"That's right."

In America, the place would have been ransacked to make it look like a robbery. Here, there was no need for such a ruse. "And you?"

"Mercifully, I was away on business." Her eyes had darkened as her vision turned inward. "This was three years ago. I returned four days after the home invasion. My family was at the mortuary, awaiting my identification." She wet her lips. "I buried them, alone."

"Your mother?"

"Ah, my mother." Irina produced a wan smile. "I visit her once a week, twice whenever I can. The sanitarium is in a beautiful location, but it's difficult to get to."

"Your mother," he said at length. "She was hurt in the home invasion."

"Oh, no." Irina swung around toward him. "She's been locked away ever since we...I...was born. She's been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia."

"These days there are a number of drugs-"

"She's tried them all." Irina's fingers wrapped around the wrought-iron balustrade as if they were bars on a cell. "Nothing's changed for her. It's been years now. Years and years. The same for her, but increasingly difficult for me. Sometimes she seems fine, other times she doesn't know me or mistakes me for the devil."

"The devil? Really?"

Irina nodded. "She hallucinates; it's all quite real for her, I assure you." She gave a little laugh that turned into a half sob. "When she mistakes me...I've taken to speaking like the person or...entity she thinks I am. The doctors caution me not to do this, but I don't listen. At least then I can converse with her. Isn't that better than watching her talk to an invisible demon for an hour?"

Whether she was seeking a form of validation or simply asking a rhetorical question was unclear. Either way, Bourne said nothing, wanting to give her more space. The trick was simple but effective. The more she talked the better sense he had of her. But as the silence grew longer, it was clear she was in need of prompting.

"Why the devil, do you think?"

"Oh, that's clear enough," Irina said. "My mother is convinced her disease is actually a demonic possession. She feels she's doing penance for her sins."

"What sins?"

"No idea, but, well, you know they could just as well be imagined as real." When Irina unwound her fingers from the balustrade they left damp marks.

Bourne did not need that telltale clue to know she was lying, just as she had been lying when she had confirmed Bourne's statement that her father was a dissident. He could see the truth hiding behind her eyes. She knew perfectly well what her mother's sins were. He was beginning to wonder whether they were knowing what her husband and son were really into.

4.

For Veniamin Belov, the hotel-the former palace-was nothing less than a prison. It was only when he was quits with it, having driven his car outside the grounds, that his breathing returned to normal. Not that Belov breathed easy anywhere in Moscow these days. He would have liked nothing more than to flee the country entirely, make himself a new home somewhere where Jews weren't hated and persecuted. Where might that be? he often found himself wondering. These days, the dangers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were ever more serious. Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, these were all implacable enemies bent on Israel's destruction. And with the way the Israeli right wing was acting-pushing Israel's borders further and further into the Gaza Strip-was it any wonder? He felt a terrible sadness at the political direction Israel had chosen. He had no love for the Palestinians per se, but didn't they deserve their own land as Israelis did? The exigencies of the implications had made him realize that all the paths laid out before him would put him in harm's way. After much fretful consideration, he had chosen. But was it the right one? He had yet to find out.

Several miles from the hotel, Belov consulted an app on his mobile that showed the location of every traffic surveillance camera in Moscow in real time, since the police and FSB were continually adding more. Satisfied, he turned off, went down a side street, and pulled to the curb. There he switched license plates, using one-one of many-stowed in a secret compartment in the trunk he had built himself.

In a burned-out lot in Chelobityevo, a Muslim slum of unrelieved squalor not far from the Garden Ring Road, Belov disposed of the identity that allowed him access to the hotel. The lot was a pit that stank of unwashed flesh, human excrement, and despair. Ignoring the furtive life all around him-old men sleeping while young boys copulated-he made a pile of his passport, driver's license, and siloviki identity card. From the inside pocket of his jacket he retrieved a small box made of thin sheets of granite. It was cool, despite having been near his body. From within, he extracted a disc not larger than a throat lozenge. This he placed atop the pile, then he lit a match and dropped it. The result was a sudden flare of green-white as the phosphorus compound ignited.

Forty minutes later, a new identity intact, he was down on the right bank of the Moskva River, beneath the shadowed bulk of the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, a surveillance-free zone, at least at the moment. At the western edge of the Kremlin, it was the first span across the river, its earliest fifteenth-century incarnation being a live bridge of boats, linking the Kremlin with Zamoskvorechye, on the southern bank. The more modern stone bridge had given way to the present-day span made of steel.

In deepest shadow, Belov saw the tiny red glow of a cigarette end, and he slipped down the bank toward it. The moon was full and riding high in a sky largely devoid of clouds. He felt its cold, silver light on his shoulders like a mantle. He did not believe in werewolves or elves. He did not even believe in the Golem forged in the ghetto of the Polish Jews. But he did believe that demons stalked the earth. The horror that was being visited on Ukraine by Russia on his own doorstep was proof enough.

