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the immense Capitol building. It was situated on the corner of Jefferson Drive and 12th
Street, SW, near the western edge of the Mall.
The building, a Florentine Renaissance palazzo faced with Stony Creek granite
imported from Co
enormous collection of Near East and East Asian art. The main entrance on the north side
of the building where the meet was to take place consisted of three arches accented by
Doric pilasters surrounding a central loggia. Because its architecture looked inward,
many critics felt it was a rather forbidding facade, especially when compared with the
nearby exuberance of the National Gallery of Art.
Nevertheless, the Freer was the preeminent museum of its kind in the country, and
Soraya loved it not only for the depth of art it housed but also for the elegant lines of the palazzo itself. She especially loved the contained open space at its entrance, and the fact that even, as now, when the Mall was agitated with hordes of tourists heading to and from
the Smithsonian Metro rail stop on 12th Street, the Freer itself was an oasis of calm and
tranquility. When things boiled over in the office during the day, it was to the Freer she
came to decompress. Ten minutes with Sung dynasty jades and lacquers acted like a
soothing balm to her soul.
Approaching the north side of the Mall, she searched past the crowds outside the
entrance to the Freer and thought she saw-among the sturdy men with their hard, clipped
Midwestern accents, the scampering children and their laughing mothers, the vacant-eyed
teenagers plugged into their iPods-Veronica Hart’s long, elegant figure walking past the
entrance, then doubling back.
She stepped off the curb, but the blare of a horn from an oncoming car startled her
back onto the sidewalk. It was at that moment that her cell phone buzzed.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Bourne said in her ear.
“Jason?”
“Why are you coming to this meet?”
Foolishly, she looked around; she’d never be able to spot him, and she knew it.
“Hart invited me. I need to talk to you. The DCI and I both do.”
“About what?”
Soraya took a deep breath. “Typhon’s listening posts have picked up a series of
disturbing communications pointing to an imminent terrorist attack on an East Coast city.
The trouble is, that’s all we have. Worse, the communications are between two cadres of
a group about which we have no intel whatsoever. It was my idea to recruit you to find
them and stop the attack.”
“Not much to go on,” Bourne said. “Doesn’t matter. The group’s name is the Black
Legion.”
“In grad school I studied the link between a branch of Muslim extremism and the Third
Reich. But this can’t be the same Black Legion. They were either killed or disbanded
when Nazi Germany fell.”
“It can and it is,” Bourne said. “I don’t know how it managed to survive, but it did.
Three of their members tried to kidnap Professor Specter this morning. I saw their device
tattooed on the gunman’s arm.”
“The three horses’ heads joined by the death’s head?”
“Yes.” Bourne described the incident in detail. “Check the body at the morgue.”
“I’ll do that,” Soraya said. “But how could the Black Legion remain so far
underground all this time without being detected?”
“They have a powerful international front,” Bourne said. “The Eastern Brotherhood.”
“That sounds far-fetched,” Soraya said. “The Eastern Brotherhood is in the forefront of
Islamic-Western relations.”
“Nevertheless, my source is unimpeachable.”
“God in heaven, what’ve you been doing while you’ve been away from CI?”
“I was never in CI,” Bourne said brusquely, “and here’s just one reason why. You say
you want to talk with me but I doubt you need half a dozen agents to do that.”
Soraya froze. “Agents?” She was on the Mall itself now, and she had to restrain herself
from looking around again. “There are no CI agents here.”
“How d’you know that?”
“Hart would’ve told me-”
“Why should she tell you anything? We go way back, you and I.”
“That’s true enough.” She kept walking. “But something happened earlier today that
makes me believe the agents you’ve spotted are NSA.” She described the way she and
Hart had been shadowed from CI HQ to the restaurant. She told him about Secretary
Halliday and Luther LaValle, both of whom were gu
Pentagon clandestine service.
“That might make sense,” Bourne said, “if there were only two of them. But six? No,
there’s another agenda, one neither of us knows about.”
“Such as?”
“The agents are vectored perfectly, triangulated on the entrance to the Freer,” Bourne
said. “This means that they must have had foreknowledge of the meet. It also means the
six weren’t sent to shadow Veronica Hart. If they aren’t here for her, they must have been
sent for me. This is Hart’s doing.”
Soraya felt a chill crawl down her spine. What if the DCI was lying to her? What if she
meant all along to lead Bourne into a trap? It would make sense for one of her first
official acts as DCI to be the capture of Jason Bourne. It certainly would put her in
solidly with Rob Batt and the others who despised and feared Bourne, and who resented
her. Plus, capturing Jason would score her big points with the president and prevent
Secretary Halliday from building on his already considerable influence. Still, why would
Hart have allowed Soraya to possibly muck up her first field op by coming along? No,
she had to believe this was an NSA initiative.
“I don’t believe that,” she said emphatically.
“Let’s say you’re right. The other possibility is just as dire. If Hart didn’t set the trap, then there’s someone highly placed in CI who did. I went to Hart directly with the
request.”
“Yes,” she said, “using my cell, thank you very much.”
“Did you find it? You’re on a new one now.”
“It was in the gutter where you tossed it.”
“Then stop complaining,” Bourne said, not unkindly. “I can’t imagine Hart told too
many people about this meet, but one of them is working against her, and if that’s the
case chances are he’s been recruited by LaValle.”
If Bourne was right… But of course he was. “You’re the grand prize, Jason. If LaValle
can take you down when no one in CI could, he’ll be a hero. Taking over CI will be a
cakewalk for him after that.” Soraya felt perspiration break out at her hairline. “Under the circumstances,” she continued, “I think you ought to withdraw.”
“I need to see the correspondence between Martin and Moira. And if Hart is instigating
this trap, then she’ll never give me access to the files at another time. I’ll have to take my chances, but not until you’re certain Hart has the material.”
Soraya, who was almost at the entrance, expelled a long breath. “Jason, I found the
conversations. I can tell you what’s in them.”
“Do you think you could quote them to me verbatim?” he said. “Anyway, it’s not that
simple. Karim al-Jamil doctored hundreds of files before he left. I know the method he
used to alter them. I have to see them myself.”
“I see there’s no way I can talk you out of this.”
“Right,” Bourne said. “When you’ve made sure the material is genuine, beep my cell
once. Then I need you to move Hart into the loggia, away from the entrance proper.”
“Why?” she said. “That’ll only make it more difficult for you to-Jason?”
But Bourne had already disco
From his vantage point on the roof of the Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue,