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Fadi considered a moment. “All right. Call your brother. Have him fetch Katya Veintrop and bring her to Miran Shah, where we will meet him. I think once Dr. Veintrop gets a look at what we can do to his wife, he’ll become compliant again.”
Abbud ibn Aziz looked pointedly at his watch. “The last flight took off hours ago. The next one isn’t scheduled until this evening.”
Fadi sat rigid, his gaze unmoving. Once again, his consciousness had removed itself, Abbud ibn Aziz knew, back to the time when his father had been shot. His guilt over the incident was enormous. Many times, Abbud ibn Aziz had tried to counsel his leader and friend to keep his mind and energies in the present. But the incident had been complicated with the deep pain of betrayal, of murder. Fadi’s mother had never forgiven him for the death of her only daughter. Abbud ibn Aziz’s mother would never have placed such a terrible burden on him. But then she was Islamic; Fadi’s mother was Christian, and this made all the difference. He himself had met Sarah ibn Ashef innumerable times, but he’d never given her a second thought until that night in Odessa. Fadi, on the other hand, was half English; who could fathom what he thought or felt about his sister, or why?
Abbud ibn Aziz felt the muscles of his abdomen tighten. He licked his lips and began the speech he’d been practicing.
“Fadi, this plan of Karim al-Jamil’s has begun to worry me.” Fadi still said nothing; his gaze never wavered. Had he even heard Abbud ibn Aziz’s words? Abbud ibn Aziz had to assume so. He continued: “First, the secretiveness. I ask you questions, you refuse to answer. I try to check security, but I am obstructed by you and your brother. Second, there is the extreme danger of it. If we are thwarted, the entire Dujja network will be threatened, the major source of our funding exposed.”
“Why bring this up now?” Fadi had not moved, had not removed his gaze from the past. He sounded like a ghost, making Abbud ibn Aziz shudder.
“It has been in my mind from the start. But now, I have discovered the identity of the woman Karim al-Jamil is seeing.”
“His mistress,” Fadi said. “What of it?”
“Your father took an infidel as a mistress, Fadi. She became his wife.”
Fadi’s head swung around. His dark eyes were like those of a mongoose that has set its sights on a cobra. “You go too far, Abbud ibn Aziz. You speak now of my mother.”
Abbud ibn Aziz had no choice but to shudder again. “I speak of Islam and of Christianity. Fadi, my friend, we live with the Christian occupation of our countries, the threat to our way of life. This is the battle we have vowed to fight, and to win. It is our cultural identity, our very essence that hangs in the balance.
“Now Karim al-Jamil sleeps with an infidel, plants his seed in her, confides in her—who knows? If this were to become known among our people, they would rise up in anger, they would demand her death.”
Fadi’s face darkened. “Is this a threat I hear from your lips?”
“How could you think that? I would never say a word.”
Fadi rose, his feet planted wide against the rocking of the sailboat, and looked down at his second. “Yet you sneak around, spying on my brother. Now you speak to me of this, you hold it over my head.”
“My friend, I seek only to protect you from the influence of the infidel. I know, though the others do not, that this plan was conceived by Karim al-Jamil. Your brother consorts with the enemy. I know, because you yourself placed me in the enemy citadel. I know how many distractions and corruptions Western culture provides. The stink of them turned my stomach. But there are others for whom that may not be so.”
“My brother?”
“It may be so, Fadi. For myself, I cannot say, since there is an impenetrable wall between him and me.”
Fadi shook his fists. “Ah, now the truth comes out. You resent being kept in the dark, even though this is my brother’s wish.” Leaning over, he landed a stinging blow to his second’s face. “I know what this is about. You want to be elevated above the others. You crave knowledge, Abbud ibn Aziz, because knowledge is power, and more power is what you’re after.”
Abbud ibn Aziz, quaking inside, did not move, did not dare raise a hand to his inflamed cheek. He knew only too well that Fadi was quite capable of kicking him overboard, leaving him to drown without an ounce of remorse. Still, he had embarked on a course. If he failed to see it through, he would never forgive himself.
