what they were doing. Instead he spent his time more advantageously memorizing their faces. He had a feeling Miss S would be very interested in what these two were up to.
Then the night lit up, he felt an intense heat on his cheek, and flames gushed out of the building.
Fire-or more accurately arson-was no stranger to Tyrone, so he couldn't say he was shocked, merely saddened. He'd lost the use of M&N Bodywork for sure. But then a thought occurred to him, and he whispered something to DJ Tank.
When they'd snuck into the place the first time, the interior had been stocked with all manner of explosives and accelerants. If the chemicals had still been inside, the explosion would have taken out the entire block, him and DJ Tank with it.
Now he asked himself: If the explosives weren't inside, where the fuck were they?
Secretary of Defense E. R. "Bud" Halliday took his meals at no fixed time of the day or night. But unless summoned by the president for a policy skull session or to take the current temperature of the Senate, unless jawboning with the vice president or the Joint Chiefs, he took his meals in his limousine. Save for certain necessary pit stops of various sorts, the limousine, like a shark, was never at rest, but continued to roll through the streets and avenues of D.C. undisturbed.
Matthew Lerner enjoyed certain privileges in the secretary's company, not the least of which was to break bread with Bud, as he was about to do this evening. In the world outside the tinted-glass windows, the hour was early for dinner. But this was the secretary's world; dinner was bang on time.
After a short prayer, they dug into their plates of Texas barbeque-massive beef ribs, a deep, glossy red; baked beans with bits of fiery chile peppers in them; and, in the lone concession to the vegetable kingdom, steak fries. All of this was washed down with bottles of Shiner Blonde, proudly brewed, as Bud would say, in Fort Worth.
Finished in jig time, the secretary wiped his hands and mouth, then grabbed another bottle of Blonde and sat back. "So the DCI hired you to be his personal assassin."
"Looks that way," Lerner said.
The secretary's cheeks were flushed, gleaming with a lovely sheen of beef fat. "Any thoughts about that?"
"I've never backed down from either a job or a dare," Lerner said.
Bud glanced down at the sheet of paper Lerner had handed him as he'd climbed into the limo. He'd already read it, of course; he did it for effect, something at which the secretary was very good.
"It took some doing, but I found out where Bourne is. His face came up on the closed-circuit security cameras at Kennedy International." Bud looked up, sucked a shred of charred beef from between his molars. "This assignment's going to take you to Odessa. That's quite a far piece from CI headquarters."
Lerner knew the secretary meant it was going to take him away from the mission Bud had sent him on in the first place. "Not necessarily," he said. "I do this for the Old Man and he owes me big time. He'll know it and I'll know it. I can leverage that."
"What about Held?"
"I've put someone I can trust on Anne Held." Lerner mopped the last of the thick, spicy sauce with a slice of Wonder Bread. "He's a dogged sonovabitch. You'd have to kill him to get him to let go."
Bourne dreamed again. Only this time, he knew it was no dream. He was reliving a shard of memory, another piece of the puzzle clicking into place: In a filthy Odessa alleyway, Soraya is kneeling over him. He hears the bitter regret in her voice. "That bastard Tariq ibn Said had me fooled from the outset," she says. "He was Hamid ibn Ashef's son, Nadir al-Jamuh. He gave me the information that led us into this trap. Jason, I fucked up."
Bourne sits up. Hamid ibn Ashef. He had to find his target, shoot him dead. Orders from Conklin. "Do you know where Hamid ibn Ashef is now?"
"Yes, and this time the intel's straight," Soraya says. "He's at Otrada Beach."
Oleksandr stirred, nudging Bourne's thigh with his blunt black muzzle. Bourne, blinking the memory from in front of his eyes, struggled to concentrate on the present. He must have fallen asleep, even though he'd meant to stay vigilant. Oleksandr had been vigilant for him.
Propped up on the planks in the tiny underground cell, he saw the