“And now you see what a visionary Alex was. What he saw has, indeed, come to pass. What we create in the Treadstone program will become America’s most potent weapon against its enemies, no matter how clever they are, no matter how remote their location. Do you think I’m going to bury something invaluable? I made a deal with the devil so that Treadstone would be resurrected.”

“And what,” Marks said, “if the devil has other ideas for Treadstone?”

“Then,” Willard replied, “the devil will have to be dealt with in some manner.” There was a slight pause. “Arkadin or Bourne, it makes no difference to me. Only the outcome of their struggle for survival interests me. And either way, I will have them-one or the other-as the prototype for the graduates Treadstone will produce.”

Start at the beginning,” Bourne said. “This has all the earmarks of a nightmare.”

“The long and the short of it,” Ottavio Moreno said with a sigh, “is that you had no right to kill Noah Perlis.”

The two men were in a safe house in Thamesmead, a small developed area directly across the river from the London City Airport. It was one of those modern crackerjack boxes being thrown up all over the sprawling suburbs that were as flimsy as they looked. They had driven there in Moreno’s gray Opel, as anonymous a car as you were likely to find in London. They’d eaten some cold chicken and pasta out of the fridge, washed it down with a bottle of decent South African wine, and then had retired to the living room where they literally threw themselves onto the sofas.

“Perlis killed Holly Moreau.”

“Perlis was business,” Ottavio Moreno pointed out.

“So, I think, was Holly.”

Ottavio Moreno nodded. “But then it became personal, didn’t it?”

Bourne had no good reply to that, since the answer was obvious to both of them.

“Water under the bridge,” Moreno said, taking Bourne’s silence as acquiescence. “The point that you’ve forgotten is that I hired Perlis to find the laptop.”

“He had no laptop; he had the ring.”

Moreno shook his head. “Forget the ring and try to remember the laptop.”

Bourne felt as if he were sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand. “You mentioned the laptop before, but I have no memory of it.”

“In that event I imagine you have no memory of how you stole it from Jalal Essai’s home.”

Bourne shook his head helplessly.

Moreno dug his thumbs into his eyes for a moment. “I see what you meant when you said start at the beginning.”

Bourne, saying nothing, watched him carefully. The constant problem with people arising out of his past was this: Who were they really and were they telling him the truth? A man with no memory isn’t difficult to lie to. In fact, Bourne reflected, it was probably fun to lie to an amnesiac and watch his reactions.

“You were given an assignment to get the laptop computer.”

“By whom?”

Moreno shrugged. “Alex Conklin, I imagine. Anyway, we made contact in Marrakech.”

Morocco again. Bourne sat forward. “Why would I contact you?”

“I was Alex Conklin’s contact there.” When Bourne gave him a skeptical look, he added, “I’m a half brother. My mother is a Berber, from the High Atlas Mountains.”

“Your father got around.”

“Make a joke, okay, it’s all right, I won’t gut you.” Ottavio Moreno laughed. “Christ, this is a fucked-up world.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Okay, look, my friend. My father had his thumb in a shitload of pies, most of them illegal, yes, I freely admit it. So what? So his business ventures took him to many places around the world, some of them strange.”

“Business wasn’t the only thing he had a healthy appetite for,” Bourne said.

Ottavio Moreno nodded. “Too true. He had an eye for exotic women.”

“Are there any other little half Morenos running around?”

Moreno laughed. “There very well might be, knowing my father. But if there are, I don’t know about them.”

Bourne decided there was nothing more to be gained by taking the subject of the elder Moreno’s love life any farther. “Okay, you say that you were Conklin’s contact in Marrakech.”

“I don’t say it,” Ottavio Moreno said with a slight frown, “I was that man.”

“I suppose you can’t produce any canceled checks from the Treadstone account.”

“Ha, ha,” Moreno said, but it wasn’t a laugh. He took out a pack of Gauloises Blondes, shook one out, and lit up. He stared at Bourne while he blew smoke at the ceiling. At length, he said, “Am I wrong in thinking we’re on the same page?”

“I don’t know. Are we?”

Bourne got up and went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of cold water. He was angry at himself, not Moreno. He knew he was at his most vulnerable at this juncture. He didn’t like being vulnerable. More to the point, in his line of work he couldn’t afford to be.

Returning to the living room, he sat down on an armchair facing the sofa where Ottavio Moreno still sat smoking slowly, as if in meditation. In Bourne’s absence he’d turned on the TV to the BBC news. The sound was off, but the images of the Vesper Club were all too familiar. Lights were flashing off the tops of emergency vehicles and police cars. Personnel emerged from the club’s front door carrying a stretcher. The body on it was draped in a cloth that covered its face. Then the scene switched to a newsreader in the BBC studios, mouthing whatever had been written for him moments before. Bourne gestured and Moreno turned up the volume, but there was nothing for them in the story, and Moreno muted the sound again.

“It will be harder than ever to get out of London now,” Bourne said shortly.

“I know more ways to get out of London than they do.” He gestured at the cop being interviewed on the screen.

“So do I,” Bourne said. “That isn’t the issue.”

Moreno leaned forward, stubbed out the butt in an ugly free-form ashtray, and lit another. “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, you’re going to be disappointed.”

“Too late for apologies,” Bourne said. “What’s so important about the laptop?”

Moreno shrugged.

“Perlis had the ring,” Bourne said. “He killed Holly to get it.”

“The ring is a symbol of the Severus Domna, all members wear it or carry it unobtrusively.”

“That’s it? If there’s nothing else important about it, why did Perlis murder Holly for it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he thought it would somehow lead him to the laptop.” Again Moreno stubbed out his cigarette. “Look, is all this distrust because Gustavo was my half brother?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Bourne said.

“Yeah, well, my big brother was a fucking thorn in my side ever since I can remember.”

“Then it’s a good thing for you he’s dead,” Bourne said drily.

Moreno eyed Bourne for a moment. “Jesus Christ, you think I’ve taken over his drug business.”

“I’d be a fool if the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.”

Moreno nodded morosely. “Fair enough.” He sat back and spread his hands wide. “Okay, then, how can I prove myself?”

“Up to you.”

Moreno crossed his arms over his chest and thought a moment. “What do you remember about the four of them: Perlis, Holly, Tracy, and Diego Hererra?”

“Virtually nothing,” Bourne said.

“I imagine you asked Diego about them. What did he tell you?”

“I know about their friendship, their romantic entanglements.”

Moreno frowned. “What romantic entanglements?”

When Bourne told him, he laughed. “Mano, your boy Diego dropped one steaming pile of shit on your doorstep. There was no romance among the four of them. There was only friendship-until, that is, Holly started wearing the ring. One of them, maybe Tracy, I don’t know, became interested in the engraving on the inside. The more interested she became in it, the more Perlis’s curiosity was piqued. He took a photo of the engraving and brought it to Oliver Liss, his boss at the time. This led directly to the tragedy of Holly’s death.”