After taking a brief tour of all the rooms, he settled down in a chair behind Kirsch’s desk. He thought long and hard about the professor. Was he Dominic Specter, the nemesis of the Black Legion, as he claimed to be, or was he, in fact, Asher Sever, the leader of the Black Legion? If he was Sever, he’d staged the attack on himself-an elaborate scheme that had cost a number of lives. Could the professor be guilty of such an irrational act? If he was the leader of the Black Legion, certainly. The second question Bourne had been asking himself was why the professor would entrust the stolen plans to Pyotr’s thoroughly undependable network. But there was another enigma: If the professor was Sever, why was he so anxious to get those plans? Wouldn’t he already have them? These two questions went around and around in Bourne’s head without producing a satisfactory solution. Nothing about the situation he found himself in appeared to make sense, which meant that a vital part of the picture was missing. And yet he had the nagging suspicion that, like Egon Kirsch’s drawings, he was being shown two separate realities-if only he could decipher which was real and which one was false.
At length, he turned his mind to something that had been bothering him ever since the incident at the Egyptian Museum. He knew that Franz Jens had been the only one to follow him into the museum, so how on earth did Arkadin know where he was? Arkadin had to have been the one to kill Jens. He also must have given the order to kill Egon Kirsch, but, again, how did he know where Kirsch was?
The answers to both questions were firmly rooted in time and place. He hadn’t been tailed to the museum, then… As a chill spread through him, Bourne went very still. With no physical tail, there had to be an electronic tail somewhere on his person. But how had it been put there? Someone could have brushed up against him in the airport. He rose, slowly undressed. As he did so, he went through every item of clothing, looking for an electronic tag. Finding nothing, he dressed, sat again in the chair, deep in thought.
With his eidetic memory, he went through every step of his journey from Moscow to Munich. When he recalled the German Immigration officer, he realized that his passport had been out of his possession for close to half a minute. Taking it out of his breast pocket, he began to leaf through it, checking each page both by sight and by touch. On the inside of the back cover, stuck in the fold of the binding, he found the tiny transmitter.
Thirty-Seven
HOW WONDERFUL it is to breathe the good night air,” Veronica Hart said as she stood on the pavement just outside the Pentagon.
“Diesel fumes and all,” Stu Gold said.
“I knew LaValle’s charges wouldn’t stick,” she said as they crossed to his car. “They’re patently trumped up.”
“I wouldn’t begin celebrating just yet,” the attorney said. “LaValle’s put me on notice that he’s going to take those surveillance photos of you and Bourne to the president tomorrow for an executive order to have you removed.”
“Come on, Stu, those were private conversations between Martin Lindros and a civilian, Moira Trevor. There’s nothing in them. LaValle’s banking on hot air.”
“He’s got the secretary of defense,” Gold said. “Under the circumstances that alone is enough to make trouble for you.”
The wind was whipping up and Hart caught her hair, pushed it off her face. “Coming into CI and marching me out in cuffs… LaValle made a big mistake grandstanding like that.” She turned, looked back at the headquarters of the NSA in which she’d been incarcerated for three hours until the moment Gold showed up with his order from a federal judge for her temporary release. “He’ll pay for humiliating me.”
“Veronica, don’t do anything rash.” Gold opened the car door, ushered her inside. “Knowing LaValle as I do it’s more than likely that he wants you to go off half-cocked. That’s how fatal mistakes are made.”
He went around the front of the car, got behind the wheel, and they drove off.
“We can’t let him get away with this, Stu. Unless we stop him he’s going to hijack CI right out from under us.” She watched the Virginia night turn into the district night as they crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The Lincoln Memorial rose up before them. “I made a pledge when I signed on.”
“Like all DCIs.”
“No, I’m talking about a personal pledge.” She very much wanted to see Lincoln sitting on his chair, contemplating all the unknowns that lay before every human being. She asked Gold to make a stop there. “I never told anyone this, Stu, but the day I officially became DCI I went to the Old Man’s grave. Have you ever been to the Arlington National Cemetery? It’s a sobering place, but in its own way a joyous place as well. So many heroes, so much courage, the bedrock of our freedom, Stu, every one of us.”
They’d come to the memorial. They both got out, walked up to the majestic floodlit granite statue, stood gazing up into Lincoln’s stern, wise face. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers at his feet, withered heads nodding in the wind.
“I stayed at the Old Man’s grave for a long time,” Hart continued in a faraway voice. “I swear I could feel him, I swear I felt something stir against me, then inside me.” Her gaze swung around to fix on the attorney. “There’s a long, exemplary legacy at CI, Stu. I swore then, and I’m swearing now, that I won’t let anything or anyone damage that legacy.” She took a breath. “So whatever it takes.”
Gold returned her stare without flinching. “Do you know what you’re asking?”
“Yes, I believe I do.”
At last, he said, “All right, Veronica, it’s your call. Whatever it takes.”
Feeling invigorated and invulnerable after his workout, Rodney Feir met General Kendall in the champagne room, reserved for those VIPs who had consummated the evening’s pleasures and wanted to linger, with or without their girls. Of course time spent in there was far more expensive with the girls than without.
The champagne room was decorated like a Middle Eastern pasha’s den. The two men lazed on voluminous pillows while being served the bubbly of their choice. This was where Feir planned to hand over the intel on Typhon’s field agents. But first he wanted to luxuriate in the pure pleasure provided in the back rooms of The Glass Slipper. After all, the moment he set foot outside, the real world would come crashing in on him with all its annoyances, petty humiliations, drudgery, and the piquancy of fear that preceded every move he made to advance LaValle’s position vis-а-vis CI.
Kendall, his cell phone at his right hand, sat rather stiffly, as befitted a military man. Feir thought he must be slightly uncomfortable in such lush surroundings. The men chatted for a time, sipping their champagne, exchanging theories about steroids and baseball, about the chances of the Redskins making the play-offs next year, the gyrations of the stock market, anything but politics.
After a time, when the bottle of champagne was nearly exhausted, Kendall looked at his watch. “What d’you have for me?”
This was the moment Feir had been keenly anticipating. He couldn’t wait to see the look on the general’s face when he caught a glimpse of the intel. Reaching into the pocket in the lining of his coat, he brought out the packet. A low-tech hard copy was the safest way to smuggle data out of the CI building, since security systems were in place to monitor the comings and goings of any device with a hard drive large enough to hold substantial data files.