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His head swung away again. There was bark under his nails, and dirt. An ant crawled along one finger, wandering, lost.
“That was the last I saw of her, my daughter. Nothing more was said. I did nothing because… because then I was Domna and there was nothing to be done in the face of its collective will. It’s true that I had lost a lot of blood and I was in pain.” He raised his right hand so Bourne could see the ugly white knot, the scar in the center of his palm. “I had no strength left, I told myself, I was loyal, I told myself. But when I returned home and saw the look on my wife’s face the lies I told myself evaporated like mist in sunlight.” His eyes sought Bourne’s. “Everything changed, do you understand?”
“You crossed the Rubicon.”
Essai let that sink in, then he nodded. “I came home a different man, a man of war, a man with a blackened heart. My colleagues—those I had considered friends—had betrayed me. They had slipped away when I wasn’t paying attention. They no longer belonged to the Domna—at least the Domna I had once admired. This was a new Domna, in thrall to the Mosque and its hideous Black Legion.
“Now all I can think of is revenge. The information on the laptop you stole was to be that revenge. I was going to steal the gold from under the Domna’s nose, but that is no longer possible.”
Bourne was about to reply when Essai waved away his words. “But Allah is great, Allah is good because in the fullness of time you have reappeared, you, the instrument of my revenge.”
There was another silence. Night creatures chittered overhead and Corellos, eyes closed, chin on chest, began to snortle like a pig.
Essai gave a dry laugh, then cleared his throat. “I need your expertise, Mr. Bourne. You are the only one I trust to find out what the Domna’s new plan is so that, together, we can stop it.”
“I work alone.”
“Odd, isn’t it?” He hadn’t heard Bourne, or if he had, he ignored him.
“Using the word trust.”
“We’re both men of our word, yes?”
Bourne nodded.
The corners of Essai’s eyes wrinkled. “Then this is what I propose—”
“I know what you want me to do,” Bourne said.
“It’s only what you were planning to do yourself. But now you have my assistance.”
“I don’t want your assistance.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Bourne, in this instance you most assuredly do. The Domna is both large and powerful, its tentacles spread into every corner of the globe.” He waggled his forefinger in Bourne’s direction. “You think I am being melodramatic, but I assure you I am not.”
“I’m going to do what I’m going to do.”
Essai nodded, almost eagerly. “Understood. In return, I propose to tell you whom the Domna has sent to kill you.”
Bourne shrugged. “I’ll find out in due course. I know all the avenues, all the players.”
“You won’t know this one. As I said to you, the Domna has embarked on a sacred mission. Without my help, you may very well be destroyed.”
“And I suppose you’re planning to withhold this information until I deliver to you the information you want on the Domna.”
“Nothing of the sort, Mr. Bourne. I want you to live! Besides, I told you that we’re both men of our word. I’m going to tell you this instant.” He took a step closer, his voice lowered. “Unless you stop him, your friend Boris Karpov will kill you.”
4
YOU’VE BEEN MORE than fair with us, Mr. Secretary.”
“Peter, I’ve asked you to call me Christopher,” Secretary of Defense Hendricks replied.
Peter Marks, sitting beside his co-director, Soraya Moore, murmured his acquiescence.
“I have ideas for the resurrected Treadstone,” Hendricks continued, “but before I voice them I want to hear from you two. How do you envision Treadstone going forward?”
The three were in the drawing room of Hendricks’s town house in Georgetown, where they were beginning a strategy briefing. Hendricks’s family, while from the upper crust of Washington society, was nevertheless lacking wealth, which meant that despite his blue blood he was possessed of a distinctly blue-collar work ethic. He was a striver, some might say an overachiever.
He was slim and tall with the upright bearing of a military man. In fact, he had served, briefly, in Korea, had been wounded in the line of duty, and had been duly decorated by the president himself before returning to the public sector. Until a year ago, he had been national security adviser.
