To her surprise the door opened easily when she pulled on the handle, as if it were set on a complex set of gimbals. Inside, the bank was like nothing she had ever seen before. There were no stands on which to write out deposit or withdrawal slips, no ATMs against the wall. There were no tellers, no place for inquiries, no sitting area in which to wait for an officer's attention. That was because there were no officers. In fact, there was no one, and the sound of her sandals against the marble floor was the only sound, echoing off columns with an aching loneliness.

Off to the left, a door stood open. Upon close inspection, this led into a short corridor off which were a series of offices-all deserted. They contained identical desks, rotary phones, bulky intercoms, IBM Selectric typewriters, stacked in- and out-boxes, paper cutters, blotters, pencil sharpeners, a round container of freshly sharpened pencils. Black metal file cabinets stood against one wall, the others were blank. The offices looked time-warped, beamed in from the sixties and seventies. The carpeting, lush and expensive, smelled new.

Stepping into the first one, she went immediately to the file cabinet. The three drawers were locked. Working her hand along the top of the cabinet, she encountered the key. She unlocked the top drawer: empty, did the same with the middle and bottom ones: empty, empty.

The same held true for the drawers in the desk, none of which were locked. Not even a speck of dust lay within. Her hands roamed over the desktop, upended the holder, spilling the pencils out onto the desk. She peered into the holder: nothing there, either.

Unfathomable, Sara thought.

That was when she heard the quickening sound from behind her.

- Because of the swiftness of Bourne's descent, the bullet from the noise-silenced pistol passed just over his head.

An instant later, he was on the floor, turning into a crouch, as the second shot was fired. The ricochet almost caught his left cheek, chips of plaster flicked past his eye. Then he had loosed one of the dirks, which, owing to its curved blade, wasn't ideal for throwing. Nevertheless, because he had calculated for its shape, the tip struck home, the dirk burying itself above the man's sternum.

Now he was alone in the comm room, with a dead man bleeding out, two more men on the roof over his head. Only it wasn't a comm room; it was nothing at all. Whatever data was being fed into the bank from the antennae array wasn't here. "Here" wasn't even finished; it looked like a mock-up of a room. Iron beams and joists made a jigsaw puzzle of the space. Below: blackness of the place between floors, where nothing but mice and roaches would want to live.

He went out of the room, into a hallway of sorts: a circular space, bare plywood that, like in the room he had just left, seemed to serve no purpose save to fill up the interior so that from the outside, the structure looked like a two-story building. A casual observer might very well think that he was in a partially built floor, but there was no sawdust, no power tools, no generator or stacked cans of paint waiting to be opened. The lack of even a grain of dust or soot was almost pathological.

If it wasn't a two-story building housing a working staff, then what was it? But then, if the Omega + Gulf Bank was for the sole benefit of the Sovereign of the Russian Federation, what need had it of a second story? Where were the funds kept? How were they disbursed when needed, often at a moment's notice? The antennae array on the roof had to lead somewhere in the bank.

He went down a circular staircase with a sinuous, polished cherrywood handrail, gilt balusters, as grand as any in an eight-figure mansion. It was carpeted, but the carpet had no imprints on it. Bourne might have been the first person to walk on it after it had been set in place. Black-and-white photographs of what appeared to be oil fields and refineries hung at regular intervals on the curving wall. Gouts of gas-fed flame, blackened, cindered ground lent them an atmosphere of the apocalyptic.

He was halfway down when he heard the first cry of pain. It wasn't the last.

59.

No time for thought. Instinct was what saved Sara. Instinct and training. Whipping off her straw hat, she threw it, whirling, at the figure rushing toward her. His forward momentum was momentarily arrested as he swatted the hat away from his face. That was all the time she needed. Scooping up one of the pencils she stepped into his attack, inside his Taser-holding hand, jammed the pencil point first into his left eye. As he reared back, roaring in stunned agony, she slammed the eraser end with the heel of her hand, driving the point through the viscous back of his eye, the optic nerve, into his brain. He screamed. She stepped back to avoid his flailing arms, his fingers clawing at the foreign object. But before he could remove it, he was dead, collapsing onto the carpet as if he were a marionette with its strings cut.

