"I wouldn't think so," Bourne said. "Llewellyn Beers does not exist."

The director sat back, frowning. Bourne could see the fear in his eyes that the windfall so recently his was beginning to slip through his fingers.

"Fyodor Ilianovich, I confess I do not understand your rather, ah, unorthodox request."

"Unorthodox it may be," Bourne said, "but surely it isn't unprecedented."

"I don't-" Mr. Tesfey's frown deepened. "I'm not sure I understand your meaning."

"Let's stop beating around the bush, Mr. Tesfey. I know I'm not the first Russian national who has opened-how shall I put it?-a black account."

"But you are. I have been director of this bank for more than seven years, Fyodor Ilianovich, and I can assure you without fear of contradiction you are the first and only individual of any nationality who has made this request."

Bourne, who had the director's number from the moment they sat down, knew he wasn't lying. This wasn't the cutout bank the Sovereign was using. How had Boris's rebus steered him wrong? Either his deciphering of the Sumerian glyphs had failed, which was unlikely since he had been accurate with the first three groups, or he had incorrectly interpreted the rebus. Either way, he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dead end with less than twenty-eight hours left until Russia invaded Ukraine.

51.

You don't look good, if you don't mind me saying so," Lieutenant Jock Southern said.

"That's a good one." Sara laughed heartily just before she passed out on top of El-Amir's corpse.

Ignoring his all-body pain, Southern went to her, his knees cracking as he knelt. Two fingers on her carotid confirmed she was still alive. Her pulse was slow but strong enough. But he had no strength to lift her up. Rolling her off the corpse, he tried to drag her back to the wooden slab on which he had tried to sleep for four nights. Too soon he was out of breath, and for a moment he hunkered down, trying to gather himself both physically and mentally. One step at a time and first things first, as his mum used to say.

Stepping over the bodies, he exited the cell, went up the stairs, into the house proper. Bars of sunlight slanting in through glassless windows and the huge rent in one wall made him half-close his eyes. He felt a headache start up like a faulty engine. Foraging in the kitchen, he found water and a tin of tea. He brewed himself a cup and, while it was steeping, removed food from the refrigerator. Then he sat at the oval table, spooned a lot of sugar into his tea, drank it while he ate a bit of cold couscous and congealed bastilla. He did so slowly and sparingly. Apart from some water with a fistful of dead mosquitoes floating on its surface, he hadn't had much in the way of sustenance in more than four days by his possibly inaccurate accounting, and his stomach must be seriously shrunken.

When he felt energy flooding back into his system, he drank some more, took some sweets in his mouth, letting them dissolve. Then he rose and returned to the basement cell. Sara was still unconscious, but her breathing was steady. Bending, he picked her up off the floor and, carrying her in his arms, slowly and painfully brought her up out of the subterranean cavern and into the half-ruined building. He found a piece of furniture to lay her down on, then took pillows off the floor, shaking them free of glass shards, and propped her head up on them. Overcome with a wave of vertigo, he perched himself on the edge of the cushion. His heartbeat was elevated; he needed to slow his system down. He did this by staring at her face, concentrating on each feature one at a time, describing them to himself in the most detailed terms.

After several deep breaths, he felt at least a semblance of calmness. His vertigo faded and, at length, vanished. He tried to feed her the sweetened tea, first wetting her lips with a fingertip he dipped into it, then, as her reddened eyelids began to flutter open, allowing her a tiny sip.

Still, despite his care, she began to choke. At once, he sat her up, held her to him as he circled her back with the flat of his hand, almost as if she were a baby. Anxious moments passed. Then he felt her head move against his shoulder.

"God."

She shuddered so hard he thought she was actually going into spasm, but it subsided soon enough.

"God, God, God..."

"You're okay now." He detached himself, held her at arm's length so he could look into her eyes. "Rebeka, you're okay."

"Yes." A faint, watery smile. "Yes, I am."

"The Rohypnol must have caught up with you." He studied her face, as he had when she was unconscious. "What the bloody hell did you do to fight it off?"

"Did you ever see yogis-real yogis-walk on red-hot coals or lie on a bed of nails?"

"In fact I have," Southern said. "When I was a teenager."

"Same thing," Sara said. "More or less."

"I could've used some of that over the last four days."