Now that he was finally in the catbird seat, he was determined to implement a number of initiatives he had been formulating for years. The first—and frankly most important—was turning the resurrected Treadstone into his own organization, free of the impediments of CI, NSA, and Congress.
Hendricks had no great desire to circumvent the law. Nevertheless, he had observed that, from time to time, there was a need for a group of people—small, tightly knit, intensely loyal to one another and to America—to operate in areas impossible for those subject to oversight and scrutiny to go. Now, with the country under attack from various extremist terrorist factions both foreign and homegrown, was such a time.
To that end, Hendricks had hired Soraya Moore and Peter Marks. Moore had headed up CI’s own black-ops group, Typhon, until being summarily fired by M. Errol Danziger, the monomaniacal new head of CI, and Peter Marks had been close to the former heads of CI. They knew each other well, had complementary temperaments, and were smart enough to think outside the box, which, in Hendricks’s opinion, was what was needed in this new splinter war of a thousand cadres they found themselves in. Best of all, Soraya Moore was Muslim, half Egyptian, with a massively deep pool of knowledge, expertise, and hands-on experience in the Middle East and beyond. The two of them were, in short, the polar opposites of the sclerotic generals and career politicians that littered the American intelligence community like bird droppings.
Marks and Moore were opposite him on a leather sofa, the twin of the one on which he sat. His assistant, Jolene, stood behind, a Bluetooth earplug connecting her to her cell. Sunlight crept in between the thick curtains. Through the slice of visible window could be seen the shadows of the secretary’s National Guard detail. On the low table between them were the remnants of breakfast. Cleo, Hendricks’s gorgeous golden boxer, sat immobile against his leg, mouth slightly open, head slightly cocked, staring at her master’s two guests as if curious about the long silence.
Soraya and Marks exchanged a quick glance, then she cleared her throat. Her large, deep-blue eyes and her prominent nose were the centerpieces of a bold Arabian face the color of cinnamon. She was possessed of a commanding presence that Hendricks found impressive. What he liked best, however, was that she wasn’t girlie—nor was she brittlely masculine like so many females in a male-dominated structure. She was her own person, which he found refreshing as well as curiously comforting. He therefore weighed her words as carefully as he did those of Marks.
“Peter and I want to move on a tip that came through early this morning,” Soraya finally said.
“What sort of tip?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Secretary,” Jolene said, leaning in, “I have Brad Findlay on the line.”
Hendricks’s head whipped around. “Jolene, what did I tell you about interrupting this briefing?”
Jolene took an involuntary step back. “I’m sorry, sir, but seeing as how it’s the head of Homeland Security, I assumed you—”
“Never, ever assume,” he snapped. “Go into the kitchen. You know how to handle Findlay.”
“Yessir.” Cheeks flaming, Jolene beat a hasty retreat out of the room.
Marks and Soraya exchanged glances again.
Soraya cleared her throat. “It’s difficult to say.”
“It’s not what you’d call a normal tip,” Marks said.
Hendricks drew his brows together. “Meaning?” He had completely forgotten Jolene, the call, and his waspish reaction.
“It d
idn’t originate from any of the usual suspects: disgruntled mullahs, opium warlords, the Russian, Albanian, or Chinese mafias.” Soraya rose and went around the room, touching a bronze sculpture here, the corner of a photo frame there. Cleo watched her with her large, liquid eyes.
Soraya stopped abruptly and, turning, looked at Hendricks. “All these things here are known. This particular tip came from the unknown—”
The secretary’s brow furrowed further. “I don’t understand. Terrorism—”
“Not terrorism,” Soraya said. “At least not as we have defined it so far. This is an individual who reached out to me.”
“Why did he want to turn? What’s his motivation?”
“That was still to be determined.”
“Well, whoever your informant is, get him over here for a debriefing,” Hendricks said. “I don’t much care for mysteries.”
