Bourne laughed softly, but he didn‘t think she was far off the mark.

She examined the newly cleaned wound. ―Not so bad, I doubt you‘ll need a fresh round of antibiotics.‖

―Are you a doctor?‖

She smiled. ―On occasion, when I have to be.‖

―That answer requires an explanation.‖

She palpated the flesh around his wound. ―What the hell happened to you?‖

―I got shot, don‘t change the subject.‖

She nodded. ―Okay, as a young woman—a very young woman—I spent two years in West Africa. There was unrest, fighting, horrible atrocities perpetrated.

I was assigned to a field hospital where I learned triage, how to dress a wound. One day we were so overloaded with wounded and dying, the doctor put an instrument in my hand and said, ‗There‘s an entry wound but no exit wound.

If you don‘t get the bullet out right away your patient will die.‘ Then he went off to work on two other patients at once.‖

―Did your patient die?‖

―Yes, but not because of his wound. He‘d been terminal before he‘d been shot.‖

―That must have helped some.‖

―No,‖ she said, ―it didn‘t.‖ Throwing the last of the used pads into a wastebasket, she applied the antibiotic cream and began the bandaging process. ―You must promise not to abuse this again. The next time the bleeding will be worse.‖ She sat back inspecting her work. ―Ideally, you should be in hospital, or at least see a doctor.‖

―This isn‘t an ideal world,‖ he said.

―So I‘ve noticed.‖

She helped him to sit up. ―Where are we?‖ he asked.

―An apartment of mine. We‘re on the other side of town from Maestranza.‖

He transferred to a chair, sat back gingerly. His chest felt as if it were made of lead. It beat with a dull ache as if from pain remembered from long ago. ―Don‘t you have an appointment with Don Fernando Hererra?‖

―I postponed it.‖ She looked at him inquiringly. ―I couldn‘t possibly go without you, Professor Alonzo Pecunia Zuiga.‖ She was speaking of the Goya expert from the Prado he was going to impersonate. Then, abruptly, she smiled. ―I like money too much to spend it when I don‘t have to.‖

She stood, moving him back to the bed. ―But now you must rest.‖

He was going to answer her but his eyelids had already slid down. With the darkness came a deep and peaceful sleep.

Arkadin pushed his recruits through the desolate landscape of Nagorno-Karabakh, working them twenty-one hours a day. When they began to doze on their feet, he slammed them with his baton. He never had to hit any of them twice. For three hours they slept wherever they happened to be, sprawled on the ground, all except Arkadin himself for whom sleep had been completely banished months ago. Instead, his mind was filled with scenes from the past, from the end of his days in Nizhny Tagil, when Stas‘s men were closing in on him and it seemed as if his only choice was to kill as many of them as he could before they shot him to death.

He wasn‘t afraid to die, that was clear to him from the outset of his forced incarceration in the basement, venturing out only at night for quick forays for food and fresh water. Above him was a hive of activity as the remaining members of Stas‘s gang feverishly coordinated the ever-intensifying search for him. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, he might have had reason to think that the gang would move on to other matters, but no, they nursed their grudge like a colicky baby, inhaling its poison until to a man they were gripped by an unshakable obsession. They wouldn‘t rest until they dragged his corpse through the streets as an object lesson for anyone else who might think of interfering with their business.

Even the cops, who were, in any event, on the gang‘s payroll, had been co-opted into the citywide dragnet by the random storms of violence visited on Nizhny Tagil night after night. They were used to turning a blind eye, even at times laughed about it, but not now—the attacks had escalated to a level that made them a laughingstock in the eyes of the state police. It was typical of their thinking that rather than clamping down on Stas‘s gang, they took the easy way and capitulated to its demands. So almost everyone was on the lookout for Arkadin, there was no surcease, there could only be a nasty end.

That was when Mikhail Tarkanian, whom Arkadin would eventually call Mischa, arrived in Nizhny Tagil from Moscow. He had been sent by his boss, Dimitri Ilyinovich Maslov, head of Kazanskaya, the most powerful family of the Moscow grupperovka, the Russian mafia, involved in drugs and black-market cars. Through his many eyes and ears Maslov had heard of Arkadin, had heard of the bloodbath he‘d single-handedly caused and its stalemate aftermath. He wanted Arkadin brought to him. ―The problem,‖ Maslov told his men, ―is that Stas‘s men want to tear him limb from limb.‖ He handed them a file. Inside were a sheaf of grainy black-and-white surveillance shots, a gallery of Stas‘s remaining crew, each with his name carefully written on the reverse.

Maslov‘s eyes and ears had been busy, indeed, and it occurred to Tarkanian, even if it didn‘t to the scowling Oserov, that Maslov must want Arkadin very badly to go to so much trouble to extract him from what seemed like an intractable situation.

Maslov could have sent his chief enforcer, Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov, at the head of a raiding party to take Arkadin by force, but Maslov was a canny dispenser of his power. Far better to make Stas‘s gang part of his empire than to start a blood feud with whoever was left after his own people got through with them.

So instead he sent Tarkanian, his chief political negotiator. He ordered Oserov along to protect Tarkanian, an assignment Oserov openly despised, adamant that if Maslov had listened to him he, Oserov, could easily have taken Arkadin from the hick baboons of Nizhny Tagil, as he called them. ―I‘d have this Arkadin back in Moscow within forty-eight hours, guaranteed,‖ he told Tarkanian several times during their tedious journey into the foothills of the Ural Mountains.

By the time they arrived in Nizhny Tagil, Tarkanian was sick to death of Oserov who, as he later told Arkadin, ―felt like a woodpecker attached to my head.‖

In any event, even before Maslov‘s emissaries left Moscow, Tarkanian had formed the outline of the plan to extract Arkadin from his predicament. He was a man with a natural Machiavellian mind. The deals he made for Maslov were legendary in both their bewildering complexity and their unerring effectiveness.

―The mission is misdirection,‖ Tarkanian told Oserov as they approached their destination. ―To that end we need to create a straw man for Stas‘s gang to go after.‖

―What do you mean we?‖ Oserov said with typical surliness.

―I mean you‘re the perfect man to establish the straw man for me.‖