second chances. Here is the gondola. Climb in, tovarich. When we're out over the green zone, I will kill you."
At precisely 5:33 PM, the DCI was up in the Library, which was where Lerner found him. The Library was a large, roughly square room with double-height ceilings. It did not, however, contain any books. Not one volume. Every bit of data, history, commentary, strategy, tactic-in sum, the collected wisdom of CI directors and officers past and present-was digitized, housed on the enormous linked hard drives of a special computer server. Sixteen terminals were arrayed around the periphery of the room.
The Old Man had accessed the files on Abu Sarif Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib, the mission instituted by Alex Conklin, the only one in the DCI's knowledge that Bourne had failed to execute. Hamid was owner of a multinational conglomerate refining oil, manufacturing chemicals, iron, copper, silver, steel, and the like. The company, Integrated Vertical Technologies, was based in London, where the Saudi had emigrated when he'd married for the second time, an upper-class Brit named Holly Cargill, who had borne him two sons and a daughter.
CI-specifically Conklin-had targeted Hamid ibn Ashef. In due course, Conklin had sent Bourne to terminate him. Bourne had run him down in Odessa, but there had been complications. Bourne had shot the Saudi but failed to kill him. With the vast network of operatives at Hamid ibn Ashef's disposal, he'd gone to ground; Bourne had barely made it out of Odessa alive.
Lerner cleared his throat. The Old Man turned around.
"Ah, Matthew, have a seat."
Lerner dragged over a chair, sat. "Dredging up old wounds, sir?"
"The Hamid ibn Ashef affair? I was trying to find out what happened to the family. Is the old man alive or dead? If he's alive, where is he? Soon after the Odessa hit cracked open, his younger son, Karim al-Jamil, took over the company. Some time after that, the elder son, Abu Ghazi Nadir al-Jamuh, vanished, possibly to take care of Hamid ibn Ashef. That would be in keeping with Saudi tribal tradition."
"What about the daughter?" Lerner asked. "Sarah ibn Ashef. She's the youngest of the siblings. As secular as her mother, so far as we know. For obvious reasons, she's never been on our radar."
Lerner inched forward. "Is there a reason you're looking at the family now?"
"It's a loose end that sticks in my craw. It's Bourne's lone failure, and in light of recent events failure is much on my mind these days." He sat for a moment, his eyes in the middle distance, ruminating. "I told Lindros to sever all ties with Bourne."
"That was a wise decision, sir."
"Was it?" The DCI regarded him darkly. "I think I made a mistake. One I want you to rectify. Martin is working night and day mobilizing Typhon in tracking down Fadi. You have a different mission. I want you to find Bourne and terminate him."
"Sir?"
"Don't play coy with me," the DCI said sharply. "I've watched you rise up the CI ladder. I know how successful you were in the field. You've done wet work. Even more important, you can get intel out of a stone."
Lerner said nothing, which was, in its way, an acknowledgment. His silence didn't mean his mind wasn't working a mile a minute. So this is the real reason he promoted me, he thought. The Old Man doesn't care about reorganizing CI. He wants my particular expertise. He wants an outsider to do the one piece of wet work he can't entrust to one of his own.
"Let's continue then." The Old Man held up a forefinger. "I've had a bellyful of this insolent sonovabitch. He's had his own agenda from the moment he first came to us. Sometimes I think we work for him. Witness his taking Cevik out of the cells. He had his reasons, you can bet on it, but he'll never willingly tell us what they were. Just like we know nothing of what happened in Odessa."
Lerner was taken aback. He was wondering whether he'd underestimated the Old Man.
"You can't mean that Bourne was never fully debriefed."
The DCI looked aggrieved. "Of course he was debriefed, along with everyone involved. But he claimed he could remember nothing-not a fucking thing. Martin believed him, but I never did."
"Give me the word. I can get the truth out of him, sir."
"Don't fool yourself, Lerner. Bourne will kill himself before he'll give up intel."
"One thing I learned in the field, anyone can be broken."