So Corellos was taking revenge for Bourne having lost him face in front of his men. Now they were mortal enemies.

“You’d better buckle up,” Bourne said.

He waited for the motorcycles to break free of the other vehicles behind him, then he accelerated. Putting on speed, they closed the distance between them. At the moment of their maximum acceleration, Bourne trod on the brakes so hard that the jeep laid a layer of rubber onto the macadam of the highway. The vehicle swerved violently from side to side as he threw it into neutral, its transmission traveling down through the gears as its tires fought to grip the road.

The motorcycles shot past him and then, swerving mightily, braked, turning in a wide circle. Bourne forced the transmission back up the ladder and stomped on the accelerator. The jeep shot forward, slamming grille-first into the right-hand motorcycle, catching it broadside, throwing it completely off the highway. Suarez’s forehead nearly went through the windshield. The motorcycle skidded wildly, the cyclist trying desperately to regain control as he skated across the width of the macadam. An instant later it crossed the narrow shoulder and disappeared over the mountainside.

A gunshot spiderwebbed the jeep’s windshield and Bourne threw the vehicle into reverse, spun it around until it was headed directly at the second motorcycle. The biker was taking aim again with his handgun. The cycle was between the jeep and the mountainside with its vertiginous drop of hundreds of feet. Owing to the FARC roadblock, the oncoming traffic had been at a standstill. Now motorists were scrambling to get away from the chaos.

Bourne drove directly at the cyclist, whose pistol was aimed right at him.

“Dios mio, what the hell are you doing?” Suarez shouted. “You’re going to get us both killed.”

“If that’s what it takes,” Bourne said.

“The reports about you are true.” The commander stared at him. “You’re insane.”

The motorcyclist must have thought so as well, because, after firing wildly, he took off in a spray of gravel. Braking, Bourne extended his left arm and squeezed off a shot. The motorcyclist’s arms flew outward as he was launched off the cycle’s seat. It slammed into a stalled car, which slewed into the truck in front of it.

Bourne took off down the highway, which, owing to both the FARC blockade and the fire in the tunnel, was now entirely deserted.

8

THIRTY THOUSAND FEET in the air, Boris Karpov sat in the jetliner and watched the dove-gray clouds scroll past the Perspex window. As always, he had mixed feelings about leaving Russia. A Russian, he mused, was never truly comfortable outside the motherland. This was to be expected. The Russian people were special—extraordinary, really, once you took into account the terrible history they’d had to endure first under the czars, the Cossacks, then Stalin and Beria, a darkness constantly stalking his beautiful country. Altruism was not a well-known quality in the Russian mind-set—deprivation had made self-preservation the primary motivating factor for so long, it was now hardwired into the Russian psyche—but in this respect Boris was different from his fellows. His love of Russia motivated him to want a better life not just for himself but for those people who were continually looking up at a light they could never attain.

The first-class cabin attendant asked if he had everything he needed.

“We’re baking chocolate chip cookies,” she said, bending over him with a smile. She was blond and blue-eyed—Nordic, he surmised—and had a slight accent. “You can have them with milk, chocolate milk, coffee, tea, or any of a dozen liquors.”

Cookies and milk, Karpov thought with a wry smile, how all-American. “The classic,” he said, making the attendant laugh softly.

“Mr. Stonyfield, you Americans,” she said affectionately, using Karpov’s legend name. And with a hushed whoosh of fabric against pantyhose, she returned up the aisle.

Karpov sank back into his ruminations. Of course Americans were born into the light, so they were used to looking down on everyone else. But what else could you expect from such a privileged people? Karpov did not know what to make of being mistaken for one of them. He waited for the reaction to come, and when it did, he realized that he was somehow humiliated, as if he were a country hick who had by some miracle been momentarily mistaken for a Yale graduate. The attendant’s error had diminished him in some way he couldn’t quite grasp, holding up to him the mirror of everything he had lacked from the moment he’d been born.

His parents had had little time for him, being locked in grim and silent combat to determine who could have the most affairs during the course of their marriage. There was never any thought of divorce; that would negate the rules of the game. Consequently, they scarcely noticed when Karpov’s sister, Alix, died of an uncontrollable brain fever. Karpov had taken care of her, nursing her through her terrible and debilitating illness, first after school, then cutting school entirely to be with her. When she was transferred to the hospital he went with her. He formed the impression that his parents were relieved to have both the children out of the house.

“So gloomy,” his mother would mutter as she made breakfast. “So damn gloomy.”

But most mornings she failed to appear. Karpov sensed that she had never come home during the night.

“I can’t stand it” was all his father could manage the mornings he did appear. He couldn’t look at Alix, much less go into her room. “What’s the point?” he responded to Karpov’s question one morning. “She doesn’t know I’m there.”

On the contrary, Karpov knew that Alix knew when someone was with her. She often squeezed his hand as he sat beside the bed. He read stories to her from books he’d bought. Other times he read aloud the lessons from schoolbooks he deemed important enough to learn. Because of these sessions with his sister he discovered a love of history. What he loved best was to read to her about various periods in Russia’s storied past, though admittedly some were depressing, awfully difficult to digest.

Karpov was at her bedside at the hospital when she died. After the doctor’s pronouncement, a suffocating silence engulfed the room. It was as if everything in the world had stopped, even his heart. His chest felt as if at any instant it would cave in. The smell of antiseptic made him want to gag. He bent over Alix’s waxen face and kissed her cool forehead. There was absolutely no outward evidence of the massive and brutal war that had gone on inside her brain.

“Is there anything I can do?” the attending nurse had said when he exited the room.

He shook his head; his chest was too congested with emotion to allow for speech. Echoes followed him down the linoleum-lined corridors, the pain-filled, inarticulate noises of the sick and the dying. Outside, the glowing Moscow twilight was filled with snow. People walked this way and that, chatting, smoking, even laughing. A young man and woman, their heads together as they whispered to each other, crossed the street. A mother pulled her little boy along, singing softly to him. Karpov observed these everyday occurrences as a prisoner will the sky and passing clouds outside his tiny, barred window. These things no longer belonged to him. He was cut off from them like a diseased limb cleaved from a tree.

There was a hole in Karpov’s heart where Alix had resided for so long. The tears came and, as he walked aimlessly, watching the snow pile up, listening to the bells of St. Basil’s, muffled and indistinct, he cried for her, but also for himself, because now he was truly alone.

“Sir?”

The attendant had reappeared with his milk and cookies, and Karpov shook himself like a dog coming out of the rain.