There's no stopping you," Bourne said, as he raised Sara to a sitting position.

Her smile was leavened with the pain from her ribs. "There's no stopping either of us, it seems." She indicated with her head. "What the hell did you do to him, anyway?"

"Nothing less than he deserved." He pulled her to her feet with one arm at the small of her back. "How badly are your ribs hurt?"

"Let's find a way out of here first."

He shook his head. "No chance. As long as the filtration system is working we'll be-"

At that instant complete silence engulfed them. Someone-most likely Mala-had turned off the internal air in the vault.

"All right?" Sara asked archly. "Is that what you were going to say? Now what do you say about finding a way-"

But Bourne had already stripped off the first minister's shirt and was tearing it into lengths he knotted together. He bound her midsection, tying the material off tightly.

"I can hardly breathe. I feel like I'm wearing a corset."

"Good. Now let's see where we stand." He crossed to the closed door. "There's always a safety mechanism to open a door like this from the inside." He found it. "Ah, here we go." He pressed the emergency release, but nothing happened.

"The Angelmaker has disabled it," Sara said. "It looks like she's living up to her name. I guess it is possible to hate someone you've never met." She glanced at Bourne. "And, by the way, why did your good friend Boris Karpov lead you here? There's no staff, no money. To me, it looks like a dead end. It's time to face the fact that he was conned, and so were we. There's nothing here for us. The Russian invasion will begin this evening dead on schedule."

Bourne shook his head. "I'm convinced this place is ground zero for the Sovereign's Chinese money. I'm missing something." He spun slowly, looking around the bare vault. "Something vital."

"Like what?"

His eyes lit up. "Like this." He recrossed the vault to the wall where Savasin's shots had chipped away at the rock face. And rock face it was, in every sense of the word. His fingertips roamed over the surface beneath. "Look here."

Sara winced as she bent stiffly to look at where he was pointing. "It's smooth!" she exclaimed. "And it's metal!"

Retrieving the Magnum, Bourne wiped off the barrel on the First Minister's trousers, then returned to the chipped wall, hacking at the thin facade-which, as it turned out, wasn't stone at all, but plaster molded and painted to resemble stone-until he revealed an array of electronic equipment. Checking the monitor, he saw that the array was connected to the Dark Web, a place in cyberspace where illicit materiel of every sort imaginable was bought, bartered, and sold.

"There's a powerful antennae array up on the roof," Bourne said. "It's invisible from the street. I wondered what it connected to. There was nothing on the second floor."

"And all the offices on the ground floor are empty-looking like dummies-a stage set," Sara said. "And yet spotless, which means someone must come in periodically to clean."

"I'm willing to bet it isn't anyone local," Bourne said.

"So now we know the bank is used for something. But what? If there are no banknotes, no bonds, no certificates of deposit, no gold, then what is the bank for?"

"I think I know," Bourne said. "But first we need to get out of here."

"As I was saying." Sara was watching him carefully. "Any ideas?"

"Just one," Bourne said. "The Angelmaker."

Sara blinked hard. "I beg your pardon?"

"She's not going to let us die in here."

"That's why she turned off the air, right?"

The air! Bourne thought. Of course.

"The Angelmaker knows this place better than we do," he said. "I would wager she's been here before-more than once."

"Doing what?" Sara said. "Mopping and dusting?"

At last, he found what he was searching for. The air vent was almost as cleverly hidden as the banks of electronic equipment it serviced. Any form of stacked electronics threw off tremendous heat, requiring powerful fans and heat sinks. The heat problem was bad enough out in the open, but when the components were secreted as these were, they required an immense amount of cooling.

Cooling meant air-a lot of it. And the cooling system had to be vented somewhere close so that the heat would not build up and destroy the components.

And there it was. He pulled off the grate, camouflaged to look like the surrounding rock wall.

"Big enough for a human body," Sara said. "Where does it lead?"

"Let's find out."

Bourne crawled inside, Sara following. The shaft, which was very cold indeed, led them horizontally for only twenty yards or so, before tilting upward so steeply they were obliged to press their knees and the outsides of their shoes against the freezing metal sides. This was particularly difficult for Sara, since she was wearing a sundress and sandals, which afforded her minimal protection in this arctic environment. In fact, she found the sandals a hindrance, and shook them off. They fell down behind her, two small plops like birds hitting a window.