“Fadi, if I show you a fistful of sand, what do you see?”
“You ask me riddles now?”
“I see the world. I see the hand of Allah,” Abbud ibn Aziz hurried on. “This is the tribal Arab in me. I was born and raised in the desert. The pure and magnificent desert. You and Karim al-Jamil were born and raised in a Western metropolis. Yes, you must know your enemy in order to defeat him, as you have rightly told me. But Fadi, answer me this: What happens when you begin to identify with the enemy? Isn’t it possible that you become the enemy?”
Fadi rocked from side to side on the balls of his feet. He was close to erupting entirely. “You dare imply—”
“I imply nothing, Fadi. Believe me. This is a matter of trust—of faith. If you do not trust me, if you do not have faith in me, turn me out now. I will go without another word. But we have known each other all our lives. I owe everything to you. As you strive to protect Karim al-Jamil, my wish is to protect you from all dangers, both within and without Dujja.”
“Then your obsession has made you mad.”
“That possibility exists, certainly.” Abbud ibn Aziz sat as he had before, without cowering or wincing, which would surely induce Fadi to kick him into the water. “I say only that Karim al-Jamil’s self-imposed isolation has made him a force unto himself. You cannot argue with the point. Perhaps this is solely to your advantage, as you both believe. But I submit that the relationship has a serious drawback. You feed off each other. There is no intermediary, no third party to provide balance.”
Abbud ibn Aziz risked gaining his feet, slowly and carefully. “Now I give you a case in point. I beg you to ask yourself: Are your motives and Karim al-Jamil’s motives pure? You know the answer: They are not. They have been clouded, corrupted by your obsession with revenge. I say to you that you and Karim al-Jamil must forget Jason Bourne, forget what your father has become. He was a great man, no question. But his day is gone; yours has dawned. This is the way of life. To stand in its path is pure arrogance; you risk getting plowed under.
“The future must be your focus, not the past. You must think of your people now. You are our father, our protector, our savior. Without you, we are dust in the wind, we are nothing. You are our shining star. But only if your motives are once again pure.”
For a long time, then, no sound issued from either of them. For his part, Abbud ibn Aziz felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He believed in his argument, every word of it. If this was to be the end of him, so be it. He would die knowing that he had fulfilled his duty to his leader and his friend.
Fadi, however, was no longer glaring at him, no longer aware of the sea or the lights of Odessa twinkling in the darkness. His gaze had turned inward again, his essence fleeing down into the depths, where, Abbud ibn Aziz suspected—no, hoped with all his might—not even Karim al-Jamil was allowed entry.
With all of CI’s computers down, all hell had broken loose within its headquarters complex. Every available member of the Signals and Codes Directorate had been ordered to tackle the problem of the computer virus. A third of them had taken Sentinel—the CI firewall—offline in order to run a series of level-three diagnostics. The rest of the agents were using hunt-and-destroy software to stalk through every vein and artery of the CI intranet. This software, designed by DARPA for CI, used an advanced heuristic algorithm, which meant that it was a problem-solving code. It changed, continually adapting depending on which form of virus it encountered.
The premises were in full lockdown mode—no one in or out. In the soundproof oval conference room across from the Old Man?
??s suite of offices, nine men sat around a burnished burlwood table. At each seat was a computer terminal, sunk into the tabletop, plus bottles of chilled water. The man to the DCI’s immediate left, the director of the Signals and Codes Directorate, was being continually updated on the progress of his feverish legions. These updates appeared on his own terminal, were cleaned up—made intelligible to the nongeeks in the room—and bloomed on one of half a dozen flat-panel screens affixed to the matte-black felt-clad walls.
“Nothing leaks outside these walls,” the DCI said. Today he was feeling all of his sixty-eight years. “What’s happened here today remains here.” History pressed down on him with the weight of Atlas’s burden. One of these days, he knew, it was going to break his back. But not today. Not today, dammit!
