“Let’s go,” Arkadin said the moment she disconnected.

“I’m not leaving Moira.”

“We have further business to discuss.”

“Then we can discuss it here.”

“Back at the convent.”

“I’m not going to fuck you,” she said.

“Thank God, fucking you would be like fucking a scorpion.”

The irony of his comment made her laugh despite her worry and despair. She went to look for coffee, and he followed her.

Bourne drove to Oxford as fast as he dared without attracting the attention of the police. The city was precisely as he had left it both times he had been there. The quiet streets, the quaint stores, the lifelong denizens going about their chores, the tearooms, the bookstores, all like a miniature created by an obsessive eighteenth-century academic. Driving its streets was like visiting the inside of a snow globe.

Bourne parked near where Chrissie had left her Range Rover when they had come together, and he trotted up the steps of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. Professor Liam Giles was also right where he had been when they had last been there, bent over his desk in his voluminous office. He looked up as Bourne entered, blinking owlishly, as if he didn’t recognize him. Bourne saw that it wasn’t Giles after all, but another man of Giles’s approximate build and age.

“Where’s Professor Giles?”

“On leave,” the man said.

“I’m looking for him.”

“So I gather. May I ask why?”

“Where is he?”

The man blinked his owlish blink. “Away.”

Bourne had looked up Giles’s official bio on the way over, which was available on the Oxford University Web site.

“It’s about his daughter.”

The man behind Giles’s desk blinked. “Is she ill?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Where can I find Professor Giles?”

“I don’t think-”

“It’s urgent,” Bourne said. “A matter of life or death.”

“Are you being deliberately melodramatic, sir?”

Bourne showed the man the EMS credentials he’d lifted after the crash. “I’m quite serious.”

“Dear me.” The man gestured. “He’s in the loo, at the moment. Battling the eel pie he ingested last night, I shouldn’t wonder.”

The neurosurgeon was young, dark as an Indian, with the long, delicate fingers of a classical pianist. He had very delicate features, so he wasn’t, in fact, an Indian. But he was a hard-nosed businessman who would not proceed until Soraya had pressed a roll of bills into his hand. Then he rushed away from them, consulting with the ER doctors who had done the workup on Moira while he strode toward the OR.

Soraya drank her shitty coffee without tasting it, but ten minutes later, while she paced the hallway uselessly, it began to burn a hole in her stomach, so when Arkadin suggested they get something to eat she agreed. They found a restaurant not far away from the hospital. Soraya checked to make sure it wasn’t colonized by insects before she sat down. They ordered their food, then sat and waited, sitting across from each other but looking elsewhere, or at least Soraya was.

“I saw you without your top,” Arkadin said, “and I liked what I saw.”

Soraya snapped into focus. “Fuck you.”

“She was an enemy,” he said, referring to Moira. “What law is she protected by?”

Soraya stared out the window at a street as unfamiliar to her as the dark side of the moon.

The food came and Arkadin began to eat. Soraya watched a couple of young women with too much makeup and too little clothing on their way to work. Latinas showing off their bodies with such casualness still astonished her. Their culture was so far from hers. And yet she felt right in tune with the aura of sorrow here. Hopelessness she could understand. It had been the cultural lot of her gender from time immemorial, and was the major reason she had chosen the clandestine services where, despite the usual gender bias, she was able to assert herself in ways that made her feel good about herself. Now, for the first time, she saw those girls in their too-tight tops and too-short skirts in a different light. Those clothes were a way-perhaps their only way-to assert themselves in a culture that continually demeaned and devalued them.

“If Moira dies, or if she can’t walk-”

“Spare me the toothless threats,” he said, mopping up the last of his huevos rancheros.

That was Arkadin’s business, she thought. No matter what he might think to the contrary, he was in the business of demeaning and devaluing women. That was the subtext in everything he said and did. He had no heart, no remorse, no guilt, no soul-nothing, in short, that defined and distinguished a human being. If he isn’t a human being, she thought with a kind of irrational terror, what is he?

The men’s loo was five doors down from Professor Giles’s office. Giles was clearly being sick behind the closed door of one of the stalls. A sour stench had pervaded the room, and Bourne strode over to the window and shoved it open as far as it would go. A sticky breeze slowly stirred the stench as a witch will her bubbling pot.

Bourne waited until the noises had subsided. “Professor Giles.”

For some time, there was no answer. Then the stall door was wrenched open and Professor Giles, looking distinctly green around the gills, staggered out past Bourne. He bent over the sink, turned on the cold water, and buried his head beneath the flow.

Bourne leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. When Giles picked his head up, Bourne handed him a handful of paper towels. The professor took them without comment, wiping his face and hair. It was only as he threw the wadded towels into the trash that he appeared to recognize Bourne.

At once his back stiffened and he stood up straight. “Ah, the prodigal returns,” he said in his most professorial tone.

“Did you expect me?”

“Not really. On the other hand, I’m hardly surprised to find you here.” He gave Bourne a wan smile. “Bad pennies continue to turn up.”

“Professor, I’d like you to once again get in touch with your chess-playing colleague.”

Giles frowned. “That may not be so easy. He’s reclusive and he doesn’t like answering questions.”

I can imagine, Bourne thought. “Nevertheless, I’d like you to try.”

“All right,” Giles said.

“By the way, what’s his name?”

Giles hesitated. “James.”

“James what?”

Another hesitation. “Weatherley.”

“Not Basil Bayswater?”

The professor turned away, facing the door.

“What question do you want to put to him?”

“I’d like him to describe the afterlife.”

Giles, who had been headed for the door, paused, turning slowly back to Bourne. “I beg your pardon?”

“Since Basil Bayswater’s son buried him three years ago,” Bourne said, “I would think he’d be in a perfect position to tell me what it’s like to be dead.”

“I told you,” Giles said, somewhat sullenly, “his name is James Weatherley.”

Bourne took him by the elbow. “Professor, no one believes that, not even you.” He moved Giles away from the door to the far end of the loo. “Now you’ll tell me why you lied to me.” When the professor remained silent, Bourne went on. “You never needed to call Bayswater for the translation of the engraving inside the ring, you already knew it.”

“Yes, I suppose I did. Neither of us was truthful with the other.” He shrugged. “Well, what can you expect from life? Nothing is ever what it seems.”

“You’re Severus Domna.”

Giles’s smile had gained a bit more traction. “There’s no point denying it, now that you’re about to hand over the ring.”

At that moment, as if he’d had his ear to the door, the man who had been behind the professor’s desk entered the loo. With the SIG Sauer in his hand he looked quite a bit less owlish. Immediately two more men, larger, muscular, armed with silenced pistols, came in just behind him. They fanned out, their weapons trained on Bourne.