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“Atta boy,” she said. “Make it so, Number One.”
“ Star Trek TNG, right?” He gave her a lopsided grin. “I won’t let you down, Captain.” Turning on his heel, he retreated down the hallway to his cubicle to begin his data search.
Peter frowned. “That was wicked cold.”
She shrugged. “It saves us some busywork and it keeps him off our streets. Where’s the harm?”
When Dick Richards heard their muffled laughter behind him, he began to change his mind about at last feeling included. Or perhaps he only imagined their laughter. What he knew was real, however, was their contempt. Director Marks had been okay—cool, but helpful—when he had arrived at the president’s beckoning. The atmosphere started to deteriorate, however, the moment Director Moore returned from her medical leave in Paris. Regarding the codirectors of Treadstone, Richards had no more to go on than hearsay, office scuttlebutt, and, least reliable of all, the inter-agency mythos that always arose like smoke obscuring the true contours of the land.
The president’s orders had been most specific. He had come to the great man’s attention through his job at the NSA, cracking the core code to the horrific Stuxnet worm, the most advanced malicious software worm to date, the first to be called a cyberweapon, that had baffled the best cyber security analysts for months. Variations on the Stuxnet worm had sucked up information on US advanced weapons systems, clandestine asset locations, forward initiatives by the military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and drone strike targets in western Pakistan. He had also been the one to realize that the SecurID tokens the federal clandestine operatives used had been hacked. He identified the security flaw that had allowed the breach and sealed it.
He was like Einstein formulating the equation for the speed of light. At least that was how he had been described to the president by Mike Holmes, his former boss at NSA. Now he worked strictly for the president, reported to him directly. Their relationship was unprecedented, and quite naturally caused no end of jealousy among the members of the president’s cabinet, who resented his presence, let alone his cyber triumphs. What it boiled down to, Richards thought now, as he climbed into his chair and faced his computer screen, was that they didn’t understand him. Human beings, he had discovered, hated and feared anyone or anything they couldn’t understand.
Now his new directors were firmly in that restive camp. Pity. He had begun to like Director Marks, and he might have felt the same way about Director Moore had either of them given him a chance. Someone else might have been angry at them for this gross disservice, but Richards’s mind didn’t work that way. He knew, also from experience, that the best way for him to not only survive at Treadstone, but to flourish, serving the president as he was expected to do, was to change the co-directors’ opinion of him.
Opening the slim file Director Moore had handed him, he read through the close-set typescript, which, he saw immediately, was little more than unreliable bits and pieces—ephemera from the field. Still, there remained the possibility, slim though it might be, that at the heart of this smoke-and-mirrors show there lay an actual piece of uncharted topography. And he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he could reveal this topography for the directors, they would begin to see him in a new light. This, more than anything else, was what he desired. It was what needed to happen. His master’s command.
He opened his Iron Key browser to the Internet and, fingers flying over the keyboard, began his search for a myth.
Rebeka stared out at the beautiful, bleak expanse of Hemviken Bay. Sitting at a waterside table at Utö Wärdshus, the only restaurant in this area of the southern Swedish archipelago, she nursed a coffee and her sore right shoulder. She’d received no more than a flesh wound from her quarry’s sudden attack. Anyone else would have berated herself for failing to deflect the attack, but not Rebeka. She had trained herself to let go, not to feel remorse or, worse, to castigate herself. She lived in the present, thinking only of the perilous future, and how to get there successfully while absorbing the minimum of damage.
Upon entering the restaurant, her practiced eye had noted all sixteen tables, only three of which were inhabited, one by a pair of old men, one of them in a wheelchair, slowly and deliberately playing chess, another by an ancient mariner with rough hands the color of a boiled lobster claw, reading a local paper while smoking a smallbowled pipe, and the third by a pregnant woman and her daughter, who Rebeka judged to be five or six. Her professional assessment was that none of them posed a threat, and she promptly forgot about them.
After her target had gone into the water, Rebeka, completely ignoring her knife wound, had spent the better part of an hour wading in looking for him. For all her efforts, standing firm against being pulled out with the tide, for the almost-frostbite in her toes, she had failed to find him. This was both unfortunate and frightening. She was fairly certain her shot had done nothing more than crease her target’s head. If she hadn’t killed him, she wanted to make certain the frigid water didn’t. She needed what was in his brain, and she cursed herself for shooting at him at all. She should have simply jumped in after him. Overpowering him in the water, she felt certain, would have been no difficult matter. Instead he was gone and, with him, the intel he carried that would save her.
Absentmindedly, she stirred more sugar into her coffee, then took a sip. Her own people were now after her. No one knew better than she how ruthless and relentless the Mossad could be when they believed one of their own had betrayed them. She fervently wished there had been another way to tackle the problem, but she knew Colonel Ari Ben David better than to think he would believe her wild tale, and there was simply no one else to go to. Well, there was one person, but her training made her reluctant to involve anyone outside Mossad.
She heard the waitress’s voice, and turning, winced. The knife wound she had received in Damascus was not yet fully healed, and certain sharp movements of her upper torso reminded her it was still there.
“Would you care for more coffee?”
The waitress smiled at her. She looked like a Valkyrie. Rebeka could imagine her, armored, riding to Ragnarök, or, more realistically, out on a fishing boat, hauling in the morning’s catch. She nodded, returning the smile.
Turning back to the bay, she saw that a storm was coming in. Fine. The increasing bleakness matched her mood. She drank her coffee, added more sugar, and reflected on her life since she had met Jason Bourne on her regularly scheduled flight to Damascus. Though it was only six weeks ago, her former cover as a flight attendant seemed like a hundred years ago. How her life had changed since then! She and Bourne had both been after the same terrorist target, Semid Abdul-Qahhar. During their showdown with him, they had both been wounded. Though he had been shot in the shoulder, Bourne had flown her in a stolen helicopter across the southern border into Lebanon and, at her whispered instructions, had set down inside the Mossad encampment in Dahr El Ahmar.
Now she had no idea where he was or whether he would even talk to her. After all, it was she who had directed him to the encampment commanded by Ben David. For all she knew, he blamed her for what had happened.
No, even if she had been able to find him, she couldn’t go to Bourne with her suspicions, in spite of the fact that they had arisen during her convalescence in Dahr El Ahmar. As far as he was concerned, she was the enemy. She had betrayed him. After what had happened, how could he think otherwise?