She was struck then, a titanic blow that knocked her sideways against the edge of the desk. A bolt of pain ran up from the tips of her ribs, filling her chest with fire, making her gasp. Her attacker was upon her, bending her backward, his foul breath in her face. His knuckles were clad with something that gleamed in the light, and when he hit her in the side, she almost blacked out. Her knees filled with water, her legs were like rubber, and the agony was so intense she could scarcely put two thoughts together. She felt stupid and weak, and this filled her with a black rage; her meticulously honed survival instinct turned her wicked, ruthless, implacable. Remembering her first sight of the desktop as if it were still before her, she reached back. Even that motion was difficult. One of my ribs must be cracked, she thought, even as her fingers scrabbled to find the heavy paper cutter.

At that instant, her assailant flipped her over onto her stomach. Bent over the desk, she felt him pull her dress up, drape the hem over her waist, exposing her. He pressed himself against her, rubbed up and down like an animal in heat. In her mind, he was barely more than that.

He held her hips, he was working the zipper of his trousers but was so engorged he was having difficulty freeing himself. Sara grabbed the paper cutter. Her angle worked against her, reducing the leverage she could apply. But she was possessed by the strength of righteous rage, which overrode both the poor leverage and the blinding flashes of pain in her side. Wrenching the long blade from the heavy base of the paper cutter, she pressed one hip into the edge of the desk and, though it was also painful, torqued herself from her hips up through her torso, swung first the flat of the blade into the small of her attacker's back, then, as he reacted, slashed his throat from side to side, nearly decapitating him in that single prodigious blow.

Blood fountained, pulse by pulse, inundating both the carpet and his fallen comrade. As he fell, a blurred figure coming through the doorway at speed brought a last savage response from her. She raised the bloody blade, ready to strike, but was halted at the top of her attack arc by a powerful grip on her wrist. She began to struggle, knowing her life hung in the balance, that if she let herself be stopped now she'd be dead within seconds.

"Sara."

The blood ran down the blade, over her fist, thick, still warm. If she didn't have that, she had other weapons at her disposal.

"Sara!"

Her entire body was a weapon. This was how she had been trained; this was how she would use it now in the last defense of her life.

"Sara, it's me, Jason."

She blinked sweat out of her eyes, saw him before her frenzied brain recognized him. Then, flooded with excruciating pain, she dropped the paper cutter blade, and, with a gasp of both agony and relief, fell against the blessed solidity of his chest, clung to him like an orphan in the adrenaline storm still thundering through her body. She shivered, began to shake uncontrollably, as if with a high fever.

"Jason," she whispered. "Jason."

"It's all right now," Bourne said, stroking her sweat-slick hair.

"If only that were true," an urbane voice said from behind him.

- They both turned to see First Minister Timur Savasin aiming a massive .357 Magnum at them.

He doesn't leave anything to chance, Bourne thought. That thing will stop a rampaging lion in its tracks. He saw no sign of Mala, and this worried him more than the threat of the Magnum.

"What is this place?" Bourne said.

"What? No greeting? No prelude to formal talks among nations?" Timur Savasin was smirking. "Well, what can you expect from an American and an Israeli?" He spat out the last three words as he shook a cigarette out from a pack at his hip pocket, lit it, all with one hand. Apparently, he had practice with this maneuver. He inhaled deeply, expelled a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. He appeared exceptionally fit beneath his open-collared shirt and lightweight linen trousers; a healthy glow suffused his face. "First, drop the gun."

Bourne did so.

"Kick it away." Savasin nodded. "That's a good lad. Now get rid of that dirk you have stuffed at your back."

Bourne grasped the hilt, began to slide it out.

