Sara reached out, touched it with the tip of her forefinger. Then she turned it around to face her, flipped it open. She had just enough time to see the words: "Mission Mounted," "Ivan Borz," and "Cairo" before she heard the scrape of the door. Hastily, she flipped the file shut, moved away from the desk. When her father entered, she was watching the city through one of the castle-like slits between the vertical blinds hanging in front of the layers of bulletproof glass.

"So," Eli said, "I've made arrangements for your flight to the Maldives."

"That's what was so important?" Sara did not turn around.

"Of course not. But while I was-"

"I'm not going to the Maldives," Sara said.

"Oh? All right. Where do you want to go?"

She turned around to look him in the eye when she said, "Cairo."

"Cairo? You're joking, yes?"

"No, Abba." She folded her arms across her breasts. "I'm not."

Eli took a step toward her. "But, Sara, you can't be serious." He stopped abruptly, turned toward his desk, where the folder lay slightly askew. He turned back to her. "Sara, no. The operation has already begun."

"Without me."

The Director snorted. "Of course without you." He spread his hands. "You were on assignment."

"And now that assignment is over."

"And you need rest."

"What I need, Abba, is to leave Jerusalem. You said it yourself."

"Don't use my words against me, daughter!"

Sara's heart beat faster. Her father only called her "daughter" when he was very angry with her. Still, it was not in her nature to back down. "Just the facts, Abba. Just the facts."

The edge of his hand cut through the air like a knife. "You're not going anywhere near Cairo, and that's final."

Her eyes flared. "You know you can't stop me."

"Sara, Sara, Sara." Eli shook his head. "I only have your best interests in mind. Your body may be healed from your near-death experience in Mexico City, but your mind-"

"My mind is as clear as a bell. I can see for miles."

He put a hand on her shoulder. "Where is this defiance coming from?"

"You know very well," she said.

Eli closed his eyes for a moment. "Ivan Borz."

"You cannot deny me this, Abba." She placed a hand atop his on her shoulder. It was a very Roman gesture, one legionnaire to another. "This of all things on earth and in hell."

Enrobed in silence, father and daughter bowed their heads and prayed together.

- A pack of wolves, that's what I've raised, Ivan Borz thought. With the grace and all-knowing guidance of Allah. The Wahhabis are the perfect foils. They were born to be raised as wolves, all they needed was a voice coming to them from out of the wilderness. And this they found. Allah brought them to me, first in ones and twos and then, as word spread, in handfuls, in entire villages, in an ever-widening gyre.

Borz sat cross-legged, as was his wont, on an ancient Egyptian rug, faded and frayed, of oxblood camelhair and Chinese silk, which was set, per his instructions, in the precise center of the mosque's central prayer room. Around him were arrayed his acolytes, his fearless warriors, his cannon fodder, male and female alike, some as young as seven or eight, in concentric circles. Like the planets of the solar system, he thought, around the sun whose heat will warm them forever, even when they are among the angels. Which, for some of them, would be very soon.

"Al-amdu lillh," Ivan Borz said. All Praise and Thanks to God. "Terrorism is victory. They are one and the same. Terrorism is what unites us under the banner of Allah. Terrorism is what makes us strong." His black eyes picked out acolytes here and there, poured his intensity, his fervor, into them as one pours boiling water from a pot. "The infidel has money, comfort, indolence, perversions beyond measure. The infidel wishes to impose his countless perversions on us. He has come to our shores, like tar washing up on the margins of our land, befouling us and our sacred way of life, our path to Allah, to Ar-Rahman the Beneficent, to Al-Qudds the Purifier. He has come armed with weapons and lies.

"And that, my family, is why we are gathered here today, at this time, in Cairo, the beating heart of Islam. To be purified in Allah's grace and holy spirit." Islam has many hearts, he thought. Cairo is but one of them. These people need to believe in their relevance, they need to know that their lives matter, that they can, in death, make a difference, because their lives are a misery of poverty and hopelessness. They need to believe in victory. In that belief lies strength-and power. Their belief is a vital part of my victory.

