"I don't think that's a good idea."

Instantly, she pouted, using coyness to try and mask her interest. "I simply want to look at it. What harm could that do?"

"Tell me about this house," Bourne said, a half smile fixed to his face.

She regarded him for a moment from beneath half-closed lids, then shrugged. "As you wish. I respect your need for privacy." She offered him a small pile of Beluga on a tiny blini, balancing it on her fingertip. "I'll talk while we eat." Her smile turned prurient again. "I don't want to be accused of letting you go to bed hungry."

3.

Such a horror to be good friends with the head of the FSB," Irina said.

"What?"

"I said it's an honor to be good friends with General Karpov."

"What you said was 'Such a horror to be good friends' with him."

Irina laughed. "I can't imagine I would say such a thing. In any event, it's not at all what I meant."

"We've known each other a long time," Bourne replied, "so he tells me."

"And you believe him."

"I do."

"Why would you? Government men are trained to lie."

"I live in that world," Bourne said. "I know it from the inside out."

She shook her head. "I simply find it odd that the general would be so close with an American."

"I suppose we've found our own private detente. It's been beneficial for both of us."

"You didn't ask him about the coin."

Bourne found her intense interest in the coin curious. "There'll be time after the ceremony."

The invitees had settled. The string quartet had been replaced by musicians who played a song that seemed vaguely martial. An odd choice for a wedding-though in Moscow, maybe not.

"And yet this man, General Karpov," Irina said under her breath, "he is frightening, yes? He and many others like him."

"There is no one like him," Bourne said.

"You are not Russian. You wouldn't understand."

"There you're wrong."

Her gaze was cautious and reappraising. "It seems improbable, but...you two are aligned in your politics?"

"We talk ethics, not politics."

"I'm relieved to hear it." But her eyes still radiated caution.

"Just think," Bourne said, "if Boris and I weren't good friends you wouldn't be here now, rubbing shoulders with the Moscow elite."

"Now you're cross."

"I'm never cross," Bourne said shortly.

Irina took a breath. "I suppose I'm having trouble seeing you as a friend of that man-of anyone in the FSB, for that matter."

Bourne turned to her briefly. "In my line of work you tend to meet the strangest people. Often it's the ones you least expect that wind up helping you."

She hesitated a moment. "That's what happened with you and the general?"

Bourne nodded. "Many times."

Her eyes were still clouded over. "Well, that's something to think about."

"Here's another," he said. "Boris assigned you to me, but you seem to hold a dim view of him."

She laughed. "He's FSB. I hold a dim view of them all. Doesn't mean I haven't learned to work with them. I mean, is there an alternative that doesn't get me killed?"

Before Bourne could ponder her reply in earnest, a pair of French horns heralded the beginning of the ceremony.

- As Bourne held Irina in his arms he was wondering what the Kremlin siloviki had thought of the Russian Orthodox ceremony. For that matter, he wondered what Boris had made of it. So far as Bourne knew, his friend had never shown the slightest interest in any organized religion. The idea must have come from his new bride, whom Bourne had yet to meet.

The chamber orchestra was playing a waltz, and Bourne and Irina were dancing along with scores of other couples across the vast ballroom floor, beneath glittering chandeliers as big as meteors. The ceremony was over, and the newly married couple had yet to make an appearance. In another part of the grand hotel photos were no doubt being taken of the wedding party.

"I was here once with Boris," Bourne said. He whirled her away from an FSB colonel and his mistress, but not before he saw the man shoot Irina a filthy look. He was handsome in a saturnine way, with the heavily mannered bearing of an aristocrat, odd enough in a Wild West city full of clattering, snorting beasts, but particularly in the buttoned-down FSB. "We were hunting an arms dealer."

"Did you catch him?"

"When it happened it wasn't pretty. It took the staff days to clean up."

"You bad boys."

Bourne didn't yet know how she meant that comment. He glanced around the ballroom. "This hotel used to be one of the czar's many palaces," he said. "I wonder what that was like, rattling around in these huge rooms. No matter how many servants and lackeys you had, I imagine it was an incredibly lonely life."

A flicker of a shadow passed across Irina's face. Tiny as it was, a crack seemed to have formed in her facade. "I've had enough dancing. Do you mind?"

They picked their way through the jostling throng, toward the French doors that led to the tiled terrace. Bourne grabbed a couple of flutes of champagne from a passing waiter's tray. Irina had already downed four glasses, and it wouldn't hurt to keep them coming. Alcohol had the almost magical effect of loosening people's tongues.

The scents of night-blooming jasmine and orange came to them. They passed a pair of guards, who gave them a cursory look before returning to their scans of the overlighted hotel grounds. Somewhere, not far off, a dog barked, then returned to its snuffling.

"Nothing to complain about as far as security is concerned," she said so softly that once again Bourne had the impression she was talking to herself.

