Bourne approached slowly and cautiously, but at the last moment the sniper must have sensed him because he drove the wooden stock of his Dragunov SVD back into Bourne’s midsection. Then he whirled, swinging the barrel of the Dragunov against Bourne’s shoulder. He was a slim, flat-faced man with small black eyes and a pushed-in nose.

He battered Bourne to his knees and then, with another blow of the Dragunov, onto his back. He pressed the rifle’s muzzle against Bourne’s heart.

“Don’t move, don’t say a word,” he said. “Just hand over the ring.”

“What ring?”

The sniper swung the muzzle of the Dragunov into Bourne’s jaw, drawing blood. But at the same instant Bourne smashed the sole of his shoe into the man’s knee. It bent inward, the bones cracked, and the sniper gasped. Bourne was rolling away even as the sniper squeezed off a shot. The bullet plowed into the ground where Bourne had been lying, splitting an old, rotting board full of long carpenter’s nails.

From one knee, the sniper began to wield the Dragunov like a club, swinging it back and forth to keep Bourne at bay while he caught his breath. Finally, with a concerted effort, he staggered to his feet. That was when Bourne lowered his shoulder and drove it into him. They went down. At once, the sniper tried to maneuver Bourne onto the nails sticking wickedly out of the board. Bourne twisted away, and now the two of them struggled for possession of the Dragunov. Until Bourne lifted an elbow, jamming it into the sniper’s Adam’s apple. He began to choke and Bourne drove a fist into the side of his head. The sniper’s body went limp.

Bourne checked his hands but found no ring. Then he went through his pockets. His name was Farid Lever, according to his French passport, but that told Bourne nothing. The passport could be real or a fake, he had no time to scrutinize it. Lever, or whoever the hell he was, had on him five thousand British pounds, two thousand euros, and a set of car keys.

Emptying the Dragunov’s magazine, he flung the rifle into the woods then slapped the sniper back into consciousness.

“Who are you?” Bourne said. “Who do you work for?”

The black eyes looked up at him impassively. Reaching down, Bourne squeezed the sniper’s ruined knee. His eyes opened wide and he gasped, but not another sound came out of his mouth. It soon would, Bourne vowed. This was a man who had shot two people, one of them dead. Prying open the sniper’s mouth, he shoved his fist in. The man gagged, arching up. He tried to twist away, to move his head from side to side, but Bourne kept a firm grip on him. As his hands came up, Bourne slapped them down and pressed harder, pushing his fist in deeper.

The sniper’s eyes began to water, he coughed and gagged again. Then his gorge rose up uncontrollably and he tried to vomit, but there was nowhere for it to go. He began to asphyxiate. Terror flooded his face, and he nodded as vigorously as he was able.

The moment Bourne extracted his fist, the sniper rolled over on his side and vomited, his eyes tearing, his nose running. His body shook all over. Bourne took him by the shoulders and turned him onto his back. His face was a mess; he looked like a kid who’d gotten the worst of a street fight.

“Now,” Bourne said. “Who are you and who do you work for?”

“Fa… Fa… Farid Lever.” Understandably, he was having trouble speaking.

Bourne held up the French passport. “One more lie and this gets stuffed down your throat, and I promise you I won’t pull it out.”

The sniper swallowed, wincing at the sour taste in his mouth. “Farid Kazmi. I belong to Jalal Essai.”

Bourne took a shot in the dimness. “Severus Domna?”

“He was.” Kazmi had to stop either to regain his breath or to get more saliva in his mouth. “I need water. Do you have any water?”

“Those two men you shot needed water, too. One of them is dead, the other isn’t, but neither is getting any,” Bourne said. “Continue. Jalal Essai…”

“Jalal was a member of Severus Domna. He has broken away from them.”

“That’s a very dangerous course. He must have a damn good reason.”

“The ring.”

“Why?”

Kazmi’s tongue came out, trying to moisten his dry lips. “It belongs to him. For years he thought it was lost, but now he knows that his brother stole it from him years ago. You have it.”

So Jalal Essai is Holly’s dreaded uncle, Bourne thought. The puzzle was at last taking shape. Holly the hedonist on one side, and her uncle Jalal the religious extremist on the other. What if Holly’s father had left Morocco to protect her from his brother, who would surely have clamped down on Holly’s natural tendencies, stifled her, killed her, in a manner of speaking? And then, after his death, who had stood between Holly and her uncle? But in a blinding flash of memory he knew: It was him. Holly had somehow recruited him to protect her from Jalal Essai. He had done that, but the curious relationship among Holly, Tracy, Perlis, and Diego Hererra-a relationship she had failed to tell him about-had undone her. Perlis had found out about the ring from her and had killed her to get it.

“I was to get the ring at all costs,” Kazmi said, bringing Bourne back into the present.

“No matter how many lives it took.”

Kazmi nodded, wincing with pain. “No matter how many.” Something lurked in those black eyes. “Jalal will get it, too.”

“What makes you say that?”

A look of serenity bloomed on Kazmi’s face and Bourne lunged for his mouth. But it was too late. His molars had ground open a fake tooth, and the cyanide inside was already shutting down his systems.

Bourne sat back on his haunches. When Kazmi had breathed his last, he rose and headed back toward the house.

Peter Marks lay on the ground, keeping as still as possible. Moving only caused a further loss of blood. Though well trained, he had never before been wounded in the field, or anywhere else, had never even experienced an accident like falling off a ladder or missing a stair tread. He lay as if dead, hearing his breath sawing in and out of his mouth, feeling the blood pulsing in his leg as if it had developed a second heart, but a heart that was malevolent, black as night, a heart that was close to death, or in whose chambers death had inveigled itself like a thief.

Marks felt his life was about to be stolen from him prematurely, as it had been from his sister. How close he felt to her at this moment, as if at the last instant he had snatched her from the doomed plane, holding her close while they soared through the clouds. This abrupt awareness of the tenuousness of his own life did not frighten him so much as change his perspective. He lay, helpless and bleeding, and watched an ant struggle with a freshly fallen leaf, a new leaf, a luminous green, until moments ago bursting with life. The leaf was clearly too big for the ant, but the insect was undeterred, tugging and pulling, dragging the recalcitrant leaf over pebbles and roots, the huge impediments of its world. Marks loved that ant. It refused to give up no matter how difficult its life had become. It persevered. It abided. This, too, Marks resolved to do. He resolved to look out for himself and for the people he cared about-Soraya, for instance-in a way that he could not have imagined, let alone foreseen, before he had been shot.

And so he lay for some time, hearing nothing but the occasional soughing of the wind through the woods. Which was why, when he heard Chrissie’s voice calling, he said, “This is Peter Marks. I’ve been hit in the leg. Moreno’s dead, and Adam went after the sniper.”

“I’m coming out to get you.”

“Stay where you are,” he shouted back. Dragging himself forward, he struggled to sit with his back against the Opel. “The area isn’t secure.”

But a moment later she appeared at his side, crouched down behind the safety of the car’s bullet-ridden flank.