Then he poured the scalding coffee down his throat.
“Next I suppose you’re going to hold your palm over an open flame.” Devra shook her head. “Men.”
“Why are you still here?” Arkadin said. “You could’ve just run off.”
“And go where? I shot one of Pyotr’s own men.”
“You must have friends.”
“None I can trust.”
Which implied she trusted him. He had an instinct she wasn’t lying about this. She’d washed off the heavy mascara that had run and smudged last night. Oddly, this made her eyes seem even larger. And her cheeks held a blush now that she’d scrubbed off what had to be white theatrical makeup.
“I’ll take you to Turkey,” she said. “A small town called Eskisёehir. That’s where I sent the document.”
Given what he knew, Turkey-the ancient gateway between East and West-made perfect sense.
The bag of ice slipped off as Arkadin grabbed the front of her shirt, crossed to the window, threw it wide open. Though the action cost him in pain to his shoulder, he hardly cared. The early-morning sounds of the street rose up to him like the smell of baking bread. He bent her backward so her head and torso were out the window. “What did I tell you about lying to me?”
“You might as well kill me now,” she said in her little-girl voice. “I won’t tolerate your abuse anymore.”
Arkadin pulled her back inside the room, let go of her. “What are you going to do,” he said with a smirk, “jump out the window?”
No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than she walked calmly to the window and sat on the sash, staring at him all the time. Then she tipped herself backward, through the open window. Arkadin grabbed her around the legs and hauled her up from the brink.
They stood glaring at each other, breathing fast, hearts pumping with excess adrenaline.
“Yesterday, while we were on the ladder, told me that you had nothing much to live for,” Devra said. “That pretty much goes for me, too. So here we both are, brothers under the skin, with nothing but each other.”
“How do I know the next link in the network is Turkey?”
She drew her hair back from her face. “I’m tired of lying to you,” she said. “It’s like lying to myself. What’s the point?”
“Talk is cheap,” he said.
“Then I’ll prove it to you. When we get to Turkey I’ll take you to the document.”
Arkadin, trying not to think too much about what she said, nodded his acknowledgment of their uneasy truce. “I won’t lay a hand on you again.”
Twelve
THE FREER GALLERY of Art stood on the south side of the Mall, bounded on the west by the Washington Monument and on the east by the Reflecting Pool, gateway to the immense Capitol building. It was situated on the corner of Jefferson Drive and 12th Street, SW, near the western edge of the Mall.
The building, a Florentine Renaissance palazzo faced with Stony Creek granite imported from Connecticut, had been commissioned by Charles Freer to house his enormous collection of Near East and East Asian art. The main entrance on the north side of the building where the meet was to take place consisted of three arches accented by Doric pilasters surrounding a central loggia. Because its architecture looked inward, many critics felt it was a rather forbidding facade, especially when compared with the nearby exuberance of the National Gallery of Art.
Nevertheless, the Freer was the preeminent museum of its kind in the country, and Soraya loved it not only for the depth of art it housed but also for the elegant lines of the palazzo itself. She especially loved the contained open space at its entrance, and the fact that even, as now, when the Mall was agitated with hordes of tourists heading to and from the Smithsonian Metro rail stop on 12th Street, the Freer itself was an oasis of calm and tranquility. When things boiled over in the office during the day, it was to the Freer she came to decompress. Ten minutes with Sung dynasty jades and lacquers acted like a soothing balm to her soul.
Approaching the north side of the Mall, she searched past the crowds outside the entrance to the Freer and thought she saw-among the sturdy men with their hard, clipped Midwestern accents, the scampering children and their laughing mothers, the vacant-eyed teenagers plugged into their iPods-Veronica Hart’s long, elegant figure walking past the entrance, then doubling back.
She stepped off the curb, but the blare of a horn from an oncoming car startled her back onto the sidewalk. It was at that moment that her cell phone buzzed.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Bourne said in her ear.
“Jason?”
“Why are you coming to this meet?”
Foolishly, she looked around; she’d never be able to spot him, and she knew it.
“Hart invited me. I need to talk to you. The DCI and I both do.”
“About what?”
Soraya took a deep breath. “Typhon’s listening posts have picked up a series of disturbing communications pointing to an imminent terrorist attack on an East Coast city. The trouble is, that’s all we have. Worse, the communications are between two cadres of a group about which we have no intel whatsoever. It was my idea to recruit you to find them and stop the attack.”
“Not much to go on,” Bourne said. “Doesn’t matter. The group’s name is the Black Legion.”
“In grad school I studied the link between a branch of Muslim extremism and the Third Reich. But this can’t be the same Black Legion. They were either killed or disbanded when Nazi Germany fell.”
“It can and it is,” Bourne said. “I don’t know how it managed to survive, but it did. Three of their members tried to kidnap Professor Specter this morning. I saw their device tattooed on the gunman’s arm.”
“The three horses’ heads joined by the death’s head?”
“Yes.” Bourne described the incident in detail. “Check the body at the morgue.”
“I’ll do that,” Soraya said. “But how could the Black Legion remain so far underground all this time without being detected?”
“They have a powerful international front,” Bourne said. “The Eastern Brotherhood.”
“That sounds far-fetched,” Soraya said. “The Eastern Brotherhood is in the forefront of Islamic-Western relations.”
“Nevertheless, my source is unimpeachable.”
“God in heaven, what’ve you been doing while you’ve been away from CI?”
“I was never in CI,” Bourne said brusquely, “and here’s just one reason why. You say you want to talk with me but I doubt you need half a dozen agents to do that.”
Soraya froze. “Agents?” She was on the Mall itself now, and she had to restrain herself from looking around again. “There are no CI agents here.”
“How d’you know that?”
“Hart would’ve told me-”
“Why should she tell you anything? We go way back, you and I.”
“That’s true enough.” She kept walking. “But something happened earlier today that makes me believe the agents you’ve spotted are NSA.” She described the way she and Hart had been shadowed from CI HQ to the restaurant. She told him about Secretary Halliday and Luther LaValle, both of whom were gunning to make CI a part of the Pentagon clandestine service.
“That might make sense,” Bourne said, “if there were only two of them. But six? No, there’s another agenda, one neither of us knows about.”
“Such as?”
“The agents are vectored perfectly, triangulated on the entrance to the Freer,” Bourne said. “This means that they must have had foreknowledge of the meet. It also means the six weren’t sent to shadow Veronica Hart. If they aren’t here for her, they must have been sent for me. This is Hart’s doing.”
