Jidan was possessed of an amphibian calm, Maricruz thought, as she lay back in her father’s large and opulent bathtub. The taps and faucets were made of jade and lapis, the surround of an enormous solid slab of jasper. Far too gaudy for her tastes, but typical of Maceo Encarnación, who had done everything with breathtaking excess.
This was why, she thought now, as she arched her back, her heavy breasts crowned with dark nipples rising out of the water like questing sea creatures, she had once been in love with Jidan. He was the precise polar opposite of all the hot-blooded males, who acted first, considered afterward, among whom she had grown up.
At first, calmness was something Maricruz came to respect. Amid the incessant clamor of her cities—Mexico City and Beijing—the interior spaces Jidan designed and provided were oases of reverential silence to be cherished, only broken, now and again, by her shouts and cries of ecstasy. Those days seemed long gone.
Her large, coffee-colored eyes finally lit upon the small jade box Jidan had given her before she had left Beijing. That Jidan had discovered the identity of her mother, a mother she had never known, a mother from whose arms her father had taken her, to be raised as he alone saw fit, was miracle enough, Maricruz thought, but that she was still alive was beyond her imagining. Though she had opened the box, she had yet to unfold the paper inside and read the name of her mother. She wondered if she ever would.
Her heart was torn by complex emotions: a desire to be held by the woman who had borne her, anger at her for allowing her baby girl to be taken away, curiosity as to why, all these years, she had made no attempt to contact her daughter.
The jade box gleamed, its engraved pair of dragons seeming to mock her. Of course, her rational mind knew that no man and certainly no woman could stand against her father once he had made up his mind. Her mother had had no choice but to acquiesce to his wishes. But still…
She heard a sudden rustling in the bedroom suite beyond the closed bathroom door.
“Wendell,” she called, “is that you?”
“Yes, Maricruz, I’m sorry to disturb you. I was looking for certain papers of your father’s.”
“Perhaps I can help you.”
“Perhaps. When you’re finished with your bath.”
“I’m finished now, Wendell,” she said.
“I don’t under—”
“No reason to be shy. Come in.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, Maricruz.”
She could hear by the sound of his voice that he was just outside the door now. “But I do, Wendell.”
The doorknob turned, slowly at first, then more rapidly as he pushed the door open. He stood on the threshold, his eyes drinking in her lush, firm body.
His mouth opened. “Oh, God,” he said softly.
“Wendell, it occurs to me,” Maricruz said, ignoring his gaping mouth, “I know nothing about you personally. I’ve read your CV, of course, but there’s more to a man than his academic achievements, don’t you think?”
Marsh said nothing. Having gazed upon the goddess Medusa, he looked as if he had been turned to stone.
“I see the cat’s got your tongue,” she said with a knowing smile. “No matter. I fancy myself an excellent judge of character. I’ll tell you what you’re like. You only have to answer yes or no.” She cocked her head, her full lips in a moue. “Surely you’re up to the task.”
He coughed drily, tried to say something, failed.
Maricruz looked him up and down before settling her eyes again on his face. “Let’s see, either you’re divorced or you’ve never married. Either way, you’ve no children.”
“Divorced,” Marsh managed to croak. “No children.”
“No girlfriend, either,” Maricruz said. “At least, not for some time.”
Marsh swallowed, nodded mechanically. His eyes never left the glistening hemispheres of her naked breasts.
“Hmmm. So how do you get your rocks off, Wendell?” She stared pointedly at the bulge in his trousers. “You’re not asexual, I can see that.” She sat up suddenly, her breasts bobbing provocatively. “Whores, prostitutes, call girls, escorts. They’re your sort of thing, aren’t they?”
Marsh did not reply, but his reddened face revealed the truth of her statement.
“No need to be embarrassed, Wendell. Sex is a natural human desire.” She rose out of the bath and, without toweling off, back arched, shoulders squared, powerful thighs propelling her forward, crossed the tile floor and pressed her gleaming naked body against his.
He gave a strangled cry but did not recoil. With a languid smile, Maricruz snaked her right arm between them and squeezed the growing lump between his thighs.
“Nice and thick, Wendell,” she whispered in his ear. “I like that.”
She pushed forward and Marsh took a step back. They continued this way, stuck together, his clothes now sopping wet, as she maneuvered him across her father’s vast bedroom. When the back of Marsh’s legs came up against the bed, Maricruz leaned her upper torso forward, applying enough pressure that he tumbled backward.
