much worse.”
Her hand twitched. Icoupov, caught up in her words, paid no attention until the bullet
she fired from her Luger struck his right shoulder. He spun back against the wall. The
pain caused him to drop the SIG. Seeing her struggling to fire again, he turned and ran
out of the apartment, fleeing down the stairwell and out onto the street.
Thirty-Nine
WILLARD, relaxing in the steward’s lounge adjacent to the Library of the NSA safe
house, was enjoying his sweet and milky midmorning cup of coffee while reading The
Washington Post when his cell phone buzzed. He checked it, saw that it was from his
son, Oren. Of course it wasn’t actually from Oren, but Willard was the only one who
knew that.
He put down the paper, watched as the photo appeared on the phone’s screen. It was of
two people standing in front of a rural church, its steeple rising up into the top margin of the photo. He had no idea who the people were or where they were, but these things were
irrelevant. There were six ciphers in his head; this photo told him which one to use. The
two figures plus the steeple meant he was to use cipher three. If, for instance, the two
people were in front of an arch, he’d subtract one from two, instead of adding to it. There were other visual cues. A brick building meant divide the number of figures by two; a
bridge, multiply by two; and so on.
Willard deleted the photo from his phone, then picked up the third section of the Post
and began to read the first story on page three. Starting with the third word, he began to
decipher the message that was his call to action. As he moved through the article,
substituting certain letters for others as the protocol dictated, he felt a profound stirring inside him. He had been the Old Man’s eyes and ears inside the NSA for three decades,
and the Old Man’s sudden death last year had saddened him deeply. Then he had
witnessed Luther LaValle’s latest run at CI and had waited for his phone to ring, but for
months his desire to see another photo fill his screen had been inexplicably unfulfilled.
He simply couldn’t understand why the new DCI wasn’t making use of him. Had he
fallen between the cracks; did Veronica Hart not know he existed? It certainly seemed
that way, especially after LaValle had trapped Soraya Moore and her compatriot, who
was still incarcerated belowdecks, as Willard privately called the rendition cells in the
basement. He’d done what he could for the young man named Tyrone, though God
knows it was little enough. Yet he knew that even the smallest sign of hope-the
knowledge that you weren’t alone-was enough to reinvigorate a stalwart heart, and if he
was any judge of character, Tyrone had a stalwart heart.
Willard had always wanted to be an actor-for many years Olivier had been his god-but
in his wildest dreams he’d never imagined his acting career would be in the political
arena. He’d gotten into it by accident, playing a role in his college company, Henry V, to
be exact, one of Shakespeare’s great tragic politicians. As the Old Man said to him when
he’d come backstage to congratulate Willard, Henry’s betrayal of Falstaff is political,
rather than personal, and ends in success. “How would you like to do that in real life?”
the Old Man had asked him. He’d come to Willard’s college to recruit for CI; he said he
often found his people in the most unlikely places.
Finished with the deciphering, Willard had his immediate instructions, and he thanked
the powers that be that he hadn’t been tossed aside with the Old Man’s trash. He felt like
his old friend Henry V, though more than thirty years had passed since he’d trod a theater
stage. Once again he was being called on to play his greatest role, one that he wore as
effortlessly as a second skin.
He folded the paper away under one arm, took up his cell phone, and went out of the
lounge. He still had twenty minutes left on his break, more than enough time to do what
was required of him. What he had been ordered to do was find the digital camera Tyrone
had on him when he’d been captured. Poking his head into the Library, he satisfied
himself that LaValle was still sitting in his accustomed spot, opposite Soraya Moore, then
he went down the hall.
Though the Old Man had recruited him, it was Alex Conklin who had trained him.
Conklin, the Old Man had told him, was the best at what he did, namely preparing agents
to be put into the field. It didn’t take him long to learn that though Conklin was renowned inside CI for training wet-work agents, he was also adept at coaching sleeper agents.
Willard spent almost a year with Conklin, though never at CI headquarters; he was part of
Treadstone, Conklin’s project that was so secret even most CI personnel was unaware of
its existence. It was of paramount importance that he have no overt association with CI.
Because the role the Old Man had planned for him was inside the NSA, his background
check had to be able to withstand the most vigorous scrutiny.
All this flashed through Willard’s mind as he walked the sacrosanct hallways and
corridors of the NSA’s safe house. He passed agent after agent and knew that he’d done
his job to perfection. He was the indispensable nobody, the person who was always
present, whom no one noticed.
He knew where Tyrone’s camera was because he’d been there when Kendall and
LaValle had spoken about its disposition, but even if he hadn’t, he’d have suspected
where LaValle had hidden it. He knew, for instance, that it wouldn’t have been allowed
to leave the safe house, even on LaValle’s person, unless the damaging images Tyrone
had taken of the rendition cells and the waterboarding tanks had been transferred to the
in-house computer server or deleted off the camera’s drive. In fact, there was a chance
that the images had been deleted, but he doubted it. In the short amount of time the
camera had been in the NSA’s possession, Kendall was no longer in residence and
LaValle had become obsessed with coercing Soraya Moore into giving him Jason
Bourne.
He knew all about Bourne; he’d read the Treadstone files, even the ones that no longer
existed, having been shredded and then burned when the information they held became
too dangerous for Conklin, as well as for CI. He knew there had been far more to
Treadstone than even the Old Man knew. That was Conklin’s doing; he’d been a man for
whom the word secrecy was the holy grail. What his ultimate plan for Treadstone had
been was anyone’s guess.
Inserting his passkey into the lock on LaValle’s office door, he punched in the proper
electronic code. Willard knew everyone’s code-what use would he be as a sleeper agent
otherwise? The door opened inward, and he slipped inside, shutting and locking it behind
him.
Crossing to LaValle’s desk, he opened the drawers one by one, checking for false
backs or bottoms. Finding none, he moved on to the bookcase, the sideboard with its
hanging files and liquor bottles side by side. He lifted the prints off the walls, searching behind them for a hidden cache, but there was nothing.
He sat on a corner of the desk, contemplated the room, unconsciously swinging his leg
back and forth while he tried to work out where LaValle had hidden the camera. All at
once he heard the sound the heel of his shoe made against the skirt of the desk. Hopping
off, he went around, crawled into the kneehole, and rapped on the skirt until he replicated the sound his heel had made. Yes, he was certain now: This part of the skirt was hollow.
Feeling around with his fingertips, he discovered the tiny latch, pushed it aside, and