Page 25 of The Bourne Dominion (Jason Bourne 9)

  Danziger looked the part. He was short and, unlike his days in the field, was running to fat around his middle, a sure sign that he liked his steaks, fries, and bourbon too much. He had a head like a football and a personality to match: tough, a will to get over the goal line, and always the possibility of fumbling short of the first down. The problem lay in his constant promotions. He had been deadly in wet work, near brilliant as the NSA’s deputy director of Signals Intelligence for Analysis and Production, but a total bust as the director of Central Intelligence. He had no sense of history, didn’t know how CI worked, and, worst of all, didn’t care. The result was akin to trying to jam a dowel into a square hole. It wasn’t working. The reality, however, had done nothing to stop Danziger’s headlong reaving of the hallowed halls of CI.

  “Welcome to the director’s suite at CI,” Lieutenant Reade said with all the officiousness of a palace chancellor. “Take a pew.”

  Hendricks looked around Danziger’s vast suite and wondered what he did with all the room. Bowl? Hold archery contests? Shoot his Red Ryder BB gun?

  Hendricks smiled without an ounce of warmth. “Where’s your shark, Reade?”

  Reade blinked. “Beg pardon, sir?”

  Hendricks swept the words away with the back of his hand. “Never mind.”

  He chose the chair that Danziger had sat in the last time they’d had a meeting here.

  Reade took a military step toward him. “Uhm, that’s the director’s chair.”

  Hendricks sat down, working his buttocks into the cushion. “Not today.”

  Reade, face darkened, was about to say something more when his master stepped into the room. Danziger wore a fashionable pin-striped suit, a blue shirt with unfashionable white collar and cuffs, and a striped regimental tie. A tiny enamel American flag was pinned to his lapel. To his credit, his pause at seeing where Hendricks had seated himself was minuscule. Still, Hendricks didn’t miss it.

  Forced into the facing chair, he made a project of lifting the fabric of his trousers over his knees, then shooting his cuffs, before he uttered one word.

  “It’s good to see you here, Mr. Secretary,” he said with a closed face. “To what do I owe this honor?”

  But of course he knew, Hendricks thought. He had gone crying to his general buddies at the Pentagon, who had petitioned the president. Who’s your mommy, Danziger? he thought.

  “Does your visit have an amusing component?” the DCI said.

  “Ah, no. Just a passing thought.”

  Danziger spread his hands. “Care to share?”

  “A private moment, Max.”

  M. Errol Danziger hated being called by his first name, which was why he had shortened it to an initial.

  Reade was still in the room, thinking of filing his nails, for all Hendricks knew.

  “Does the boy need to be here?” It was interesting, Hendricks thought, to see how both Danziger and Reade bristled at precisely the same moment.

  “Lieutenant Reade knows everything I know,” Danziger said after a frozen moment.

  Hendricks kept silent, and, after several moments, Danziger got the point. He raised a hand in the lazy fashion of Old World royalty, and, following a murderous glare at Hendricks, Reade departed.

  “You really shouldn’t have embarrassed him like that,” Danziger muttered.

  “What is that, Max? A threat?”

  “What? No.” Danziger shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

  “Uh-huh.” Hendricks scooted forward. “Listen, Max, let’s get something straight. I don’t care for Reade, and I certainly don’t give a shit about his feelings. That being the case, I don’t want to see or talk to him the next time we meet. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Danziger said in a strangled voice.

  Without warning, Hendricks rose and stepped toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Danziger said. “We haven’t even—”

  “The job is yours, Max.”

  Danziger jumped. “What?” He trailed after Hendricks.

  At the door, Hendricks turned toward him. “You want Samaritan, it’s yours.”

  “But what about you?”

  “I’m out, Max. I’ve pulled my people.”

  “But what about the preliminary work they’ve done?”

  “Shredded this morning. I know you have your own methodology.” Hendricks pulled open the door, half expecting Reade to have his ear to it. “As of now, you’re in charge of security at Indigo Ridge.”

