Just as she was turning over, the Valkyries began to ride on her enciphered cell phone, and she thought, Even here, in the New World, I’m tethered to my old life. Lunging for the cell, she answered.

“Where are you?” Benjamin’s thin, echoey voice slapped her from across the Atlantic.

“In the hotel room, making sure everything is ready for Hendricks.”

“There’s been a change of plan.”

She shot up, her heart pounding in a leap of hope. “What do you mean?”

“Hendricks has been relieved of security at Indigo Ridge.”

“What?” She poured disbelief into her voice. “How could that happen?”

“In the madhouse of American politics, who can say?”

She rose, swung her long legs off the bed, and padded over to the window to stare out at the passing traffic. Her heart lifted and the vise around her lungs released. For the first time in days, she took a deep breath.

“So, where do we go from here?” she said, though she knew perfectly well. “After I close the mission down.”

“The mission is still active.”

Her breath froze in her throat. “I… I don’t understand.” Her heart seemed to be flogging her chest to death.

“Hendricks is on to Fitz; he assigned one of his people, Peter Marks, to look into it.”

Maggie stared out at the street, where young couples window-shopped arm in arm. A mother jogged by while pushing her baby in one of those special strollers. Horns blared, testament to their drivers’ impatience. Maggie wanted desperately to be in one of those cars, to be moving away, to be anywhere but in this room, talking to anyone but Benjamin El-Arian.

She cleared her throat. “Give me two hours. I can get Hendricks to shut the investigation down.”

El-Arian didn’t bother to ask her how she would do it. “Too late,” he said. “Marks found something. We’ve taken care of him, but that still leaves one loose end.”

Maggie pressed her forehead against the window, trying to transfer the coolness of the glass to her burning body. “You don’t expect me to kill him?”

“I expect you to follow orders.” Benjamin’s voice was like a wasp in her ear.

“He’s the secretary of defense, Benjamin.”

“Get creative, but just get it done,” El-Arian said.

There was a long silence during which Maggie could hear the blood rushing in her ears.

“Are you there?”

“Yes,” she said, almost inaudibly.

“You know the only way it can be done.”

“Yes.” Her breath leaving her, as if forever.

“Skara, you knew before you left what this mission could turn into.”

She closed her eyes, trying to will herself to remain calm. Nevertheless, her voice held the slightest tremor when she said, “I did.”

“Well, then, now you know for certain.” El-Arian’s voice, like a wasp, delivered its sting. “You are on a suicide mission.”

Bourne heard the muffled sound and immediately identified it as a shot with a suppressor-enhanced pistol. Peering out of Kaja’s window, he was just in time to see Marlon Etana emerging from his own bedroom window. Etana eeled through a stand of palms, then leapt a low wall. Bourne opened the window and leapt through. He took a line that got him to the wall and over it faster, and he was on Etana within the space of a hundred yards.

They hit the ground together, rolling. Bourne struck first, but Etana managed to tumble away and was up on his feet and running again. Bourne sprinted after him, out of the stand of palms to the verge of the sea road, then across it, dodging speeding Vespas as he headed toward the dockside area.

Ducking into a shipwright’s workshop, Etana snatched up an awl, threw it behind him. Bourne ducked and kept on, vaulting over the hull of a boat whose outside was being re-tarred. He grabbed a four-foot length of wood and threw it like a javelin. It struck Etana on the left shoulder, spinning him around even as he staggered, his arms flailing to keep his balance. He struck a wall, which saved him from losing his feet, and he reeled onward, out the other side of the shack, into the spangled night.

The water, rippled with moonlight, was on their right, the seawall on their left. Etana lurched to the left in an attempt to mount the wall, but Bourne cut him off and he was obliged to head the other way, out to the boat slips.

Etana ran out onto one of the long slips, boats on either side. Bourne was gaining on him. He saw this and leapt onto one of the vessels, vanishing behind the cockpit. Instead of heading directly for him, Bourne sprinted toward the adjacent boat, leaping onto it as Etana appeared holding a Taurus PT145 Millennium. Etana looked around, baffled as to where Bourne had gone.

Headlights swept the docks, illuminating for Bourne the path he needed to take; crouching low, he scuttled to the starboard side of the boat and made the jump onto Etana’s boat. At once Etana appeared, no doubt having felt the slight rocking Bourne’s weight had caused.

The two men stalked each other, using the contours of the boat to shield themselves as they moved about. Etana fired at Bourne as he showed himself briefly. Now that he knew where Etana was, Bourne doubled back, vaulted onto the cockpit, rolled over it, and dropped down on Etana. The Taurus went off again, and then, with Bourne’s second blow, it went skittering across the deck.

Etana drove a fist into Bourne’s cheek and blood spurted out of Bourne’s mouth. He followed that up with a vicious kidney punch that dropped Bourne to the deck, writhing in agony. Etana turned and, snatching up the Taurus, turned back in time to receive a kick that flattened his nose. He staggered backward, blood gushing over his face, but still managed to bring the Taurus into firing position. But before he had a chance to squeeze off a shot, Bourne drove the end of his fingers into the spot just below Etana’s sternum.

All the air went out of Etana, he doubled over, and Bourne grabbed the Taurus out of his hand. He jammed the muzzle of the pistol into the side of Etana’s head.

“Stop!” a voice called from dockside. “That’s enough!”

Bourne turned and saw Don Fernando standing in a spread-legged shooter’s stance, arms straight out in front of him.

“Put the Taurus down, Jason, and step away.” When Bourne hesitated, Don Fernando cocked the hammer of the Magnum .357 Colt Python. “Now or never. It will only take one shot.”

Book Four

25

“I’D KILL YOU right here, General Karpov, but killing isn’t allowed in the sacred grounds of the Mosque.” Zachek prodded Boris in the small of his back. “Not that I wouldn’t mind.”

The two men with him grinned, waving their weapons as if they were flags.

Outside, the night had formed a gritty layer, a tense gray band that seemed at any moment ready to snap back into its original shape. They waded through this as if it were the shallows of the ocean.

Zachek bundled Boris into a waiting car. He was squeezed in between Zachek and one of the gunmen.

“How does it feel?” Zachek said. “To be on your own, no direction home?”

The second gunman slid in beside the driver, and they took off, crossing the river, driving deep into Sendling, one of Munich’s two industrial districts. At this time of night, there were few vehicles on the streets and no foot traffic whatsoever. The driver pulled to the curb along Kyreinstrasse and they got out. The driver unlocked a door and they entered what appeared to be an abandoned building. The stench of the past was strong in Boris’s nostrils. The walls were peeling, a chair with a broken leg lay on its side, cartons were falling apart. Everywhere he looked was decay, as if they were inside a huge animal slowly dying.

While the two gunmen looked to their weapons, Zachek led Boris to the rear wall and turned him so his back was facing it. “This is where it will happen,” he said.