“You’ll have them tonight.” Hendricks maneuvered around traffic, the car containing his detail for the night right behind him. “Two portions if that’s your desire.”

She looked at him. The oncoming headlights turned her eyes glittery.

“I like that,” she said softly. “A man who’s not afraid of turning me into a glutton.”

They were on the bridge now, the city’s monuments lit up, turning the evening sky gold and gray.

“I can’t imagine you being a glutton.”

Maggie sighed. “Sometimes,” she said, “there’s a certain excitement in overindulging.”

He frowned. “I’m not sure I—”

“It’s the forbidden nature of the act, do you know what I mean?”

Hendricks didn’t, but he was beginning to wish that he did.

You’ve never done anything forbidden, have you?”

Maggie, a martini in her hand, watched him from across the table at Vermilion, an atmospheric town house. Their table was beside a window, and from their second-floor perch they could watch the nighttime parade of young people—tourists and residents alike—as they passed by on the sidewalk below.

“You’ve always been the good fellow.”

Hendricks was both nettled and fascinated that she had nailed him so quickly. “What makes you say that?”

She took a sip of her drink. It looked like it had twinkly lights in the center of it. “You smell like one of the good ones.”

He smiled uncertainly. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

She put her drink down and, leaning forward, took his free hand in hers. Turning it over, she smoothed open his fingers so she could study his palm. The instant she took hold of him, Hendricks felt an electric pulse travel up his arm, into his chest, before settling in his groin. He felt as if he had stepped into a tub of warm water.

Her eyes flicked up to engage his, and he had the distinct sense that she knew precisely what he was feeling. A slow smile spread across her face, but it was without irony or guile.

“You’re an older brother or else an only child. Either way, you were the firstborn.”

“That’s true,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation.

“That’s why you have such a strong sense of duty and responsibility. Firstborns always do; it’s like it’s hardwired into them before birth.”

Slowly and sensually, her forefinger traced the creases on his palm. “You were the good son, the good man.”

“I wasn’t such a good husband—at least the first time. And I certainly wasn’t a good father.”

“Your duty is to job and country.” Her eyes seemed to gather him in. “Those things come first—they always did, yes?”

“Yes,” Hendricks said. He found that he was inexplicably hoarse.

He cleared his throat, took his hand from hers, and drank half of his single-malt. This intemperate act caused his eyes to water, and he almost choked.

“Careful,” Maggie said. “You’ll bring your babysitters running.”

Hendricks, his cheeks pink, nodded. He wiped his eyes with his napkin and cleared his throat again.

“Better,” Maggie said.

He wasn’t sure whether that was a question, in which case it would require a response. He let it go and sipped the remains of his scotch.

“So how many languages do you speak?”

She shrugged. “Seven. Does it matter?”

“Merely curious.”

But it was more than that. Part of him, already infatuated, sat back with eyes closed, but the other part, the always vigilant good fellow, as Maggie herself put it, wanted to vet her. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the government’s vetting process—though he could name numerous cases where it had missed something vital—but rather he trusted his own instincts more.

He handed her a menu and opened his own. “What do you feel like? Or would you prefer to have the profiteroles first?”

She looked past the menu and smiled. “You’re so sad. Is it me? Would you rather we do this another time, or not at all? Because that would be—”

“No, no.” Hendricks found himself raising his voice to ensure that he stopped her. “Please, Maggie. Just…” He looked away, his eyes losing their focus for a moment.

As if sensing his shift in mood, she tapped the menu. “You know what I love here? The soft-shell crab BLT.”

His gaze swung back to her, and he smiled. “No profiteroles?”

She returned his smile. “Now I think of it, tonight I just might want another kind of dessert.”

11

WHEN JALAL ESSAI left Bourne, he boarded a flight to Bogotá and then ninety minutes later transferred to an overseas flight, just as he told Bourne he would do. After that, however, it was a different story.

He flew to Madrid and then to Seville, where he hired a car and began his journey to Cadiz on the southwest coast of Spain. Cadiz had a storied history. Depending on whom you believed, it was founded either by the Phoenicians or, following Greek legend, by Hercules. The Phoenicians called it Gadir, the Walled City. The Greeks knew it as Gadira. According to legend, Hercules built the city after he had killed the three-headed monster, Geryon, completing his tenth labor. In any event, Cadiz was Western Europe’s oldest continuously settled city. It had passed through the hands of a number of legendary conquerors—the Carthaginians, Hannibal, the Romans, the Visigoths, and the Moors, who ruled Q

Essai had cause to think on this history as his car jounced the seventy-some-odd miles from the Seville airport to the sandy spit on which Cadiz was built. The Moors had spent the most time in control of the city, and it looked it. Because of the sandy soil, there were no high-rises in Cadiz, so the skyline looked more or less the same as it had in medieval times. Though in Spain, the city had a distinctly North African aspect and feel to it.

Following the map engraved in his mind, he entered the walls of Casco Antiguo, the old city. The cream-colored house off the Avenida de Duque de Nájera overlooked Playita de las Mujeres, one of the city’s most beautiful beaches. From the second-story rear windows all of Casco Antiguo presented itself like the history of southern Spain.

Essai had called from the airport in Seville. Consequently, Don Fernando Hererra was expecting him. He opened the thick medieval wooden door as soon as Essai turned off the car’s engine.

Don Fernando, who lived in Seville but maintained this second home as an occasional getaway, wore an immaculate summer-weight linen suit the exact shade of cream as the outside of his house. Though he was in his early seventies, his body was nevertheless lean and flat, as if he had been constructed in two dimensions instead of three, the vivid blue eyes made all the more prominent by his leathery skin, dark, wind-burned, and sun-wrinkled. Apart from his eyes, he might have been mistaken for a Moor.

Essai got out of the car, stretched, and the two men embraced in the European style.

Then Hererra frowned. “Where is Estevan?”

“Estevan is fine. He’s being protected,” Essai said. “It’s a long story.”

Hererra nodded, ushering Essai into the cool interior, but his worried expression did not abate.

The house was built in the Moorish style, with a central open space cooled by fountains and the fronds of slender date palms, which clashed softly in the sea breeze.

Hererra had set out food and drink on a beaten-brass tray atop a folding wooden table. After Essai had washed, the two men sat amid the shifting shadows and the musical plinking of the fountains, eating the foodstuffs of the desert bedouins with only their right hands, as the Arabs do.

Hererra plucked a Valencia orange from a bowl. “Ahora,” he said. “Digame, por favor.” Taking out a folding knife with a long, thin blade, he began to peel the orange. “Estevan is not simply an employee of mine, he’s an old friend. I sent you to Colombia to fetch him and the woman and bring them back here before the Domna killed them.”