She had begun to despair for Antonio’s life when her cell rang. Without waiting for Arkadin to give her permission, she answered it.

“Soraya.” It was Peter Marks.

“Yes.”

“What’s happened?” Intuitive as ever, he’d picked up on the tension in her voice.

She stared into Arkadin’s eyes. “Everything’s hunky-dory.”

“Arkadin?”

“You bet.”

“Excellent, you’ve made contact.”

“More than.”

“There’s a problem, I get it. Well, you’ll have to find your way out of it and fast, because our mission’s become urgent.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“You need to get Arkadin to the following address within seventy-two hours.” Then he recited the address Willard had given him.

“That’s an impossible order to fill.”

“Obviously, but it’s got to be done. He and Bourne have to meet, and that’s where Bourne will be.”

A pinpoint of light appeared in the darkness ahead of her. Yes, she thought, it just might work. “Okay,” she said to Peter, “I’ll put a rush on it.”

“And make sure he takes his laptop with him.”

Soraya let out a breath. “How d’you propose I do that?”

“Hey, that’s why you get the big bucks.”

He rang off before she could tell him to go to hell. With a grunt of disgust, she pocketed her cell.

“Business problems?” Arkadin said in a mocking tone.

“Nothing that can’t be solved.”

“I like your can-do attitude.” Mocking her still, he brandished the switchblade. “Are you going to solve this problem?”

Soraya put a thoughtful expression on her face. “Possibly.” Walking past him, she went into the hearth, where Antonio watched her with the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. She was shocked to find him grinning at her.

“Don’t mind me,” he said in a hoarse voice, “I’m having fun.”

Without Arkadin being able to see, she put her forefinger to her lips, then pressed it to his. It came away bloody. She turned back to Arkadin. “It all depends on you.”

“I don’t think so. The ball’s in your court.”

“Here’s how this will work.” She emerged back into the flickering candlelight. “You let Antonio go and I’ll tell you how to find Jason Bourne.”

He burst out laughing. “You’re bluffing.”

“When it comes to someone’s life,” she said, “I never bluff.”

“Still, what does an importer-exporter know about Jason Bourne?”

“Simple enough.” Soraya had already worked out her answer. “From time to time, he uses my company as a cover.” This was a plausible enough story to give him reason to believe her.

“And why does an importer-exporter think I care where Jason Bourne is?”

She cocked her head. “Do you?” This was no time to back down or show weakness.

“And what if you’re not what you say you are?”

“What if you’re not what you say you are?”

He waggled a forefinger at her. “No, I don’t think you’re an importer-exporter.”

“All the more intriguing then.”

He nodded. “I confess I like mysteries, especially when they bring me closer to Bourne.”

“Why do you hate him so?”

“He’s responsible for the death of someone I loved.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You never loved anyone.”

He took a step toward her, but whether it was a threat or simply to get closer to her was difficult to tell.

“You use people, and when you’re finished with them, you crumple them up like a used Kleenex and throw them in the garbage.”

“And what of Bourne? He’s exactly like me.”

“No,” she said, “he’s not like you at all.”

His smile broadened, and for the first time it was without even a hint of menace or irony. “Ah, finally I have a useful bit of knowledge about you.”

She almost spit in his face, but she realized that would make him even happier, because it would indicate just how close he’d come to the bone.

All at once something seemed to change in him. He reached out and ran his fingertips along the line of her jaw. Then, indicating Antonio with the tip of the switchblade, “Go ahead, untie the stubborn fucker.”

As she entered the hearth one last time and knelt to free Antonio, he added, “I don’t need him anymore. I have you.”

This is how it happened.” Chrissie was standing in the kitchen, facing the window over the sink. There was nothing to see, except the grayness of dawn creeping through the treetops like gauze. She had said nothing when Bourne walked into the room, but she started when she felt him beside her.

“How what happened?” Bourne said into the silence.

“How I came to lie to you.” Chrissie turned on the hot water and, placing her hands in the stream, began to wash them as if she were Lady Macbeth. “One day,” she said, “a year or so after Scarlett was born, I looked in the mirror and said to myself, You have a body that’s been abandoned. Perhaps a man can’t understand. I had abandoned my body to motherhood, which means I had abandoned myself.”

Her hands moved in the water, washing, washing. “From that moment, I began to hate myself, and then, by extension, my life, which included Scarlett. Of course, that was something I couldn’t tolerate. I fought against it and immediately fell into a dreadful depression. My work began to suffer, so obviously that the department chair suggested and then gently but firmly insisted I take a sabbatical. Finally, I agreed, I mean I hadn’t a choice, had I? But when I locked my office door behind me, when I drove out of Oxford, drowsing like Avalon in the mist, I knew something drastic had to be done. I knew it was no coincidence that I had locked myself away in a place that never changed. Like my father, I was safe in Oxford, where everything is pre-planned, pre-ordained, even; where there’s no possibility of even the slightest deviation. That’s why he reacted to Trace’s life choices the way he did. They terrified him, so he lashed out at her. It wasn’t until that day, leaving Oxford behind, that I understood that family dynamic and how it had affected me. It occurred to me that I might have chosen my safe life for him, not for myself.”

She turned off the water and dried her hands on a dish towel. The backs were red and raw looking. “I need to get my family out of here.”

“As soon as a friend shows up we’ll leave,” Bourne said.

“Scarlett.”

“She’s with your father.”

She looked back, almost wistfully, through the doorway into the living room. “Scarlett, at least, loves my parents.” She sighed. “Let’s go outside. I’m finding it difficult to breathe in here.”

Through the kitchen door they emerged into the dewy morning. The air was chill, and when they spoke little puffs of steam emerged from their mouths. The bases of the trees were still black, as if the roots were holding on to the dead of night. Chrissie shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.

“What happened?” Bourne said.

“Nothing that made sense, it was simply blind luck that I met Holly.”

Bourne was startled. “Holly Marie Moreau?”

She nodded. “She was looking for Trace and found me instead.”

Everything in this puzzle seems to return to Holly, he thought. “And you became friends?”

“More than friends, and less,” she said. “I know that doesn’t make much sense.” She shrugged. “I went to work for her.”

Bourne frowned. He felt like a miner inching along a tunnel without lights, but nevertheless knowing by instinct which way to turn. “What was she doing?”

Chrissie gave a little embarrassed laugh. “She was what she euphemistically called a stocker. Now and again she traveled to Mexico for two or three weeks at a time. At a client’s request, she’d stock a narcorrancho. Narcorranchos are shell estates owned by the Mexican drug lords out in the desert somewhere, usually in the north, in Sonora, but sometimes in a more southerly state like Sinaloa. Apart from a caretaker and maybe a guard or two, no one lives in them full-time.