Текст книги "The Bourne Imperative (Крах Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Maceo Encarnación sighed as he took out his mobile, punched in a number, and clapped it to his ear. “Someone will be coming for you,” he said into his phone. “He’ll be in Paris within the hour.”

Nicodemo, grateful to get off the subject of Rebeka’s knifing, said, “Don Fernando Hererra is dead. Blown up when his private jet crashed outside Paris. Why are we stopping off there when we should be heading on?”

Maceo Encarnación reversed the phone to show him the news stories. “Martha Christiana will be forwarding the coroner’s report to verify that Hererra was actually on the plane. She always manages to get hold of these reports, the devil knows how. This is a beautiful thing, no? It’s part of her skill set.” He slid the mobile away. “You will go to her the moment we land.”

“What do you want me to do?” Nicodemo said. “Kill her?”

“ Dios, no!” Maceo Encarnación looked appalled. “Martha Christiana is special to me, do you understand?”

“I didn’t think anyone was special to you, but what does it matter?”

Maceo Encarnación regarded him for a moment, as if he were a lower form of life. It seemed clear that the female Mossad agent had somehow gotten under his skin, an inexplicable feat he had thought near to impossible. He wondered what effect her death would have on him. To kill someone you cared about took an enormous amount of emotional fortitude, he knew from experience. Nicodemo had killed many people, of course, most of them in cold blood, some faceto-face, when you tried to catch that ineffable moment when life was transformed into death, when the soul fled into the shadows, when desire became destiny. He banished this disagreeable thought. “Martha Chrisiana is in Paris. Just bring her to me. And, Nicodemo, treat her like the lady she is.”

“A lady,” Nicodemo echoed. He turned to the window, his gaze far away.

“Nicodemo,” Maceo Encarnación said, “what is on your mind?” When Nicodemo didn’t answer, he said, “My daughter is on the other side of the world, married, and, one hopes, happy.”

“I don’t care about Maricruz.”

You despise her, Maceo Encarnación thought. “What doyou care about?” No response. Rebeka again. “I see.”

“I’m thinking about Jason Bourne,” Nicodemo said after the silence had become unendurable.

“What about him?”

“Jason Bourne represents more than just a problem. He could be the end of us.”

“Calm yourself.” This wasn’t about Jason Bourne, and Maceo Encarnación knew it.

Nicodemo, restless in his seat, continued to stare out the Perspex window. Despite the jet’s speed, the clouds seemed to drift past, as if in a dream. “We don’t even know whether Rebeka is dead.”

Now we get to it, Maceo Encarnación thought. “From what you tell me, it seems unlikely she has survived, even if Bourne somehow managed to get her to a hospital, which he hasn’t. I have people looking; they would know if she had been admitted.”

“Bourne has resources. A private doctor, maybe.”

“From how you described the wound, no doctor could have saved her. She would have needed a full-fledged trauma team, and even then...” He allowed the thought to run its own course. “Forget her. That chapter is closed.”

Nicodemo was brooding. “But not on Bourne.”

“Of course not.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t leave me in Mexico City to deal with him.”

“Deal with him?” Maceo Encarnación echoed. “I listened to you; we tried that once. You see how that turned out. Rebeka is dead and Bourne is still at large. Now one must create a real plan, execute it, at the conclusion of which Bourne dies. This is precisely what has been put in place. Anunciata is seeing to it.”

In many ways Dick Richards’s skills mimicked the finest watchmaker’s.

The difference was that he worked in the world of cyberspace, a place of infinite area, but without dimension. He had managed to quarantine his own Trojan and was now accessing the Core Energy network, where he had stored the preliminary codes that would activate the potent virus he had inserted like a drop of ink into its cyber heart of ones and zeros. Those codes were too complex even for his memory, and there was no way he would risk being caught with a rogue thumb drive or SD card. Besides, the attack had to seem to come from outside Treadstone, traced back to the Chinese. He could only seed the false ISP trail with a code that originated outside the Treadstone intranet.

Despite the canned air emanating from the vents in the ceiling, sweat rolled down his sides from under his arms, slid down the rills of his bent back as he sat, tensed, filled with a tremulous excitement, but also a terrible dread.

