better.”
“She never slept with him,” Tyrone said before he could stop himself.
“Sure. She told you that.” Munch, munch, munch went Kendall’s jaws, shredding the
crisp bacon. “What’d you expect her to say?”
The sonovabitch was playing mind games with him, Tyrone knew that for a fact.
Trouble was, he wasn’t lying. Tyrone knew how Soraya felt about Bourne-it was written
all over her face every time she saw him or his name came up. Though she’d said
otherwise, the question Kendall had just raised had gnawed at him like an addict at a
candy bar.
It was difficult not to envy Bourne with his freedom, his encyclopedic knowledge, his
friendship as equals with Deron. But all these things Tyrone dealt with in his own way. It
was Soraya’s love for Bourne that was so hard to live with.
He heard the scrape of chair legs and then felt the presence of Kendall as he squatted
down beside him. It was astonishing, Tyrone thought, how much heat another human
being gave off.
“I have to say, Tyrone, you really have taken a beating,” Kendall said. “I think you
deserve a reward for how well you’ve held up. Shit, we’ve had suspects in here who were
crying for their mamas after twenty-four hours. Not you, though.” The quick click-clack
of a metal utensil against a china plate. “How about some eggs and bacon? Man, this was
some big plate of food, I surely can’t finish it myself. So come on. Join me.”
As the hood was raised high enough to expose his mouth Tyrone was conflicted. His
mind told him to refuse the offer, but his severely shrunken stomach yearned for real
food. He could smell the rich flavors of bacon and eggs, felt the food warm as a kiss
against his lips.
“Hey, man, what’re you waiting for?”
Fuck it, Tyrone said to himself. The tastes of the food exploded inside his mouth. He
wanted to moan in pleasure. He wolfed down the first few forkfuls fed to him, then
forced himself to chew slowly and methodically, extracting every bit of flavor from the
hickory-smoked meat and the rich yolk.
“Tastes good,” Kendall said. He must have regained his feet because his voice was
above Tyrone when he said, “Tastes real good, doesn’t it?”
Tyrone was about to nod his assent when pain exploded in the pit of his stomach. He
grunted when it came again. He’d been kicked before, so he knew what Kendall was
doing. The third kick landed. He tried to hold on to his food, but the involuntary reaction had begun. A moment later he vomited up all the delicious food Kendall had fed him.
The Munich courier is the last one in the network,” Devra said. “His name is Egon
Kirsch, but that’s all I know. I never met him; no one I know did. Pyotr made sure that
link was completely compartmentalized. So far as I know Kirsch dealt directly with Pyotr
and no one else.”
“Who does Kirsch deliver his intel to?” Arkadin said. “Who’s at the other end of the
network?”
“I have no idea.”
He believed her. “Did Heinrich and Kirsch have a particular meeting place?”
She shook her head.
On the Lufthansa flight from Istanbul to Munich he sat shoulder-to-shoulder with her
and wondered what the hell he was doing. She’d given him all the information he was
going to get from her. He had the plans; he was on the last lap of his mission. All that
remained was to deliver the plans to Icoupov, find Kirsch, and persuade him to lead
Arkadin back to the end of the network. Child’s play.
Which begged the question of what to do with Devra. He’d already made up his mind
to kill her, as he’d killed Marlene and so many others. It was a fait accompli, a fixed
point detailed in his mind, a diamond that only needed polishing to sparkle into life.
Sitting in the jetliner he heard the quick report from the gun, leaves falling over her dead body, covering her like a blanket.
Devra, who was seated on the aisle, got up, made her way back to the lavatories.
Arkadin closed his eyes and was back in the sooty stench of Nizhny Tagil, men with filed
teeth and blurry tattoos, women old before their time, bent, swigging homemade vodka
from plastic soda bottles, girls with sunken eyes, bereft of a future. And then the mass
grave…
His eyes popped open. He was having difficulty breathing. Heaving himself to his feet,
he followed Devra. She was the last of the passengers waiting. The accordion door on the
right opened, an older women bustled out, squeezed by Devra then Arkadin. Devra went
into the lavatory, closed the door, and locked it. The OCCUPIED sign came on.
Arkadin walked to the door, stood in front of it for a moment. Then he knocked on it
gently.
“Just a minute,” her voice came to him.
Leaning his head against the door, he said, “Devra, it’s me.” And after a short silence,
“Open the door.”
A moment later, the door folded back. She stood in front of him.
“I want to come in,” he said.
Their eyes locked for the space of several heartbeats as each tried to gauge the intent of
the other.
Then she backed up against the tiny sink, Arkadin stepped inside, with some difficulty
shut the door behind him, and turned the lock.
Thirty
IT’S STATE-OF-THE-ART,” Gunter Mьller said. “Guaranteed.”
Both he and Moira were wearing hard hats as they walked through the series of semi-
automated workshops of Kaller Steelworks Gesellschaft, where the coupling link that
would receive the LNG tankers as they nosed into the NextGen Long Beach terminal had
been manufactured.
Mьller, the team leader on the NextGen coupling link project, was a senior vice
president of Kaller, a smallish man dressed impeccably in a conservatively cut three-
piece chalk-striped suit, expensive shoes, and a tie in black and gold, Munich’s colors
since the time of the Holy Roman Empire. His skin was bright pink, as if he’d just had his
face steam-cleaned, and thick brown hair, graying at the sides. He talked slowly and
distinctly in good English, though he was rather endearingly weak with modern
American idioms.
At each step he explained the manufacturing process with excruciating detail, great
pride. Spread out before them were the design drawings, along with the specs, to which
Mьller referred time and again.
Moira was listening with only one ear. How her situation had changed now that the
Firm was out of the picture, now that NextGen was on its own with the security of its
terminal operations in Long Beach, now that she had been reassigned.
But the more things change, she thought, the more they stay the same. The moment
Noah had handed her the packet for Damascus she knew she wouldn’t disengage herself
from the Long Beach terminal project. No matter what Noah or his bosses had
determined she couldn’t leave NextGen or this project in jeopardy. Mьller, like everyone
else at Kaller and, for that matter, nearly everyone at NextGen, had no idea she worked
for the Firm. Only she knew she should be on a flight to Damascus, not here with him.
She had a grace period of mere hours before her contact at NextGen would begin to ask
questions as to why she was still on the LNG terminal project. By then, she hoped to
convince NextGen’s president of the wisdom of her disobeying the Firm’s orders.
Finally, they reached the loading bay where the sixteen parts of the coupling link were
being packed for shipment by air to Long Beach on the NextGen 747 jet that had brought
her and Bourne to Munich.
“As specified in the contract, our team of engineers will be accompanying you on the