Sara's eyes started to lose focus, and Southern slapped her cheek hard enough to startle her awake. "Here," he said, handing her the glass of tea.

"It's always tea with you Brits, isn't it?"

"Mother's milk." He grinned. "That's better, isn't it?"

When she nodded, he held out his hand palm up. "I found treasure."

Sara's eyes opened wide. "Chocolate!" She popped a square into her mouth, chewed as it began to melt. "Mmm. Manna from heaven." Then she gave a deep sigh as she began to come fully back to herself. She regarded him critically. "Hell, you look like shit, Lieutenant."

He laughed. "I must stink like it, too."

"No comment." She held out her hand, and he gave her more chocolate.

"The good news is I feel a ton better than I look."

She grinned as she devoured the chocolate. "A reprieve from a beheading will do that to you."

"Right. No bad news at the mo, except we're smack-dab in the middle of a hot war zone. A shower, shave, and a change of clothes will do me up right."

"No time for any of civilization's niceties," Sara said, feeling more herself with every tick of the clock. She rose. "We've got to find a way out of here before ISIS troops get here, otherwise we'll-"

"Don't even say it," Southern said with a shudder. "One threat of a beheading is more than anyone should face in a lifetime."

They went through the house, looking for weapons, but apart from several carving knives from the kitchen found nothing of use.

"Outside," Sara said. "Borz's men are all dead and they were heavily armed."

Together, they climbed through the rubble at the foot of the ruined wall, and were confronted by all manner of semiautomatic weapons, lying beside twisted corpses.

"Speaking of treasure," Sara said. "Here we go."

Which was when they were caught in a withering cross fire.

- Poor Mr. Tesfey. The crestfallen look on his face when Bourne rose and excused himself without making that fantastic deposit was classic. However, Bourne had no time to worry about anyone else's disappointment. He had his own to contemplate.

Time was fast running out. If he couldn't find the hidden bank the Sovereign was using to fund his horrifying war, the resulting worldwide conflagration would be catastrophic. He put his head back against the seat as the taxi took him back to the airport. There were two other international banks in Asmara, neither of which had the word commerce in its name. Nevertheless, Bourne had dutifully visited them, repeating the stage show he had put on for Mr. Tesfey, both with the same result.

Dead end.

Bourne closed his eyes. "So now I will show you the glyphs while I pronounce them in Russian," Boris had said that year's-ago day in the Jerusalem cafe, "and, naturally, you will memorize them as I draw them. Finally, we will each write a cipher for the other to decode. A game, if you will. Our kind of game. And like all our games, one with the possibility of deadly consequences."

Bourne wondered whether at that moment Boris could have had any intimation of just how deadly this one would become.

And then he sat bolt upright as another fragment of that same conversation rose into the forefront of his mind: "And, of course," Boris had reminded him, "there's always the false group hidden somewhere in the message in the event a hostile figures out the cipher key."

- The moment Bourne had left, Mr. Gebre Tesfey stood looking at a door in his office he had hoped never to open. But now he knew he must. Using a key, he unlocked the door, stepped inside. As he pulled the door shut behind him the lights came on and the electronic antisurveillance system was activated. Three months ago, a cadre of workmen had outfitted this windowless room. It had taken them three days, working fourteen hours a day. Mr. Tesfey knew this for a fact; he had been required to be present in his office the entire time. When they were finished, they left as mysteriously as they had come. They never once talked to one another-at least when he was in earshot-he had no idea of their nationality. Just as well, he thought now as he crossed to a desk, unlocked the lower of the two drawers. He did not know the nationality or even the identity of the man who had contacted him by phone, the man who had arranged everything, including his ten-thousand-dollar-a-month stipend. That money guaranteed two things: the first, that Mr. Tesfey never, ever ask questions or seek to discover the man's identity. He was about to fulfill the second condition.

Inside the drawer was only one item: an encrypted mobile phone sent to him by international courier the day the workmen left for parts unknown. The mobile was always plugged in to an outlet in the rear of the drawer, ensuring the battery would never run down.

Mr. Tesfey was disturbed to discover his hands were moist as he gripped the phone, that his upper lip had grown a thin, itchy line of cold sweat. Unplugging the mobile, he punched in a three digit code. As if it were alive, the mobile sprang into consciousness, automatically dialing an overseas number.

"Yes," the man at the other end of the line said. It was both a greeting and a question.

