Page 4 of The Bourne Betrayal (Jason Bourne 5)

  Abruptly he shook himself. Enough of this morbid self-pity; he had work to do. Placing the laptop on the corner of the real Dr. Sunderland’s desk, he brought up enlargements of the digital photos he’d made of this room. As before, he was meticulous in his scrutiny, assuring himself that every single detail of the consult room was as he had found it. It was essential that no trace of his presence remain after he’d left.

  His quad-band GSM cell phone buzzed, and he put it to his ear.

  “It’s done,” Veintrop said in Romanian. He could have used Arabic, his employer’s native language, but it had been mutually decided that Romanian would be less obtrusive.

  “To your satisfaction?” It was a different voice, somewhat deeper and coarser than the compelling voice of the man who’d hired him, belonging to someone who was used to exhorting rabid followers.

  “Most certainly. I have honed and perfected the procedure on the test subjects you provided for me. Everything contracted for is in place.”

  “The proof of it will occur shortly.” The dominant note of impatience was soured by a faint undertone of anxiety.

  “Have faith, my friend,” Veintrop said, and broke the connection.

  Returning to his work, he packed away his laptop, digital camera, and Firewire connector, then slipped on his tweed overcoat and felt fedora. Grasping his briefcase in one hand, he took one final look around with exacting finality. There was no place for error in the highly specialized work he did.

  Satisfied, he flipped the light switch and, in utter darkness, slipped out of the office. In the hallway he glanced at his watch: 4:46 PM. Three minutes over, still well within the time-frame tolerance allotted to him by his employer. It was Tuesday, February 3, as Bourne had said. On Tuesday, Dr. Sunderland had no office hours.

  Two

  CI HEADQUARTERS, located on 23rd Street NW, was identified on maps of the city as belonging to the Department of Agriculture. To reinforce the illusion, it was surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns, dotted here and there with ornamental shade trees, divided by snaking gravel paths. The building itself was as nondescript as was possible in a city devoted to the grandeur of monumental Federal architecture. It was bounded to the north by huge structures that housed the State Department and the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, and on the east by the National Academy of Sciences. The DCI’s office had a sobering view of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as well as a slice of the shining, white Lincoln Memorial.

  Anne Held hadn’t been exaggerating. Bourne had to go through no less than three separate security checkpoints before he gained admittance to the inner lobby. They took place in the bomb- and fireproof public lobby, which was, in effect, a bunker. Hidden behind decorative marble slabs and columns were half-meter-thick meta-concrete blast walls, reinforced with a mesh of steel rods and Kevlar webbing. There was no glass to shatter, and the lighting and electrical circuits were heavily shielded. The first checkpoint required him to repeat a code phrase that changed three times a day; at the second he had to submit to a fingerprint scanner. At the third, he put his right eye to the lens of a sinister-looking matte-black machine, which took a photo of his retina and digitally compared it with the photo already on file. This added layer of high-tech security was crucial since it was now possible to fake fingerprints with silicone patches affixed to the pads of the fingers. Bourne ought to know: He’d done it several times.

  There was another security check just before the elevator bank, and still another—a jury-rigged affair as per Code Mesa regs—just outside the DCI’s suite of offices on the fifth floor.

  Once through the thick, steel-plated, rosewood-clad door he saw Anne Held. Uncharacteristically, she was accompanied by a whey-faced man with muscles rippling beneath his suit jacket.

  She gave him a small, tight smile. “I saw the DCI a few moments ago. He looks like he’s aged ten years.”

  “I’m not here for him,” Bourne said. “Martin Lindros is the only man in CI I care about and trust. Where is he?”

  “He’s been in the field for the last three weeks, doing God alone knows what.” Anne was dressed in her usual impeccable fashion in a charcoal-gray Armani suit, a fire-red silk blouse, and Manolo Blahniks with three-inch heels. “But I’ll wager high money that whatever signals the DCI has received today are what’s caused the extraordinary flap around here.”

