“No, you’re sitting here talking to me.” Soraya cocked her head. “Tell me, Richards, why were you coming to Peter with this and not to me?”

Land mines, Richards thought. She’s placing land mines all over the place. I have to tread very carefully without letting on I know what she’s up to.He could say that Marks had told him he’d given Director Moore a couple of days off, but that wasn’t strictly speaking true. He’d overheard it. Snoopingmight be a better term. He couldn’t afford to have her catch him in a lie, or even a half-truth. “My first contact here was with Director Marks. I worked with him for several weeks, more or less collegially, before you arrived, and then...” He allowed his voice to trail off as he shrugged. She knew very well how she had frozen him out, treated him like a worm in the apple.

“I see.” Soraya put down the file unread, and, steepling her fingers, leaned back in Peter Marks’s chair. “So you’re lodging a complaint against me, is that it?”

He saw his mistake immediately and silently cursed himself. He could sense that any denial on his part would only make things worse. He could tell now that she despised any form of weakness, whether merely apparent or real. “Director, allow me a moment to take my foot out of my mouth.” He allowed a brief sense of relief as the flicker of her smile impressed itself on him. “I have a thick skin. I didn’t used to, but you know NSA.”

“Do I?”

“M. Errol Danziger, the current CI director, is NSA-trained, so I would judge that you know better than most.”

“During your time at NSA did you form an opinion of Director Danziger?”

“He’s an asshole, in my humble opinion.” This answer appeared to please her, and he willed himself to relax. “If my tenure at NSA taught me anything, it was that in order to survive, I had to toughen up. Which is all to say that how you treat me is entirely your business.”

“Thank you.”

Noting her sharply sardonic tone, he said, “My business is to carry out to the best of my ability whatever orders you give me.”

“Not whatever orders the president has given you?”

“I understand that you don’t trust me. Frankly, in your place I’d feel the same.”

“Just why the hell didthe president press you onto us?”

“In the past, there has been too much leeway taken inside blackops organizations. He’s asked me to monitor—”

“Spy on us.”

“If I’m to be honest, I don’t think he’s being adversarial.”

“Then what?”

“He’s cautious, I guess would be the best term for it.”

Soraya smirked. “And you agree with him, I imagine.”

“I guess I did before I got here. But now, seeing what Treadstone does...” He left a small silence to punctuate that statement.

“I’m all ears.”

“And I’m doing my best to earn your trust.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The deeper I get into the Nicodemo assignment, the more of a tangle it becomes. I finally came to the conclusion that this tangle, which proliferated at every turn of whatever form of search I performed, was deliberate.”

“Nothing would arouse as much suspicion as your finding Nicodemo easily.”

“Exactly! Of course, this was the first thought that came to me as I made my way through the first layers. But, as you’ll see in the file, this is more than a hacker’s tangle. It’s a goddamned Gordian knot. The more I unraveled one strand, the tighter the knot became.”

“Isn’t that simply superior security?”

“No,” Richards said. “It’s a double-blind.”

“Meaning?”

“This Gordian knot is meant to seemlike superior security, the better to suck in expert hackers who, unlike me, are conspiracy theorists at heart. But, in fact, it’s nothing but bullshit. The Gordian knot is the product of some evil genius—sound and fury signifying nothing.”

“So you’re saying—what? —Nicodemo doesn’t exist?”

“Not as you and I were trained to think of him—and maybe not at all.”

“Okay.” Soraya spread her hands. “Say you’re right.”

“I amright.”

“Then who the hell owns Core Energy?”

Richards blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“I have it on good authority that Nicodemo is connected with Core Energy.”

“Where did you hear that? Tom Brick is CEO of Core Energy.”

Soraya had learned about Core Energy and Nicodemo from Jason Bourne, with whom, by long-standing arrangement, she was in periodic phone contact, but she wasn’t about to tell Richards that. “According to this source, Core Energy has a shitload of masked subsidiaries that are buying up energy mines and producers worldwide, making deals Tom Brick or any other legit CEO couldn’t touch with a fifty-foot pole. If, as you claim, Nicodemo doesn’t exist, then who the hell is making those corrupt deals?”

“I...I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, though I’ve tried my damnedest to find out.” She closed the file and skimmed it back across the desk to him. “Back to the salt pits, Richards. You want to impress me, dig me out some useful intel.”

A hot spray of blood coated Bourne’s face as the gunshot reverberated through his mind.

Helpless, he stared up into the gunman’s stunned face. An instant later, the gunman’s eyes turned glassy, and he keeled over onto his side.

A second shadow passed across Bourne’s vision. He turned his head, saw another figure, gun in hand. Sunlight turned the figure inky, no more than a silhouette. Then the sun slipped behind a racing cloud bank and, as the figure knelt beside him, Bourne recognized the face.

“Rebeka,” he said.

She smiled. “Welcome back to the living, Bourne.”

Trying to move, he crackled like an iceberg cleaving. Reversing her Glock, she used the butt to chip off the layer of ice that had turned his coat and trousers to armor.

“We’d better peel this stuff off you before it adheres to your skin permanently.” As she worked, she said: “It’s good to see you. I never thanked you for saving my life.”

“All in a day’s work,” Bourne said now. “Is Alef okay?” She frowned. “Who?”

“The man next to me. I pulled him out of the water several days ago.”

“Oh, you mean Manfred Weaving.” She glanced to Bourne’s left.

“He’s fine. Thanks to you. But I need to get him inside, too.” Bourne was beginning to regain movement in his limbs, but he was still dreadfully chilled. To keep his teeth from chattering, he said, “How d’you know him? What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been pursuing him for weeks now, all the way from Lebanon.”

She laughed. “You remember Lebanon, Bourne, don’t you?”

“How’s Colonel Ben David?”

“Pissed as a bear up a tree.”

“Good.”

“He hates your guts.”

“Even better.”

With a wry smile, she helped him up to a sitting position. “I’ve got to get you both warmed up.”

He turned, glanced at the man lying in his own blood. “Who the hell is this?”

“His name’s Ze’ev Stahl. He worked for Ari Ben David.”

Bourne looked at her. “You killed one of your own?”

“It’s a long story.” She nodded at Manfred Weaving. “We’d better get going.” She gave him a wry smile. “You, I don’t know about, but he’s far too valuable to let freeze to death.”

Peter Marks sat in his unmarked car, enjoying a Snickers bar.

He hated stakeouts so much that the only way to get through them was to give himself a constant supply of treats. It being a particularly mild day, he had all the windows down, breathing in the air of a coming spring. While he waited, he listened again to the relevant snippet of recording from his office:

Soraya: “I have it on good authority that Nicodemo is connected with Core Energy.”

Richards: “Where did you hear that?”