Sitting astride him, she began to pluck off his clothes. Water dripped from her hair, off the erect tips of her breasts. Slowly, his trembling hands rose up to cup her breasts.
“Do you like that, Wendell?” She stripped off his sodden shirt. “I’ll just bet you do.”
He squeezed her nipples and her eyes closed briefly.
Her hands worked faster, then, pulling down his zipper, unbuckling his belt, peeling his trousers away. She unfolded him like an origami sculpture.
She leaned into him, her flat belly fluttering.
“Here’s what I like, Wendell.”
The percussion blast wave that burst outward when the missile impacted with Colonel Sun’s white Mercedes slammed into Bourne as he rolled across the pavement, shoved him off the road entirely and into a drainage ditch, where he was protected from the terrible effects of the shredded car, bits like shrapnel, like miniature missiles themselves, radiating out from the point of impact.
Numb and temporarily deaf, Bourne lay in the ditch unmoving. He watched the sky turn from orange to yellow to smoky gray, and then to the clear blue it had been in the first moments he had exited the tunnel.
He tried to shake off the numbness, felt only a rumble deep in his bones. Then all of a sudden his hearing returned with an unpleasant pop and, looking up, he saw the approaching police helo.
Scrambling out of the ditch, he ran toward the red-lacquered buildings, gilt signs, and narrow streets of Huangpu.
What was left of the white Mercedes was still burning hotly when the helo landed a safe distance away. The moment it alit, Colonel Sun pushed open the door and leapt out. He was followed closely by another man in army uniform.
“Who’s responsible for this?” he cried, pointing to the fire. “Give me a name!”
An officer appeared, saluted, and pointed to the soldier who had fired the missile. Colonel Sun stalked over to the man, who seemed to turn to water as Sun closed on him.
“What did you think you were doing?”
“Following orders, sir,” the soldier said fearfully.
Colonel Sun’s black eyes bored into the man with a terrible intensity. “Your orders were to aim in front of the vehicle, not at it.”
He lashed the man across the face, leaving a trail of fresh blood and ripped flesh. Thinking of what he was going to tell Ouyang, he hit the man again and again until he slid to his knees. Bourne wasn’t meant to die, not here, not now. Not yet. Colonel Sun kicked the man so hard he fell over backward.
“Get this dog out of my sight,” Sun snapped at the officer.
After the man was hustled away, Colonel Sun turned to the man who had been in the helo with him. “Captain Lim, as soon as the fire has burned itself out, get a forensics team in there. I want a definitive ID on the driver as quickly as possible.”
Wow.” Wendell Marsh, lying sweat-slick on his late boss’s bed, stared at Maricruz’s flawless back as she sat up. “When can we do that again?”
Maricruz laughed. “Don’t mistake me for one of your call girls, Wendell.”
“I’m just asking—”
“I do the asking, Wendell. You would do well to remember that.”
He watched her, a little frightened now. He was in a foreign country that gave him the willies, in a situation suddenly beyond his understanding. He waited, listening to his own breath sough in and out of his half-open mouth, until the silence weighed too heavily on him.
“I meant no disrespect, Maricruz.”
“Of course you did. That’s just your way. You never learned how to treat a woman.”
Certainly not a woman like you, he thought, but wisely kept his own counsel.
Maricruz sighed deeply. “You know, Wendell, you’ve been a bad, bad boy.”
His heart skipped a beat, forcing him to sit up, pushing the pillow behind him. “What d’you mean?”
“Do you really think I’d meet with you without gathering all the information on you I could? And what you did, Wendell, was embezzle money from my father.”
Marsh’s blood pressure went sky-high; he felt an unpleasant heat traveling through his body like an invisible serpent. “I mean to pay it back, Maricruz. Every cent of it. In fact, I’ve already started to—”
“Why did you do it?” She turned on him now, and he quailed to see the force and determination on her face. “My father trusted you.”
Marsh hung his head. “The money wasn’t for me, it was for my sister. She married a very rich, very abusive man. She thought she loved him, thought she could change him but…” He shrugged. “I finally convinced her to leave him. In retaliation, he came down on her with a legal team that threatened her, tried to strip her of all her rights. I had no choice but to find her the best defense money could buy. The problem was, that team of lawyers and private investigators was way beyond even my means.”
Maricruz considered this for a moment. She already knew he was telling the truth, but the mess he had made had to be cleaned up before they could go forward. “Why didn’t you ask my father for the money?”
