Page 41 of The Bourne Betrayal (Jason Bourne 5)

  “Bollocks!” she muttered, turned her attention to the carton on her right, filled with Overton’s personal effects. These turned out to be even more pathetic than she had expected: a cheap comb and brush sporting a thin mat of hairs; two packs of TUMS, one opened; a blue dress shirt, soiled down the placket with what looked like marinara sauce; a hideous blue-and-red-striped polyester tie; a photo of a goofily grinning young man in a football outfit, probably Overton’s son; a box of Raisinets, and another of nonpareils, both unopened. That was it.

  “Merde!”

  With a convulsive gesture, she swept the gutter leavings of Overton’s life off the table. She was about to turn away when she saw a bit of white sticking out of the breast pocket of the blue shirt. Bending down, she pulled it out with extended fingertips. It was a square of lined paper, folded in quarters. She opened it up, saw scribbled in blue ballpoint ink:

  S. Moore—8 & 12 NE (ck)

  Anne’s heart beat fast. This was what she was looking for. S. Moore was undoubtedly Soraya; (ck) could mean “check.” Of course, 8th Street didn’t cross 12th Street in Northeast—or in any quadrant of the district, for that matter. Still, it was clear that Overton had followed Soraya into Northeast. What the hell was she doing there? Whatever it was, she’d kept it secret from CI.

  Anne stood staring at the memo Overton had made to himself, trying to work it out. Then it hit her, and she began to laugh. The twelfth letter of the alphabet was L. Eighth and L NE.

  If Soraya was alive, it was more than likely she’d gone to ground there.

  When Bourne passed between the two hulking chunks of stone, the lamplight revealed the path Muta ibn Aziz had taken. It went west for perhaps a kilometer before veering sharply to the northeast. He ascended a slight rise, after which the path headed almost directly north, down into a shallow swale that gradually rose onto the beginning of what appeared to be a plateau of considerable size.

  All the while, he had been drawing closer to Muta ibn Aziz, who for the last minute or so hadn’t moved. The pine forest was still dense, the thatch of brown needles underfoot deeply aromatic, deadening sound.

  Within five minutes, however, the forest simply ended. Clearly it had been cut down here to make room for a landing strip long enough to accommodate the jet he saw sitting at one end of the packed-dirt runway.

  And there was Muta ibn Aziz, at the foot of the folding stairs. Bourne strode out from the path through the forest, heading directly for the plane, a Citation Sovereign. The pitch-black sky was strewn with stars, glittering coolly like diamonds on a jeweler’s velvet pad. A breeze, dense with sea minerals, played across the cleared hilltop.

  “Time to leave,” Muta ibn Aziz said. “Everything in order?”

  Bourne nodded. Muta ibn Aziz pressed a button on a small black object in his hand, and the runway lights flashed on. Bourne followed him up the stairway, retracting it as soon as he was inside. He went down the cabin to the cockpit. He was familiar with the Citation line. The Sovereign had a range of more than 4,500 kilometers and a top speed of 826 kph.

  Seating himself in the pilot’s chair, he flipped switches, turned dials as he went through the intricate pre-takeoff checklist. Everything was as it should be.

  Releasing the brakes, he pushed the throttle forward. The Sovereign responded at once. They taxied down the runway, gathering speed. Then they lifted off into the inky, spangled sky, climbing steadily, leaving the Golden Horn, the gateway to Asia, behind.

  Thirty

  WHY DO THEY do it?” Martin Lindros said in very fine Russian.

  Lying flat on his back in the infirmary in Miran Shah, he gazed up into the bruised face of Katya Stepanova Vdova, Dr. Veintrop’s stunning young wife.

  “Why do they do what?” she said dully as she rather ineptly administered to the abrasions on his throat. She had been training to be a physician’s assistant after Veintrop had made her quit Perfect Ten modeling.

