of my first visit here, to Odessa. But at the time, I didn't even know it was Odessa, let alone what I was doing there."
"But how could that memory be part of this conspiracy you're constructing?"
"I don't know," Bourne conceded.
"It can't be part of it." Soraya realized that she was pleading a case against him.
Bourne waved a hand. "Let's leave that aside for the moment. When I was bringing Martin home, he told me that I needed to come here-no matter what-to find a man named Lemontov who, he said, was Dujja's banker. His reasoning was that if I got Lemontov, Dujja's money flow would dry up."
Soraya nodded. "Acute thinking."
"It would have been if Lemontov existed. He doesn't." Bourne's expression was perfectly unreadable. "Not only that, but Fadi knew about Lemontov. He knew Lemontov was fiction!"
"So?"
Bourne pushed off the wall, faced her squarely. "So by what possible means could Fadi know about Lemontov?"
"You forget that Lindros was interrogated by Dujja. Maybe they fed him disinformation."
"That would presuppose they knew he was going to be rescued."
Soraya considered for a moment. "This Lemontov thing interests me. Lindros told me about him as well. He's the reason I'm here. But why? Why did he send us both here?"
"To chase a ghost," Bourne said. "Chasing Lemontov was just a ruse. Fadi was waiting for us. He knew we were coming. He was prepared to kill me-in fact, if I'm any judge, he needed to. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. He'd been waiting a long time to catch up to me."
Soraya looked shaken.
"One other thing," Bourne pressed on. "On the plane ride home, Martin said that his interrogators kept asking about a mission targeting Hamid ibn Ashef. A mission of mine. He kept asking if I'd remembered it."
"Jason, why would Lindros want to know about a mission dreamed up by Alex Conklin?"
"You know why," Bourne said. "Fadi and Martin are somehow connected."
"What?"
"As is Dr. Sunderland." There was a relentless logic to his theory. "Sunderland's treatment did something to me, something that caused me to make mistakes at crucial moments."
"How is that possible?"
"A technique in brainwashing is to use a color, a sound, a key word or phrase to trigger a certain response in the subject at a later date."
Nothing to burn in the hole. The words had bounced around in Bourne's head until he thought he'd go mad.
Bourne repeated the phrase to Soraya. "Fadi used it. That phrase is what set off the headache. Fadi had the trigger phrase Sunderland set up in my brain."
"I remember the look on your face when he said it," Soraya said. "But do you also remember that he said he'd spent time in Odessa?"
"The Odessa mission to kill Hamid ibn Ashef is the key, Soraya. Everything points back to it." His skin was gray; he seemed abruptly weary. "The conspiracy is in place. But what's its ultimate purpose?"
"Just as impossible to fathom is how they coerced Lindros into helping them."
"They didn't. I know Martin better than anyone. He couldn't be coerced to turn traitor."
She spread her hands. "What other explanation is there?"
"What if the man I saved from Dujja, the man I brought back to CI, the man I vouched for, isn't Martin Lindros?"
"Okay, stop right there." Her hands came up, palms outward. "You've just crossed the line from paranoia into full-blown psychosis."
He ignored her outburst. "What if the man I brought back, the man who is right now running Typhon, is an impostor?"
"Jason, that's impossible. He looks like Lindros, talks like Lindros. For God's sake, he passed the retinal scanner test."
"The retinal scanner can be fooled," Bourne pointed out. "It's extremely rare and difficult to do-it requires a retinal or a full eye implant. But then if this impostor went to the trouble of having his face remade, the retinal implant would have been a piece of cake."
Soraya shook her head. "Do you have any idea of the ramifications of what you're saying? An impostor in the center of CI, controlling more than a thousand agents worldwide. I say again it's impossible, utterly insane."
"That's precisely why it's worked. You, me, everyone in Typhon and CI-all of us are being manipulated, misdirected. That was the plan all along. While we trot all around the globe, Fadi has been free to smuggle his people into the United States, to ship the nuclear device-in pieces, no doubt-to the location where they mean to detonate it."
"What you're saying is monstrous." Soraya was near shock. "No