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My name isn’t important,” Peter said. “Richards was followed here.”
Brick’s eyes were adamantine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Seriously?” Peter looked around at the table crowd. “Any idea where your man is?”
“My man?”
“Right. Owen.” Peter snapped his fingers. “What’s his last name?” A flicker like a passing shadow in Brick’s eyes. “What about Owen?”
“Best I show you.” Peter took a step away.
Brick pulled himself reluctantly away from the railing. “What’s this about then?”
Without another word, Peter led him out of the clubhouse and around the side of the pro shop, passing through the labyrinth of high boxwood to where Florin Popa lay.
Brick stopped dead in his tracks. “What the fuck?”
“Dead as a doornail,” Peter observed pitilessly as Brick bent over Popa’s corpse. “Mr. Brick, you’re clearly under threat. I think it would be prudent for us to get out of here.”
Brick, one hand on Popa’s shoulder, looked up at him. “Bugger off, mate. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Peter nodded solemnly. “Okay, then. I’ll leave you to muddle through on your own.”
As he began to make his way back through the boxwood, Brick called out.
“Wait a sec. Who the bloody hell are you and who do you work for?”
Bourne reached into the fire, grabbed a burning log, and hurled it at the intruder.
The firebrand hissed and flickered, one end of it bursting into sparking fury when it struck the intruder’s shoulder. He half-spun, flung up one arm to bat the burning log away. Thus engaged, he was poorly prepared for Bourne’s hurtled body. Behind him, Bourne could hear a mad scramble as Rebeka dragged Rowland out of harm’s way.
The intruder chopped down on Bourne’s back, arching him backward, hauled him off, and delivered a blow to his solar plexus. He grabbed Bourne by the collar and threw him against the wall. Bourne ripped a print off the wall, smashing it as the intruder bullrushed him. The glass shattered. Bourne, grasping a long, slender piece, and ignoring the cut in his palm as he grasped it, struck downward.
He had aimed for the intruder’s neck, but missed, the point of the glass shard burying itself, instead, in the intruder’s back. The momentum of the bull rush took both men down to the floor. Seemingly ignoring the glass shard, the intruder flicked out a knife, stabbing down with it. Bourne rolled away, and the knife point buried itself in a narrow gap between the ancient floorboards. Instead of wasting time trying to pry it free, the intruder simply let it go, freeing another weapon.
Rebeka recognized Ilan Halevy immediately. The moment Bourne engaged the Babylonian, she busied herself dragging Weaving back around the corner into the shadows of the kitchen cupboards.
With a whispered, “For the love of God, stay put,” she drew a pair of scaling knives out of their wooden holder, slipped one into her waistband and hefted the other as she reappeared around the corner, just in time to see the Babylonian, a shard of glass protruding from his bloodstained back, stab brutally down with a folding dagger.
She moved swiftly and silently, the scaling knife held in front of her. It had a wicked-looking gut-hook on its top edge. If she could bury it deep enough and then jerk back on the hilt, she could do the Babylonian some serious damage.
Both his strength and his stamina were legendary. She knew he hardly felt the glass shard in his back, wouldn’t feel the scaling knife, either, unless she was lucky enough to hit a vital organ, or skillful enough to bury the gut-hook in his viscera and then pull backward. The resulting gush of blood would give even him pause.
But despite her stealth, he sensed her attack, and at the last instant, turned his body sideways to her, in the process absorbing two heavy blows from Bourne. His left hand whipped out, his fingers like tentacles as they clasped her, twisting viciously, grinding the bones in her wrist against one another. The breath went out of her as flashes of light exploded behind her eyes. In that instant, the Babylonian wrenched the scaling knife from her and slashed it at her. He’d meant to open her throat from side to side, but her reflexes saved her from the lethal blow. The blade slit open her sweater and shirt, opening a horizontal bright-red bloom across her chest, just above her breasts. She gasped and fell backward.
When Harry Rowland—for he was absolutely certain now that was his name—heard the grunts, thumps, and hard exhalations of handto-hand combat, something clicked inside his brain. Completely ignoring Rebeka’s order, he slithered around the corner of the kitchen. In an instant, his measured, professional gaze took in the chaotic situation. Something peeled away. He felt as if, after having been cast adrift in a hazy dreamworld since awakening in the clinic in Stockholm, everything now had become sharp and clear.
Without further conscious thought, he scrambled to his feet, ran to the fireplace, and snatched up the fire tongs. Deftly avoiding Rebeka, he stepped to where Bourne and the intruder grappled in lethal hand-to-hand combat. He regarded the two of them, one after the other. Everything seemed to move in slow motion except his mind, which, having flickered to life, was now racing at a fever pitch. Memories were surfacing, flashing like schools of silvery fish lifted from the depths. They came in rapid succession, but now in their proper order. So many things unknown he now understood, like a thick curtain being pulled back, revealing, layer by layer, his life before being shot. Not everything was there—the tapestry still had holes, missing pieces, curious dead ends that puzzled him, fish slipping through his fingers, returning to the unfathomable deep. Some thoughts still didn’t make sense, but certain imperatives did, and these drove him to decisive, galvanic action.
Lifting the fire tongs over his head, Harry Rowland brought them whistling down toward the top of Bourne’s skull.
Book Two
9
WE LIVE IN A world where information is constantly flowing, through servers, networks, intranets, the Internet.”
Charles Thorne, typing notes on his iPad 3 as an app recorded every word Maceo Encarnación uttered, nodded.
“We are fast becoming a cloud-culture,” Encarnación continued. “Each hour of each day the amount of information grows exponentially, and all of this expanding tsunami of information—all of it— exists in some form or other that can be read and understood by outsiders—by overhearing, bugging, or hacking.”
Thorne, sitting with Encarnación in the offices of Politics As Usual, felt his mobile buzz against his thigh as it lay in his pocket. He ignored it, nodding encouragingly at Encarnación. It had taken him months of complex negotiations with a succession of underlings to get Encarnación, the president and CEO of SteelTrap, to agree to be interviewed. SteelTrap, the world’s largest Internet security firm, was an anomaly in the world of business—so large, so influential, so successful, yet privately held, therefore beholden to no one. Its internal structure was entirely opaque.
In the end, Thorne had lucked out. Encarnación, on his way from Paris to Mexico City, where part of his vast staff maintained one of his palatial residences, had agreed to the interview while his private jet was being refueled. He had insisted that no photos be taken of him. This hardly surprised Thorne since, as part of his research for the interview, he had discovered a curious fact: there were no photos of Encarnación anywhere online. He was a bear of a man, curiouslooking owing to the fact that he was entirely hairless. Thorne found himself wondering if this was a deliberate deforestation or the result of a congenital condition. Another curious thing that he typed into his iPad: Encarnación had not once looked directly at him. His eyes were restless things, like caroming marbles, in constant motion.