"I'm getting out of here," he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

"You'll do nothing of the kind." Her hand on his shoulder was firm, strong, incontestable. "You're under my care now, Andrei. Orders from on high."

He knew what that meant. Savasin must have received a report about the incident in the hotel room, no doubt drawn up with all requisite venom by Colonel Korsolov or one of his damned minions. Avilov cursed the day he had ever been in the same room with Svetlana Novachenko. Was this Boris Karpov reaching out from the grave? He dismissed the thought almost as soon as it bubbled up, was furious with himself that it had ever occurred to him.

"Time to change your bandage," Dr. Nova said. "I'll just be a moment."

She crossed to the bathroom, closed the door behind her. The room was like a ticking clock or a body laid out on an operating table, turned inside out, its beating heart exposed. He looked over to the door, which, he saw, she had not fully closed. He moved from the position into which she had pushed him, edging down the bed. A gap between the edge of the door and its jamb revealed her to him, as if he were watching an X-rated movie. She had her skirt rucked up around her hips. One gleaming leg was exposed. Her thigh gleamed, substantial, hard-muscled, ending in the deep-shadowed dell of unfulfilled promise.

As he watched, she rose slightly, wiping herself, and his eyes were transfixed by the erotic boundary of curling hair, black as a moonless night. Her legs were spread as she hunched down, her pelvis canted slightly forward. Had she been aware he was watching he would have sworn she was offering herself to him. But that invitation was merely a product of his fevered thoughts.

Then she was finished, the toilet flushed, the water ran. When she emerged he was precisely where he had been when she had left.

She came over to the bed. "Ready?"

Her hands rose, pink and fresh from her thorough scrubbing.

"This might hurt, but only a little."

He felt a tremor begin along the insides of his thighs, traveling inward and outward at the same time.

She bent over him. Involuntarily, his nostrils flared: she smelled of gardenias and musk. "Is that perfume you're wearing?" Hyperaware of his lengthening penis, he was having trouble breathing normally.

"I don't wear perfume."

He closed his eyes, his senses swirling with the scent of her. He drew his knees up.

"Stay still, please."

He was as hard as a rock. "Couldn't a nurse do this?" he asked as he felt her cool fingers, and then the surgical scissors on his skin.

"I like to admire my own work," she said, her mocking laugh reduced to an impertinent smile. "An impulse you can surely understand, Andrei."

Stung, his eyes flew open. "I'd prefer you call me by my rank."

"I'd have preferred not to work on you, Andrei, but we all have our crosses to bear." Having peeled the last layer off, she stood back. "There."

"How does it look?"

Only afterward, when he was alone again, did it occur to him how much like a child he had sounded. And then he couldn't get Dr. Nova out of his mind. Or any part of his body.

14.

No," Irina said when they returned to her mansion, "don't turn on the lights."

"Are you worried that the FSB has staked out the property?" Bourne asked.

She shook her head. "You took care of that. It's just..."

He stood close to her, felt rather than saw her shrug.

"Sometimes I prefer being in the dark."

Perfect, Bourne thought. My normal state of being.

She moved, and he saw the glitter in her eyes. The illumination from the security lights, striped through the curtains, limned her in profile like an old-fashioned cameo. He thought she might take his arm then, but she didn't. Instead, she headed for the marble-and-gilt staircase.

"Time for sleep," she said, and he didn't contradict her.

But an hour or so later, when she was safely tucked in bed, Bourne crept out of his room barefoot, down the curved, baronial stairs, along the hallways until he reached the room that had been her father's study. It smelled of old cigar smoke, leather book bindings, and carpet fibers.

- On the floor above him, Irina was on the phone with Aleksandr.

"He's here with me now," she said softly into her mobile.

"What about the coin?"

"Patience, my love."

"Patience is not my strong suit."

She gave a low, seductive chuckle. "Except in the most important area." She lay back against the pillows, one hand behind her head. "Not to worry. This is a man who cannot be hurried. He is suspicious of everything. I need to move slowly and with exceptional caution. As we have discussed, gaining his trust won't be a simple thing."

"If you move too slowly," her brother said, "we'll never find out the secret of that coin."

"Without Bourne we would never find out. And I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve for when the time is right. He'll come around, you'll see."

"And when will I see you? I'm dying for-"

"Not now, my love." She rose off the bed. She had not changed out of her clothes. "It's time for me to see what there is to see."

"Keep me apprised."

"Always."

"Wherever you go," Aleksandr said, "my love is with you."

