join us,” LaValle said.

Kindness had nothing to do with it, Batt thought. A convergence of objectives did.

“The pleasure’s all mine, gentlemen. I’m flattered and, if I may be frank, grateful that you reached out to me.”

“We’re here,” General Kendall said, “to speak frankly.”

“We’ve opposed the appointment of Veronica Hart from the start,” LaValle said. “The secretary of defense made his opinion quite clear to the president. However, others, including the national security adviser and the secretary of state-who, as you know, is a personal friend of the president-both lobbied for an outsider from the private security sector.”

“Bad enough,” Batt said. “And a woman.”

“Precisely.” General Kendall nodded. “It’s madness.”

LaValle stirred. “It’s the clearest sign yet of the deterioration of our defense grid that Secretary Halliday has been warning against for several years now.”

“When we start listening to Congress and the people of the country all hope is lost,” Kendall said. “A mulligan stew of amateurs all with petty axes to grind and absolutely no idea of how to maintain security or run the intelligence services.”

LaValle gave off an icy smile. “That’s why the secretary of defense has labored mightily to keep the workings clandestine.”

“The more they know, the less they understand,” General Kendall said, “and the more inclined they are to interfere by means of their congressional hearings and threats of budgets cuts.”

“Oversight is a bitch,” LaValle agreed. “Which is why areas of the Pentagon under my control are working without it.” He paused for a moment, studying Batt. “How does that sound to you, Deputy Director?”

“Like manna from heaven.”

Oleg had screwed up big time,” Devra said.

Arkadin took a stab. “He got in over his head with loan sharks?”

She shook her head. “That was last year. It had to do with Pyotr Zilber.”

Arkadin’s ears pricked up. “What about him?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes opened wide as Arkadin raised his fist. “I swear it.”

“But you’re part of Zilber’s network.”

She turned her head away from him, as if she couldn’t stand herself. “A minor part. I shuffle things from here to there.”

“Within the past week Shumenko gave you a document.”

“He gave me a package, I don’t know what was in it,” Devra said. “It was sealed.”

“Compartmentalization.”

“What?” She looked up at him. Blood beads on her face looked like freckles. Tears had caused her mascara to run, giving her dark half circles under her eyes.

“The first principle of putting together a cadre.” Arkadin nodded. “Go on.”

She shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

“What about the package?”

“I passed it on, as I was instructed to do.”

Arkadin bent over her. “Who did you give it to?”

She glanced at the crumpled form on the floor. “I gave it to Filya.”

LaValle had paused a moment to reflect. “We never knew each other at Yale.”

“You were two years ahead of me,” Batt said. “But in Skull and Bones you were notorious.”

LaValle laughed. “Now you flatter me.”

“Hardly.” Batt unbuttoned his overcoat. “The stories I heard.”

LaValle frowned. “Are never to be repeated.”

General Kendall let loose with a guffaw that filled the compartment. “Should I leave you two girls alone? Better not; one of you could wind up pregnant.”

The comment was meant as a joke, of course, but there was a nasty undercurrent to it. Did the military man resent his exclusion from the elite club, or the connection the other two had through Skull amp; Bones? Possibly it was a bit of both. In any event, Batt noted the second’s tone of voice, tucked the possible implications into a place where he could examine them later.

“What d’you have in mind, Mr. LaValle?”

“I’m looking for a way to convince the president that his more immoderate advisers made a mistake in recommending Veronica Hart for DCI.” LaValle pursed his lips. “Any ideas?”

“Off the top of my head, plenty,” Batt said. “What’s in it for me?”

As if on cue LaValle produced another smile. “We’re going to require a new DCI when we can Hart’s ass out of the District. Who would be your first choice?”

“The current deputy director seems the logical one,” Batt said. “That would be me.”

LaValle nodded. “Our thought precisely.”

Batt tapped his fingertips against his knee. “If you two are serious.”

“We are, I assure you.”

Batt’s mind worked furiously. “It seems to me unwise at this early juncture to have attacked Hart directly.”

“How about you don’t tell us our business,” Kendall said.

LaValle held up a hand. “Let’s hear what the man has to say, Richard.” To Batt, he added, “However, let me make something crystal clear. We want Hart out as soon as possible.”

“We all do, but you don’t want suspicion thrown back at you-or at the defense secretary.”

LaValle and General Kendall exchanged a quick and knowing look. They were like twins, able to communicate with each other without uttering a word. “Indeed not,” LaValle said.

“She told me how you ambushed her at that meeting with the president-and the threats you made to her outside the White House.”

“Women are more easily intimidated than men,” Kendall pointed out. “It’s a well-known fact.”

Batt ignored the military man. “You put her on notice. She took your threats very personally. She had a killer’s rep in Black River. I checked through my sources.”

LaValle seemed thoughtful. “How would you have handled her?”

“I would have made nice, welcomed her to the fold, let her know you’re there for her whenever she needs your help.”

“She’d never have bought it,” LaValle said. “She knows my agenda.”

“It doesn’t matter. The idea is not to antagonize her. You don’t want her knives out when you come for her.”

LaValle nodded, as if he saw the wisdom in this approach. “So how do you suggest we proceed from here?”

“Give me some time,” Batt said. “Hart’s just getting started at CI, and because I’m her deputy I know everything she does, every decision she makes. But when she’s out of the office, shadow her, see where she goes, who she meets. Using parabolic mikes you can listen in to her conversations. Between us, we’ll have her covered twenty-four/seven.”

“Sounds pretty vanilla to me,” Kendall said skeptically.

“Keep it simple, especially when there’s so much at stake, that’s my advice,” Batt said.

“What if she cottons on to the surveillance?” Kendall said.

Batt smiled. “So much the better. It’ll only bolster the CI mantra that the NSA is run by incompetents.”

LaValle laughed. “Batt, I like the way you think.”

Batt nodded, acknowledging the compliment. “Coming from the private sector Hart’s not used to government procedure. She doesn’t have the leeway she enjoyed at Black River. I can already see that, to her, rules and regs are meant to be bent, sidestepped, even, on occasion, broken. Mark my words, sooner rather than later, Director Hart is going to give us the ammunition we need to kick her butt out of CI.”

Seven

HOW IS your foot, Jason?”

Bourne looked up at Professor Specter, whose face was swollen and discolored. His left eye was half closed, dark as a storm cloud.

“Yes,” Specter said, “after what just happened I’m compelled to call you by what seems like your rightful name.”

“My heel is fine,” Bourne said. “It’s me who should be asking about you.”

Specter put fingertips gingerly against his cheek. “In my life I’ve endured worse beatings.”

The two men were seated in a high-ceilinged library filled with a large, magnificent Isfahan carpet, ox-blood leather furniture. Three walls were fitted floor-to-ceiling with books neatly arrayed on mahogany shelves. The fourth wall was pierced by a large leaded-glass window overlooking stands of stately firs on a knoll, which sloped down to a pond guarded by a weeping willow, shivering in the wind.

Specter’s personal physician had been summoned, but the professor had insisted the doctor tend to Bourne’s flayed heel first.

“I’m sure we can find you a pair of shoes somewhere,” Specter said, sending one of the half a dozen men in residence scurrying off with Bourne’s remaining shoe.

This rather large stone-and-slate house deep in the Virginia countryside to which Specter had directed Bourne was a far cry from the modest apartment the professor maintained near the university. Bourne had been to the apartment numerous times over the years, but never here. Then there was the matter of the staff, which Bourne noted with interest as well as surprise.

“I imagine you’re wondering about all this,” Specter said, as if reading Bourne’s mind. “All in good time, my friend.” He smiled. “First, I must thank you for rescuing me.”

“Who were those men?” Bourne said. “Why did they try to kidnap you?”

The doctor applied an antibiotic ointment, placed a gauze pad over the heel, taped it in place. Then he wrapped the heel in cohesive bandage.

“It’s a long story,” Specter said. The doctor, finished with Bourne, now rose to examine the professor. “One I propose to tell you over the breakfast we were unable to enjoy earlier.” He winced as the doctor palpated areas of his body.

“Contusions, bruises,” the doctor intoned colorlessly, “but no broken bones or fractures.”

He was a small swarthy man with a mustache and dark slicked-back hair. Bourne made him as Turkish. In fact, all the staff seemed of Turkish origin.

He gave Specter a small packet. “You may need these painkillers, but only for the next forty-eight hours.” He’d already left a tube of the antibiotic cream, along with instructions, for Bourne.

While Specter was being examined, Bourne used his cell phone to call Deron, the art forger whom he used for all his travel documents. Bourne recited the license tag of the black Cadillac he’d commandeered from the professor’s would-be kidnappers.

“I need a registration report ASAP.”

“You okay, Jason?” Deron said in his sonorous London-accented voice. Deron had been Bourne’s backup through many hair-raising missions. He always asked the same question.

“I’m fine,” Bourne said, “but that’s more than I can say for the car’s original occupants.”

“Brilliant.”

Bourne pictured him in his lab in the northeast section of DC, a tall, vibrant black man with the mind of a conjuror.

When the doctor departed, Bourne and Specter were left alone.

“I already know who came after me,” Specter said.

“I don’t like loose ends,” Bourne replied. “The Cadillac’s registration will tell us something, perhaps something even you don’t know.”

The professor nodded, clearly impressed.

Bourne sat on the leather sofa with his leg up on the coffee table. Specter eased himself into a facing chair. Clouds chased each other across the windblown sky, setting patterns shifting across the Persian carpet. Bourne saw a different kind of shadow pass across Specter’s face.

“Professor, what is it?”

Specter shook his head. “I owe you a most sincere and abject apology, Jason. I’m afraid I had an ulterior motive in asking you to return to university life.” His eyes were filled with regret. “I thought it would be good for you, yes, that’s true enough, absolutely. But also I wanted you near me because…” He waved a hand as if to clear the air of deceit. “Because I was fearful that what happened this morning would happen. Now, because of my selfishness, I’m very much afraid that I’ve put your life in jeopardy.”

Turkish tea, strong and intensely aromatic, was served along with eggs, smoked fish, coarse bread, butter, deep yellow and fragrant.

Bourne and Specter sat at a long table covered with a white hand-finished linen cloth. The china and silverware were of the highest quality. Again, an oddity in an academic’s household. They remained mute while a young man, slim and sleek, served their perfectly cooked, elegantly presented breakfast.

When Bourne began to ask a question, Specter cut him off. “First we must fill our stomachs, regain our strength, ensure our minds are working at full capacity.”

The two men did not speak again until they were finished, the plates and cutlery were cleared, and a fresh pot of tea had been poured. A small bowl of gigantic Medjool dates and halved fresh pomegranates lay between them.

When they were again alone in the dining room, Specter said without preamble, “The night before last I received word that a former student of mine whose father was a close friend was dead. Murdered in a most despicable fashion. This young man, Pyotr Zilber, was special. Besides being a former student he ran an information network that spanned several countries. After a number of difficult and perilous months of subterfuge and negotiation he had managed to obtain for me a vital document. He was found out, with the inevitable consequences. This is the incident I’ve been dreading. It may sound melodramatic, but I assure you it’s the truth: The war I’ve been engaged in for close to twenty years has reached its final stage.”

“What sort of a war, Professor?” Bourne said. “Against whom?”

“I’ll get to that in a moment.” Specter leaned forward. “I imagine you’re curious, shocked even, that a university professor should be involved in matters that are more the province of Jason Bourne.” He lifted both arms briefly to encompass the house. “But as you’ve no doubt noted there is more to me than meets the eye.” He smiled rather sadly. “This makes two of us, yes?

“As someone who also leads a double life I understand you better than most others. I need one personality when I step onto campus, but here I’m someone else entirely.” He tapped a stubby forefinger against the side of his nose. “I pay attention. I saw something familiar in you the moment I met you-how your eyes took in every detail of the people and things around you.”

Bourne’s cell buzzed. He flipped it open, listened to what Deron had to say, then put the phone away.

“The Cadillac was reported stolen a hour before it appeared in front of the restaurant.”

“That is entirely unsurprising.”

“Who tried to kidnap you, Professor?”

“I know you’re impatient for the facts, Jason. I would be, too, in your place. But I promise they won’t have meaning without some background first. When I said there’s more to me than meets the eye, this is what I meant: I’m a terrorist hunter. For many years, from the camouflage and sanctuary my position at the university affords me, I have built up a network of people who gather intelligence just like your own CI. However, the intelligence that interests me is highly specific. There are people who took my wife from me. In the dead of night, while I was away, they snatched her from our house, tortured her, killed her, then dumped her on my doorstep. As a warning, you see.”

Bourne felt a prickling at the back of his neck. He knew what it felt like to be driven by revenge. When Martin died all Bourne could think about was destroying the men who’d tortured him. He felt a new, more intimate connection with Specter, even as the Bourne identity rose inside him, riding a cresting wave of pure adrenaline. All at once the idea of him working at the university struck him as absurd. Moira was right: He was already chafing at the confinement. How would he feel after months of the academic life, bereft of adventure, stripped of the adrenaline rush for which Bourne lived?

“My father was taken because he was plotting to overthrow the head of an organization. They call themselves the Eastern Brotherhood.”

“Doesn’t the EB espouse a peaceful integration of Muslims into Western society?”

“That’s their public stance, certainly, and their literature would have you believe it’s so.” Specter put down his cup. “In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. I know them as the Black Legion.”

“Then the Black Legion has finally decided to come after you.”

“If only it were as simple as that.” He halted at a discreet knock on the door. “Enter.”

The young man he’d sent on the errand strode in carrying a shoe box, which he set down in front of Bourne.

Specter gestured. “Please.”

Taking his foot off the table, Bourne opened the box. Inside were a pair of very fine Italian loafers, along with a pair of socks.

“The left one is half a size larger to accommodate the pad that will protect your heel,” the young man said in German.

Bourne pulled on the socks, slipped on the loafers. They fit perfectly. Seeing this, Specter nodded to the young man, who turned and, without another word, left the room.

“Does he speak English?” Bourne asked.

“Oh, yes. Whenever the need arises.” Specter’s face was wreathed in a mischievous smile. “And now, my dear Jason, you’re asking yourself why he’s speaking German if he’s a Turk?”

“I assume it’s because your network spans many countries including Germany, which is, like England, a hotbed of Muslim terrorist activity.”

Specter’s smile deepened. “You’re like a rock. I can always count on you.” He raised a forefinger. “But there is yet another reason. It has to do with the Black Legion. Come. I’ve something to show you.”

Filya Petrovich, Pyotr’s Sevastopol courier, lived in an anonymous block of crumbling housing left over from the days the Soviets had reshaped the city into a vast barracks housing its largest naval contingent. The apartment, frozen in time since the 1970s, had all the charm of a meat locker.

Arkadin opened the door with the key he’d found on Filya. He pushed Devra over the threshold, stepped in. Turning on the lights, he closed the door behind him. She hadn’t wanted to come, but she had no say in the matter, just as she’d had no say in helping him drag Filya’s corpse out the nightclub’s back door. They set him down at the end of the filthy alley, propped up against a wall damp with unknown fluids. Arkadin poured the contents of a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka over him, then pressed the man’s fingers around the bottle’s neck. Filya became one drunk among many other drunks in the city. His death would be swept away on an inefficient and overworked bureaucratic tide.

