“Can I help you with something?” Ann stood in the doorway, watching him with the coldly luminous eyes of a reptile. She hadn’t stepped into the shower after all. He closed his eyes, raging at himself for falling into so obvious a trap. Obvious in retrospect. His hate for her was so powerful he could taste it. Then she moved. “Get away from my things, you pathetic sonofabitch.”

He stepped back hurriedly as she snatched her purse from his hand.

“You want to know where I was?” Ann’s nostrils flared as she shook her head, contempt altering her expression. “I had a little visit with Mr. Li.”

As his eyes widened, a smile curled her lips. “That’s right,  your Mr. Li.” She opened a drawer of her dresser, put the clutch inside, then leaned on the open drawer as if to show him how much he wearied her. “Only, he never was your Mr. Li. Not exclusively, anyway.”

“How...?” Thorne felt paralyzed. His brain seemed to have lost the ability to string two thoughts together. “How did you...?”

She laughed silently. “Who do you think introduced him to his Israeli girlfriend?”

Back at the toolbox, Bourne grabbed a crowbar and used it to pry up the grate.

Setting it aside, he trained the beam of light down to see the trajectory of the drain. It was a sheer vertical drop for only about seven or eight feet, after which there was a bend as it sloped slightly farther down. He gripped the flashlight between his teeth and gathered Rebeka into his arms. Holding her against him, he slid down the storm drain, the soles of his shoes thudding hard against the bottom of the vertical drop.

Shifting her slightly in his arms brought no response from her. Tilting his head so the beam of light lit up her face, he saw that her eyes were closed. The wound in her side was deep, and he wondered if the knife blade had nicked, or even penetrated, a vital organ. There was no way to tell. He tried again to stanch the flow of blood but was only partially successful.

“Rebeka,” he said softly. Then forcefully. But her eyes opened only after he had slapped her cheek. “Don’t pass out on me,” he said. “I’m getting you out of here.” Her eyes gazed up at him, slightly out of focus. “Just hold on a little longer.”

The urgency of escape weighed on him, and he negotiated her through the bend, then scuttled along the slope, which became less and less severe. Their escape route smelled of concrete, dead leaves, and rot. The bottom of it was wet and dank. Echoes of their progress followed them like ghosts fleeing into the darkness.

He tilted his head upward, playing the beam of light across the top of the drainpipe, looking for the service junction el Enterradorhad told them was three hundred yards beyond the wall of the estate and emerged onto a heavily treed area of Lincoln Park.

The pipe was slowly narrowing, something el Enterradorhad failed to mention. Bourne’s progress was slowed by the constant maneuvering of Rebeka’s body to fit the changing dimensions. He kept going, murmuring a soft litany to keep her conscious. There was still no sign of the service junction. Just then, the beam of light began to stutter. Darkness replaced light. It returned, but with a dimmer wattage. The batteries were failing.

Bourne redoubled his efforts to move forward quickly, but the drainpipe continued to narrow, obliging him to inch along, headfirst, Rebeka’s body on top of him. He could feel the beat of her heart, the shudder of her breathing, which was becoming ragged as she fought for air. He had to get her out of the ground and into the air immediately.

He kept going forward, inch by bloody inch, every second crucial now. The flashlight failed again, took longer to come on, the beam faded, worn-out and flickering. But in its inconstant illumination, Bourne at last saw the outline of the service junction, a vertical shaft up to the park.

Trying to pick up speed, he dragged Rebeka along with him, his back raw and wet through his clothes from scraping along the bottom of the pipe. A semicircular rim, shimmering like a sliver of moon in a nighttime sky, beckoned to him and then winked out as the flashlight’s batteries finally failed. He was plunged into the pitch black.

Natasha Illion?” Thorne felt the world slipping from beneath his feet. “I don’t—”

“Understand?” Ann held her icy smile. “Poor Charles. Let’s just say Tasha and I are friends and leave it at that.”

“You bitch!” he cried and leaped at her.

Ann took her hand out of the dresser drawer. She gripped a small Walther PPK/S. Thorne either didn’t see it or didn’t care. Enraged, he came on, his hands raised, seeking to strangle her.

Ann pulled the trigger once, twice, holding her hand rock-steady, squeezing the trigger. The powerful .32 ACP bullets tore through him, knocking Thorne against the wall with such force he ricocheted off.

His eyes opened in shock and disbelief. Then came the blinding pain, and he pitched into her. For a moment he gripped her as he once had when they were lovers, desperate in their feverish lust.

His mouth opened and closed, a speared fish gasping for air. “Why...? You...”

Ann watched him dying with a cold, almost clinical eye. “You’re a traitor, Charles. To me, to our marriage, but most of all to our country.” He slipped to his knees. “Do you know what you were up to with the estimable Mr. Li? Estimable as a spy, that is.”

Thorne felt as if there were no more shocks left for him to endure. The landslide had come and it was covering him completely.

“Good-bye, Charles.” Ann pushed him away, found his blood on her. Stepping over him, she returned to the bathroom, where she stepped into the shower and began to scrub her body clean.

Bourne kept moving forward, judging the distance from the last after-image of the shaft’s rim still shining in his mind’s eye. The pipe was now so narrow that he could feel the top by lifting his arm in his prone position. This is how he traversed the last few feet to the rim. Feeling it with his fingertips, his heart lifted.

Setting Rebeka down, he stood up into the shaft. Reaching above his head, he felt the bottom of the hatch. There was a metal ring distended from the bottom. He turned this to the left, then pushed, and was rewarded by a rush of light and fresh air.

Freedom!

Ducking back down, he once more gathered Rebeka up and, lifting her into the shaft, pushed her up to the surface. A moment later, he followed her up. Daylight glowed around them. They were in the center of a copse of trees, planted in a perfectly symmetrical square, four trees deep on each side.

Keeping Rebeka down and out of sight, he lifted his head, listening for sounds of pursuit. He heard the distant rumble of traffic from the perimeters. It was too early for any strollers to be visiting the park. They were alone.

Checking Rebeka again, he saw that the wound was already suppurating. He tried using one of the bits of cloth he’d taken from the toolbox to stanch the flow, but almost immediately the cloth was saturated. The difficult travel through the drainpipe had exacerbated the wound.He listened to her heart, then her lungs, and didn’t like what he heard. He tried to calculate how much blood she had lost—more than she had on their flight from Damascus to Dahr El Ahmar. Her face was ashen, all color drained from her eyes. She tried to speak but couldn’t manage it. If he didn’t get her to a hospital soon, she’d surely bleed out.

She opened her mouth, said something unintelligible.

“Save your strength,” he whispered. “Only a little way to go now until the hospital.”

He picked his head up again. What they needed now was transportation.