Текст книги "The Bourne Imperative (Крах Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“Soraya, I forced you to cross a line with Charles Thorne that should never be crossed.”

“I did,” she whispered, her voice paper-thin. “ Idid.”

He shook his head, his expression genuinely sorrowful. “Soraya. I—”

“No regrets,” she said, just before the surgeon came in and ordered an end to the interview.

At almost the very moment Hendricks returned to the waiting room, his mobile buzzed. He glanced down. “Ah, well. The president needs me.”

“How is she?” Delia’s anxiety was written all over her face.

“Weak, but she seems okay.” He looked around for his coat, but his bodyguard, stepping into the room, handed it to him. “Listen, you have my mobile number. Keep me posted.”

“Absolutely.”

“Well.” He shrugged on his coat. “I’m deeply relieved.”

As it had been doing all morning, Delia’s mind flashed back to her first meeting with Soraya. After the bomb had been defused and it had been delivered to a joint forensics team, the two women had returned to their respective offices. But late in the day, Delia’s phone had rung. Soraya asked if she would join her for a drink.

They met in a dim, smoky bar that smelled of beer and bourbon.

Soraya took her hand. “I never saw anything like that.” She looked up at Delia’s face. ‘You’ve got the fingers of an artist.”

Delia was dumbstruck. The instant Soraya took her hand, she felt a tingling that ran all the way up her arm. It entered her torso, and where it ended up made her realize that she wasn’t asexual after all. She could barely recall what they talked about as they drank, but as they moved to the restaurant next door, and the conversation turned to their backgrounds, Delia’s mind snapped back into focus. Both she and Soraya viewed themselves as outsiders: They didn’t hang in groups, they weren’t joiners, even though the fast track in any meaningful job in DC required joining as many clubs as possible.

“We all are,” Delia said now to Secretary Hendricks, though she was acutely aware that the stab of fear she had experienced when Hendricks had called her had not fully dissipated.

Silence, though somewhere a dog barked. Stasis, though somewhere a car started up.

“Well?”

Peter felt Brick’s gaze descend on him like a hammer blow.

“Act!”

Peter took Dick Richards’s chin in his hand, tilting his head up so that their eyes met. “Yes, it’s true—I want a position at your company.” Deep in Richards’s eyes he could see that the other had been listening closely to every word that had been spoken in his presence. He knew that Tom Brick knew Peter as Tony. If he had any sense at all, he’d know that Peter was undercover. But Peter was looking into the eyes of a presumed triple agent. Deep down, whose side did Dick Richards want to be on? He supposed it was time to find out.

He let go of Richards’s chin and, snapping free the Glock’s cartridge, found it to be empty. He checked the chamber: one bullet. Had he been expected to kill Richards with a single shot?

Looking up into Brick’s interested face, he said, “You’ve ordered me to act.” Turning the handgun around, he returned it to Bogdan, who seemed to be sunk deep into a sulk, possibly because he had been denied the prospect of physical mayhem. Like a retriever who needed daily running, this guy seemed like he required a daily dose of destruction.

Peter turned to Tom Brick, who stared at him for a moment. Suddenly, Brick broke out into a fit of laughter and, going into a deep cockney accent, said, “Crikey Moses, gov, you’ve got some pair a cobbler’s awls, you ’ave.”

Peter blinked. “What?”

“Cobbler’s awls. Balls,” Bogdan said unexpectedly. “Cockneys’re always street-rhyming. It’s in their nature.”

Brick pointed to Richards. “Bogs, untie the little bugger, yeah?” reverting to his normal refined accent. “Then have a bit of a dekko outside, make sure we’re comfy, cozy, and all on our onlys, there’s a good lad.”

Richards sat still as a statue as Bogdan untied him, kept sitting still as a statue as the hulking bodyguard loaded his Glock’s magazine and snapped it into place. It was only when Bogdan stalked out of the room and he heard the front door slam that he slowly rose. He was as unsteady as a newborn colt.

Seeing this, Brick crossed to the bar, poured him a stiff whiskey. “Ice, yeah?”

“Right, yeah.” Richards looked not at him, but at Peter. There was a kind of pleading in his eyes, a silent apology.

Peter, his back to Brick, mouthed: Trust me.To his immense relief, Richards gave a tiny nod. Did that mean he could trust Richards? Far too early to say. But his expression was confirmation of Peter’s suspicion. Richards was, in fact, a double agent, reporting both to the president and to Brick. Peter fought back an urge to wring his scrawny neck. He needed answers. Why was Richards playing this dangerous game? What did Brick hope to gain?