"We have been marginalized by the infidel, pushed into the shadows, run up into the mountains that so terrify and confound our enemies. The infidel needs us to feel helpless. The infidel feeds on our hopelessness. Our poverty strengthens him, our bitterness emboldens him as he seeks to grind us under his decadent Gucci shoe.

"Nevertheless, we are not helpless. Allah, the All-Seeing, the All-Knowing, Ar-m the Exceedingly Merciful, has provided for us. He has armed us with a weapon so powerful that we will find victory, my family. Terrorism is what Allah has given us. Terrorism is all we have to fight the infidel, to fight him as he seeks to destroy us. But terrorism is all we need. Terrorism does what no other weapon on earth can do. Terrorism plunges a dagger into the minds of the infidel. Terrorism strikes fear in the rich, the indolent, the perverted. He cannot sleep for fear of us. He cannot feel happiness because of us. He drugs himself up because of us. He does not know when or where we will strike next. He fears for the future."

Ivan Borz moved a five-sided box to a place between his knees. The box was made of a dark metal with a rime of frost at its angles. It was icy to the touch, kept cold by the packs of blue gel lining the inside. Ivan Borz lifted the box's heavy lid, and every pair of eyes was riveted to the movement of his hands. Setting the lid down, he reached into the box and lifted high the severed head, holding it by a fistful of dark greasy hair. The hair hadn't been washed in months. Neither had the body to which it belonged.

"An American journalist, captured, interrogated, turned to Islam, martyred in the name of Allah the merciful. His sacrifice is your rallying cry." His legs unfolded like that of a praying mantis as he rose to his full height. He lifted the head higher so even those in the back rows could see clearly.

"Witness now how the infidel will be defeated. Terrorism will defeat the infidel. This I promise you."

22.

Night had overtaken the cauldron of the day when Bourne arrived in Cairo. The heat was like an oven with the door open instead of closed: stifling yet tolerable. He was almost killed twice in the maelstrom of the city traffic, once when the taxi he was in was nearly broadsided by a truck, another when it overtook and cut off a bus with barely an inch between the vehicles. The taxi left a tail of diesel particulates behind it. It belched more noises than a dyspeptic stomach. The interior stank of falafel grease and stale sweat.

Ah, Cairo! Bourne thought as he vigorously cranked down the window. How do you miss a city and at the same time wish you had never been here?

But then that was Cairo, a seething chaos of contradictions, where ten million vehicles and one stoplight made for a dark and exhilarating passage.

He checked into the nearly deserted El Gezirah Hotel, washed up, changed, then called for a taxi. It took him crosstown in a dizzying, zigzag pattern in order to beat the insane traffic, letting him off at Midan Kit Kat. From there, he walked down to the Nile, through the charcoaled meat and stew scents of the evening. An uneasiness compressed the reddish atmosphere of the city, like a bow drawn too tight from which a launched bolt would at any moment cause devastation.

On the near bank wooden gangplanks led individually to a line of one- and two-story houseboats, some painted, others simply of beaten boards, all weather furrowed and weary. Many of them had once been gaily painted, serving as nightclubs and casinos, but that time was long past. Though remnants of their former glory were everywhere to be seen, in bits of signage, boards of painted gilt and silver, they were dulled now as if viewed in sepia photos.

Bourne found the houseboat painted a Nile blue. As he crossed its wooden gangplank, the muezzin started his call to prayer. The rising and falling voice from the filigreed wrought-iron balcony high up on the soaring minaret several blocks north floated over the wide river, as if it were a bird diving for its supper.

Bourne stood absolutely still before the wooden door. The sounds of the thick water lapping, the soft, fitful breeze on which was carried the supple voice of the muezzin-all these together brought Cairo rushing back to him as if he had never left.