It quickly got worse: the shaft turned vertical. Now they used elbows as well as knees and feet. Sara shivered. Even that involuntary motion sent shards of pain through her side, but the ties that bound her also saved her, and she thought it a fitting legacy of First Minister Savasin's despicable life, one he'd hate. And, in fact, it was his inimical hatred that helped her keep going when the agony swept over her, threatening to make her lose her grip. How easy, she thought, to just let go, to let the darkness come rushing up to greet her, to fall into its open arms and rest there for a while before dropping into sleep.

As if psychically bonded to her, Bourne's voice broke apart her black thoughts at just the right moment: "Sara, I can see light up above. We're almost there."

Each word was another rung in the lifeline extended to her, pulling her inch by inch out of darkness's seductive embrace. She had never felt so tired or in pain in her life, not even when she was bleeding out in the back of a taxi in Mexico City. There, she was basically self-anesthetized; here, she was all raw nerve endings and rage.

Up ahead, she heard Bourne working on another grate, knew that he had stopped, that they were at the end. She clutched her Star of David and said a short prayer. Moments later, Bourne was lifting her out of the air shaft. She wanted to cry out, but her training took hold, and she just gritted her teeth and let the pain wash over her once more. But now she was in the arms of the man she loved, felt his heartbeat and, beyond that, the solace of human warmth.

- Bourne set her down gently. "I've got to get you to a hospital."

"Later," she said, and smiled at him as she got to her feet. "Or maybe not at all."

She looked around. They were on the unfinished second floor. It was just as Bourne had described it. "Tell me what you've discovered."

"I'll do more than that," Bourne said. "I'll show you."

He led her down the wide, curving stairs. "The photos, Sara. What are they of?"

She frowned. "An oil field," she said. "Refineries."

"Not just any oil field. Vankor."

"The oil field the Sovereign sold part of to the Chinese."

"The same," he said, nodding.

As they moved slowly down, tread by tread, he lifted off each photo. "Of course this bank doesn't hold banknotes, bearer bonds, stock certificates, or gold. They're all too cumbersome to transport efficiently at a moment's notice, which is how this bank's assets are deployed."

Behind the third photo down was a metal plate with a large keypad on it.

"Oh my God," Sara said. "Diamonds!"

Bourne nodded. "Now look at the keypad. It's not like any other I've ever seen."

"Me neither," Sara said. "It's got thirty-three keys, all of them blank." She looked from the keypad to Bourne. "How on earth will you open it?"

"The answer is staring right at us from these photos."

"Vankor."

"The Russian alphabet is composed of thirty-three letters." Bourne touched the keypad six times, inputting the Cyrillic equivalent of VANKOR. The door popped open. He put his hand inside, drew out a single red silk bag. It was embroidered with a gold Chinese dragon, and was tied with a drawstring. Opening it up, he spilled a pile of diamonds into Sara's open palm, shimmering and winking like stars in the night sky.

"But..." She looked at him. "Surely, that's not all there is."

"There are hundreds of others," Bourne said.

"But there won't be for long."

They turned to see the Angelmaker. She held a machine pistol on them, threw a doctor's satchel made of worn pigskin at Bourne. "Fill it up."

Sara stiffened. "You're not going to let her-hey!"

Bourne was sweeping the red silk bags of diamonds into the satchel.

"Thank you for finding the safe and opening it," the Angelmaker said. "I knew whether I asked you politely or not you'd refuse." She nodded. "Now set it down and step back."

Bourne did as she asked, dragging a reluctant Sara with him.

The Angelmaker stepped down, put her boot through the satchel's handles, lifted it up with her leg. When she had hold of it, she peered into its depths, then, pushing the satchel up her arm to hold it in place, put her hand inside the safe, presumably to make sure Bourne had emptied it completely.

"Now," she said, "I must be going." As she backed up the stairs, Sara broke away from Bourne, took a step toward her. "Don't even," the Angelmaker said in a tone of unmistakable menace. "I will shoot you dead." She continued up the stairs. "One shot."

Then she vanished into the unfinished upper floor.

Sara turned to Bourne. "You're not going after her?"

"She's a trained assassin. She meant what she said. I plan to live at least another day."

"The better part of valor. All right." Sara ascended to his level, hefted the diamonds still in her palm. "Why didn't she threaten to kill me in the vault in order to coerce you into telling her where the diamonds were? That worked for Savasin."