This was his big test, his ticket to the major leagues of hacking. When he pulled this off, he would prove indispensable to Tom Brick and Core Energy. This, more than anything, was what he wanted. Working for the government was soul-destroying. Other people took credit for his breakthroughs, he received a puny salary, and the president treated him like a pet dog, occasionally stroked but never allowed up on the furniture where his human masters sat in daily judgment. His transfer to Treadstone had unexpectedly improved his lot. Though Soraya and, to some extent, Peter treated him with suspicion and contempt, he could not blame them. He had been sent to spy on them. He deserved their suspicion and contempt. But he also saw their willingness to give him the credit due him, if he could prove himself loyal.

True, Brick often treated him like a dog, but sometimes not. And he paid a shitload more than the government ever did—or could. Up until now, Richards had been trying to be faithful to three masters, but the tension was tearing him apart. He could no longer live this way. He needed to choose sides.

But what about Peter? How had he managed to infiltrate Core Energy? How did he know about Tom Brick? If Richards was to choose a side, then he had to decide what to do about Peter. Should he tell Peter everything he knew about Brick, Core Energy, and the secret entity that did its bidding? Should he, on the other hand, reveal Peter’s real identity to Brick? Prior to working at Treadstone, the choice would have been a no-brainer. But now Treadstone had stymied him. He had to admit he liked it here. Unaccountably, the atmosphere was more like the private sector. There was little or no red tape, the co-directors saw to that.

On the horns of this dilemma, he continued his work, but his mind was elsewhere, so much so that he almost missed it. Some instinct, lodged in the most primitive part of his brain, the part humans counted on for survival, sent out a silent alarm that jerked him back to full concentration. Something was wrong. Immediately, he took his hands off the computer keyboard. Staring at the code he had been typing in, he felt an icy chill crawling down his spine. For a long time then, he did nothing but stare at the screen. Slowly, he drew his hands back from their position over the keyboard to rest them in his lap, as if he were a penitent, praying.

The normal sounds of the Treadstone office—hushed voices, the hum of machines, the careful tread of shoes—came to him as if from a great distance. His mobile phone ringing made him start. He picked it up.

“Richards, it’s Anderson.”

His guilty heart leaped into his throat, closing it down for a terrifying moment. “Yessir,” he eventually managed to croak.

“Made any progress?”

“The, uh, the Trojan is quarantined, sir.”

“Good deal.”

“It just...it’s proving more difficult than I imagined to get rid of. There’s...There seems to be some kind of mechanism embedded inside it.” The moment he said this, he knew it was a mistake.

“What the hell does that mean?” Anderson thundered.

He had been trying to absolve himself of any culpability when the virus struck, but it seemed he had only inflamed Anderson.

“Goddammit, Richards. Answer me!”

“I’m dealing with the problem, sir. It’s just going to take more time than I had expected.”

“Now that the Trojan’s quarantined, don’t mess with it further. I don’t want something else to be triggered.”

Oh, you fool, Richards berated himself.

“Your number one priority is to find out how that fucking thing jumped our firewall, got me?”

“Yessir.”

“I’ll be back at HQ in an hour. I want an answer by then.”

Richards’s hand was trembling as he cut the connection. He tried to calm himself, but his mind was racing so fast that gathering his thoughts was like trying to herd cats. Pushing back his chair, he got up and, on anxiety-stiffened legs, stalked to the closest window. He stood with his forehead pressed against the cool glass. He felt as if he were burning up with fever. It seemed to him now that he had leaped into the abyss without thinking anything through, without any understanding of his capacity to bear up under a life dominated by mendacity and duplicity.

With a barely audible moan, he lurched away from the window and stumbled back to his desk. He now had what seemed an impossible deadline. Anderson would be back in less than an hour. By that time, he needed to understand his situation and find a way out.

Back at his desk, he ran his hands through his hair while he stared at the screen. What was wrong? There was the most minute lag between his pressing the keys and seeing the code on the screen. Changing screens, he checked the hardware through the Control Panel, but no recent additions had been made. Device Manager produced the same results. But when he checked the computer’s CPU usage, he saw an unusual spike upward that dated back to the time he had started working. He felt a sudden rush of blood to his head. API based keyloggers added to the CPU usage as they polled and recorded each keystroke.

That bastard Anderson, Richards thought fiercely. He had an API based keylogger inserted into the software, which picked up every keystroke Richards made. The whole thing was premeditated, a setup. But how? There was only one answer: Peter Marks. Marks had betrayed him, had had no faith that he might give Tom Brick up to Treadstone.

A great rage filled Richards. He shook with the force of it. He looked one last time at the screen of incomplete virus code and thought: Fuck it. Fuck him. Fuck them all.

