Which meant he wasn’t being taken to a hospital. Peter stared up into Blondie’s face, which was now as blank as a bank vault door. Were these the people responsible for wiring his car with explosives?

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

Blondie looked down at him, took the Glock away from his cheek.

“I know you expected me to die in the explosion.”

Blondie stroked the barrel of the Glock lovingly.

“What impresses me is how you got past security to wire my car.”

Blondie delivered a wry smile to someone out of Peter’s field of vision. “Who says it was wired in the garage?”

So these were the people who had targeted his car, and they knew where he lived. He still didn’t know who they were working for or—more to the immediate point—how many of them were in the ambulance with him. He assumed three—Blondie, the driver, and whoever Blondie had grinned at just now—but maybe there was a fourth riding shotgun up front. One thing was clear: These people were well trained and well funded.

The ambulance swerved around a corner. Peter felt the gurney wanting to slide to one side, but it was locked down. Fortunately, the turn loosened the straps so that he could get his left hand free. Moving it down off the top of the gurney, he searched for the lever that would unlock it. A bit of surreptitious fumbling brought his fingers to the right spot, and he held on tight.

Blocks passed, and Peter was despairing of ever getting his chance, but then he felt the centrifugal force begin to kick in as the ambulance went into another turn. He pushed down on the lever at the apex of the turn. The gurney slammed into Blondie’s knees, then caromed back the other way. Peter freed his right hand, and when Blondie fell over him, Peter grabbed his Glock. As Blondie tried to right himself, Peter slammed the pistol into the side of his head.

The second man came into Peter’s view, lunging at him. Peter fired and the man spun backward. His heavyset frame careened into the rear doors. Peter unsnapped the straps holding him down and slid off the gurney.

At the same time, the ambulance was slowing; the driver was probably alarmed by the gunshot. Peter wasted no time. Leaping over the two bodies, he wrenched open the doors and jumped out. He hit the ground and rolled on his hip, but having used the last reserves of his strength, he was having difficulty even getting to his knees.

Several yards farther on, the ambulance had pulled over. The driver jumped out, running back toward where Peter lay. Peter knew his only chance was the Glock, but he had lost it during his fall. He desperately looked around and saw it lying in the gutter. But the driver was on him before he had a chance to crawl the few feet toward it.

He was plowed under by the driver’s fists. He had no strength left with which to adequately defend himself, let alone retaliate. Bright spots of light exploded behind his eyes and waves of blackness rolled over him. He struggled against unconsciousness, but it was a losing battle.

A drowning man going under for the last time could not have felt more despairing than Peter did. He never imagined a moment like this, a defeat this unexpected and complete. And then, after a maelstrom of violence, a concentration of pain, the last wave reaching up to pull him down, there was a soft breeze on his face. Sunlight. The sweet smell of a motorcycle’s exhaust.

And a face, blurry and indistinct as a dark cloud, loomed large in his limited field of vision.

“Not to worry, Chief, you’re not dead yet.”

15

IN THE DEWY light of morning, Jalal Essai went for a walk along the curving seaside streets of Cadiz. The day was already bright, with only a handful of white fluffy clouds way off to the south. The air was fresh, tangy with salt and phosphorus. Out on the water, several sailboats tacked, taking advantage of the wind. Many of the tourist shops were still closed, their metal gates rolled down like castle walls, and Essai caught a glimpse of the melancholy that invades coastal cities in the winter.

He carefully chose the seaside café, passing up a cluster of others nearer to Don Fernando’s house for the one with the blue-and-white-striped awning emblazoned with a red anchor. Seating himself at a small round table in the second row from the sidewalk, he ordered breakfast.

Bicyclists whirred by like giant insects and occasionally a car or a delivery truck rumbled past, otherwise the early hour had scoured the sidewalks clean. His coffee and pastry arrived. He sipped the coffee tentatively, deemed it good, and added just a touch of milk. Then he bit into his chewy, sweet pastry and sat back, breathing the humid air deep into his lungs.

He began his ritual of plan review. Every day variables cropped up that interfered with the plan or caused it to be altered in vital ways. It was like working out a delicately balanced puzzle that subtly changed each time you looked at it. Human beings were usually at fault—those involved both voluntarily and unwittingly. They were far too often unpredictable in their responses, and therefore had to be monitored carefully. It was exhausting work, worth the trouble only if the payoff was sufficiently valuable or desirable. In this case, Essai thought, the payoff was both.

Unfortunately, monitoring each human element was not always possible. Estevan Vegas, for instance, was an old friend of Don Fernando, but he meant nothing to Essai. But Bourne—well, Bourne was the constant in Essai’s plan. Bourne’s innate honor made him utterly predictable in life-or-death situations. This current situation was a case in point. Benjamin El-Arian had finally made a major mistake by assigning Boris Karpov to kill Bourne, had failed to understand that the results of a collision between Bourne and Karpov were unpredictable and would likely be wholly unexpected. El-Arian did not know Bourne the way Essai did—in fact, he knew next to nothing about him. Essai was counting on that, just as he was counting on Bourne to bring back Vegas and the woman from Colombia.

He was congratulating himself when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He did not turn, he did not move. He simply stared straight ahead and watched Marlon Etana emerge out of the trembling morning sunshine and make his way beneath the blue-and-white-striped awning with the red anchor.

This way,” Lana Lang said. “Quickly!”

Karpov followed her through the cluttered streets of Munich until they reached a small, dark green Opel. Fitful showers fell from a swollen sky the color of sheet metal.

“Get in,” she said as she slid behind the wheel. Then she looked up at him, still standing on the sidewalk. “Come on, what are you waiting for?”

Boris was waiting for inspiration. Walking down the street with someone he didn’t know was one thing, but getting into a small, enclosed, mobile space with her was something else altogether. Every instinct was screaming its paranoia in his mind.

“Hey,” she said, clearly irritated. “We don’t have time for this.”

There’s never time for anything, Karpov thought, getting in. Leastways, anything important. His life was filled with a constant flow of needs, obligations, accommodations, and reciprocal gestures—large, small, and everything in between. A political dance, in other words, that he could never ignore, or even take the least little break from, for fear that when the music stopped his chair would be taken over by someone else. And then, despite all his years of devotion, hard work, and the accretion of small atrocities for the state that hung invisibly on his uniform like medals of the secret wars, he would be looking at life from the outside in, which, in Russia, meant no life at all.

Lana Lang drove very hard and very fast through the maze of city streets. She drove, Boris observed, like a man, with great competence, nerve, and not a lick of fear, even though the rain fell harder, the streets slick. Here was her area of competence, he thought, whereas in the biergarten she had seemed like a silly, fashion-obsessed female whom he had no business accompanying, let alone trusting with his life.