Текст книги "The Bourne Objective (Цель Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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“And, of course, the girls.”

Diego grinned. “Of course the girls.”

“Didn’t he want to see Tracy-and Holly?”

“When they were here, but most times they weren’t.”

“You were a foursome.”

Diego frowned. “Why would you think that?”

“Judging by the photos in Noah’s flat.”

“What are you implying?”

Something almost imperceptible had crept into Diego’s demeanor. A tension akin to a subtle ripple emanating from the core of him. Bourne was pleased that his probing had struck a nerve.

Bourne shrugged. “Nothing, really, other than in those photos you all looked very close.”

“As I said, we were friends.”

“Closer than friends, I would think.”

At that moment Diego glanced down at his watch. “If you fancy a bit of a flutter, now’s the time to take ourselves to Knightsbridge.”

The Vesper Club was a very posh casino in London’s very posh West End. It was one of those discreet affairs, hardly noticeable from the street, the polar opposite of the exclusive velvet-rope nightclubs in New York and Miami Beach that revel in their crassness.

Inside it was all butter-soft leather banquettes at the restaurant, a long, snaking brass-and-glass, neon-lit bar, and a number of gaming rooms clad in marble, mirrors, and stone columns with Doric capitals. They passed among the slots. Off to one side was the electronic gaming room whose high-decibel rock music and neon lights seemed to blink Go!Bourne peered in, saw that it was patrolled by a guard. He guessed the club figured the younger clients were more apt to get rowdy than the older, more established ones.

They went down several steps into the more sedate but no less opulent main gaming area, featuring all the usual suspects: baccarat, roulette, poker, blackjack. The oval room was filled with the low buzz of bets being made, roulette wheels spinning, the calls of the croupiers, and the ubiquitous clink of glassware. They wound their way through this expanse to a green baize door guarded by a large man in a tuxedo. The moment he caught sight of Diego, he smiled and gave a small deferential nod.

“How are you this evening, Mr. Hererra?”

“Quite all right, Donald.” He gestured. “This is my friend Adam Stone.”

“Good evening, sir.” Donald opened the door, which swung inward. “Welcome to the Vesper Club’s Empire Suite.”

“This was where Noah liked to play poker,” Diego said over his shoulder. “Only high stakes, only expert players.”

Bourne looked around at the dark walls, the solid-marble floor, three kidney-shaped tables; the hunched shoulders and concentrated expressions of the men and women who sat around the green baize analyzing the cards, sizing up their opponents and placing their bets accordingly. “I wasn’t aware that Noah had the kind of money to be a high-roller.”

“He didn’t. I staked him to it.”

“Wasn’t that risky?”

“Not with Noah.” Diego grinned. “When it came to poker he was an expert’s expert. Before an hour went by I’d get my money back and then some. I’d go and play with the profit. It was a good deal for both of us.”

“Did the girls come here?”

“What girls?”

“Tracy and Holly,” Bourne said patiently.

Diego looked thoughtful. “Once or twice, I suppose.”

“You don’t remember.”

“Tracy liked to gamble, Holly didn’t.” Diego’s shrug was an attempt to conceal his growing discomfort. “But surely you know this already.”

“Tracy didn’t like to gamble.” Bourne kept any hint of accusation out of his voice. “She hated her job, which caused her to gamble almost every day.”

Diego turned back to him, a look of consternation on his face, or was it fear?

“She worked for Leonid Arkadin,” Bourne continued. “But surely you knew this already.”

Diego licked his lips. “Actually, I had no idea.” He looked as if he wanted to sit down. “But how… how is this possible?”

“Arkadin was blackmailing her,” Bourne said. “He had something on her, what was it?”

“I… I don’t know,” Diego said in a shaky voice.

“You need to tell me, Diego. It’s vitally important.”

“Why? Why is it vitally important? Tracy is dead-she and Holly are both dead. And now Noah, too. Shouldn’t they all be left in peace?”

Bourne took a step toward him. Though he lowered his voice, it was full of menace. “But Arkadin is still alive. He was responsible for Holly’s death. And it was your friend Noah who murdered Holly.”

“No!” Diego stiffened. “You’re wrong, he couldn’t possibly-”

“I was there when it happened, Diego. Noah pushed her off a flight of steps at the top of a temple in East Bali. That, my friend, is fact, not the fiction you’ve been feeding me.”

“Drink,” Diego said in a voice made thin and hoarse by his consternation.