“What’re you looking for?” Devra stood in the middle of the living room, watching Arkadin’s methodical search. “What d’you think you’ll find? The document?” Her laugh was a kind of shrill catcall. “It’s gone.”

Arkadin glanced up from the mess his switchblade had made of the sofa cushions. “Where?”

“Far out of your reach, that’s for sure.”

Closing his knife, Arkadin crossed the space between the two of them in one long stride. “Do you think this is a joke, or a game we’re playing here?”

Devra’s upper lip curled. “Are you going to hurt me now? Believe me, nothing you could do would be worse than what’s already been done to me.”

Arkadin, the blood pounding in his veins, held himself in check to consider her words. What she said was probably the truth. Under the Soviet boot, God had forsaken many Ukrainians, especially the young attractive females. He needed to take another tack entirely.

“I’m not going to hurt you, even though you’re with the wrong people.” He turned on his heel, sat down on a wood-framed chair. Leaning back, he ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve seen a lot of shit-I’ve done two stints in prison. I can imagine the systematic brutalization you’ve been through.”

“Me and my mother, God rest her soul.”

The headlights of passing cars shone briefly through the windows, then dwindled away. A dog barked in an alleyway, its melancholy voice echoing. A couple passing by outside argued vehemently. Inside the shabby apartment the patchy light cast by the lamps, their shades either torn or askew, caused Devra to look terribly vulnerable, like a wisp of a child. Arkadin rose, stretched mightily, strolled over to the window, looked out onto the street. His eyes picked out every bit of shadow, every flare of light no matter how brief or tiny. Sooner or later Pyotr’s people were going to come after him; it was an inevitability that he and Icoupov had discussed before he left the villa. Icoupov had offered to send a couple of hard men to lie low in Sevastopol in the event they were needed, but Arkadin refused, saying he preferred to work alone.

Having assured himself that the street was for the moment clear, he turned away from the window, back to the room. “My mother died badly,” he said. “She was murdered, brutally beaten, left in a closet for the rats to gnaw on. At least that’s what the coroner told me.”

“Where was your father?”

Arkadin shrugged. “Who knows? By that time, the sonovabitch could’ve been in Shanghai, or he could’ve been dead. My mother told me he was a merchant marine, but I seriously doubt it. She was ashamed of having been knocked up by a perfect stranger.”

Devra, who had sat down on the ripped-apart arm of the sofa during this recitation, said, “It sucks not knowing where you came from, doesn’t it? Like always being adrift at sea. You’ll never recognize home even if you come upon it.”

“Home,” Arkadin said heavily. “I never think of it.”

Devra caught something in his tone. “But you’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

His expression went sour. He checked the street again with his usual thoroughness. “What would be the point?”

“Because knowing where we come from allows us know who we are.” She beat softly at her chest with a fist. “Our past is part of us.”

Arkadin felt as if she’d pricked him with a needle. Venom squirted through his veins. “My past is an island I’ve sailed away from long ago.”

“Nevertheless, it’s still with you, even if you’re not aware of it,” she said with the force of having mulled the question over and over in her own mind. “We can’t outrun our past, no matter how hard we try.”

Unlike him, she seemed eager to talk about her past. He found this curious. Did she think this subject was common ground? If so, he needed to stay with it, to keep the connection with her going.

“What about your father?”

“I was born here, grew up here.” She stared down at her hands. “My father was a naval engineer. He was thrown out of the shipyards when the Russians took it over. Then one night they came for him, said he was spying on them, delivering technical information on their ships to the Americans. I never saw him again. But the Russian security officer in charge took a liking to my mother. When he’d used her up, he started on me.”

Arkadin could just imagine. “How did it end?”

“An American killed him.” She looked up at him. “Fucking ironic, because this American was a spy sent to photograph the Russian fleet. When the American had completed his assignment he should’ve gone back home. Instead he stayed. He took care of me, nursed me back to health.”

“Naturally you fell in love with him.”

She laughed. “If I was a character in a novel, sure. But he was so kind to me; I was like a daughter to him. I cried when he left.”

Arkadin found that he was embarrassed by her confession. To distract himself, he looked around the ruined apartment one more time.

Devra watched him warily. “Hey. I’m dying for something to eat.”

Arkadin laughed. “Aren’t we all?”

His hawk-like gaze took in the street once more. This time the hairs on the back of his neck stirred as he stepped to the side of the window. A car he’d heard approaching had pulled up in front of the building. Devra, alerted by the sudden tension in his body, moved to the window behind him. What caught his attention was that though its engine was still running, all its lights had been extinguished. Three men exited the car, headed for the building entrance. It was past time to leave.

He turned away from the window. “We’re going. Now.”

“Pyotr’s people. It was inevitable they’d find us.”

Much to Arkadin’s surprise she made no protest when he hustled her out of the apartment. The hallway was already reverberating with the tribal beat of heavy shoes on the concrete floor.

Bourne found walking unpleasant but hardly intolerable. He’d put up with a lot worse than a flayed heel in his time. As he followed the professor down a metal staircase into the basement, he reflected that this was proof again that there were no absolutes when it came to people. He had assumed that Specter’s life was neat, tidy, dull, and quiet, restricted by the dimensions of the university campus. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Halfway down, the staircase changed to stone treads, worn by decades of use. Their way was guided by plenty of light from below. They entered a finished basement made up of movable walls that separated what looked like office cubicles outfitted with laptop computers attached to high-speed modems. All of them were staffed.

Specter stopped at the last cubicle, where a young man appeared to be decoding text that scrolled across his computer screen. The young man, becoming aware of Specter, pulled a sheet of paper out of the printer hopper, handed it to him. As soon as the professor read it a change came over his demeanor. Though he kept his expression neutral, a certain tension stiffened his frame.

“Good work.” He gave the young man a nod before he led Bourne into a room that appeared to be a small library. Specter crossed to one section of the shelves, touched the spine of a compilation of haiku by the master poet Matsuo BashoЇ. A square section of the books opened to reveal a set of drawers. From one of these Specter pulled out what looked like a photo album. All the pages were old, each one wrapped in archival plastic to preserve them. He showed one of them to Bourne.

At the top was the familiar war eagle, gripping a swastika in its beak, the symbol of Germany’s Third Reich. The text was in German. Just below was the word OSTLEGIONEN, accompanied by a color photo of a woven oval, obviously a uniform insignia, of a swastika encircled by laurel leaves. Around the central symbol were the words TREU, TAPIR, GEHORSAM, which Bourne translated as “loyal, brave, steadfast.” Below that was another color photo of a woven rampant wolf’s head, under which was the designation: OSTMANISCHE SS-DIVISION.

Bourne noted the date on the page: 14 December 1941.

“I never heard of the Eastern Legions,” Bourne said. “Who were they?”

Specter turned the page and there, pinned to it, was a square of olive fabric. On it had been sewn a blue shield with a black border. Across the top was the word BERGKAUKASIEN-Caucasus Mountains. Directly beneath it in bright yellow was the emblem of three horses’ heads joined to what Bourne now knew was a death’s head, the symbol of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the Protective Squadron, known colloquially as the SS. It was exactly the same as the tattoo on the gunman’s arm.

“Not were, are.” Specter’s eyes glittered. “They’re the people who tried to kidnap me, Jason. They want to interrogate me and kill me. Now that they’ve become aware of you, they’ll want to do the same to you.”

Eight

THE ROOF or the basement?” Arkadin said.

“The roof,” she said at once. “There’s only one way in and out of the basement itself.”

They ran as fast as they could to the stairway, then took the steps two at a time. Arkadin’s heart pounded, his blood raced, the adrenaline pumped into him with every leap upward. He could hear his pursuers laboring up below him. The noose was tightening around him. Racing to the far end of the narrow hallway, he reached up with his right hand, pulled down the metal ladder that led to the roof. Soviet structures of this era were notorious for their flimsy doors. He knew he’d have no trouble breaking out onto the roof. From there, it was a short jump to the next building and the next, then down to the streets, where it would be easy to elude the enemy.

Boosting Devra’s body through the square hole in the ceiling, he clambered up. Behind him, the shouted calls of the three men: Filya’s apartment had been searched. All of them were coming after him. Gaining the tiny landing, he now faced the door to the roof, but when he tried to push against the horizontal metal bar nothing happened. He pushed harder, with the same result. Fishing a ring of slender metal picks out of his pocket, he inserted one after another into the lock, fiddling it up and down, getting nowhere. Looking more closely, he could see why: The interior of the cheap lock was rusted shut. It wouldn’t open.

He turned back, staring down the ladder. Here came his pursuers. He had nowhere to go.

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Soviet Russia,” Professor Specter said. “As they did so they came upon thousands upon thousands of enemy soldiers who either surrendered without a fight or were flat-out deserting. By August of that year the invading army had interned half a million Soviet prisoners of war. Many of them were Muslims-Tatars from the Caucasus, Turks, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakhs, others from the tribes in the Ural Mountains, Turkestan, Crimea. The one thing all these Muslims had in common was their hatred of the Soviets, Stalin in particular. To make a very long story short, these Muslims, taken as prisoners of war, offered their services to the Nazis to fight alongside them on the Eastern Front, where they could do the most damage both by infiltration and by decoding Soviet intelligence transmissions. The Fьhrer was elated; the Ostlegionen became the particular interest of Reichsfьhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, who saw Islam as a masculine, war-like religion that featured certain key qualities in common with his SS philosophy, mainly blind obedience, the willingness for self-sacrifice, a total lack of compassion for the enemy.”

Bourne was absorbing every word, every detail of the photos. “Didn’t his embrace of Islam fly in the face of the Nazi racial order?”

“You know humans better than most, Jason. They have an infinite capacity for rationalizing reality to fit their personal ideas. So it was with Himmler, who had convinced himself that the Slavs and the Jews were subhuman. The Asian element in the Russian nation made those people who were descended from the great warriors Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane fit his criteria of superiority. Himmler embraced the Muslims from that area, descendants of the Mongols.

“These men became the core of the Nazi Ostlegionen, but the cream of the crop Himmler reserved for himself, training them in secret with his best SS leaders, honing their skills not simply as soldiers, but as the elite warriors, spies, and assassins it was widely known he’d yearned to command. He called this unit the Black Legion. You see, I’ve made an exhaustive study of the Nazis and their Ostlegionen.” Specter pointed to the shield of three horses’ heads joined by the death’s head. “This is their emblem. From 1943 on it became more feared than even the SS’s own twin lightning bolts, or the symbol of its adjunct, the Gestapo.”

“It’s a little late in the day for Nazis to be a serious threat,” Bourne said, “don’t you think?”

“The Black Legion’s Nazi affiliation has long since vanished. It’s now the most powerful and influential Islamic terrorist network no one has heard of. Its anonymity is deliberate. It is funded through the legitimate front, the Eastern Brotherhood.”

Specter took out another album. This one was filled with newspaper clippings of terrorist attacks all over the world: London, Madrid, Karachi, Fallujah, Afghanistan, Russia. As Bourne paged through the album, the list grew.

“As you can see, other, known terrorist networks claimed responsibility for some of these attacks. For others, no claim was made, no terrorists were ever linked to them. But I know through my sources that all were perpetrated by the Black Legion,” Specter said. “And now they’re planning their biggest, most spectacular attack. Jason, we think that they’re targeting New York. I told you Pyotr Zilber, the young man the Black Legion murdered, was special. He was a magician. He’d somehow managed to steal the plans for the target of the Legion’s attack. Normally, of course, the planning would all be oral. But apparently the target of this attack is so complex, the Black Legion had to obtain the actual plans of the structure. That’s why I believe it to be a large building in a major metropolitan area. It’s absolutely imperative that we find that document. It’s the only way we’ll know where the Black Legion intends to strike.”

Arkadin sat on the floor of the small landing, his legs on either side of the opening down to the top residential floor.

“Shout to them,” he whispered. Now that he was situated on the high ground, so to speak, he wanted to draw them to him. “Go on. Let them know where you are.”

Devra screamed.

Now Arkadin heard the hollow ring of someone climbing the metal ladder. When a head popped up, along with a hand holding a gun, Arkadin slammed his ankles into the man’s ears. As his eyes began to roll up, Arkadin snatched the gun from his hand, braced himself, and broke the man’s neck.

The moment he let go the man vanished, clattering back down the ladder. Predictably, a hail of gunfire shot through the square opening, the bullets embedding themselves in the ceiling. The moment that abated, Arkadin shoved Devra through the opening, followed her, sliding down with the insides of his shoes against the outside of the ladder.

As Arkadin had hoped, the remaining two men were stunned by the fall of their compatriot and held their fire. Arkadin shot one through the right eye. The other retreated around a corner as Arkadin fired at him. Arkadin gathered the girl, bruised but otherwise fine, ran to the first door, and pounded on it. Hearing a querulous man’s voice raised in protest, he pounded on the opposite door. No answer. Firing his gun at the lock, he crashed open the door.

The apartment was unoccupied, and from the looks of the piles of dust and filth no one had been in residence in quite some time. Arkadin ran to the window. As he did so, he heard familiar squeals. He stepped on a pile of rubbish and out leapt a rat, then another and another. They were all over the place. Arkadin shot the first one, then got hold of himself and slid the window up as far as it would go. Icy rain struck him, sluiced down the side of the building.

Holding Devra in front of him, he straddled the sash. At that moment he heard the third man calling for reinforcements, and fired three shots through the ruined door. He manhandled her out onto the narrow fire escape and edged them to his left, toward the vertical ladder bolted to the concrete that led to the roof.

Save for one or two security lights, the Sevastopol night was darker than Hades itself. The rain slanted in needled sheets, beating against his face and arms. He was close enough to reach out for the ladder when the wrought-iron slats on which he was walking gave way.

Devra shrieked as the two of them plummeted, landing against the railing of the fire escape below. Almost immediately this rickety affair gave way beneath their weight and they toppled over the end. Arkadin reached out, grabbed a rung of the ladder with his left hand. He held on to Devra with his right. They dangled in the air, the ground too far for him to risk letting go. Plus there was no convenient fully loaded Dumpster to break their fall.

He began to lose his grip on her hand.

“Draw yourself up,” he said. “Put your legs around me.”

“What?”

He bellowed the command at her and, flinching, she did as he ordered.

“Now lock your ankles tight around my waist.”

This time she didn’t hesitate.

“All right,” Arkadin said, “now reach up, you can just make the lowest rung-no, hold on to it with both hands.”

The rain made the metal slippery, and on the first attempt Devra lost her grip.

“Again,” Arkadin shouted. “And this time don’t let go.”

Clearly terrified, Devra closed her fingers around the rung, held on so tightly her knuckles turned white. As for Arkadin, his left arm was being slowly dislocated from its socket. If he didn’t change his position soon, he’d be done for.

“Now what?” Devra said.

“Once your grip on the rung is secure, uncross your ankles and pull yourself up the ladder until you can stand on a rung.”

“I don’t know if I have the strength.”

He lifted himself up until he’d wedged the rung in his right armpit. His left arm was numb. He worked his fingers, and bolts of pain shot up into his throbbing shoulder. “Go ahead,” he said, pushing her up. He couldn’t let her see how much pain he was in. His left arm was in agony, but he kept pushing her.

Finally, she stood on the ladder above him. She looked down. “Now you.”

