“What I wouldn’t give to be one of them now,” Soraya said softly. “Not a care in the fucking world.”

And Marks breathed a silent sigh of relief, knowing now that she would swallow the bitter pill he offered. She would take the assignment.

Curious. Very curious, indeed.” In the warm light of the morning sun Chrissie was studying the engraving on the inside of the gold band Bourne had taken from Noah Perlis.

“I know linguistics,” Bourne said, “but this isn’t a known language, is it?”

“Well, it’s hard to say. There are some characteristics of Sumerian, possibly Latin as well, though it’s really neither.” She looked up at him. “Where did you get this?”

“It makes no sense, does it?”

She shook her head. “No, it doesn’t.”

She had made coffee while Bourne rooted around in the freezer. He came up with a pair of crumpets, though judging by the ice crystals clinging to the bag they had been in there for some time. They found some jam and ate standing up, both of them filled with nervous energy. Neither of them mentioned last night. Then Bourne had showed her the ring.

“But that’s only my opinion and I’m far from an expert.” She handed the ring back to Bourne. “The only way to find out for sure is to take it up to Oxford. I have a friend who’s a professor at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. If it can be deciphered, he’s sure to know.”

It was after midnight when Lieutenant R. Simmons Reade tracked his boss down at an all-night squash court in Virginia, where the DCI worked out for two strenuous hours with one of the resident instructors three times a week. Reade was the only one inside CI who could deliver bad news to DCI Danziger without a qualm. He had been Danziger’s prize pupil when Danziger was briefly teaching at the NSA’s clandestine Academy for Special Operations, which the Old Man, who had contempt for everything the NSA stood for, used to call the Academy for Special Services, so he could jokingly refer to it as ASS.

Reade sat through the end of the last game, then made his presence known to the DCI by walking out onto the court, which was hot and smelled of sweat despite the fierce air-conditioning.

Danziger tossed his racquet at the instructor, wrapped a towel around his neck, and walked over to his adjutant.

“How bad?” No preliminaries were needed; the fact that Reade had sought him out at this hour, that he had chosen to come in person rather than through a phone call, was enough to clue him in.

“Bourne has neutralized the extraction team. They’re either dead or in police custody.”

“Jesus Christ,” Danziger said, “how does Bourne do it? No wonder Bud needed me to take over.”

They walked over to a bench and sat. No one else was on the court, the only sound came from the hum of the air-conditioning vents.

“Is Bourne still in London?”

Reade nodded. “As of this moment, yes, sir, he is.”

“And Coven is there, Lieutenant?”

Danziger only called him by his rank when he was truly pissed off. “Yes, sir.”

“Why didn’t he intervene?”

“The site was too public, there were too many witnesses for him to try to snatch Bourne off the street.”

“Other options?”

“Woefully lacking,” Reade said. “Shall I do something about that? I can reach out to our people at NSA for-”

“In time, Randy, but for now I can’t shake the tree and bring in my men wholesale, not politic, as Bud is quick to remind me. No, we have to make the best of the hand we’ve been dealt.”

“Judging by his kill record, sir, Coven is damn good.”

“Fine.” The DCI slapped his thighs and stood up. “Set him loose on Bourne. Tell him he has a free hand, whatever it takes to bring Bourne in.”

8

AFTER PETER MARKS had given her the assignment to find and attach herself to Arkadin, Soraya Moore had returned to Delia Trane’s apartment where she had been holed up. For the last two hours she had been on her plugged-in cell phone with a number of her field agents at Typhon. Though Typhon was no longer hers, the same could not be said for the people she had hired, trained, and mentored for the highly specialized jobs monitoring and infiltrating the various Sunni and Shi’a cadres, insurgent groups, jihadists, and extreme splinter politicos in virtually every country in the Middle and Far East. No matter what their current orders were or who was now in charge of Typhon, their loyalty was to her.

Currently she was talking to Yusef, her contact in Khartoum. Arkadin was well known in that part of the world now that he supplied the majority of the armament.

“Arkadin isn’t anywhere in the Middle East,” Yusef said, “or holed up in the mountains of Azerbaijan, for that matter.”

“And he’s not anywhere in Europe, Russia, or Ukraine, I’ve already made certain of that,” Soraya said. “Do you know why he’s gone to ground?”

“Dimitri Maslov, his old mentor, has taken out a fatwa, or whatever the Russians call it, on him.”

“I can understand why,” Soraya said. “Maslov hired him to get the arms business from Nikolai Yevsen, which is what he was doing in Khartoum several weeks ago. Instead he made off with Yevsen’s entire client list, which was stored on a computer server.”

“Well, the word is that Maslov caught up with Arkadin in Bangalore, but was unable to either kill or capture him, so now he’s vanished.”

“In this day and age,” Soraya said, “no one can vanish, at least for long.”

“Well, at least now you know where he isn’t.”

“True enough.” Soraya thought a moment. “I’ll get someone to run through immigration security tapes in the Americas, maybe Australia, too, and see what they come up with.”

David Webb had been to Oxford University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the English-speaking world, twice that Bourne could recall, though, of course, there could have been more visits. In those days the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents had been located in the university’s Classics Centre at the Old Boys’ School in George Street. Now it was housed in a new home, the ultramodern Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies at 66 St Giles’, as incongruous to the study of ancient languages as it was to Oxford’s stately eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings. This part of St Giles’ was in the center of Oxford, an ancient city whose charter had been enacted in 1191. The center was known as Carfax, a word derived from the French carrefour, meaning “crossroads.” And indeed, the four great thoroughfares of Oxford, including High Street, met at this juncture, as famous in its own way as Hollywood and Vine, and with a whole lot more history.

Chrissie had phoned her friend, a professor by the name of Liam Giles, before they started out from London. Oxford was only fifty-five miles away, and it took them just over an hour to get there using her old Range Rover. Tracy had given it to her when she started traveling so much.

The city was precisely as he remembered it, transporting all who arrived there back in time to an age of top hats, robes, horse-drawn carriages, and communications by post. It was as if it and all its inhabitants had been preserved in amber. Everything about Oxford belonged to another, simpler age.

By the time Chrissie found a parking spot the sun had begun to peer out from behind voluminous clouds, and the day had begun to warm, as if it might really be spring. They found Professor Liam Giles ensconced in his office, a large space set up as a workroom-cum-laboratory. Shelves were filled with manuscripts and thick hand-bound books. He was bent over one of them, scrutinizing a copy of a papyrus with a magnifying glass.

According to Chrissie, Professor Giles was the Richards-Bancroft Chair of the department, but as he glanced up Bourne was surprised to see a man of barely forty. He sported a prominent nose and chin and was balding, small round glasses pushed up onto his ever-expanding forehead. He had fur on his forearms, which were also short, like a kangaroo’s.