Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative

by Eric Van Lustbader

  The president leveled his clear, hard gaze at his most trusted ally. “You think it’s the truth, Chris.”

  “I do, sir, yes.”

  The president pointed at the folder. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my long and storied political career, it’s that a truth without facts is more dangerous than a lie.”

  Hendricks drummed his fingers on the file. “And why would that be, sir?” He said this without rancor; he sincerely wanted to know.

  The president heaved a sigh. “Because without facts, rumor, innuendo, intimation, and supposition have a way of conflating into myth. Myths have a way of worming their way into people’s psyches, becoming something more, something larger than life. Something indelible. Thus is born what Nietzsche called his ‘superman.’”

  “And you believe that’s the case here.”

  “I do.”

  “That this man does not exist.”

  “I didn’t say that.” The president swiveled his chair around, put his forearms on his gleaming desk, steepled his fingers judicially. “What I don’t believe are these rumors of what he has done—what he’s capable of doing. No, as of this moment I don’t believe those things.”

  A small silence descended over them. Outside the Oval Office, the sound of a leaf blower was briefly heard, just inside the wall of reinforced concrete barriers at the perimeter of the sacred grounds. Looking out, Hendricks could see no leaves. But then, all work in and around the White House was inherently secretive.

  Hendricks cleared his throat. “Nevertheless, sir, it’s my unwavering belief that he is a significant threat to this country.”

  The American flag stood curled by the right side of the window, stars rippled. The president’s eyes were half-closed, his breathing deep and even. If Hendricks didn’t know better, he’d think the president had fallen asleep.

  The president gestured for the file and Hendricks slid it back to him. The president opened it, leafing through the dense paragraphs of typescript. “Tell me about your shop.”

  “Treadstone is running quite well.”

  “Both your directors are up to speed?”

  “Yes.”

  “You say that too quickly, Chris. Four months ago, Peter Marks was struck at the periphery of a car bomb. At almost the same time, Soraya Moore was hurt, involved as she was in tragic circumstances in Paris.”

  “She got the job done.”

  “No need to be defensive,” the president said. “I’m simply voicing my concern.”

  “They’ve both been cleared medically and psychologically.”

  “I’msincerelygladtohearit.Buttheseareuniquedirectors,Chris.” “How so?”

  “Oh, come on, I don’t know any other intelligence directors who routinely deploy themselves in the field.”

  “That’s the way it’s done in Treadstone. It’s a very small shop.”

  “By design, I know.” The president paused. “And how is Dick Richards working out?”

  “Integrating into the team.”

  The president nodded. He tapped his forefinger ruminatively against his lower lip. “All right,” he said at length. “Put Treadstone on this business, if you must—Marks, Moore, Richards, whichever. But—” he raised a warning forefinger “—you’ll provide me with daily briefings on their progress. Above all, Chris, I want facts. Give me proof that this businessman—”

  “The next great enemy to our security.”

  “Whatever he is, give me proof that he warrants our attention, or you’ll deploy your valuable personnel on other pressing matters. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Hendricks rose and left the Oval Office, even more troubled than when he had entered.

  When Soraya Moore had returned from Paris three months ago, she had found Treadstone a changed place. For one thing, because security had been breached when the car bomb that had injured Peter went off in the underground garage of the old offices, Treadstone had been moved out of Washington to Langley, Virginia. For another, the presence of a tall, reedy man with thinning hair and a winning smile.

  “Who moved my cheese?” she had said to her co-director and close friend Peter Marks in a parody of a stage whisper.

  Peter had barked a laugh as he embraced her. She knew he was about to ask her about Amun Chalthoum, the head of al Mokhabarat, the Egyptian secret service, who had been killed during her mission in Paris. She gave him a warning look and he bit his tongue. The tall, reedy man, having emerged from his cubicle, was wandering over to them. He stuck out his hand, introducing himself as Dick Richards. An absurd name, Soraya thought.

  “It’s good to have you back,” he said affably.

  She shot him a quizzical look. “Why would you say that?”

  “I’ve heard lots about you since my first day on the job, mostly from Director Marks.” He smiled. “I’d be pleased to get you up to date on the intel files I’ve been working, if you like.”

  She plastered a smile on her face until he nodded to them both. When he was gone, she turned to Peter. “Dick Richards? Really?”

  “Richard Richards. Like something out of Catch-22.”

  “What was Hendricks thinking?”

  “Richards isn’t our boss’s doing. He’s a presidential appointee.”

  Soraya had glanced at Richards, who was back toiling away at his computer. “A spy in the house of Treadstone?”

  “Possibly,” Peter had said. “On the plus side, he’s got a crackerjack rep at IDing and foiling cyber spying software.”

  She had meant it as a joke, but Peter had answered her in all seriousness. “What, all of a sudden the president doesn’t trust Hendricks?”

  “I think,” Peter had said in her ear, “that after what has happened to both of us, the president has his doubts about us.”

  Eventually, Soraya and Peter tackled the twin traumas the two of them had suffered four months ago. It took a long time for her to get around to saying anything about Amun. Not surprisingly, Peter showed infinite patience with her; he had faith that she would tell him when she was ready.

