Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative by Eric Van Lustbader

he said, “My business is to carry out to the best of my ability whatever orders you give me.”
    “Not whatever orders the president has given you?”
    “I understand that you don’t trust me. Frankly, in your place I’d feel the same.”
    “Just why the hell did the president press you onto us?”
    “In the past, there has been too much leeway taken inside blackops organizations. He’s asked me to monitor—”
    “Spy on us.”
    “If I’m to be honest, I don’t think he’s being adversarial.”
    “Then what?”
    “He’s cautious, I guess would be the best term for it.”
    Soraya smirked. “And you agree with him, I imagine.”
    “I guess I did before I got here. But now, seeing what Treadstone does...” He left a small silence to punctuate that statement.
    “I’m all ears.”
    “And I’m doing my best to earn your trust.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “The deeper I get into the Nicodemo assignment, the more of a tangle it becomes. I finally came to the conclusion that this tangle, which proliferated at every turn of whatever form of search I performed, was deliberate.”
    “Nothing would arouse as much suspicion as your finding Nicodemo easily.”
    “Exactly! Of course, this was the first thought that came to me as I made my way through the first layers. But, as you’ll see in the file, this is more than a hacker’s tangle. It’s a goddamned Gordian knot. The more I unraveled one strand, the tighter the knot became.”
    “Isn’t that simply superior security?”
    “No,” Richards said. “It’s a double-blind.”
    “Meaning?”
    “This Gordian knot is meant to seem like superior security, the better to suck in expert hackers who, unlike me, are conspiracy theorists at heart. But, in fact, it’s nothing but bullshit. The Gordian knot is the product of some evil genius—sound and fury signifying nothing.”
    “So you’re saying—what? —Nicodemo doesn’t exist?”
    “Not as you and I were trained to think of him—and maybe not at all.”
    “Okay.” Soraya spread her hands. “Say you’re right.”
    “I am right.”
    “Then who the hell owns Core Energy?”
    Richards blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
    “I have it on good authority that Nicodemo is connected with Core Energy.”
    “Where did you hear that? Tom Brick is CEO of Core Energy.”
    Soraya had learned about Core Energy and Nicodemo from Jason Bourne, with whom, by long-standing arrangement, she was in periodic phone contact, but she wasn’t about to tell Richards that. “According to this source, Core Energy has a shitload of masked subsidiaries that are buying up energy mines and producers worldwide, making deals Tom Brick or any other legit CEO couldn’t touch with a fifty-foot pole. If, as you claim, Nicodemo doesn’t exist, then who the hell is making those corrupt deals?”
    “I...I don’t know.”
    “Neither do I, though I’ve tried my damnedest to find out.” She closed the file and skimmed it back across the desk to him. “Back to the salt pits, Richards. You want to impress me, dig me out some useful intel.”

    A hot spray of blood coated Bourne’s face as the gunshot reverberated through his mind.
    Helpless, he stared up into the gunman’s stunned face. An instant later, the gunman’s eyes turned glassy, and he keeled over onto his side.
    A second shadow passed across Bourne’s vision. He turned his head, saw another figure, gun in hand. Sunlight turned the figure inky, no more than a silhouette. Then the sun slipped behind a racing cloud bank and, as the figure knelt beside him, Bourne recognized the face.
    “Rebeka,” he said.
    She smiled. “Welcome back to the living, Bourne.”
    Trying to move, he crackled like an iceberg cleaving. Reversing her Glock, she used the butt to chip off the layer of ice that had turned his coat and trousers to armor.
    “We’d better peel this stuff off you before it adheres to your skin permanently.” As she worked, she said: “It’s good to see you. I never