  Maggie heard the encrypted cell phone even in her sleep. The ring was “The Ride of the Valkyries.” She was no fan of that Nazi Richard Wagner, nevertheless she dearly loved the Ring cycle. She turned over, her eyelids heavy, gluey with sleep. Returning to her apartment after her lunch with Christopher, she had crawled into bed and immediately fallen fast asleep. She’d been in the midst of a dream in which she and Kaja were engaged in the same argument that had defined pretty much their entire childhood. In fact, her throat ached as if she had been screaming in her bedroom as well as screaming in her dream. Screaming at Kaja had never worked. Why had she continued to do it? Their relationship, the secrets they knew about each other, made conflict inevitable. Had they been brothers, they surely would have beaten the crap out of each other. They had worked with what they had, which was precious little, and in the end they could no longer stand the sight of each other. If circumstance hadn’t pulled them apart, they would have parted anyway. And yet, in dreams Maggie missed her sister. Mikaela never appeared in her dreams, but Kaja did. And seeing her, Maggie cried dream-tears, her dream-heart breaking. But when their dream-conversations began, they were invariably acrimonious from the very first words: the bile of two sisters who loved each other but could find no common ground. In latter days their arguments had revolved around their father. Their memories of him were so different, as if he were two people. The arguments, grown ever more bitter and vitriolic, saddened as well as angered her.

  With the Valkyries riding herd on her consciousness, she rolled over and stared balefully at the cell phone atop the nightstand. She knew who was calling her: Benjamin El-Arian was the only one with the number.

  She dug her thumbs into her closed lids to haul herself into full wakefulness, but ignored the call. Instead she stared at the evening’s dusty shadows extending across the ceiling. Mid-note the Valkyries ceased to ride. In the eerie silence she thought about Benjamin. It was a mystery how she ever could have been attracted to him. He seemed part of another life, another person.

  America had changed her. She had traveled to many places in the world, but never, before this, to the United States. Benjamin had planted the idea of America as corrupt and evil, a country that had become weak after a string of diplomatic and military defeats. But she’d had no hands-on experience on which to base that idea. Now that she was here, now that she had spent time at Christopher’s side in the core of capitalism’s prime engine, so to speak, she found America to be dynamic, vital, filled with the thrilling cross-currents of dissent. In short, quite agreeable.

  And with that road-to-Damascus moment had come understanding of the speciousness of Benjamin’s bitterly anti-American screed. She had pretended to buy into it, to get close to him, but it was only now, having come into contact with Benjamin’s avowed enemy, that she realized the depth of his self-delusion.

  Even now, after having spent so much time with him, she didn’t know whether he had kept his extremist views hidden from the other Domna directors until he was in a position of power, or whether they had been grafted onto him later by Semid Abdul-Qahhar.

  She despised the leader of the Mosque, a man animated by a hatred so pure and unrelenting there was no room in his world for compromise. If there were Evil in the world, Evil with a capital E, as the Catholic Church preached, she was certain it must be cultivated and maintained by such hatred.

  At first she had been confounded by the alliance between the two men, but gradually, from incidents s

he witnessed, it became clear that Benjamin was using Abdul-Qahhar as his enforcer to maintain and consolidate his power, to keep the other directors in line. She had seen the result of Abdul-Qahhar’s handiwork on a director who had been foolish enough to publicly defy El-Arian. His corpse had been a sight so diabolically foul that, as a matter of self-preservation, she had immediately consigned it to the realm of nightmare. Only Jalal Essai, of all the directors, had managed to survive as a dissident, and now sought to challenge Benjamin’s leadership. Abdul-Qahhar’s slaughterers had failed to silence his voice, which was why El-Arian had dispatched Marlon Etana to take care of Essai.