His entire left side was numb; the rest of him was on fire.

Devra reached down toward him. “Come on.”

“I’ve got nothing much to live for, I died a long time ago.”

“Screw you.” She crouched down so when she reached down again she grabbed onto his arm. As she did so, her foot slipped off the rung, slid downward and against him with such force she almost dislodged them both.

“Christ, I’m going to fall!” she screamed.

“Wrap your legs back around my waist,” he shouted. “That’s right. Now let go of the ladder one hand at a time. Hold on to me instead.”

When she’d done as he said, he commenced to climb up the ladder. Once he was high enough to get his shoes onto the rungs the going was easier. He ignored the fire burning up his left shoulder; he needed both hands to ascend.

They made the roof at last, rolling over the stone parapet, lying breathless on tar streaming with water. That was when Arkadin realized the rain was no longer hitting his face. He looked up, saw a man-the third of the trio-standing over him, a gun aimed at his face.

The man grinned. “Time to die, bastard.”

Professor Specter put the albums away. Before he closed the drawer, however, he took out a pair of photos. Bourne studied the faces of two men. The one in the first photo was approximately the same age as the professor. Glasses almost comically magnified large, watery eyes, above which lay remarkably thick eyebrows. Otherwise, his head was bald.

“Semion Icoupov,” Specter said, “leader of the Black Legion.”

He took Bourne out of the basement library, up the steps, out the back of the house into the fresh air. A formal English garden lay before them, defined by low boxwood hedges. The sky was an airy blue, high and rich, full of the promise of an early spring. A bird fluttered between the bare branches of the willow, unsure where to alight.

“Jason, we need to stop the Black Legion. The only way to do that is to kill Semion Icoupov. I’ve already lost three good men to that end. I need someone better. I need you.”

“I’m not a contract killer.”

“Jason, please don’t take offense. I need your help to stop this attack. Icoupov knows where the plans are.”

“All right. I’ll find him and the plans.” Bourne shook his head. “But he doesn’t have to be killed.”

The professor shook his head sadly. “A noble sentiment, but you don’t know Semion Icoupov like I do. If you don’t kill him, he’ll surely kill you. Believe me when I tell you I’ve tried to take him alive. None of my men has returned from that assignment.”

He stared out across the pond. “There’s no one else I can turn to, no one else who has the expertise to find Icoupov and end this madness once and for all. Pyotr’s murder signals the beginning of the endgame between me and the Black Legion. Either we stop them here or they will be successful in their attack on this target.”

“If what you say is true-”

“It is, Jason. I swear to you.”

“Where is Icoupov?”

“We don’t know. For the last forty-eight hours we’ve been trying to track him, but everything’s turned up a blank. He was in his villa in Campione d’Italia, Switzerland. That’s where we believe Pyotr was killed. But he’s not there now.”

Bourne stared down at the two photos he held in his hand. “Who’s the younger man?”

“Leonid Danilovich Arkadin. Up until a few days ago we believed he was an independent assassin for hire among the families of the Russian grupperovka.” Specter tapped a forefinger between Arkadin’s eyes. “He’s the man who brought Pyotr to Icoupov. Somehow-we’re still trying to establish how-Icoupov discovered that it was Pyotr who had stolen his plans. In any event, it was Arkadin who, along with Icoupov, interrogated Pyotr and killed him.”

“Sounds as if you’ve got a traitor in your organization, Professor.”

Specter nodded. “I’ve reluctantly come to the same conclusion.”

Something that had been bothering Bourne now rose to the surface of his mind. “Professor, who called you when we were having breakfast?”

“One of my people. He needed verification of information. I had it in my car. Why?”

“Because it was that call that drew you out into the street just as the black Cadillac came by. That wasn’t a coincidence.”

A frown creased Specter’s brow. “No, I don’t suppose it could have been.”

“Give me his name and address,” Bourne said, “and we’ll find out for certain.”

The man on the rooftop had a mole on his cheek, black as sin. Arkadin concentrated on it as the man pulled Devra off the tar, away from Arkadin.

“Did you tell him anything?” he said without taking his eyes off Arkadin.

“Of course not,” Devra shot back. “What d’you take me for?”

“A weak link,” Mole-man said. “I told Pyotr not to use you. Now, because of you, Filya is dead.”

“Filya was an idiot!”

Mole-man took his eyes off Arkadin to sneer at Devra. “He was your fucking responsibility, bitch.”

Arkadin scissored his legs between Mole-man’s, throwing him off balance. Arkadin, quick as a cat, leapt on him, pummeling him. Mole-man fought back as best he could. Arkadin tried not to show the pain in his left shoulder, but it was already dislocated and it wouldn’t work correctly. Seeing this, Mole-man struck a blow as hard as he could flush into the shoulder.

All the breath went out of Arkadin. He sat back, dazed, almost blacked out with pain. Mole-man scrabbled for his gun, found Arkadin’s instead, and swung it up. He was about to pull the trigger when Devra shot him in the back of the head with his own gun.

Without a word, he pitched over onto his face. She stood, wide-legged, in the classic shooter’s stance, one hand supporting the other around the grips. Arkadin, on his knees, for the moment paralyzed with agony, watched her swing the gun around, point it at him. There was something in her eyes he couldn’t identify, let alone understand.

Then, all at once, she let out the long breath she’d been holding inside, her arms relaxed, and the gun came down.

“Why?” Arkadin said. “Why did you shoot him?”

“He was a fool. Fuck me, I hate them all.”

The rain beat down on them, drummed against the rooftop. The sky, utterly dark, muffled the world around them. They could have been standing on a mountaintop on the roof of the world. Arkadin watched her approach him. She put one foot in front of the other, walking stiff-legged. She seemed like a wild animal-angry, bitter, out of her element in the civilized world. Like him. He was tied to her, but he didn’t understand her, he couldn’t trust her.

When she held out her hand to him he took it.

Nine

I HAVE this recurring nightmare,” Defense Secretary Ervin Reynolds “Bud” Halliday said. “I’m sitting right here at Aushak in Bethesda, when in comes Jason Bourne and in the style of The Godfather Part II shoots me in the throat and then between my eyes.”

Halliday was seated at a table in the rear of the restaurant, along with Luther LaValle and Rob Batt. Aushak, more or less midway between the National Naval Medical Center and the Chevy Chase Country Club, was a favorite meeting place of his. Because it was in Bethesda and, especially, because it was Afghani, no one he knew or wanted to keep secrets from came here. The defense secretary felt most comfortable in off-the-beaten-path places. He was a man who despised Congress, despised even more its oversight committees, which were always mucking about in matters that didn’t concern them and for which they had no understanding, let alone expertise.

The three men had ordered the dish after which the restaurant was named: sheets of pasta, filled with scallions, drenched in a savory meat-infused tomato sauce, the whole crowned by rich Middle Eastern yogurt in which flowered tiny bits of mint. The aushak, they all agreed, was a perfect winter meal.

“We’ll soon have that particular nightmare laid to rest, sir,” LaValle said with the kind of obsequiousness that set Batt’s teeth on edge. “Isn’t that so, Rob?”

Batt nodded emphatically. “Quite right. I have a plan that’s virtually foolproof.”

Perhaps that wasn’t the correct thing to say. Halliday frowned,.”No plan is foolproof, Mr. Batt, especially when it involves Jason Bourne.”

“I assure you, no one knows that better than I do, Mr. Secretary.”

Batt, as the seniormost of the seven directorate heads, did not care for being contradicted. He was a linebacker of a man with plenty of experience beating back pretenders to his crown. Still, he was aware that he was treading terra incognita, where a power struggle was raging, the outcome unknown.

He pushed his plate away. In dealing with these people he knew he was making a calculated gamble; on the other hand, he felt the spark that emanated from Secretary Halliday. Batt had entered the nation’s true power grid, a place he’d secretly longed to be, and a powerful sense of elation shot through him.

“Because the plan revolves around DCI Hart,” Batt said now, “my hope is that we’ll be able to bring down two clay pigeons with one shot.”

“Not another word”-Halliday held up his hand-“to either of us. Luther and I must maintain plausible deniability. We can’t afford this operation coming back to bite us on the ass. Is that clear, Mr. Batt?”

“Perfectly clear, sir. This is my operation, pure and simple.”

Halliday grinned. “Son, those words are music to these big ol’ Texan ears.” He tugged at the lobe of his ear. “Now, I assume Luther here told you about Typhon.”

Batt looked from the secretary to LaValle and back again. A frown formed on his face. “No, sir, he didn’t.”

“An oversight,” LaValle said smoothly.

“Well, no time like the present.” A smile continued to light Halliday’s expression.

“We believe that one of CI’s problems is Typhon,” LaValle said. “It’s become too much for the director to properly rehabilitate and manage CI, and keep tabs on Typhon. As such, responsibility for Typhon will be taken off your shoulders. That section will be controlled directly by me.”

The entire topic had been handled smoothly, but Batt knew he’d been deliberately sandbagged. These people had wanted control of Typhon from the beginning. “Typhon is home-grown CI,” he said. “It’s Martin Lindros’s brainchild.”

“Martin Lindros is dead,” LaValle pointed out needlessly. “Another female is the director of Typhon now. That needs to be addressed, along with many other decisions that will affect Typhon’s future. You will also need to be making crucial decisions, Rob, about all of CI. You don’t want more on your plate than you can handle, do you.” It wasn’t a question.

Batt felt himself losing traction on a slippery slope. “Typhon is part of CI,” he said as a last, feeble attempt to win back control.

“Mr. Batt,” Halliday interjected. “We have made our determination. Are you with us or shall we recruit someone else for DCI?”

The man whose call had drawn Professor Specter out into the street was Mikhail Tarkanian. Bourne suggested the National Zoo as a place to meet, and the professor had called Tarkanian. The professor then contacted his secretary at the university to tell her that he and Professor Webb were each taking a personal day. They got in Specter’s car, which had been driven to the estate by one of his men, and headed toward the zoo.

“Your problem, Jason, is that you need an ideology,” Specter said. “An ideology grounds you. It’s the backbone of commitment.”

Bourne, who was driving, shook his head. “As far back as I can remember I’ve been manipulated by ideologues. So far as I can tell, all ideology does is give you tunnel vision. Everything that doesn’t fit within your self-imposed limits is either ignored or destroyed.”

“Now I know I’m truly speaking to Jason Bourne,” Specter said, “because I tried my best to instill in David Webb a sense of purpose he lost somewhere in his past. When you came to me you weren’t just cast adrift, you were severely maimed. I sought to help heal you by helping you turn away from whatever it was that hurt you so deeply. But now I see I was wrong-”

“You weren’t wrong, Professor.”

“No, let me finish. You’re always quick to defend me, to believe I’m always right. Don’t think I don’t appreciate how you feel about me. I wouldn’t want anything to change that. But occasionally I do make mistakes, and this was one of them. I don’t know what went into the making of the Bourne identity, and believe me when I tell you that I don’t want to know.

“What seems clear to me, however, is that however much you don’t want to believe it, something inside you, something innate and connected with the Bourne identity, sets you apart from everyone else.”

Bourne felt troubled by the direction of the conversation. “Do you mean that I’m Jason Bourne through and through-that David Webb would have become him no matter what?”

“No, not at all. But I do think from what you’ve shared with me that if there had been no intervention, if there had been no Bourne identity, then David Webb would have been a very unhappy man.”

This idea was not a new one to Bourne. But he’d always assumed the thought occurred to him because he knew so damnably little about who he’d been. David Webb was more of an enigma to him than Jason Bourne. That realization itself haunted Bourne, as if Webb were a ghost, a shadowing armature into which the Bourne identity had been hung, fleshed out, given life by Alex Conklin.

Bourne, driving up Connecticut Avenue, NW, crossed Cathedral Avenue. The entrance to the zoo appeared up ahead. “The truth is, I don’t think David Webb would have lasted to the end of the school year.”

“Then I’m pleased I decided to involve you in my real passion.” Something seemed to have been settled inside Specter. “It’s not often a man gets a chance to rectify his mistakes.”

The day was mild enough that the gorilla family had been let out. Schoolchildren clustered noisily at the end of the area where the patriarch sat, surrounded by his brood. The silverback did his level best to ignore them, but when their incessant chatter became too much for him, he walked to the other end of the compound, trailed by his family. There he sat while the same annoyances spiraled out of control. Then he plodded back to the spot where Bourne had first seen him.

Mikhail Tarkanian was waiting for them beside the silverback gorilla area. He looked Specter up and down, clucking over his black eye. Then he took him in his arms, kissed him on both cheeks. “Allah is good, my friend. You are alive and well.”

“Thanks to Jason here. He rescued me. I owe him my life.” Specter introduced the two men.

Tarkanian kissed Bourne on both cheeks, thanking him effusively.

There came a shuffling of the gorilla family as some grooming got under way.

“Damn sad life.” Tarkanian hooked his thumb at the silverback.

Bourne noted that his English was heavily accented in the manner of the tough Sokolniki slum of northeast Moscow.

“Look at the poor bastard,” Tarkanian said.

The gorilla’s expression was glum-resigned rather than defiant.

Specter said, “Jason’s here on a bit of a fact-finding mission.”

“Is he now?” Tarkanian was fleshy in the way of ex-athletes-neck like a bull, wary eyes sunk in yellow flesh. He kept his shoulders up around his ears, as if to ward off an expected blow. Enough hard knocks in Sokolniki to last a lifetime.

“I want you to answer his questions,” Specter said.

“Of course. Anything I can do.”

“I need your help,” Bourne said. “Tell me about Pyotr Zilber.”

Tarkanian, appearing somewhat taken aback, glanced at Specter, who had retreated a pace in order to center his man’s full attention on Bourne. Then he shrugged. “Sure. What d’you want to know?”

“How did you find out he’d been killed?”

“The usual way. Through one of our contacts.” Tarkanian shook his head. “I was devastated. Pyotr was a key man for us. He was also a friend.”

“How d’you figure he was found out?”

A gaggle of schoolgirls pranced by. When they had passed out of earshot, Tarkanian said, “I wish I knew. He wasn’t easy to get to, I’ll tell you that.”

Bourne said casually, “Did Pyotr have friends?”

“Of course he had friends. But none of them would betray him, if that’s what you’re asking.” Tarkanian pushed his lips out. “On the other hand…” His words trailed off.

Bourne found his eyes, held them.

“Pyotr was seeing this woman. Gala Nematova. He was head-over-heels about her.”

“I assume she was properly vetted,” Bourne said.

“Of course. But, well, Pyotr was a bit, um, headstrong when it came to women.”

“Was that widely known?”

“I seriously doubt it,” Tarkanian said.

That was a mistake, Bourne thought. The habits and proclivities of the enemy were always for sale if you were clever and persistent enough. Tarkanian should have said, I don’t know. Possibly. As neutral an answer as possible, and closer to the truth.

“Women can be a weak link.” Bourne thought briefly of Moira and the cloud of uncertainty that hovered over her from the CI investigation. The idea that Martin could have been seduced into revealing CI secrets was a bitter pill to swallow. He hoped when he read the communication between her and Martin that Soraya had unearthed, he could lay the question to rest.

“We’re all sick about Pyotr’s death,” Tarkanian offered. Again the glance at Specter.