  The whey-faced man escorted them wordlessly down one corridor after another—a deliberately bewildering labyrinth through which visitors were led via a different route every time—until they arrived at the door to the DCI’s sanctum sanctorum. There his escort stood aside, but did not leave. Another marker of Code Mesa, Bourne thought as he smiled thinly up at the tiny eye of the security camera.

  A moment later, he heard the electronic lock clicking open remotely.

  The DCI stood at the far end of an office as large as a football field. He held a file in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other, defying the building’s federally mandated ban. When did he start smoking again? Bourne wondered. Standing beside him was another man—tall, beefy, with a long scowling face, light brush-cut hair, and a dangerous stillness about him.

  “Ah, you’ve come at last.” The Old Man strode toward Bourne, the heels of his handmade shoes clicking across the polished wood floor. His shoulders were up around his ears, hunched as if against heavy weather. As he approached, the floodlights from outside illuminated him, the moving images of his past exploits written like soft white explosions across his face.

  He looked old and tired, his cheeks fissured like a mountainside, his eyes sunken into their sockets, the flesh beneath them puddled and yellow, a candle burned too low. He jammed the cigarette between his liver-colored lips, underscoring the fact that he would not offer to shake hands.

  The other man followed, clearly and deliberately at his own pace.

  “Bourne, this is Matthew Lerner, my new deputy director. Lerner, Bourne.”

  The two men shook hands briefly.

  “I thought Martin was DDCI,” Bourne said to Lerner, puzzled.

  “It’s complicated. We—”

  “Lerner will brief you following this interview,” the Old Man interrupted.

  “If there is to be a briefing after this.” Bourne frowned, abruptly uneasy. “What about Martin?”

  DCI hesitated. The old antipathy was still there—it would never disappear. Bourne knew that and accepted it as gospel. Clearly the current situation was dire enough for the Old Man to do something he’d sworn never to do: ask for Jason Bourne’s help. On the other hand, the DCI was the ultimate pragmatist. He’d have to be to keep the director’s job for so long. He had become immune to the slings and arrows of difficult and, often, morally ambiguous compromise. This was, simply, the world in which he existed. He needed Bourne now, and he was furious about it.

  “Martin Lindros has been missing for almost seven days.” All at once the DCI seemed smaller, as if his suit were about to fall off him.

  Bourne stood stock-still. No wonder he hadn’t heard from Martin. “What the hell happened?”

  The Old Man lit another cigarette from the glowing end of the first, grinding out the butt in a cut-crystal ashtray. His hand shook slightly. “Martin was on a mission to Ethiopia.”

  “What was he doing in the field?” Bourne asked.

  “I asked the same question,” Lerner said. “But this was his baby.”

  “Martin’s people have gotten a sudden increase in chatter on particular terrorist frequencies.” The DCI pulled smoke deep into his lungs, let it out in a soft hiss. “His analysts are expert at differentiating the real stuff from the disinformation that has counterterrorist divisions at other agencies chasing their tails and crying wolf.”

  His eyes locked with Bourne’s. “He’s provided us with credible evidence that the chatter is real, that an attack against one of three major cities in the United States—D.C., New York, L.A.—is imminent. Worse still, this attack involves a nuclear bomb.”

  The DCI

took a package off a nearby sideboard and handed it to Bourne.

  Bourne opened it. Inside was a small, oblong metallic object.

  “Know what that is?” Lerner spoke as if issuing a challenge.

  “It’s a triggered spark gap. It’s used in industry to switch on tremendously powerful engines.” Bourne looked up. “It’s also used to trigger nuclear weapons.”

  “That’s right. Especially this one.” The DCI’s face was grim as he handed Bourne a file marked DEO—Director’s Eyes Only. It contained a highly detailed spec sheet on this particular device. “Usually triggered spark gaps use gases—air, argon, oxygen, SF6, or a combination of these—to carry the current. This one uses a solid material.”

  “It’s designed to be used once and once only.”

  “Correct. That rules out an industrial application.”

  Bourne rolled the TSG between his fingers. “The only possible use, then, would be in a nuclear device.”