The question of how well Svetlana knew General Karpov, whether he would willingly or unwillingly follow her direction in undermining the Sovereign's planned full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was to be the subject of tonight's rendezvous. His contact claimed to possess intel Svetlana needed to help keep their beloved Ukraine free of the Sovereign's pernicious influence. It was too sensitive to be transmitted. Any electronic transmission, no matter how secure, was a potentially lethal liability to people like Belov. In these days of complete network surveillance the old-school methodology had returned as the most secure way of transferring information from one agent to another.

The contact threw down the butt of his cigarette, mashed it underfoot as Belov came up.

"Yasha," he said, "what have I always told you? Leave no sign."

"It's one of those terrible cheap Russian brands. The kind found around here all the time." With an almost theatrical sigh, Yasha bent down, snatched up the flattened butt, put it in his pocket. He was a small man, pale, his eyes big in his skull-like head. With his undershot jaw, he looked harmless as a mouse, which was the point. "We have only six days," he said.

Belov sucked in his breath. "So short a time. I was sure we had more."

"Well, we don't. The economic sanctions imposed by the West have put enormous pressure on the Sovereign. The ruble is plunging, along with the stock market. Food, already scarce, is getting scarcer. There are daily demonstrations in the Moscow streets. Far worse, the oligarchs are getting restless; their holdings are shrinking daily. He has to act before his coalition of siloviki and oligarchs fractures." Yasha's voice, which should have been triumphant, was instead sulky. He was a bit of a drama queen, but he was a fine agent for all that-slippery as an eel. "Our plan now seems untenable at best-at worst, impossible."

"That's why we have someone on the inside working for us."

Yasha made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. "How can you trust her? I mean, she's Russian."

"She's half Ukrainian, which makes all the difference. Besides, I'm Russian, Yasha."

"Sadly, that's true," Yasha said with a crooked smile.

Belov opened his mouth in time to eat the bullet fired from the Makarov that had appeared in Yasha's hand. As he staggered back, blood spurting, clawing at his mouth, Yasha whirled, reacting to a movement in the periphery of his vision.

He blinked as he saw an unexpected figure in the wavering light of a passing ship.

"Rebeka!" he said. "Why are you here?"

She landed a vicious kick, sending his Makarov spinning out into the river.

"Rebeka, please! I was taking care of the leak!"

"You're not the solution, Yasha," she said. "You're the problem. Belov wasn't the leak; it was you. You sold him-and the people like us-out to the FSB. We stood ready to help the Ukrainians' pivot to the West succeed. But now..."

The ship's horn sounded mournfully, ushering Yasha into oblivion as a bullet fired from a Glock fitted with a noise suppressor entered his forehead and penetrated his brain.

5.

At roughly the same time Belov was gasping his last breath, the final table of wedding guests was served their appetizers. Boris Karpov excused himself from the crowd of well-wishers surrounding him and Svetlana at their table in the hotel's ballroom and rose to slip away. With a hand on his forearm, Svetlana held him up.

"Where are you going?"

"What? Now I'm married I can't even take a piss without explaining myself?" he said only half jovially.

Svetlana stared hard into his eyes. "I don't believe you."

Boris's expression hardened. "Shall we proceed directly to the divorce without even the bliss of our wedding night?"

She laughed suddenly, her face brightening like the moon in the sun's reflected light. "There will be many things for us both to get used to, my love, not the least of which is sharing the same space. I know you were a confirmed bachelor."

Boris laid a hand on her cheek. "Until I met you."

"With many, many female conquests."

"Every man is required to sow his wild oats."

"As long as they're not too wild." She leaned in and kissed him hard on the mouth. "Don't be long, my love. We've more dancing and toasting to do."

In truth, Boris's bladder was not the pressing issue of the moment; it was his preplanned meeting with Jason Bourne. He knew why Bourne had come to Moscow, and it wasn't primarily to attend the wedding. He was on the trail of Ivan Borz, the master terrorist-arms dealer, who might be Chechen or might very well not be. Even the FSB wasn't sure, just as they had in their possession over a dozen surveillance photos claiming to be of Ivan Borz, all of them of different men. Bourne had thought he'd killed Borz twice last year, only to discover that both men were not Borz at all, but stalking horses. Borz had been running El Ghadan, the terrorist who had attempted to force Bourne to kill the American president. How Bourne had managed to wriggle out of that spider's web was still a mystery to Boris, one he meant to have his friend answer tonight. But before they got to reminiscing there was vital intel Boris needed to impart to Bourne-intel that concerned Ivan Borz.

