There was that off-kilter smile again. Malachev hated it and her.

"His delay," she said, "is permanent."

Then she swung the satchel, catching him flush on the face. As he staggered back, she shot him three times in the chest, making a neat isosceles triangle. Malachev had just enough time for his brain to register shock and outrage before he fell backward onto the platform. Around him, the pages of the paper settled like nesting cranes.

"Time," the Angelmaker called. "I've cleared the way."

A small figure, his greatcoat swirling around his ankles, removed himself from the deepest shadows behind her, moving swiftly into the light.

"Pity about Malachev," she said, her critical eye appraising the corpse.

"He was an idiot." Ivan Volkin fastidiously lifted the hem of his greatcoat as he stepped over the bloody corpse, into the parlor car.

The Angelmaker followed him, the door closed behind her, and, as Volkin, the eminence gris of all the Russian grupperovka, took his seat in the chair normally reserved for Timur Savasin, the train lurched into motion, sliding out of the station, into the tunnel burrowed under all the others, snaking beneath Moscow.

Volkin looked around the interior of the car. "I've dreamed about this moment for years." A wolfish smile overtook his face. "And now I know just how comfortable this chair is."

The Angelmaker, feet spread wide, balanced easily to the rocking motion. She swung the doctor's satchel up onto his lap.

He looked up at her. "And difficulties?"

"None I couldn't handle."

"Good." He nodded. "Good." He flipped open the brass catch, opened the satchel's jaws, peered into the interior. He removed one of the red silk bags, the gold dragon glinting in the car's warm lamplight. Spilling the diamonds into his cupped palm, he said, "How many bags?"

"One hundred seventy."

"Have you calculated the amount?"

"North of seventy-seven billion dollars, depending on the final examination of the diamonds."

"You looked at them?"

"I took a random sampling."

"And?"

"High grade," she said. "Very."

"Then I have it all. All the Sovereign's wealth."

"Not all," Bourne said, opening the door and stepping out of the bedroom car. He held up the red silk bag Mala had left for him-her breadcrumb through the last section of the dazzling mirrored labyrinth Ivan Volkin had built. The bag was empty of diamonds. It was weighted by pebbles from the Nicosia beach, but no point in telling the old man that.

A slow smile creased Volkin's face. "By God, Jason, you are persistent. I won't even ask how you got in here unobserved. That's your stock in trade, after all." He waved a hand. "Do sit down. You look like hell."

When Bourne made no move, Volkin shrugged. "Suit yourself."

Bourne, standing with legs apart, faced Mala, with Volkin between them. Volkin turned, picked a green bottle out of a bucket of ice, bracketed to the floor. "Champagne? No?" He grinned. "Considering the company, me neither." He dropped the bottle back into the bucket, the sound of a body falling through thin ice.

Crossing his hands in his lap, he said, "So, Jason, what can I do for you? I have the diamonds now. I've saved the world from the psychopath who runs this country-at least for the moment. Honestly, I think I deserve a medal."

"You deserve more than that," Bourne said. "It took me a while-longer than it should have, maybe. But you were counting on that. You knew how very few friends I have. You knew the only way to shake me up was to kill one of them. You picked Boris for many reasons, though only now are they fully clear to me."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

The train slowed, going around a bend in the tunnel. Both Bourne and Mala leaned more heavily on their flexed left leg. Volkin closed the satchel, placed it beside his chair.

Bourne, watching everything, said, "I started to wonder how Boris had obtained the information he sent me. One of his lieutenants at FSB? I didn't think so. The intel on what the Sovereign was up to was too hot for anyone but Boris to have seen. So the enigma remained, and got more knotty when I realized that his ciphered message to me contained the means to stop Russia in its tracks. Now there's intel you don't pick up from contacts or from the usual rumor mills."

Volkin stared at Bourne, unblinking, hands still folded placidly on his lap. "So how do you think Boris got the intel? I'm curious to hear your theory."

"He got it from you, Ivan. And that's no theory."

