Bourne nodded. “We’ll deal with them in a minute.”
“Aren’t you concerned they’ll burst in here, guns drawn?”
“They won’t show themselves until I’ve left here; they want me, not you.” Bourne touched the ring with his forefinger. “Go on.”
Suparwita inclined his head. “They were hiding from Holly’s uncle. He had vowed to bring her back to the family compound in the High Atlas Mountains.”
“They’re Berbers. Of course, Moreaumeans ‘Moor,’ ” Bourne mused. “Why did Holly’s uncle want to bring her back to Morocco?”
Suparwita looked at Bourne for a long time. “I imagine you knew, once.”
“Noah Perlis had the ring last, so he must have murdered Holly to get it.” Bourne took the ring in his hand. “Why did he want it? What’s so important about a wedding ring?”
“That,” Suparwita said, “is a part of the story you were trying to discover.”
“That was some time ago. Now I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Perlis had flats in many cities,” Suparwita said, “but he was based in London, which was where Holly went when she traveled abroad during the eighteen months before she returned to Bali. Perlis must have followed her back here to kill her and obtain the ring for himself.”
“How do you know all this?” Bourne asked.
Suparwita’s face broke into one of his thousand-watt smiles. All at once he looked like the genie conjured up by Aladdin. “I know,” he said, “because you told me.”
Soraya Moore noticed the differences between the old Central Intelligence under the late Veronica Hart and the new CI under M. Errol Danziger the moment she walked into CI headquarters in Washington, DC. For one thing, security had been beefed up to the point that getting through the various checkpoints felt like infiltrating a medieval fortress. For another, she didn’t recognize a single member of the security personnel on duty. Every face had that hard, beady look only the US military can instill in a human being. She wasn’t surprised by this. After all, before being appointed as DCI by the president, M. Errol Danziger had been the NSA’s deputy director of Signals Intelligence, with a long and distinguished career in the armed forces and then in the DoD. He also had a long and distinguished career as a brass-balled sonovabitch. No, what startled her was simply the speed with which the new DCI had installed his own people inside CI’s formerly sacrosanct walls.
From the time that it had been the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the agency had been its own domain, entirely free of interference from either the Pentagon or its intelligence arm, the NSA. Now, because of the growing power of Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday, CI was being merged with NSA, its unique DNA being diluted. M. Errol Danziger was now its director, and Danziger was Secretary Halliday’s creature.
Soraya, the director of Typhon, a Muslim-staffed anti-terrorist agency operating under the aegis of CI, considered the changes Danziger had instigated during the several weeks she had been away in Cairo. She felt lucky that Typhon was semi-independent. She reported directly to the DCI, bypassing the various directorate heads. She was half Arab and she knew all her people, had in most instances handpicked them. They would follow her through the gates of hell, if she asked it of them. But what about her friends and colleagues inside CI itself? Would they stay or would they go?
She got off at the DCI’s floor, drenched in the eerie green light filtered through bullet- and bombproof glass, and came up against a young man, reed-thin, steely-eyed, with a high-and-tight marine haircut. He was sitting behind a desk, riffling through a stack of papers. The nameplate on his desk read: LT. R. SIMMONS READE.
“Good afternoon, I’m Soraya Moore,” she said. “I have an appointment with the DCI.”
Lt. R. Simmons Reade glanced up and gave her a neutral look that nevertheless seemed to hold the hint of a sneer. He wore a blue suit, a starched white shirt, and a red-and-blue regimental striped tie. Without glancing at his computer terminal he said, “You hadan appointment with Director Danziger. That was fifteen days ago.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I was in the field, cleaning up the loose ends of the mission in northern Iran that had to be-”
The light’s greenish tint made Reade’s face seem longer, sharper, dangerous, almost like a weapon. “You disobeyed a direct order from Director Danziger.”
“The new DCI had just been installed,” she said. “He had no way of knowing-”
“And yet Director Danziger knows all he needs to know about you, Ms. Moore.”
Soraya bristled. “What the hell does that mean? And it’s DirectorMoore.”
“Not surprisingly, you’re out of date, Ms. Moore,” Reade said blandly. “You’ve been terminated.”
“What? You’ve got to be joking. I can’t-” Soraya felt as if she were being sucked down a sinkhole that had just appeared beneath her feet. “I demand to see the DCI!”
Reade’s face got even harder, like a pitchman for the “Be All You Can Be” slogan. “As of this moment, your clearance has been revoked. Please surrender your ID, company credit cards, and cell phone.”
Soraya leaned forward, her fists on the sleek desktop. “Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”
“I’m the voice of Director Danziger.”
“I don’t believe a word you say.”
“Your cards won’t work. There’s nowhere to go but out.”
She stood back up. “Tell the DCI I’ll be in my office when he decides he has time to debrief me.”
R. Simmons Reade reached down beside his desk and lifted a small, topless cardboard box, which he slid across to her. Soraya looked down and almost choked on her tongue. There, neatly stacked, was every personal item she’d had in her office.
Ican only repeat what you yourself told me.” Suparwita stood up and, with him, Bourne.
“So even then I was concerned with Noah Perlis.” It wasn’t a question and the Balinese shaman didn’t treat it as such. “But why? And what was his connection to Holly Marie Moreau?”
“Whatever the truth of it,” Suparwita said, “it seems likely they met in London.”
“And what of the odd lettering that runs around the inside of the ring?”
“You showed it to me once, hoping I could help. I have no idea what it means.”
“It isn’t any modern language,” Bourne said, still racking his damaged memory for details.
Suparwita took a step toward him and lowered his voice until it was just above a whisper. Nevertheless, it penetrated into Bourne’s mind like the sting of a wasp.
“As I said, you were born in December, Siwa’s month.” He pronounced the god Shiva’s name as all Balinese did. “Further, you were born on Siwa’s day: the last day of the month, which is both the ending and the beginning. Do you understand? You are destined to die and be born again.”
“I already did that eight months ago when Arkadin shot me.”
Suparwita nodded gravely. “Had I not given you a draft of the resurrection lily beforehand, it’s very likely you would have died from that wound.”
“You saved me,” Bourne said. “Why?”
Suparwita gave him another of his thousand-watt grins. “We are linked, you and I.” He shrugged. “Who can say how or why?”
Bourne, needing to turn to practical matters, said, “There are two of them outside, I checked before I came in.”
“And yet you led them here.”
Now it was Bourne’s turn to grin. He lowered his voice even further. “All part of the plan, my friend.”
Suparwita raised a hand. “Before you carry out your plan, there is something you must know and something I must teach you.”
He paused long enough for Bourne to wonder what was on his mind. He knew the shaman well enough to understand when something grave was about to be discussed. He’d seen that expression just before Suparwita had fed him the resurrection lily concoction in this very room some months ago.