At precisely 10:45 PM Karim al-Jamil's computer terminal chimed softly, reminding him that the second of his twice-daily briefings with the DCI was fifteen minutes away. This concerned him less than the mysterious disappearance of Matthew Lerner. He'd asked the Old Man, but the b.a.s.t.a.r.d had only said that Lerner was "on a.s.signment." That could mean anything. Like all the best schemers, Karim al-Jamil hated loose ends, which was precisely what Matthew Lerner had become. Even Anne didn't know where the man was, an oddity in itself. Normally, she would have booked Lerner's itinerary personally. The DCI was up to something. Karim al-Jamil could not discount the possibility that Lerner's sudden disappearance had something to do with Anne. He'd have to find out, as quickly as possible. That meant dealing directly with the DCI.

The monitor chimed again: time to go. He scooped up the translations of the latest Dujja chatter the Typhon team had compiled, picking up a couple more as he stepped out of his office. He read them on his way up to the DCI's suite.

Anne was waiting for him, sitting behind her desk in her usual formal pose. Her eyes lit up for a tenth of a second when he appeared. Then she said, "He's ready for you."

Karim al-Jamil nodded, strode past her. She buzzed him into the enormous office. The DCI was on the phone, but he waved Karim al-Jamil in.

"That's right. All stations to remain on highest alert."

It seemed clear he was talking to the chief of Operations Directorate.

"The director of the IAEA was briefed yesterday morning," the DCI continued, after listening for a moment to the voice on the other end. "Their personnel have been mobilized and are temporarily under our aegis. Yes. The chief problem now is keeping Homeland Security from s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the works. No, as of now we're maintaining a strict news blackout on all of this. The last thing we need is the media instigating a panic among the civilian population." He nodded. "All right. Keep me informed, night or day."

He put down the receiver, motioned for Karim al-Jamil to take a seat. "What d'you have for me?"

"A break, finally." Karim al-Jamil handed over one of the sheets he'd been given on exiting his office. "There's unusual activity with Dujja's signature coming out of Yemen."

The DCI nodded as he studied the intel. "Specifically Shabwah, in the south, I see."

"Shabwah is mountainous, spa.r.s.ely populated," Karim al-Jamil said. "Perfect for building an underground nuclear facility."

"I agree," the Old Man said. "Let's get Skorpion units there ASAP. But this time I want ground a.s.sist." He grabbed the phone. "There are two battalions of Marine Rangers stationed in Djibouti. I'll get them to send in a full company to coordinate with our personnel." His eyes were alight. "Good work, Martin. Your people may have provided us with the means to nip this nightmare in the bud."

"Thank you, sir."

Karim al-Jamil smiled. The Old Man would have been right, had the intel not been disinformation his people at Dujja had put out into the airwaves. Though the wilds of Shabwah did indeed make an excellent hiding place-one that he and his brother had once considered-the actual location of Dujja's underground nuclear facility was, in fact, nowhere near South Yemen.

Soraya was lucky in one sense, though at first blush it failed to impress her: Veins of metal in the walls of the catacombs made it impossible for the policeman to contact the rest of his contingent. He was on his own.

Regaining her composure, she ceased to move. Her struggling had only served to work her body deeper into the slurry pit in the catacombs' floor. She was up to her crotch in muck, and the Ukrainian policeman was strutting toward her.

It was only when he neared her that she realized just how frightened he was. Maybe he'd lost a brother or a daughter to the catacombs, who knew? In any event, it was clear that he was all too aware of the multiple dangers that lurked in every corner of the tunnels. He saw her now where he'd been imagining himself ever since he'd been ordered inside.

"For the love of G.o.d, please help me!"

The policeman, as he approached the edge of the pit, played the beam of light over her. She had one arm in front of her, the other behind her back.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

"I'm a tourist. I got lost down here." She began to cry. "I'm afraid. I'm afraid I'll drown."

"A tourist, no. I've been told who you are." He shook his head. "For you and your friend, it's too late. You're both in too deep." He drew his gun, leveled it at her. "Anyway, you're both going to die tonight."

"Don't be so sure," Soraya said, shooting him through the heart with the ASP pistol.

The policeman's eyes opened wide, and he fell backward as if he were a cardboard target on a firing range. He dropped the light, which rang onto the floor and immediately went out.

"s.h.i.t," she said under her breath.