  She was acutely aware of what a dangerous game she was playing with Benjamin, but she remained resolute in her desire to continue on the path she had chosen. She knew El-Arian found it amusing to have her—the daughter of Christien Norén—under his thumb. She had been meticulous in her planning, careful to give him what he wanted: someone subservient to his will. Her father—secretly working for another entity—had betrayed the Domna. This was a sin Benjamin would not forgive. She understood that the sin of Christien Norén would one day be visited on her. The tricky part lay in clearing out before that day arrived.

  And now here she was in America, a place in which, ironically, she felt safe. It wasn’t the luxuries of American culture she responded to; she’d had her pick of luxuries while in Paris. It was the freedom to say what she thought, to be who she wanted to be without fear of ridicule or reprisal. A new life so different from her childhood, which just as well be light-years away. There was a reason it had been known as the New World, and in certain circles still was. Was it any wonder she didn’t want to return to her life inside the Domna, at Benjamin El-Arian’s side? And it was becoming clear to her that the time was near when she would be free of El-Arian and Severus Domna. Either that, or she would be dead.

  The Valkyries rode again, making her teeth clench. This time she knew she had to take the call.

  Picking up the phone, she hesitated for a moment, then activated it. “This is an inconvenient time,” she said.

  “Every time seems an inconvenient time for you.” There was no misconstruing Benjamin’s displeasure. “You are two days late with your report.”

  Maggie closed her eyes and imagined thrusting a knife into his heart. “The field is the field,” she said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Doing what, precisely?”

  “What our plan set out to do: discredit Christopher Hendricks in order to protect FitzWilliams from scrutiny during our acquisition phase.”

  “And? I have not seen any negative reports concerning Hendricks.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” she said shortly. “Do you think something like that can be established in seventy-two hours? He’s the United States secretary of defense.”

  El-Arian was silent for a moment. “What progress have you made?”

  Maggie sat up, pushing the pillows behind her back. “I don’t care for your tone, Benjamin.” Then she sat, silent and waiting, determined not to say another word until he relented.

  “The field is the field, as you pointed out,” El-Arian said after allowing the silence to stretch on past a normal length.

  Figuring that was as much of an apology as she was going to get, she relented. “Do you think anyone but me could have gotten to Hendricks in such a short time?”

  “I don’t, no.”

  Another concession. How lucky can a girl get? she thought.

  “The legend you prepared was pitch-perfect,” she said.

  Actually, it was people lower on the Domna food chain who had prepared her Margaret Penrod identity, but it never hurt to use a little sugar. Especially, she thought, now that I’m walking such a perilous tightrope.

  “And what of Hendricks himself?” El-Arian asked.

  “Hooked,” she said, “completely.” It was curious—and not a little frightening—how much disquiet saying this out loud to Benjamin caused her.

  “Well then, now is the time to reel him in.”

  “Slowly,” she said. “We can’t afford to have him become suspicious at this point.”

  El-Arian cleared his throat. “Skara, in twenty-four hours the acquisition period will come to its end phase. We need you to meet that ETA.”

  Twenty-four hours, she thought. That’s all the time I have left?

  “I understand perfectly,” she said. “You can count on me.”

  “I always have,” he said. “À bientôt.”

  Skara threw the phone across the room.

  Hendricks stood in the garage at what had been the Treadstone building, but which he had ordered abandoned immediately following the car bomb explosion. This was his second visit to the crime scene, the first being less than an hour after the explosion had detonated. At that time, having ordered a phalanx of federal agents to do a secure search of the immediate area and Peter’s house, and not knowing whether Peter Marks had been blown to kingdom come, he had assembled a task force to investigate the matter.

  The forensics team had determined that Peter had not been in the car. So far, so good. Then where was he? The task force had had no luck finding him. Hendricks called Marks’s cell but, as before, got his voice mail. Next, he called Ann at the temporary offices he had secured for the Treadstone personnel, but she hadn’t seen or heard from Marks. He gave up and departed the crime scene.