Bourne took him by the elbow and walked him over to the small bar at the rear of the Empire Suite. Diego lurched on stiff legs as if he were already drunk. As soon as he collapsed on a stool he ordered a double whiskey-no refined sherry for him now. He drank the whiskey off in three long gulps, then asked for another. He would have downed all of that, as well, if Bourne hadn’t pulled the glass out of his unsteady hand and set it down on the black granite bartop.

“Noah killed Holly.” Diego was slumped over, staring into the depths of the whiskey, into a past that he’d thought he knew. “What a fucking nightmare.”

Diego did not seem to be a man prone to foul language. He was clearly out of his element, which indicated that he wasn’t privy to his father’s illicit arms trafficking. Neither, apparently, did he know what Noah had done for a living.

Suddenly his head swung around and he looked at Bourne. “Why? Why would he do that?”

“He wanted something she had. Apparently she wouldn’t give it to him voluntarily.”

“So he killedher?” Diego looked incredulous. “What kind of man would do something like that?” He shook his head slowly and sadly. “I can’t conceive of anyone wanting to harm her.”

Bourne noticed that Diego hadn’t said, I can’t conceive of Noah wanting to harm her.“Clearly,” he said, “Noah was not who you thought he was.” He refrained from adding, Neither was Tracy.

Diego grabbed the glass and finished off the second double. “Good God,” he whispered.

Very gently Bourne said, “Tell me about the four of you, Diego.”

“I need another drink.”

Bourne ordered him a single this time. Diego lunged for the glass like a life jacket thrown to a drowning man. At one of the tables a woman in a glittery gown cashed in, rose, and walked out. Her place was taken by a man with the shoulders of a football player. A heavyish older woman with frosted hair, who had apparently just come in, sat down at the middle table. All three tables were full up.

Diego took two convulsive swallows of whiskey, then said in a voice bled dry, “Tracy and I had a thing, nothing serious, we saw other people-at least she did. It was very off-and-on, very casual. We had a few giggles, nothing more. We didn’t want it to disturb our friendship.”

Something in his voice alerted Bourne. “That’s not all of it, is it?”

Diego’s mournful expression deepened, and he looked away. “No,” he said. “I fell in love with her. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t even want to,” he added, as if it had been within his power to choose. “She was so nice about it, so kind. But still…” His voice drifted away on a tide of sad memories.

Bourne thought it time to move on. “And Holly?”

Diego seemed to snap out of his daze. “Noah seduced her. I saw it happening, I thought it was amusing, in a way, that no harm would come of it. Please don’t ask me why.”

“What happened?”

Diego sighed. “As it turned out Noah had a thing for Tracy, a very bad thing. For her part she wanted nothing to do with him, she told him flat-out.” He took another gulp of his whiskey. He was drinking it as if it were water. “The thing she wouldn’t say, even to me, was that she didn’t really like Noah, or at least she didn’t trust him.”

“Which meant?”

“Tracy was very protective of Holly, she saw Noah moving in on Holly because he couldn’t have her. She felt Noah was just being cynical and self-destructive while Holly was taking the liaison far more seriously. She believed it would end in tears-Holly’s tears.”

“Why didn’t she step in, tell Noah to back off?”

“She did. He told her-far too bluntly, if you ask me-to stay out of it.”

“Did you talk to him?”

Diego looked even more miserable than before. “I should have, I know, but I didn’t believe Tracy, or maybe I chose not to believe her because if I did, then the situation had already gotten so messy and I didn’t…”

“What, you didn’t want to get your hands dirty?”

Diego nodded, but he wouldn’t meet Bourne’s eyes.

“You must have had your own suspicions about Noah.”

“I don’t know, perhaps I did. But the fact is I wanted to believe in us, I wanted to believe that everything would work out all right, that we would make it all right because we cared about one another.”

“You cared about one another all right, but not in the right way.”

“Looking back now everything seems twisted, no one was who they said they were, or liked what they said they liked. I don’t even understand what drew us together.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Bourne said, not unkindly. “Each one of you wanted something from someone else in the group; in one way or another all of you used your friendships as leverage.”

“Everything we did together, everything we said or confided to one another was a lie.”

“Not necessarily,” Bourne said. “You knew Tracy was working for Arkadin, didn’t you?”

“I told you I didn’t.”

“When I asked you what Arkadin had on her, do you remember what you said?”

Diego bit his lip, but said nothing.

“You said that Tracy was dead-that she and Holly were both dead, and shouldn’t they be left in peace?” He peered into Diego’s face. “That’s a response of a man who knows exactly what he’s been asked.”