She stowed the ASP back in its shoulder holster. She'd drawn it the moment she'd regained her equilibrium, had been holding it behind her back as the policeman approached. Now her first order of business was to reach his feet. She lowered her upper torso into the muck, trying to splay herself out horizontally. This maneuver also had the effect of moving her closer to her objective.

Float, she thought. Float, dammit!

She let her legs go slack, using the strength in her upper body only to inch forward, arms stretched out in front of her to their farthest extent. She could feel the muck sucking at her, reluctant to release her legs and hips. She fought down another wave of panic, set her mind firmly on moving one inch at a time. In the darkness, it was more difficult. Once or twice she thought she was already under, already dead.

Then her fingers encountered rubber: boot soles! Squirming another centimeter or two brought her enough purchase to grasp the policeman's boots. She took a deep breath, hauled with all her might. She didn't move, but he did. His feet and legs angled down into the pit. That was it, though; his huge body wouldn't budge another millimeter.

It was all she needed. Using his corpse as a makeshift ramp, she slowly but surely pulled herself hand-over-hand up his legs until she could grasp his wide belt with both her palms. In this way, she slowly pulled herself the rest of the way out of the slurry pit.

For a moment, she lay atop him, feeling the thunder of her heart, hearing the breath sigh in and out of her lungs. At length, she rolled away, onto the damp floor of the catacombs, and regained her feet.

As she feared, his light was beyond repair. Wiping off her own, she prayed that it still worked. A feeble beam flickered on, off, on again. Now that she had more leverage, she was able to roll the policeman into the pit. She scuffed at the floor, kicking dirt and debris over whatever blood had leaked from him.

Knowing the light's batteries were running down, she hurried into the left-hand fork, heading toward the access point nearest Dr. Pavlyna's house.

At the second refueling stop, the plane carrying Martin Lindros took on a new pa.s.senger. This individual sat down next to Lindros and said something in the Bedouin-inflected Arabic of Abbud ibn Aziz.

"But you are not Abbud ibn Aziz," Lindros said, turning his head in the way of a blind man. He still wore the black cloth hood.

"No, indeed. I am his brother, Muta ibn Aziz."

"Are you as good at maiming human beings as your brother is?"

"I leave such things to my brother," Muta ibn Aziz said rather sharply.

Lindros, whose sense of hearing had been honed by his lack of sight, heard the note; he thought he could exploit the emotion behind it. "Your hands are clean, I imagine." He sensed the other studying him, as if he'd just stumbled upon a new species of mammal.

"My conscience is clear."

Lindros shrugged. "It doesn't matter to me that you're lying."

Muta ibn Aziz struck him across the face.

Lindros tasted his own blood. He wondered dimly if his lip could swell any more than it already had. "You have more in common with your brother than you seem to think," he said thickly.

"My brother and I could not be more different."

There was an awkward silence. Lindros realized that Muta had revealed something he regretted. He wondered what dispute lay between Abbud and Muta, and whether there was a way to exploit it.

"I've spent some weeks with Abbud ibn Aziz," Lindros said. "He has tortured me then, when that didn't work, he tried to become my friend."

"Hah!"

"That was my response also," Lindros said. "All he wanted was how much I knew about the shooting of Hamid ibn Ashef."

He could hear Muta's body shift, could feel him moving closer. When Muta spoke again, his voice was barely audible over the drone of the engines. "Why would he want to know about that? Did he tell you?"

"That would have been stupid." Lindros's internal antenna was focused now on what had just happened. The mention of the Hamid ibn Ashef incident was obviously of extreme importance to both brothers. Why? "Abbud ibn Aziz may be many things, but stupid isn't one of them."

"No, he's not stupid." Muta's voice had hardened into steel. "But a liar and a deceiver, now that is another matter."

Karim al-Jamil bin Hamid ibn Ashraf al-Wahhib, the man who for the past few days had pa.s.sed for Martin Lindros, was in the process of worming his way into the CI mainframe, where every iota of sensitive data was stored. The problem was, he didn't know the access code that would unlock the digital gateway. The real Martin Lindros had failed to cough up his access code. No surprise there. He'd devised an alternative that was as elegant as it was efficient. Trying to hack into the CI mainframe was useless. People more talented than he was at geek-logic had tried and failed. The CI firewall-known as Sentinel-was notorious for its vault-like properties.

The problem was then how to get into a hackproof computer for which you lacked an access code. Karim knew that if he could shut down the CI mainframe, the CI tech people would issue everyone-including him-new access codes. The only way to do that was to introduce a computer virus into the system. Since that couldn't be done from the outside-because of Sentinel-it had to be done from the inside.

