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“Where has Don Fernando gone?”
Christien, too, put down his utensils and wiped his mouth. “Jason, there is a very good reason why Don Fernando asked me to keep his whereabouts secret. He was afraid that you’d try to follow him.”
“Why?” Bourne leaned forward. “Where has he gone? Tell me.”
Christien sighed. “Jason, we have our own mystery to solve here.”
“There’s no going back. You’ll tell me now.”
The two men’s gazes locked in a contest of wills. At length, Christien looked down at his plate. He picked up his knife and fork and returned to eating. He did not look up from his food. Between bites he said, “Don Fernando has gone to find the Dji
Rebeka paid her check, rose, and walked to the door. At the last minute, she turned and sat down at the table where the blade-thin man had installed himself some time before.
“Edge of the world,” he said dryly.
She eyed him. “Not nearly.”
“For us, at least.”
“You mean Jews?”
“That, too.”
He had curiously dainty hands, milky white, the knuckles prominent, as if the bones were about to burst through the skin. His eyes were black, his thi
“You’re lucky I found you,” Ze’ev said.
“How does that work?” She cocked her head.
He took an almost dainty sip of coffee. “They’ve activated the Babylonian.”
Beneath her cool exterior, Rebeka felt the first ripples of apprehension. She tamped down on this emotion before it could turn into outright fear. “Why would they do that?”
“What the devil are you up to?” Ze’ev said.
At first, she thought he had deliberately ignored her question, but she quickly realized that his counter-question washis answer. The depth to which she had shaken her bosses was signified by their extreme response.
She shook her head.
“I don’t understand you, Rebeka. You’ve had a stellar career so far. Then you go and bring Jason Bourne into Dahr El Ahmar, into the heart of—”
“He saved my life. I was bleeding out. There was nowhere else to go.”
Ze’ev sat back, his black eyes contemplating her. She wondered what he was thinking.
“You had clearance. You knew the secret nature of Dahr El Ahmar.”
She met his gaze, said nothing.
“And yet—”
“As I said.”
He shook his head. “Colonel Ben David is out for your blood— and, of course, Bourne’s.”
“I had no idea of the Colonel’s intense antipathy toward Bourne.” “Are you saying he’s not justified?”
She thought about this for a moment. “I suppose not. But at the time of the crisis I had no knowledge—”
“But you did have the one piece of crucial knowledge: the absolute secrecy in which Dahr El Ahmar operates. Bourne escaped. He knows—”
“You have no idea what he knows,” she snapped. “He was in the encampment for less than fifteen minutes. He was wounded and fighting for his life. I hardly think he had time to—”
“One, Bourne is a trained agent; he sees and hears everything. Two, he knows, at the very least, that Dahr El Ahmar exists. Three, he escaped via helicopter, which means he overflew the compound.”
“That doesn’t mean he made sense of what he saw. He was too busy trying to evade the ground-to-air missile Ben David sent up after him.”
“So far as Colonel Ben David—and, I have it on good authority, Dani Amit—are concerned, Bourne’s presence at Dahr El Ahmar is more than enough to condemn him. The security breach is of the most serious level. Following this, you vanish off the grid. Rebeka, you must see where their thinking has taken them.”
“The two incidents are wholly unrelated.”
“Of course you’d say that.”
“It’s the truth.”
He shook his head. “They don’t buy it and, frankly, neither do I.”
“Look—”
“The Babylonian has been loosed, Rebeka. He’s coming for you.” He sighed. “There’s only one way to stop him.”
“Forget it,” she said. “Don’t even ask me.”
He shrugged. “Then I’m talking to a dead woman. Pity.” He threw down some money, then rose.
“Wait.”
He stood, staring down at her with an expression that made something inside her wither.
Rebeka’s mind was working furiously. “Sit.”
He hesitated, then did as she requested.
“There’s something—” She stopped herself, abruptly frightened. She had promised herself to tell no one what had happened at Dahr El Ahmar. She looked away, chewing her lower lip in uncertainty.
“What is it?” Ze’ev said, leaning forward.
Some tone in his voice—conciliatory, as if he harbored a real concern for her—caused her to turn back. This is the moment, she thought. To trust or not to trust. It’s now or never.Of course, there was an entirely different route she could take.
She took a deep breath, trying to settle herself, but nothing could stop the almost painful hammering of her heart. The not-quite-healed wound in her side began to throb.
“Rebeka, look, there are two reasons someone in your position bolts. These days, we can forget ideology. So what are we left with? Money and sex.” He regarded her with great sympathy, even during her continued silence. “I’m going to hazard a guess. There’s been only one change in your recent life—Jason Bourne. Am I right?”
Oh, my God, she thought. He believes I betrayed Mossad at Bourne’s request. But perhaps she could use that misconception.
She rose abruptly and pushed out the door, only to be slapped in the face by the storm. She stood under the eaves of the restaurant, which sheltered her partially from the stinging snow but not at all from the ferocious wind.
It wasn’t long before she sensed that Ze’ev had pushed through the door to stand close beside her.
“You see,” he said, his voice raised over the unearthly howling, “there’s nowhere to go from here.”
She allowed a long silence to build before she let out a breath and said, “You’re right.” She made herself look slightly ashamed. “It is Bourne.”
Ze’ev’s eyebrows knitted together. “What did he say to convince you? What did he do?”
“I was with him for two nights in Damascus.” Her eyes engaged fully with his. “What d’you think?”
Life at Treadstone was difficult for Dick Richards. Going from NSA, where he was revered, even by the president, to being a virtual pariah was not easy on the nerves. That, on top of his duplicitous role, was getting to him. He was not someone cut out for the field; he did not have that nerveless sort of personality those agents did. You had to be born with it; no amount of training would give it to you. The fact was, he was a physical coward. He had lived with this humiliating knowledge since he was thirteen, in summer camp, in a house commanded by a bully who, sensing Richards’s weakness, preyed on him mercilessly. Instead of fighting back, he had endured the humiliations until, at the end of the dreadful summer, he had held out his hand to the bully and said, “ No hard feelings, yeah?” All he had gotten in return was a knowing smirk. That memory haunted him into adult life, where it had been repeated in other forms. His intellectual achievements sometimes masked this core failing in him, but not always, and certainly not, as now, in the dead of night, when even the city’s golden glow failed to exorcise the feeling of helplessness from his heart.
He had been at his computer all afternoon, evening, and into the night, stopping only to relieve his bladder and to get himself a hurried bite of fast food that now sat like a congealed lump in his roiling stomach. Opening a drawer without taking his eyes off the screen, he twisted open a bottle of antacids and popped a handful into his mouth, then chewed desultorily as he continued to pretend to track down the ghost in the sketchy intel his directors had given him, half, he suspected, in jest. Another humiliation piled onto all the others. On the other hand, it was heartening to know they weren’t much interested in Nicodemo themselves. The order must have come down from above, which meant that it was Secretary Hendricks who was trying to find Nicodemo. Richards had no idea who Nicodemo was; nevertheless, he knew far more about him than did anyone else at Treadstone.