His attention was suddenly drawn to a movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye. Soraya was sprinting the last fifteen feet that separated them. She struck Oserov a blow on his left wrist that paralyzed his hand. Arkadin saw the dirk as it fell at Oserov’s feet.
For a frozen instant he stared into Soraya’s eyes. A secret, silent communication passed between them and then, in a flash, vanished, never to be spoken of or referred to aloud. Arkadin, his heart seething with a rage that had been building for years, slammed the heel of his hand against the side of Oserov’s head. The head jerked hard to the right, against the wall of Arkadin’s encircling arm. The vertebrae cracked, Oserov spasmed like an insane marionette. His fingernails clawed at Arkadin’s forearm, drawing rivulets of blood. He bellowed like a buffalo, and for an instant his strength was so great that he almost broke away.
Then Arkadin cracked his neck again, harder this time, and whatever burst of energy was left in Oserov drained into the gutter. Oserov gave a terrible, soft cry. He tried to say something that seemed vitally important to him, but all that escaped his mouth was his tongue and a gout of blood.
Still, Arkadin would not let him go. He continued to slam the side of his head as if the neck had not already sustained multiple fractures.
“Arkadin,” Soraya said softly, “he’s dead.”
He stared at her, the light of madness in his eyes. Her hands were on him, trying to pry Oserov away from him, but he could feel nothing. It was as if his nerve endings were locked within the last moments of the struggle, as if his will to destroy Oserov would not terminate, would not allow him to let go. And he thought: If I keep hold of him I’ll be able to kill him again and again.
Gradually, however, the hurricane of emotion began to ebb. He felt Soraya’s hands on him. Then he heard her voice, repeating, “He’s dead,” and at last he unwound his arm. The corpse collapsed into a grotesque heap.
He looked down at Oserov’s ruined face and felt neither triumph nor satisfaction. He felt nothing at all. Empty. There was nothing inside him, just the abyss growing darker and deeper.
Punching a code on his cell phone, he walked to the rear of the car. He unlocked the trunk and took out the laptop in its protective case.
Looking around, Soraya could see a number of men in their Berber robes. They had been watching from the shadows. The moment Oserov slid to the ground, they began to converge on the car.
“It’s Severus Domna,” Soraya said. “They’re coming for us.”
At that moment a car screeched to a halt beside them. Arkadin opened the rear door.
“Get in,” he commanded, and she obeyed.
Arkadin slid in beside her and the car took off. There were three men inside, all heavily armed. Arkadin spoke to them in rapid, idiomatic Russian, and Soraya remembered their exchange in Puerto Peñasco.
“What do you want from me now?” she had asked Arkadin.
And he had answered: “The same thing you want from me. Destruction.”
Then she heard the words scorched earth and knew that he had come to Tineghir prepared to wage war.
BOURNE ARRIVED IN Tineghir armed with the knowledge Tanirt had given him. Inevitably, he was drawn to the crowd around the bullet-riddled car. The dead man was unrecognizable. Nevertheless, because of the severely burn-scarred face he knew it must be Oserov.
There were no police around the body or, indeed, anywhere in the area. But there were plenty of Severus Domna soldiers, which in this area probably amounted to the same thing. No one had made a motion to do anything about the corpse. Flies buzzed in ever-increasing swarms, and the stench of death was beginning to spread like an airborne disease.
Bourne passed the scene by, got out of his car several blocks away, and proceeded on foot. What Tanirt had said had changed his plan, and not, he felt, for the better. But he had no choice, she had made that quite clear.
And so he looked up. The sky was the pale and abandoned color it often is at five in the morning, though it was now deep in the afternoon. Instead of heading toward the address he had been given, the Severus Domna house, he searched for a café or restaurant and, finding one, entered it. He sat down at a table facing the front and ordered a plate of couscous and whiskey berbere, which was mint tea. He waited with one leg crossed over the other, emptying his mind, thinking of Soraya and nothing else. The small glass had been placed before him, the fragrant tea poured from a height without a drop spilled when he saw the Russian glance in as he walked slowly by. It wasn’t Arkadin, but it was a Russian, Bourne could tell by his features and the way he used his eyes, which was neither Berber nor Muslim. This told him a number of things, none of them helpful.
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.”