Alem was trailing his fingers in the icy rubble at the base of the wall. “You’ll beat me,” he muttered.
“Why would I do that?”
“I scavenged something.” He jerked his head in the direction of the crash site. “From there.”
“Alem, I promise you. All I care about is finding my friend.”
Without another glance at Bourne, Alem produced a ring. Bourne took it, held it in the sunlight. He recognized the shield with an open book in each quadrant: the coat of arms of Brown University.
“This is my friend’s ring.” Carefully, he gave it back to Alem. “Will you show me where you found it?”
Alem took him over the wall, then tromped through the snow to a spot several hundred meters away from the crash site. He knelt down, Bourne with him.
“Here?”
Alem nodded. “It was under the snow, half buried.”
“As if it had been ground into the dirt,” Bourne finished for him. “Yet you found it.”
“I was up here with my father.” Alem’s wrists rested on his bony knees. “We were scavenging.”
“What did your father find?”
Alem shrugged.
“Will you take me to him?”
Alem stared down at the ring in his grimy palm. He curled his fingers over it, put it back in his pocket. Then he looked up at Bourne.
“I won’t tell him,” Bourne said quietly. “I promise.”
Alem nodded, and they rose together. From Davis, Bourne got antiseptic and a bandage for his hand. Then the boy led him down from the small, bleak alpine meadow via a heart-stoppingly steep path that twisted along the iced rock face of Ras Dejen.
Anne wasn’t kidding about Lerner being out for blood. There were two glowering agents waiting for Soraya at Typhon level as she stepped out of the elevator. Even to be here, she knew, they had to have Typhon-issued ID. Bad news, getting worse every second.
“Acting Director Lerner wants a word,” the one on the left said.
“He asks that you come with us,” the one on the right said.
She used her lightest, flirtatious voice. “D’you think I could freshen up first, boys?”
The one on the left, the taller one, said: “‘ASAP.’ That was the acting director’s order.”
Stoics, eunuchs, or both. Soraya shrugged and went with them. In truth, there wasn’t much else she could do. As she marched down the corridors between the two animated pillars, she tried not to worry. The best thing she could do now was to keep her head while those around her were losing theirs. Lerner would no doubt needle her, do his best to drive her to the wall. She’d heard stories about him, and he had been at CI, what, all of six months? He’d know she resented him, and he’d work on that like a sadistic dentist clamped onto her molar.
At the end of the corridor, she confronted the corner office. The taller agent beat a brief military tattoo on the door with his callused knuckles. Then he opened the door and stood aside for her to enter. But he and his doppelgänger didn’t leave. They stepped into the office behind her, closed the door, and took a step back, as if holding the wall up with their brawny shoulders.
Soraya’s heart sank. In the blink of an eye, Lerner had taken over Lindros’s office, swept all of Lindros’s personal mementos into God only knew where. The photos were down, their faces turned to the wall, as if already in exile.
The acting director was sitting behind Lindros’s desk, his beefy ass in Lindros’s chair, leafing through a pale green folder, a CAD—a current action dossier—while he fielded Lindros’s calls as if they were his own. They were his own, Soraya reminded herself, and was instantly depressed. She longed for Lindros to return, prayed for Bourne to find him and bring him back alive. What other outcome should she hope for?
“Ah, Ms. Moore.” Lerner hung up the phone. “Good of you to join us.” He smiled but did not offer her a seat. Clearly he wanted her to stand, like a pupil brought before the vice principal for disciplinary action.
“Just where have you been?”
She knew he knew because she’d checked in via her cell. Apparently, it was a personal confession he wanted. He was a man, she saw, for whom the world existed as a series of boxes, all the same size, into which he could fit everything and everyone, each to its own neat cubbyhole. In that way he fooled himself into believing that he could control the chaos of reality.
“I’ve been consoling Tim Hytner’s mother and sisters in Maryland.”
“There are certain procedures,” Lerner said stiffly. “They’re there for a reason. Or didn’t that occur to you?”