One of Volkin's eyebrows arched up. "No?"

"It's a fact."

"Now you sound like a madman."

Bourne smiled. "I'll admit that for the longest time you had me fooled. I was sure Savasin had ordered Boris's death."

"You mean he didn't?"

"He had Svetlana killed in Cairo. That much I can pin on him. But Boris...?" He shook his head slowly. "You see, I had assumed that Borz was working on Savasin's orders. It made perfect sense. The first minister hated Boris, would have done just about anything to destroy his reputation. But order his execution? No, that was not his way."

"I've known Savasin longer than you do, and far, far better. It would be a mistake to underestimate how badly he wanted Boris out of the way."

"But you see, Ivan, I underestimated how badly you wanted Boris out of the way."

Volkin's upper lip curled in a sneer. "You couldn't be more wrong. I liked Boris. He saved my twins from certain death."

"True enough. And your fondness for each other might have survived, except that for you the world wasn't enough. You decided to step out of the shadows, to straddle all three upper layers of Russian rule. You became a friend and advisor to everyone, but underneath you played the mobs against the oligarchs, the oligarchs against the Kremlin's siloviki. All to increase your power exponentially.

"But Boris was smarter than you in many ways. He saw through you, saw what you were up to, and he found it intolerable. Worse for you, he proved incorruptible. You tried every way you knew how to keep his nose out of your business, but he wouldn't listen. That's Boris, through and through."

"Do you hear this?" Volkin said, addressing the Angelmaker. "Can you beat this? He's raving like a madman."

"What I forgot about in the morass you were throwing at me, Ivan, was right in front of me all along. Your hall of mirrors began with your grandson pretending to be Boris's courier, handing me the false coin in Hamburg. He intercepted Boris's real courier. How did he know Boris had dispatched a courier, let alone where he was going and who he was going to meet?"

"Savasin could have-"

"No, Ivan. Boris knew every one of Savasin's people-even the ones embedded inside the FSB. No, it had to be someone else. And once I knew the impersonator's real identity, I should have put it together. But I didn't. I had more pressing things on my mind, including the loss of my best friend. You were dead on about that, anyway.

"You saw to it I received Boris's cipher, but only under your control. You knew about the Sovereign's plans, about the Omega and Gulf Bank. What you didn't know-and neither did Savasin-was how to get the money out. That's why you needed me."

Volkin was all but goggling at him. "I misjudged you, Jason. You need to be locked up."

"And then," Bourne went on, ignoring Volkin's outburst, "we come to Irina Vasilevna's seemingly inexplicable behavior at Mik's. Why did she lead me to the money launderer in the first place? I thought it was because it would bring me one step closer to Borz. Only much later did I realize that she had taken me there to unmask you. She wanted to let me know that Mik was your money launderer."

When the old man made no comment, Bourne went on. "Irina Vasilevna had had her fill of you controlling her life. She said as much to me. But, again, I was too preoccupied to see it as a key piece of the puzzle. No, she had broken away, but was too scared to tell you. She was going to show you when I exposed you through Mik's ledgers."

Volkin's eyes were half closed, as if he were on the verge of sleep. "That never happened."

"Of course it never happened," Bourne said. "You saw to it that it never happened. Why would Mik blow himself up? I asked myself this question over and over without coming up with an answer."

"But of course there is an answer," Volkin said. "There always is."

"For a man who's lost two generations of his family," Bourne said pointedly, "you're awfully pleased with yourself."

Volkin screwed up his face, pricked by Bourne's words. "And so I fucking should be. Mik didn't commit suicide, he wasn't the type. But I had to have a fail-safe in case Mik made a mistake. I arranged to have an explosive device planted in his office." Volkin spread his hands. "You understand, Jason, I couldn't risk the evidence of money transfers falling into the wrong hands. Like yours, for instance."

"Or Irina's."

Volkin frowned. "That was...unfortunate. It was only a week ago that I discovered that she and Aleksandr had gone into business on their own." He shook his head. "Without proper upbringing children can be so foolish."

