Peter nodded in satisfaction. He had to hand it to Soraya. She was a fucking expert. When she had first outlined her plan, he had counted on confronting Richards himself, but she had made a clear case otherwise.

“First, he won’t expect me to be in the office, let alone be sitting at your desk,” she had said.  “Second, I give him the heebie-jeebies, I can tell. He doesn’t know whether to spit at me or ask me out.When he looks at me, I can see the heat in his eyes. I can use all that to rattle him.”As it turned out,she had been dead-on in her psychprofile of Dick Richards.

Taking a last luxurious bite of his Snickers, Peter glanced at the dashboard clock. Fifteen minutes since the impromptu meeting in his office had concluded. Movement at the entrance to the Treadstone building caused him to look up. Bingo! Here came Richards, hurrying down the steps, turning left into the guarded and electronically surveilled parking lot.

Peter watched as he climbed into his car, started the engine, and drove out. Putting his own car in gear, Peter nosed out into the traffic flow, taking up a position a car length behind Richards.

He had expected Richards to head across the Key Bridge into DC, but instead he went the other way, heading out past the suburban sprawl of Arlington, into the rolling Virginia hills, so lushly verdant in spring and summer, aflame in autumn, brown now, sleeping in winter’s chill.

Exiting the highway, they passed through sleepy villages and tony residential enclaves, separated by long swaths of parkland, stands of trees beside golf courses and tennis courts.

On the old Blackfriar Pike, they rose up, then swung down into a broad valley. The road ascended again, cresting a hill, and Peter thought, Really? This is where he’s gone?

Beyond, on the left, he could make out the thick brick walls of the Blackfriar, the oldest and still the most exclusive country club in the area, tendentiously outmuscling the clutch of multi-million-dollar pretenders that had sprung up over the decades. Blackfriar accepted only the most powerful pols, lobbyists, newsmen and -women, influence peddlers, and attorneys, starting, of course, with the president and the vice president.

Soraya: “I have it on good authority that Nicodemo is connected with Core Energy.”

Richards: “Where did you hear that?”

Peter was playing the taped conversation again, homing in on the question that must have so shaken Dick Richards. “Where did you hear that?”The question had given him away. He had already known about Core Energy, but he had withheld that information. Peter was following him to find out why. According to Soraya, Bourne strongly suspected a connection between Nicodemo and Core Energy. From where Peter sat now, it looked as if he was right on the money. As usual.

Richards’s car turned into the driveway, stopped at the guardhouse that sat as ominous as a military installation just outside the front gate, which remained closed to the uninitiated and the uninvited alike.

Peter was not a member of Blackfriar, which, in any event, would not have him. Nevertheless, he needed to gain entrance. Showing his credentials to the guards was out of the question; he might as well announce his presence via loudspeaker.

Driving farther along until he was out of sight of the guardhouse, he pulled over, off the road, and onto the mowed grass strip that separated the wall from the tarmac. The brick wall was thick, topped by a wide, decorative concrete band in which were set, at precise intervals, a series of black wrought-iron spikes whose tips were fashioned in the shape of a fleur-de-lys.

Peter got out, clambered onto his car’s roof, and from there scrambled up onto the concrete top of the wall. Turning himself sideways so as to slip between the spikes, he leaped down onto the other side, landing in a crouch behind a spindly-limbed Eastern rosebud, harbinger of spring, the first to bloom at winter’s end.

Being inside Blackfriar made him profoundly uneasy. It was a place to which he had no desire to belong, but whose deep-seated contempt for people like him made it hostile and alien territory.

These thoughts passed through his mind as he rose and began to head back toward the area where Richards would drive in. Passing a number of tennis players exiting the winter indoor courts, he saw the car almost immediately, which was a relief; it seemed as if it had been held up at the guardhouse, presumably because Richards wasn’t a member and hadn’t been expected by the president.

He was close by the pro shop. Rows of golf carts crouched in neat rows, drowsing idly for the first taste of spring to bring out the duffers. Commandeering one, he jump-started the engine and paralleled Richards’s car as it drove slowly down the winding two-lane road that split the country club in two. When he was certain Richards was heading for the two-story colonial clubhouse, he veered off, taking a shortcut that got him onto the gravel surrounding the building like a moat. Ditching the cart, he strode into the clubhouse, nodding occasionally at the few who glanced his way.

Inside, the clubhouse was more or less as expected: grand woodbeamed spaces with crystal chandeliers, deep masculine chairs and sofas in the great room that opened into a dining room to his left. Straight ahead, through a line of enormous French doors, the great room led out onto an enormous veranda filled with expensive wicker chairs, glass tables, and uniformed waiters ferrying highballs, gin and tonics, and mint juleps to lounging members who were chatting about their stock market calls, their Bentleys, their Citations. The overripe atmosphere made Peter want to gag.

He saw Richards hurry in and stood back in the shadow of a potted palm, as if this were a scene from a 1940s Sydney Greenstreet potboiler. Glancing around the great room, Peter did not see the president, nor could he spot any of the Secret Service agents who, if he were there, would be discreetly scattered about the area, talking into the cuffs of their starched white shirts.

He moved to keep Richards in sight and was rewarded to see his quarry head toward a small grouping of upholstered wing chairs. He seated himself in one of them, facing a man the crown of whose head was the only part visible. He had silver hair, but that was all Peter could tell from his position. He continued around the periphery of the great room in a counterclockwise direction, but just as the person Richards had come all this way to see was about to appear from behind a wing of the chair in which he was seated, someone tapped Peter on the shoulder. Turning, he found steel-gray eyes locked on his; the needle nose and thin lips below showed not a trace of bonhomie, let alone humor. As Peter tried to pull away, the man jabbed something sharp against Peter’s side—the point of a switchblade.

“The atmosphere is toxic for you in here,” the man said. He had dark hair, long at the collar, and slicked back. Hardly a fashionable DC style. His English held a slight accent that Peter couldn’t place for the moment. “Let’s step outside, shall we?”

“I’d rather not,” Peter said, then winced as the knife point slid through his clothes to prick his skin.

The steel-gray eyes grew icy. “I’m afraid you have no choice in the matter.”

6

THERE ARE ALWAYS two sides to a story,” Rebeka said. “Except,” Bourne said, “when there are three—or four.” She smiled. “Drink your hot toddy.”

Bourne, in clean clothes, crouched by the fire and stared at Alef—

or, according to Rebeka, Manfred Weaving. Weaving was lying on a mattress Rebeka had dragged in from a spare bedroom to lay by the fire. She had cut off his frozen clothes, as she had done, quickly and professionally, with Bourne. Then she had dressed him in shirt and trousers extracted from a large cedar chest at the foot of the bed she was using, then swaddled him in a woolly striped blanket. He was breathing normally, but he was unconscious, as he had been since Bourne had dragged him out of the water a second time. Before leaving the frozen lake, Rebeka had rolled Ze’ev off the ice, into the darkness of the frozen water. He sank as purposefully as if he were wearing a diver’s lead-weighted belt.