“No question.” Bourne smiled rather vaguely. “Murder’s a serious matter, especially in this case. I’m talking to everyone, that’s all.”

“Of course. I understand.”

“You’ve been extremely helpful.” Bourne smiled, shook Tarkanian’s hand. As he did so, he said in a sharp tone of voice, “By the way, how much did Icoupov’s people pay you to call the professor’s cell this morning?”

Instead of freezing Tarkanian seemed to relax. “What the hell kind of question is that? I’m loyal, I always have been.”

After a moment, he tried to extricate his hand, but Bourne’s grip tightened. Tarkanian’s eyes met Bourne’s, held them.

Behind them, the silverback made a noise, growing restive. The sound was low, like the sudden ripple of wind disturbing a field of wheat. The message from the gorilla was so subtle, Bourne was the only one who picked up on it. He registered movement at the extreme edge of his peripheral vision, tracked for several seconds. He leaned back to Specter, said in a low, urgent voice. “Leave now. Go straight through the Small Mammal House, then turn left. A hundred yards on will be a small food kiosk. Ask for help getting to your car. Go back to your house and stay there until you hear from me.”

As the professor walked swiftly away, Bourne grabbed Tarkanian, pushed him in the opposite direction. They joined a Home Sweet Habitat scavenger hunt comprising a score of rowdy kids and their parents. The two men Bourne was tracking hurried toward them. It was this pair and their rushed anxiety that had aroused the suspicion of the silverback, alerting Bourne.

“Where are we going?” Tarkanian said. “Why did you leave the professor unprotected?”

A good question. Bourne’s decision had been instantaneous, instinct-driven. The men headed toward Tarkanian, not the professor. Now, as the group moved down Olmsted Walk, Bourne dragged Tarkanian into the Reptile Discovery Center. The lights were low here. They hurried past glass cases that held dozing alligators, slit-eyed crocodiles, lumbering tortoises, evil-looking vipers, and pebble-skinned lizards of all sizes, shapes, and dispositions. Up ahead, Bourne could see the snake cases. At one of them, a handler opened a door, prepared to set out a feast of rodents for the green tree pythons, which, in their hunger, had emerged from their stupor, slithering along the case’s fake tree branches. These snakes used infrared heat sensors to target their prey.

Behind them, the two men wove their way through the crowd of children. They were swarthy but otherwise unremarkable in feature. They had their hands plunged into the pockets of their wool overcoats, surely gripping some form of weapon. They weren’t hurrying now. There was no point in alarming the visitors.

Passing the European glass lizard, Bourne hauled Tarkanian into the snake section. It was at that moment that Tarkanian chose to make a move. Twisting away as he lunged back toward the approaching men, he dragged Bourne for a step, until Bourne struck him a dizzying blow to the side of the head.

A workman knelt with his toolbox in front of an empty case. He was fiddling with the ventilation grille at the base. Bourne swiped a short length of stiff wire from the box.

“The cavalry’s not going to save you today,” Bourne said as he dragged Tarkanian toward a door set flush in the wall between cases that led to the work area hidden from the public. One of the pursuers was closing in when Bourne jimmied the lock with the bit of wire. He opened the door, stepped through. He slammed it shut behind him, set the lock.

The door began to shudder on its hinges as the men pounded on it. Bourne found himself in a narrow utility corridor, lit by long fluorescent tubes, that ran behind the cases. Doors and, in the cases of the venomous snakes, feeding windows appeared at regular intervals along the right-hand wall.

Bourne heard a soft phutt! and the lock popped out of the door. The men were armed with small-caliber handguns fitted with suppressors. He pushed the stumbling Tarkanian ahead of him as one of the men stepped through. Where was the other one? Bourne thought he knew, and he turned his attention to the far end of the corridor, where any moment now he expected the second man to appear.

Tarkanian, sensing Bourne’s momentary shift of attention, spun, slamming the side of his body into Bourne’s. Thrown off balance, Bourne skidded through the open doorway into the tree python case. With a harsh bark of laughter, Tarkanian rushed on.

A herpetologist in the case to check on the python was already protesting Bourne’s appearance. Bourne ignored him, reached up, unwound one of the hungry pythons from the branch nearest him. As the snake, sensing his heat, wrapped itself around his outstretched arm, Bourne turned and burst out into the corridor just in time to drive a fist into the gunman’s solar plexus. When the man doubled over, Bourne slid his arm out of the python’s coils, wrapped its body around the gunman’s chest. Seeing the python, the man screamed. It began to tighten its coils around him.

Bourne snatched the handgun with its suppressor from his hand, took off after Tarkanian. The gun was a Glock, not a Taurus. As Bourne suspected, these two weren’t part of the same team that had abducted the professor. Who were they then? Members of the Black Legion, sent to extract Tarkanian? But if that was the case, how had they known he’d been blown? No time for answers: The second man had appeared at the far end of the corridor. He was in a crouch, motioning to Tarkanian, who squeezed himself against the side of the corridor.

As the gunman took aim at him Bourne covered his face with his folded forearms, dived headfirst through one of the feeding windows. Glass shattered. Bourne looked up to see that he was face-to-face with a Gaboon viper, the species with the longest fangs and highest venom yield of any snake. It was black and ocher. Its ugly, triangular head rose, its tongue flicked out, sensing, trying to determine if the creature sprawled in front of it was a threat.

Bourne lay still as stone. The viper began to hiss, a steady rhythm that flattened its head with each fierce exhalation. The small horns beside its nostrils quivered. Bourne had definitely disturbed it. Having traveled extensively in Africa, he knew something of this creature’s habits. It was not prone to bite unless severely provoked. On the other hand, he couldn’t risk moving his body at all at this point.

Aware that he was vulnerable from behind as well as in front, he slowly raised his left hand. The hissing’s steady rhythm didn’t change. Keeping his eyes on the snake’s head, he moved his hand until it was over the snake. He’d read about a technique meant to calm this kind of snake but had no idea whether it would work. He touched the snake on the top of its head with a fingertip. The hissing stopped. It did work!

He grasped it at its neck. Letting go of the gun, he supported the viper’s body with his other hand. The creature didn’t struggle. Walking gingerly across the case to the far end, he set it carefully down in a corner. A group of kids were staring, openmouthed, from the other side of the glass. Bourne backed away from the viper, never taking his eyes from it. Near the shattered feeding window he knelt down, grasped the Glock.

A voice behind him said, “Leave the gun where it is and turn around slowly.”

The damn thing’s dislocated,” Arkadin said.

Devra stared at his deformed shoulder.

“You’ll have to reset it for me.”

Drenched to the bone, they were sitting in a late-night cafй on the other side of Sevastopol, warming themselves as best they could. The gas heater in the cafй hissed and hiccupped alarmingly, as if it were coming down with pneumonia. Glasses of steaming tea sat before them, half empty. It was barely an hour after their hair’s-breadth escape, and both of them were exhausted.

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“Absolutely, you will,” he said. “I can’t go to a proper doctor.”

Arkadin ordered food. Devra ate like an animal, shoving dripping pieces of stew into her mouth with her fingertips. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Perhaps she hadn’t. Seeing how she laid waste to the food, Arkadin ordered more. He ate slowly and deliberately, conscious of everything he put into his mouth. Killing did that to him: All his senses were working overtime. Colors were brighter, smells stronger, everything tasted rich and complex. He could hear the acrid political argument going on in the opposite corner between two old men. His own fingertips on his cheek felt like sandpaper. He was acutely aware of his own heartbeat, the blood rushing behind his ears. He was, in short, a walking, talking exposed nerve.

He both loved and hated being in this state. The feeling was a form of ecstasy. He remembered coming across a dog-eared paperback copy of The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda, had learned to read English from it, a long, torturous path. The concept of ecstasy had never occurred to him before reading this book. Later, in emulation of Castaneda, he thought of trying peyote-if he could find it-but the idea of a drug, any drug, set his teeth on edge. He was already lost quite enough. He held no desire to find a place from which he could never return.

Meanwhile the ecstasy he was in was a burden as well as a revelation, but he knew he couldn’t long stand being that exposed nerve. Everything from a car backfiring to the chirrup of a cricket crashed against him, as painful as if he’d been turned inside out.

He studied Devra with an almost obsessive concentration. He noticed something he hadn’t seen before-likely, with her gesticulating, she’d distracted him from noticing. But now she’d let down her guard. Perhaps she was just exhausted or had relaxed with him. She had a tremor in her hands, a nerve that had gone awry. Clandestinely, he watched the tremor, thinking it made her seem even more vulnerable.

“I don’t get you,” he told her now. “Why have you turned against your own people?”

“You think Pyotr Zilber, Oleg Shumenko, and Filya were my own people?”

“You’re a cog in Zilber’s network. What else would I think?”

“You heard how that pig talked to me up on the roof. Shit, they were all like that.” She wiped grease off her lips and chin. “I never liked Shumenko. First it was gambling debts I had to bail him out of, then it was drugs.”

Arkadin’s voice was offhand when he said, “You told me you didn’t know what the last loan was for.”

“I lied.”

“Did you tell Pyotr?”

“You’re joking. Pyotr was the worst of the lot.”

“Talented little bugger, though.”

Devra nodded. “So I thought when I was in his bed. He got away with an awful lot of shit because he was the boss-drinking, partying, and, Jesus, the girls! Sometimes two and three a night. I got thoroughly sick of him and asked to be reassigned back home.”

So she’d been Pyotr’s squeeze for a short time, Arkadin thought. “The partying was part of his job, though, forging contacts, ensuring they came back for more.”

“Sure. Trouble was he liked it all too much. And inevitably, that attitude infected those who were close to him. Where d’you think Shumenko learned to live like that? From Pyotr, that’s who.”

“And Filya?”

“Filya thought he owned me, like chattel. When we’d go out together he’d act as if he was my pimp. I hated his guts.”

“Why didn’t you get rid of him?”

“He was the one supplying Shumenko with coke.”

Quick as a cat, Arkadin leaned across the table, looming. “Listen, lapochka, I don’t give a fuck who you like or don’t like. But lying to me, that’s another story.”

“What did you expect?” she said. “You blew in like a fucking whirlwind.”

Arkadin laughed then, breaking a tension that was stretched to the breaking point. This girl had a sense of humor, which meant she was clever as well as smart. His mind had made a connection between her and a woman who’d once been important to him.

“I still don’t understand you.” He shook his head. “We’re on different sides of this conflict.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I was never part of this conflict. I didn’t like it; I only pretended I did. At first it was a goal I set for myself: whether I could fool Pyotr, and then the others. When I did, it just seemed easier to keep going. I got paid well, I learned quicker than most, I got perks I never would have gotten from being a DJ.”

“You could’ve left anytime.”

“Could I?” She cocked her head. “They would’ve come after me like they’re coming after you.”

“But now you’ve made up your mind to leave them.” He cocked his head. “Don’t tell me it’s because of me.”

“Why not? I like sitting next to a whirlwind. It’s comforting.”

Arkadin grunted, embarrassed again.

“Besides, the last straw came when I found out what they’re planning.”

“You thought of your American savior.”

“Maybe you can’t understand that one person can make a difference in your life.”

“Oh, but I can,” Arkadin said, thinking of Semion Icoupov. “In that, you and I are the same.”

She gestured. “You look so uncomfortable.”

“Come on,” he said, standing. He led her back past the kitchen, poked his head in for a moment, then took her into the men’s room.

“Get out,” he ordered a man at the sink.

He checked the stall to make sure they were alone. “I’ll tell you how to fix this damnable shoulder.”

When he gave her the instructions, she said, “Is it going to hurt?”

In answer, he put the handle of the wooden spoon he’d swiped from the kitchen between his teeth.

With great reluctance Bourne turned his back on the Gaboon viper. Many things flitted through his mind, not the least of which was Mikhail Tarkanian. He was the mole inside the professor’s organization. Who knew how much intel he had about Specter’s network; Bourne couldn’t afford to let him get away.

The man before him now was flat-faced, his skin slightly greasy. He had a two-day growth of beard and bad teeth. His breath stank from cigarettes and rotting food. He pointed his suppressed Glock directly at Bourne’s chest.

“Come out of there,” he said softly.

“It won’t matter whether or not I comply,” Bourne answered. “The herpetologist down the corridor has surely phoned security. We’re all about to be put into custody.”

“Out. Now.”

The man made a fatal error of gesturing with the Glock. Bourne used his left forearm to knock the elongated barrel aside. Slamming the gunman back against the opposite wall of the corridor, Bourne drove a knee into his groin. As the gunman gagged, Bourne chopped the gun out of his hand, grabbed him by his overcoat, flung him headlong into the Gaboon viper’s case with such force that he skidded along the floor toward the corner where the viper lay coiled.

Bourne, imitating the viper, made a rhythmic hissing sound, and the snake raised its head. At the same moment it heard the hissing of a rival snake, it sensed something living thrust into its territory. It struck out at the terrified gunman.

Bourne was already pounding down the corridor. The door at the far end gaped open. He burst out into daylight. Tarkanian was waiting for him, in case he escaped the two gunmen; he had no stomach to prolong the pursuit. He drove a fist into Bourne’s cheek, followed that up with a vicious kick. But Bourne caught his shoe in his hands, twisted his foot violently, spinning him off his feet.

Bourne could hear shouts, the slap and squeak of cheap soles against concrete. Security was on its way, though he couldn’t see them yet.

“Tarkanian,” he said, and coldcocked him.

Tarkanian went down heavily. Bourne knelt beside him and was giving him mouth-to-mouth when three security guards rounded the corner, came pounding up to him.

“My friend collapsed just as we saw the men with the guns.” Bourne gave an accurate description of the two gunmen, pointed toward the open door to the Reptile Discovery Center. “Can you get help? My friend is allergic to mustard. I think there must have been some in the potato salad we had for lunch.”

One of the security guards called 911, while the other two, guns drawn, vanished into the doorway. The guard stayed with Bourne until the paramedics arrived. They took Tarkanian’s vitals, loaded him onto the gurney. Bourne walked at Tarkanian’s side as they made their way through the gawking crowds to the ambulance waiting on Connecticut Avenue. He told them about Tarkanian’s allergic reaction, also that in this state he was hypersensitive to light. He climbed into the back of the ambulance. One of the paramedics closed the doors behind him while the other prepared the IV drip of phenothiazine. The vehicle took off, siren wailing.

Tears streamed down Arkadin’s face, but he made no noise. The pain was excruciating, but at least the arm was back in its socket. He could move the fingers of his left hand, just barely. The good news was that the numbness was giving way to a peculiar tingling, as if his blood had turned to champagne.

Devra held the wooden spoon in her hand. “Shit, you almost bit this in two. It must’ve hurt like a bitch.”

Arkadin, dizzy and nauseous, grimaced in pain. “I could never get food down now.”

Devra tossed aside the spoon as they left the men’s room. Arkadin paid their check, and they went out of the cafй. The rain had stopped, leaving the streets with that slick, just-washed look so familiar to him from old American films from the 1940s and 1950s.

“We can go to my place,” Devra offered. “It’s not far from here.”

Arkadin shook his head. “I think not.”

They walked, seemingly aimlessly, until they came to a small hotel. Arkadin booked a room. The flyblown night clerk barely looked at them. He was only interested in taking their money.