Without another thought, he disabled the keylogger software and continued with his code, working without even seeming to breathe. In the back of his mind, he prayed Anderson would show up early.

Almost fifty minutes later, six minutes before Anderson was due to arrive, Richards set the last section of the code in place. All he needed to do now was press the enter key and the virus would flood the onsite Treadstone servers, bringing down the entire network, freezing the communication channels, fouling the operating system itself.

He stood up, grabbed his coat, and, with one stab downward, hit enter. Then he crossed the room, went out the door, took the elevator to the lobby, and walked out, on his way back to his life with Tom Brick.

In the smoky distance, sirens wailed.

By the sound of them, vehicles were racing toward the Basilica de Guadelupe. The Mass was finished. Someone had found the body of el Enterrador.

“I don’t know where Maceo Encarnación and Nicodemo were going,” Anunciata said. “But I know someone who might.”

“Tell me,” Bourne said. He kept a sharp eye on the street, on the lookout for police cars.

“I’ll take you there.”

“No.” Bourne looked at her. “Your involvement is at an end.” He produced the wallet he had taken from Rebeka’s body. “It’s time for you to leave.” The last of Rebeka would go toward helping someone escape into a new life. He knew she would have liked that.

He opened the wallet, showing Anunciata the contents. “There’s money here, more than enough to set you up somewhere far away from Mexico. And a passport.” He paged through it. “You see my friend’s photo. You can pass for her. You’re more or less the same height and weight. Find a good salon, get your hair cut and dyed to match hers. A little makeup from a professional. That’s all you need.”

“Mexico is my home.”

“It will also be your death. Leave. Now. After today, it will be too late.”

Anunciata, holding the keys to her new life in the palms of her hands, looked up at him. Her eyes were swollen with tears. “Why are you doing this?”

“You deserve a chance at a new life,” he said.

“I don’t know whether I have the strength—”

“It’s what your mother wanted for you.”

The tears welled, falling. The sirens kept up a wail that could have come from her.

“There’s something...”

Bourne waited, then he engaged her eyes. “Anunciata?”

“Nothing.” She looked up. “It’s nothing.” She smiled. “Thank you.”

“Now,” Bourne said, folding her fingers over the wallet, “tell me who I need to see.”

Salazar Flores was an aviation mechanic. He worked mainly on private planes, most notably Maceo Encarnación’s Bombardier Global 5000. Bourne found him on the job in the maintenance hangar at the private airfield Encarnación used to house the Bombardier, exactly where Anunciata said he’d be at this time of the morning.

Flores was a short, sharp-eyed man in his middle years. His jowly cheeks were smeared with grease and his spatulate hands were permanently dyed by the fluids he used every day. He looked up sideways when Bourne approached him, then he stood and, wiping his hands on a greasy rag he pulled out of a back pocket of his overalls, faced the newcomer.

“How can I help you?” he said.

“I’m buying a Gulfstream SPX,” Bourne said, “and I’m thinking of housing it here.”

“You got the wrong guy.” Flores indicated the office building across the runway from the hangar where they stood. “You need to talk to Castillo. He’s the boss.”

“I’m more interested in talking with you,” Bourne said. “You’ll be taking care of my plane.”

Flores eyed Bourne appraisingly. “How’d you hear about me?”

“Anunciata.”

“Really?”

Bourne nodded.

“How’s her mom?”

“Maria-Elena died yesterday.”

Bourne seemed to have passed some kind of test. Flores nodded. “An inexplicable tragedy.”

Bourne had no intention of telling Flores just how explicable Maria-Elena’s death was. “Did you know her well?”

Flores regarded him for a moment. “I need a smoke.”

He led Bourne out of the clanging hangar where three other mechanics were at work, out onto the airfield. Keeping to the side of the runway, he shook out a cigarette, offered it to Bourne, then stuck it into his mouth and lit up.

He stared up at the high clouds as if looking for a sign. “You’re a Gringo, so I suppose you know Anunciata better.” He let smoke drift out between his lips. “Maria-Elena had a difficult life. Anunciata didn’t like to talk about it.” He shrugged bull shoulders. “Maybe she didn’t know. Maria-Elena was very protective of her daughter.”

“She wasn’t the only one,” Bourne said, thinking of the conversation he had overheard in the rectory of the Basilica de Guadelupe between Anunciata and el Enterrador. “Maceo Encarnación kept her like a hothouse flower.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.” Flores looked around as if at any moment one of Maceo Encarnación’s men was going to pop out of the shadows like a ghoul.