Diego slapped the flat of his hand onto the bartop. “I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“I understand,” Bourne said gently, “but keeping it a secret now doesn’t help her.”

Diego passed a hand across his face, as if trying to wipe away a memory. At the second table from them a man said, “I’m out,” pushed his chair back, rose, and stretched.

“All right.” Diego’s eyes met Bourne’s. “She said that Arkadin had helped get her brother out of terrible trouble and now he was using that against her.”

Bourne almost said, But Tracy didn’t have a brother.He caught himself and said, “What else?”

“Nothing. It was after… before we went to sleep. It was very late, she’d had too much to drink, she’d been depressed all evening and then as soon as we finished she couldn’t stop crying. I asked her if I’d done anything wrong, which only made her cry harder. I held her for a long time. When she calmed down she told me.”

Something was very wrong. Chrissie said they had no brother, Tracy told Diego they did. One of the two sisters was lying, but which one? What possible reason could Tracy have for lying to Diego, and what reason would Chrissie have to lie to him?

At that moment Bourne saw movement out of the corner of his eye. The man who had cashed in was making his way toward the bar, and within another two steps Bourne knew that he was heading straight for them.

Though the man wasn’t large he gave a formidable appearance. His black eyes seemed to smolder out of a face the color of tanned leather. His thick hair and close-cropped beard matched the color of his eyes. He had a hawk-like nose, a wide thick-lipped mouth, and cheeks like slabs of concrete. A small diagonal scar bisected one furry eyebrow. He moved with a low center of gravity, his arms loose and relaxed, though not swinging or even moving at all.

And it was this gait, this way of holding himself that marked him as a man of professional intent, a man with whom death walked from dusk until dawn. It was also these things that triggered a memory, causing it to pierce the maddening veils of Bourne’s amnesia.

A shiver of recognition passed down Bourne’s spine: This was the man who had helped him obtain the Dominion ring.

Bourne moved away from Diego. This man, whoever he was, didn’t know him as Adam Stone. As Bourne approached him, he extended his hand and a smile creased his face.

“Jason, at last I’ve caught up with you.”

“Who are you? How do you know me?”

The smile lost its luster. “It’s Ottavio. Jason, don’t you remember me?”

“Not at all.”

Ottavio shook his head. “I don’t understand. We worked together in Morocco, an assignment from Alex Conklin-”

“Not now,” Bourne said. “The man I’m with-”

“Diego Hererra, I recognize him.”

“Hererra knows me as Adam Stone.”

Ottavio nodded, at once focused. “I understand.” He glanced over Bourne’s shoulder. “Why don’t you introduce us?”

“I don’t think that would be wise.”

“Judging by Hererra’s expression, it will look odd if you don’t.”

Bourne saw that he had no choice. Turning on his heel, he led Ottavio back to the bar.

Bourne introduced them, “Diego Hererra, this is Ottavio-”

“Moreno,” Ottavio said, extending his hand for Diego to take.

As Diego did so his eyes opened wide in shock and his body slumped down onto the stool. That was when Bourne saw the scarred man pull out the slender, ceramic blade of the knife, which through sleight of hand he had palmed and slipped through Diego’s chest. Its tip was curved slightly upward, mimicking his smile, which now seemed ghastly.

Bourne grabbed him by the shirtfront and hauled him off his feet, but the scarred man would not let go of Diego’s hand. He was immensely powerful, his grip was like a vise. Bourne turned to Diego but saw that the life was already fleeing his body, the knife tip had probably pierced his heart.

“I’ll kill you for this,” Bourne whispered.

“No you won’t, Jason. I’m one of the good guys, remember?”

“I don’t remember a thing, not even your name.”

“Then you’ll just have to trust me. We’ve got to get out-”

“I’m not letting you go anywhere,” Bourne said.

“You have no choice but to trust me.” The scarred man glanced toward the door, which had just opened. “Regard the alternative.”

Bourne saw Donald the bouncer come into the Empire Suite. He was accompanied by two other brawny men in tuxedos. All of them, Bourne noted with an electric shock that passed clear through him, were wearing gold rings on the forefingers of their right hands.

“They’re Severus Domna,” the scarred man said.

Book Two

12

IN THE ABSOLUTE stillness of inaction, the only sound was the whisper of gamblers losing money. Ottavio handed Bourne a pair of specially baffled earplugs, along with the whispered word: “Now.”

