to pull it from his throat, gasping in air, and reverse their positions, wrapping the wire around Prowess's neck. He fought and kicked like a madman, but Bourne held on, working the wire tighter and tighter, until the agent's body went slack. His head toppled to one side. Bourne didn't slacken the wire until he'd assured himself there was no longer a pulse. Then he let the man slide to the floor.
He was bent over, hands on thighs, taking deep, slow breaths when Gala walked out of the bathroom amid a halo of lavender-scented mist.
"Jesus Christ," she said. Then she turned and vomited all over her bare pink feet.
Chapter Twenty-Three
ANY WAY you slice it or dice it," Luther LaValle said, "he's a dead man."
Soraya stared bleakly through the one-way glass at Tyrone, who was standing in a cubicle ominously outfitted with a shallow coffin-like tub that had restraints for wrists and ankles, a fire hose above it. In the center of the room a steel table was bolted down to the bare concrete floor, beneath which was a drain to sluice both water and blood away.
LaValle held up the digital camera. "General Kendall found this on your compatriot." He touched a button, and the photos Tyrone had taken scrolled across the camera's screen. "This smoking gun is enough to convict him of treason."
Soraya couldn't help wondering how many shots of the torture chambers Tyrone had managed to take before he was caught.
"Off with his head," Kendall said, baring his teeth.
Soraya could not rid herself of the sick feeling in her stomach. Of course, Tyrone had been in dangerous situations before, but she was directly responsible for putting him in harm's way. If anything happened to him she knew she'd never be able to forgive herself. What was she thinking involving him in such perilous work? The enormity of her miscalculation was all too clear to her now, when it was too late to do anything about it.
"The real pity," LaValle went on, "is that with very little difficulty we can make a case against you, as well."
Soraya was solely focused on Tyrone, whom she had wronged so terribly.
"This was my idea," she said dully. "Let Tyrone go."
"You mean he was only following orders," General Kendall said. "This isn't Nuremberg. Frankly, there's no viable defense the two of you can put up. His conviction and execution-as well as yours-are a fait accompli."
They took her back to the Library, where Willard, seeing her ashen face, fetched her a fresh pot of Ceylon tea. The three of them sat by the window. The fourth chair, conspicuously empty, was an accusation to Soraya. Her grievous mismanagement of this mission was compounded by the knowledge that she had seriously underestimated LaValle. She'd been lulled by his smug, overaggressive nature into thinking he was the sort of man who'd automatically underestimate her. She was dead wrong.
She fought the constriction in her chest, the panic welling up, the sense that she and Tyrone were trapped in an impossible situation. She used the tea ritual to refocus herself. For the first time in her life she added cream and sugar, and drank the tea as if it were medication or a form of penance.
She was trying to get her brain unfrozen from shock, to get it working normally again. In order to help Tyrone, she knew she needed to get herself out of here. If LaValle meant to charge her as he threatened to do with Tyrone, she'd already be in an adjacent cell. The fact that they'd brought her back to the Library allowed a sliver of light into the darkness that had settled around her. She decided for now to allow this scenario to play out on LaValle's and Kendall's terms.
The moment she set her teacup down, LaValle took up his ax. "As I said before, Director, the real pity is your involvement. I'd hate to lose you as an ally-though, I see now, I never really had you as an ally."
This little speech sounded canned, as if each word had been chewed over by LaValle.
"Frankly," he continued, "in retrospect, I can see that you've lied to me from the first. You never had any intention of switching your allegiance to NSA, did you?" He sighed, as if he were a disciplinary dean addressing a bright but chronically wayward student. "That's why I can't believe that you concocted this scheme on your own."
"If I were a betting man," Kendall said, "I'd wager your orders came from