Brick returned, handed Richards the whiskey, and said cheerily, “Bottoms up, lad!”

Turning to Peter, he said, “You know, I never would have let you put a bullet through Dick’s head.” At this, Richards nearly choked on his whiskey. “Nah, the little bugger’s far too valuable.” He eyed Peter. “Know as what?”

Peter put an interested look on his face.

“He’s a stone-cold wizard at creating and cracking ciphers. Isn’t that right, Dick?”

Richards, eyes watering, nodded.

“That what he does for Core Energy?” Peter said. “Crack codes?”

“There’s a shitload of corporate spying, and at our level, it’s bloody serious, let me tell you.” Brick took another delicate sip of the Irish, which was first-rate. “We’re in need of a bugger with his skills.” He slapped Richards on the back. “Rare as hen’s teeth, lads like him are.”

Richards managed a watery smile.

“So, Anthony Dzundza, meet Richard Richards.”

The two men shook hands solemnly.

He gestured. “Righto, let’s get this little chin-wag started.”

As they were making their way to the low, angular sofas around the bend in the L, Bogdan returned from his dekko—his recon. He nodded to Brick, who from then on completely ignored him.

“I’d like an apology,” Richards said as the other two men sat down.

“Don’t be a wanker.” Brick waved a hand. “It’s so bloody tiresome.”

Richards, however, remained standing, fists clenched at his sides, glaring at his boss, or, Peter thought, one of them, anyway.

Brick snorted finally. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He turned to Peter in a theatrical stage aside. “What I won’t do to keep the staff happy.”

Turning back, he smiled up at Richards. “Sorry you had to undergo the Bogs Method, old thing, but I had to put Tony’s feet to the fire, as it were. All in a day’s work.”

“Not mywork, dammit!”

“Now you arebeing tiresome.” He sighed. “There’ll be a bit extra in your monthly stipend, how’s that for compo?”

Richards did not reply, simply sat down as far away from the other two men as he dared.

“You know, it’s a curious thing,” Brick began, “but Dick has never disappointed me. Not once. That’s a serious achievement.” Now he looked directly into Peter’s eyes. “Something for you to ponder, Tony; something for you to strive for.” He smiled. “Everyone needs a goal.”

“I’m self-motivated, Tom.”

Brick scowled deeply. “No one calls me Tom.”

Peter said nothing. There ensued a silence, increasingly uncomfortable as it drew out.

At length, Peter said, “I don’t apologize unless I’ve made a mistake.”

“That was a mistake.”

“Only after the ground rules are set.”

Brick stared at him. “Shall we take them out and measure them?”

“I already know who’d win.”

This comment, meant to provoke, instead made Brick laugh. He shook a forefinger in Peter’s direction. “Now I know the reason I liked you from the get-go.” He paused for a moment, staring up at the high ceiling as if contemplating the infinite mystery of the stars in the night sky. When he looked at them again, his expression was altogether different. The British jokester was nowhere to be seen.

“Times have changed,” he began. “Well, times are always changing, but now they change to our advantage. Events have taken on an ironfisted certainty; there is no longer the will for compromise. In other words, society is made of tigers and lambs, so to speak. This has always been true, I suppose, but the change that moves in our favor is that the tigers are all weak. In times past, these tigers were vindictive—this was always true. You merely have to take a peek at mankind’s history of wars to understand that. Yet now, the tigers are both vindictive and obstinate. All of them have dug in their heels. Good for us. Their pigheadedness has made them brittle, easy to manipulate, to discredit. Which leaves all society’s sheep leaderless in the meadow, ready to be sheared.” He grinned. “By us.”

Good Lord, Peter thought, what have I stumbled into?Masking his face in a bland expression, he said, “How will that work, precisely? The shearing, I mean?”

“Let’s not put the shears before the barber, old thing. We need to get ourselves in position first.”

Peter nodded. “All right. I understand perfectly. But who do you mean by ‘we’?”

The moment the question was out of his mouth he knew it was a mistake.

“Why do you ask?” Brick came forward on the sofa like a predator who scents his prey. He became tense and wary. Peter knew he had to do something to defuse his sudden suspicion.

“I’m accustomed to knowing who I work for.”

“You work for me.”

“Core Energy.”

“You will have an official position in the company, yes, of course.”

“But I won’t work there.”

“Why would you?” Brick spread his hands. “Do you know anything about energy?” He waved his hand, erasing his own words. “Never mind, that isn’t what I’m hiring you for.”

