“He was a spy, an assassin,” Bourne said. “Who was he working for?”

“I don’t know,” Kaja said. “And believe me I tried to find out.” Her eyes cut away for a moment. “I feel certain that Mikaela, my other sister, discovered who it was.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“She was killed before she could say a word to either me or Skara.”

“Triplets,” Don Hernando cut in.

Now the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. “So you and Skara ghosted away, changing identities,” Bourne said, “hiding, as you said, in plain sight.”

“I did at least.” Kaja put her head down, resting the sugary rim of the glass against her forehead. “I went as far away from Stockholm as I could.”

“But your father’s organization found you anyway.”

She nodded. “Two men came. I killed one and wounded the other. I was running away from him when I surprised the margay.”

Bourne thought for a moment. “Is there anything you can tell me about the two men?”

Kaja shuddered and took another deep breath. For the first time, she looked terribly young and vulnerable, the runaway girl from Stockholm. And in that moment, Bourne caught a glimpse of the energy it took for her to maintain her Rosie identity.

“The men spoke to each other in English,” she said at last. “But at the end, the one I killed said something just before he died. It wasn’t in English. It was in Russian.”

20

HENDRICKS WAS JUST wrapping up the eighth Samaritan strategy session in the last thirty-six hours—this one on staff deployment along the perimeter that had been established around the Indigo Ridge mine—when Davies, one of his half a dozen aides, entered the room.

“It’s the POTUS on the secure line, sir,” Davies whispered in his ear before departing.

“Okay, out,” Hendricks said to the participants. “But stand by for final orders. We deploy personnel in four hours.”

After everyone had filed out and the door was closed, Hendricks swiveled his chair and, for a moment, stared out the window at the pristine, newly mowed lawn, bordered by the picket line of massive concrete anti-terrorist blockades that had been erected in 2001. Someone, perhaps in a fit of irony, had placed a row of flowerpots atop them. Like planting flowers on a battleship, he thought. The blockades stood immutable; their purpose could not be mitigated. Tourists milled on the other side of them, but the lawn was spotless, not a single weed allowed to show its face. Something about that deserted expanse depressed Hendricks.

Sighing inwardly, he picked up the receiver connected to the secure line to the White House.

“Chris, you there?”

There was a hollow sound, peculiar to the encryption program that scrambled their words every ten seconds.

“I’m right here, Mr. President.”

“How’s the boy!”

Hendricks’s stomach contracted. The president’s voice evinced that false heartiness it typically took on when he had some bad news to impart to the recipient.

“Tip-top, sir.”

“That’s the spirit. How are the plans for Samaritan progressing?”

“Almost complete, sir.”

“Uhm-hum,” the president said, by which he meant he wasn’t listening.

Hendricks reached into a drawer for the box of Prilosec he always kept on hand for emergencies.

“It’s Samaritan I want to talk to you about. It so happens that this morning I had breakfast with Ken Marshall and Billy Stokes.”

The president paused to allow the two names to sink in. Marshall, who had been in the initial Samaritan meeting in the Oval Office, and Stokes, who had not, were, respectively, the Pentagon’s and the DoD’s most powerful generals.

“Anyway,” the POTUS continued, “with one thing and another, the conversation eventually came around to Samaritan. Now listen here, Chris, it’s Ken and Billy’s considered opinion that as far as Samaritan is concerned, CI’s gotten the short end of the stick.”

“You mean Danziger.”

Hendricks could sense the president taking a breath while he counted to ten.

“What I mean is that I agree with them. I want you to give Danziger a larger role in the operation.”

Hendricks closed his eyes. He swallowed a Prilosec even as he felt a headache beating a tattoo against his forehead. “Sir, with all due respect, Samaritan is already set.”

“Almost. You said it yourself, Chris.”

Was it possible to scream at yourself? Hendricks wondered.

“This is my operation,” he said doggedly. “You gave it to me.”

“The Lord giveth, Chris, and the Lord taketh away.”

Hendricks gritted his teeth. It was no use telling the president what a perfect little shit M. Errol Danziger was. The president had appointed him. Even supposing the POTUS shared Hendricks’s opinion, he would never admit that he’d made a mistake, not in the current perilous political climate. One false move would set alight the worldwide blogosphere, which would in turn ignite a firestorm of talking heads on CNN and Fox News, which would spawn endless op-ed column inches. The poll numbers the president and his advisers scrutinized every month would plummet. No, these days even the president of the United States needed to be ultra-cautious with both his choices and his statements.

“I’ll do what I can to soothe the ruffled feathers,” Hendricks said.

“Music to my ears, Chris. Keep me informed on your progress.”

With that fiat, the president disconnected. Hendricks didn’t know what gave him more pain, his stomach or his head. He knew Danziger was aiming for complete control of Samaritan, which would surely end in disaster. Danziger was a career opportunist. Amassing power was his sole objective. He had come over to CI from NSA and for the past year he had been remaking CI into a carbon copy of NSA. NSA being an extension of the Pentagon, this was not good news for the American intelligence community. The military relied far too heavily on remote surveillance: eyes in the sky, spy drones, and the like. CI’s stock in trade had always been human eyes and ears in the field. The intercom buzzed, interrupting his misery.

“Sir, everyone’s out here waiting.” Davies’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Do you want to resume the briefing?”

Hendricks rubbed his forehead. A fierce streak of rebelliousness bubbled up in him. “They have their orders. Tell them to put the deployment into effect immediately.”

Russian,” Bourne said. “What form of Russian?”

Kaja stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dialect. Was it southern or—”

“Moscow. He was from Moscow.”

Bourne put his glass down onto a table inlaid with Moroccan tiles. “You’re certain?”

Kaja spoke to him in the Russian dialect used by Muscovites.

“Your father was working for the Russians,” Bourne said.

“That’s the first thing I considered when I heard him,” Kaja said, “but it doesn’t seem credible.”

“Why not?”

“Both my parents hated the Russians.”

“Perhaps your mother did,” Bourne said carefully. “But as for your father, if he was working for the Russians his hatred for them would be part of his cover.”

“Hiding in plain sight.”

Bourne nodded.

She got up then. Don Fernando caught Bourne’s eye. Bourne could see that the Spaniard didn’t want him to continue this topic. Kaja stood in front of the window, staring at her reflection much as Bourne himself had done at Vegas’s house the night before the helicopter attack.

A terrible silence invaded the room, but it was Kaja’s silence. Neither Bourne nor Don Fernando felt it wise to break it.

“Do you think it’s true?” Kaja’s voice seemed to come from another place.

At length, she turned back in to the room and looked from one to the other, repeating her question.

“From what you’ve told us,” Bourne said, “it seems the likeliest possibility.”

“Fuck,” Kaja said. “Fuck-fuck-fuck.”