Nevertheless, the Freer was the preeminent museum of its kind in the country, and Soraya loved it not only for the depth of art it housed but also for the elegant lines of the palazzo itself. She especially loved the contained open space at its entrance, and the fact that even, as now, when the Mall was agitated with hordes of tourists heading to and from the Smithsonian Metro rail stop on 12th Street, the Freer itself was an oasis of calm and tranquility. When things boiled over in the office during the day, it was to the Freer she came to decompress. Ten minutes with Sung dynasty jades and lacquers acted like a soothing balm to her soul.
Approaching the north side of the Mall, she searched past the crowds outside the entrance to the Freer and thought she saw-among the sturdy men with their hard, clipped Midwestern accents, the scampering children and their laughing mothers, the vacant-eyed teenagers plugged into their iPods-Veronica Hart's long, elegant figure walking past the entrance, then doubling back.
She stepped off the curb, but the blare of a horn from an oncoming car startled her back onto the sidewalk. It was at that moment that her cell phone buzzed.
"What exactly do you think you're doing?" Bourne said in her ear.
"Jason?"
"Why are you coming to this meet?"
Foolishly, she looked around; she'd never be able to spot him, and she knew it.
"Hart invited me. I need to talk to you. The DCI and I both do."
"About what?"
Soraya took a deep breath. "Typhon's listening posts have picked up a series of disturbing communications pointing to an imminent terrorist attack on an East Coast city. The trouble is, that's all we have. Worse, the communications are between two cadres of a group about which we have no intel whatsoever. It was my idea to recruit you to find them and stop the attack."
"Not much to go on," Bourne said. "Doesn't matter. The group's name is the Black Legion."
"In grad school I studied the link between a branch of Muslim extremism and the Third Reich. But this can't be the same Black Legion. They were either killed or disbanded when Nazi Germany fell."
"It can and it is," Bourne said. "I don't know how it managed to survive, but it did. Three of their members tried to kidnap Professor Specter this morning. I saw their device tattooed on the gunman's arm."
"The three horses' heads joined by the death's head?"
"Yes." Bourne described the incident in detail. "Check the body at the morgue."
"I'll do that," Soraya said. "But how could the Black Legion remain so far underground all this time without being detected?"
"They have a powerful international front," Bourne said. "The Eastern Brotherhood."
"That sounds far-fetched," Soraya said. "The Eastern Brotherhood is in the forefront of Islamic-Western relations."
"Nevertheless, my source is unimpeachable."
"God in heaven, what've you been doing while you've been away from CI?"
"I was never in CI," Bourne said brusquely, "and here's just one reason why. You say you want to talk with me but I doubt you need half a dozen agents to do that."
Soraya froze. "Agents?" She was on the Mall itself now, and she had to restrain herself from looking around again. "There are no CI agents here."
"How d'you know that?"
"Hart would've told me-"
"Why should she tell you anything? We go way back, you and I."
"That's true enough." She kept walking. "But something happened earlier today that makes me believe the agents you've spotted are NSA." She described the way she and Hart had been shadowed from CI HQ to the restaurant. She told him about Secretary Halliday and Luther LaValle, both of whom were gunning to make CI a part of the Pentagon clandestine service.
"That might make sense," Bourne said, "if there were only two of them. But six? No, there's another agenda, one neither of us knows about."
"Such as?"
"The agents are vectored perfectly, triangulated on the entrance to the Freer," Bourne said. "This means that they must have had foreknowledge of the meet. It also means the six weren't sent to shadow Veronica Hart. If they aren't here for her, they must have been sent for me. This is Hart's doing."
Soraya felt a chill crawl down her spine. What if the DCI was lying to her? What if she meant all along to lead Bourne into a trap? It would make sense for one of her first official acts as DCI to be the capture of Jason Bourne. It certainly would put her