“Nothing has been compromised.” This from the director of S&C, scanning the raw data scrolling across his terminal. “This virus, it appears, did not come from outside. The diagnostics on Sentinel have been completed. The firewall was doing its job, just as it was programmed to do. It was not breached. I say again, it was not breached.”
“Then what the hell happened?” the DCI barked. He was already thanking his lucky stars that the defense secretary would never know anything about this unmitigated disaster.
The S&C director lifted his shining, bald head. “As far as we can determine at this stage, we were attacked from inside.”
“Inside?” Karim al-Jamil said, incredulously. He was sitting at the Old Man’s right hand. “Are you saying we have a traitor inside CI?”
“It would seem that way,” said Rob Batt, the chief of operations, most influential of the Seven—as the directors were known internally.
“Rob, I want you all over this angle ASAP,” the Old Man said. “Confirm it, or assure us we’re clean.”
“I can handle that,” Karim said, and immediately regretted it.
Rob Batt’s snakelike gaze was turned in his direction. “Don’t you have enough on your plate as it is, Martin?” he said softly.
The DCI cleared his throat. “Martin, I need you to concentrate all your resources on stopping Dujja.” The last thing he needed now, he thought sourly, was an interdirectorate turf war. He turned to the director of S&C. “I need an ETA for the computers to be restored.”
“Could be a day or more.”
“Unacceptable,” the Old Man snapped. “I need a solution so we’ll be up and running within two hours.”
The S&C director scratched his bald dome. “Well, we could switch to the backup net. But that would entail distributing new access codes to everyone in the build—”
“Do it!” The DCI said sharply. He slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “All right, gentlemen. We all know what we have to do. Let’s get this shit off our shoes before it starts to stink!”
Bourne, slipping in and out of consciousness, was revisited by the events from his past that had been haunting him ever since Marie’s death.
… He is in Odessa, running. It is night; a chill mineral wind coming in off the Black Sea skids him along the cobbled street. She is in his arms—the young woman leaking blood at a terrific rate. He sees the gunshot wound, knows she is going to die. Even as this thought comes to him, her eyes open. They are pale, the pupils dilated in pain. She is trying to see him in the darkness at the end of her life.
He can do nothing, nothing but carry her from the square where she was gunned down. Her mouth moves. She cannot project her voice. His ear is bloodied as he presses it to her open mouth.
Her voice, fragile as glass, reverberates against his eardrum, but what he hears is the sound of the sea rushing in, pulling back. Breath fails her. All that remains is the unsteady beat of his shoes against the cobbles…
He falters, falls. He crawls until his back is against a slimy brick wall. He cannot relinquish his hold on the woman. Who is she? He stares down at her, trying to concentrate. If he can bring her back to life, he can ask her who she is. I could have saved her, he thinks in despair.
And now, in a flash, it is Marie he’s holding in his arms. The blood is gone, but life has not returned. Marie is dead. I could have saved her, he thinks in despair…
He woke, crying for his lost love, for his lost life. “I should have saved you!” And all at once he knew why the fragment of his past returned at the moment of Marie’s death.
Guilt was crippling him. Guilt at not being there to save Marie. Then it must follow that he’d had a chance to save the bloody woman, and didn’t.
Martin, a word.”
Karim al-Jamil turned to see Rob Batt watching him. The director of operations had not risen like everyone else in the conference room. Now only he and Karim remained in the darkened space.
Karim regarded him with a deliberately neutral expression. “As you said, Rob, I have a great deal on my plate.”
Batt had hands like meat cleavers. The palms were unnaturally dark, as if they had been permanently stained by blood. He spread them, normally a conciliatory gesture—but now there was something distinctly menacing in the display of raw animal power, as if he were a silverback gorilla preparing to charge.
“Indulge me. This won’t take but a minute.”
Karim went back, sat down at the table across from him. Batt was one of those people for whom an office environment was almost intolerable. He wore his suit as if it had bristles on the inside. His leathery, deeply scored, sun-crisped face could have come from either skiing in Gstaad or taking lives in the Afghani mountains. Karim found all this interesting, as he had spent so much time in fine tailor shops being fitted in fine Western clothes that a Savile Row suit felt as natural to him as a burnoose.