Bourne shrugged. “I assumed you knew the two of them well.”

Flores took a last suck on his cigarette, dropped it, shredding it beneath the heel of his boot. “I have to get back to work.”

“Are we getting into dangerous territory?”

Flores shot him a look. “Whatever it is you want, I can’t help you.”

“This can help you, though.” Bourne spread the five hundred-dollar bills between them.

“ ¡Madre de Dios!” Flores puffed out his cheeks, exhaled heartily through pursed lips. He looked up at Bourne. “What is it you want?”

“Only one thing,” Bourne said. “Maceo Encarnación took off this morning. Where was he headed?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Bourne stuffed the bills into the pocket of his overalls. “I’m sure your wife and kids could use some new clothes.”

Flores looked around again, still jumpy, though no one was in earshot and those who could be seen weren’t paying them the slightest attention. “I could lose my job...or my head. Then where would my wife and kids be?”

Bourne added another five hundred. “A couple of iPads will make you a hero.”

Flores, visibly sweating, ran a hand through his hair. Bourne could see the tug of war between greed and fear being played out on his face. Still Flores hesitated. It was time to play his last card.

“It was Anunciata who suggested I talk to you about Encarnación’s destination.”

At this, Flores’s eyes opened wide. “She was—”

“She wants you to tell me.” A jet turned onto the head of the runway, its engines building to a roar. Bourne took a step closer. “It’s important, Señor Flores. It involves Maria-Elena’s death.”

Flores’s face registered shock. “What d’you mean?”

“I can’t tell you,” Bourne said, “and you don’t want to know.”

Flores licked his lips, took one last glance around the airfield, and nodded. As the jet shot down the runway and, in a veil of noise and fumes, lifted off, he leaned forward and whispered a word in Bourne’s ear.

Martha Christiana took the call from Maceo Encarnación with an icy serenity.

In an hour his plane would be landing, he would send one of his people to fetch her, and that would be the end. She would be in the center of the vortex, unable to extricate herself. The moment she stepped onto his plane, she would be in jail—she could feel it. She possessed too much incriminating information on him. One way or the other, he would never allow her to leave him.

From Don Fernando’s living room windows, Martha Christiana stared longingly at the ethereal spiderwork of Notre Dame, its floodlit stone cool as marble. In the depths of night, she was wide awake. Don Fernando wasn’t. He slept on one side of the large bed in the master bedroom, the curtains closed against the lights and noise of the city.

Below her, on the western tip of the Île Saint-Louis, rose the sounds of young laughter, a guitar being strummed, drunken voices raised briefly in a raucous chorus of some beer-hall sing-along. Then more laughter, a shout. A fistfight broke out, a beer bottle smashed.

Martha did not look down. She wanted no part of the ugliness below; she had enough ugliness in her own life. Instead, she allowed her eyes to trace the ancient grace of the cathedral’s flying buttresses, curved like angels’ harps. She was tired, but she wasn’t sleepy, a semipermanent state in her profession.

As she often did when her eyes lit on beauty, she thought of her home in Marrakech, of the beauty with which her benefactor, her captor, her teacher, surrounded himself. He had been an aesthete. He taught her how to appreciate all forms of art that brought beauty and joy to his life. “For me, there is nothing else,”he told her once. “Without art, without beauty, the world is an ugly place, and life the ugliest of all states.”She had thought about this when she escaped his airless, obsessive museum-villa. She had thought about it many times afterward, after every kill, after sitting through a concert or visiting an art gallery, or flying high above the earth from assignment to assignment. As she did tonight, with Don Fernando asleep in the next room, faced once again with both the beauty and the ugliness of the world, of life.

She closed her eyes and ears to everything but the rushing of her blood. She heard her heartbeat as it might sound to a doctor. Her torso swayed a little as she drifted into a deep meditative state. She was back in Marrakech, amid the incense, chased silver services, the intricate filigreed wood screens, the colorful tiled floors and walls made up of geometric shapes. She was her young self again, imprisoned.

She opened her eyes and found that she held her handbag in her lap, cradling it as one would a toy poodle. Without looking, she opened it, feeling around for what appeared to be a book of matches. She took it out. It said Moulin Rouge on one side. Where the striker ought to be was a thin metal rod. When she dug a nail beneath it and pulled, a nylon filament unspooled to a length of eighteen inches. She had constructed this murder weapon herself, using principles handed down by the hashashin, the ancient Persian sect whose objective was to assassinate Christian knight infidels.