Bourne fitted the plugs into his ear canals. He saw what looked like a ball bearing palmed out of Ottavio’s pocket, held between the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand. Only its rough surface and the earplugs gave clues to what it might be: a USW, an ultrasonic weapon.

At that moment Ottavio let the USW drop to the floor, where it rolled across the slick marble squares toward the three Severus Domna agents standing between them and the green baize door. The USW activated as soon as it hit the floor, sending out an AFS, an area field of sound, that affected the inner ears of everyone in the room, causing them to collapse in waves of dizziness.

Bourne followed Ottavio past the tables, leaping over prone bodies. Donald and the other two bouncers were on the floor with the gamblers and the dealers, but as the scarred man stepped over a bouncer the man reached up and, pulling hard on the back of his jacket, toppled him backward, then struck him hard just above the right ear. Bourne sidestepped Ottavio’s falling body. As the bouncer rose, Bourne recognized him as the man patrolling the electronic gaming room; he wore earplugs to mute the rock music. They weren’t the kind Bourne and the scarred man were using, but they had dampened the field enough for him to overcome his disorientation.

Bourne slammed his fist into the bouncer’s side. The bouncer grunted, and when he turned, he held a Walther P99 in his hand. Bourne drove the edge of his hand down onto the bouncer’s wrist. He wrested the Walther away from him and swung its butt into the bouncer’s face, but he ducked away out of reach. Bourne drove him against the wall; the bouncer hit him hard on the right biceps and Bourne’s arm went numb. The bouncer, seeking to build on his advantage, drove his fist toward Bourne’s solar plexus, but Bourne deflected the blow, buying himself time to regain feeling in his right arm.

They fought savagely and silently in a room bizarrely filled with people slumped over the gaming tables or puddled on the floor like spilled Jell-O. Their soundless fury was a blur of intense motion in a room otherwise devoid of it, lending the vicious give-and-take of hand-to-hand combat an eerie quality, as if they were battling underwater.

Oxygenated blood was rushing back into Bourne’s right arm when the bouncer got himself inside Bourne’s defense and landed a powerful blow in the same spot. Bourne’s arm dropped as if it were made of stone, and he could see the grin of triumph informing the bouncer’s face. He feinted right, which didn’t fool the man, whose grin widened. Bourne’s left elbow connected with his throat, breaking the hyoid bone. The bouncer made an odd, clicking sound as he went down and stayed down.

By this time Ottavio had regained his feet and was shaking off the effects of the blow to his head. Bourne pulled open the door and, together, they went out into the casino’s main room, walking quickly but not fast enough to draw attention to themselves. The sonic field hadn’t penetrated here. Everything was moving at a normal pace, no one yet suspected what had happened in the Empire Suite, but Bourne knew it was just a matter of time before the head of security or one of the managers went looking for Donald or one of the other two bouncers.

Bourne tried to hurry them along, but the scarred man hung back.

“Wait,” he said, “wait.”

They had removed their earplugs and the scrapes and rustlings of the rarefied world around them plunged in on them like the roar of angry surf.

“We can’t afford to wait,” Bourne said. “We need to get out of here before-”

But it was already too late. A man with a ramrod-straight back and the clear no-nonsense air of authority was striding across the main room toward them. There were too many people around for a confrontation, nevertheless Bourne saw Ottavio heading toward the manager.

Bourne cut him off and, smiling broadly, said, “Are you the floor manager?”

“Yes. Andrew Steptoe.” He made an attempt to look over Bourne’s shoulder at the green baize door outside of which Donald should have been stationed. “I’m afraid I’m rather busy at the moment. I-”

“Donald said someone would call you over.” He took Steptoe’s elbow and, inclining his head toward him, said in a confidential whisper, “I’m in the middle of one of those high-stakes battles that come along once in a great while, if you understand me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t-”

Bourne turned him away from the door to the Empire Suite. “But of course you do, a mano-a-mano duel over the poker table, I know you do. It’s a matter of money, you see.”

Moneywas the magic word. He had Steptoe’s full attention now. Behind the manager’s back he could see the scarred man break out into a sly smile. He walked Steptoe closer and closer to the cashier, which was on the right side of the slots room, conveniently located near the entryway so that the clientele could buy chips on their way in and the occasional winners could cash out as they left-if they made it past all the other glittering lures the gambling profession threw at them.

“How much money?” Steptoe could not keep a note of greed out of his voice.

“Half a million,” Bourne said without hesitation.

Steptoe didn’t know whether to frown or lick his chops. “I’m afraid I don’t know you…”

“James. Robert James.” They were nearing the cashier’s cage and, by proximity, the front door. “I’m an associate of Diego Hererra’s.”

