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“Oolong for me, please.”
Hart finished brewing the tea, brought the pot and two small handleless cups back to
the living room. The two women settled themselves on opposite sides of the table, sitting
cross-legged on the abstract patterned rug. Soraya looked around. There were some basic
prints on the wall, the kind you’d expect to find at any midlevel hotel chain. The furniture looked rented, as anonymous as anything else. There were no photos, no sense of Hart’s
background or family. The only unusual feature was an upright piano.
“My only real possession,” Hart said, following Soraya’s gaze. “It’s a Steinway K-52,
better known as a Chippendale hamburg. It’s got a sounding board larger than many
grand pianos, so it lets out with a helluva sound.”
“You play?”
Hart went over, sat down on the stool, began to play Frйdйric Chopin’s Nocturne in B-
Flat Minor. Without missing a beat she segued into Isaac Albйniz’s sensuous
“Malagueсa,” and, finally, into a raucous transposition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”
Soraya laughed and applauded as Hart rose, came back to sit opposite her.
“My absolute only talent besides intelligence work.” Hart opened one of the cartons,
spooned out General Tso’s chicken. “Careful,” she said as she handed it over, “I order it
extra hot.”
“That’s okay by me,” Soraya said, digging deep into the carton. “I always wanted to
play the piano.”
“Actually, I wanted to play electric guitar.” Hart licked oyster sauce off her finger as
she passed over another carton. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. According to him, electric
guitar wasn’t a ‘lady’s’ instrument.”
“Strict, was he?” Soraya said sympathetically.
“You bet. He was a full-bird colonel in the air force. He’d been a fighter pilot back in
his salad days. He resented being too old to fly, missed that damn oily-smelling cockpit
something fierce. Who could he complain to in the force? So he took his frustration out
on me and my mother.”
Soraya nodded. “My father is old-school Muslim. Very strict, very rigid. Like many of
his generation he’s bewildered by the modern world, and that makes him angry. I felt
trapped at home. When I left, he said he’d never forgive me.”
“Did he?”
Soraya had a faraway look in her eyes. “I see my mom once a month. We go shopping
together. I speak to my father once in a while. He’s never invited me back home; I’ve
never gone.”
Hart put down her chopsticks. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It is what it is. Do you still see your father?”
“I do, but he doesn’t know who I am. My mother’s gone now, which is a blessing. I
don’t think she could’ve tolerated seeing him like that.”
“It must be hard for you,” Soraya said. “The indomitable fighter pilot reduced like
that.”
“There’s a point in life where you have to let go of your parents.” Hart resumed eating,
though more slowly. “Whoever’s lying in that bed isn’t my father. He died a long time
ago.”
Soraya looked down at her food for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me how you knew
about the NSA safe house.”
“Ah, that.” Hart’s face brightened. Clearly, she was happy to be on a work topic.
“During my time at Black River we were often hired by NSA. This was before they
trained and deployed their own home-grown black-ops details. We were good for them
because they never had to specify to anyone what we’d been hired to do. It was all
‘fieldwork,’ priming the battlefield for our troops. No one on Capitol Hill was going to
look farther than that.”
She dabbed her mouth, sat back. “Anyway, after one particular mission, I caught the
short straw. I was the one from my squad who brought the findings back to the NSA.
Because it was a black-ops mission, the debriefing took place at the safe house in
Virginia. Not in the fine library you were taken to, but in one of the basement-level
cubicles-windowless, featureless, just gritty reinforced concrete. It’s like a war bunker
down there.”
“And what did you see?”
“It wasn’t what I saw.” Hart said. “It was what I heard. The cubicles are soundproof,
except for the doors, I assume so the guards in the corridors know what’s going on. What
I heard was ghastly. The sounds were barely human.”
“Did you tell your bosses at Black River?”
“What was the point? They didn’t care, and even if they did, what were they going to
do? Start a congressional investigation on the basis of sounds I heard? The NSA would
have cut them off at the knees, put them out of business in a heartbeat.” She shook her
head. “No, these boys are businessmen, pure and simple. Their ideology revolves around
milking as much money from the government as possible.”
“So now we have a chance to do what you couldn’t before, what Black River wouldn’t
do.”
“That’s right,” Hart said. “I want to get photos, videos, absolute proof of what NSA is
doing down there so I can present the evidence myself to the president. That’s where you
and Tyrone come in.” She shoved her plate away. “I want Luther LaValle’s head on a
platter, and by God I’m going to get it.”
Nineteen
BECAUSE OF the corpse and all the blood on the seats Bourne was forced to abandon
the Volga. Before he did, though, he took Baronov’s cell phone, as well as his money. It
was freezing. Within the preternatural afternoon winter darkness came the snow, swirling
down in ever-heavier curtains. Bourne knew he had to get out of the area as quickly as
possible. He took the SIM card out of his phone, put it in Baronov’s, then threw his own
cell phone down a storm drain. In his new identity as Fyodor Ilianovich Popov he
couldn’t afford to be in possession of a cell with an American carrier.
He walked, leaning into the wind and snow. After six blocks, huddled in a doorway, he
used Baronov’s cell phone to call his friend Boris Karpov. The voice at the end of the line grew cold.
“Colonel Karpov is no longer with FSB.”
Bourne felt a chill go through him. Russia had not changed so much that lightning-
swift dismissals on trumped-up charges were a thing of the past.
“I need to contact him,” Bourne said.
“He’s now at the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency.” The voice recited a local number
before abruptly hanging up.
That explained the attitude, Bourne thought. The Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency was
headed up by Viktor Cherkesov. But many believed he was much more than that, a
silovik ru
Recently an internal war between Cherkesov and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB,
the modern-day successor to the notorious KGB, had sprung up within the government.
The silovik who won that war would probably be the next president of Russia. If Karpov
had gone from the FSB to FSB-2, it must be because Cherkesov had gotten the upper
hand.
Bourne called the office of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, but he was told that
Karpov was away and could not be reached.
For a moment he contemplated calling the man who had picked up Baronov’s Zil in
the Crocus City parking lot, but he almost immediately thought better of it. He’d already
gotten Baronov killed; he didn’t want any more deaths on his conscience.
He walked on until he came to a tram stop. He took the first one that appeared out of
the gloom. He’d used the scarf he’d bought at the boutique in Crocus City to cover up the
mark the wire had made across his throat. The small seepage of blood had dried up as
soon as he’d hit the frigid air.