"How was the bomb rigged?"

"I had remote surveillance installed. I knew everything before it happened." His smile was as thin as a razor blade. "One of the few benefits of old age is hard-learned knowledge. When it comes to business, never leave anything to chance."

Bourne took a step to his left. "So. How does it feel, Ivan, to know that you've murdered your grandchildren?"

Volkin leapt at Bourne, a stiletto in one hand, drawn from inside the cuff of his greatcoat. Bourne took the thrust, allowed it to pass between his side and his arm. He grabbed Volkin by the throat, and squeezed.

"Don't just stand there gaping. Do something!" Volkin said in a strangled voice. "Why don't you do something?"

The Angelmaker remained perfectly still, save for the motion caused by the train's progress across the diameter of Moscow.

Bourne turned his head. "Why didn't you kill him yourself? Why did you need me?"

"Your reason for killing him is emotional," the Angelmaker said. "Mine is purely financial."

Bourne shook his head. "The time for deluding yourself is over, Mala. Volkin was using you just like the Somali. Their methods might be different, but what they wanted from you was the same."

"You won't kill him? Have you become a coward?"

"You know me better than that," Bourne said. "But I'm tired of other people leading me around by the nose, including you."

With that, he hurled Volkin across the car. He fetched up against a table, which immediately canted over, crashed to the floor. Volkin rolled onto his stomach, and at last the Angelmaker moved, crossing the car to scoop up the satchel with the diamonds. Then she reached up to pull the emergency stop cord.

"I can't let you go," Bourne said. "You're culpable in all this."

"You won't harm me. We both know that."

And in that moment, while their eyes were fixed on each other, Volkin reached inside his greatcoat, pulled out a small .22 pistol. He aimed squarely at the Angelmaker's head, which, this close, he couldn't fail to hit. And he would have, had not Bourne, catching the movement out of the corner of his eye, pushed Mala away. The bullet caught him instead, twisting him to one side. But he rose, advancing on Volkin, who squeezed the trigger a second time an instant after the Angelmaker pulled the emergency cord.

The train lurched, losing speed with such rapidity that the shot, which otherwise would have penetrated Bourne's heart, struck his shoulder instead. Bourne kicked out, the toe of his shoe catching Volkin on the point of his chin. His head rocketed back at such an angle that when it slammed into the upended table edge, his neck cracked, fracturing multiple vertebrae. He was dead in an instant.

The train shuddered, lurching again with such violence that Bourne, bleeding from both wounds, lost his balance, slid to the floor. The train, jerking and juddering, came at last to rest in the middle of the tunnel, where it crouched panting, as if after a too-long run. In a moment, the engineer, no doubt armed, would be racing back to deal with the emergency.

The Angelmaker slammed the heel of her hand onto the manual override, and the car doors slid open. Staggering, Bourne regained his feet, launched himself after her, but as he reached her he lost consciousness.

As he slipped down, she caught him in her free arm. For a moment, she stood with him in her arms, uncertain as to what to do. The anxious sound of hurried footfalls galvanized her. The engineer was coming. Setting the satchel down for a moment, she bent her knees, hoisted Bourne up over her shoulder in the classic fireman's lift and, at the edge of the car, leaped the two feet onto the tracks.

She headed away from the engineer, hurrying down the tunnel the way they had come. She could feel Bourne's blood running down her neck, into the channel of her spine. It dripped down her arm, scrolling across the pigskin of the satchel she gripped with a kind of desperation.

She heard an alarmed shout from behind her. "Hey! Hey, wait! Come back!" A warning shot had her scurrying to the side of the tunnel. In the shadows between two caged bulbs, she found a narrow metal maintenance door. It was locked. Setting down her precious satchel, she fiddled with the lock, using one of the dozen picks she carried with her. The lock was no match for her expertise. She gathered up the satchel, opened the door, stepped through, pulled it shut behind her.

