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“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you giving this to me?”
“It belonged to your mother, Kaja. She tried to shoot me with it.”
“I’m not Kaja,” she said. “I’m Skara.”
For a moment time seemed to stand still, the throbbing noise from outside seemed to fade, and Bourne’s mind ran in circles. “You must be Kaja,” he said. “Skara was in Damascus with Semid Abdul-Qahhar.”
“Kaja died in the destruction of El-Gabal,” the woman said. “It was my sister, Kaja, you met there.”
Kaja. Skara. One of them was lying, but which one? “Skara has dissociative identity disorder,” he said, “which fits with the sister I confronted in Damascus.”
“Well, that seals it, doesn’t it? Kaja was the one with dissociative identity disorder.”
Bourne felt as if the ground had fallen away under him.
As if divining his confusion, she said, “Let’s go somewhere less charged.”
She took him to a small café in Gamla Stan. It was filled with teenagers and twenty-somethings, which would include her, if Bourne’s calculations were correct. The two remaining sisters had fled Stockholm when they were fifteen. They had been away for thirteen years. That made the woman sitting across from him twenty-eight.
“My sister loved to tell everyone that I was the one suffering from dissociative identity disorder. It was part of her problem.”
The coffee and stollen they had ordered came, and she spent some time adding sugar and cream to her cup. “Kaja was a stellar liar,” she said after she had taken her first sip. “She had to be, in order to keep her brain from flying into a thousand pieces. Every personality she displayed was at once authentic and a lie.” She put down her cup and gave him a sad smile. “I see you don’t believe me. It’s okay, you’re not alone. Kaja fooled everyone.”
“Even Don Fernando Hererra?”
“She was a master at it. I’m quite certain she could have beaten a lie detector.”
“Because she believed her own lies.”
“Yes, absolutely.”
Bourne took a moment to regroup. Now that he had been talking to this woman for a while he had begun to notice differences from the Kaja he had known—or, to be accurate, not known. He was becoming more and more convinced that the person sitting across from him was, indeed, Skara. Into his mind swam the final encounter in the storeroom at El Gabal. There had been something different in the woman’s eyes, something achingly familiar. “Kill me,” she had cried. “Kill me now and end this.”
Had that woman returned to being Kaja just before the end?
There was one way to be absolutely sure.
Bourne leaned toward her. “Show me your neck.”
“What did you say?” She looked at him quizzically.
“Kaja was mauled by a margay. She has scars down the sides of her neck.”
“All right.” She pulled down her turtleneck, revealing a long, beautiful neck with skin a luminous pink, and perfectly clear. “Do I pass?”
Bourne relaxed, but there was a sadness inside him. “Kill me now and end this.” Poor Kaja, tortured by the nightmare of personalities she couldn’t control.
“What was Kaja doing with Semid Abdul-Qahhar?” he said at length.
Skara sighed as she rearranged her turtleneck. “One of her personalities hated our father. She wanted to strike back at him for walking out on us.”
“So she told the truth about that.”
Skara regarded him for a moment. “First of all, the best lies are always embedded in the truth. Second of all, the truth she told you is incomplete.”
Bourne felt chilled. He took up his cup and drank off some of the coffee, black, bitter, but invigorating. “Tell me.”
For a moment her gaze was lost in the dregs of her coffee. “I’d rather not.”
“No?” Bourne felt a rising anger. The feeling of being manipulated was all too familiar.
“It’s not for me to tell you.” She smiled. “Please. Be patient just until tomorrow morning.” She took a small leather notebook out of her handbag, wrote out an address, tore it off, and handed it to him. “Ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” She raised her arm to summon the waitress and got their cups refilled.
Her eyes went to his left shoulder. “You were injured in Damascus.”
“I’m fine,” Bourne said. He was going to ask her how she knew about him and what had happened in Damascus, but decided against it. He sensed he would find out soon enough.
“Now tell me about the Beretta.” She frowned. “I had no idea my mother owned a gun, let alone was armed when she was killed. Did you take it from her?”
“Your sister had it,” he said. “I have no idea how.”
Skara nodded, as if coming upon a fact that had been self-evident all along. “She must have given it to Viveka. That would be just like Kaja.”
“At fifteen?”
“After my father left, we were all terrified. I can imagine Mother grabbing it without a second thought.”
“There’s more to this story, isn’t there?”
Skara summoned up a bleak smile. “Unfortunately for all of us, there always is.”
Sometime during the night, the snow had stopped falling. Sometime during the night, Bourne had called Rebeka, who sounded tired but happy to hear from him. In the darkness of the hotel room, their murmured conversation felt like a dream. Afterward, the deep, basso throb of the drowsing city lulled him to sleep. In his dream, a truck rumbled along a deserted highway, sounding lonely and forlorn.
When morning arrived and he stepped out of his hotel and into a waiting taxi, the sky was a sparkling blue, the sunlight intense, as if magnified by the clear, crisp air. He got out in front of a modern building on Birger Jarlsgatan. Across the street was Goldman Sachs International.
Skara was waiting for him outside the building and, linking arms with him, took him inside. The entire ground floor was taken up by the Nymphenburg Landesbank of Munich. The guards nodded to her as she took him across the checkered marble floor to an elevator that whisked them skyward. When they got out, she led him to a huge suite of offices, passing by a pair of secretaries and three assistant managers, through a door marked with an engraved plaque that read MARTIN SIGISMOND, PRESIDENT, and into an enormous office with a breathtaking view of downtown Stockholm. Sunlight glittered on the river.
Sigismond, a tall, handsome man, slim and very fit, with straight blond hair and blue eyes, was waiting for them. He wore a navy-blue suit. His tie was a tongue of flame. At his side was Don Fernando Hererra, wearing a pair of pleated wool trousers and, of all things, a smoking jacket.
“Ah, Mr. Bourne, it’s a genuine pleasure to meet you,” Sigismond said, extending his hand. “Don Fernando speaks very highly of you.”
“Oh, please.” Skara was on the verge of laughing. “Mr. Bourne, I’d like to present Christien Norén, my father.”
After the shortest of pauses, Bourne took his hand. “Your grip is strong for a dead man.”
Christien smiled. “I’m back from the dead, and none the worse for it.”
The four of them sat together on facing sofas in one section of the president’s office.
“To all intents and purposes I’m Martin Sigismond,” Christien Norén said, “and have been for many years.”
“As you can imagine,” Don Fernando said, “Almaz produced all the identification papers Christien needed.”
“Almaz is behind this entire scheme,” Bourne said.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you everything,” Don Fernando said. “We needed you focused on the co
“Semid Abdul-Qahhar had engineered an armed attack on Indigo Ridge, a rare earth mine in California,” Christien said. “He had a man inside Indigo Ridge, Roy FitzWilliams, whom he had recruited to his cause years ago.”