"Hmmm." Timur Savasin sipped his resiny wine without enjoying it in the least. How could people drink this swill? he asked himself. Calling a waiter over, he placed his glass on the tray, and ordered a pair of triple vodkas on the rocks. In the meantime, he lit a cigarette, drew the smoke deep into his lungs.

"One hour," he said to his companion. "Is that so much to ask?"

The Angelmaker hesitated for just a moment, then she smiled. Something magical happened to her face when she smiled-what had been deeply, inarguably erotic became irresistible. Though it could never be said of the Angelmaker that she was unaware of her sexual allure, she was never bound to it. Her radiance was entirely effortless, and therefore all the more potent.

"Like a vacation?" she asked.

He nodded. "Like a vacation."

The vodka came, as icy as he liked it, and they toasted again, this time to their sixty-minute vacation, whatever that might entail besides food and a proper Russian drink. Not that the Angelmaker was Russian. She was, in fact, Estonian, a member of a people whose strange and vaguely unsettling language was entirely opaque to him. Much like the Angelmaker herself. Which he believed was part of her allure. He was aware of only one small sliver of her past, the one he was able to mend for her. Perhaps he could have discovered more had he put his people to work. But he found the thought of others pawing through her intensely private past intolerable. Besides, she was part of his own intensely private life. Anything discovered about her would inevitably lead to him. And so these two remained as sun and moon, a binary system whose components were destined to be neither reconciled nor happy, circling one another in the secretive fastness of the Federation firmament.

Timur Savasin allowed her to order for them; this restaurant was, after all, her recommendation. The quality of the food was her responsibility. With their meal ordered, he said, "How's Liis?"

"You know perfectly well how Liis is."

"Of course. I have someone watching her day and night." He smiled. "But there is some news I prefer to hear from someone who loves her above all others."

She regarded him for a moment-one of her patented enigmatic expressions that so thrilled him. Until the Angelmaker, he had never met a woman he found unfathomable.

"She's just been made soloist in the Company." She meant the New York City Ballet.

"I imagine congratulations are in order."

The Angelmaker laughed, and it was like sleigh bells in the snow of a Christmas morning. "If you mean the three dozen pairs of toe shoes and the bouquet of red roses you sent, I believe you've already taken care of that."

"I'm proud of her."

"You sent the gifts in my name."

"What of it?"

"You don't know?"

"It was an altruistic gesture."

"No," the Angelmaker said. "It was egotistical. 'From your loving sister.' She read me the card."

"Why did she do that?"

"Because it didn't sound like me."

"She could tell that just from that one short sentence."

"You were an only child, weren't you?" She sat back, eyed him again as their food, a deluge of little plates, cold and hot, all fragrant, was set down in front of them.

He smirked, nothing more than a defense. She had his number-why couldn't he get a handle on hers? "I know from experience that gifts don't always make you angry."

She took up a fork, speared a bit of octopus ceviche. "I'm not angry. Disappointed, perhaps."

He was genuinely at sea. "By what?"

"That you didn't tell Liis who the gifts were from. She would have appreciated-"

"I don't want her thanks," he said a bit too coldly.

"I already conveyed her thanks."

"You never should have told her about me."

"Not tell her about the man who rescued her from the Albanian mob? Who got her psychiatric help for the anguish those fucks put her through-"

"Those fucks, as you so colorfully put it, are no longer among the living."

"It was important for Liis to know that. It would have meant the world to her to meet you."

"We've been down this road too many times," the first minister said. "What I did... It was personal, part of my other life only you are privy to."

"Fine," she said. "She knows who sent her the toe shoes and the flowers. She's very grateful."

He said nothing for a time. There was a point, at the very beginning, when rescuing the Angelmaker's younger sister was nothing more than a means to an end, but latterly he had come to realize that Liis's continued well-being contained meaning for him-meaning he never suspected would exist. He wondered about this, just as he wondered what the Angelmaker was to him. Her official duties were simple enough, but then there was the hidden side, as if she were a human black op.

Thoughts like these caused him to pick at his food. He didn't like any of it, especially the octopus ceviche she seemed so fond of. His mouth watered for a steak, thick and bloody, or, failing that, a rack of veal.

"You don't like that kind of attention, do you?" the Angelmaker said.

"In my world it's too often unhealthy."

"My God, FM, she's half a world away-safe in the arms of New York City. You ensure that."

"Stealth and prudence-two words I live by."

The Angelmaker put down her fork, having apparently lost her taste for the octopus. "Which brings us to why you're here." She never inserted herself into conversations regarding these clandestine field trips. It was as if she was invisible or didn't exist.

"So the vacation's over."

"As far as I can see it was just the right amount of time."

He nodded. Sometimes-and he was at a loss to understand this-he felt good bending to her will. Better than good, actually. He felt a stirring in his loins, an ache, which was so inappropriate he encouraged it to its full extent, until he had to shift in his seat because of the pain of his phallus against the crotch of his trousers.

"Anything the matter, FM?" Her full lips were half open, shining as if with the thinnest coating of saliva. "Something I can help you with?"

