He kept an eye out for the residents or security, but saw no one. He moved through rooms filled with books in glass-fronted cases crisscrossed by security wires, down more corridors, wood-paneled and hushed.

Gradually, he became aware of the murmur of voices and turned in that direction. As he moved closer, he recognized one of the voices: Hendricks. The other speaker was also male, his voice pitched slightly higher. As he approached closer still, it struck him as being naggingly familiar. The pitch, the cadence, the long-winded sentences without pauses for punctuation. And then, when he had crossed the room, the voices were so clear he was certain they came from the open doorway to the next room. A particular turn of phrase caused him to freeze.

The man Hendricks was talking with was M. Errol Danziger, the vampiric current head of CI. He had sacked Soraya, one of the reasons Peter had quit—he’d seen her demise at CI coming. And now Danziger was in the process of dismantling the proud organization the Old Man had built from the scraps left to him by those who had remodeled the wartime OSS.

Peter stole closer to the open doorway. If Hendricks is cooking up a deal with Danziger, he thought, it’s no wonder he doesn’t want us to know about it.

He could hear them clearly now.

“—are you?” Hendricks’s voice.

“I couldn’t say,” Danziger replied.

“You mean you won’t.”

A deep sigh, probably from the director of CI.

“I don’t understand the need for this high-school-level cloak and dagger. Why meet here? My office—”

“We weren’t ever going to meet in your office,” Hendricks said, “for precisely the same reason you weren’t invited to the meeting in the Oval Office.”

This was followed by what Peter could only characterize as a deathly silence.

“What is it you want from me, Mr. Secretary?” Danziger’s voice was so drained of emotion it might be called robotic.

“Cooperation,” Hendricks said. “It’s what we all want, and by we I mean the president. In the matter of Samaritan, I am his voice. Is that understood?”

“Completely,” Danziger said. But even at his close remove, Peter could hear the venom in that one word.

“Good,” Hendricks said. Whether he had noted the bitterness in the director’s voice or he’d chosen to ignore it was impossible for Peter to say. “Because I won’t be saying any of this twice.” There was a soft rustling. “Samaritan is on the strictest need-to-know basis. That means even the people you choose won’t know about it until they arrive at Indigo Ridge. Samaritan is the president’s number one priority, which means that from this moment forward it’s our number one priority. Here are your orders. Have your people rendezvous with the others at Indigo Ridge forty-eight hours from now.”

“Forty-eight hours?” Danziger echoed. “How do you expect—I mean, for God’s sake, look at this list. What you’re asking is impossible to mobilize in that time frame.”

“Directors are trained to accomplish the impossible.” Hendricks’s implied threat was clear enough. “That will be all, Mr. Danziger.”

Peter heard first one set of footstep echoing on the polished floorboards, then, some moments later, another. Both faded away into the distance.

Peter leaned back against the wall. Samaritan, Indigo Ridge—two clues he would have to follow. Samaritan is the president’s number one priority, he thought. Why did Hendricks agree to let Soraya go to Paris? Why didn’t he involve us in Samaritan? These were questions Peter knew he had to answer, and the sooner the better. He had an urge to text Soraya, briefing her on what he had just learned and asking her to come back to Washington, but his trust in her stayed his hand. If she thought this death was important enough to investigate personally, that was good enough for him. He’d learned that her instincts were impeccable.

Then his mind turned to happier thoughts. It looked like Danziger was standing at the precipice. Peter felt elated, especially because he had been given inside knowledge. Anything he could do to sabotage Danziger’s part in Samaritan—whatever that was—would be a giant step in destroying his career and getting him out of CI.

Off with his head! Peter’s silent shout pinballed around his mind, gaining energy with each successive carom.

Having dropped Essai off at the airport, Bourne stopped at a cantina on the western outskirts of Perales. He was hungry but he also needed time to think. The place was flyblown, with walls somewhere between mustard and adobe. The fluorescent lighting had a tic, and the heartbeat of the ancient iced drink cooler against one wall sounded erratic. There were two waiters, both young men, thin and harried. While scanning the paper menu, he noted faces, expressions, and the angles of repose of the other patrons, old men with skin like tanned hides reading the local paper, drinking coffee, talking politics, or playing chess, an exhausted-looking prostitute past her prime, and a farmer practically inhaling an enormous plate of food. A person on surveillance never held his body in the same way as a civilian. There was always a certain telltale tension in the back, neck, or shoulders. He also studied everyone who came in or out.

Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he ordered a drink and bandeja paisa with a side of arepas. When the aguapanela—sugarcane-sweetened water with a muddle of fresh lime—came he drank half of it at once, then settled back.

“There’s a spare sat phone in the glove box, charged and ready to go,” Essai had said. “Also a detailed map of the area. Ibagué is clearly marked, as is the oil field Vegas runs.” That much he could buy, but Essai had made a mistake when he’d added: “You’ll find my sat number pre-programmed into it.” It was entirely possible—even prudent—for Essai to have a spare sat phone, and the map was a no-brainer. But the fact that he had pre-programmed his sat phone number into it indicated to Bourne that it wasn’t a spare at all. Bourne asked himself whether it was possible that Essai had known he had been sent to find and kill Corellos. Maybe Corellos himself had told him, but, if so, it would have been long after Essai could’ve bought a second sat phone. All of this meant that it was likely Essai was lying when he said he no longer had a way to ferret out intel from the Domna. If so, then he had a man inside the group, someone who was loyal to him.

Bourne had never been completely sold on Essai’s earnestness, but he didn’t for an instant doubt his desire to destroy Severus Domna. In this one matter, he and Essai were aligned—they needed each other. They also needed to trust each other, but the trust was compromised because it pertained solely to the matter of the Domna’s demise. After that, all bets were off.

The food arrived, fragrant and steaming. Bourne, suddenly ravenous, dug in, using the arepas to soak up the sauce as a combination fork and spoon. As he ate, his thoughts continued. Then there was the matter of the Domna enlisting Boris to kill him. The story was so outrageous he had been inclined to dismiss it out of hand. Until, that is, Essai had described the trap Benjamin El-Arian had laid for his friend. He knew Boris wanted to be the head of FSB-2 more than anything. In a sense, he’d dedicated his entire adult life to that end. If he had been given the choice between his heart’s desire and protecting Bourne, what would he do? Bourne was shaken by the knowledge that he didn’t know. Boris was a friend, true, and he had saved Boris’s life in the temporary war zone of northeastern Iran, but Boris was a Russian through and through. His ethos was different, which made predicting his choices difficult, if not impossible.

The thought that, even at this moment, Boris might be hunting him sent a chill through him that could not be dispelled by Perales’s blazing heat. He pulled out the sat phone from Essai’s car and, placing it on the table, stared at it for a time. He resisted the urge to call Boris and ask him outright what had happened and where he stood. That would be an unforgivable mistake. If Boris was innocent he’d be mortally offended—in fact, now that Bourne considered it, he’d act mortally offended even if he was guilty. Plus, if Essai was telling the truth, Boris would have been given a warning, and Bourne would lose a vital advantage.