— I‘m sorry, sir, he said. -There was nothing any of us could do.
Then Khoury looked beyond him to the three strangers, and immediately the primitive part of his brain, the fight-or-flight center, understood. Nevertheless, the civilized part of him was shocked, rooting him to the spot.
— What is this? he said.
As if sleepwalking, he went across the magnificent jewel-tone carpet, a present from the president of Iran, staring with stupefaction at the three men in tailored suits ranged behind his desk. The men on the left and right stood with their arms hanging loosely at their sides and produced laminated badges identifying them as agents of the US Department of Defense. The one in the middle with hair the color of iron filings and a hard, angular face said,
— Good afternoon, Mr. Khoury. My name is Reiniger. A
— Custody? Khoury was taken aback. -I don‘t understand. How could you-?
His voice died in his throat as he looked down at the dossier Reiniger had produced. To his horror he saw photo after photo, green-lit from infrared film, of him with the sixteen-year-old busboy from the See CafA©, whom he saw three times a week when he went to Lake Starnberg ostensibly for lunch.
Gathering himself with a supreme effort, Khoury pushed the photos across the desk. -I have many enemies with deep resources. This smut is doctored. Anyone can see it isn‘t me performing these wicked and disgusting acts. He looked up into Reiniger‘s yellow teeth, wrapped in his fraudulent piety. -How dare you accuse me of such-
Reiniger made a small gesture with one hand and the man on his right stepped one pace to the left, revealing the sixteen-year-old busboy from the See CafA©. The boy would not meet Khoury‘s dark glare, instead staring fixedly at the tops of his sneakers. In this superheated room, amid the tall, wide-shouldered Americans in their dark suits, he looked younger than his years, slender and fragile as bone china.
— I‘d introduce you, one of the American agents said with an audible snicker, — but that would be redundant.
Khoury‘s brain was on fire. How had this horror been visited on him? Why, if he was the chosen of Allah, had his dark secret, learned at the knee of his childhood instructor, been revealed? He had no thought for who had betrayed him, only that he could not bear to live with the shame, which would strip him of the power and prestige he‘d worked for decades to amass.
— This is the end for you, Khoury, the other American said.
Which one was which? They all looked alike to him. They had the evil look of dissolute infidels. He wanted to kill them both.
— The end of you as a public figure, the American went on in his implacable cyborg voice. -But more importantly, it‘s the end of your influence. Your brand of extremism has been revealed as a sham, a joke, a goddamn hypocritical-
Khoury growled deep in his throat as he lunged at the boy. He saw the American nearest the boy draw a Taser, but he couldn‘t stop now. The twin barbed hooks impaled themselves, one in his torso, the other in his thigh, and the pain spasmed him backward. His knees buckled and he fell, flopping and arching, but all was ringing silence, as if he had already passed to another plane. Even as the movement in the room grew frenzied, even when, some minutes later, he was transferred to a gurney, taken down in the elevator, rushed through the ground-floor lobby filled with silent and shocked blobs that must once have been faces, all was silence. All was silence out in the street, even as traffic passed by, even as paramedics and the dark-suited Americans jogged beside the gurney and mouths opened, perhaps to shout warnings for gawping passersby to step aside or move back. Silence. Only silence.
And then he was lifted up as if by the hand of Allah and rolled inside the ambulance. Two paramedics climbed in, along with a third man, and even as the rear doors were closing, the ambulance took off. Its siren must have been wailing, but Khoury couldn‘t hear a thing. Neither could he feel his body, which seemed to bind him to the gurney like lead weights. All he felt was the fire in his chest, the laboring of his heart, the irregular pulse of blood circulating through him.
He hoped the third man wasn‘t one of the Americans; he was afraid of them. The German he knew he could handle once he regained his voice; he had cultivated many friendships in the
With a wave of relief, he saw that the third man was Reiniger. He could feel a tingling in his extremities, found that he could move his fingers and toes. He was about to try out his vocal cords when Reiniger bent over him and, with the flourish of a magician on stage, removed a nose and cheeks made out of silicone putty, along with a set of yellowed teeth that he‘d worn over his own. Instantly, a premonition overtook Khoury like the flutter of death‘s black wave.
— Hello, Khoury, Reiniger said slowly.
Khoury tried to speak, bit his tongue instead.
Reiniger grinned as he patted the stricken man on the shoulder. -How you doing? Not well, I see. He shrugged, his grin flowering open. -No matter, because it‘s a good day to die. He placed the pad of his right thumb against Khoury‘s Adam‘s apple and pressed down until something vital popped.
— Good for us, anyway.
4
WHEN SORAYA MOORE walked into the DCI‘s office, Veronica Hart got up from behind her desk and beckoned Soraya to sit beside her on a sofa against one wall. In the past year of Hart‘s tenure as DCI, the two women had become close friends as well as associates. They had been forced by circumstance to trust each other from the moment Hart had come on board following the Old Man‘s untimely death. The two of them had united against Secretary of Defense Halliday while Willard took down his attack dog, Luther LaValle, and handed Halliday the most humiliating defeat of his political career. That they‘d made a mortal enemy in the process was never far from their minds or their discussions. Neither was Jason Bourne, whom Soraya had twice worked with, and whom Hart had come to understand better than anyone else at CI save for Soraya herself.
