felt certain, would have been no difficult matter. Instead he was gone and, with him, the intel he carried that would save her.
Absentmindedly, she stirred more sugar into her coffee, then took a sip. Her own people were now after her. No one knew better than she how ruthless and relentless the Mossad could be when they believed one of their own had betrayed them. She fervently wished there had been another way to tackle the problem, but she knew Colonel Ari Ben David better than to think he would believe her wild tale, and there was simply no one else to go to. Well, there was one person, but her training made her reluctant to involve anyone outside Mossad.
She heard the waitress’s voice, and turning, winced. The knife wound she had received in Damascus was not yet fully healed, and certain sharp movements of her upper torso reminded her it was still there.
“Would you care for more coffee?”
The waitress smiled at her. She looked like a Valkyrie. Rebeka could imagine her, armored, riding to Ragnarök, or, more realistically, out on a fishing boat, hauling in the morning’s catch. She nodded, returning the smile.
Turning back to the bay, she saw that a storm was coming in. Fine. The increasing bleakness matched her mood. She drank her coffee, added more sugar, and reflected on her life since she had met Jason Bourne on her regularly scheduled flight to Damascus. Though it was only six weeks ago, her former cover as a flight attendant seemed like a hundred years ago. How her life had changed since then! She and Bourne had both been after the same terrorist target, Semid Abdul-Qahhar. During their showdown with him, they had both been wounded. Though he had been shot in the shoulder, Bourne had flown her in a stolen helicopter across the southern border into Lebanon and, at her whispered instructions, had set down inside the Mossad encampment in Dahr El Ahmar.
Now she had no idea where he was or whether he would even talk to her. After all, it was she who had directed him to the encampment commanded by Ben David. For all she knew, he blamed her for what had happened.
No, even if she had been able to find him, she couldn’t go to Bourne with her suspicions, in spite of the fact that they had arisen during her convalescence in Dahr El Ahmar. As far as he was concerned, she was the enemy. She had betrayed him. After what had happened, how could he think otherwise?
And, of course, she herself had come under suspicion from having brought Bourne into the encampment. Colonel Ben David was not a forgiving man—in truth, he could not afford to be—but the change in how he viewed her shocked, then saddened, her. She was inured to the byzantine ways of her world, but nothing she had experienced before could have prepared her for how quickly and thoroughly he had turned on her. In fact, he had acted more like a jilted lover than her commanding officer. It was only later, after she had left, after she had decided to act on the intel she had overheard while convalescing, after she had been in full pursuit of her target, that the nature of Ben David’s true feelings had dawned on her. In hindsight, she realized that she had never been just an agent to him. Now, of course, it was too late to do anything about that, even had she wished to.
The stormfront hurled the first fistfuls of snow against the window with a force that startled her. The glass shivered and creaked in the wind. It was then that she turned around and saw the man, thin as a blade, sitting at a table near the door farthest from her, and knew that all was lost.
One man. A single man.” Christien looked at Bourne. “His name is Nicodemo, but he is more commonly known at the Djinn Who Lights The Way.”
“Meaning?”
“He is the advance guard, the outrider.”
“In other words, he gets things done.”
Christien nodded.
Bourne stared out the window. It was late morning. Clouds kept
rolling in from the north like waves on a seashore. Off and on, snow gusted in the wind eddies. The nameless man, who Bourne had come to think of as Alef, had passed into an exhausted sleep. Bourne and Christien had decided to take a break from interrogating him, though neither of them had wanted to.
“Tell me about Nicodemo,” Bourne said. “Why are you