The room was mean, barely furnished with a bed, a hard-backed chair, and a dresser with three legs and a pile of books propping up the fourth corner. A circular threadbare carpet covered the center of the room. It was stained, pocked with cigarette burns. What appeared to be a closet was the toilet. The shower and sink were down the hall.

Arkadin went to the window. He’d asked for a room in front, knowing it would be noisier, but would afford him a bird’s-eye view of anyone coming. The street was deserted, not a car in sight. Sevastopol glowed in a slow, cold pulse.

“Time,” he said, turning back into the room, “to get some things straight.”

“Now? Can’t this wait?” Devra was lying crosswise on the bed, her feet still on the floor. “I’m dead on my feet.”

Arkadin considered a moment. It was deep into the night. He was exhausted but not yet ready for sleep. He kicked off his shoes, lay down on the bed. Devra had to sit up to make room for him, but instead of lying down parallel to him, she resumed her position, head on his belly. She closed her eyes.

“I want to come with you,” she said softly, almost as if in sleep.

He was instantly alert. “Why?” he said. “Why would you want to come with me?”

She said nothing in reply; she was asleep.

For a time, he lay listening to her steady breathing. He didn’t know what to do with her, but she was all he had left of this end of Pyotr’s network. He spent some time digesting what she had told him about Shumenko, Filya, and Pyotr, looking for holes. It seemed improbable to him that Pyotr could be so undisciplined, but then again he’d been betrayed by his girlfriend of the moment, who worked for Icoupov. That spoke of a man out of control, whose habits could indeed filter down to his subordinates. He had no idea if Pyotr had daddy issues, but given who his daddy was it certainly wasn’t out of the question.

This girl was strange. On the surface she was so much like other young girls he’d come across: hard-edged, cynical, desperate, and despairing. But this one was different. He could see beneath her armor plating to the little lost girl she once had been and perhaps still was. He put his hand on the side of her neck, felt the slow pulse of her life. He could be wrong, of course. It could all be a performance put on for his benefit. But for the life of him he’d couldn’t figure out what her angle might be.

And there was something else about her, connected to her fragility, her deliberate vulnerability. She needed something, he thought, as, in the end, we all did, even those who fooled themselves into thinking they didn’t. He knew what he needed; it was simply that he chose not to think about it. She needed a father, that was clear enough. He couldn’t help suspecting there was something about her he was missing, something she hadn’t told him but wanted him to find. The answer was already inside him, dancing like a firefly. But every time he reached out to capture it, it just danced farther away. The feeling was maddening, as if he’d had sex with a woman without reaching an orgasm.

And then she stirred, and in stirring said his name. It was like a bolt of lightning illuminating the room. He was back on the rainy rooftop, with Mole-man standing over him, listening to the conversation between him and Devra.

“He was your responsibility,” Mole-man said, referring to Filya.

Arkadin’s heart beat faster. Your responsibility. Why would Mole-man say that if Filya was the courier in Sevastopol? As if of their own accord, his fingertips stroked the velvet flesh of Devra’s neck. The crafty little bitch! Filya was a soldier, a guard. She was the courier in Sevastopol. She’d handed the document off to the next link. She knew where he had to go next.

Holding her tightly, Arkadin at last let go of the night, the room, the present. On a tide of elation, he drifted into sleep, into the blood-soaked clutches of his past.

Arkadin would have killed himself, this was certain, had it not been for the intervention of Semion Icoupov. Arkadin’s best and only friend, Mischa Tarkanian, concerned for his life, had appealed to the man he worked for. Arkadin remembered with an eerie clarity the day Icoupov had come to see him. He had walked in, and Arkadin, half crazed with a will to die, had put a Makarov PM to his head-the same gun he was going to use to blow his own brains out.

Icoupov, to his credit, didn’t make a move. He stood in the ruins of Arkadin’s Moscow apartment, not looking at Arkadin at all. Arkadin, in the grip of his sulfurous past, was unable to make sense of anything. Much later, he understood. In the same way you didn’t look a bear in the eye, lest he charge you, Icoupov had kept his gaze focused on other things-the broken picture frames, the smashed crystal, the overturned chairs, the ashes of the fetishistic fire Arkadin had lit to burn his clothes.

“Mischa tells me you’re having a difficult time.”

“Mischa should keep his mouth shut.”

Icoupov spread his hands. “Someone has to save your life.”

“What d’you know about it?” Arkadin said harshly.

“Actually, I know nothing about what’s happened to you,” Icoupov said.

Arkadin, digging the muzzle of the Makarov into Icoupov’s temple, stepped closer. “Then shut the fuck up.”

“What I am concerned about is the here and now.” Icoupov didn’t blink an eye; he didn’t move a muscle, either. “For fuck’s sake, son, look at you. If you won’t pull back from the brink for yourself, do it for Mischa, who loves you better than any brother would.”

Arkadin let out a ragged breath, as if he were expelling a dollop of poison. He took the Makarov from Icoupov’s head.

Icoupov held out his hand. When Arkadin hesitated, he said with great gentleness, “This isn’t Nizhny Tagil. There is no one here worth hurting, Leonid Danilovich.”

Arkadin gave a curt nod, let go of the gun. Icoupov called out, handed it to one of two very large men who came down the hallway from the far end where they had been stationed, not making a sound. Arkadin tensed, angry at himself for not sensing them. Clearly, they were bodyguards. In his current condition, they could have taken Arkadin anytime. He looked at Icoupov, who nodded, and an unspoken connection sprang up between them.

“There is only one path for you now,” Icoupov said.

Icoupov moved to sit on the sofa in Arkadin’s trashed apartment, then gestured, and the bodyguard who had taken possession of Arkadin’s Makarov held it out to him.

“Here, now, you will have witnesses to your last spasm of nihilism. If you wish it.”

Arkadin for once in his life ignored the gun, stared implacably at Icoupov.

“No?” Icoupov shrugged. “Do you know what I think, Leonid Danilovich? I think it gives you a measure of comfort to believe that your life has no meaning. Most times you revel in this belief; it’s what fuels you. But there are times, like now, when it takes you by the throat and shakes you till your teeth rattle in your skull.” He was dressed in dark slacks, an oyster-gray shirt, a long black leather coat that made him look somewhat sinister, like a German SS-Stьrmbannfьhrer. “But I believe to the contrary that you are searching for the meaning of your life.” His dark skin shone like polished bronze. He gave the appearance of a man who knew what he was doing, someone, above all, not to be trifled with.

“What path?” Arkadin said dully, taking a seat on the sofa.

Icoupov gestured with both hands, encompassing the self-inflicted whirlwind that had torn apart the rooms. “The past for you is dead, Leonid Danilovich, do you not agree?”

“God has punished me. God has abandoned me,” Arkadin said, regurgitating by rote a lament of his mother’s.

Icoupov smiled a perfectly innocent smile, one that could not possibly be misinterpreted. He had an uncanny ability to engage others one-on-one. “And what God is that?”

Arkadin had no answer because this God he spoke of was his mother’s God, the God of his childhood, the God that had remained an enigma to him, a shadow, a God of bile, of rage, of split bone and spilt blood.

“But no,” he said, “God, like heaven, is a word on a page. Hell is the here and now.”

Icoupov shook his head. “You have never known God, Leonid Danilovich. Put yourself in my hands. With me, you will find God, and learn the future he has planned for you.”

“I cannot be alone.” Arkadin realized that this was the truest thing he’d ever said.

“Nor shall you be.”

Icoupov turned to accept a tray from one of the bodyguards. While they had been talking, he’d made tea. Icoupov poured two glasses full, added sugar, handed one to Arkadin.

“Drink with me now, Leonid Danilovich,” he said as he lifted his steaming glass. “To your recovery, to your health, to the future, which will be as bright for you as you wish to make it.”

The two men sipped their tea, which the bodyguard had astutely fortified with a considerable amount of vodka.

“To never being alone again,” said Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.

That was a long time ago, at a way station on a river that had turned to blood. Was he much changed from the near-insane man who had put the muzzle of a gun to Semion Icoupov’s head? Who could say? But on days of heavy rain, ominous thunder, and twilight at noon, when the world looked as bleak as he knew it to be, thoughts of his past surfaced like corpses in a river, regurgitated by his memory. And he would be alone again.

Tarkanian was coming around, but the phenothiazine that had been administered to him was doing its job, sedating him mildly and impairing his mental functioning enough so that when Bourne bent over him and said in Russian, “Bourne’s dead, we’re in the process of extracting you,” Tarkanian dazedly thought he was one of the men at the reptile house.

“Icoupov sent you.” Tarkanian lifted a hand, felt the bandage the paramedics had used to keep light out of his eyes. “Why can’t I see?”

“Lie still,” Bourne said softly. “There are civilians around. Paramedics. That’s how we’re extracting you. You’ll be safe in the hospital for a few hours while we arrange the rest of your travel.”

Tarkanian nodded.

“Icoupov is on the move,” Bourne whispered. “Do you know where?”

“No.”

“He wants you to be most comfortable during your debriefing. Where should we take you?”

“Moscow, of course.” Tarkanian licked his lips. “It’s been years since I’ve been home. I have an apartment on the Frunzenskaya embankment.” More and more he seemed to be speaking to himself. “From my living room window you can see the pedestrian bridge to Gorky Park. Such a peaceful setting. I haven’t seen it in so long.”

They arrived at the hospital before Bourne had a chance to continue the interrogation. Then everything happened very quickly. The doors banged open and the paramedic leapt into action, getting the gurney down, rushing it through the automatic glass doors into a corridor leading to the ER. The place was packed with patients. One of the paramedics was talking to a harried overworked intern, who directed him to a small room, one of many off the corridor. Bourne saw that the other rooms were filled.

The two paramedics rolled Tarkanian into the room, checked the IV, took his vitals again, unhooked him.

“He’ll come around in a minute,” one of them said. “Someone will be in shortly to see to him.” He produced a practiced smile that was not unlikable. “Don’t worry, your friend’s going to be fine.”

After they’d left, Bourne went back to Tarkanian, said, “Mikhail, I know the Frunzenskaya embankment well. Where exactly is your apartment?”

“He’s not going to tell you.”

Bourne whirled just as the first gunman-the one he’d wrapped the python around-threw himself on top of him. Bourne staggered back, bounced hard against the wall. He struck at the gunman’s face. The gunman blocked it, punched Bourne hard on the point of his sternum. Bourne grunted, and the gunman followed up with a short chop to Bourne’s side.

Down on one knee, Bourne saw him pull out a knife, swipe the blade at him. Bourne shrank back. The gunman attacked with the knife point-first. Bourne landed a hard right flush on his face, heard the satisfying crack of the cheekbone fracturing. Enraged, the gunman closed, the blade swinging through Bourne’s shirt, bringing out an arc of blood like beads on a string.

Bourne hit him so hard he staggered back, struck the gurney on which Tarkanian was stirring out of his drugged stupor. The man took out his handgun with the suppressor. Bourne closed with him, grabbing him tightly, depriving him of space to aim the gun.

Tarkanian ripped off the bandage the paramedics had used to keep light out of his eyes, blinked heavily, looking around. “What the hell’s going on?” he said drowsily to the gunman. “You told me Bourne was dead.”

The man was too busy fending off Bourne’s attack to answer. Seeing his firearm was of no use to him he dropped it, kicked it along the floor. He tried to get the knife blade inside Bourne’s defense, but Bourne broke the attacks, not fooled by the feints the gunman used to distract him.

Tarkanian sat up, slid off the gurney. He found it difficult to talk, so he slipped to his knees, crawled across the cool linoleum to where the gun lay.

The gunman, one hand gripping Bourne’s neck, was working the knife free, prepared to stab downward into Bourne’s stomach.

“Move away from him.” Tarkanian was aiming the gun at the two men. “I’ll have a clear shot.”

The gunman heard him, shoved the heel of his hand into Bourne’s Adam’s apple, choking him. Then he moved his upper body to one side.

Just as Tarkanian was about to squeeze the trigger Bourne rabbit-punched the gunman in the kidney. He groaned and Bourne hauled him between himself and Tarkanian. A coughing sound announced the bullet plowing into the gunman’s chest.

Tarkanian cursed, moved to get Bourne back in his sights. As he did so, Bourne wrested the knife away from the gunman’s limp hand, threw it with deadly accuracy. The force of it lifted Tarkanian backward off his feet. Bourne pushed the gunman away from him, crossed the room to where Tarkanian lay in a pool of his own blood. The knife was buried to the hilt in his chest. By its position, Bourne knew it had pierced a lung. Within moments Tarkanian would drown in his own blood.

Tarkanian stared up at Bourne. He laughed even as he said, “Now you’re a dead man.”

Ten

ROB BATT made his arrangements through General Kendall, LaValle’s second in command. Through him, Batt was able to access certain black-ops assets in the NSA. No congressional oversight, no fuss, no muss. As far as the federal government was concerned, these people didn’t exist, except as auxiliary staff seconded to the Pentagon; they were thought to be pushing papers in a windowless office somewhere in the bowels of the building.

Now, this is the way the clandestine services should run, Batt said to himself as he laid out the operation for the eight young men ranged in a semicircle in a Pentagon briefing room Kendall had provided for him. No supervision, no snooping congressional committees to report to.

The plan was simple, as all his plans tended to be. Other people might like bells and whistles, but not Batt. Vanilla, Kendall had called it. But the more that was involved, the more that could go wrong was how he looked at it. Also, no one fucked up simple plans; they could be put together and executed in a matter of hours, if need be, even with new personnel. But the fact was he liked these NSA agents, perhaps because they were military men. They were quick to catch on, quicker even to learn. He never had to repeat himself. To a man, they seemed to memorize everything as it was presented to them.

Better still, because of their military background, they obeyed orders unquestioningly, unlike agents in CI-Soraya Moore a case in point-who always thought they knew a better way to get things done. Plus, these bad boys weren’t afraid of rendition; they weren’t afraid to pull the trigger. If given the appropriate order they’d kill a target without either question or regret.

Batt felt a certain exhilaration at the knowledge that no one was looking over his shoulder, that he wouldn’t have to explain himself to anyone-not even the new DCI. He’d entered an altogether different arena, one all his own, where he could make decisions of great moment, devise field operations, and carry them out with the confidence that he would be backed to the hilt, that no operation would ever boomerang on him, bring him face-to-face with a congressional committee and disgrace. As he wrapped up the pre-mission briefing, his cheeks were flushed, his pulse accelerated. There was a heat building inside him that could almost be called arousal.

He tried not to think of his conversation with the defense secretary, tried not to think of Luther LaValle heading up Typhon while he looked helplessly on. He desperately didn’t want to give up control of such a powerful weapon against terrorism, but Halliday hadn’t given him a choice.

One step at a time. If there was a way to foil Halliday and LaValle, he was confident he’d find it. But for the moment, he returned his attention to the job at hand. No one was going to fuck up his plan to capture Jason Bourne. He knew this absolutely. Within hours Bourne would be in custody, down so deep even a Houdini like him would never get out.

Soraya Moore made her way to Veronica Hart’s office. Two men were emerging: Dick Symes, the chief of intelligence, and Rodney Feir, chief of field support. Symes was a short, round man whose red face appeared to have been applied directly to his shoulders. Feir, several years Symes’s junior, was fair-haired, with an athletic body, an expression as closed as a bank vault.

