watched Icoupov as he dealt with the pain of sitting up straight.
“I need to see a doctor.” Icoupov was panting like an underpowered engine struggling
up a steep grade.
“What you need, dear Semion, is a surgeon,” Specter said. “Unfortunately, there’s no
time for one. I need to get to Long Beach and I can’t afford to leave you behind.”
“This was my idea, Asher.” Having braced his back against the seat, some small
amount of color was returning to Icoupov’s cheeks.
“So was using Pyotr. What did you call my son? Oh, yes, a useless wart on fate’s ass,
that was it, wasn’t it?”
“He was useless, Asher. All he cared about was getting laid and getting high. Did he
have a commitment to the cause, did he even know what the word meant? I doubt it, and
so do you.”
“You killed him, Semion.”
“And you had Iliev murdered.”
“I thought you’d changed your mind,” Sever said. “I assumed you’d sent him after
Bourne to expose me, to gain the upper hand by telling him about the Long Beach target.
Don’t look at me like that. Is it so strange? After all, we’ve been enemies longer than
we’ve been allies.”
“You’ve become paranoid,” Icoupov said, though at the time he had sent his second in
command to expose Sever. He’d temporarily lost faith in Sever’s plan, had finally felt the
risks to all of them were too great. From the beginning, he’d argued with Sever against
bringing Bourne into the picture, but had acquiesced to Sever’s argument that CI would
bring Bourne into play sooner later. “Far better for us to preempt them, to put Bourne in
play ourselves,” Sever had said, capping his argument, and that had been the end of it,
until now.
“We’ve both become paranoid.”
“A sad fact,” Icoupov said with a gasp of pain. It was true: Their great strength in
working together without anyone in either camp knowing about it was also a weakness.
Because their regimes ostensibly opposed each other, because the Black Legion’s
nemesis was in reality its closest ally, all other potential rivals shied away, leaving the Black Legion to operate without interference. However, the actions both men were
sometimes obliged to take for the sake of appearance caused a subconscious erosion of
trust between them.
Icoupov could feel that their level of distrust had achieved its highest point yet, and he
sought to defuse it. “Pyotr killed himself-and, in fact, I was only defending myself. Did
you know he hired Arkadin to kill me? What would you have had me do?”
“There were other options,” Sever said, “but your sense of justice is an eye for an eye.
For a Muslim you have a great deal of the Jewish Old Testament in you. And now it
appears that that very justice is about to be turned on you. Arkadin will kill you, if he can get his hands on you.” Sever laughed. “I’m the only one who can save you now. Ironic,
isn’t it? You kill my son and now I have the power of life and death over you.”
“We always had the power of life and death over each other.” Icoupov still struggled to
gain equality in the conversation. “There were casualties on both sides-regrettable but
necessary. The more things change the more they stay the same. Except for Long Beach.”
“There’s the problem precisely,” Sever said. “I’ve just come from interrogating Arthur
Hauser, our man on the inside. As such, he was monitored by my people. Earlier today,
he got cold feet; he met with a member of Black River. It took me some time to convince
him to talk, but eventually he did. He told this woman-Moira Trevor-about the software
flaw.”
“So Black River knows.”
“If they do,” Sever said, “they aren’t doing anything about it. Hauser also told me that
they withdrew from NextGen; Black River isn’t handling their security anymore.”
“Who is?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sever said. “The point is the tanker is less than a day away from
the California coastline. My software engineer is aboard and in place. The question now
is whether this Black River operative is going to act on her own.”
Icoupov frowned. “Why should she? You know Black River as well as I do, they act as
a team.”
“True enough, but the Trevor woman should have been on to her next assignment by
now; my people tell me that she’s still in Munich.”
“Maybe she’s taking some downtime.”
“And maybe,” Sever said, “she’s going to act on the information Hauser gave her.”
They were nearing the airport, and with some difficulty Icoupov pointed. “The only
way to find out is to check to see whether she’s on the NextGen plane that’s
transshipping the coupling link to the terminal.” He smiled thinly. “You seem surprised
that I know so much. I have my spies as well, many of whom you know nothing about.”
He gasped in pain as he searched beneath his greatcoat. “It was texted to me, but I can’t
seem to find my cell.” He looked around. “It must have fallen out of my pocket when
your driver manhandled me into the car.”
Sever waved a hand, ignoring the implied rebuke. “Never mind. Hauser gave me all
the details, if we can get through security.”
“I have people in Immigration you don’t know about.”
Sever’s smile held a measure of the cruelty that was common to both of them. “My
dear Semion, you have a use after all.”
Arkadin found Icoupov’s cell phone in the gutter where it had fallen as Icoupov had
been bundled into the Mercedes. Controlling the urge to stomp it into splinters, he opened
it to see whom Icoupov had called last, and noticed that the last incoming message was a
text. Accessing it, he read the information on a NextGen jet due to take off in twenty
minutes. He wondered why that would be important to Icoupov. Part of him wanted to go
back to Devra, the same part that had balked at leaving her to go after Icoupov. But
Kirsch’s building was swarming with cops; the entire block was in the process of being
cordoned off, so he didn’t look back, tried not to think of her lying twisted on the floor, her blank eyes staring up at him even after she stopped breathing.
Do you love me, Leonid?
How had he answered her? Even now he couldn’t remember. Her death was like a
dream, something vivid that made no sense. Maybe it was a symbol, but of what he
couldn’t say.
Do you love me, Leonid?
It didn’t matter, but he knew to her it did. He had lied then, surely he’d lied to ease the moments before her death, but the thought that he’d lied to her sent a knife through
whatever passed for his heart.
He looked down at the text message and knew this was where he’d find Icoupov.
Turning around, he walked back toward the cordoned-off area. Posing as a crime reporter
from the Abendzeitung newspaper, he boldly accosted one of the junior uniformed police,
asking him pointed questions about the shooting, stories of gunfire he’d gleaned from
residents of the neighboring buildings. As he suspected, the cop was on guard duty and
knew next to nothing. But that wasn’t the point; he’d now gotten inside the cordon,
leaning against one of the police cars as he conducted his phony and fruitless interview.
At length, the cop was called away, and he dismissed Arkadin, saying the
commissioner would be holding a press conference at 16:00, at which time he would be
free to ask all the questions he wanted. This left Arkadin alone, leaning against the
fender. It didn’t take him long to walk around the front of the vehicle, and when the
medical examiner’s van arrived-creating a perfect diversion-he opened the driver’s-side