“I assume that’s not why you hired Richards here, either.”

Brick smiled. “Keep up that unbridled insolence of yours, my son, and guaranteed you’ll come a cropper.” All at once, his voice softened. “Let me ask you a question, Tony. If you do your job right, it’s the only question I’ll ever ask you: Do the ends justify the means?”

“Sometimes,” Peter said. “People who see the world as black or white are wrong. Life is a continuum of grays, each shade with its own set of rules and conditions.”

Brick tapped his forefinger against his lips. “I like that, old thing. No one has put it quite that way. But, no matter. Here, where we are now, you’re wrong. Here there are no ends, only means. We ask for– we demand—results. If one mean doesn’t produce the desired result, we move on to another. Do you understand? There are no ends here; only means.”

“Philosophy is all well and good,” Peter said, “but it’s not helping me understand what we’re doing.”

“An example is required.” Brick lifted a finger. “All right, then. Let’s take the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which led the country to shut down four reactors crucial for electricity. For months now Tokyo and other major cities have had to ration their electricity needs. Even in Tokyo’s main office buildings, the headquarters of its most prestigious corporations, the air-conditioning has to be set at eighty degrees. Do you know what it’s like to work in eighty-degree temperature? In a suit and tie? Dress codes have had to be relaxed, a Japanese cultural taboo, fetishistic to an extreme, obliterated. Now the country is faced with having to revert to more expensive and environmentally polluting fossil fuels for its electricity needs. The alternative is sitting immobile in the dark. Full-on economic disaster. Then here we come and provide a cheaper energy alternative. What can the Japanese government say but yes? They fairly leaped at our offer.

“As I say, this is an example, but an instructive one nonetheless. Core Energy will now provide an affordable, reliably constant energy flow.”

“Okay, I get that,” Peter said. “But you’re taking advantage of a fluke of nature, a one-off event no one could have foreseen.”

“It would seem that way, wouldn’t it?” A slow smile spread across Brick’s face. “But the fact is, the natural order of things isn’t what caused the core meltdowns. It was human error. The reactors were twelve years old. Their emergency core cooling systems still relied on electricity, rather than the updated versions that use gravity to inundate the cores with water to cool the rods even when electricity isn’t available.”

Peter shook his head. “I’m not certain I understand.”

“It is to our advantage to make use of human greed, old son. Nuclear inspectors and key company officials were given, um, incentives, to look the other way.”

It took a moment or two for Peter to get his head around the enormity of what Brick was telling him. When the truth did hit him, he felt dizzy, sick to his stomach. “Are you...?” For an agitated moment he couldn’t form the words. “Are you telling me that Core Energy was the cause of the disaster?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Brick said. “But we certainly did our part to help matters along. And while it’s true that France, for instance, gets eighty percent of its electricity from its nuclear reactors, and we haven’t yet discovered a way to incapacitate them as we did in Japan, the country—in fact, all of Europe—gets its essential natural gas via a pipeline that originates in Russia. Now what do you suppose would happen if that pipeline were to shut down or if sections were blown to bits? What would happen if the carefully fomented so-called Arab Spring uprisings caused the blockade of the Suez Canal or the Gulf of Aqaba? Disaster or opportunity, you see what I’m getting at? Every other company in the world seeks to control supply. We, however, strive to control demand. This is how we occupy the center of the board.”

The shock must have shown on Peter’s face, because Brick said, “Oh, no one at Core Energy can be linked, if that’s what’s worrying you. There is a—what would be the term?—a black ops division that handles such matters, creating need—the opportunities necessary for Core Energy to expand its business. This is where you fit in, old thing. Why do you think I hired you?”

From his hidey-hole beneath the pile of half-splintered wood, Bourne saw a majority of the police vehicles peel off, trying to follow the flight path of the copter. One cop car and an EMS vehicle kept straight on toward the vacant lot. He’d already scanned the perimeter and knew they had entered via the only hole in the fence.

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Rebeka was emerging from beneath the impromptu stone-and-brick rubble fortress in which she had taken shelter. He poked his head out and, when she saw him, gestured at the wooden boards. Understanding his silent signal, she nodded and scrambled out, checking the immediate environment. Bourne did the same, digging through the layers of debris and discarded garbage lodged under the boards. His fingers found a couple of cans, and he pulled them free.

