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Now, having pulled up a chair, Delia sat beside her friend’s bed and took her hand. Soraya’s eyes fluttered open. Her lids were blue, bruised-looking. In fact, she had the dazed look of someone who had just received a thorough thrashing.
“Hello, Raya.”
“Deel—”
Tubes ran in and out of both arms. There was still a drain poking through the bandages on the side of her head. Hideous thing, Delia thought, trying to avert her gaze without being conspicuous about it. She failed.
“I guess you shouldn’t show me a mirror.” Soraya tried for a smile and just missed. It looked lopsided, grotesque, and for a breathless moment Delia was terrified that the operation had done something to the nerves on that side of her face. Then, as Soraya started to talk more, she realized it was merely fatigue combined with the remnants of the anaesthesia.
“How d’you feel, Raya?”
“Bad as I look. Maybe worse.”
Now it was Delia’s turn to smile. “It’s fine now. Everything’s fine.”
“Hendricks told me the baby’s okay.”
Delia nodded. “That’s right. No problems.”
Soraya sighed, visibly relaxing. “When can I get out of here, did the doctors say?”
Delia laughed. “Why? You itching to get back to work already?”
“I have a job to do.”
Delia bent over her. “Right now your job is to get better—for yourself and for the baby.” She took her friend’s hand. “Listen, Raya, I did something...something you warned me not to do. But under the circumstances, I thought...I told Charles about the baby.”
Soraya, overwhelmed with guilt, closed her eyes. But she knew she had to continue on down this path, step by ugly step.
“I’m sorry, Raya. Truly. But I was so afraid for you. I thought he had a right to know.”
“It’s your basic decency, Deel,” Soraya said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I should have known.” In fact, she hadknown. She had been banking on Delia’s basic decency.
“Where’s Charlie now?”
“He’s been here for a while,” her friend said. “I’m kind of surprised he’s stayed so long.”
“Does his wife know he’s here?”
Delia made a face. “A
“How d’you know that?”
“I read Politico. They don’t like her, either.”
“Who does, except her constituents? And, of course, The Beltway Journal.”
“Now you’re going to say you can’t understand why he married her.” Soraya’s lips curled in the semblance of a smile. “ Shemarried him.
She was like an unstoppable force. He couldn’t say no.”
“Any adult can say no and mean it, Raya.”
“But not Charlie. He was bedazzled.”
“Senator Ring has that effect on a lot of conservative Republicans. She could do a spread in Playboy.”
“If only,” Soraya said. “Then we’d all be rid of her.”
“I don’t know. I have a feeling she’d be able to somehow spin it to her advantage.”
Soraya laughed and squeezed her friend’s hand. “What would I do without you, Deel?”
Delia squeezed back. “Heaven only knows.”
“Listen, Deel. I want to see Charlie.”
Delia’s face clouded over. “Raya, do you think that’s such a good idea?”
“It’s important. I—”
All at once, her eyes opened wide, and she gasped. Her hand turned into a claw and her torso arched off the bed. The monitors to which she was hooked up started to go crazy. Delia started screaming, and Thorne pushed open the door, his face white and drawn.
“What is it?” He looked from her to Soraya. “What’s happened?”
Delia could hear the soft slap of ru
Bourne and Rebeka silently entered the apartment she had rented on Sankt Eriksgatan in Kungsholmen. It was on the third floor, a block and a half from the water. Christien was waiting for them downstairs in the Volvo, along with a bodyguard-messenger from his office he had picked up on a prearranged street corner in Gamla Stan.
The pair went stealthily through all the rooms, checking the shallow closets, even under the bed, and behind the shower curtain. When they had assured themselves that the apartment was secure, Rebeka knelt down on the tile floor of the bathroom.
“How much money have you stowed away?” Bourne said.
“I always establish a private vault in a secure location. It’s not safe to carry so much on my person.”
Bourne, kneeling beside her, helped her carefully peel up two thin lines of grout, making certain they wouldn’t crumble. This left an island tile, which she plucked up. Beneath lay a thick wad of bills— krona, euros, American dollars.
Stuffing the wad into her pocket, she stood up. “Come on,” she said. “This place gives me the creeps.”
They left the apartment, hurrying down the twilit stairs.
Ilan Halevy, code name the Babylonian, sat behind the wheel of the rental car he had parked in a strategic spot across the street and down the block from the entrance to the building in which Rebeka had rented her apartment. He had been waiting for hours, but for him those hours felt like minutes. It seemed as if he had been waiting for something to happen all his life. As a boy of ten, he had waited for his parents to divorce; as an adolescent of fourteen, he had waited for the bully he had put into the hospital to die; shortly afterward, he had found himself waiting for a train to take him out of the heartland of his country into the capital, the busiest, shiniest, most confusing place he could think of in which to get lost. He had killed again, but this time on his own terms. He chose well—a wealthy American businessman, with whom he had struck up a conversation in the bar of the capital’s poshest hotel. Now, with money in his pocket and an alternate identity, he shaved his beard, bought himself two sets of the best Western clothes from the Brioni boutique in the selfsame hotel, charging it to one of the businessman’s credit cards. Before that moment, he had never before seen a credit card in the flesh, let alone handled one.
Soon after, he had slid quite naturally into Tel Aviv’s criminal underbelly, making a name for himself quickly, ruthlessly, remorselessly. He supposed that was how he had come to the attention of Colonel Ben David. In any event, when Ben David had approached him, he was properly wary. But, in time, the two men established a relationship. Despite its undisputed closeness, no one would mistake it for friendship, especially the two principals.
Halevy sighed, longing for a shwarma whose delicious muttony grease he could dribble over a pile of Israeli couscous. He hated the Nordic countries—Sweden in particular. He hated their women, blond, blue-eyed, upholding the abhorrent Aryan ideal of the superman. There wasn’t a Swedish runway model he didn’t feel compelled to kick in her perfect, chiseled face. Give him a dark-ski
He was still enmeshed in these sour thoughts when he saw the late-model Volvo draw up to the building under his surveillance. Rebeka stepped out, crossing the pavement to the front door. He was about to emerge from his car when he saw Bourne striding after her.
Why the hell are they still together?he asked himself. She’s working with him?He ground his teeth in fury and sat back against the seat, forcing himself to wait. A familiar state for him, but sometimes, as now, it maintained its power to drive him crazy.
Along the E4 motorway, Christien turned off into a fast-food and gas lay-by. Since stopping off briefly at Rebeka’s apartment, they had been heading steadily north out of Gamla Stan, where Christien had picked them up. Bourne wondered where they were going.