  They had just gotten a call from Hendricks, calling for a crash briefing an hour from now, so, while they had the time, the two of them by silent mutual consent grabbed their coats.

  “Field assessment meeting in forty minutes,” the chubby blonde named Tricia said to Peter as they pushed out the door. Peter grunted, his mind elsewhere.

  They left the offices, went out of the building and across the street where, at the edge of a park, they bought coffees and cinnamon buns from their favorite cart and, with hunched shoulders, strolled beneath the inconstant shelter of the bare-branched trees. They kept their backs to the Treadstone building.

  “The really cruel thing,” she said, “is that Richards is a sharp cookie. We could use his expertise.”

  “If only we could trust him.”

  Soraya took a sip of her coffee, warming her insides. “We could try to turn him.”

  “We’d be going up against the president.”

  She shrugged. “So what else is new?”

  He laughed and hugged her. “I missed you.”

  She frowned as she ripped off a hunk of cinnamon bun and chewed it reflectively. “I stayed in Paris a long time.”

  “Hardly surprising. It’s a city that’s hard to get out of your system.”

  “It was a shock losing Amun.”

  Peter had the grace to keep his own counsel. They walked for a while in silence. A child stood with his father, paying out the string on a kite in the shape of the Bat-Signal. They laughed together. The father put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. The kite rose higher.

  Soraya stared at them, her gaze rising to watch the kite’s flight. At length, she said, “While I was recovering, I thought, What am I doing? Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life, losing friends and—?” For a moment, she couldn’t go on. She had had strong, though conflicting, feelings for Amun. For a time, she had even thought she loved him but, in the end, she had been wrong. That r
evelation had only exacerbated her guilt. If she hadn’t asked him, if he hadn’t loved her, Amun would never have come to Paris. He’d be alive now.

  Having lost her taste for food, she handed her coffee and the rest of her bun to a homeless man on a bench, who looked up, slightly stunned, and thanked her with a nod. When they were out of his earshot, she said softly, “Peter, I can’t stand myself.”

  “You’re only human.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “You’ve never made a mistake before?”

  “Only human, yes,” she echoed him, her head down. “But this was a grievous error in judgment that I am determined never to make again.”

  The silence went on so long that Peter became alarmed. “You’re not thinking of quitting.”

  “I’m considering returning to Paris.”

  “Seriously?”

  She nodded.

  A sudden change came over Peter’s face. “You’ve met someone.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Not a Frenchman. Please don’t tell me it’s a Frenchman.”

  Silent, she stared at the kite, rising higher and higher.

  He laughed. “Go,” he said. “Don’t go. Please.”

  “It’s not only that,” she said. “Over there, in Paris, I realized there’s more to life than clinging to the shadows like a spider to its web.”

  Peter shook his head. “I wish I knew what to—”

  All at once one leg buckled under her. She staggered and would have fallen had Peter not dropped his food, the coffee spilling like oil at their feet, and grabbed her under the arm to steady her. Concerned, he led her over to a bench, where she sat, bent over, her head in her hands.

  “Breathe,” he said with one hand on her back. “Breathe.”

  She nodded, did as he said.

  “Soraya, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. Ever since I got out of the hospital I’ve been getting these dizzy spells.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “There was no need. They were getting less and less frequent. I haven’t had one for over two weeks.”

  “And now this.” He moved his hand in a circular motion on her back in an attempt to soothe her. “I want you to make an appointment—”

  “Stop treating me like a child.”

  “Then stop acting like one.” His voice softened. “I’m concerned about you and I wonder why you aren’t.”

  “All right,” she said. “All right.”

  “Now you can’t go,” he said, only half in jest. “Not until—”

  She laughed, and at last her head lifted. Tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. “That’s my dilemma precisely.” Then she shook her head. “I’ll never find peace, Peter.”

  “What you mean is you don’t deserve to find peace.”

  She looked at him and he shrugged, a wan smile on his face. “Maybe what we need to concentrate on is explaining to each other why we both deserve a bit of happiness.”

  She rose, shaking off his help, and they turned back. The homeless man had finished the breakfast Soraya had provided and was curled on his side on a bench beneath sheets of The Washington Post.

  As they passed him they could hear him snoring deeply, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. And maybe, she thought, he didn’t.

  She shot Peter a sideways glance. “What would I do without you?”

  His smile cleared, widening as he walked beside her. “You know, I ask myself that all the time.”

  "Gone?” the Director said. “In what way gone?”

  Above his head was engraved the current Mossad motto, excerpted from Proverbs 11:14: Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.

  “She’s vanished off the grid,” Dani Amit, head of Collections, said. “Despite our most diligent efforts, we cannot locate her.”

  “But we must locate her.” The Director shook his shaggy head, his livery lips pursed, a clear sign of his agitation. “Rebeka is the key to the mission. Without her, we’re dead in the water.”

  “I understand that, sir. We all do.”

  “Then—”

  Dani Amit’s pale blue eyes seemed infinitely sad. “We are simply at a loss.”