“You mean a loan?”
“To fight such a man, he would have given it to you.”
Marsh looked away. “I was ashamed.”
“So instead you just took the money.”
“I was sure I could pay it back before anyone discovered it, but the divorce proceedings went on longer, and then I needed more money, and it was too late.” He looked back at her. “Is it too late with you?”
She studied him for a moment. “Wendell, do you know what aliyah means?”
He shook his head.
“I’m not surprised. Aliyah is a Hebrew word. It means ‘penance’ or ‘atonement.’ You will perform an aliyah for me, Wendell.”
He felt a cooling wave of relief flush through him that obliterated the serpent of fire. “Yes, Maricruz. Of course I will.”
“The aliyah will be difficult, Wendell, and not without a considerable amount of danger. However, when you have completed it, I will know that I can trust you again.”
Wei-Wei, the Mossad agent in place whose mysterious pressing business had caused him to postpone the meet with Bourne, lived on Jiujiaochang Road, just down the block from the gaudy facade of the China Citic Bank and Fanghua pearl shop. In the distance, a clutch of ugly pastel-colored high-rises marred the skyline like chewed nails on a dowager’s scented hand.
Wei-Wei’s apartment was on the second floor, above the China Beauty shop, where women were trying on all manner of patterned silk scarves. Bourne was still slightly numb, his digits tingly, not totally at his command. On the way he stopped at another clothes shop and, for the second time, bought a new wardrobe, dropping his burned and torn jacket, shirt, and trousers into the trash bin next to the sink in the filthy toilet. He was sorry to see his military uniform go, but he had no choice; it smelled like singed hair and roasted metal.
Continuing his walk, he paused at a street vendor’s stall to eat cubes of roast pork belly on a bamboo stick, washing the protein down with two bottles of Coke so chilled, shards of ice were floating in them. By the time he was finished consuming the food, his fingers had stopped tingling and his head had cleared.
On reaching Jiujiaochang Road, he spent the next several minutes checking the immediate vicinity. While he watched the passersby, he listened to snatches of their conversations. He neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary. When a siren sounded, it was far away, headed in other directions. At length, he ducked through the front door to Wei-Wei’s building. It was narrow, as was the entryway, which smelled of hot oil and sizzling Sichuan peppercorns. The stairs rose steeply ahead of him, creaking with every step he took.
On the second-floor landing the cooking smells were stronger. Even out here, the oil from the burst peppercorns stung his eyes. Wei-Wei’s apartment was at the far end of the landing, in the back. As he passed a grime-coated window, he peered out, could see a narrow alley abutted by the overlapping tiles of steeply pitched rooftops on the neighboring buildings.
Wei-Wei’s doorbell was out of order, so he knocked on the door, then harder. There was no response. He put his ear against the door. At first he could hear nothing but what sounded like the wind soughing through the apartment, as if Wei-Wei had left the window open. Then, following his third knock, a brief rustling came to him, as of stiff clothes rubbing against flesh. Still, Wei-Wei didn’t answer.
Standing back, Bourne kicked the door in, and was immediately confronted by a Shanghainese police office pointing a gun at him.
“Who are you?” he said in an affected and officious voice. “What are you doing breaking into a private citizen’s home?”
“Wei-Wei is a friend of mine,” Bourne said. He showed the cop his Carl Halliday passport. “From time to time, we do a little business.”
The cop’s eyes narrowed. “What sort of business?” The muzzle of his service pistol never wavered from Bourne’s chest.
“Nothing major,” Bourne said. “Just, from time to time, shipments of gum.”
“Gum?”
“Chewing gum.” Bourne produced the pack he had purchased at the airport and held it out. “Chinese herbs. See? Canadians are nuts for Chinese herbs.”
Then Bourne frowned as he put away the pack of gum. “Where is my friend? Where’s Wei-Wei?”
The cop beckoned with his free hand and he and Bourne went into the tiny bedroom, where the man known as Wei-Wei was hanging from a rope looped over a wooden rafter.
“Seems a competitor got to him,” the cop said. He gestured with his gun. “I’ll have to ask you to leave. The forensics team is on its way. I can question you in the hallway.”
Bourne was about to protest when he heard a sound like that of a small box closing. The cop’s eyes opened wide, his lips pulled back from his nicotine-stained teeth, and he pitched forward into Bourne’s arms.
A tiny dart stuck out the side of his neck.