“Tim was my friend.”
“You were presumptuous to assume CI incapable of caring for its own.”
“I know his family. It was better the news came from me. I made it easier for them.”
“By lying, by telling them Hytner was a hero, instead of an inept bungler who allowed himself to be used by the enemy?”
Soraya was desperately trying to keep herself on an even keel. She hated herself for feeling intimidated by this man.
“Tim wasn’t a field op.” At once, she knew she’d made a tactical error.
Lerner picked up the CAD. “And yet your own written report states that Hytner was drawn into the field directly by Jason Bourne.”
“Tim was working to decode the cipher we found on Cevik—the man we now know was Fadi. Bourne wanted to use that fact to make him talk.”
Lerner’s face grew hard and tight as a drumhead. His eyes seemed to her like bullet holes—black, deadly, ready to erupt. Other than that he seemed to her quite ordinary. He could have been a shoe salesman, a middle-aged office drone of any flavor. Which, she supposed, was just the point. A good field agent needed to be forgotten almost as soon as he was seen.
“Let me get this straight, Ms. Moore. You’re defending Jason Bourne?”
“It was Bourne who identified Fadi. He’s given us a starting point to—”
“Curious that he made this so-called ID after Hytner was killed, after he allowed Cevik to escape.”
Soraya was incredulous. “Are you saying you don’t think Cevik was Fadi?”
“I’m saying all you have is the say-so of a rogue agent, whose word is as far from gospel as it’s possible to get. It’s damn dangerous to allow your personal feelings to get in the way of your professional judgment.”
“I’m sure that’s not the—”
“You cleared this little excursion to Hytner’s family with whom?”
Soraya tried to keep her equilibrium through his abrupt shifts of topics. “There was no one to clear it with.”
“There is now.” With a flourish, he closed the CAD. “Here’s a bit of advice, Ms. Moore: Don’t wander off the reservation again. Are we clear on that point?”
“Quite clear,” she said shortly.
“I wonder. You see, you haven’t been here the last several days, so you missed an important staff meeting. Would you care to hear the gist of it?”
“Very much,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Here it is in a nutshell,” Lerner said amiably. “I’m changing Typhon’s mission.”
“You’re doing what?”
“You see, Ms. Moore, what this agency needs is less navel-gazing and more action. It doesn’t matter in the least what the Islamic extremists think or feel. They want us dead. Therefore, we’re going to go out and kick their butts into the Red Sea. It’s as simple as that.”
“Sir, if I may say, there’s nothing simple about this war. It’s not like other—”
“Now you’ve been brought up to speed, Ms. Moore,” Lerner said sharply.
An acid churning had begun in Soraya’s guts. This couldn’t be happening. All of Lindros’s planning, all of their hard work, was going down the drain. Where was Lindros when they all needed him? Was he even alive? She had to believe that he was. But for the moment, at least, it was this monster from the field who was calling the shots. At least this interrogation was over.
Elbows
on the desk, Lerner steepled his fingers. “I wonder,” he said, once again turning on a dime, “if you could clear up a matter for me.” He wagged the CAD up and down as if it was an admonishing finger. “How on earth did you fuck things up so royally?”
She stood stock-still, despite the rage running through her. He’d led her to believe the interview was over. In fact, it was just starting. She knew that he was just getting around to the real reason he’d called her in.
“You allowed Bourne to take Hiram Cevik out of the cage. You were on site when Cevik made his escape. You ordered the choppers into action.” He dropped the dossier onto the desktop. “What have I gotten wrong so far?”
Soraya briefly thought about remaining mute, but she didn’t want to give him that measure of satisfaction. “Nothing,” she said dully.
“You were the agent in charge for Cevik. You were responsible.”
Nothing for it now. She squared her shoulders. “Yes, I was.”
“Grounds for firing, Ms. Moore, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“That’s just the trouble. You should know. Just as you should’ve known better than to let Cevik out of his cage.”