Both men greeted her cordially, but there was a repellent condescension to Symes’s smile.

“Bearding the lioness in her den?” Feir said.

“Is she in a bad mood?” Soraya asked.

Feir shrugged. “Too soon to tell.”

“We’re waiting to see if she can carry the weight of the world on those delicate shoulders,” Symes said. “Just like with you, Director.”

Soraya forced a smile though her clenched jaws. “You gentlemen are too kind.”

Feir laughed. “Ready, willing, and able to oblige, ma’am.”

Soraya watched them leave, two peas in a pod. Then she poked her head into the DCI’s inner sanctum. Unlike her predecessor, Veronica Hart maintained an open-door policy when it came to her upper-echelon staff. It engendered a sense of trust and camaraderie that-as she’d told Soraya-had been sorely lacking at CI in the past. In fact, from the vast amount of electronic data she’d pored over the last couple of days it was becoming increasing clear to her that the previous DCI’s bunker mentality had led to an atmosphere of cynicism and alienation among the directorate heads. The Old Man came from the school of letting the Seven vie with one another, complete with duplicity, backstabbing, and, so far as she was concerned, outright objectionable behavior.

Hart was a product of a new era, where the primary watchword was cooperation. The events of 2001 had proved that when it came to the intelligence services, competition was deadly. So far as Soraya was concerned that was all to the good.

“How long have you been at this?” Soraya asked.

Hart glanced out the window. “It’s morning already? I ordered Rob home hours ago.”

“Way past morning.” Soraya smiled. “How about lunch? You definitely need to get out of this office.”

She spread her hands to indicate the queue of dossiers loaded onto her computer. “Too much work-”

“It won’t get done if you pass out from hunger and dehydration.”

“Okay, the canteen-”

“It’s such a fine day, I was thinking of walking to a favorite restaurant of mine.”

Hearing a warning note in Soraya’s otherwise light voice, Hart looked up. Yes, there was definitely something her director of Typhon wanted to talk to her about outside the confines of the CI building.

Hart nodded. “All right. I’ll get my coat.”

Soraya took out her new cell, which she’d picked up at CI this morning. She’d found her old one in the gutter by her car at the Moira Trevor surveillance site, had disposed of it at the office. Now she texted a message.

A moment later Hart’s cell buzzed. The text from Soraya read: VAN X ST. Van across the street.

Hart folded her cell away and launched into a long story at the end of which both women laughed. Then they talked about shoes versus boots, leather versus suede, and which Jimmy Choos they’d buy if they were ever paid enough.

Both women kept an eye on the van without seeming to look at it. Soraya directed them down a side street where the van couldn’t go for fear of becoming conspicuous. They were moving out of the range of its electronics.

“You came from the private sector,” Soraya said. “What I don’t understand is why you’d give up that payday to become DCI. It’s such a thankless job.”

“Why did you agree to be director of Typhon?” Hart asked.

“It was a huge step up for me, both in prestige and in pay.”

“But that’s not really why you accepted it, was it?”

Soraya shook her head. “No. I felt a strong sense of obligation to Martin Lindros. I was in at the beginning. Because I’m half Arab, Martin sought out my input both in the creation of Typhon and in its recruitment. He meant Typhon to be a very different intelligence-gathering organization, staffed with people who understood both the Arab and the Muslim mind-set. He felt-and I wholeheartedly agree-that the only way to successfully combat the wide array of extremist terrorist cells was to understand what motivates them. Once you were in sync with their motivation, you could begin to anticipate their actions.”

Hart nodded, her long face in a neutral set as she sank deeper in thought. “My own motivations were similar to yours. I grew sick of the cynical attitude of the private security firms. All of them, not just Black River where I worked, were focused on how much money they could milk out of the mess in the Middle East. In times of war, the government is a mighty cash cow, throwing newly minted money at every situation, as if that alone will make a difference. But the fact is, everyone involved has a license to plunder and steal to their heart’s content. What happens in Iraq stays in Iraq. No one’s going prosecute them. They’re indemnified against retribution for profiting from other people’s misery.”

Soraya took them into a clothes store, where they made a pretense of checking out camisoles to cover the seriousness of the conversation.

“I came to CI because I couldn’t change Black River, but I felt I could make a difference here. The president gave me a mandate to change an organization that was in disarray, that long ago had lost its way.”

They went out the back, across the street, hurrying now, down the block, turning left for a block, then right for two blocks, left again. They went into a large restaurant boiling with people. Perfect. The high level of ambient noise, the multiple crosscurrents of conversations would make their own conversation undetectable.

At Hart’s request they were seated at a table near the rear where they had excellent sight lines of the interior as well as the front door. Everyone who came in would be visually vetted by them.

“Well executed,” Hart said when they were seated. “I see you’ve done this before.”

“There were times-especially when I was working with Jason Bourne -when I was obliged to lose a CI tail or two.”

Hart scanned the large menu. “Do you think that was a CI van?”

“No.”

Hart looked at Soraya over the menu. “Neither do I.”

They ordered brook trout, Caesar salads to start, mineral water to drink. They took turns checking out the people who came into the restaurant.

Halfway through the salads Soraya said, “We’ve intercepted some unconventional chatter in the last couple of days. I don’t think alarming would be a too strong a word.”

Hart put down her fork. “How so?”

“It seems possible that a new attack on American soil is in its final stages.”

Hart’s demeanor changed instantly. She was clearly shaken. “What the hell are we doing here?” she said angrily. “Why aren’t we in the office where I can mobilize the forces?”

“Wait until you hear the whole story.” Soraya said. “Remember that the lines and frequencies Typhon monitors are almost all overseas, so unlike the chatter other intelligence agencies scan, ours is more concentrated, but from what I’ve seen it’s also far more accurate. As you know, there’s always an enormous amount of disinformation in the regular chatter. Not so with the terrorists we keep an ear on. Of course, we’re checking and rechecking the accuracy of this intel, but until proven otherwise we’re going on the assumption that it’s real. We have two problems, however, which is why mobilizing CI now isn’t the wisest course.”

Three women came in, chatting animatedly. The manager greeted them like old friends, showed them to a round table near the window, where they settled in.

“First, we have an immediate time frame, that is to say within a week, ten days at the outside. However, we have almost nothing on the target, except from the intercepts we know it’s large and complex, so we’re thinking a building. Again, because of our Muslim expertise we believe it will be a structure of both economic and symbolic importance.”

“But no specific location?”

“East Coast, most probably New York.”

“Nothing’s crossed my desk, which means none of our sister agencies has a clue about this intel.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Soraya said. “This is ours alone. Typhon’s. This is why we were created.”

“You haven’t yet told me why I shouldn’t inform Homeland Security and mobilize CI.”

“Because the source of this intel is entirely new. Do you seriously think HS or NSA would take our intel at its face value? They’d need corroboration-and A, they wouldn’t get it from their own sources, and, B, their mucking about in the bush would jeopardize the inroads we’ve made.”

“You’re right about that,” Hart said. “They’re about as subtle as an elephant in Manhattan.”

Soraya hunched forward. “The point is the group planning the attack is unknown to us. That means we don’t know their motivation, their mind-set, their methodology.”

Two men came in, one after the other. They were dressed as civilians, but their military bearing gave them away. They were seated at separate tables on opposite sides of the restaurant.

“NSA,” Hart said.

Soraya frowned. “Why would NSA be shadowing us?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Let’s continue with what’s most immediately pressing. You mean we’re dealing with a complete unknown, an unaffiliated terrorist organization that is capable of planning a large-scale attack? That sounds far-fetched.”

“Imagine how it’ll sound to your directorate heads. Plus, our operatives have determined that keeping our information secret is the only way to get more intel. The moment this group catches wind of our mobilizing they’ll postpone the operation for another time.”

“Assuming the current time frame is correct, could they abort or postpone at this late stage?”

“We couldn’t, that’s for sure.” Soraya gave her a sardonic smile. “But terrorist networks have no infrastructure or bureaucracy to slow them down, so who knows? Part of the difficulty in locating them and taking them down is their infinite flexibility. This superior methodology is what Martin wanted for Typhon. That’s my mandate.”

The waiter took their half-eaten salads away. A moment later, their main courses arrived. Hart asked for another bottle of mineral water. Her mouth was dry. Now she had NSA on one side, an off-the-grid terrorist organization about to carry out an attack on a large East Coast building on the other. Scylla and Charybdis. Either one could wreck her career at CI before it even began. She couldn’t allow that to happen. She wouldn’t.

“Excuse me a moment,” she said, getting up.

Soraya scanned the restaurant, but kept at least one of the agents in her peripheral vision. She saw him tense when the DCI went off to the ladies’ room. He had risen and was making his way toward the rear when Hart returned. He reversed course, sat back down.

When the DCI had settled herself in her chair she looked Soraya in the eye. “Since you decided to deliver this intel here instead of the office I assume you have a specific idea as to how to proceed.”

“Listen,” Soraya said, “we have a red-hot situation, and we don’t have enough intel to mobilize, let alone act. We have less than a week to find out everything on this terrorist organization based God only knows where with who knows how many members.

“This isn’t the time or place for the usual protocols. They’re not going to avail us anything.” She glanced down at her fish as if it were the last thing she wanted to put in her mouth. When her gaze rose again, she said, “We need Jason Bourne to find this terrorist group. We’ll take care of the rest.”

Hart looked at her as if she were out of her mind. “Out of the question.”

“Given the urgency of the mission,” Soraya said, “he’s the only one who has a chance of finding them and stopping them.”

“I wouldn’t last a day in the job once it got out that I was using Jason Bourne.”

“On the other hand,” Soraya said, “if you don’t follow through on this intel, if this group executes their attack, you’ll be out of CI before you can catch your breath.”

Hart sat back, produced a short laugh. “You really are a piece of work. You want me to authorize the use of a rogue agent-a man who’s unstable at best, who many powerful people in this organization feel is dangerous to CI in particular-for a mission that could have dire consequences for this country, for the continuation of CI as you and I know it?”

A jolt of anxiety ran down Soraya’s spine. “Wait a minute, back that up. What do you mean the continuation of CI as we know it?”

Hart glanced from one of the NSA agents to the other. Then she expelled a deep breath and told Soraya everything that had happened from the moment she’d been summoned into the Oval Office to meet with the president and had found herself confronting Luther LaValle and General Kendall.

“After I managed to prevail with the president, LaValle accosted me outside for a chat,” Hart concluded. “He told me that if I didn’t play nice with him he’d come after me with everything he has. He wants to take over CI, Soraya, wants it as part of his ever-enlarging intelligence services domain. But it isn’t just LaValle we’re fighting, it’s his boss, the secretary of defense. The plan is Bud Halliday’s through and through. Black River had some dealings with him when I was there, none of them pleasant. If he succeeds in bringing CI into the Pentagon fold, you can be sure the military will come in, ruin everything with their usual war-like mentality.”

“Then there’s even more reason to let me bring Jason in for this.” Soraya’s voice had taken on added urgency. “He’ll get the job done where a company of agents can’t. Believe me, I’ve worked with him in the field twice. Whatever’s said about him within CI is totally false. Sure, lifers like Rob Batt hate his guts, why wouldn’t they? Bourne’s got a freedom they wish they had. Plus, he’s got abilities they never dreamed of.”

“Soraya, it’s been implied in several evaluations that you once had an affair with Bourne. Please tell me the truth-I need to know if you’re being swayed by anything other than what you think will be best for the country and for CI.”

Soraya knew this was coming and was prepared. “I thought Martin had laid that office scuttlebutt to rest. There’s absolutely no truth to it. We became friends when I was chief of station in Odessa. That was a long time ago; he doesn’t remember. When he came back last year to rescue Martin he had no idea who I was.”

“Last year you were in the field with him again.”

“We work well together. That’s all,” Soraya said firmly.

Hart was still clandestinely watching the NSA agents. “Even if I thought what you were proposing would work, he’d never consent. From everything I’ve read and heard since coming to CI, he hates the organization.”

“True enough,” Soraya said. “But once he understands the nature of the threat I think I can convince him to sign on one more time.”

Hart shook her head. “I don’t know. Even talking to him is a damn huge gamble, one I’m not sure I’m willing to take.”

“Director, if you don’t seize this opportunity, you’ll never be able to. It’ll be too late.”

Still, Hart was unsure which direction to take: the tried and true or the unorthodox. No, she thought, not unorthodox, insane.

“I think this place has outlived its usefulness,” she said abruptly. She signaled the waiter. “Soraya, I believe you have to powder your nose. And while you’re there, please call the Metro DC Police. Use the pay phone; it’s in working order, I checked. Tell Metro that there are two armed men at this restaurant. Then come right back to the table and be ready to move quickly.”

Soraya gave her a small conspiratorial smile, then rose, threading her way back to the ladies’ room. The waiter approached the table, frowning.

“Is there something wrong with the brook trout, ma’am?”

“It’s fine,” Hart said.

As the waiter gathered up the plates Hart took out five twenty-dollar bills, slipped them in his pocket. “You see that man over there, the one with the wide face and football player’s shoulders?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How about you trip when you get to his table.”

“If I do that,” the waiter said, “I’m liable to dump these brook trouts in his lap.”

“Precisely,” Hart said with a winning smile.

“But it could mean my job.”

“Don’t worry.” Hart took out her ID, showed it to him. “I’ll square things with your boss.”

The waiter nodded, turned away. Soraya reappeared, made her way to the table. Hart threw some bills onto their table but didn’t stand up until the waiter bumped into a busboy. He staggered, the plates tipped. As the NSA shadow leapt up, Hart rose. Together she and Soraya walked to the door. The NSA shadow was berating the waiter, who was brushing him down with several napkins; everyone was looking, gesticulating. A couple of people closest to the accident were shouting their versions of what happened. Amid the escalating chaos, the second NSA shadow had gotten up to come to his compatriot’s aid, but when he saw his target heading toward him he changed his mind.

Hart and Soraya had reached the door, were stepping out into the street. The second NSA shadow began to follow them, but a pair of burly Metro cops burst into the restaurant detaining him. “Hey! What about them!” he shouted at the two women.

Two more patrol cars screeched to a halt, cops raced out. Hart and Soraya already had their IDs out. The cops checked them.

“We’re late for a meeting,” Hart said briskly and authoritatively. “National security.”

The phrase was like open sesame. The cops waved them on.

“Sweet,” Soraya said, impressed.

Hart nodded her head in acknowledgment, but her expression was grim. Winning such a small skirmish meant nothing to her, save a bit of immediate gratification. It was the war she had her gaze set on.

When they were several blocks away and had determined that they were clean of LaValle’s tags, Soraya said, “At least let me set up a meet with Bourne so we can pick his brain.”

“I very much doubt this will work.”

“Jason trusts me. He’ll do the right thing,” Soraya said with absolute conviction. “He always does.”

Hart considered for some time. Scylla and Charybdis still loomed large in her thought process. Death by water or fire, which was it to be? But even now she didn’t regret taking the director’s position. If there was anything she was up for at this stage in her life it was a challenge. She couldn’t imagine a bigger one than this.