In fact, Borz had been the reason Boris had been in cipher communication with his team in Cairo earlier in the evening. Goga, his lead man there, claimed he had found traces of Borz-the real Borz this time, so his contacts swore-in the Egyptian capital. It turned out that Borz had peculiar sexual proclivities, a bit of information Boris had shared with Bourne during their last phone call several days ago. If true, it was a decided weakness, one Boris was only happy to exploit. His honeymoon would have to wait until he returned from Cairo, possibly with Borz's head. He would ask Jason to accompany him. The arrangements had already been made; it would be like old times. Boris suddenly felt in need of old times.

Being the director of the newly merged FSB and FSB-2 was draining-overseeing the daily intel, devising infiltration plans, as well as dealing with the Kremlin hierarchy in which a terrible schism had appeared, dividing the conservative and the liberal members in constant feuds, backstabbing, and ideologically motivated purges. Picking his way through that land-mined territory was like dancing on the head of a pin, but Boris hardly thought of himself as an angel. Too much blood had run under the bridge for that fantasy. It was a good thing he had his second-in-command, Colonel Vladimir Korsolov, to count on. Korsolov came from a family of high-ranking siloviki, mother and father both. He knew all the trapdoors and a good number of the skeletons, hiding out deep in the Kremlin closets. He made Boris's job a good deal easier.

He thought of all this as he hurried down the wide corridor. He was picked up by a pair of bodyguards, who flanked him as he headed toward the bathroom. He waved them off as he went inside, stayed there for three minutes, then returned to the corridor, heading toward the loggia where he had asked Jason to meet him. He wanted no FSB personnel around when he met with his American friend, no CCTV, either, which was why he had hit upon the loggia.

Pushing through a swinging door, he found himself beneath the east side of the loggia, whose tiled roof was held up by twelve pillars in the shape of caryatids. The women in their Grecian robes regarded him with solemn grace. In the courtyard itself, cherry trees rose up from the four corners. Then it was roses and zinnia all the way to the center, where a marble fountain with water overflowing an urn carried by a female water bearer filled the night air with the sounds of what seemed to him children playing. It recalled to him scenes from his youth, before his life in the service of the siloviki was even a gleam in his eye. How simple everything was then. His parents had a country house, with a cherry orchard ragged from inattention. One morning in early summer when he was ten, his father roused him from sleep. He did so with his great walrus moustache, the feel of which always made Boris giggle.

"You and I," his father said, as Boris dressed, "are going to have an adventure!"

That entire summer, father and son labored in the cherry orchard, raking, watering, feeding, pruning, and later, spreading nets over the budding fruit to keep the birds from stealing it. All of June, July, and August, when they came out to the house, Boris worked from morning till dusk. He and his father scarcely said a word to each other, but his father's proud smile, and a kiss on the top of his head each night, meant everything to him. It was the happiest summer of his life. Looking back on it, it was perhaps his only happy summer, for his father keeled over and died on the coldest day of the following winter-the ides of February-when snow covered the ground from horizon to horizon. Boris, ever the stoic, watched his father lowered into his grave with dry eyes and nary a sound escaping his lips. But days later, out at the house, he awoke to an icy dawn, drew on his clothes, and padded out to the cherry orchard.

The trees were bare, pale as bone stripped of flesh and sinew, dead looking. Behind him were the dark imprints of his snow boots. In the center of the orchard, he removed his boots and thick wool socks. He stood in his bare feet, sunken into the snow until they reached the frozen, black earth, and there he sobbed without respite, until he was as dry and empty as the husk of an old and forgotten tree.

He stepped out into the garden, the light of a full moon falling on him like the memories of his childhood. The memories of a father he rarely thought of now and had all but forgotten. How could he have pushed such a powerful figure into the obscurity of time, cobwebbed and dim, he berated himself, when all that he had accomplished, all that he was, was due to his father's strict but fair teaching?

It was a question he was destined never to find the answer to. At that moment a length of shining piano wire, thin as a nerve, was whipped around his neck, pulled so quickly across his throat he didn't have time to get his fingers up to protect the vulnerable spot, so tight he could not draw another breath.

Boris struggled. He was not a young man, but he was as fit as any soldier, and a good deal more canny. He had been in numerous lethal situations in his time and had survived them all. At what point he became aware that this time was different he'd never be able to say. But when that moment did come, when he knew that his unknown and unseen assailant was implacable, unstoppable, and would within moments succeed in killing him, he was prepared. In a sense, he had always been prepared. From the moment his father died he had taken a path through life that would familiarize him with death. And now, at the end, he knew why.

He'd known this moment would come, sooner rather than later. There was no surprise, no sorrow, not even a sense of loss. But then into his mind came all the people he had killed and had ordered murdered, and he grew afraid that their souls were waiting for him, to judge him, and to cast him down. That instant passed as in the misty distance the cherry orchard of his childhood appeared. He made out his father standing in the center of it, looking at him, waiting. As if in a dream, he moved closer to his father. He was in the mist now. It should have felt cold, but instead it was warm and welcoming. Closer and closer he came to his father, until they were one.

