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Bourne, buffeted by the quickening throngs, felt as if his head were on fire. Something
about those phrases. He knew them, and he didn’t, how could that be? He shook his head
as if to clear it; memories were appearing like knife slashes through a piece of fabric.
Light was glimmering…
And then he saw Moira. She was hurrying toward the Chinese pagoda from the
opposite direction, her expression intent, grim, even. What had happened? What
information did she have for him?
He craned his neck, trying to find Soraya in the swirl of the demonstration. That was
when he remembered.
Right as rain.
He and Soraya had had this conversation before-where? In Odessa? Hi, it’s me coming
before her name meant that she was under duress. Actually coming before a place where
she was supposed to be meant that she wasn’t there.
Right as rain meant it’s a trap.
He looked up and his heart sank. Moira was heading right into it.
When the door opened, Willard froze. He was on his hands and knees hidden from the
doorway by the desk’s skirt. He heard voices, one of them LaValle’s, and held his breath.
“There’s nothing to it,” LaValle said. “E-mail me the figures and after I’m done with
the Moore woman I’ll check them.”
“Good deal,” Patrick, one of LaValle’s aides said, “but you’d better get back to the
Library, the Moore woman is kicking up a fuss.”
LaValle cursed. Willard heard him cross to the desk, shuffle some papers. Perhaps he
was looking for a file. LaValle grunted in satisfaction, walked back across the office, and closed the door after him. It was only when Willard heard the grate of the key in the lock
that he exhaled.
He fired up the camera, praying that the images hadn’t been deleted, and there they
were, one after another, evidence that would damn Luther LaValle and his entire NSA
administration. Using both the camera and his cell phone, he linked them through the
wireless Bluetooth protocol, then transferred the images to his cell. Once that was
completed, he navigated to his son’s phone number-which wasn’t his son’s number,
though if anyone called it a young man who had standing instructions to pass as his son
would answer-and sent the photos in one long burst. Sending them one by one via
separate calls would surely cause a red flag on the security server.
At last, Willard sat back and took a deep breath. It was done; the photos were now in
the hands of CI, where they’d do the most good, or-if you were Luther LaValle-the most
damage. Checking his watch, he pocketed the camera, relatched the door to the hidden
compartment, and scrambled out from under the desk.
Four minutes later, his hair freshly combed, his uniform brushed down, and looking
very smart, indeed, he placed a Ceylon tea in front of Soraya Moore and a single-malt
scotch in front of Luther LaValle. Ms. Moore thanked him; LaValle, staring at her,
ignored him as usual.
Moira hadn’t seen him, and Bourne couldn’t call out to her because in this maelstrom
of people his voice wouldn’t carry. Blocked in his forward motion, he edged his way
back to the periphery, moving to his left in order to circle around to her. He tried her cell again, but she either couldn’t hear it or wasn’t answering.
It was as he was disengaging the line that he saw the NSA agents. They were moving
in concert toward the center of the crowd, and he could only assume that there were
others in a tightening circle within which they meant to trap him. They hadn’t spotted
him yet, but Moira was close to one of the pair in Bourne’s view. There was no way to
get to her without them spotting him. Nevertheless, he continued to circle through the
fringes of the crowd, which had grown so large that many of the young people were
shoving one another as they shouted their slogans.
Bourne pushed on, although it seemed to him at a slower and slower pace, as if he
were in a dream where the laws of physics were nonexistent. He needed to get to Moira
without the agents seeing him; it was dangerous for her to be looking for him with NSA
infiltrating the crowd. Far better for him to get to her first so he could control both their movements.
Finally, as he neared the NSA agents, he could see the reason for the sudden rancor of
the crowd. The shoving was being precipitated by a large group of skinheads, some
wielding brass knuckles or baseball bats. They had swastikas tattooed on their bulging
arms, and when they began to swing at the chanting university students, Bourne made a
run for Moira. But as he lunged for her, one of the agents elbowed a skinhead aside and,
as he did so, caught a glimpse of Bourne. He whirled, his lips moving as he spoke
urgently into the earpiece with which he was wirelessly co
members of what Bourne assumed was an execution team.
He grabbed Moira, but the agent had hold of him, and he began to jerk Bourne back
toward him, as if to detain him long enough for the other members of the team to reach
them. Bourne struck him flush on the chin with the heel of his hand. The agent’s head
snapped back, and he collapsed into a group of skinheads, who thought he was attacking
them and started beating him.
“Jason, what the hell happened to you?” Moira said as she and Bourne turned, making
their way through the throng. “Where’s Soraya?”
“She was never here,” Bourne said. “This is another NSA trap.”
It would have been best to keep to where the garden was most crowded, but that would
put them in the center of the trap. Bourne led them around the crowd, hoping to emerge
in a place where the agents wouldn’t spot them, but now he saw three more outside the
mass of the demonstration and knew retreat was impossible. Instead he reversed course,
drawing Moira farther into the surging mass of demonstrators.
“What are you doing?” Moira said. “Aren’t we headed straight into the trap?”
“Trust me.” Instinctively he headed toward one of the flashpoints where the skinheads
were clashing with the university students.
They reached the edge of the escalating fight between the two groups of teens. Out of
the corner of his eye Bourne saw an NSA agent struggling through the same mass of
people. Bourne tried to alter their course, but their way was blocked, and a resurgent
wave of students pushed them like flotsam at the tide line. Feeling the new influx of
people, the agent turned to fight against it and ran right into Moira.
He barked Bourne’s name into the microphone in his earpiece, and Bourne slammed a
shoe into the side of his knee. The agent faltered, but managed to counter the chop
Bourne directed at his shoulder blade. The agent drew a handgun, and Bourne snatched a
baseball bat from a skinhead’s grip, struck the agent so hard on the back of his hands that he dropped the handgun.
Then, from behind him, Bourne heard Moira say. “Jason, they’re coming!”
The trap was about to snap shut on both of them.
Forty-One
LUTHER LAVALLE waited on tenterhooks for the call from his extraction team
leader in Munich. He sat in his customary chair facing the window that looked out over
the rolling lawns to the left of the wide gravel drive, which wound through the elms and
oaks lining it like sentinels. Having verbally put her in her place after returning from his office, he contrived to ignore Soraya Moore and Willard who, after the second time, had
given up asking him if he wanted his single-malt scotch refreshed. He didn’t want his