“Ah. I see.” Steptoe pursed his lips. “Even so, Mr. James, this establishment does not know you personally. You understand, we cannot put up such a large amount-”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant to imply.” Bourne feigned shock. “Rather I need your permission to leave the premises during the game in order to obtain the amount in question, so that I can remain in the game.”

Now the manager did frown. “At this time of night?”

Bourne radiated confidence. “A wire transfer can be effected. It will only take twenty minutes-thirty, at most.”

“Well, it’s highly irregular, don’t you know.”

“Half a million pounds, Mr. Steptoe, is a large amount of money, as you yourself pointed out.”

Steptoe nodded. “Quite so.” He sighed. “I suppose that under the circumstances it can be allowed.” He waggled a forefinger in Bourne’s face. “But be quick about it, sir. I can give you no more than half an hour.”

“Understood.” Bourne shook the manager’s hand. “Thank you.”

Then he and the scarred man turned, went up the steps, across the entryway, through the glass doors, and into the windswept London night.

Several blocks away, as they turned a corner, Bourne rammed the scarred man hard against the side of a parked car and said, “Now tell me who you are and why you killed Diego.”

As the scarred man reached for his knife Bourne gripped his wrist. “Let’s have none of that,” he said. “Give me answers.”

“I would never harm you, Jason, you know that.”

“Why did you kill Diego?”

“He’d been told to bring you to the club at a certain time tonight.”

Bourne remembered Diego looking down at his watch and saying, “Now’s the time to take ourselves to Knightsbridge.”An odd way to put it, except if this man was telling the truth.

“Who told Diego to bring me there?” But Bourne already knew.

“The Severus Domna got to him-I don’t know how-but they gave him precise instructions on how to betray you.”

Bourne remembered Diego picking at his food as if he had something important on his mind. Had he been anticipating the betrayal? Was Ottavio right?

The scarred man stared into Bourne’s face. “You really don’t know me, do you?”

“I told you I didn’t.”

“My name is Ottavio Moreno.” He waited a beat. “Gustavo Moreno’s brother.”

A tiny tremor of recognition raced through Bourne as the veils of his amnesia stirred and tried to part.

“We met in Morocco.” Bourne’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Yes.” A smile creased Ottavio Moreno’s face. “In Marrakech, we traveled into the High Atlas Mountains together, didn’t we?”

“I don’t know.”

“Good God!” Ottavio Moreno’s face registered surprise, perhaps even shock. “And the laptop? What about the laptop?”

“What laptop?”

“You don’t remember the laptop?” He grabbed Bourne by the arms. “Jason, come on. We met in Marrakech in order to get the laptop.”

“Why?”

Ottavio Moreno frowned. “You told me it was a key.”

“Key to what?”

“To the Severus Domna.”

At that moment they heard the familiar high-low wail of police sirens.

“The mess we left behind in the Empire Suite,” Moreno said. “Come on, let’s go.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Bourne said.

“But you must, you owe me,” Ottavio Moreno said. “You killed Noah Perlis.”

In other words,” Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday said as he scanned the report in front of him, “between retirements, normal attrition, and requests for transfer-all of which, I see, have been not only granted but expedited-a quarter of the Old Man’s CI has moved on.”

“And our own personnel have moved in.” DCI Danziger did not bother to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. The secretary appreciated confidence as much as he disliked indecision. Danziger took back the report and carefully folded it away. “It will be only a matter of months, I believe, before that number will increase to fully a third of the old guard.”

“Good, good.”

Halliday rubbed his large, square hands over the remnants of his Spartan lunch. The Occidental was abuzz with the jawing of politicos, reporters, flacks, power brokers, and industry influence peddlers. All of them had paid their respects to him in one circumspect manner or another, whether it was with a slightly terrified smile, an obeisant nod of the head, or, as in the case of the elderly and influential Senator Daughtry, a quick handshake and a down-home how-dee-do. Swing-state senators accumulated power even during non-election years, both parties seeking to curry favor. It was simply standard operating procedure inside the Beltway.

For some time, then, the two men sat in silence. The restaurant began to thin out as the denizens of the DC political pits straggled back to work. But soon enough their place was taken by tourists in striped shirts and baseball caps they’d bought from the vendors down by the Mall imprinted with CIA or FBI. Danziger returned to his lunch, which, as usual, was more substantial than Halliday’s unadorned strip steak. All that was left on the secretary’s plate were several pools of blood, clotted with congealed fat.