- Closing the heavy wooden door behind him, Bourne crossed the Isfahan carpet to the oversize burlwood desk, where with a small squeak he sat in the old-fashioned swivel chair and switched on the task light. Rummaging through the drawers he found a magnifying glass, set it on the leather-framed baize blotter, drew out from his pocket the Star of David. Perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps the point wasn't damaged. Perhaps this wasn't Sara's star. Setting it on a clean sheet of notepaper, he held it under the light, peering at it in its small puddle through the magnifying glass.

At once, his heart sank. There was the damage-the same damage he'd seen on the star the last time he and Sara were in Jerusalem. Quickly tucking the star away, he drew out the Roman coin.

"We have urgent matters to discuss," Boris had whispered in his ear when they had met in the ballroom. Had he already had intimations of his death? Was that why he'd had the coin prepared, just in case he couldn't tell Bourne in person what was so urgent?

Bourne peered at it through the lens, turning it this way and that. It took him some moments but at length he saw it, and moved the coin on end, closer to the lens. There it was: a hairline juncture running all the way around the coin's edge. It was a fake, then, but a damn fine one. And what had Boris secreted inside it?

He was just thinking of trying to open the coin when the door swung open and Irina floated through.

"I couldn't sleep, either."

The task lamp lit the lower half of her, leaving her in shadow from the waist up. She had not turned on any of the lights on her way downstairs to find him. Not that it mattered. Sometime previous a troubled dawn had stumbled past the heavy drapes, and now spilled across the floor like mercury.

"May I ask what you're doing?" she said, as she rounded the desk and came to stand over his left arm.

He lifted the coin. "It's genuine. A Dupondius-that's a measure of its worth-from sometime after twenty-five BCE."

"Very old, then."

"Yes."

"As you said."

He watched her as she plucked the coin from his fingers, rolled it around. "Again, why did the general send it to you?"

"I still have no clue."

She threw him a hard look. "How is that possible?"

Bourne sighed. "I told you that I had to take Boris's word that we were old friends. Remember?"

She nodded. "I do."

"Years ago, I was shot in Marseilles. I was pitched into the Med, lost consciousness. I would have died if fishermen hadn't pulled me out, if their doctor hadn't nursed me back to life. One thing he couldn't do was give me back my memory. Everything from before I was shot is lost to me, including, I'm thinking, what this means."

He took the coin back from her. It was too precious for her to keep long, especially with the magnifier around. He put both the coin and the magnifier away, switched off the task lamp.

Sunlight shimmered through the gap in the drapes. A new day, a new mystery.

15.

Why didn't you ask Ivan about the coin?" Irina asked now in the ghostly, dawn-lit study.

"How do you know I didn't?" When she didn't reply, Bourne said, "I was waiting to see if you would ask him. Why didn't you?"

"I think you can work that out for yourself."

"Why didn't you want him to know about its existence?"

She sighed. "Because then he'd take it away from me, just like he's taken everything away from me." She looked hard at Bourne. "He thinks he's doing me a favor, making things easier." The tip of her forefinger made tight circles on the desktop. "I don't want that kind of help-from him or from anyone."

"Meaning me," Bourne said, rising.

Her eyes held steady on him. "When I ask for help that's another matter entirely."

He nodded. "Fair enough."

She made a disdainful face. "Whoever said 'All's fair in love and war' never read Tolstoy."

"Or any other Russian novelist, for that matter."

She gave him a wry smile. "True. We Russians aren't ones for happy endings. So few of us ever had one. You can't fill your belly on hope."

It was odd, Bourne thought, hearing these proletariat sentiments from a scion of a wealthy father. But he'd already figured out that Irina wasn't like any other member of her family. Defiantly so, if he was any judge of character. What had happened to her along the way to make her so filled with rage, so fiercely independent?

Irina watched him with a curious expression. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm interested in Ivan's theory of who killed Karpov."

"Ivan's evidence is circumstantial. Until we determine that Borz is in Moscow-or was up until last night-we can't be sure of anything."

"But it's a theory that makes perfect sense," Bourne said. "General Karpov had made Borz a target. If he discovered something vital about him, it figures Borz would want him dead."

"Now that the general has been murdered you should be more interested in the mystery of the coin, but you're not. Why?"

"I already told you."

"Meaning?"

"Borz," Bourne said. "He's the real reason I came to Moscow. To find him."

"To kill him."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"A terrorist perpetually in the shadows, who pays men to impersonate him. Do I need another reason?"

Irina gave him a hard look. "A man like you? Yes."

Bourne hesitated. The worst thing he could do was to underestimate this woman. He didn't trust her, but he had to respect both her intellect and her cunning. "Borz was behind a plot to force me to kill the president of the United States. He had a friend of mine and her two-year-old daughter abducted to make sure I did."

"And yet the American president is alive and well."