The Mossad agent had appeared from around the far side of the furiously burning building, and he wasn’t alone. Colonel Ben David was with him.

Maceo Encarnación cursed the day he had agreed to Tom Brick’s plan to buy the SILEX process from the avaricious Ben David. He’d bought into Brick’s argument that the process would mean that Core Energy would eventually corner the market on nuclear fuel, which, despite certain setbacks, was surely the main energy source of an emissionless future without fossil fuel.

Perhaps Brick had been right. Maceo Encarnación didn’t know, and he no longer cared. It had been his idea to rope in Minister Ouyang, knowing through Maricruz’s weekly reports how desperate the Chinese were for more energy, especially now with their great engine of progress slowing because of massive pollution all over the country. The Chinese were building nuclear reactors at an astonishing rate. Their appetite for enriched uranium to fuel these plants was increasing exponentially. Maceo Encarnación hated the Chinese with an unrivaled passion. They stood for everything he despised, everything he had spent his entire adult life fighting against: repression, regulation, dampening the free spirit of the country’s population. Seeing the opportunity to fuck them over was too great a temptation. But now, as he made himself invisible in the shadows near the front door of the laboratory, he understood how his desire had conflicted with destiny.

He was not meant to be here, on the run from Jason Bourne. He should have been back in Mexico City with Anunciata. Now he was faced with the moment when dominion slips through one’s grip, when expectations of wealth, influence, and power are overwhelmed by self-preservation and survival.

He stiffened as the door to the laboratory opened inch by inch. The interior of the building, designed by the five scientists at work here, was broken up into rooms where the separate processes of the formula could be produced and refined before being chained together with the others in the largest area at the far end of the structure. This last space was lead-lined, and all precautions had been taken owing to the radioactive material being created there. As far as he could tell, all the scientists were clustered in the far lab, finishing the last of the SILEX testing.

The door opened farther. Maceo Encarnación, checking his firearm, discovered that it was empty. Tossing it aside, he raised his machete over his head, ready to strike off Bourne’s head the moment he entered the building.

A shadow fell across the widening wedge of doorway, and Maceo Encarnación felt the tremor of intent run up his arm and into the fists that grasped the machete with a professional executioner’s grip.

He watched the silhouette form: the nose, lips, forehead, chin, until the entire head was in front of him like that of a condemned criminal on the block. The machete whistled down, the long, wicked blade glimmering briefly before it fell into shadow as it cleaved through the neck, severing the head from its trunk.

The head bounced along the floor while the trunk danced and spun, blood spurting with each frantic pump of the heart. For an instant, Maceo Encarnación was transported back to the shoreline of Mexico, the soft Gulf waves rolling onto the shore, both seawater and sand soaking up the blood, as the head rolled back and forth in the pink foam of the surf.

Then the present returned with the speed of a rocket, and he saw the severed head facing away from him. He turned it toward him by hooking his foot against the side of the nose. It stared up at him with the unthinking eyes of a landed shark. It was a face he knew well, but it wasn’t Bourne’s.

He expelled a startled yelp as Bourne grabbed hold of him and slammed him back against the wall so hard he dropped the bloody machete. He stared from Bourne to the severed head.

“I thought Ben David had been burned to death.”

“One of his agents saved him, and I liberated him from his agent,” Bourne said. “I wanted his death to have meaning.”

Maceo Encarnación’s gaze returned to Colonel Ben David’s face, which stared up at him from its position on the floor. There was no seawater to wash away the blood and gore, to make the death clean and neat, to dream the dream of a perfect death.

“I thought he was you,” Maceo Encarnación said.

“Of course you did.”

Maceo Encarnación shuddered. “Let me go. I have the secret to SILEX. Imagine the wealth you and I will share.”

Bourne stared into his eyes.

“You killed Nicodemo in Paris.” It was only a semi-question.

“He knifed Rebeka,” Bourne said by way of answer. “She died a slow, painful death.”

“For that I’m sorry.”

“I looked into her eyes. I saw the pain. I saw the end coming, and there was nothing I could do.”

“For a man like you, that must be terrible indeed.”

Bourne drove a fist deep into Encarnación’s stomach. He doubled over, and Bourne pulled him erect by his hair.

The Mexican’s red-rimmed eyes opened wide. “You killed my son.”

 “He killed himself.”

Maceo Encarnación spat into his face. “How dare you!”

“I tried to subdue him underwater, but you trained him too well. He would have killed me and Don Fernando if I hadn’t killed him.” “ ¡Asesino!” Encarnación slipped a push-dagger from a sheath hidden beneath his clothes. His fist shot out, the blade aimed at Bourne’s heart.

Bourne grasped the wrist, and turned it, snapping it in two. Maceo Encarnación grimaced, slammed Bourne’s throat with the heel of his other hand. Bourne, a low animal growl erupting from deep inside him, spun him around, grasped his head in both hands, and cracked the neck completely in two. As he let Maceo Encarnación go, the Mexican’s head lolled at an unnatural angle, as if begging to be separated from the rest of him.

Epilogue

Tel Aviv, Israel

THE DIRECTOR WOULD like to talk with you,” Dani Amit, head of Mossad Collections, said.

“Talk with me,” Bourne said. “Not kill me.”

Amit laughed, but his pale blue eyes remained steady and grave. The two men were sitting at a small table at Entr’acte, a seaside restaurant along Tel Aviv’s sweeping scimitar beach.

“The termination order was a mistake. Obviously.”

“In our business,” Bourne said, matching Amit’s tone, “almost everything is a mistake in hindsight.”

Amit’s eyes drifted to the water, the lines of empty chairs set up on the beach. “That which doesn’t kill us turns us gray.”

“Or insane.”

Amit’s gaze snapped back.

“It was insane to send someone after Rebeka,” Bourne said.

“She went off the grid. She broke protocol.”

“Because she couldn’t trust anyone.”

Amit sighed and folded his hands together, as if in prayer. “Concerning Dahr El Ahmar, we owe you a great debt of gratitude.”

“Rebeka suspected Ben David was rotten.” Bourne would not let the subject go. “She was right.”

Amit licked his lips. “Concerning Rebeka, we have received her body from the authorities in Mexico City.”

“I know. You will bury her with honors. I want to be there.”

“Outsiders are not permitted—” Amit bit off the automatic response, and nodded. “Of course.”

A soft breeze ruffled Bourne’s hair. His body ached. He could feel every place the flames had touched him, every place Maceo Encarnación had struck him.

“Did she have family?”

“Her parents are dead,” Amit said. “You’ll meet her brother at the funeral.”

“He’s Mossad also.”

“Finish your espresso,” Amit said, “then we must go.”

Aboard the Director’s boat, Bourne was provided with a panoramic view of the city. The sun beat down from a sky studded with small clouds, scudding before a following wind. He seemed far removed from the snowy highlands of Lebanon.