Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(19)
Morgana liked MacQuerrie as a boss—he pretty much left her to do her own thing in the manner she felt best. That was a major perk of being off-site and so deeply blacked out from the rest of the government’s acronymic agencies, who spent much of their time butting heads and snooping into each other’s territory to make sure they weren’t getting scooped. What a briar patch.
At that moment, she received a three-word text. She bit her lower lip, nodded to herself. She pulled out and raced down the street, heedless of what amber lights might come.
And then there were days like today when she felt run over, betrayed, marginalized, and totally out of the loop. After informing her of the über-secretive Karpov cyber initiative, after putting her in charge of stopping it, after informing her that Jason Bourne had taken it over from his old pal, MacQuerrie had gone out and ordered Bourne terminated.
Bourne’s death is the last thing I want, she thought. The very last thing this shitstorm calls for.
She shook her head as she overtook a truck, accelerated into the left-hand lane. She had a heavy foot. In the long hours since Mac had given her her new brief, she and her team had parsed the vertical code he had sent her without even an iota of success. All they could tell her—and this she confirmed herself—was that the code delivered to them was a piece of the whole; a very small piece, indeed. Not nearly big enough to be the Rosetta stone to unlocking the full computer code.
As a consequence, she’d had a couple of her team members scour the web, monitoring chatter from the Russian Federation and their known affiliates, hackers lurking in their dark web dens, known purveyors of cyber weapons. They had turned up zero. She was beginning to consider the possibility that they would fail in their mission. That they wouldn’t be able to decipher the code at all, and therefore wouldn’t be able to stop it before it was deployed.
Two possibilities has occurred to her. One, the code was not yet complete. Two, it was complete but was being held in abeyance for some unknown reason. Bourne, had he been brought in alive, would have provided the answer to that vital question as well as the key to shutting this unthinkable weapon down for good.
Sure, Mac had told her that he was initiating new protocols to keep the nuclear codes safer than they already were. But who was to say those new protocols would be enough to stave off Karpov’s cyber weapon? None of them could take that chance, least of all Mac. She had tried to make that crystal clear to him, but for some reason she had failed—or, more likely, he had failed to take her arguments seriously enough. People like Mac, career officers in the intelligence community, had blinders. They heard what they wanted to hear, they acted as they wanted to act, sure in the conviction that they knew best. This was particularly true when it came to ignoring intel on the ground that didn’t fit their perception of the situation. She’d seen it happen again and again, aghast that no one learned from past mistakes. The old boys’ club rules were rigidly—even obsessively—enforced to ensure hegemony, even when they ran counter to the rapidly changing situation in the field. They had invested themselves in a quasi-religious belief in the rightness of their iron-bound laws.
“Call Mac,” she said to her Bluetooth-connected mobile. But, as before, the call went straight to voice mail. This time she didn’t bother leaving a message. What was the point?
She raced along Route 175, headed toward NSA headquarters. She swerved around the vehicles in front of her, not caring how far over the speed limit she was pushing the car.
She knew she was spoiling for a fight. Part of her understood why Mac hadn’t read her in to what he was doing: Mac was just doing his thing the way he always did his thing. But the fact was, the moment he had revealed that Bourne had taken up Karpov’s mantle, he had involved her.
The bulk of the vast NSA complex loomed up before her, forcing her to finally slow down. But instead of heading to the perimeter, she veered off to the left, heading down narrower streets.
OTTO’S FINE EUROPEAN TAILORING, the stenciled lettering on the front window proclaimed. The building had once been painted white, but the pockmarked stucco fa?ade was in dire need of multiple repairs. At cursory glance it looked abandoned, which was more or less the point.
Pushing through the front door, she passed into the tailor shop, where Otto, a balding man in his sixties, sat behind a waist-high counter, chalking up a suit jacket on a dummy. His own suit jacket was on a hanger hooked over the top of a full-length mirror. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow, revealing powerful forearms. His vest held his tie close to his chest. The air smelled of cloth sizing and sour pickles. A half-eaten pastrami on rye lay on its waxed paper at his right elbow. No one else was in the shop.
Otto glanced at her through dust-speckled glasses and nodded as she went through the swinging door in the counter and down a narrow, ill-lighted hallway, through to a room at the rear of the building.
A figure sat in a chair behind a desk equipped with a laptop and several other pieces of equipment. A wide pool of light from the desk lamp fell across the face and hands of the shadowy figure.
“Hello, Morgana.” A well-modulated female voice with perhaps just a touch of an indeterminate foreign accent. “Thank you for coming.”
“I did debate with myself, Soraya.”
“Understandable. You live a remarkably ordered life.” Her beautiful profile was typical of Egyptian women but at the same time utterly unique.
There was no place for Morgana to sit, so she remained standing.