"Slowly," Savasin said. "Very slowly." He nodded again. "Now drop it and kick it away, too."

When Bourne had done as he was ordered, the first minister took another puff on his cigarette, said, "To answer your question, this place is precisely what it purports to be: the Omega and Gulf Bank."

"Bullshit!" Sara snapped. She appeared to have recovered a bit of her core energy. "There are no tellers, no safes, no money. It's no bank at all."

Timur Savasin looked only at Bourne. Smoke drifted past one eye. "It is a bank because I say it's a bank."

"That, unfortunately, isn't enough, First Minister," Bourne said, even as he squeezed Sara, warning her to keep her mouth shut. "Rebeka is correct. There's nothing here to indicate it's anything but a hollow shell, a half-finished stage set."

"That's because you haven't seen the vault." Savasin's eyes gleamed like unholy lamps in the dark. "You haven't taken the journey down to level one. The journey we're going to make right now." He gestured with the barrel of the Magnum as he backed carefully out of the doorway. Dropping the butt, he ground it out beneath his heel. Then he gestured in a mock bow. "After you."

- They took an elevator, so large it could have served as a freight lift, down one level. The door slid back, and they found themselves in a small, almost claustrophobic space excavated out of the island's bedrock. Savasin turned on the electric lights, revealing the immense circular steel door of the bank's vault, gleaming like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He had not lied. Here before them lay the repository of the Sovereign's new wealth, courtesy of the mainland Chinese.

As the three of them stood before the vault door, Timur Savasin said, "Here is the nub of my dilemma, Bourne. I need to open the vault, yet I do not have the code to open the door." He stepped closer to the vault, but at the same time kept his distance from Bourne. "You, I believe, do."

"In that," Bourne said, "you're mistaken."

"Well, you see, I don't believe you, Bourne." Savasin leveled the Magnum. "And to prove it I will give you precisely one minute to input the code into the keypad at the center of the door."

"I can't do it," Bourne said truthfully. "I don't have the code."

"You have fifty seconds left, Bourne. At the end of that time I will shoot your inamorata, though how you can bear to touch Israeli animal flesh is beyond my ken."

Sara made to move, but Bourne restrained her. "Don't," he whispered in her ear. "Don't do or say anything. He will shoot you at the least provocation, of that I'm sure."

She subsided, but he could feel her seething just as if he shared her body. "How will you stop him?" she whispered in return.

"By opening the vault."

Her eyes opened wide. "How?"

"Well, that's the enigma I need to solve." He released his grip on her. "Can you stand on your own?"

Her eyes flashed fire. "Don't be absurd."

He gave her a hard grin before stepping to the input plate on the vault door. It was a touch screen with numbers from one to zero. No letters. This confused him.

"Thirty seconds," Timur Savasin called from behind him. "Twenty-nine, twenty-eight..."

No letters, only numbers. But there were no numbers in Boris's message. It had said, Follow the money, it had contained the place and the bank name, but no clue as to the code. The only numbers were today's date-the commencement of the Russian Federation's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

"Fifteen seconds, fourteen, thirteen..."

Bourne stared at the touch pad. No letters, only numbers. And then he had it. The date! The date was the code!

"Ten, nine, eight..."

He inputted the date, turned the bar. It wouldn't budge.

"Six, five..."

Sweat broke out on his forehead and upper lip. The nape of his neck was wet.

"Four, three..."

Then he saw his mistake. He had inputted the date in the American manner with the month first, then the day. Now he reversed it, tapping the day first, then the month, in the European fashion. He finished with the year.

"Two, one..."

He gripped the handle. It released down, he heard the tumblers clicking away, a whirring as the thick solid steel bolts retracted, and the vault door swung open.

- The three of them stepped in to find that the interior was completely barren. No skids of dollars, euros, or yen. No bars of gold. No thick stacks of bearer bonds or stock certificates. They were confronted with nothing at all.