No matter what she said, he found a way to turn it against her. “Begging your pardon, but I had orders from the DCI’s office to accommodate Bourne in every way.”
Lerner stared at her for a long moment. Then he gestured in an almost avuncular fashion. “Why the hell are you standing?” he said.
Soraya settled into a chair facing him.
“On the subject of Bourne.” His eyes locked on hers. “You would seem to be something of an expert.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Your file says that you worked with him in Odessa.”
“I suppose you could say I know Jason Bourne better than most agents.”
Lerner sat back. “Surely, Ms. Moore, you don’t think you’ve learned all there is to know about your craft.”
“I don’t. No.”
“Then I have full confidence that we’ll get along, that eventually you’ll be as loyal to me as you were to Martin Lindros.”
“Why are you talking as if Lindros is dead?”
Lerner ignored her. “For the moment, I have to respond to the unfolding situation. As AIC, the fiasco with Cevik was your responsibility. Therefore, I have no recourse but to ask for your resignation.”
Soraya’s heart leapt up into her throat. “Resignation?” she barely got out.
Lerner, gimlet-eyed, said, “A resignation will look better on your records. Even you should be able to understand that.”
Soraya jumped up. He’d played her cruelly and beautifully, which infuriated her all the more. She hated this man and she wanted him to know it. Otherwise nothing would be left of her self-esteem. “Who the hell are you to come in here and throw your weight around?”
“That’s it, we’re done here, Ms. Moore. Clear out your things. You’re fired.”
Eight
THE NARROW PATH, treacherous with ice, down which Alem led him went on so long that Bourne felt it would never end. All at once, however, it did, winding inward from the dizzying face of the mountain to emerge into an alpine meadow many times the size of the one onto which the two Chinooks had been brought down. Much of this one was clear of snow.
The village was little more than a grouping of ramshackle structures, none of them very large. A gridwork of streets appeared to be made of tramped-down manure. A flock of brown goats lifted their triangular heads as the two approached but, apparently recognizing Alem, shortly returned to munching clumps of brittle brown grasses. Farther away, horses whinnied, shaking their heads as the men’s scents reached them.
“Your father is where?” Bourne said.
“In the bar, as usual.” Alem looked up at him. “But I won’t take you to him. You must go alone. You can’t let him know that I said anything to you about his scavenging.”
Bourne nodded. “I promised you, Alem.”
“Or even that you met me.”
“How will I recognize him?”
“By his leg—his left leg is thin, and you can see it’s shorter than his right. His name is Zaim.”
Bourne was about to turn away when Alem pressed Lindros’s ring into his hand.
“You found this, Alem—”
“It belongs to your friend,” the boy said. “If I return it to you maybe he won’t be dead.”
It was time to eat. Again. No matter how else you resisted, Oscar Lindros had told his son, you could not refuse to eat. You needed to keep up your strength. Your captors could starve you, of course, but only if they wanted to kill you, which quite clearly Dujja didn’t. They could drug your food, of course, and after the torture proved fruitless Martin Lindros’s captors had done just that. To no avail. Ditto for sensory deprivation. His mind was vaulted up; his father had seen to that. Sodium Pentothal, for instance, had made him babble like a baby, but about nothing useful. Everything they wanted to know was inside the vault, unavailable to them.
They were on a timetable, so now they more or less left him alone. They did feed him regularly, though sometimes his jailers spat in his food. One of them would not clean him up when he soiled himself. When the stink became unbearable, they pulled out a hose. The resulting blast of ice-cold water lifted him off his feet, slammed him against the rock wall. There he would lie for hours, blood and water mingling in pink rivulets, while he reeled trout out of the peaceful lake, one by one.
But that was weeks ago—at least he thought so. He was better now. They’d even had a doctor look at him, stitch up the worst of the cuts, bandage him, feed him antibiotics for the fever that had raged through him.
