The Bourne Dominion by Robert & Lustbader Ludlum

premises. There was a side entrance used by the staff and, on occasion, the flock of scholars and fellows who were, at any given time, in residence. He drove around the block, parked, and approached the side door, which was discreetly tucked away behind a line of sheared boxwood.
    Thick and solid, the door was made of stout oak, studded with OldWorld bronze roundhead nails. It reminded Peter of the door to a medieval castle keep. He drew a pick out of his inside pocket. He’d carried a couple of these, which he’d filed himself, ever since he got locked out of his apartment five years ago.
    Within thirty seconds he was inside, moving down a dimly lit corridor that smelled of filtered air and old books. The odor was both pleasant and familiar, bringing back days in his youth when he’d haunted used-book stores for hours at a time, scanning titles, reading chapters or even, sometimes, entire sections. Sometimes, it was enough just feeling the heft of a volume in his hands, imagining his older self, amid a library he himself had amassed.
    He kept an eye out for the residents or security, but saw no one. He moved through rooms filled with books in glass-fronted cases crisscrossed by security wires, down more corridors, wood-paneled and hushed.
    Gradually, he became aware of the murmur of voices and turned in that direction. As he moved closer, he recognized one of the voices: Hendricks. The other speaker was also male, his voice pitched slightly higher. As he approached closer still, it struck him as being naggingly familiar. The pitch, the cadence, the long-winded sentences without pauses for punctuation. And then, when he had crossed the room, the voices were so clear he was certain they came from the open doorway to the next room. A particular turn of phrase caused him to freeze.
    The man Hendricks was talking with was M. Errol Danziger, the vampiric current head of CI. He had sacked Soraya, one of the reasons Peter had quit—he’d seen her demise at CI coming. And now Danziger was in the process of dismantling the proud organization the Old Man had built from the scraps left to him by those who had remodeled the wartime OSS.
    Peter stole closer to the open doorway.
If Hendricks is cooking up a deal with Danziger
, he thought,
it’s no wonder he doesn’t want us to know about it.
    He could hear them clearly now.
    “—are you?” Hendricks’s voice.
    “I couldn’t say,” Danziger replied.
    “You mean you won’t.”
    A deep sigh, probably from the director of CI.
    “I don’t understand the need for this high-school-level cloak and dagger. Why meet here? My office—”
    “We weren’t ever going to meet in your office,” Hendricks said, “for precisely the same reason you weren’t invited to the meeting in the Oval Office.”
    This was followed by what Peter could only characterize as a deathly silence.
    “What is it you want from me, Mr. Secretary?” Danziger’s voice was so drained of emotion it might be called robotic.
    “Cooperation,” Hendricks said. “It’s what we all want, and by
we
I mean the president. In the matter of Samaritan, I am his voice. Is that understood?”
    “Completely,” Danziger said. But even at his close remove, Peter could hear the venom in that one word.
    “Good,” Hendricks said. Whether he had noted the bitterness in the director’s voice or he’d chosen to ignore it was impossible for Peter to say. “Because I won’t be saying any of this twice.” There was a soft rustling. “Samaritan is on the strictest need-to-know basis. That means even the people you choose won’t know about it until they arrive at Indigo Ridge. Samaritan is the president’s number one priority, which means that from this moment forward it’s our number one priority. Here are your orders. Have your people rendezvous with the others at Indigo Ridge forty-eight hours from now.”
    “Forty-eight hours?” Danziger echoed. “How do you expect—I mean, for God’s sake, look at this list.