This was Feyd's home. Bourne had met him before he broke away from Treadstone. Feyd was a Treadstone stringer, one of many the organization had maintained in its worldwide network. For as many years as Bourne could remember he had used Feyd, and Treadstone had, in turn, paid him well. His information was always impeccable and so accurate it inevitably breached the heart of the matter.

Bourne remembered Feyd as a sturdy man, short of leg and arm, with a wrestler's deep chest and shoulders. His face, quick to smile, seemed to have won a hard-fought victory over time, each line and crease a misfortune overcome, a face that was at once crumpled and triumphant.

Bourne raised his hand and knocked on the door.

It wasn't long before he heard soft footfalls approaching, then an instant's silence before the door was wrenched open, and the muzzle of a pistol was aimed at his chest.

- A girl with huge coffee-colored eyes, black hair, and an oval face dark as stained teak peered out at him from the dim interior of Feyd's houseboat. The handgun she held was steady as a rock. Her forefinger lay alongside the trigger guard but the safety was off. She knew what she was doing.

"Did Feyd teach you how to use that?" Bourne asked.

As she looked at him, her initial alarm faded. She cocked her head, her brows drew together, as did her lips into what might have been misinterpreted as a pout. Bourne, however, knew it was not.

Recognition illuminated her face as from a lightning flash at night. "Uncle Samson!" She lowered the gun and flew into his arms, her body pressed against his. Samson had been his operational name when he had been in Cairo.

"Amira." He inhaled the scents of cinnamon and incense wreathing her like a halo. Then he held her at arm's length. "You were a tiny thing the last time I saw you."

Her heavy eyelids fluttered. "Not so tiny, Uncle Samson." She twitched her narrow shoulders. "But, yes, I suppose I've grown taller."

"Grown in every way."

"I was eleven the last time you saw me. I'm sixteen now-seventeen in five months."

"Don't push it. Time goes too fast." He smiled. "May I come in?"

"Of course." She stepped aside, pulled him over the threshold. "What an idiot I am!"

"I've come to see your father. Where is Feyd? Is he home?"

Her expression seemed uncertain, then darkened as she turned from leading him into the living room. "My father was killed two weeks ago."

"Amira, I'm so sorry." He stepped toward her, embraced her for a moment before stepping back. "And you've been alone since then?"

She nodded, for the moment mute.

"Amira I need to ask. Was it an accident or-?"

"Murdered," Amira said.

"Will you tell me about it?"

She nodded, ringlets bouncing shadows across her cheeks. "But first we must drink and eat, or what a poor host am I?" She made a sound deep in her throat, which could be interpreted either as joy or sorrow, or both. "What, then, would my mother have thought of me, had she been here?"

She slipped silently into the open kitchen, began preparing food. Behind him, Bourne heard the fairy tinkling of myriad wind chimes made of seashells, an ethereal accompaniment to the muezzin's controlled wail.

All around Bourne were photos of Amira's mother and father, haphazardly placed on shelves, bookcases, side tables, as if often moved according to Amira's mood or where she was in the room so that some were always in her view. The photos were of the parents alone; there were none of them together.

The photos, the cheap mementos crowded in around them, spoke of a life well lived, of marriage, of family, of time passing and remembered in all its marvelous complexity.

Bourne had none of this. Try as he might, he could not remember his parents, where he had been born and raised, whether or not he had siblings. All of this reminded him that he had no idea who he was or where he had come from. It brought home to him again that he had nothing of his own. He was an unmoored creature on a sea without any sight of land, drifting with the current or fighting against it, in the end it didn't matter. And yet in his dreams he kept being drawn back to the moment off the coast of Marseilles. He could hear the shot, a crack of thunder splitting the low sky open, but he couldn't feel the bullet strike his body. Then the freezing water of the Mediterranean, inky-black, oily. Blackness, blankness. Pulled from the sea by fishermen, part of the early morning's catch. Their doctor had saved his life, but his memory had died, leaving a great void yearning to be filled.

This great void inside him was why Sara had become so important to him. Her life, her father, she herself loomed large in his present as well as in his recent past, which meant his entire life. It was why the death of Boris had hit him so hard. When you take a penny from a pauper, what has he left?