"He was just here," Mr. Tesfey said.

"You're quite certain?"

"He claimed to be Fyodor Ilianovich Popov, second vice president of Gazprom. Is that his real name?" The moment he asked the question, Mr. Tesfey knew it was a mistake.

Silence.

"Hello? Are you there?"

Mr. Tesfey's blood ran cold. The line was dead. He fervently prayed the same wouldn't soon be said of him.

- "So the third group-the one with the oblique reference to Eritrea-was a false clue," Abdul said when Bourne returned to the plane.

"That's right, and I fell for it."

"Don't blame yourself, Jason. You couldn't know that Boris was using a double-blind cipher."

"The point is I should have known the moment I saw the Sumerian glyphs."

"Forget regrets. Forward," Aziz ordered. He held out a small plate. "Have some halvah."

"Abdul."

"What? It's sesame-brain food. Every good Arab knows that."

Bourne popped a square into his mouth, sat chewing it slowly while he wrote the Sumerian cipher down on a ruled pad provided by his friend. He pointed. "See, here, the first grouping is the date-tomorrow-when the invasion is set to begin. I can only think that ISIS is preparing a major assault-possibly on western Turkey-to coincide with the Sovereign's troops pushing across the border in Ukraine."

"The Western powers will be paralyzed. They won't know which way to look first. There will be chaos in the United Nations and the EU, with politicians and diplomats debating endlessly on what response to make."

"Precisely the point," Bourne said. His pen point moved to the second group. "Here, Boris writes, Follow the money."

"And the third group is when you ran into trouble."

Bourne crossed it out. "It's the double-blind, in case the cipher fell into hostile hands and was cracked."

"So that leaves us with the fourth group," Aziz said. "Logically, it would be the account number and security code."

"Yes, and the third group would translate as the name of the bank. But, as we've seen, Boris wasn't being logical. The double-blind is much too clever for that." Bourne considered for a moment. "More often than not it's an inversion."

Aziz pursed his lips in concentration. "Meaning the three active groups don't follow in sequential order."

"Correct," Bourne nodded. "Added to that is the fact that the fourth group doesn't translate into a number string as it would if it were the account number."

"Then what does it translate as?"

"That's the central enigma Boris has left me." Bourne tapped the pen point on the paper underneath the fourth group of glyphs. "Maybe I've been looking at this the wrong way."

"How d'you mean?"

"I've been assuming that all the information I need is right here in the cipher."

Aziz nodded. "That would be logical." His brows lifted, his eyes brightened. "But, as we now know, this cipher doesn't follow a logical course."

"Right," Bourne said. "There are three necessities for this bank: it needs to be officially unconnected with Bank Rossiya, but, preferably, with some back-channel proximity in case of emergency; it needs to be hidden away somewhere out of major banking centers."

"Like Asmara."

Bourne grunted. "That was the brilliance of Boris's double-blind. Asmara appeared to fit the bill, even down to-" He broke off, his eyes going out of focus.

Aziz became alarmed. "Jason, what is it? You look like you've had a stroke."

"A stroke of luck, maybe." Bourne's attention snapped back to his friend. "Listen, Abdul, the third and maybe most important necessity was that the bank the Sovereign chose had to be in need of a big account like his."

"Money coming in, going out in odd amounts and at odd times." Aziz nodded. "I understand."

Bourne's eyes were alight with a strange passion. "Where in this part of the world would fulfill those requirements better than any other?" He didn't wait for his friend to answer. "Cyprus."

Aziz snapped his fingers. "That's right! Cyprus's banking system almost failed less than two years ago. The IMF bailed them out-at least to some extent-but the infrastructure has been in desperate need of a substantial capital infusion since then."

"Now the island is home to banks from Greece, Lebanon, Jordan, Eastern Europe, and-"

"Russia!"

"Just so. Let's go on the premise the bank we're looking for is domiciled in Cyprus and see where that leads us." Returning to the fourth cipher group, Bourne stared long and hard at his translation in this new light. The last section of the rebus was still withholding its secret.

"The first two glyphs translate as 'shore bird,'" Bourne said. "The third is 'fair.'"

"I'm no expert on the language," Aziz ventured, "but that fourth glyph doesn't look Sumerian at all."

"That's because it's written backward."

"Why would Boris do that?"