"Jesus Christ," Timur Savasin said. Clearly he was as surprised as Bourne and Sara. "What the hell-"

Then the door slammed shut behind them, the bolts slid to.

60.

They were locked inside. This was Mala's work, Bourne knew. The devil's work.

"The Angelmaker has fucked you, First Minister," he said.

"The bitch has fucked us all," Savasin howled.

He turned the Magnum on Sara, as if she, not the Angelmaker, had betrayed him, and in a more fundamental way, she had. She was a Jew. Worse, she was Israeli, his implacable enemy, the ready tip of the bayonet that had been thrust through so many of his comrades.

He fired at her at the same moment Bourne's shoulder slammed into him. Sara went down, but whether she had been hit or had simply ducked out of harm's way Bourne had no way of telling. He had his hands full with the first minister.

Timur Savasin, the martial arts expert, possessed a fierce will not merely to survive but to triumph. Anything other than victory was not only unacceptable, it was unthinkable. Beyond that, he completely surprised Bourne with his understanding and practice of haragei-the art of balance and power emanating from the lower belly. Haragei was the basis of all Japanese martial arts, from sumo to karate to the almost extinct harakei.

The first minister's chosen expertise was, like Bourne's, in aikido. While firing his Magnum-a distraction, nothing more-he slid into Bourne attack, bending his torso, while sweeping his feet in a shallow arc that struck Bourne's leading ankle, taking him off his feet.

With the Magnum out of bullets, Savasin reversed his grip, swinging the butt into Bourne's chin. Bourne's head slammed back against the rock floor. On the verge of blacking out, Bourne raised his arms in defense, but Savasin was already inside his semicircle of defense, and he smashed his fist three, four times into Bourne's side, aiming for the muscle over Bourne's kidneys.

But even while being battered, Bourne gathered himself. The true beauty of aikido was that it taught not only the inner centralization and coordination of power, but also emphasized the building up of the mental core, eliminating normal inhibitions in order to attain a single focus, so that even injured a proponent could not only persevere but gain victory.

But, again, Savasin was turning out to be an aikido savant. He immediately knew that Bourne had retreated into haragei, knew what he was doing, and sought to counter it by attacking Bourne's source of power, his lower belly. Again and again, he struck Bourne as he raised up over him, his thighs locked against Bourne's hips to keep him from rolling or wriggling away.

Bourne could feel the darkness of unconsciousness lapping at the edges of his vision, while blinding sparks exploded like fireworks in the center, making him effectively blind. But none of that mattered, because, in fact, Savasin did not know Bourne; he had only files and hearsay to go by, and those were not nearly enough. Not by a long shot. Now he found out.

- Bourne grabbed the cigarette pack out of Savasin's hip pocket, ground the cigarettes, tossed a blizzard of tobacco in his face. Savasin could not see the calloused edges of Bourne's hands rising up like serpents, but he certainly felt them strike him, causing him to loosen his grip on his prey's hips. He stared sightless, helpless, while Bourne tossed him aside, and was just about to regain a semblance of his faculties when the hammer came down.

Blood filled his cracked lungs, rose up into his throat and mouth. He was drowning in his own fluids.

- Bourne stared into First Minister Timur Savasin's bloodshot eyes, watched more and more blood overflow the corners of his mouth.

"It wasn't enough that you murdered my friend," he said, "you had to kill Svetlana as well."

Savasin's mouth worked spasmodically. Animal noises emanated from him that might once have been intelligible words. Then he turned his head to one side, spat out a gobbet of blackish blood with a shard of his own lung embedded in it. When he turned back to Bourne, he spoke. The hateful words, though slightly garbled, were unmistakable as he spat them at Sara: "Jew bitch should never have been born."

Those were also the last words he ever spoke. Bourne took up the empty Magnum, shoved the long barrel through the top of Timur Savasin's palette, through his sinuses, into his brain. There, he stirred the pot until all light faded from the first minister's eyes. Life abandoned him, as if it could not flee fast enough.

61.