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Library when he and Soraya had entered. He watched Soraya scoop up LaValle’s cell
phone from the table.
“Good,” she said with an audible sigh of relief. “No one’s called. Jason must be safe.”
She tried him on her cell, but he wasn’t answering.
Hart, who had stood up when they’d come over, said, “You look a little the worse for
wear, Tyrone.”
“Nothing a stint at the CI training school wouldn’t cure,” he said.
Hart glanced at Soraya before saying, “I think you’ve earned that right.” She smiled.
“In your case, I’ll forgo the usual warning about how rigorous the training program is,
how many recruits drop out in the first two weeks. I know we won’t have to be concerned
about you dropping out.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Just call me Director, Tyrone. You’ve earned that as well.”
He nodded, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off LaValle.
His interest did not go u
Tyrone decide your fate.”
“You’re out of your mind.” LaValle looked apoplectic. “You can’t-”
“On the contrary,” Hart said, “I can.” She turned to Tyrone. “It’s entirely up to you,
Tyrone. Let the punishment fit the crime.”
Tyrone, impaling LaValle in his glare, saw there what he always saw in the eyes of
white people who confronted him: a toxic mixture of contempt, aversion, and fear. Once,
that would have sent him into a frenzy of rage, but that was because of his own
ignorance. Perhaps what he had seen in them was a reflection of what had been on his
own face. Not today, not ever again, because during his incarceration he’d finally come
to understand what Deron had tried to teach him: that his own ignorance was his worst
enemy. Knowledge allowed him to work at changing other people’s expectations of him,
rather than confronting them with a switchblade or a handgun.
He looked around, saw the look of expectation on Soraya’s face. Turning back to
LaValle, he said: “I think something public would be in order, something embarrassing
enough to work its way up to Secretary of Defense Halliday.”
Veronica Hart couldn’t help laughing, she laughed until tears came to her eyes, and she
heard the Gilbert and Sullivan lines run through her head: His object all sublime, he will
achieve in time-let the punishment fit the crime!
Forty-Two
I SEEM TO HAVE you at quite a disadvantage, dear Semion.” Dominic Specter
watched Icoupov as he dealt with the pain of sitting up straight.
“I need to see a doctor.” Icoupov was panting like an underpowered engine struggling
up a steep grade.
“What you need, dear Semion, is a surgeon,” Specter said. “Unfortunately, there’s no
time for one. I need to get to Long Beach and I can’t afford to leave you behind.”
“This was my idea, Asher.” Having braced his back against the seat, some small
amount of color was returning to Icoupov’s cheeks.
“So was using Pyotr. What did you call my son? Oh, yes, a useless wart on fate’s ass,
that was it, wasn’t it?”
“He was useless, Asher. All he cared about was getting laid and getting high. Did he
have a commitment to the cause, did he even know what the word meant? I doubt it, and
so do you.”
“You killed him, Semion.”
“And you had Iliev murdered.”
“I thought you’d changed your mind,” Sever said. “I assumed you’d sent him after
Bourne to expose me, to gain the upper hand by telling him about the Long Beach target.
Don’t look at me like that. Is it so strange? After all, we’ve been enemies longer than
we’ve been allies.”
“You’ve become paranoid,” Icoupov said, though at the time he had sent his second in
command to expose Sever. He’d temporarily lost faith in Sever’s plan, had finally felt the
risks to all of them were too great. From the begi
bringing Bourne into the picture, but had acquiesced to Sever’s argument that CI would
bring Bourne into play sooner later. “Far better for us to preempt them, to put Bourne in
play ourselves,” Sever had said, capping his argument, and that had been the end of it,
until now.
“We’ve both become paranoid.”
“A sad fact,” Icoupov said with a gasp of pain. It was true: Their great strength in
working together without anyone in either camp knowing about it was also a weakness.
Because their regimes ostensibly opposed each other, because the Black Legion’s
nemesis was in reality its closest ally, all other potential rivals shied away, leaving the Black Legion to operate without interference. However, the actions both men were
sometimes obliged to take for the sake of appearance caused a subconscious erosion of
trust between them.
Icoupov could feel that their level of distrust had achieved its highest point yet, and he
sought to defuse it. “Pyotr killed himself-and, in fact, I was only defending myself. Did
you know he hired Arkadin to kill me? What would you have had me do?”
“There were other options,” Sever said, “but your sense of justice is an eye for an eye.
For a Muslim you have a great deal of the Jewish Old Testament in you. And now it
appears that that very justice is about to be turned on you. Arkadin will kill you, if he can get his hands on you.” Sever laughed. “I’m the only one who can save you now. Ironic,
isn’t it? You kill my son and now I have the power of life and death over you.”
“We always had the power of life and death over each other.” Icoupov still struggled to
gain equality in the conversation. “There were casualties on both sides-regrettable but
necessary. The more things change the more they stay the same. Except for Long Beach.”
“There’s the problem precisely,” Sever said. “I’ve just come from interrogating Arthur
Hauser, our man on the inside. As such, he was monitored by my people. Earlier today,
he got cold feet; he met with a member of Black River. It took me some time to convince
him to talk, but eventually he did. He told this woman-Moira Trevor-about the software
flaw.”
“So Black River knows.”
“If they do,” Sever said, “they aren’t doing anything about it. Hauser also told me that
they withdrew from NextGen; Black River isn’t handling their security anymore.”
“Who is?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sever said. “The point is the tanker is less than a day away from
the California coastline. My software engineer is aboard and in place. The question now
is whether this Black River operative is going to act on her own.”
Icoupov frowned. “Why should she? You know Black River as well as I do, they act as
a team.”
“True enough, but the Trevor woman should have been on to her next assignment by
now; my people tell me that she’s still in Munich.”
“Maybe she’s taking some downtime.”
“And maybe,” Sever said, “she’s going to act on the information Hauser gave her.”
They were nearing the airport, and with some difficulty Icoupov pointed. “The only
way to find out is to check to see whether she’s on the NextGen plane that’s
transshipping the coupling link to the terminal.” He smiled thinly. “You seem surprised
that I know so much. I have my spies as well, many of whom you know nothing about.”
He gasped in pain as he searched beneath his greatcoat. “It was texted to me, but I can’t
seem to find my cell.” He looked around. “It must have fallen out of my pocket when
your driver manhandled me into the car.”
Sever waved a hand, ignoring the implied rebuke. “Never mind. Hauser gave me all
the details, if we can get through security.”
“I have people in Immigration you don’t know about.”