The official vehicles were nearing; they had very little time before the cops would be crawling all over the lot. They could not afford to be caught up as material witnesses or, worse, persons of interest in a police investigation. The Swedish cops took the discharging of firearms extremely seriously. There would be no end of interrogations and incarcerations.

Rebeka scuttled toward him. “I didn’t find anything flammable,” she whispered.

“As it happens, I did.” He held up the two dented cans of paint. They were two-thirds empty, but there was still more than enough left for ignition.

As he pried open the lids, she produced her lighter. Bourne set the cans just beneath a chimney of boards, moving them to allow the right amount of draw. She lit the paint and they scrambled back around behind the pile of boards. They were very dry underneath and caught almost immediately.

The cops and EMS team spotted the flames and smoke and ducked through the rent in the chain-link fence, making directly for the fire. By this time, Bourne and Rebeka were fifty yards away.

“Nice diversion,” she said, “but we’re still not out of here.”

Bourne led them, crouched and hidden, along the periphery, until he found a patch of protected ground. Shoving a piece of wood into her hand, he said, “Dig.”

While she went to work, he grasped the bottom of the fence and tried to curl it up. It wouldn’t budge.

“Stop,” he said.

He stood in front of one of the leaning fence posts, kicked it hard twice, and it canted over so that the section of fence became a kind of ramp. Grasping it with curled fingers, they climbed to the top, then jumped off onto the pavement beyond the lot.

They ran.

The problem,” Dr. Steen said, “is that Soraya waited so long.” He regarded Delia as if she were a functional idiot. “She waited until she had an acute episode. If she had taken my advice—”

“She didn’t,” Delia said curtly. She hated the way doctors spoke down to everyone else. “Let’s move on.”

Dr. Santiago, the head surgeon on Soraya’s team, cleared his throat. “Let’s move to a more private space, shall we?”

Delia and Thorne had been led by a nurse through the big metal door into the sacred space where the operating theaters and recovery rooms existed, as if on a faraway shore. Dr. Santiago led them into an unoccupied recovery cubicle. It was small, close, and claustrophobic. It smelled strongly of disinfectant.

“All right,” Delia said, weary of being given yet another prognosis, which would contradict the ones that came before. “Let’s hear it.”

“The bottom line,” Dr. Santiago said, “is she’s had some bleeding as the edema leaked. We’ve taken care of that; we’re draining the excess fluid out of her brain. We’re doing everything we can. Now we have to wait for her body to do the rest.”

“Is she compromised because of the fetus?”

“The brain is a highly complex organ.”

“Just, for God’s sake, tell me!”

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

“How badly?”

“Impossible to say.” Dr. Santiago shrugged. He was a pleasant looking man with black eyes and a hawk-like nose. “It’s a...complication we could do without.”

“I’m quite certain Soraya doesn’t feel that way.” She deliberately let the awkward silence extend before she said, “I want to see her now.”

“Of course.” Both of the doctors appeared relieved to end the interview. Doctors hated feeling helpless, hated admitting it even more.

As they went out, Delia turned to Thorne. “I’m going in first.”

He nodded. As she was about to turn away, he said, “Delia, I want you to know...” He stopped there, unable to go on.

“Whatever you have to say, Charles, say it to her, okay?”

He nodded again.

Dr. Santiago was waiting for her. He smiled thinly at her and gestured. “This way.”

She followed him down a corridor that seemed to be a separate entity, breathing on its own. He stopped at a curtained doorway and stood aside.

“Five minutes,” he cautioned. “No more.”

Delia found that her heart was pounding in her chest. It ached for her friend. Unable to imagine what was lying in wait for her behind the curtain, she pulled it aside, and stepped into the room.

12

"YOUR CAR.”

“Is registered to my friend’s company,” Bourne said. “He’ll take care of any questions from the police.”

Rebeka glanced behind them. No one was following. “I have a small flat here,” she said. “We can hole up there until we

decide what to do next.”

“I have a better idea.”

They were in a residential neighborhood whose streets were fast filling with traffic as people rose and went to work. Bourne took out his mobile and, despite the early hour, called Christien.

“What the hell have you and Alef been up to?” Christien’s voice buzzed in his ear. “I’m already fielding calls from the police.”

“He’s regained his memory. His name’s Harry Rowland, or so he claims. There was nothing to be done.” Bourne went on to explain briefly what had taken place yesterday in Sadelöga. He mentioned Rebeka, but only as a friend of his, not wanting to complicate matters further or cause his friend any degree of suspicion.

“Damn,” Christien said. “But you’re unharmed?”