Now he could let go of the lake for longer and longer periods of time. He could take in his surroundings, understand that he was in a cave. Judging by the chill, the howling of the wind that swirled in the cave mouth, he was high up, presumably still somewhere on Ras Dejen. He did not see Fadi, but from time to time he saw Fadi’s chief lieutenant, the man called Abbud ibn Aziz. This man had been his chief interrogator after Fadi had failed to break him in the first few days of his incarceration.
For Lindros, Abbud ibn Aziz was a familiar type. He was essentially feral—that is to say, he was a stranger to civilization. He always would be. His comfort came from the trackless desert, where he had been born and raised. This much Lindros surmised from the form of Arabic he spoke—Abbud ibn Aziz was a Bedouin. His understanding of right and wrong was perfectly black-and-white, carved in stone. In this sense, he was exactly like Oscar Lindros.
Abbud ibn Aziz seemed to enjoy talking with Lindros. Perhaps he relished the prisoner’s helplessness. Perhaps he felt that if they talked long enough Lindros would come to see him as a friend—that the Stockholm syndrome would set in, making Lindros identify with his captor. Perhaps he was simply being the Good Cop, because it was he who always toweled Lindros off after the hose attacks, it was he who changed Lindros’s clothes when Lindros was too weak or out of it to do it himself.
Lindros was not a person to be affected by the temptation to reach out from his isolation, to become friends. Lindros had never made friends easily; he found that it was far easier to be a loner. In fact, his father had encouraged it. Being a loner was an asset if you aspired to be a spy, Oscar had said. This tendency had also been noted in Lindros’s personnel file when he’d gone through the grueling monthlong vetting process thought up by the sadistic CI psych wonks just before his acceptance into the agency.
By now he knew very well what Abbud ibn Aziz wanted from him. It had come as something of a mystery to him that the terrorist sought information on a mission CI had mounted years ago against Hamid ibn Ashef. What did Hamid ibn Ashef have to do with Abbud ibn Aziz?
They had wanted more from him, of course. Much more. And despite Abbud ibn Aziz’s apparent single-mindedness, Lindros had noted with interest that the interrogation about the CI mission against Hamid ibn Ashef occurred only when Abbud was
alone with him.
From this, he had deduced that this particular line of questioning was a private agenda that had nothing at all to do with Dujja’s reason for kidnapping him.
“How are you feeling today?”
Abbud ibn Aziz stood in front of him. He had brought two identical plates of food. He put one in Lindros’s hands. When it came to food, Lindros knew his way around the Quran. All food fell into one of two categories: haram or halal, forbidden or allowed. All the food here was, of course, strictly halal.
“No coffee today, I’m afraid,” Abbud said. “But the dates and buttermilk curds are fine.”
The dates were a bit on the dry side, and the curds had a strange taste. These things were small but, in Lindros’s world, significant. The dates were drying up, the curds turning, and the coffee was gone. No more supplies were being delivered. Why?
They both ate with their right hands, their teeth bared as they bit into the dark flesh of the dates. Lindros’s mind was racing.
“How is the weather?” he asked at length.
“Cold, and the constant wind makes it colder still.” Abbud shivered. “Another front is coming in.”
Lindros knew that he was used to hundred-plus-degree temperatures, sand in his food, the molten-white glare of the sun, the blessed cool relief of a star-strewn night. This endless deep freeze was intolerable, to say nothing of the altitude. His bones and his lungs must be protesting like old men on a forced march. Lindros watched as he switched his Ruger semiautomatic in the crook of his left arm.
“Being here must be painful for you.” Lindros’s question was not mere banter.
Abbud’s shrug ended as another shiver.
“It’s more than the desert you miss.” Lindros put his plate aside. Taking an almost constant beating day after day did terrible things to the appetite. “It’s the world of your fathers that you miss, isn’t it?”
“Western civilization is an abomination,” Abbud said. “Its influence on our society is like an infectious disease that needs to be wiped out.”
“You’re afraid of Western civilization, because you don’t understand it.”