  “A nuclear device in the hands of terrorists,” Lerner said with a dark look.

  The DCI took the TSG from Bourne, tapped it with a gnarled forefinger. “Martin was following the trail of an illicit shipment of these TSGs, which led to the mountains of northwestern Ethiopia where he believed they were being transshipped by a terrorist cadre.”

  “Destination?”

  “Unknown,” the DCI said.

  Bourne was deeply disturbed, but he chose to keep the feeling to himself. “All right. Let’s hear the details.”

  “At 17:32 local time, six days ago, Martin and the five-man team of Skorpion One choppered onto the upper reaches of the northern slope of Ras Dejen.” Lerner passed over a sheet of onionskin. “Here are the exact coordinates.”

  The DCI said, “Ras Dejen is the highest peak in the Simien Range. You’ve been there. Better yet, you speak the language of the local tribespeople.”

  Lerner continued. “At 18:04 local time, we lost radio contact with Skorpion One. At 10:06 AM Eastern Standard Time, I ordered Skorpion Two to those coordinates.” He took the sheet of onionskin back from Bourne. “At 10:46 EST today, we got a signal from Ken Jeffries, the commander of Skorpion Two. The unit found the burned-out wreckage of the Chinook on a small plateau at the correct coordinates.”

  “That was the last communication we had from Skorpion Two,” the DCI said. “Since then, nothing from Lindros or anyone else in the party.”

  “Skorpion Three is stationed in Djibouti and ready to go,” Lerner said, neatly sidestepping the Old Man’s look of disgust.

  But Bourne, ignoring Lerner, was turning over possibilities in his mind, which helped him put aside his anxiety regarding his friend’s fate. “One of two things has happened,” he said firmly. “Either Martin is dead or he’s been captured and is undergoing articulated interrogation. Clearly, a team is not the way.”

  “The Skorpion units are made up of some of our best and brightest field agents—battle-hardened in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq,” Lerner pointed out. “You’ll need their firepower, believe me.”

  “The firepower of two Skorpion units couldn’t handle the situation on Ras Dejen. I go in alone, or not at all.”

  His point was clear, but the new DDCI wasn’t buying it. “Where you see ‘flexibility,’ Bourne, the organization sees irresponsibility, unacceptable danger to those around you.”

  “Listen, you called me in here. You’re asking a favor of me.”

  “Fine, forget Skorpion Three,” the Old Man said. “I know you work alone.”

  Lerner closed the file. “In return, you’ll get all the intel, all the transportation and support you need.”

  The DCI took a step toward Bourne. “I know you won’t pass up the chance to go after your friend.”

  “In that you’re right.” Bourne walked calmly to the door. “Do whatever the hell you want with the people you command. For myself, I’m going after Martin without your help.”

  “Wait.” The Old Man’s voice rang out in the huge office. There was a note to it like a whistle on a train passing through a dark and deserted landscape. Sadness and cynicism venomously mixed. “Wait, you bastard.”

  Bourne took his time turning around.

  The DCI glared at him with a bitter enmity. “How Martin gets along with you is a goddamn mystery.” Hands clenched behind his back, he strode in full military fashion to the window, stood staring out at the immaculate lawn and, beyond, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He turned back and fixed Bourne in his implacable gaze. “Your arrogance disgusts me.”

  Bourne met his gaze mutely.

  “All right, no leash,” the DCI snapped. He was shaking with barely suppressed rage. “Lerner will see that you have everything you need. But I’m telling you, you’d damn well better bring Martin Lindros home.”

  Three

  LERNER LED BOURNE out of the DCI’s suite, down the hall, into his own office. Lerner sat down behind his desk. When he realized that Bourne had chosen to stand, he leaned back.

  “What I’m about to tell you cannot under any circumstances leave this room. The Old Man has named Martin director of a black-ops agency code-named Typhon, dealing exclusively with countering Muslim extremist terrorist groups.”