Across the table Halliday’s mind had drifted to the dream he couldn’t remember. He had read articles that dreams were a necessary part of sleep-REM sleep, the eggheads called it-without which a man would, eventually, go insane. On the other hand, it was certainly true that he couldn’t recall a single dream. His entire sleeping existence was a perfect blank wall on which nothing was ever scrawled.

He shook himself like a dog coming out of the rain. Why did he care? Well, he knew why. The Old Man had once confided in him that he suffered from the same strange illness-that’s what the Old Man called it, an illness. Strange to think that the two of them had once been friends, more than friends, come to think of it-what had they called it then? Blood brothers. As young men they had confided all their little tics and habits, the secrets that inhabited the dark corners of their souls. Where had it all gone wrong? How had they become the bitterest of enemies? It might have been the gradual divergence of their political views, but friends often dealt with disagreement. No, their separation had to do with a sense of betrayal, and in men such as they were, loyalty was the ultimate-the only-test of friendship.

The truth was they had betrayed what they had built as young men, as their idealism was burned away in the crucible of the nation’s capital, where they had both chosen to serve lifetime sentences. The Old Man had been an acolyte of John Foster Dulles while he had attached himself to Richard Helms-men with wildly divergent backgrounds, methodologies, and, most importantly, ideologies. And since they were in the business of ideology and that business was their life there was no recourse but to turn on each other, to try with every fiber of their being to prove the other wrong, to bring him down, to destroy him.

For decades the Old Man had outwitted him at every turn, but now the tables were turned, the Old Man was dead, and he had the prize he’d set his gaze on so long ago: control of CI.

Danziger clearing his throat brought Halliday back from the chasm of the past.

“Is there anything we’ve failed to cover?”

The secretary regarded him as a child studies an ant or a beetle, with the curiosity reserved for a species so far below him that it seemed inconceivably distant. Danziger was far from a stupid man, which was why Halliday had chosen him as his knight to move back and forth across the chessboard of the American clandestine services. But apart from his usefulness on the board, he viewed Danziger as entirely expendable. Halliday had closed himself off the moment he felt the Old Man’s betrayal. He had a wife and two children, of course, but he scarcely thought of them. His son was a poet-good Christ, a poet, of all things! And his daughter, well, the less said about her and her female partner the better. As for his wife, she had betrayed him as well, giving birth to two disappointments. These days, apart from formal functions where the strict code of Washington family values required her to be on his arm, they lived entirely separate lives. It had been years since they had slept in the same room, let alone the same bed. Occasionally they found themselves having breakfast together, a minor torture Halliday escaped as quickly as he could.

Danziger was leaning forward confidentially across the table. “If there’s anything I can help you with, you only have to-”

“I think you’ve confused me with a friend,” Halliday snapped. “The day I ask for your help is the day I put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”

He slid out of the booth and walked away without a backward glance, leaving Danziger to pay the check.

Alone for the moment while Boris Karpov slept inside the convent, Arkadin poured himself a mescal and took the drink out into the steamy Sonora night. Dawn would soon be scything through the stars, extinguishing them as it went. The shorebirds were already awake, flocking out of their nests to sweep along the beachfront.

Arkadin, breathing deeply of the salt and the phosphorus, punched in a number on his cell. The phone rang for a very long time. Knowing there would be no voice mail, he was about to hang up when a raspy voice sounded in his ear.

“Who in the unholy name of Saint Stephen is this?”

Arkadin laughed. “It’s me, Ivan.”

“Why, hello, Leonid Danilovich,” Ivan Volkin said.

Volkin had once been the most powerful man in the grupperovka.Unaffiliated with any family, he had for many years been a negotiator, both between families and between the bosses of certain families and the most corrupt businessmen and politicians. He was a man, in sum, to whom practically anyone in power owed favors. And though long retired, he had defied convention by becoming even more powerful as his age advanced. He was also particularly fond of Arkadin, whose strange ascent in the underworld he’d followed since the day Maslov had him brought to Moscow from his hometown of Nizhny Tagil.

“I thought you might be the president,” Ivan Volkin said. “I told him I couldn’t help him this time.”

The thought of the president of the Russian Federation calling Ivan Volkin for a favor caused Arkadin to chuckle all the more. “Pity for him,” he said.

“I did some digging regarding your problem as you outlined it to me. You do indeed have a mole, my friend. I was able to narrow the candidates down to two, but that’s as far as I was able to get.”