She stood so abruptly that her handbag slid off her lap to the carpet. Landing, it made no sound. On bare feet, she picked her way across the living room, to the doorway beyond which Don Fernando lay asleep in his bed.

He had told her that he was different from all the other men in her life, men who had sought to manipulate her in one way or another, bend her to their own ends, use her like a gun or a knife, to work out their need for power and revenge.

From the moment she stepped aboard his plane, Don Fernando’s plan to turn her from her assignment had been set in motion. He had played on her long-buried emotions, bringing her face to face with her past, her dead father, her demented mother. He had brought her home, seeking to soften her to his will, which was to live. And in the plane on the return flight, he had turned the screws on her even tighter by lying to her over and over until she had made the decision he had wanted her to make all along: abandon her mission.

But she was not so easily duped. She was in far more control of her emotions than he could know. There was a job to do, she could see it so clearly now, see through all the bullshit men threw at her as smokescreens. At last, she had seen the path through the bullshit to, once and for all, make her way to the other side.

Always imprisoned.

She stepped over the threshold and entered Don Fernando’s bedroom. He lay on his back on the side of the bed nearest her, veiled in deep shadow. Moving to the window, she pulled back the drapes. His patrician face was illuminated by Paris’s mellow glow. Returning to him, she reached out, touched him on the shoulder, and he gave a snort and rolled over on his side, facing away from her. Perfect.

She lifted the strangler’s filament, concentrating solely on her purpose. When her vision narrowed to a pinpoint, when all she could hear was the rhythmic beating of her heart, purpose became action.

She moved with perfect, deadly intent.

23

THE MOMENT DR. SANTIAGO removed the drain from the side of her head and bandaged the wound, Soraya felt as if she had returned from the gray land of near-death to a world full of color and promise.

Everything looked sharp-edged. Her acuity of vision and hearing was like that of a hawk. Every surface she ran her hand over felt new, different, and exciting.

When she remarked on this to Dr. Santiago, he broke out into a wide smile. “Welcome back,” he said.

For the first time since she had been admitted, she was free, untethered by lifelines to fluids and monitors. She moved around her room on legs made unfamiliar and shaky by her ordeal.

“Look at you,” Delia said. “Look at you!”

Soraya embraced her friend, held her tight, aware of the baby between them. She did not want to let go. Brushing tears away, she kissed Delia on both cheeks. Her heart was full.

Only one thought clouded her return from the back of beyond. “Deel, I need to go see Peter. Will you help me?”

Without another word, Delia went and got a wheelchair into which Soraya lowered herself. Hours before, on his last visit, Hendricks had told her that Peter had been shot. “We don’t know how badly yet,”he had said, “but I want you to be prepared. The bullet lodged near his spine.” “Does he know?”she had asked. Hendricks had nodded. “Right now he has no feeling in his legs.”

Before he left, Hendricks had signaled to Delia, and they had walked out of Soraya’s room together. Now, as Delia pushed her along the hospital’s hushed corridors, Soraya asked, “What did you and Hendricks talk about outside my hearing?”

There was a telling hesitation. “Raya, concentrate on Peter. I don’t think this is the time—”

Soraya put her hands on the wheels, stopping them. “Deel, come around where I can see you.” When her friend had complied, she said, “Tell me the truth, Deel. Does it have something to do with my baby?”

“Oh, no!” Delia cried. She knelt in front of Soraya and took her hands in hers. “No, no, no, the baby’s fine. It’s...” Again the telling hesitation. “Raya, Charles is dead.”

Soraya felt the shock of disappointment, nothing more. “What?”

“Ann shot him.”

Soraya shook her head. “I don’t...I don’t understand.”

“There was an altercation. Charles came at her and she defended herself. That’s not the official story. He was shot during a B and E, that’s what the news outlets are being fed.”

Soraya said nothing for some time. Nurses squeaked by on rubbersoled shoes, phones rang softly, doctors’ names were called, some urgently. Everything else was still.

“I don’t believe it,” Soraya breathed.

Delia searched her friend’s face. “Raya, are you okay? The secretary left it up to me to tell you, but I don’t know whether this was the right time.”

“There is no right time,” Soraya said. “There’s only the present.”