He said nothing, even when her shoeless foot slipped between his thighs and her exceedingly talented toes, in concert with the ball of her foot, began to stretch his trousers to the limit.

"It's you who should have been a ballet dancer," he murmured with half-closed eyes. "Such talent shouldn't go unnoticed."

"Is it unnoticed now?"

All Timur Savasin could do was groan softly through bared teeth.

54.

Are you telling me he's alive?"

Dov nodded. "So far as we know. Some of these Kurds here on the ground took Bourne in a Jeep to the military air base just outside of Suruc, north of here."

"It was definitely him."

"The man who skydived out of the helo seconds before it was hit. Yes."

Sara's heart turned over. She could feel it pumping new life into her. She and Dov were on the ground at a Kurdish base some miles beyond the border. The makeshift hut they were in was hastily constructed of stones, wood planks, waxed muslin, and God alone knew what other odds and ends. They sat facing each other on upended empty ammo crates. Beside her was a mattress that smelled as if it were stuffed with straw. It was covered in old, raggedy blankets and on it sat a hull pillow. To Sara, it looked like a little bit of heaven.

Lieutenant Southern had been airlifted by his people to a hospital in Istanbul. Sara had found their parting bittersweet, which was almost always the way when you spent time with someone under fire. This had been one of those odd times when she regretted not telling him her real name, but in the field there was, of course, no choice. She was Rebeka, and would always be to him, the angel whom he had saved and who, in turn, had saved him. There could be no stronger bond between two people.

"Where did Bourne go from the airfield?" she asked now. She was not going to call him "Jason" in front of Dov; their relationship was none of her boss's business.

"None of the Kurds know. But as they were leaving they saw a private jet coming in to land. It's likely he boarded that."

"Any markings?"

Dov waggled his head. "Sara, please. Right now, we need to concentrate on you, not Bourne."

It's the same thing, she almost said, but, biting her lip, didn't. She was appalled at how close her emotions were to the surface. The belief that he had died had harrowed her beyond anything she had ever known, and this both elated and frightened her.

"From what little you've told me, you've been to hell and back."

That I have, she thought, unable to keep Jason out of her head. He resided there now like every other part of her.

"Ivan Borz is dead," she said. "The wildly successful ISIS recruitment campaign has ended." Overcome by another bout of vertigo, she fell silent, head down. She massaged her temples with her fingertips.

"Despite the disaster in Cairo, you've made the mission a success. That's all that matters."

"You're wrong about that," she murmured, unable for the moment to speak any louder.

"The Director is furious," he said. Either he hadn't heard her or else he thought she was semidelirious.

"I can imagine."

"He wants you home ASAP." Dov shoved a canteen full of cold water into her hands. "Drink," he said. "Water's the best way to get the residue of the drug out of your system."

She nodded, drank until the canteen was empty. Dov replaced it with another, and she continued to drink until she felt as if she were drowning. "Enough."

He took the canteen from her. "It's not enough, but it'll do for now."

Her head was still down; she was staring at the dirt between her boots, trying to think and not think at the same time. She knew he was trying to read her by her body language, since she'd pretty much hidden her face from him.

"Rebeka, more than anything now, you need to sleep."

"I can't."

"Regain your strength."

"No time."

"Otherwise, you won't be of any use to anyone..." He paused, sighed deeply. "Including Bourne."

She lifted her head, looked him directly in the eye. There was absolutely nothing in his expression to reveal his thought process.

"There's something else going on. Something bigger than Ivan Borz."

He went very still. He certainly was listening now. "What, precisely?"

"I don't know," she said. "But a lot of people have been killed because of it."

"Don't make me wait too long for the other shoe to drop."

"There's only one person I know who does know."

For the next several, agonizing minutes Dov appeared to be putting his mind through a vigorous debate. At length, he said, "I'll see if the owner of that private jet can be identified, and, if so, determine where it was off to."

She smiled. "Thank you, Dov."

"For what?" He stood up. "I did nothing. Nothing at all." He began to turn away. "In fact, right about now I'm sitting in a cafe in Tripoli enjoying a Campari and soda, wondering where the hell you are." He grinned at her over his shoulder. "Now get some sleep. Hear me?"

"Yes, boss." With a groan, Sara slid off the crate, onto the bed. She had never felt anything so soft and inviting. She stretched out.

She had not prayed since she was a little girl, but now silent words came to her: Dear God of our fathers, thank you.

An instant later, she plunged into a deep and dreamless slumber.

- "A bank," Timur Savasin said.

The Angelmaker turned from her contemplation of the view outside their top-floor hotel suite. "Name?"

"You've never heard of it."

She had the sliding glass door partially open. Beyond the rim of the terrace the Mediterranean pulled and subsided against the pebbled shore.

"Is that so?"

"It is," the first minister said. He was in a powder-blue polo shirt and jeans, huaraches on his feet. He felt ridiculous. But then everything about this island was ridiculous. Apart from the Turks, no one took Cyprus seriously. That was the point; that was why the bank was situated here. "No one's ever heard of it."