“Are you looking for something in particular, Mr. Stone?”
“Call me Adam.” Somehow he knew there would be French doors out onto the back, and there was the pear tree in the mews. “I’m looking for the house martins.”
“I beg your pardon?” Her voice was pitched a bit higher, thinner, and her speech was more rapid than her sister’s had been.
“Tracy said that come spring a pair of house martins nested in that pear tree.”
She was at his shoulder. Her hair smelled of lemon. She wore an inexpensive cotton man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing sun-browned arms, jeans, not the fashionable low-riding ones, but sturdy Levi’s with the cuffs rolled up, cheap flats, scuffed and worn at the heels, and was in a light sweat as if she had been cleaning or rooting around for some time. She wore no jewelry, not even a wedding band. And yet her last name was Lincoln, not Atherton.
“Do you see a sign of them?” she asked in a brittle voice.
“No,” he said, turning away.
She frowned momentarily and remained silent for a long time.
“Chrissie?”
When she didn’t answer he went and got her a glass of cold water from the kitchen. She took it without comment and drank it slowly and methodically, as if it were medicine.
When she put the glass down, she said to him, “I’m afraid this was a mistake letting you in. I’d prefer if you left.”
Bourne nodded. He’d seen the flat; he didn’t know what he’d expected to find, maybe it was nothing at all, save the scent of her, lingering long after she had left. The night they had shared in Khartoum was far more intimate than if they had made love, an act that despite its name could seem impersonal, even detached. The revelation that came later, that Tracy had been working for Leonid Arkadin, had come like a cold slap across the face. But in the weeks after her death he’d been haunted by the notion that something was wrong with that equation. Not that he doubted she’d been in Arkadin’s employ, but deep down he couldn’t escape the notion that the story wasn’t that simple. It was altogether possible that he’d come here looking for some form of proof, a confirmation of his suspicion.
They had moved back to the front door now, and now Chrissie opened it for him. As he was about to step out, she said, “Mr. Stone-”
“Adam.”
She tried to smile and failed, her face seemed tight and pained. “Do you know what happened in Khartoum?”
Bourne hesitated. He stared out into the hallway, but what he was seeing was Tracy’s face, spattered with blood, as he cradled it in his lap.
“Please. I know I’ve been less than hospitable. I–I’m not thinking straight, you see.” She stood back for him to reenter.
Bourne turned back one hand on the partially open door. “Her death was an accident.”
Chrissie looked at him fearfully, expectantly. “You know this?”
“I was there.”
He saw the blood leave her face. She was staring at him fixedly, as if she couldn’t look away, as if with a terrible clarity she saw an accident about to happen.
“Will you tell me how she died?”
“I don’t think you want to hear the details.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. I–I need to know. She was my only sibling.” She shut the door and locked it and went over to an armchair, but she did not sit down. Rather, she stood behind it, staring into the middle distance. “I’ve been in a kind of personal hell since I got the news. A sister’s death, it’s-well, it’s not like any other death. I–I can’t explain it.”
Bourne watched her as she stood, her fingers dug into the high, arched back of the chair.
“She was struck by shards of glass, one went through her. She bled out in minutes; there was nothing anyone could do.”
“Poor Trace.” She was gripping the chair back so hard, her knuckles had turned white. “I begged her not to go, just as I begged her not to take that cursed assignment.”
“What assignment?”
“That bloody Goya.”
“Why did she tell you about the Goya?”
“It wasn’t the painting, but the assignment. She said it was going to be her last. She wanted me to know that. Because she knew I disapproved of what she did, I suppose.”
She shuddered. “Evil thing, that Black Painting.”
“You say that as if it were alive.”
She turned back to him. “In a sense it was, because it was connected with that man.”
“Arkadin.”
“She never told me his name. From what I could gather he gave her extremely dangerous assignments, but he paid her so well she accepted them all, at least that’s what she told me.”
“You didn’t believe her?”
“Oh, I believed her, all right, when we were young we made a pact never to lie to each other.” Her hair was a shade darker than her sister’s, and thicker, lush even, and her face was a bit less angular, softer, more open. It was also more careworn. She moved more quickly than Tracy, or perhaps it was that she moved in nervous bursts as if set off by a series of tiny interior explosions. “The problem arose when we grew up. I’m positive there were a great many things about her private life she refused to share.”
“You didn’t push it.”
“Secrecy was her choice,” she said defensively. “I honored her wishes.”
He followed her back into the bedroom. She stood looking around as if dazed, as if she’d lost her sister and now inexplicably couldn’t find her. Light slanting in through the window was splintered in lozenges and rectangles by the pear tree. It was mellow, toned, like the surface of a sepia print. She moved into one of those luminous geometric shapes now.
Her arms wound around her waist as if she were trying to hold in her emotions. “But of one thing I’m quite certain. That man’s a monster, she’d never have worked for him voluntarily. I’m sure he must have had something on her.”
An echo of his own suspicions. Maybe she had something to tell him after all. “Can you think of what it might be?”
“I already told you, Trace was the most secretive person on earth.”
“So there was nothing, no odd response to your questions, nothing of that nature.”
“No.” Chrissie drew the word out into two syllables. “I mean there was one thing, but, well, it’s kind of ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? How so?”
“I remember one time we were together and, for once, there didn’t seem to be anything to talk about after I’d exhausted the news about me. I was bored with all that, anyway, it was old news to me. I guess I got a bit frustrated, because I said, laughing, you know, something about was she hiding someone up her sleeve.”
Bourne cocked his head. “And?”
“Well, I mean she didn’t think it was funny, did she? She didn’t laugh, that’s for sure. I’d meant a boyfriend or a husband but she said, quite fiercely, that I was the only family she had.”
“You don’t think-”
“No, I don’t,” Chrissie said emphatically. “That wouldn’t be like her at all. She didn’t get on well with Mum and Dad, she was offended by everything about them. And they were deeply offended by her rebelliousness. I was the good daughter. I became a professor at Oxford, following in my father’s footsteps. But Trace… God only knows what they thought she was up to. Anyway, from the time she was thirteen or so they would fight like cats and dogs, until one day she stormed out of the house and never went back. No, I can tell you that she didn’t want a family of her own.”
“And you find that sad.”
“No,” Chrissie said, rather defiant. “I find it admirable.”
Well, at least we get to go after Bourne,” Marks said. “That’s some consolation, he’s one half of the Treadstone equation, isn’t he?”
“Don’t be dense,” Willard snapped. “Liss didn’t even bother to mention it as a peace offering because he knew I’d laugh in his face. He knows I’m the only person on earth-at least one under his control-who can get to Bourne without having his neck or back broken. No, he planned this out from the beginning, it was his whole reason for agreeing to back Treadstone in the first place, and I played right into his hand.”