Страница 105 из 115
of Defense Halliday who’ll be leading the charge to punish you for your criminal
protocols.”
“I do what I do in the defense of my country,” LaValle said stiffly. “When a country is
at war extraordinary actions must be undertaken in order to safeguard its borders. It’s you and people like you, with your weak-willed leftist leanings, that are to blame, not me.”
He was livid, his cheeks aflame. “I’m the patriot here. You-you’re just an obstructionist.
This country will crack and fall if people like you are left to run it. I’m America’s only
salvation.”
“Sit down,” Hart said quietly but firmly, “before one of my ‘leftist’ people knocks you
down.”
LaValle glared at her for a moment, then slowly sank into the chair.
“Nice to be living in your own private world where you make the rules and you don’t
give a shit about reality.”
“I’m not sorry for what I did. If you’re expecting remorse, you’re sorely mistaken.”
“Frankly,” Hart said, “I’m not expecting anything out of you until after you’re
waterboarded.” She waited until all the blood had drained from his face, before she
added, “That would be one solution-your solution-but it isn’t mine.” She shuffled the
photos back into their envelope.
“Who’s seen those?” LaValle asked.
The DCI saw him wince when she said, “Everyone who needs to see them.”
“Well, then.” He was unbowed, unrepentant. “It’s over.”
Hart looked past him to the front of the Library. “Not quite yet.” She nodded. “Here
come Soraya and Tyrone.”
Semion Icoupov sat on the stoop of a building not far from where the shooting had
taken place. His greatcoat hid the blood that had pooled inside it, so it he didn’t draw a
crowd, just a curious glance or two from pedestrians hurrying by. He felt dizzy and
nauseated, no doubt from shock and loss of blood, which meant he wasn’t thinking
clearly. He looked around with bloodshot eyes. Where was the car that had brought him
here? He needed to get out of here before Arkadin emerged from the building and spotted
him. He’d taken a tiger from the wild and had tried to domesticate him, a historic mistake
by any measure. How many times had it been attempted before with always the same
result? Tigers weren’t meant to be domesticated; neither was Arkadin. He was what he
was, and would never be anything else: a killing machine of almost preternatural abilities.
Icoupov had recognized the talent and, greedily, had tried to harness it to his own needs.
Now the tiger had turned on him; he’d had a premonition that he would die in Munich,
now he knew why, now he knew how.
Looking back toward Egon Kirsch’s apartment building, he felt a sudden rush of fear,
as if at any moment death would emerge from it, stalking him down the street. He tried to
pull himself together, tried to rise to his feet, but a horrific pain shot through him, his knees buckled, and he collapsed back onto the cold stone.
More people passed, now ignoring him altogether. Cars rolled by. The sky came down,
the day darkened as if covered with a shroud. A sudden gust of wind brought the onset of
rain, hard as sleet. He ducked his head between his shoulders, shivered mightily.
And then he heard his name shouted and, turning his head, saw the nightmare figure of
Leonid Danilovich Arkadin coming down the steps of Kirsch’s building. Now more
highly motivated, Icoupov once again tried to get up. He groaned as he gained his feet,
but tottered there uncertainly as Arkadin began to run toward him.
At that moment, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up to the sidewalk. The driver hurried
out and, taking hold of Icoupov, half carried him across the pavement. Icoupov struggled,
but to no avail; he was weak with lost blood, and growing weaker by the moment. The
driver opened the rear door, bundled him into the backseat. He pulled an HK 1911.45 and
with it warned Arkadin away, then he hustled back around the front of the Mercedes, slid
behind the wheel, and took off.
Icoupov, slumped in the near corner of the backseat, made rhythmic grunts of pain like
puffs of smoke from a steam locomotive. He was aware of the soft rocking of the shocks
as the car sped through the Munich streets. More slowly came the realization that he
wasn’t alone in the backseat. He blinked heavily, trying to clear his vision.
“Hello, Semion,” a familiar voice said.
And then Icoupov’s vision cleared. “You!”
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, hasn’t it?” Dominic Specter said.
The Empire State Building,” Moira said as she studied the plans Bourne had managed
to scoop up in Kirsch’s apartment. “I can’t believe I was wrong.”
They were parked in a rest stop by the side of the autobahn on the way to the airport.
“What do you mean, wrong?” Bourne said.
She told him what Arthur Hauser, the engineer hired by Kaller Steelworks, had
confessed about the flaw in LNG terminal’s software.
Bourne thought a moment. “If a terrorist used that flaw to gain control of the software,
what could he do?”
“The tanker is so huge and the terminal is so complex that the docking is handled
electronically.”
“Through the software program.”
Moira nodded.
“So he could cause the tanker to crash into the terminal.” He turned to her. “Would that
set off the tanks of liquid gas?”
“Quite possibly, yes.”
Bourne was thinking furiously. “Still, the terrorist would have to know about the flaw,
how to exploit it, and how to reconfigure the software.”
“It sounds simpler than trying to blow up a major building in Manhattan.”
She was right, of course; and because of the questions he’d been pondering he grasped
implications of that immediately.
Moira glanced at her watch. “Jason, the NextGen plane with the coupling link is
scheduled to take off in thirty minutes.” She put the car in gear, nosed out onto the
autobahn. “We have to make up our minds before we get to the airport. Do we go to New
York or to Long Beach?”
Bourne said, “I’ve been trying to figure out why both Specter and Icoupov were so
hell-bent on retrieving these plans.” He stared down at the blueprints as if willing them to speak to him. “The problem,” he said slowly and thoughtfully, “is that they were
entrusted to Specter’s son, Pyotr, who was more interested in girls, drugs, and the
Moscow nightlife than he was in his work. As a consequence, his network was peopled
by misfits, junkies, and weaklings.”
“Why in the world would Specter entrust so important a document to a network like
that?”
“That’s just the point,” Bourne said. “He wouldn’t.”
Moira glanced at him. “What does that mean? Is the network bogus?”
“Not as far as Pyotr was concerned,” Bourne said, “but so far as Specter saw it, yes,
everyone who was a part of it was expendable.”
“Then the plans are bogus, too.”
“No, I think they’re real, and that’s what Specter was counting on,” Bourne said. “But
when you consider the situation logically and coolly, which no one does when it comes to
the threat of an imminent terrorist attack, the probability of a cell managing to get what it needs into the Empire State Building is very low.” He rolled up the plans. “No, I think
this was all an elaborate disinformation scheme-leaking communications to Typhon,
recruiting me because of my loyalty to Specter. It was all meant to mobilize American
security forces on the wrong coast.”
“So you think the Black Legion’s real target is the LNG terminal in Long Beach.”
“Yes,” Bourne said, “I do.”
Tyrone stood looking down at LaValle. A terrible silence had descended over the