  Bourne recalled that Typhon was a name out of Greek mythology: the fearsome hundred-headed father of the deadly Hydra. “We already have a Counterterrorist Center.”

  “CTC knows nothing about Typhon,” Lerner said. “In fact, even inside CI, knowledge of it is on a strict need-to-know basis.”

  “So Typhon is a double-blind black op.”

  Lerner nodded. “I know what you’re thinking: that we haven’t had anything like this since Treadstone. But there are compelling reasons. Aspects of Typhon are—shall we say—extremely controversial, so far as powerful reactionary elements within the administration and Congress are concerned.”

  He pursed his lips. “I’ll cut to the chase. Lindros has constructed Typhon from the ground up. It’s not a division, it’s an agency unto itself. Lindros insisted that he be free of administrative red tape. Also, it’s by necessity worldwide—he’s already staffed up in London, Paris, Istanbul, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and three locations in the Horn of Africa. And it’s Martin’s intention to infiltrate terrorist cells in order to destroy the networks from the inside out.”

  “Infiltration,” Bourne said. So that’s what Martin had meant when he’d told Bourne that save for the director, he was completely alone inside CI. “That’s the holy grail of counterterrorism, but so far no one’s been able to even come close.”

  “Because they have few Muslims and even fewer Arabists working for them. In all of the FBI, only thirty-three out of twelve thousand have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of those works in the sections of the bureau that investigate terrorism within our borders. With good reason. Leading members of the administration are still reluctant to use Muslims and Western Arabists—they’re simply not trusted.”

  “Stupid and shortsighted,” Bourne said.

  “But these people exist, and Lindros has been quietly recruiting them.” Lerner stood up. “So much for orientation. Your next stop, I believe, will be Typhon ops itself.”

  Because it was a double-blind counterterrorist agency, Typhon was down in the depths. The CI building sub-basement had been recast and remodeled by a construction firm whose every worker had been extensively vetted even before they had been made to sign a confidentiality agreement that would assure them a twenty-year term in a federal maximum-security facility if they were foolish or greedy enough to break their silence. The supplies that had been filling up the sub-basement had been exiled to an annex.

  On his way out of the DCI’s office, Bourne briefly stopped by Anne Held’s domain. Armed with the names of the two case officers who had eavesdropped on the conversation that had sent Martin Lindros halfway around the world on the trail of transshipped TSGs, he took the private elevator that shuttled between the DCI’s floor and the sub-basement.

  As the elevator sighed to a

stop, an LCD panel on the left-hand door activated, an electronic eye scanning the shiny black octagon Anne had affixed to the lapel of his jacket. It was encoded with a number invisible save to the scanner. Only then did the steel doors slide open.

  Martin Lindros had reimagined the sub-basement as, basically, one gigantic space filled with mobile workstations, each with a braid of electronic leads spiraling up to the ceiling. The braids were on tracks so they could move with the workstations and the personnel as they relocated from assignment to assignment. At the far end, Bourne saw, was a series of conference rooms, separated from the main space by alternating frosted-glass and steel panels.

  As befitted an agency named after a monster with two hundred eyes, the Typhon office was filled with monitors. In fact, the walls were a mosaic of flat-panel plasma screens on which a dizzying array of digital images were displayed: satellite chartings, closed-circuit television pictures of public spaces, transportation hubs such as airports, bus depots, train stations, street corners, cross sections of snaking highways and suburban rail lines, metropolitan underground platforms worldwide—Bourne recognized metros in New York, London, Paris, Moscow. People of all shapes, sizes, religions, ethnicities walking, milling mindlessly, standing undecided, lounging, smoking, getting on and off conveyances, talking to one another, ignoring one another, plugged into iPods, shopping, eating on the run, kissing, cuddling, exchanging bitter words, oblivious, cell phones slapped to their ears, accessing e-mail or porno, slouched, hunched, drunk, stoned, fights breaking out, first-date embarrassments, skulking, mumbling to themselves. A chaos of unedited video from which the analysts were required to find specific patterns, digital omens, electronic warning signs.