"A penny for your thoughts," Amira said as she carried two plates of stew to the table on the balcony. "Let's eat outside where we'll catch a river breeze." She inclined her head toward a shallow bowl. "Would you bring the pita?"

She lit a string of fairy lights. The wind chimes turned and sang in counterpoint to the muezzin's voice.

When they were seated, she said, "You taught me that: 'A penny for your thoughts.'" She laughed. "At the time, I didn't even know what a penny was." Her expression grew solemn. "But, Uncle Samson, you looked so lost in thought."

Bourne began to eat, breaking off a section of pita, shoveling up some stew onto it using only his right hand. "I lost a good friend yesterday," he said, once again pushing down his anguish. "And now I find that Feyd is dead."

Amira rose, went back inside, crossed to the refrigerator, and returned with two frosty bottles of beer. For a time, they drank and ate in companionable silence broken only by the soft lap of the water, the cry of a bird. Some raucous music played, then abruptly stopped. The muezzin's call to prayer had ended.

"But it seemed to me more, as if you were lost in the past," Amira said, engaging him with her coffee-colored eyes.

"I have no past," Bourne said, "to speak of."

"That can't be true. I know you for-"

"I mean before that. I have no memory of where I was born, who my parents were, if I have sisters or brothers. But you have a brother, I recall."

She nodded. "El-Amir, yes. He is in the West. You never met him. He's so smart, so clever. He finished his A-levels, then went on to the London School of Visual Arts, where he met and married an heiress, and was installed at a high-level position at CloudNet satellite TV, one of his father-in-law's media companies."

"So you must have seen him recently."

With a sad smile Amira shook her head. "My father used to say that we Egyptians must look to the future, always. 'The future is our salvation, my children,' he would say, always with a kindly smile. 'Honor the past, yes. But for us to dwell on the past brings only sadness and more loss than we can bear.'"

"So he left you here on your own."

"El-Amir is a big shot now." Tears sparkled at the corners of her eyes, but did not spill over. "Apart from the occasional postcard and the money he sends us I don't hear from my brother."

"Amira-"

"It's no big deal. I still love him. El-Amir is all that's left of my family. And he looks after me in his own way. He's very generous." She continued to look at him, studying his face as if she were an artist about to sketch out an idea on a fresh canvas. "I don't begrudge him leaving." Her mouth half open, she seemed on the verge of continuing, then apparently thought better of it.

He pushed his plate aside. "Tell me what happened to your father."

Amira sighed, looked out over the Nile, where the moon's reflection rippled and coalesced in an age-old rhythm. "After Treadstone was shut down he fell on hard times. Everyone associated with the organization was discredited. He tried to talk to representatives of the U.S. government, but got nowhere. He was, as he said, radioactive.

"For a while, he did odd jobs, whatever he could get, nothing much really, but enough for us to make ends meet. Then about a year ago he began to work as a guide for one of the big tourist hotels. He expected great things, but, you know, after the Arab Spring almost no tourists come to Egypt anymore. He was left with boring businessmen, always with one foot out the door, waiting to be contacted." She shrugged. "One day his past caught up with him. I suppose he knew it would happen sooner rather than later." Her expression grew pensive. "I think now he was marking time, waiting for it to happen. Maybe that's why he took the job-so he would be more visible, easier to contact."

"Who contacted him? CIA? Typhon?"

"Neither."

A boat drifted into view, lying low in the water. The sound of its diesel engine came to them like the sputter of an old man clearing his throat.

She turned to look at him. "It was the Russians."

A tiny chill slithered down Bourne's spine. The boat, clearer now across the water, looked like a tourist barge. Dual sphinxes rose from the curving prow. It was almost empty.

"Who?" he said. "Who was it who contacted him?"

"He said he was a general in the FSB." Amira had been fiddling with the last piece of pita. Now she set it down on her plate. "His name was Karpov. Boris Karpov."