“That would be the protocol, of course,” Marks said. “Unfortunately, he’s dead.”
“Murdered?”
“Hit-and-run,” Marks said.
“The point is we don’t know.” Soraya gripped the back of an upholstered chair. “We want to go to Paris and investigate.”
“Forget him. You have more important matters to see to. Besides, who knows whether he was trustworthy.”
“He had given me some preliminary information on a group known as Severus Domna.”
“Never heard of it, and furthermore the name sounds bogus,” Hendricks said. “I think this contact is playing you.”
Soraya stood her ground. “I don’t share that opinion.”
Hendricks rose and crossed to one of the windows. When he’d first met Soraya Moore, he’d wondered if she was a lesbian. There was something about her—a balance, an openness, a willingness to accept the complexities of people that a lot of hetero women simply couldn’t manage. Then he’d dived deeper into her jacket and discovered that her lover was Amun Chalthoum, head of al Mokhabarat, the Egyptian secret service. In fact, he’d called Chalthoum and had an interesting twenty-minute talk. Danziger had used her affair with Chalthoum as an excuse to fire her from Typhon. That was high on the long list of stupidities perpetrated by M. Errol Danziger since he’d come to CI. Typhon’s invaluable contacts and deep-cover operatives were loyal only to her. The moment Hendricks had named her co-director of Treadstone, every one of them had come with her. So now he had a sense of how unique she was.
“All right,” he said. “Look into it.” Then he turned back to them. “But, Peter, I want you here. Treadstone is still in its infancy and the fact is I envisioned it as an agency with the ability to police and clean up the giant squid of our post–nine-eleven intelligence community. There are now two hundred sixty-three and counting intelligence organs created or reorganized since 2001. And that doesn’t account for the hundreds of private intel firms we’ve seen fit to hire, some of them so beyond our control they’re operating here in the States in the same manner they do in world war zones. Do you realize that at this moment there are eight hundred fifty thousand Americans with top-secret clearance? That’s far too many by a staggeringly exponential number.” He shook his head emphatically. “There’s no way I will allow both my directors in the field at the same time.”
Marks took a step toward him. “But—”
“Peter.” Hendricks smiled. “Soraya has the field experience so she gets this assignment. It’s simple logic.” As they were leaving, he said, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been able to get the Treadstone servers access to all the clandestine services’ databases.”
After they’d gone, Hendricks thought about Samaritan. He had deliberately kept its existence from Peter, knowing that the moment he got wind of it, he’d want to become involved in the security of Indigo Ridge. Despite the president’s clear warning, Hendricks wanted to keep Peter on Treadstone, which was his baby now, a long-held desire that he was not going to relinquish, even for Samaritan. He was taking a risk, he knew that full well. Should any of the others in the Oval Office meeting, especially General Marshall, suspect that he was holding back key personnel for his own use he’d be in an untenable position.
Ah well, he thought, what’s life without risk?
He stepped back to the window. His roses looked bedraggled and forlorn. He glanced impatiently at his watch. Where was that damn rose specialist he’d hired?
It was quiet here, the house removed from the hubbub at the center of the city. Normally, he enjoyed that; it allowed him to think. But this morning was different. He had awoken with the nagging sense that he had missed something. He had already been married and divorced twice when he had met, married, and then buried his beloved Amanda. He had one son, from the second wife, now a marine in military intelligence, deployed in Afghanistan. He should have been worried about him, but the fact was he rarely thought about him. He’d had little to do with raising him; to be truthful, he might have been someone else’s son. Without Amanda, he had no attachments, no sense of family, only place. Like a European, he valued property over cash. In a sense, this house was all he had, all he needed. Why was that? he asked himself. Was something wrong with him? In restaurants, at official functions or the theater, he encountered colleagues with their wives, sometimes with their grown children. He was always alone, even though, from time to time, he had one woman or another on his arm—widows desperate to remain part of the social scene inside the Beltway. They meant nothing to him, these women of a certain age, with tight, poreless faces, breasts pushed up to their carefully sculpted chins, in their long gowns manufactured to impress. Often they wore gloves to hide their age spots.