Therefore, he had needed an absolutely foolproof way to get the computer virus into the CI building. Far too dangerous for him or Anne to smuggle it in; and there were too many safeguards for it to be done another way. No. It could not even be brought into the building by a CI agent. This was the problem he and Fadi had spent months trying to solve.

Here was what they had come up with: The cipher on the b.u.t.ton the CI agents had found on Fadi's shirt wasn't a cipher at all, which was why Tim Hytner had gotten nowhere in trying to break it. It was step-by-step instructions on how to reconstruct the virus using ordinary computer binary code-a string of root-level commands that worked in the background, totally invisible. Once reconstructed on a CI computer, the root-level commands attacked the operating system-in this case, UNIX-corrupting its basic commands. The process would create wholesale havoc, rendering the CI terminals inoperative in the s.p.a.ce of six minutes.

There was a safeguard, too, so that even if by some fluke of luck Hytner tumbled to the fact that it wasn't a cipher, he couldn't inadvertently begin the chain of instructions-because they were reversed.

He brought up the computer file Hytner was working on, typed in the binary string in reverse, saved it to a file. Then he exited the Linux OS and went into C++ computer language. Pasting the chain of instructions into this set up the steps he needed to build the virus in C++.

Karim al-Jamil, staring at the virus, needed only to depress one key to activate it. In a tenth of a second it would insinuate itself into the operating system-not simply the main pathways, but also the byways and cross-connections. In other words, it would clog and then corrupt the data streams as they entered and exited the CI mainframe, thus bypa.s.sing Sentinel altogether. This could only be accomplished on a networked computer inside CI, because Sentinel would stop any extra-network attack, no matter how sophisticated, dead in its tracks.

First, however, there was one more matter that required his attention. On another screen, he brought up a personnel file and began affixing to it a string of irrefutable artifacts, including the cipher he was using to create the virus.

This done, he made hard copies of the file, put the pages in a CI dossier, locked it away. With one fingertip, he cleared the screen, brought up the program that had been patiently awaiting its birth. Exhaling a small sigh of satisfaction, he depressed the key.

The virus was activated.

Nineteen.

ABBUD IBN AZIZ, alone with the waves and his darkening thoughts, was the first to see Fadi emerge from the hole where the grate had been. It had been more than three hours since he and the police contingent had gone in. Attuned to the facial expressions and body language of his leader, he knew at once that Bourne hadn't been found. This was very bad for him, because it was very bad for Fadi. Then the policemen stumbled out, gasping for breath.

Abbud ibn Aziz heard Lieutenant Kove's plaintive voice. "I've lost a man in this operation, Major General Romanchenko."

"I've lost far more than that, Lieutenant," Fadi snapped. "Your man failed to detain my objective. He was killed for his incompetence, a just punishment, I should say. Instead of whining to me, you should use this incident as a learning experience. Your men are not hard enough-not by a long shot."

Before Kove could respond, Fadi turned on his heel and strode down the beach to the jetty at which the sailboat was tied up.

"Get under way," he snapped as he came aboard.

He was in such a foul mood, sparks seemed to fly off him. At such times, Fadi was at his most volatile, as Abbud ibn Aziz knew better than anyone, save perhaps Karim al-Jamil. It was about Karim al-Jamil that he needed to talk to his leader now.

He waited until they had cast off, the sails trimmed. Gradually, they left the police contingent behind, plowing through the Black Sea night on its way to a dockage where Abbud ibn Aziz had a car waiting to take them to the airport. Sitting with Fadi in the bow, away from the two-man crew, he offered food and drink. For some time, they ate together with only the whooshing of the water purling in a symmetrical bow wave and the occasional hoot of a ship's horn, mournful as the cry of a lost child.

"While you were gone, I had a disturbing communication from Dr. Senarz," Abbud ibn Aziz said. "It is his contention that Dr. Veintrop is ready for the final series of procedures to complete the nuclear device, even though Veintrop denies this."

"Dr. Veintrop is stalling," Fadi said.

Abbud ibn Aziz nodded. "That's Dr. Senarz's contention, and I'm inclined to believe him. He's the nuclear physicist, after all. Anyway, it wouldn't be the first time we had a problem with Veintrop."

Fadi considered a moment. "All right. Call your brother. Have him fetch Katya Veintrop and bring her to Miran Shah, where we will meet him. I think once Dr. Veintrop gets a look at what we can do to his wife, he'll become compliant again."

