“I don’t need a lecture on women’s role in history,” she snapped.
Marks decided to ignore her comment. “Whatever else you might think, the indisputable fact is that women possess a unique ability.”
“Would you please stop saying unique?”
“An ability to attract men, to seduce them, to find the chinks in their armor, and to use that weakness against them. You know better than I what a potent weapon sex can be when applied judiciously. This is especially true in the clandestine services.” He turned to her. “In our world.”
“Jesus Christ, you are the little fucker, aren’t you?” She leaned on the railing, fingers enlaced, as a man might, with a man’s confidence that was typical of her.
Marks pulled out his cell, brought up a head shot of Arkadin, handed it to her. “Handsome sonovabitch, isn’t he? Magnetic, too, so I’m told.”
“You disgust me.”
“That sort of outrage doesn’t become you.”
“But screwing Arkadin does?” She thrust the cell back at him, but he didn’t reach for it.
“Fight against it all you want, the fact remains that espionage work is what you do, this is what you are. More to the point, this is the life you chose. No one ever twisted your arm.”
“No? What are you doing now?”
He took a calculated risk. “I haven’t given you an ultimatum. You can get up and walk away anytime.”
“And then what? I’ll have nothing, I’ll be nothing.”
“You can return to Cairo, marry Amun Chalthoum, have babies.”
He said this not unkindly, but the concept itself was unkind, or rather despicable. In any event, this was how it struck her. And all at once the full realization of how thoroughly M. Errol Danziger had fucked her dealt her its last, worst body blow. She was done at CI, which was bad enough, but he had made sure that she couldn’t get a position at a competing government agency. One of the private risk management firms was also out of the question; she wasn’t about to get involved with an organization of mercenaries like Black River. She turned away and bit her lip in order to hold back her tears of frustration. She felt the way she imagined women had felt down through the ages when they had ventured into a man’s world, taking orders, biting back their opinions, hoarding secrets revealed in the whispered aftermath of sex, until the day came…
“This guy isn’t unknown to you,” Marks said, careful to keep the urgency he felt out of his voice. “He’s as bad as they get, Raya. This playing up to him, it’s a good thing you’ll be doing.”
“That’s what you all say.”
“No, we all do what needs to be done. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“Easy for you to say, you’re not being asked to-”
“You don’t know what I’ve been asked to do.”
She turned away again. He watched her staring out at the canal, at the smears of lights on the water. Off to their left, the kids burst out into a rolling wave of laughter that seemed to gain in intensity as it circled the group.
“What I wouldn’t give to be one of them now,” Soraya said softly. “Not a care in the fucking world.”
And Marks breathed a silent sigh of relief, knowing now that she would swallow the bitter pill he offered. She would take the assignment.
Curious. Very curious, indeed.” In the warm light of the morning sun Chrissie was studying the engraving on the inside of the gold band Bourne had taken from Noah Perlis.
“I know linguistics,” Bourne said, “but this isn’t a known language, is it?”
“Well, it’s hard to say. There are some characteristics of Sumerian, possibly Latin as well, though it’s really neither.” She looked up at him. “Where did you get this?”
“It makes no sense, does it?”
She shook her head. “No, it doesn’t.”
She had made coffee while Bourne rooted around in the freezer. He came up with a pair of crumpets, though judging by the ice crystals clinging to the bag they had been in there for some time. They found some jam and ate standing up, both of them filled with nervous energy. Neither of them mentioned last night. Then Bourne had showed her the ring.
“But that’s only my opinion and I’m far from an expert.” She handed the ring back to Bourne. “The only way to find out for sure is to take it up to Oxford. I have a friend who’s a professor at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. If it can be deciphered, he’s sure to know.”
It was after midnight when Lieutenant R. Simmons Reade tracked his boss down at an all-night squash court in Virginia, where the DCI worked out for two strenuous hours with one of the resident instructors three times a week. Reade was the only one inside CI who could deliver bad news to DCI Danziger without a qualm. He had been Danziger’s prize pupil when Danziger was briefly teaching at the NSA’s clandestine Academy for Special Operations, which the Old Man, who had contempt for everything the NSA stood for, used to call the Academy for Special Services, so he could jokingly refer to it as ASS.
Reade sat through the end of the last game, then made his presence known to the DCI by walking out onto the court, which was hot and smelled of sweat despite the fierce air-conditioning.
Danziger tossed his racquet at the instructor, wrapped a towel around his neck, and walked over to his adjutant.
“How bad?” No preliminaries were needed; the fact that Reade had sought him out at this hour, that he had chosen to come in person rather than through a phone call, was enough to clue him in.
“Bourne has neutralized the extraction team. They’re either dead or in police custody.”
“Jesus Christ,” Danziger said, “how does Bourne do it? No wonder Bud needed me to take over.”
They walked over to a bench and sat. No one else was on the court, the only sound came from the hum of the air-conditioning vents.
“Is Bourne still in London?”
Reade nodded. “As of this moment, yes, sir, he is.”
“And Coven is there, Lieutenant?”
Danziger only called him by his rank when he was truly pissed off. “Yes, sir.”
“Why didn’t he intervene?”
“The site was too public, there were too many witnesses for him to try to snatch Bourne off the street.”
“Other options?”
“Woefully lacking,” Reade said. “Shall I do something about that? I can reach out to our people at NSA for-”
“In time, Randy, but for now I can’t shake the tree and bring in my men wholesale, not politic, as Bud is quick to remind me. No, we have to make the best of the hand we’ve been dealt.”
“Judging by his kill record, sir, Coven is damn good.”
“Fine.” The DCI slapped his thighs and stood up. “Set him loose on Bourne. Tell him he has a free hand, whatever it takes to bring Bourne in.”
AFTER PETER MARKS had given her the assignment to find and attach herself to Arkadin, Soraya Moore had returned to Delia Trane’s apartment where she had been holed up. For the last two hours she had been on her plugged-in cell phone with a number of her field agents at Typhon. Though Typhon was no longer hers, the same could not be said for the people she had hired, trained, and mentored for the highly specialized jobs monitoring and infiltrating the various Sunni and Shi’a cadres, insurgent groups, jihadists, and extreme splinter politicos in virtually every country in the Middle and Far East. No matter what their current orders were or who was now in charge of Typhon, their loyalty was to her.
Currently she was talking to Yusef, her contact in Khartoum. Arkadin was well known in that part of the world now that he supplied the majority of the armament.
“Arkadin isn’t anywhere in the Middle East,” Yusef said, “or holed up in the mountains of Azerbaijan, for that matter.”