He was pulled away from his ruminations by the sharp sound of the bell. Opening the front door, he was confronted by a woman in her mid- to late thirties, her hair pulled back from her heart-shaped face in a tomboyish ponytail. She wore round steel-rimmed glasses, denim overalls atop a plaid man’s shirt, frog-green clogs, and a floppy canvas sun hat.
She introduced herself as Maggie Penrod and presented her credentials just as she had with the bodyguards patrolling the property. Hendricks studied them. She was trained at the Sorbonne and at Trinity at Oxford. Her father (deceased) had been a social worker, her Swedish mother (also deceased) a language teacher in the Bethesda school district. There was nothing memorable about her except, as she leaned forward to take back her ID, her scent, which had a decided tang. What was it? Hendricks asked himself. He sniffed as inconspicuously as possible. Ah, yes. Cinnamon and something slightly bitter, burnt almond, maybe.
As he led the way outside to the sad-looking rose bed, he said, “What’s an art history major doing—”
“In a place like this?”
She laughed, a soft, mellow sound that somehow stirred something inside him, long hidden.
“Art history was a totally unrealistic career choice. Besides, I don’t do well in academia—too much skulduggery and intrigue.”
She had a slight accent, doubtless a product of her Swedish mother, Hendricks thought.
She paused at the edge of the rose bed, hands on hips. “And I like being my own boss. No one but me to answer to.”
Listening more closely, he became aware that her accent softened her words, lending them an unmistakable sensuality.
She knelt down, her soft, strong fingers pushing aside stillborn flowers, their edges tight, ruffled, and brown. Blood streaked her skin, but she seemed unmindful of the thorns.
“The roses are balled and the leaves are being eaten.” She stood up and turned to him. “For one thing, you’re overwatering them. For another, they need to be sprayed once a week. Not to worry, I use only organics.” She smiled up at him, her cheeks aflame in sunlight. “It’ll take a couple of weeks, but I think I can get them out of intensive care.”
Hendricks gestured. “Whatever you need.”
The sunlight slid over her forearms like oil, illuminating tiny white-gold hairs that seemed to stir beneath his gaze. Hendricks’s breath felt hot in his throat.
And then, without his kno
wing quite how the words slipped out, he said, “Care to come inside for a drink?”
She smiled sweetly at him, the sun in her eyes. “Not today.”
I don’t believe it,” Bourne said. “It simply isn’t possible.”
“Anything is possible,” Essai said. “Everything is possible.”
“No,” Bourne said firmly, “it’s not.”
Essai smiled his enigmatic smile. “Mr. Bourne, you are now in the dominion of Severus Domna. Please believe me in this.”
Bourne stared into the fire. Darkness had come and, with it, a fresh wild pig, which Corellos’s men had trapped, scraped free of hair, and spitted. The rich odor of its melting fat suffused the campsite. He and Essai sat near the fire, talking.
Some distance away, Corellos was talking animatedly to his lieutenant. “Petty victories,” Essai said, eyeing him.
Bourne looked at him inquiringly.
“You see how it is. He knows I can’t eat pork and yet this is what he offers for dinner. If you ask him, he’ll say it’s a treat for his men.”
“Let’s return to Boris Karpov.”
The enigmatic smile returned. “Benjamin El-Arian, our enemy, is a master chess player. He thinks many moves ahead. He planned for the eventuality that you might succeed in keeping the Domna from finding Solomon’s hoard of gold.” He turned his head, the firelight glinting off his eyes. “You’ve heard of Viktor Cherkesov, yes?”
“Until several months ago, he was the head of FSB-2. He left under mysterious circumstances and Boris took his place. Boris told me all this. Cleaning up FSB-2 has been a long-held dream of his.”