"I didn't know then. I think she suspected that."

She shot him a skeptical look, as if she knew something more was at work. But she was too canny to press him. If he wanted to tell her, he would have. "Okay, leaving that aside, can you at least tell me why she left these behind?"

Breadcrumbs, Bourne thought.

"No again. You can't mean after all this the Sovereign will get his money, after all."

Bourne shook his head. "He won't. I need to go back to Moscow." Where it all began.

"And the invasion?"

"Will not now happen. Without these diamonds, the Federation will have trouble feeding its own people, let alone anyone else, including its standing army in Eastern Ukraine."

She gave him a puzzled look. "You know this for a fact?"

"As much as anyone can know anything in this life. And in a few months a twenty-one-billion-dollar loan to Rosneft will come due. Where will the Kremlin get the money? If Rosneft, the largest state-run energy company, fails, Russia will be in ruins."

At last, she acquiesced. "I'll accept that. I mean do I have a choice? We'll go to Moscow together."

He shook his head. "You need treatment and then a bit of rest." He spilled the remainder of the bag into her hand. "Then I'd like you to take on a special mission. As a personal favor."

"Of course." She watched him carefully, searching for a clue to his odd behavior, but none presented itself. Okay, then. She needed to exact some form of concession from him, a test, perhaps-minor perhaps, but significant to her. "But only if you promise to see me afterward."

"That," Bourne said, with a quick kiss to her lips, "was never in doubt."

62.

Igor Malachev was reading the morning's New York Times when he saw the Angelmaker enter the subterranean station. Savasin had a personal copy flown in daily. He was properly suspicious of electronic editions of any newspaper or magazine, believing they could be hacked at any time by anyone, their stories turned into propaganda or, worse, disinformation.

WESTERN POWERS READY TO ACT ON RUSSIA'S NEXT MOVE, ran the headline of the above-the-fold front page story he had just read. Another beside it: IRAQI ARMY RETAKES MAJOR OILFIELD FROM ISIS. And another: ALLEGED ISIS COINAGE NOW A MIRAGE. And still another: UKRAINE IN MAJOR TILT TOWARD NATO. The news was all bad and getting worse. The first minister had better have answers for this, he thought sourly. Otherwise, I'll be out of a job. Guilt by association was a favorite death sport inside the Kremlin.

As the Angelmaker approached, he folded the paper under his arm, automatically looking for his boss. It was two days past the deadline Timur Savasin had told him about. Russian troops and tanks were still inside Eastern Ukraine-though this was vehemently denied by their foreign minister and, last night, in a televised speech, by the Sovereign himself-but they had stalled. Now there was even some talk of a gradual withdrawal, a slow slinking back into the shadows of Crimea. Malachev did not know what had transpired over the last forty-eight hours to turn the tides, but he was both eager and anxious to find out from the first minister himself. Savasin had been out of contact since leaving the country with the Angelmaker. He had not asked their destination and the first minister had not volunteered it. He understood the need for compartmentalization and deniability, plausible or otherwise, as well as any siloviki inside the Kremlin.

Now here came the Angelmaker, an old-fashioned doctor's satchel swinging easily from her left hand. She smiled as she approached him beneath the domed tile ceiling of the first minister's private subway station. But it was an odd, inward smile, as if she had just told herself an amusing joke. On this morning, Malachev's vestigial sense of humor had vanished.

Already on edge, having ingested the Kremlin's panic-mode stress level over the last two days, Malachev took a step forward, anticipating his sighting of the first minister; he needed explanations that were not forthcoming in the offices or even the gossipy halls of the Kremlin. Soon enough, however, it became clear that the Angelmaker had arrived by herself.

"Where is he?" he asked the Angelmaker when she stopped in front of him. "Where is the first minister?"

"Timur has been unavoidably delayed," she said.

Her smile was so completely gone, he wondered whether he had imagined it.

"Delayed by the cluster-fuck at the Kremlin, I imagine." When she made no response, he added: "When can I expect him?"

"He told me to board his train, and wait."

Malachev immediately blocked her path. Just behind him Timur Savasin's opulent train stood waiting, its doors open. But he had strict orders not to allow anyone on the train without direct orders-oral or written-from the first minister.

"You didn't answer my question. How long is the first minister expected to be delayed?"