  “How can that be? She is one of us.”

  “That is precisely the problem. We have trained her too well.”

  “If that were the case, our people, trained as she was trained, could find her. The fact that up till now they haven’t would argue for the fact that she is something more, something better than they are.” The rebuke was as clear as it was sharp.

  “I’m afraid—”

  “I cannot abide that phrase,” the Director said shortly. “Her job at the airline?”

  “Dead end. Her supervisor has had no contact with her since the incident in Damascus six weeks ago. I am convinced he does not know where she is.”

  “What about her phone?”

  “She’s either thrown it away or disabled its GPS.”

  “Friends, relatives.”

  “Have been interviewed. One thing I know for certain is that Rebeka told no one about us.”

  “To break protocol like this—”

  There was no need to finish that sentence. Mossad rules were strictly enforced. Rebeka had violated the prime rule.

  The Director turned, stared broodingly out the window of his satellite office on the top floor of a curving glass-faced structure in Herzliya. On the other side of the city were the Mossad training center and the summer residence of the prime minister. The Director often came here when he grew melancholy and found the Mossad’s ant-colony central HQ in downtown Tel Aviv oppressive and enervating. Here, there was a fountain in the middle of the circular driveway and fragrant flower beds all year round, not to mention the nearby harbor with its fleet of sailboats rocking gently in their slips. There was something reassuring about that forest of masts, even to Amit, as if their presence spoke of a certain permanence in a world where everything could change in the space of a heartbeat.

  The Director loved sailing. Whenever he lost a man, which was, thankfully, not all that often, he went out on his boat, alone with the sea and the wind and the plaintive cry of the gulls. Without turning back, he said rather harshly, “Find her, Dani. Find out why she has disobeyed us. Find out what she knows.”

  “I don’t—”

  “She has betrayed us.” The Director swung back, leaned forward, his bulk making his chair squeal in protest. The full force of his authority was explicit behind each word he spoke. “She is a traitor. We will treat her as such.”

  “Memune, I wonder at the wisdom of rushing to judgment.” Amit had used the Director’s internal title, first among equals.

  The bullet and bombproof windows were coated with a film that reflected light as well as the possibility of long-range surveillance, lending the room a distinctly aqueous quality. The Director’s eyes seemed to glimmer in the office’s low lamplight like a deep-sea fish rising into the beacon of a diver’s headlamp. “It isn’t lost on me that she has been your pet project, but it is time now to admit your

  mistake. Even if I were inclined to give Rebeka the benefit of the doubt, we are out of time. Events threaten to overrun us. We are old friends as well as comrades in arms. Don’t force me to call in the Duvdevan.”

  Invoking the specter of the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite strike unit caused a blade of anxiety to knife through Amit. It was a measure of Rebeka’s extreme importance to Israeli security that the Director would even use the threat of the Duvdevan to induce Amit to do what the Director knew full well he was reluctant to do.

  “Who will you use?” The Director said this conversationally, as if he were asking after Amit’s wife and children.

  “What about her unique skills, her usefulness—”

  “Her betrayal has trumped everything, Amit, even th
ose extraordinary skills. We must assume that what she discovered has sent her to ground. What if her intent is to sell that knowledge to the highest—”

  “Impossible,” Amit flared.

  The Director contemplated him for a moment from beneath halfclosed eyelids. “And I daresay up until today you would have said her disappearing off the grid was impossible.” He waited. “Am I wrong?”

  Amit hung his head. “You’re not.”

  “So.” The Director knit his fingers together. “Who will it be?”

  “Ilan Halevy,” Amit said with a heavy heart.

  “The Babylonian.” The Director nodded, seemingly impressed. Ilan had garnered his operations name by almost single-handedly shutting down the Iraqi Babylon Advanced Weapons Project. He had killed more than a dozen enemy operatives in that pursuit. “Well, now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.”

  TheDirectorlovednothingbetter;it was one of his many admirable traits. His inflexibility was not. However, it was his iron hand on the tiller that for the past five years had guided them successfully through the rough seas of international espionage, clandestine forays into the territories of their enemies, and state-sanctioned executions while keeping their casualties to a minimum. He felt the deaths of his people like body blows, which was why, when they occurred, he needed to take to the sea. Out there, he buried his sorrow and cleared his head.

  “You’ll start him—”

  “Immediately,” Amit said. “He knows Rebeka well, better than most.”

  “Except you.”

  Amit knew what the Director was implying but as yet he was unwilling to engage the notion. “I will brief the Babylonian myself. He will know everything I know.”

  That was a lie, and Amit suspected his old friend knew it, but mercifully the Director remained silent. How could he tell the Babylonian everything he knew about Rebeka? That was a betrayal he was not about to commit, even to curry favor with the Director. He had lied to forestall the possibility of being given a direct order to divulge all he knew to the Babylonian. Such a moral choice might possibly spell the end of him or, at the very least, his effectiveness within Mossad.

  The chair squealed again as the Director returned to his survey of the port city. Who knew what he was thinking? “Then it’s settled.” He said this as if he were speaking to himself. “It’s done.”