“Yes. What we need is to somehow track the copter that snatched Rowland.”

“Are you in a safe place?”

Bourne spotted a small café, open for breakfast. “We are now. Yes.” Christien got their location in Gamla Stan, told Bourne to sit tight, that he’d come to get them himself.

They went to the café, all their senses on high alert. Inside, they reconnoitered, discovered the rear entrance through the kitchen, then chose a table in the rear with a view of everyone who came in and out.

When they had ordered, Bourne said, “Tell me how the Israeli government was able to establish a research facility in Dahr El Ahmar.” Rebeka had stiffened at the words research facility. “So you know.”

“I thought you had brought me to a temporary Mossad forward outpost in Lebanon.”

He waited while the server set down their coffee and sweet rolls.

“When I escaped in the copter I had stolen in Syria, I realized that Dahr El Ahmar isn’t a military encampment. The Mossad is there to guard a research facility.”

Rebeka stirred sugar into her coffee.

“What did you see?”

“I saw the camouflage netting, and I swung low enough to see the bunkered building underneath. There are experiments going on in that building, and I have to ask myself why these experiments are being undertaken in Lebanon, not Israel, where they’d be far more secure.”

“But would they be more secure in Israel?” Rebeka cocked her head. “Why would our enemies look for Israeli research on Lebanese soil?”

Bourne stared at her. “They wouldn’t.”

“No,” she said slowly. “They wouldn’t.”

“What’s in the bunker lab? What are they working on?”

Three people came in, one left. She stirred more sugar into her coffee, then took a sip. She was gazing at a space between him and the door, looking at nothing but her own thoughts, as if weighing her next action.

At last, she said, “Have you ever heard of SILEX?”

He shook his head.

“For decades now, there has been a theory knocking around the nuclear fuel industry that posited the theory of extracting U-235, the isotope used for enriched uranium fuel rods, via lasers. For a long time it was overhyped, and all designs proved either ineffective or prohibitively expensive. Then, in 1994, a pair of nuclear physicists came up with SILEX—separation of isotopes by laser excitation. The Americans control that process, and a project with SILEX at its center is even now going forward. At Dahr El Ahmar, we have come up with a parallel methodology. It’s being tested in such secrecy because of fears that, if stolen, the technology could be used by terrorist cells or nations like Iran to accelerate weapons designs.”

Bourne thought a moment. “Rowland was trying to steal the technology at Dahr El Ahmar.”

“That’s what I thought. But the fact is that Harry knew nothing about the real purpose of Dahr El Ahmar, let alone the experiments. No, he was looking for you, and, ironically, in pursuing him, I led him directly to you.”

“You couldn’t know that.”

She made a face.

Outside in the street, they watched a long black car slide past, more slowly than the rest of the traffic. It could mean nothing, or everything. They kept their eyes on the plate-glass door. Two elderly ladies walked in and sat down. A suit with an iPad under his arm rose and went out. A young mother and child pushed in and looked around for a free table. The three servers passed to and fro. When several minutes went by and nothing untoward happened, Rebeka relaxed.

“I’m taking a chance telling you this,” she said.

“Colonel Ben David is already convinced I know Dahr El Ahmar’s secret. The question to be answered is why Harry Rowland was sent to kill me.”

“Why? Do you think it’s all connected?”

“We can’t rule out the possibility until we know the network’s goal.”

“For that we need Harry.”

He nodded. “Our only lead is the copter that snatched him.” Rebeka frowned. “How do you propose we—?”

Her question was cut short as two uniformed police came through the door and began to scrutinize the customers.

Martha Christiana, sitting next to Don Fernando Hererra in a private jet, was used to walking a tightrope—in fact, she welcomed it. But, for the first time since she had begun taking on commissions, she wasn’t certain of her footing. Don Fernando was proving to be more of a challenge than she could have anticipated.

For one thing, he was something of an enigma. For another, he didn’t act like any older man she had ever met. He was a dynamo of physical energy, and mentally he wasn’t stuck in the reminiscences of a former age, unable to embrace an increasingly complex technological present. More than anything, he wasn’t afraid of the even more challenging future. Experience had taught her that older men, having expended their reserves of creative energy, were now content to fade into the comfortable background, letting the present whiz by them in an uncomprehensible blur. Don Fernando’s grasp of cutting-edge technology was both comprehensive and dazzling.