Searching through the corridors of her mind, she could find no feeling for Charles Thorne other than disappointment that their business relationship was at an end. Conduits weren’t easy to find, especially one so perfectly placed at the center of the information superhighway. But, on the other hand, if Charles was right about the impending investigation, his usefulness would have been at an end anyway. What she felt most was relief. It had been distasteful to her to lie to him about the baby. She could absolve herself, at least, of that sin. “Raya, what are you thinking?”

Soraya nodded to Delia. “Let’s go see Peter.”

He had been out of surgery for over an hour and he was awake. He seemed happy to see them.

“Hey, Peter,” Soraya said in an overbright voice. He looked ghostly, arms pale, pierced by needles whose tubes ran up and out of him. His face was contorted by pain though he tried his best to hide it. His lopsided smile broke her heart.

“You look good,” he said.

“You, too.” She was standing, clutching the railing of his bed for support.

“I have to get going,” Delia said. She and Soraya embraced.

“Later,” Soraya whispered into her ear.

“You’re full of shit,” Peter said when Delia was gone. “As always.”

Soraya laughed, touched his knee beneath the overstarched bedclothes just to reestablish the link between them that she found so important. “I’m glad you’re still here.”

He nodded. “I wish I could say I’ll be as good as new when I get out of here.”

Her heart turned to ice. “What do you mean? What have the doctors told you?”

“The bullet didn’t hit my spine.”

“That’s good news!”

“I wish it had.”

“What d’you mean?”

“The impact shattered it. Pieces lodged everywhere, including my spinal column.”

Soraya felt a sudden dryness in her throat, and she swallowed convulsively. She met his gaze head-on.

“I have no feeling in my legs,” Peter said. “They’re paralyzed.”

“Oh, Peter.” Soraya felt her heart beating faster, a certain churning began in the pit of her stomach. “Are they sure? It’s early yet. Who knows what will happen next week, or even tomorrow?”

“They’re sure.”

“Peter, you can’t give up.”

“I don’t know. The president going after our asses, you talking about leaving, then this happens.” His laugh sounded weak and hollow. “That’s three, isn’t it? It’s the end.”

“Who said I’m leaving?” It was out of her mouth before she had a chance to think about it.

“You did, Soraya. Remember our walk in the park, you said—”

“Forget what I said, Peter. I was just shooting my mouth off to a friend. I’m not going anywhere.” Much to her astonishment, she realized she meant it. While moving to Paris sounded great, it was a pipe dream. Her life was here with Treadstone, with Peter. Looking into his face, she knew she couldn’t leave him in this state, perhaps she never would have, even if this hadn’t happened to him.

“Soraya.” He smiled.

He seemed more relaxed now. She could see how heavily the thought of her leaving had weighed on him, and she was sorry she had ever mentioned it.

“Take a pew.” Blood had come back to his face; he seemed more himself again. “I have a lot to catch you up on.”

In his dream, Don Fernando walked at the edge of the sea and the shoreline. The odd thing was that he was walking on the water, not on the sand, which seemed to steam and bubble, as if it were being stirred in a vast cauldron. His feet were bare, his trousers rolled up to his calves. His feet looked pale and indistinct, as they would if viewed underwater. He walked and walked, but the curve of the landscape never changed, he never seemed to get anywhere.

In the next heartbeat, he was awake, a shadow like a giant bird passing over him, so close he could smell it. It had Martha Christiana’s scent. For the instant she was above him, and he felt paralyzed, as if stuck between two dreamworlds, one where he walked on water, the other where Martha spread her wings, flying above him.

Then the shadow was gone, Martha was gone with it, and he heard, like the cathedral bells of Notre Dame, the sound of shattering wood and glass. In the space of the next heartbeat, a chill breeze off the river invaded the room.

He turned over, still half-asleep, and saw the curtains billowing crazily, the window’s panes and sash demolished as if by a great force. It wasn’t until he heard the screaming from outside that he rose, curious, and, then, as he approached the ruined window, his curiosity turned to a mounting horror.

“Martha,” he called over his shoulder. And then more loudly, “Martha!”

No answer. Of course there was no answer. He stuck his head out the window, unmindful of the glass shards that penetrated his palms. He looked down, and saw her, spread-eagled on the cobbles of the narrow street. Around her, like a princess’s bed of diamonds, glass shards glittered wetly. Blood leaked from beneath her, running in rivulets, as a crowd gathered. The screaming continued, even after the unmistakable sounds of police and ambulance sirens made their way along the quay, coming ever closer.

My dear Senator Ring,” Li Wan said, “let me be one of the first to express my sincere condolences for your loss.”