the few flecks of paint from her vehicle. He had just finished memorizing the plate number when a local police inspector crouched down beside him.
"What d'you reckon?" He was a whey-faced man with bad teeth and breath to match. He looked as if he had been raised on tepid beer, bangers and mash, and treacle.
"The speed must have been fantastic in order to do this damage." Bourne spoke in a hoarse voice, using his best South London accent.
"Cold or allergies?" the local inspector said. "Either way, you should take care of yourself in the bloody-minded weather."
"I'll need to see the victims."
"Righto." The inspector rose on creaky knees. The backs of his hands were chapped and reddened, the result of a long, hard winter stuck in an underheated office. "This way."
He led Bourne through the knots of people to where the corpse was still laid out. He lifted the tarp for Bourne to have a look. The body was broken up. Bourne was surprised to see that the man was older, he guessed in his late forties or early fifties - extremely odd for an executioner.
The inspector's wrists rested on his bony knees. "With no ID, it'll be a bitch trying to notify his wife."
The corpse wore what appeared to be a gold wedding band on the third finger of his left hand. Bourne thought that interesting, but he wasn't about to share his opinion, or anything else for that matter, with the inspector. He had to get a look at the inside of the ring.
"I'm going in," Bourne said.
The inspector guffawed.
Bourne slipped off the ring. This ring was far older than the one he already had. He held it up to see more clearly. It was scratched and worn, thinned out over time. It took gold maybe a hundred years or more to get this thin. He tipped the ring. It was engraved on the inside. He could make out the Old Persian and Latin, yes. He peered more closely, rotating the ring between his fingers. There were only two words, Severus Domna. The third one, Dominion, was missing.
"Find anything?"
Bourne shook his head. "I thought maybe there'd be some sort of engraving - 'To Bertie, from Matilda,' something of that sort."
"Another dead end," the inspector said sourly. "Christ on a crutch, my knees are killing me." He stood up with a little groan.
Now Bourne knew what Severus Domna must stand for: a group or a society. Whatever you wanted to call them, one thing was clear - they had gone to great lengths to keep themselves secret from the world at large. And now, for whatever reason, they had surfaced, risking their secretive status - all for the ring engraved with their name and the word Dominion.
Chapter Eleven
OLIVER LISS, STRIDING down North Union Street in Alexandria's Old Town, checked the time and, a moment later, stepped into one of those large chain drugstores that carried most everything. He went past the dental hygiene and foot care sections, picked out a cheap cell phone with thirty prepaid minutes, and took it up to the checkout counter where an Indian woman rang it up, along with a copy of The Washington Post. He paid cash.
Back out on the street, the paper tucked under one arm, he pulled apart the plastic blister pack and walked back beneath a dull and starless sky to where he'd parked his car. He got in and attached the phone to his portable charger, which would give it a full charge in less than five minutes. While he waited, he put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He hadn't had much sleep last night or, for that matter, any night since he'd agreed to fund the resurrected Treadstone.
Not for the first time he wondered whether he had done the right thing, and then he tried to recall the last time he'd made a business decision of his own free will. More than a decade ago he'd been approached by a man who called himself Jonathan, though Liss soon enough surmised that wasn't his name at all. Jonathan said that he was part of a large multinational group. If Liss played his cards right, if he pleased Jonathan and, therefore, the group, Jonathan would ensure that the group became Liss's permanent client. Jonathan had then suggested to him that he found a private risk management firm under cover of which the business could become a private contractor for the US armed forces in overseas