  Hendricks arrived home early and unannounced. While his security team scoured the interior for electronic listening devices, as they did twice a week, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a beer. He stood watching the suits go about their business, controlled and precise as ants. Picking up the phone, he tried again to call Jackie, but his son was still in a forward position in the Afghanistan mountains, maintaining communications blackout.

  He’d finished half his beer when the team members nodded on their way to take up positions outside. He put down his glass and went into his study, closing the door behind him. The windows were fitted with wide-slatted jalousies, which he kept closed all the time. Sitting down at his desk, he removed a small key from his wallet and inserted it in a lock in the lower left-hand drawer. He took out a tiny disc approximately half the size of his thumbnail. He knew what it was but he had never seen the design before. What he couldn’t understand was why his security team had failed to find this electronic bug in their continual sweeps of his house.

  He had discovered it ten days ago purely by accident. He had been in a hurry, his hand sweeping across the desk to snatch up a file that had been delivered by courier. In the process, he had upended a glass Eiffel Tower, swirls of color embedded in it, that Amanda had bought him the first time they had been in Paris. As such, it was a beloved token, a way to keep her close after her death. The tower’s four feet were covered in felt, but when he’d upended it he’d seen that one of the felt discs had been replaced by this curious and frightening electronic bug.

  Two possibilities had immediately occurred to him. The first was that someone on his security team had planted it and was deliberately ignoring it during the sweeps. The second was that this bug was so sophisticated, it was invisible to the electronic sweeps. Neither hypothesis was comforting, but the second one disturbed him more because it meant an unknown entity was in possession of surveillance equipment that far outstripped the US government’s own. He had made several discreet inquiries, pulling in favors from people deep inside the intelligence community whom he thought might be able to tell him if a cabal inside the government was working against him. So far, no hint of such a group had surfaced.

  He stared at the bug now, a dull silver-green, scarcely distinguishable from the felt pads on the bottom of Amanda’s gift. He had quite deliberately kept it live, putting it on his desk, making innocuous calls and such because he did not want its owner to know that he had discovered its existence. It was this bug that had prompted him to form the complex communications system with Peter Marks. He replaced it, shut the drawer, and locked it.

  Ope

ning his laptop, he logged onto the government server on which his files resided, navigated to the encrypted file, and opened it. To Peter’s credit, he had figured out the system and accessed the encrypted file on Hendricks’s computer. A message detailed what Marks had discovered. At a regional meeting in Qatar in the spring of 1968, Fitz was listed as a consultant for El-Gabal Mining, a now defunct government-run company. What interested Marks—and now Hendricks himself—was that Fitz had neglected to list El-Gabal on his CV.

  In light of Marks’s own investigation, it might not be so surprising that he hadn’t reported in, Hendricks thought now. If Marks had found something further on Fitz, then, following the attempt on his life, he might have gone undercover to check it out himself. Maybe he had contacted Soraya. Hendricks rang her cell but, again, got no answer. He pulled out his cell and went out of the study, down the hall, and into a bathroom, where he turned on the taps.

  It was after nine in Paris, so he called Jacques Robbinet at home. His wife told him that her husband was still at the office. Apparently there was an international incident he’d had to handle. Worried now, Hendricks called Robbinet’s office. While the connection was being made, he stared out at his deserted house and not for the first time wished with all his heart that he could hear Amanda puttering about, cleaning out the closets as she loved to do. It depressed him to think that the closets hadn’t been touched since her death. He wondered what the house would be like with Maggie in it permanently.

  Robbinet finally answered. “Chris, I was just going to call. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of an incident.”

  “What kind of incident?” Hendricks listened with sweaty hands as Robbinet related the meeting with M. Marchand, how Soraya, Aaron Lipkin-Renais, and the Egyptian Chalthoum had followed Marchand, and all that had happened.

  “So Chalthoum is dead.” Christ, what a fuckup, Hendricks thought. The head of al Mokhabarat murdered on French soil. No wonder Robbinet was still at the office; he’d probably be there all night. “Is Soraya okay?”