The couscous came, but he was without an appetite. Soraya entered the café first, but Arkadin wasn’t far behind. He expected Soraya to have a haunted look, but she didn’t, and Bourne wondered whether he had underestimated her. If so, it would be the day’s first positive sign.
Soraya picked her way through the café and sat down without saying a word. For some moments Arkadin remained in the doorway, watching everything. Bourne began to eat his couscous with his right hand, which was the custom. His left hand lay in his lap.
“How are you?” he said.
“Fucked.”
He gave her a thin smile. “How many men does he have with him?”
She appeared surprised. “Three.”
Arkadin came toward them. On the way, he picked up a chair from an adjacent table and sat down on it.
“How’s the couscous?”
“Not bad,” Bourne said. He pushed the plate across the table.
Arkadin used the ends of the fingers of his right hand to taste the couscous. He nodded, licked off the oil, and wiped his fingers on the tabletop.
Arkadin hunched forward. “We’ve been chasing each other a long time.”
Bourne took the plate back. “And now here we are.”
“Cozy as three bugs in a Moroccan carpet.”
Bourne took up his fork. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to shoot with the gun you have aimed at me under the table.”
A flicker passed across Arkadin’s face. “It’s not for you to decide, is it?”
“That’s a matter of opinion. I have a Beretta 8000 loaded with.357 hollow-points aimed at your balls.”
A black expression was erased by Arkadin’s harsh laugh. It sounded to Bourne as if he had never really learned how to laugh. “Bugs in a carpet indeed,” Arkadin said.
“Besides,” Bourne said, “with me dead, you’ll never get out of that house alive.”
“I think otherwise.”
Bourne buried the tines of the fork in a mound of couscous. “Listen to me, Leonid, there are other forces at work here, forces neither you nor I can handle.”
“I can handle anything. And I brought allies.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bourne said, quoting an Arab proverb.
Arkadin’s eyes narrowed. “What are you suggesting?”
“We are the only two graduates of Treadstone. We were trained for situations like this. But the two of us are not exactly alike. Mirror images, perhaps.”
“You’ve got ten seconds. Get to the fucking point.”
“Together we can beat Severus Domna.”
Arkadin snorted. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Think about it. Severus Domna brought us here, it has prepared the house for us, and it believes that when we come together one of us will wind up killing the other.”
“And?”
“And then everything goes according to its plan.” Bourne waited a moment. “Our only chance is to do the unexpected.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Bourne nodded.
“Until he’s not.”
Arkadin placed the Magpul he had been holding onto the table, and Bourne set down the Beretta that Tanirt had given him.
“We’re a team,” Bourne said. “The three of us.”
Arkadin glanced briefly at Soraya. “Spit it out then.”
“First and foremost,” Bourne said, “is a man named Idir Syphax.”
The house crouched in the middle of the block, its flanks rubbing up against those of its neighbors. Night had fallen, swift and complete, like a hood thrown over a head. All around the valley the mountains were pitch black. A bitter wind, knifing through the town, hurried snow crystals or grains of sand across streets and down alleys. The light from the stars was hallucinatory.
Idir Syphax was crouched on a rooftop across the street from the rear of the house. Flanking him were two Severus Domna sharpshooters, their Sako TRG-22 rifles aimed and ready. Idir watched the house as if waiting for his daughter to come home, as if feeling the danger of unknown places spreading its wings, as if the house itself were his child. And, in a way, it was. He had designed the house with advice from Tanirt. “I want to build a fortress,” he had told her. And she had said: “You cannot do better than to follow the plan of the Great Temple of Baal. It was the greatest fortress known to man.” After scrutinizing what she had drawn for him, he had agreed, and he himself had helped to build it. Every board, every nail, every length of rebar, every form of concrete bore the tattoo of his sweat. The house was invented not for people, but for a thing, an idea, an ideal, even; anyway, something intangible. In that sense it was a sacred place, as sacred as any mosque. It was the beginning of all things, and the end. Alpha and omega, a cosmos unto itself.
Idir understood this but others in Severus Domna did not. For Benjamin El-Arian, the house was a Venus flytrap. For Marlon Etana, it was a means to an end. In any event, for them both, the house was a dead thing, a pack animal at best. It was not holy, it was not a gateway to the divine. They did not understand that Tanirt had chosen the spot, using the ancient incantation she possessed and he coveted. He had once asked her what language she was chanting. It was Ugaritic. She said it was spoken by the alchemists of King Solomon’s court, in what is now Syria. That was why she had placed the statue in the very center of the house, the space from which its holiness emanated. He’d had to have it smuggled in because any statues of this sort were strictly forbidden by sharia. And of course, neither Benjamin El-Arian nor Marlon Etana knew of its existence. They’d have had him burned alive as a heretic. But if Tanirt had taught him anything, it was that there were ancient forces-perhaps mysteries was a better term-that had preceded religion, any religion, even Judaism, which were all the inventions of mankind in attempts to come to terms with the terror of death. The origins of the mysteries, Tanirt had told him, were divine, which according to her had nothing to do with man’s conception of God. “Did Baal exist?” she had asked rhetorically. “I doubt it. But something did.”
Save for the wind, the night was still. He knew they were coming, but he didn’t know from where. All attempts to follow them had ended in failure-a failure, he told himself, that was not unexpected. On the other hand, there had been attraction. Arkadin’s three men had been neutralized at the sacrifice of four of his own. These Russians were fierce warriors. Not that it mattered; Arkadin would not gain entrance no matter what he tried. All houses had vulnerabilities that could serve as points of entrance-sewers, for instance, or drains, or the place where the electrical lines came in. Because this house was not designed for people there were no sewers. Because there was no heating or cooling, no refrigerators or ovens to drain electricity, all the electrical systems ran off a giant generator in a shielded room within the house. There was, literally, no way into the house that wouldn’t set off the various alarms, which would in turn trip other security measures.
His son, Badis, had wanted to come, but of course Idir wouldn’t hear of it. Badis still asked about Tanirt even though at eleven he was old enough to know better. Badis remembered only when Tanirt loved his father, or at least said she loved him. Now she engendered in Idir a bone-deep terror that invaded his nights, his very sleep, shattering it with unspeakable nightmares.