“As you no doubt know,” she said, “Bourne wants to see the files on the conversations between Lindros and Moira Trevor.” She paused in order to judge Soraya’s reaction to the woman Bourne was now linked with. “I agreed.” There wasn’t even a tremor in Soraya’s face. “I’m meeting him this evening at five,” she said slowly, as if still chewing the idea over. Then, all at once, she nodded decisively. “Join me. We’ll hear his take on your intel then.”

Eleven

SPLENDIDLY DONE,” Specter said to Bourne. “I can’t tell you how impressed I am with how you handled the situations at the zoo and at the hospital.”

“Mikhail Tarkanian is dead,” Bourne said. “I never meant that to happen.”

“Nevertheless it did.” Specter’s black eye wasn’t quite as swollen, but it was beginning to turn lurid colors. “Once again I’m deeply in your debt, my dear Jason. Tarkanian was quite clearly the traitor. If not for you, he would have been the instigator of my torture and eventual death. You’ll pardon me if I don’t grieve for him.”

The professor clapped Bourne on the back as the two men walked down to the weeping willow on Specter’s property. Out of the corner of his eye, Bourne could see several young men, armed with assault rifles, flanking them. Following the events of today, Bourne didn’t begrudge the professor his armed guards. In fact, they made him feel better about leaving Specter’s side.

Under the nebula of delicate yellow branches the two men gazed out at the pond, its surface as perfectly flat as if it were a sheet of steel. A brace of skittish grackles lifted up from the willow, cawing angrily. Their feathers gleamed in brief rainbow hues as they banked away from the swiftly lowering sun.

“How well do you know Moscow?” Specter asked. Bourne had told him what Tarkanian had said, and they’d agreed that Bourne should start there in his search for Pyotr’s killer.

“Well enough. I’ve been there several times.”

“Still and all, I’ll have a friend, Lev Baronov, meet you at Sheremetyevo. Whatever you require, he’ll provide. Including weapons.”

“I work alone,” Bourne said. “I don’t want or need a partner.”

Specter nodded understandingly. “Lev will be there for support only, I promise he won’t be a hindrance.”

The professor paused a moment. “What worries me, Jason, is your relationship with Ms. Trevor.” Turning so that he faced away from the house, he spoke more softly. “I have no intention of prying into your personal life, but if you’re going overseas-”

“We both are. She’s off to Munich this evening,” Bourne said. “I appreciate your concern, but she’s as tough a woman as I’ve come across. She can take care of herself.”

Specter nodded, clearly relieved. “All right, then. There’s just the matter of the information on Icoupov.” He drew out a packet. “In here are your plane tickets to Moscow, along with the documentation you’ll need. There’s money waiting for you. Lev has the details as to which bank, the account number attached to the safe-deposit box, and a false identity. The account has been established in that name, not in yours.”

“This took some planning.”

“I had it done last night, in the hope that you’d agree to go,” Specter said. “All that remains is for us to take a picture of you for the passport.”

“And if I’d said no?”

“Someone else had already volunteered.” Specter smiled. “But I had faith, Jason. And my faith was rewarded.”

They turned back and were heading for the house when the professor paused.

“One more thing,” he said. “The situation in Moscow vis-а-vis the grupperovka-the criminal families-is at one of its periodic boiling points. The Kazanskaya and the Azeri are vying for sole control of the drug trade. The stakes are extraordinarily high-in the billions of dollars. So don’t get in their way. If there is any contact with you, I beg you not to engage them. Instead, turn the other cheek. It’s the only way to survive there.”

“I’ll remember that,” Bourne said, just as one of Specter’s men came hurrying out of the back of the house.

“A woman, Moira Trevor, is here to see Mr. Bourne,” he said in German-inflected Turkish.

Specter turned to Bourne, his eyebrows raised in either surprise or concern, if not both.

“I had no other choice,” Bourne said. “I need to see her before she leaves, and after what happened today I wasn’t about to leave you until the last moment.”

Specter’s face cleared. “I appreciate that, Jason. Indeed, I do.” His hand swept up and away. “Go see your lady friend, and then we’ll make our last preparations.”

I’m on my way to the airport,” Moira said when Bourne met her in the hallway. “The plane takes off in two hours.” She gave him all the pertinent information.

“I’m on another flight,” he said. “I have some work to do for the professor.”

A flicker of disappointment crossed her face before vanishing in a smile. “You have to do what you think is best for you.”

Bourne heard the slight distance in her voice, as if a glass partition had come down between them. “I’m out of the university. You were right about that.”

“Another bit of good news.”

“Moira, I don’t want my decision to cause any problems between us.”

“That could never happen, Jason, I promise you.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I have some interviews lined up when I get to Munich, security people I’ve been able to contact through back channels-two Germans, an Israeli, and a German Muslim, who may be the most promising of the lot.”

As two of Specter’s young men came through the door, Bourne took Moira into one of the two sitting rooms. A ship’s brass clock on the marble mantel chimed the change in watch.

“Quite a grand palace for the head of a university.”

“The professor comes from money,” Bourne lied. “But he’s private about it.”

“My lips are sealed,” Moira said. “By the way, where’s he sending you?”

“Moscow. Some friends of his have gotten into a bit of trouble.”

“The Russian mob?”

“Something like that.”

Best that she believe the simplest explanation, Bourne thought. He watched the play of lamplight reveal her expression. He was certainly no stranger to duplicity, but his heart constricted at the thought that Moira might be playing him as she was suspected of playing Martin. Several times today he had considered bypassing the meet with the new DCI, but he had to admit to himself that seeing the questioned communication between her and Martin had become important to him. Once he saw the evidence he’d know how to proceed with Moira. He owed it to Martin to discover the truth about his relationship with her. Besides, it was no use fooling himself: He now had a personal stake in the situation. His newly revealed feelings for her complicated matters for everyone, not the least himself. Why was there was a price to pay for every pleasure? he wondered bitterly. But now he stood committed; there was no turning back, either from Moscow or from discovering who Moira really was.

Moira, moving closer to him, put a hand on his arm. “Jason, what is it? You look so troubled.”

Bourne tried not to look alarmed. Like Marie, she had the uncanny ability to sense what he was feeling, though with everyone else he was adept at keeping his expression neutral. The important thing now was not to lie to her; she’d pick that up in a heartbeat.

“The mission is extremely delicate. Professor Specter has already warned me that I’m jumping into the middle of a blood feud between two Moscow grupperovka families.”

Her grip on him tightened briefly. “Your loyalty to the professor is admirable. And after all, your loyalty is what Martin admired most about you.” She checked her watch. “I’ve got to go.”

She lifted her face to his, her lips soft as melting butter, and they kissed for what seemed a long time.

She laughed softly. “Dear Jason, don’t worry. I’m not one of those people who ask about when I’ll see you again.”

Then she turned and, walking into the foyer, saw herself out. A moment later Bourne heard the cough of a car starting up, the crunch of its tires as it performed a quarter circle back down the gravel drive to the road.

Arkadin awoke grimy and stiff. His shirt was still damp with sweat from his nightmare. Gray light sifted in through the skewed blinds on the window. Stretching his neck by rolling his head in a circle, he thought what he needed most was a good long soak, but the hotel had only a shower in the hallway bathroom.

He rolled over to find that he was alone in the room; Devra had gone. Sitting up, he slid out of the damp, rumpled bed, scrubbed his rough face with the heels of his hands. His shoulder throbbed. It was swollen and hot.

He was reaching for the doorknob when the door opened. Devra stood on the threshold, a paper bag in one hand.

“Did you miss me?” she said with a sardonic smile. “I can see it in your face. You thought I’d skipped out.”

She came inside, kicked the door shut. Her eyes, unblinking, met his. She put her free arm up. Her hand squeezed his left shoulder, gently but firmly enough to cause him pain.

“I brought us coffee and fresh rolls,” she said evenly. “Don’t manhandle me.”

Arkadin glared at her for a moment. The pain meant nothing to him, but her defiance did. He was right. There was much more to her than what she presented on the surface.

He let go and so did she.

“I know who you are,” he said. “Filya wasn’t Pyotr’s courier. You are.”

That sardonic smile returned. “I was wondering how long it would take you to figure it out.” She crossed to the dresser, lined up the paper cups of coffee, set the rolls on the flattened bag. She took out a small bag of ice and tossed it to him.

“They’re still warm.” She bit into one, chewed thoughtfully.

Arkadin placed the ice on his left shoulder, sighed inwardly at the relief. He wolfed down his roll in three bites. Then he poured the scalding coffee down his throat.

“Next I suppose you’re going to hold your palm over an open flame.” Devra shook her head. “Men.”

“Why are you still here?” Arkadin said. “You could’ve just run off.”

“And go where? I shot one of Pyotr’s own men.”

“You must have friends.”

“None I can trust.”

Which implied she trusted him. He had an instinct she wasn’t lying about this. She’d washed off the heavy mascara that had run and smudged last night. Oddly, this made her eyes seem even larger. And her cheeks held a blush now that she’d scrubbed off what had to be white theatrical makeup.

“I’ll take you to Turkey,” she said. “A small town called Eskisёehir. That’s where I sent the document.”

Given what he knew, Turkey-the ancient gateway between East and West-made perfect sense.

The bag of ice slipped off as Arkadin grabbed the front of her shirt, crossed to the window, threw it wide open. Though the action cost him in pain to his shoulder, he hardly cared. The early-morning sounds of the street rose up to him like the smell of baking bread. He bent her backward so her head and torso were out the window. “What did I tell you about lying to me?”

“You might as well kill me now,” she said in her little-girl voice. “I won’t tolerate your abuse anymore.”

Arkadin pulled her back inside the room, let go of her. “What are you going to do,” he said with a smirk, “jump out the window?”

No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than she walked calmly to the window and sat on the sash, staring at him all the time. Then she tipped herself backward, through the open window. Arkadin grabbed her around the legs and hauled her up from the brink.

They stood glaring at each other, breathing fast, hearts pumping with excess adrenaline.

“Yesterday, while we were on the ladder, told me that you had nothing much to live for,” Devra said. “That pretty much goes for me, too. So here we both are, brothers under the skin, with nothing but each other.”

“How do I know the next link in the network is Turkey?”

She drew her hair back from her face. “I’m tired of lying to you,” she said. “It’s like lying to myself. What’s the point?”

“Talk is cheap,” he said.

“Then I’ll prove it to you. When we get to Turkey I’ll take you to the document.”

Arkadin, trying not to think too much about what she said, nodded his acknowledgment of their uneasy truce. “I won’t lay a hand on you again.”

Except to kill you, he thought.

Twelve

THE FREER GALLERY of Art stood on the south side of the Mall, bounded on the west by the Washington Monument and on the east by the Reflecting Pool, gateway to the immense Capitol building. It was situated on the corner of Jefferson Drive and 12th Street, SW, near the western edge of the Mall.

The building, a Florentine Renaissance palazzo faced with Stony Creek granite imported from Connecticut, had been commissioned by Charles Freer to house his enormous collection of Near East and East Asian art. The main entrance on the north side of the building where the meet was to take place consisted of three arches accented by Doric pilasters surrounding a central loggia. Because its architecture looked inward, many critics felt it was a rather forbidding facade, especially when compared with the nearby exuberance of the National Gallery of Art.

Nevertheless, the Freer was the preeminent museum of its kind in the country, and Soraya loved it not only for the depth of art it housed but also for the elegant lines of the palazzo itself. She especially loved the contained open space at its entrance, and the fact that even, as now, when the Mall was agitated with hordes of tourists heading to and from the Smithsonian Metro rail stop on 12th Street, the Freer itself was an oasis of calm and tranquility. When things boiled over in the office during the day, it was to the Freer she came to decompress. Ten minutes with Sung dynasty jades and lacquers acted like a soothing balm to her soul.

Approaching the north side of the Mall, she searched past the crowds outside the entrance to the Freer and thought she saw-among the sturdy men with their hard, clipped Midwestern accents, the scampering children and their laughing mothers, the vacant-eyed teenagers plugged into their iPods-Veronica Hart’s long, elegant figure walking past the entrance, then doubling back.

She stepped off the curb, but the blare of a horn from an oncoming car startled her back onto the sidewalk. It was at that moment that her cell phone buzzed.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Bourne said in her ear.

“Jason?”

“Why are you coming to this meet?”

Foolishly, she looked around; she’d never be able to spot him, and she knew it.

“Hart invited me. I need to talk to you. The DCI and I both do.”

“About what?”

Soraya took a deep breath. “Typhon’s listening posts have picked up a series of disturbing communications pointing to an imminent terrorist attack on an East Coast city. The trouble is, that’s all we have. Worse, the communications are between two cadres of a group about which we have no intel whatsoever. It was my idea to recruit you to find them and stop the attack.”

“Not much to go on,” Bourne said. “Doesn’t matter. The group’s name is the Black Legion.”

“In grad school I studied the link between a branch of Muslim extremism and the Third Reich. But this can’t be the same Black Legion. They were either killed or disbanded when Nazi Germany fell.”

“It can and it is,” Bourne said. “I don’t know how it managed to survive, but it did. Three of their members tried to kidnap Professor Specter this morning. I saw their device tattooed on the gunman’s arm.”

“The three horses’ heads joined by the death’s head?”

“Yes.” Bourne described the incident in detail. “Check the body at the morgue.”

“I’ll do that,” Soraya said. “But how could the Black Legion remain so far underground all this time without being detected?”

“They have a powerful international front,” Bourne said. “The Eastern Brotherhood.”

“That sounds far-fetched,” Soraya said. “The Eastern Brotherhood is in the forefront of Islamic-Western relations.”

“Nevertheless, my source is unimpeachable.”

“God in heaven, what’ve you been doing while you’ve been away from CI?”

“I was never in CI,” Bourne said brusquely, “and here’s just one reason why. You say you want to talk with me but I doubt you need half a dozen agents to do that.”

Soraya froze. “Agents?” She was on the Mall itself now, and she had to restrain herself from looking around again. “There are no CI agents here.”

“How d’you know that?”

“Hart would’ve told me-”

“Why should she tell you anything? We go way back, you and I.”

“That’s true enough.” She kept walking. “But something happened earlier today that makes me believe the agents you’ve spotted are NSA.” She described the way she and Hart had been shadowed from CI HQ to the restaurant. She told him about Secretary Halliday and Luther LaValle, both of whom were gunning to make CI a part of the Pentagon clandestine service.

“That might make sense,” Bourne said, “if there were only two of them. But six? No, there’s another agenda, one neither of us knows about.”

“Such as?”

“The agents are vectored perfectly, triangulated on the entrance to the Freer,” Bourne said. “This means that they must have had foreknowledge of the meet. It also means the six weren’t sent to shadow Veronica Hart. If they aren’t here for her, they must have been sent for me. This is Hart’s doing.”

Soraya felt a chill crawl down her spine. What if the DCI was lying to her? What if she meant all along to lead Bourne into a trap? It would make sense for one of her first official acts as DCI to be the capture of Jason Bourne. It certainly would put her in solidly with Rob Batt and the others who despised and feared Bourne, and who resented her. Plus, capturing Jason would score her big points with the president and prevent Secretary Halliday from building on his already considerable influence. Still, why would Hart have allowed Soraya to possibly muck up her first field op by coming along? No, she had to believe this was an NSA initiative.

“I don’t believe that,” she said emphatically.

“Let’s say you’re right. The other possibility is just as dire. If Hart didn’t set the trap, then there’s someone highly placed in CI who did. I went to Hart directly with the request.”