On a fundamental level, she found Don Fernando charming, erudite, and psychologically astute. He drew her in as the sun does a planet. The two of them made intimate connections that both exhilarated and alarmed her. She found herself basking in these connections the way a beachgoer toasts in sunshine. When she was with him, she was happy. In this, she was deviating from the successful execution of her commission. She knew this, but she didn’t stop. Such behavior was completely foreign to her and, as such, a mystery.

Another thing: There was in Don Fernando something of a memory for her, of a time before Marrakech, before she ran away from the lighthouse. A time of raging storms and walls of water crashing furiously against the rocky promontory into which her home was driven like a massive spike. Or had her thoughts turned in this direction because Don Fernando was flying her to Gibraltar?

“I’d like to take you to dinner,” he had said earlier that day. “What restaurant?” she had said. “How shall I dress?” She wore a black sheath skirt and matching braided bolero jacket, beneath which was an oyster-white silk shirt, pinned at the top with an onyx oval.

“It’s a surprise.” His eyes twinkled. “As for how to dress, I see nothing wrong with what you’re wearing.”

The surprise had been the jet, waiting for them on the tarmac of a private field on the outskirts of Paris. It was only after they had raced down the runway and lifted into the air that he had told her their destination.

Heart racing, she had said, “What’s in Gibraltar?”

“You’ll see.”

Now they had landed. A car and driver were waiting for them. As soon as they climbed in, it swept away down a coast all too familiar to her. Twenty minutes later, the lighthouse came into view, rising from the rocky promontory of her youth.

“I don’t understand.” She turned to him. “Why have you brought me here?”

“Are you angry?”

“I don’t know how you...I don’t know...No, I—”

The car stopped. The lighthouse loomed high above them.

“It’s automated now. It has been for years,” Don Fernando said as they got out. “But it’s still functioning, it still serves its original purpose.”

Leading her around to the west side of the lighthouse, he walked with her several hundred yards to the grave site. She stopped, reading the headstone. It was her father’s grave.

“Why have you done this, Don Fernando?”

“You areangry. Perhaps I was wrong.” He took her elbow gently. “Come. We’ll leave immediately.”

But she did not move, stood her ground and shook off his hand as gently as he had gripped her. She walked several paces away until she was directly in front of the grave. Someone had left flowers in a zinc container, but that was some time ago. The flowers were dried, many of the petals missing.

Martha Christiana stared down at the stone below which her father lay buried. Then, surprising even herself, she knelt down to touch the earth. Above her, clouds raced across the azure sky. Sea birds swooped, calling to one another. Lifting her head, she saw a sea eagle’s nest and thought of family and home.

Unaccountably, her fingers went to the pin she wore at her throat. She unfastened it, dug a shallow depression in the earth over her father, and placed the pin in it. Then slowly, almost reverently, she covered it over, placed her palm onto the earth, as if she could still feel it, like a beating heart.

When she rose, Don Fernando said, “Do you want to go inside?”

She shook her head. “I belong out here.”

He nodded, as if he understood her completely. Instead of annoying her, that gesture of their unspoken, innate connection comforted her. She linked her arm in his, walked him away to the edge of the rocky promontory. Below them, the sea rose, foaming against the granite teeth far below.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used to stand here. The sea looked like brittle glass as it broke apart on the rocks. It made me think of my family. It made me sad.”

“This is why you left.”

She nodded. Back in the car, as they drove slowly away from the shore and the glowering lighthouse, she said, “How did you find out?” “Everything is knowable,” he said with a smile, “these days.”

She said nothing more. It did not matter how he had found her history, only that he knew. One more astonishment: She was not unhappy that he knew. Somehow, even without asking, she understood that it would remain their secret.

She stared at the countryside, and like a sleeper waking from a pleasant dream into harsh reality she remembered that she had been sent here to kill this man. The idea seemed absurd to her now, and yet she knew that she had no choice. She never did once she took a commission from Maceo Encarnación.

Emerging from her difficult thoughts, she saw that they were turning off Castle Road into an area of Gibraltar unfamiliar to her. After several small streets, they came to a triangle of parkland, dotted with pencil cypress and palm trees. Martha rolled down the tinted window, heard the clatter of swaying fronds. A bright spray of gulls flickered by. Sunlight glimmered off a bisque-tile roof, which came nearer as the car rolled up a driveway and came to rest before a pillared portico.

“Where are we?” Martha said.

Without a word, Don Fernando accompanied her up the stone steps, across the portico, and into a large, airy entryway, dominated by a cut-crystal chandelier and a high mahogany banc behind which sat a young woman, efficiently fielding calls while entering data on a computer console.