Abbud ibn Aziz looked pointedly at his watch. "The last flight took off hours ago. The next one isn't scheduled until this evening."

Fadi sat rigid, his gaze unmoving. Once again, his consciousness had removed itself, Abbud ibn Aziz knew, back to the time when his father had been shot. His guilt over the incident was enormous. Many times, Abbud ibn Aziz had tried to counsel his leader and friend to keep his mind and energies in the present. But the incident had been complicated with the deep pain of betrayal, of murder. Fadi's mother had never forgiven him for the death of her only daughter. Abbud ibn Aziz's mother would never have placed such a terrible burden on him. But then she was Islamic; Fadi's mother was Christian, and this made all the difference. He himself had met Sarah ibn Ashef innumerable times, but he'd never given her a second thought until that night in Odessa. Fadi, on the other hand, was half English; who could fathom what he thought or felt about his sister, or why?

Abbud ibn Aziz felt the muscles of his abdomen tighten. He licked his lips and began the speech he'd been practicing.

"Fadi, this plan of Karim al-Jamil's has begun to worry me." Fadi still said nothing; his gaze never wavered. Had he even heard Abbud ibn Aziz's words? Abbud ibn Aziz had to a.s.sume so. He continued: "First, the secretiveness. I ask you questions, you refuse to answer. I try to check security, but I am obstructed by you and your brother. Second, there is the extreme danger of it. If we are thwarted, the entire Dujja network will be threatened, the major source of our funding exposed."

"Why bring this up now?" Fadi had not moved, had not removed his gaze from the past. He sounded like a ghost, making Abbud ibn Aziz shudder.

"It has been in my mind from the start. But now, I have discovered the ident.i.ty of the woman Karim al-Jamil is seeing."

"His mistress," Fadi said. "What of it?"

"Your father took an infidel as a mistress, Fadi. She became his wife."

Fadi's head swung around. His dark eyes were like those of a mongoose that has set its sights on a cobra. "You go too far, Abbud ibn Aziz. You speak now of my mother."

Abbud ibn Aziz had no choice but to shudder again. "I speak of Islam and of Christianity. Fadi, my friend, we live with the Christian occupation of our countries, the threat to our way of life. This is the battle we have vowed to fight, and to win. It is our cultural ident.i.ty, our very essence that hangs in the balance.

"Now Karim al-Jamil sleeps with an infidel, plants his seed in her, confides in her-who knows? If this were to become known among our people, they would rise up in anger, they would demand her death."

Fadi's face darkened. "Is this a threat I hear from your lips?"

"How could you think that? I would never say a word."

Fadi rose, his feet planted wide against the rocking of the sailboat, and looked down at his second. "Yet you sneak around, spying on my brother. Now you speak to me of this, you hold it over my head."

"My friend, I seek only to protect you from the influence of the infidel. I know, though the others do not, that this plan was conceived by Karim al-Jamil. Your brother consorts with the enemy. I know, because you yourself placed me in the enemy citadel. I know how many distractions and corruptions Western culture provides. The stink of them turned my stomach. But there are others for whom that may not be so."

"My brother?"

"It may be so, Fadi. For myself, I cannot say, since there is an impenetrable wall between him and me."

Fadi shook his fists. "Ah, now the truth comes out. You resent being kept in the dark, even though this is my brother's wish." Leaning over, he landed a stinging blow to his second's face. "I know what this is about. You want to be elevated above the others. You crave knowledge, Abbud ibn Aziz, because knowledge is power, and more power is what you're after."

Abbud ibn Aziz, quaking inside, did not move, did not dare raise a hand to his inflamed cheek. He knew only too well that Fadi was quite capable of kicking him overboard, leaving him to drown without an ounce of remorse. Still, he had embarked on a course. If he failed to see it through, he would never forgive himself.

"Fadi, if I show you a fistful of sand, what do you see?"

"You ask me riddles now?"

"I see the world. I see the hand of Allah," Abbud ibn Aziz hurried on. "This is the tribal Arab in me. I was born and raised in the desert. The pure and magnificent desert. You and Karim al-Jamil were born and raised in a Western metropolis. Yes, you must know your enemy in order to defeat him, as you have rightly told me. But Fadi, answer me this: What happens when you begin to identify with the enemy? Isn't it possible that you become the enemy?"

Fadi rocked from side to side on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. He was close to erupting entirely. "You dare imply-"