had underestimated her. If so, it would be the day's first positive sign.
Soraya picked her way through the cafe 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."
"And?"
"And then everything goes according to its plan." Bourne waited a moment. "Our only chance is to do the unexpected."
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Bourne nodded.
"Until he's not."
Arkadin placed the Magpul he had been holding onto the table, and Bourne set down the Beretta that Tanirt had given him.
"We're a team," Bourne said. "The three of us."
Arkadin glanced briefly at Soraya. "Spit it out then."
"First and foremost," Bourne said, "is a man named Idir Syphax."
The house crouched in the middle of the block, its flanks rubbing up against those of its neighbors. Night had fallen, swift and complete, like a hood thrown over a head. All around the valley the mountains were pitch black. A bitter wind, knifing through the town, hurried snow crystals or grains of sand across streets and down alleys. The light from the stars was hallucinatory.
Idir Syphax was crouched on a rooftop across the street from the rear of the house. Flanking him were two Severus Domna sharpshooters, their Sako TRG-22 rifles aimed and ready. Idir watched the house as if waiting for his daughter to come home, as if feeling the danger of unknown places spreading its wings, as if the house itself were his child. And, in a way, it was. He had designed the house with advice from Tanirt. "I want to build a fortress," he had told her. And she had said: "You cannot do better than to follow the plan of the Great Temple of Baal. It was the greatest fortress known to man." After scrutinizing what she had drawn for him, he had agreed, and he himself had helped to build it. Every board, every nail, every length of rebar, every form of concrete bore the tattoo of his sweat. The house was invented not for people, but for a thing, an idea, an ideal, even; anyway, something intangible. In that sense it was a sacred place, as sacred as any mosque. It was the beginning of all things, and the end. Alpha and omega, a cosmos unto itself.
Idir understood this but others in Severus Domna did not. For Benjamin El-Arian, the house was a Venus flytrap. For Marlon