“Yes,” she said, “using my cell, thank you very much.”

“Did you find it? You’re on a new one now.”

“It was in the gutter where you tossed it.”

“Then stop complaining,” Bourne said, not unkindly. “I can’t imagine Hart told too many people about this meet, but one of them is working against her, and if that’s the case chances are he’s been recruited by LaValle.”

If Bourne was right… But of course he was. “You’re the grand prize, Jason. If LaValle can take you down when no one in CI could, he’ll be a hero. Taking over CI will be a cakewalk for him after that.” Soraya felt perspiration break out at her hairline. “Under the circumstances,” she continued, “I think you ought to withdraw.”

“I need to see the correspondence between Martin and Moira. And if Hart is instigating this trap, then she’ll never give me access to the files at another time. I’ll have to take my chances, but not until you’re certain Hart has the material.”

Soraya, who was almost at the entrance, expelled a long breath. “Jason, I found the conversations. I can tell you what’s in them.”

“Do you think you could quote them to me verbatim?” he said. “Anyway, it’s not that simple. Karim al-Jamil doctored hundreds of files before he left. I know the method he used to alter them. I have to see them myself.”

“I see there’s no way I can talk you out of this.”

“Right,” Bourne said. “When you’ve made sure the material is genuine, beep my cell once. Then I need you to move Hart into the loggia, away from the entrance proper.”

“Why?” she said. “That’ll only make it more difficult for you to-Jason?”

But Bourne had already disconnected.

From his vantage point on the roof of the Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue, Bourne tracked his high-powered night-vision glasses from Soraya as she moved toward the DCI, past clots of tourists hurrying about, to the agents in place around the west end of the Mall. Two lounged, chatting, at the northeast corner of the Department of Agriculture North Building. Another, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, was crossing diagonally southwest from Madison Drive toward the Smithsonian. A fourth was behind the wheel of an illegally parked car on Constitution Avenue. In fact, he was the one who’d given the game away. Bourne had spotted the car illegally parked just before a Metro police cruiser stopped parallel to it. Windows were rolled down, a conversation ensued. ID was briefly flashed by the driver of the illegally parked car. The cruiser rolled on.

The fifth and sixth agents were east of the Freer, one approximately midway between Madison and Jefferson drives, the other in front of the Arts Industries Building. He knew there had to be at least one more.

It was almost five o’clock. A short winter twilight had descended, aided by the twinkling lights wound festively around lampposts. With the location of each agent memorized Bourne returned to the ground, using the window ledges for hands and feet.

The moment he showed himself the agents would start moving. Estimating the distance they were from where the DCI and Soraya stood, he calculated he’d have no more than two minutes with Hart to get the files.

Hidden in shadows, waiting for Soraya’s signal, he strained to pick out the remaining agents. They couldn’t afford to leave Independence Avenue unguarded. If Hart didn’t in fact have the files, then he’d do as Soraya first suggested and get out of the area without being spotted.

He imagined her at the entrance to the Freer, talking with the DCI. There would be the first nervous moment of acknowledgment, then Soraya would have to direct the conversation around to the files. She’d have to find a way for Hart to show them to her, to make sure they were authentic.

His phone beeped once and was still. The files were authentic.

He accessed the Internet, navigating to the DC Metro site, checked the up-to-the-minute transit schedules, checking his options. This procedure took longer than he would have liked. The very real and immediate danger was that one of the six agents was in contact with home base-either CI or the Pentagon-whose sophisticated electronic telemetry could pinpoint his phone and, worse, spy on what he was pulling up from the Net. Couldn’t be helped, however. Access had to be made on site and at the immediate moment in case of unforeseen transit delays. He put the worry out of his head, concentrated on what he’d have to do. The next five minutes were crucial.

Time to go.

Moments after Soraya secretly contacted Bourne she said to Veronica Hart, “I’m afraid we may have a problem.”

The DCI’s head whipped around. She’d been scanning the area for any sign of Bourne’s presence. The crowds around the Freer had thickened as many made their way to the Smithsonian Metro station around the corner, returning to their hotels to prepare for dinner.

“What kind of problem?”

“I think I saw one of the NSA shadows we picked up at lunch.”

“Hell, I don’t want LaValle knowing I’m meeting with Bourne. He’ll have a fit, go running to the president.” She turned. “I think we ought to leave before Bourne gets here.”

“What about my intel?” Soraya said. “What chance are we going to have without him? I say let’s stay and talk to him. Showing him the material will go a long way toward winning his trust.”

The DCI was clearly on edge. “I don’t like any of this.”

“Time is of the essence.” Soraya took her by the elbow. “Let’s move back here,” she said, indicating the loggia. “We’ll be out of the shadow’s line of sight.”

Hart reluctantly walked into the open space. The loggia was especially crowded with people milling about, discussing the art they’d just seen, their plans for dinner and the next day. The gallery closed at five thirty, so the building was starting to clear out.

“Where the hell is he, anyway?” Hart said testily.

“He’ll be here,” Soraya assured her. “He wants the material.”

“Of course he wants it. The material concerns his friend.”

“Clearing Martin’s name is extremely important to him.”

“I was speaking of Moira Trevor,” the DCI said.

Before Soraya could form a reply, a group of people spewed out of the front doors. Bourne was in the middle of them. Soraya could see him, but he was shielded from anyone across the street.

“Here he is,” she muttered as Bourne came quickly and silently up behind them. He must have somehow gotten into the Independence Avenue entrance at the south side of the building, closed to the public, made his way through the galleries to the front.

The DCI turned, impaling Bourne with a penetrating gaze. “So you came after all.”

“I said I would.”

He didn’t blink, didn’t move at all. Soraya thought that he was at his most terrifying then, the sheer force of his will at its peak.

“You have something for me.”

“I said you could read it.” The DCI held out a small manila envelope.

Bourne took it. “I regret I haven’t the time to do that here.”

He whirled, snaking through the crowd, vanishing inside the Freer.

“Wait!” Hart cried. “Wait!”

But it was too late, and in any event three NSA agents came walking rapidly through the entrance. Their progress was slowed by the people exiting the gallery, but they pushed many of them aside. They trotted past the DCI and Soraya as if they didn’t exist. A third agent appeared, took up position just inside the loggia. He stared at them and smiled thinly.

Bourne moved as quickly as he thought prudent through the interior. Having memorized it from the visitors’ brochure and come through it once already, he did not waste a step. But one thing worried him. He hadn’t seen any agents on his way in. That meant, more than likely, he’d have to deal with them on the way out.

Near the rear entrance, a guard was checking galleries just before closing time. Bourne was obliged to detour around a corner with an outcropping of a fire call box and extinguisher. He could hear the guard’s soft voice as he herded a family toward the exit in front. Bourne was about to slip out when he heard other voices sharper, clipped. Moving into shadow, he saw a pair of slim, white-haired Chinese scholars in pin-striped suits and shiny brogues arguing the merits of a Tang porcelain vase. Their voices faded along with their footsteps as they headed toward Jefferson Drive.

Without losing another instant Bourne checked the bypass he’d made on the alarm system. So far it showed everything as normal. He pushed out the door. Night wind struck his face as he saw two agents, sidearms drawn, hurrying up the granite stairs. He had just enough time to register the oddness of the guns before he ducked back inside, went directly to the fire call box.

They came through the door. The leading one got a face full of fire-smothering foam. Bourne ducked a wild shot from the second agent. There was virtually no noise, but something pinged off the Tennessee white marble wall near his shoulder, then clattered to the floor. He hurled the fire extinguisher at the shooter. It struck him on the temple and he went down. Bourne broke the call box’s glass, pulled hard on the red metal handle. Instantly the fire alarm sounded, piercing every corner of the gallery.

Out the door, Bourne ran diagonally down the steps, heading west, directly for 12th Street, SW. He expected to find more agents at the southwest corner of the building, but as he turned off Independence Avenue onto 12th Street he encountered a flood of people drawn to the building by the alarm. Already the sirens of fire trucks could be heard floating through the rising chatter of the crowd.

He hurried along the street toward the entrance down to the Smithsonian Metro stop. As he did so, he accessed the Internet through his cell. It took longer than he would have liked, but at last he pressed the FAVORITES icon, was returned to the Metro site. Navigating to the Smithsonian station, he scrolled down to the hyperlink to the next train arrival, which was refreshed every thirty seconds. Three minutes to the Orange line 6 train to Vienna/Fairfax. Quickly he composed a text mail “FB,” sent it to a number he’d prearranged with Professor Specter.

The Metro entrance, clogged with people stopped on the stairs to watch the unfolding scenario, was a mere fifty yards away. Bourne heard police sirens now, saw a number of unmarked cars heading down 12th Street toward Jefferson. They turned east when they got to the junction-all except one, which headed due south.

Bourne tried to run, but he was hampered by the press of people. He broke free, into a small area blessedly empty of the gigantic jostle, when the driver’s window of a cruising car slid down. A burly man with a grim face and a nearly bald head aimed another one of those strange-looking handguns at him.

Bourne twisted, putting one of the Metro entrance posts between himself and the gunman. He heard nothing, no sound at all-just as he hadn’t back inside the Freer-and something bit into his left calf. He looked down, saw the metal of a mini dart lying on the street. It had grazed him, but that was all. With a controlled swing, Bourne went around the post, down the stairs, pushing his way through the gawkers into the Metro. He had just under two minutes to make the Orange 6 to Vienna. The next train didn’t leave for four minutes after that-too much time in the platform, waiting for the NSA agents to find him. He had to make the first train.

He bought his ticket, went through. The crowds thinned and thickened like waves rushing to shore. He began to sweat. His left foot slipped. Rebalancing himself, he guessed that whatever was in that mini dart must be having an effect despite only grazing him. Looking up at the electronic signs, he had to work to focus in order to find the correct platform. He kept pushing forward, not trusting himself to rest, though part of him seemed hell-bent on doing just that. Sit down, close your eyes, sink into sleep. Turning to a vending machine, he fished in his pockets for change, bought every chocolate bar he could. Then he entered the line for the escalator.

Partway down he stumbled, missed the riser, crashed into the couple ahead of him. He’d blacked out for an instant. Gaining the platform, he felt both shaky and sluggish. The concrete-paneled ceiling arched overhead, deadening the sounds of the hundreds crowding the platform.

Less than a minute to go. He could feel the vibration of the oncoming train, the wind it pushed ahead of it.

He’d gobbled down one chocolate bar and was starting on the second when the train pulled into the station. He stepped in, allowing the surge of the crowd to take him. Just as the doors were closing, a tall man with broad shoulders and a black trench coat sprinted into the other end of Bourne’s car. The doors closed and the train lurched forward.

Thirteen

AS HE SAW the man in the black trench making his way toward him from the end of the train car, Bourne felt an unpleasant form of claustrophobia. Until they reached the next station, he was trapped in this finite space, Moreover, despite the initial chocolate hit, he was starting to feel a lassitude creeping up from his left leg as the serum entered his bloodstream. He tore off the wrapping on another chocolate bar, wolfed it down. The faster he could get the sugar and the caffeine into his system, the better able his body would be to fight off the effects of the drug. But that effect would only be temporary, and then his blood sugar would plummet, draining the adrenaline out of him.

The train reached Federal Triangle and the doors slid open. A mass of people got off, another mass got on. Black Trench used the brief slackening of passengers to make headway toward where Bourne stood, hands clasped around a chromium pole. The doors closed, the train accelerated. Black Trench was blocked by a huge man with tattoos on the backs of his hands. He tried to push by, but the tattooed man glared at him, refusing to budge. Black Trench could have used his federal ID to move people out of the way, but he didn’t, no doubt so as not to cause a panic. But whether he was NSA or CI was still a mystery. Bourne, struggling to stop his mind from going in and out of focus, stared into the face of his newest adversary, looking for clues to his affiliation. Black Trench’s face was blocky, bland, but with the particular dry cruelty the military demanded in its clandestine agents. He must be NSA, Bourne decided. Through the fog in his brain, he knew he had to deal with Black Trench before the rendezvous point at Foggy Bottom.

Two children swung into Bourne as the train lurched around a bend. He held them upright, returning them to their place beside their mother, who smiled her thanks at him, put a protecting arm around their narrow shoulders. The train rolled into Metro Center. Bourne saw a brief glare of temporary spotlights where a work crew was busy fixing an escalator. On the other side of him a young blonde with earbuds leading to an MP3 player pressed her shoulder against his, took out a cheap plastic compact, checked the state of her makeup. Pursing her lips, she slid the compact back in her bag, dug out flavored lip gloss. While she was applying it, Bourne lifted the compact, palming it immediately. He replaced it with a twenty-dollar bill.

The doors opened and Bourne stepped out within a small whirlwind of people. Black Trench, caught between doors, rushed down the car, made it onto the platform just in time. Weaving his way through the hurrying throngs, he followed Bourne toward the elevator. The majority of people headed for the stairs.

Bourne checked the position of the temporary spotlights. He made for them, but not at too fast a pace. He wanted Black Trench to make up some of the distance between them. He had to assume that Black Trench was also armed with a dart gun. If a dart struck Bourne anywhere, even in an extremity, it would mean the end. Caffeine or no caffeine, he’d pass out, and NSA would have him.

There was a wall of elderly and disabled people, some of them in wheelchairs, waiting for the elevator. The door opened. Bourne sprinted ahead as if making for the elevator, but the moment he reached the glare of the spotlights, he turned and aimed the mirror inside the compact at an angle that reflected the dazzle into Black Trench’s face.

Momentarily blinded, Black Trench halted, put up his hand palm-outward. Bourne was at him in a heartbeat. He drove his hand into the main nerve bundle beneath Black Trench’s right ear, wrested the dart gun out of his hand, fired it into his side.

As the man listed to one side, staggering, Bourne caught him, dragged him to a wall. Several people turned their heads to gape, but no one stopped. The pace of the crowd hurrying by barely flickered before returning to full force.

Bourne left Black Trench there, eeled his way through the almost solid curtain of people back to the Orange line. Four minutes later, he’d eaten through two more chocolate bars. Another Orange 6 to Vienna rolled in and, with a last glance thrown over his shoulder, he got on. His head didn’t feel any deeper in the mist, but he knew what he needed most now was water, as much as he could get down his throat, to flush the chemical out of his system as quickly as possible.

Two stops later, he exited at Foggy Bottom. He waited at the rear of the platform until no more passengers got off. Then he followed them up, taking the stairs two at a time in an attempt to further clear his head.

His first breath of cool evening air was a deep and exhilarating one. Except for a slight nausea, perhaps caused by a continuing vertigo, he felt better. As he emerged from the Metro exit a nearby engine coughed to life; the headlights of a dark blue Audi came on. He walked briskly to the car, opened the passenger’s-side door, slid in.

“How did it go?” Professor Specter nosed the Audi out into the heavy traffic.

“I got more than I bargained for,” Bourne said, leaning his head against the seat rest. “And there’s been a change of plan. People are sure to be looking for me at the airport. I’m going with Moira, at least as far as Munich.”

A look of deep concern crossed the professor’s face. “Do you think that’s wise?”

Bourne turned his head, stared out the window at the passing city. “It doesn’t matter.” His thoughts were of Martin, and of Moira. “I passed wise some time ago.”