6.

Colonel Vladimir Korsolov had the indifferent gaze of a doctor or a gravedigger. He held the appearance of a man who knew he was different and didn't much care for it. Perhaps as a child he had been beaten up for it. In any event, he seemed to regard everyone else with a disdain he could not afford to turn inward.

This assessment ran through Bourne's mind when Korsolov and three of his FSB minions intercepted him as he hurried toward the loggia. He was late. It had been easy enough to break away from Irina, but then, on his way out of the ballroom, he had been detained by Svetlana, and it had been difficult to cut short his conversation with the bride. To his surprise, two of the agents held Irina between them as if she were a prisoner.

"Halt," Korsolov ordered. "Stay where you are, Bourne. Do not move."

The third agent positioned himself directly behind Bourne, so close Bourne could hear his stentorian breathing, like a farm animal.

Korsolov, having introduced himself, now stood in front of Bourne, his eyes steady, his countenance perfectly blank. "Why are you near the loggia?"

With events clearly overrunning Boris's timeline, Bourne felt the truth was the best course. "I was on my way to meet Boris."

"General Karpov, you mean. Is this correct?"

"It is." Bourne craned his neck. "Why is Irina Vasilevna being held?"

"I'll ask the questions, Bourne." Korsolov took a step closer. He was the FSB colonel who had eyed Bourne and Irina while they were dancing. "Why were you meeting with General Karpov?"

"I've no idea," Bourne said evenly. He was getting a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach that he couldn't shake no matter how hard he tried. "Boris told me he wanted to talk. He suggested we meet in the loggia after the first course was served."

Korsolov waited a beat before he said, "And?"

"And nothing. I'm on my way to meet him, and instead here I am talking to you and your goons."

Korsolov frowned. "'Goons'? I don't know this word."

"It's American slang for 'FSB agents.'"

Korsolov's frown deepened, but behind his back Bourne saw Irina's brief ironic smile. The colonel took another step closer to Bourne. He lowered his voice. "Listen, Bourne, I don't like Americans-especially Americans who think they have special privileges in Moscow. Going forward don't for a minute think you'll get the kind of lax treatment General Karpov afforded you."

Bourne reacted to Korsolov's use of the past tense. "What do you mean?" The falling sensation in the pit of his stomach accelerated. "Has something happened to Boris?"

Without a word, Korsolov turned on his heel, led the way down the remaining length of the corridor. Bourne was keenly aware of the goon at his back. He saw Irina shake her head before she, too, was marched down the corridor. The unmistakable sound of a generator threw harsh decibels at them, and Bourne's heart sank. In this context a generator could only mean one thing: a crime scene.

Double doors opened onto the loggia. Floodlights used to illuminate the hotel entrance for the wedding were being relocated, their electrical cords snaking away behind them, all connected to a large, ungainly-looking generator, coughing like a dragon with emphysema.

The moment Bourne caught a glimpse of the body, he broke away from the close-knit group. In the periphery of his vision he was aware of the goon who had been behind him start to sprint after him, but be arrested by a hand signal from Korsolov, who, smartly, was more interested in Bourne's reaction than in keeping him on a close tether.

Bourne had seen plenty of corpses in his day, some at his own hand, but the sight of the too-wide red smile that ran across Boris's throat brought him to his knees.

"Jesus, Boris," he whispered, "how could you have let this happen?"

Boris lay on his back, his arms splayed to either side, palms up as if in supplication. Bourne noted the fresh dirt on the knees of his friend's trousers. What were his last thoughts as the life pumped out of him? Bourne could not guess, but his own thoughts turned to the many times he and Boris had shared both danger and laughs, had gotten drunk on good vodka and bad, had hidden each other, lied to each other when they needed to, but mostly told each other the truth, backed each other up, saved each other. A deep sadness welled up in Bourne where moments before agitation and dread had uncomfortably mixed. Friends of Boris's nature came only rarely into people's lives, and in their profession possibly not at all. Boris was a rare bird, and this was no way for him to die.

He resisted the urge to get up, smash the generator, plunge the loggia into shadows and moonlight, the better to hide the atrocity. Murder was bad enough, but the harsh light stripped Boris's corpse of all dignity and sense of, if not peace, which was never a word in Boris's vocabulary, then proper rest.

With these thoughts threatening to overwhelm his uncanny powers of observation, Bourne brought himself from the brink of despair back to the moment at hand. Tough though it might be, he knew the only way to honor Boris's memory was to solve the enigma of his murder. He had little doubt that his friend's sudden demise had something to do with whatever it was Boris had wanted to talk to him about. Even on the evening of his wedding Boris felt it couldn't wait. The urgency of whatever situation Boris had found himself in was as clear and hot as the spotlights illuminating him.