He looked out over the grounds, but all his other senses were attuned to her, trying to work out the true nature of the woman beneath the dazzling, erotic surface.

"I live with loneliness all the time," he said. "It's my world-but I don't know whether I've chosen it or it's chosen me. Normally, I don't think about it much, but there are times"-he gave her the briefest glance-"when I do."

Irina sipped her champagne thoughtfully. "Is that a compliment or...?" She shrugged her beautiful, square shoulders. "Doesn't matter."

The sounds of the dog came again, closer this time. They saw its shadow first, huge and distorted. When it came into view it was at the end of a thick chain leash held by a guard: almost as big as its shadow, its coat bristling, nosing around the bushes for the scent of an intruder. It was wholly intent on scent, until it paused, lifted its leg, and almost disdainfully peed on the bush.

Irina laughed softly. "I feel sorry for the animal, chained and bound."

Bourne said nothing, waiting. And then his patience was rewarded, but not in the way he had anticipated.

"Tell me," she said, "have you ever been in love?"

He kept surprise out of his voice. "Why do you ask?"

"Last night. You spoke her name."

"I don't believe I spoke anyone's name."

"But you did. While you were asleep. You were restless, dreaming. Perhaps it was a nightmare."

"I don't have nightmares."

She smiled at him. "I have nightmares. Everyone does."

"Nevertheless, I never spoke a name."

"But you did. I heard it."

"I don't believe you."

"Sara. You called 'Sara.'"

Bourne did not care for the turn the conversation had taken. Had he spoken Sara's name in his sleep? "I don't know any Sara."

"You love her."

Something hardened inside him. "Irina, what is this about?" and then she surprised him again.

"I was in your bedroom last night. I heard you call out her name. 'Sara,' you said in the tenderest voice I have ever heard. I was jealous, I admit it. I've always wanted a man to speak my name so tenderly."

What to make of this woman? It was as if she were many people. "It's you who were dreaming."

She ignored this. "I sat for hours watching you sleep."

"I would have known."

She took the slightest sip of her champagne. "I was engaged once. I was young enough to have fallen deeply in love. He was just like you, that's how stupid I was. He worked in your world, on the margins, in the shadows. He was very good-very good, indeed. Many people were terrified of him. But he inhabited this world fully and completely. He stepped out of the shadows only briefly. I soon discovered there was no room for me. Well, you must know all about that." She wet her lips. "As I say I was young and stupid. I was too besotted to break it off. One day he left for god alone knows where. He never came back. He never left a trace. He vanished off the face of the earth. Poof! Up in smoke, like a magician."

"There are no magicians," Bourne said. "Only illusionists."

Her smile was ironic just before she turned away. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "So many things can kill you, so many ways to die."

Once more he didn't know whether she was talking to him or to herself.

"Have you ever thought about dying, Bourne?"

"Every day," he said. "But I've already died once. I'm on my second life."

"What's that song? 'You Only Live Twice'?"

"Nancy Sinatra." Bourne laughed. "That's part of a life long ago and far away."

Irina finished off her champagne, reached for his untouched flute. "I want to live twice," she said.

A dark note in her voice put him on alert. "Has there been a threat to your life?"

"This is Russia, Bourne." She downed his champagne in one long swallow, set the empty flute on top of the balustrade next to hers, peered at them as if they were a psychic's crystal ball.

"This estate," she said, after what seemed a long time. "This palace, so huge and forbidding. Like a knight's castle, it might as well have a moat around it." She moved the flutes together until their lips touched. "I know what that kind of loneliness feels like." Her eyes caught Bourne's, then slowly drifted away. "I live alone in my house," she went on. "Three years ago it was different, of course. I had Father and my brother."

"Where are they now?" Bourne asked.

"Dead." Irina's eyes searched his for a reaction. "They were murdered."

"By whom?"

She shrugged. "Many guesses, a show investigation by the police, no arrests." She shrugged again. "I expected nothing more. It's Russia, after all."

"But your family is wealthy."

"That was the problem, wasn't it? It's the siloviki-the security wonks-who have the political clout. All the oligarchs have is money, and in the dawning of this new era of conservatism and isolationism, money isn't nearly enough." She gripped the balustrade, as if for security. "Still, in my father's case, there was another issue: All oligarchs cast shadows. Some shadows-very, very few, to be sure-are almost as long as the Sovereign's." She pursed her lips. "Mikhail Khodorkovsky was lucky. He only got ten years in prison for defying the Sovereign."

"So your father was a dissident like Khodorkovsky." When she nodded, Bourne said, "How were he and your brother killed?"

"The estate was infiltrated. At night. Alarms were deactivated."

"Professionals."

She nodded again. "They slaughtered my father and brother in their beds."

"I imagine nothing was taken."