He steepled his fingers, stitched the ghost of a smile onto his face. “What can I do for you, Rob?”
“Frankly, I’m a little concerned.” Batt apparently did not care to beat around the bush, but perhaps conversation wasn’t his forte.
Karim, his heart beating fast, kept his tone polite. “In what way?”
“Well, you’ve had a helluva difficult time. To be honest, I felt strongly that you should take a few weeks off—relax, be evaluated by other doctors.”
“Shrinks, you mean.”
Batt went on as if the other hadn’t responded. “I was overruled by the DCI. He said your work was too valuable—especially in this crisis.” His lips pulled back in what in someone else might have been a smile.
“But then, just now, you wanted in on my investigation into whoever the hell it was set the virus loose on us.” Those snakelike eyes, black as volcanic soil, ran over Karim as if he were mentally frisking the DDCI. “You’ve never poached on my territory before. In fact, we made a pact never to poach.”
Karim said nothing. What if the statement was a trap? What if Lindros and Batt had never made such a pact?
“I’d like to know why you’ve reneged,” Batt said. “I’d like to know why, in your current state, you’d want to take on even more work.” His voice had dropped in volume and, at the same time, had slowed like cooling honey. If he were an animal, he’d be circling Karim now, waiting for a moment to his advantage.
“Apologies, Rob. I just wanted to help, that’s all. There was no—”
Batt’s head lunged forward so sharply that Karim had to keep himself in check, lest he recoil.
“See, I’m concerned about you, Martin.” Batt’s lips, already thin, were compressed into bloodless lines. “But unlike our peerless leader, who loves you like a son, who forgives you anything, my concern is more like that of an older brother for his younger sibling.”
Batt spread his enormous clublike hands on the table between them. “You lived with the enemy, Martin. The enemy tried to fuck you up. I know it and you know it. You know how I know it? Do you?”
“I’m sure my test results—”
“Fuck the test results,” Batt said shortly. “Test results are for academics, which you and I most certainly are not. Those boys are still debating the results; they’ll be in that hole till hell fr
eezes over. To boot, we’ve been forced to take the opinion of Jason Bourne, a man who is at best unstable, at worst a menace to CI protocol and discipline. But he’s the one person who knows you best. Ironic, no?” He cocked his head. “Why the hell do you maintain your relationship with him?”
“Take a look at his file,” Karim said. “Bourne is more valuable to me—to us—than a handful of your Ways and Means agents.” Me singing Jason Bourne’s praises, now that’s irony, he thought.
Batt would not be deterred. “See, it’s your behavior I’m worried about, Martin. In some ways it’s fine—just as it always was. But in other, smaller, more subtle ways…” He shook his head. “Well, let’s just say it doesn’t track. God knows you were always a reclusive sonovabitch. ‘Too good for the rest of us,’ the other directorate chiefs said. Not me. I had you pegged. You’re an idea tank; you have no need for the idle chitchat that passes for friendship in these hallways.”
Karim wondered whether the time had come—a possibility he had, of course, factored into his plan—when one of Lindros’s colleagues would become suspicious. But he’d calculated that the probability of this was low—his time at CI was a matter of days, no more. And as Batt himself had said, Lindros had always been something of a loner. Despite the odds, here he was on the precipice of having to decide how to neutralize a directorate chief.
“If you’ve noticed anything erratic in my behavior, I’m quite certain it’s due to the stress of the current situation. One thing I’m a master of is compartmentalizing my life. I assure you that the past isn’t an issue.”
There was silence for a moment. Karim had the impression of a very dangerous beast passing him by, so close he could smell its rank musk.
Batt nodded. “Then we’re done here, Martin.” He rose, extended his hand. “I’m glad we had this little heart-to-heart.”
As Karim walked out, he was grateful that he had planted convincing evidence as to the identity of the “traitor.” Otherwise Batt’s teeth would be sinking into the back of his neck.
