convulsive gulps.
While he drank, Bourne built up snow walls on either side of them, to reflect back their own heat. He took back the canteen.
"First question: Do you know what happened up here?"
The boy shook his head.
"You must've seen the flash of weapons, the balls of smoke rising up over the mountain."
A small hesitation. "I saw them, yes." He had the high voice of a girl.
"And naturally enough, you were curious. You climbed up here, didn't you?"
The boy looked away, bit his lip.
This wasn't working. Bourne knew he had to find another way to get the boy to open up.
"My name is Jason," he said. "What's yours?"
Again that hesitation. "Alem."
"Alem, did you ever lose anyone? Someone you cared about a great deal?"
"Why?" Alem asked suspiciously.
"Because I've lost someone. My best friend. That's why I'm here. He was in one of the burned-out birds. I need to know if you saw him or know what happened to him."
Alem was already shaking his head.
"His name is Martin Lindros. Have you heard it spoken by anyone?"
Alem bit his lip again, which had begun to tremble slightly, but not, Bourne thought, from the chill. He shook his head.
Bourne reached down, scooped snow onto the back of his hand where Alem had bitten it. He saw Alem's eyes following his every movement.
"My older brother died six months ago," Alem said after a time.
Bourne went on with packing the snow. Best to act casual, he reasoned. "What happened to him?"
Alem drew his knees up to his chest, crossed his arms over them. "He was buried in a rockslide that crippled my father."
"I'm sorry," Bourne said, meaning it. "Listen, about my friend. What if he's alive? Would you want him to die?"
Alem was trailing his fingers in the icy rubble at the base of the wall. "You'll beat me," he muttered.
"Why would I do that?"
"I scavenged something." He jerked his head in the direction of the crash site. "From there."
"Alem, I promise you. All I care about is finding my friend."
Without another glance at Bourne, Alem produced a ring. Bourne took it, held it in the sunlight. He recognized the shield with an open book in each quadrant: the coat of arms of Brown University.
"This is my friend's ring." Carefully, he gave it back to Alem. "Will you show me where you found it?"
Alem took him over the wall, then tromped through the snow to a spot several hundred meters away from the crash site. He knelt down, Bourne with him.
"Here?"
Alem nodded. "It was under the snow, half buried."
"As if it had been ground into the dirt," Bourne finished for him. "Yet you found it."
"I was up here with my father." Alem's wrists rested on his bony knees. "We were scavenging."
"What did your father find?"
Alem shrugged.
"Will you take me to him?"
Alem stared down at the ring in his grimy palm. He curled his fingers over it, put it back in his pocket. Then he looked up at Bourne.
"I won't tell him," Bourne said quietly. "I promise."
Alem nodded, and they rose together. From Davis, Bourne got antiseptic and a bandage for his hand. Then the boy led him down from the small, bleak alpine meadow via a heart-stoppingly steep path that twisted along the iced rock face of Ras Dejen.
Anne wasn't kidding about Lerner being out for blood. There were two glowering agents waiting for Soraya at Typhon level as she stepped out of the elevator. Even to be here, she knew, they had to have Typhon-issued ID. Bad news, getting worse every second.
"Acting Director Lerner wants a word," the one on the left said.
"He asks that you come with us," the one on the right said.
She used her lightest, flirtatious voice. "D'you think I could freshen up first, boys?"
The one on the left, the taller one, said: "'ASAP.' That was the acting director's order."
Stoics, eunuchs, or both. Soraya shrugged and went with them. In truth, there wasn't much else she could do. As she marched down the corridors between the two animated pillars, she tried not to worry. The best thing she could do now was to keep her head while those around her were losing theirs. Lerner would no doubt needle her, do his best to drive her to the wall. She'd heard stories about him, and he had been at CI, what, all of six months? He'd know she resented him, and he'd work on that like a sadistic dentist clamped onto her molar.
At the end of the corridor, she confronted the corner office. The