Using the light app on her mobile, she took a look around. Flicking a switch on the wall beside her gave her all the illumination she needed. Stuffing the mobile into her pocket, she went on, unmindful of the weight on one shoulder. She had carried heavier weights than Bourne for longer distances. She possessed the endurance of the long-distance runner.

She found herself on the edge of a maintenance air shaft that ran vertically, upward to the public transport tunnel, downward into God alone knew what. It was black as pitch down there, impossible to make out a thing. An iron ladder bolted to one wall led up the vertical shaft. She heard the sound of the engineer's voice calling, and knew it was only a matter of time until he pulled the maintenance door open and found her.

Only one way out. She started to climb, one rung at a time. The ascent was awkward. Owing to Bourne's body, she was obliged to lean out farther than she would have liked, and her only grab hold was with the hand clutching the satchel. No matter. She'd had more difficult obstacles to overcome; she would overcome this one, as well.

She was perhaps a hundred yards up the ladder when Bourne suddenly came to. He started to flail, knocking her sideways so violently she was forced to stab out for the next rung. In so doing, she lost her hold on the satchel, which plummeted straight down. Down and down it sailed, until it was lost to sight in the blackness of the shaft. She listened for it to hit bottom, to get a reading on how far down she'd have to climb to retrieve it. She counted off the seconds, and when she heard it hit bottom, she did her calculation. At almost the same time, a fresh gout of blood from Bourne's wounds inundated her. She had her choice starkly laid out before her. If she went back down for the satchel Bourne would surely bleed out. If she took him up into the light and safety, the diamonds would be lost forever. The engineer would have raised the alarm, and when Volkin and Malachev were found the lower tunnel would be crawling with FSB agents. Then it would be sealed up for all time.

She couldn't save both. It was either the diamonds or Bourne. It took her less than a minute to make her decision.

FORTY DAYS LATER.

Christmas Eve. A fresh snowfall lay on Manhattan's sidewalks, obliterating the crunchy overlay of salt crystals. The gutters ran with filthy water, and already the heavy holiday traffic had churned the street beds to slush. Cars hissed by Lincoln Center, where, in the David H. Koch Theater, the evening's performance of Balanchine's The Nutcracker was just getting under way. The New York City Ballet production was, as usual, both lavish and impeccable, the audience-adults and children alike-was alight with the dance, the music, and the spectacle that for many epitomized Christmas.

Their excitement reached a fever pitch during the Arabian dance. There was a new soloist, recently promoted from the corps, and reviewers in plum orchestra seats and dancers in the company not onstage at the moment strained to see how the newcomer, Liis Ilves, would perform the sinuous dance. Liis was Estonian, the program informed the audience. Her surname meant "lynx," and she was proving to be every inch the lithe animal her family was named for as she whirled and pirouetted. The applause, when it came, was a tidal roar of acclamation, and much later, at her stall backstage, bouquets of flowers were brought in, lined up as on a florist's bench, in green glass vases.

Sara watched the young girl, with whom she had bonded over the past five days, with a growing sense of pride and affection that surprised her. The girl was an unusual mixture of navete and mental toughness. She still seemed lost in New York, grateful for the hermetically sealed world of ballet. She fed off the toughness of the exercises and rehearsals, reveled in the constant pressures imposed on body and mind. It was only latterly that Sara came to understand that this was a form of seeking shelter from a larger world which was frightening and, in every way, senseless. A drowning princess, she clung to her emaciated company with all the considerable will she possessed.

Bourne arrived, as he always did, unexpectedly, while Liis was in the tiny room she used to change in and out of street clothes.

"Did you get here on time?" Sara asked, after their first, fierce embrace. "Did you see her?"

"I did."

"She was magnificent!" Sara's eyes were shining. "Thank you for introducing me to her."

"You're wearing a brace," he said.

"Leave it to you to kill a good mood."

"Seriously. How are your ribs? And don't tell me 'fine.'"

She gave him a wry smile. "It only hurts when I breathe, doc." Then she laughed. "It only hurts when I twist too quickly. Israeli doctors-they're all grin-and-bear-it types."

"And your father?"