While still talking into his mike, he went down the hall, opened his front door, and hauled the carpet into his foyer. He grunted; it was very heavy. The carpet was tied in three places with common twine. He went back to his desk, retrieved a folding knife from a drawer, and returned to the foyer. Squatting down, he severed the three lengths of twine and unrolled the carpet. This unleashed an unholy stench that caused him to jump back.

When he saw the body, when he recognized it, when he realized that it was still alive, he cut short the call. Staring down at Frederick Willard, he thought, Allah preserve me, Jalal Essai has declared war on me. Unlike the deaths of the men he had sent to terminate Essai, this was a personal statement.

Setting aside his natural revulsion, he bent over Willard. One eye would not open, and the other was so inflamed there was no white at all.

“I will pray for you, my friend,” El-Arian said.

“I have no interest in Allah or in God.” Willard’s dry, cracked lips scarcely moved, and something terrible must have been done to his throat or vocal cords because his voice was nearly unrecognizable. It sounded like a razor cutting through flesh. “The rest is darkness. There is no one left to trust.”

El-Arian asked him a question, but the answer wasn’t forthcoming. Leaning forward, he touched the side of Willard’s neck. There was no pulse. El-Arian said a brief prayer, if not for the infidel, then for himself.

Book Four

28

YOU SEEM SURPRISED,” Tanirt said.

Bourne was surprised. He had been expecting a woman of Don Fernando’s age, possibly a decade younger. It was difficult to tell precisely, but Tanirt seemed to be in her late thirties. This was an illusion, surely. Assuming Ottavio actually was her son, she had to be at least fifty.

“I came to Morocco with no expectations,” he said.

“Liar.” Tanirt was dark-skinned and dark-haired, with a voluptuous figure that had lost none of its lush ripeness. She carried herself as if she were a princess or a queen, and her huge, liquid eyes seemed to take in everything at once.

She studied him for a moment. “I see you. Your name is not Adam Stone,” she said with utter certainty.

“Does that matter?”

“Truth is the only thing that matters.”

“My name is Bourne.”

“Not the name you were born with, but the one you go by now.” She nodded, as if satisfied. “Please give me your hand, Bourne.”

He had called her the moment he landed in Marrakech. As Don Fernando had promised, she was expecting him. She had given him directions on where to meet her: a sweets shop in the center of a market on the southern edge of the city. He had found the market without difficulty, parked, and proceeded on foot through the labyrinth of alleys lined with stalls and shops selling everything from incised leather goods to camel feed. The sweets shop was owned by a wizened Berber who seemed to recognize Bourne on sight. Smiling, he waved him into the interior, which smelled of caramel and roasted sesame seeds. The shop was dark and full of shadows. Nevertheless, Tanirt was illuminated, as if from within.

Now he offered her his hand, palm up, and she took it. Tanirt looked up at him. She wore simple robes, belted at the waist. Nothing was exposed, and yet her sexuality, pulsing with life, seemed utterly revealed to him.

She held his hand tenderly, her forefinger lightly tracing the lines on his palm and fingers. “You are a Capricorn, born on the last day of the year.”

“Yes.” There was no way she could know that, and yet she did. A tingling began in Bourne’s toes, percolating up through his body, warming him, drawing him to her, as if she had established an energy link between them. Slightly disturbed, he thought about walking out of the shop, but didn’t.

“You have…” She stopped short and put her hand over his, as if trying to block out her sudden vision.

“What is it?” Bourne said.

She looked up at him and at that moment he felt as if he could drown in those eyes. She had not let go of his hand. On the contrary, she held it tightly between her two palms. There was a magnetism about her that was both intensely exciting and intensely disquieting. He felt forces inside him tugging him this way and that, as if in fierce opposition.

“Do you really want me to tell you?” Her voice was that of a trained contralto, deep and rich and sonorous. Even at low volume it seemed to pierce into every packed corner of the sweets shop.

“You started this,” Bourne pointed out.

She smiled, but there was nothing happy in it. “Come with me.”

He followed her to the rear of the shop and out a narrow door. Once again in the labyrinthine heart of the market, he looked out at a bewildering array of goods and services: live cocks and velvet-winged bats in cages, cockatoos on bamboo perches, fat fish in tanks of seawater, a butchered lamb, skinned and bloody, hanging from a hook. A brown hen waddled by, squawking as if being strangled.

“Here you see many things, many creatures, but as for people, only Amazighs, only Berbers.” Tanirt pointed south, into the High Atlas. “The town of Tineghir is centered within an eighteen-and-a-half-mile oasis at an altitude of more than five thousand feet, stretching across a relatively thin wedge of lush wadi between the High Atlas range to the north and the Anti-Atlas to the south.

“It is a homogeneous place. Like the area around it, the town is inhabited by Amazighs. The Romans called us Mazices; the Greeks, Libyans. By whatever name, we are Berbers, indigenous to many parts of North Africa and the Nile Valley. The ancient Roman author Apuleius was actually Berber, as was Saint Augustine of Hippo. So was, of course, Septimius Severus, emperor of Rome. And it was a Berber, Abd ar-Rahman the First, who conquered southern Spain and established the Umayyad Caliphate in Córdoba, the heart of what he called al-Andalus, modern-day Andalusia.”

She turned to him. “I tell you this so you may better understand what is to come. This is a place of history, of conquest, of great deeds and great men. It is also a place of great energy-a power spot, if you will. It is a nexus point.”

She took his hand again. “Bourne, you are an enigma,” she said softly. “You have a long lifeline-an unusually long lifeline. And yet…”

“What is it?”

“And yet you will die here today or perhaps tomorrow, but certainly within the week.”

All of Marrakech appeared to be a souk, all Moroccans vendors of something or other. Everything seemed to be bought and sold from the storefronts and marketplaces that lined the jammed streets and boulevards.

Arkadin and Soraya had been observed upon their arrival, which he had expected, but no one approached them and they weren’t followed from the airport into the city. This did not reassure him. On the contrary, it made him even more wary. If the Severus Domna agents at the airport hadn’t followed them, it was because they had no need to. His conclusion was that the city, probably the entire Ouarzazate region, was swarming with them.

Soraya confirmed that opinion when he voiced it. “It makes no sense you being here,” she said inside a taxi that smelled of stewed lentils, fried onions, and incense. “Why are you walking into such an obvious trap?”

“Because I can.” Arkadin sat with his small suitcase on his lap. Inside was the laptop computer.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t give a shit what you believe.”

“Another lie, otherwise I wouldn’t be here with you now.”

He looked at her, shaking his head. “Within ten minutes I could make you cry out, I could make you forget all your previous lovers.”

“I’m charmed, truly.”

“Mother Teresa, not Mata Hari.” He said this with a good measure of disgust, as if her chastity had made him lose respect for her, or at least devalue her.