  “The doctors here: your husband, Senarz, Andursky. Why have they hired out their services to Fadi?” Speaking of Andursky, the plastic surgeon who had remade Karim’s face with his eye, Lindros wondered, Why isn’t he tending to me instead of this clumsy amateur? Almost as soon as he had posed the question, he had the answer: He was no longer of any use either to Fadi or to his brother.

  “They’re human,” Katya said. “Which means they’re weak. Fadi finds their weakness and uses it against them. For Senarz, it was money. For Andursky, it was boys.”

  “And Veintrop?”

  She made a face. “Ah, my husband. He thinks he’s being noble, that he’s being forced to work for Dujja because Fadi holds my own well-being over his head. He’s fooling himself, of course. The truth is he’s doing it to get his pride back. Fadi’s brother sacked him from IVT on false allegations. He needs to work, my husband. That’s his weakness.”

  She sat back, her hands in her lap. “You think I don’t know how bad I am at this? But Costin insists, you see, so what choice do I have?”

  “You have a choice, Katya. Everyone does. You have only to see it.” He glanced at the two guards just outside the infirmary door. They were talking to each other in low tones. “Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  “What about Costin?”

  “Veintrop’s finished his work for Fadi. A smart woman like you should know that he’s now a liability.”

  “That’s not true!” she said.

  “Katya, we all have the capacity for fooling ourselves. That’s where we get into trouble. Look no further than your husband.”

  She sat very still, staring at him with an odd look in her eyes.

  “We also all have the capacity to change, Katya. It only takes us deciding that we have to in order to keep going, in order to survive.”

  She looked away for a moment, as people do when they’re afraid, when they’ve made up their minds but need encouragement.

  “Who did that to you, Katya?” he said softly.

  Her eyes snapped back to him, and he saw the shadow of her fear lurking there. “Fadi. Fadi and his man. To persuade Costin to complete the nuclear device.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Lindros said. “If Veintrop knew Fadi had you, that should have been enough.”

  Katya bit her lip, kept her eyes focused on her work. She finished up, then rose.

  “Katya, why won’t you answer me?”

  She didn’t look back as she walked out of the infirmary.

  Anne Held, standing in a chill rain on the corner of 8th and L NE, felt the presence of the S&W J-frame compact handgun in the right-hand pocket of her trench coat as if it were some terrible disfigurement with which she had just been diagnosed.

  She knew she would risk anything, do anything to rid herself of the feeling that she no longer belonged anywhere, that there was nothing left inside her. The only thing to do was to prove herself worthy again. If she shot Soraya dead, Jamil would surely welcome her back. She would belong again.

  Pulling up her collar against the wind-driven rain, she began to walk. She should have been afraid in this neighborhood—the police certainly were—but strangely she was not. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t strange at all. She had nothing left to lose.

  She turned the corner onto 7th Street. What was she looking for? What kinds of clues would tell her whether she had deduced correctly that this was where Soraya had gone to ground? A car went by, then another. Faces—black, Hispanic, hostile, strange—glared at her as the vehicles cruised by. One driver grinned, waggled his tongue obscenely at her. She put her right hand in her pocket and closed it around the S&W.

  As she walked, she kept her eye on the houses she passed—torn up, beaten down, singed by poverty, neglect, and flames. Rubble and rubbish filled their tiny front yards, as if the street were inhabited by junkmen displaying their woebegone wares for sale. The air was fouled by the stench of rotting garbage and urine, defeat and despair. Gaunt dogs ran here and there, baring their yellow teeth at her.

  She was like a drowning

woman, clutching at the only thing that could save her from going under. Her palm felt sweaty against the grip of the handgun. The day had finally arrived, she thought vaguely, when all her hours on the firing range would stand her in good stead. She could hear the deep, crisp voice of the CI firearms instructor correcting her stance or her grip while she reloaded the agency-issue S&W.

  She thought again of her sister, Joyce, remembering the pain of their shared childhood. But surely there had been pleasure, too, hadn’t there, on the nights they had slept in one bed, telling each other ghost stories, seeing which one of them would be the first to scream in fear? Anne felt like a ghost now, drifting through a world she could only haunt. She crossed the street, passing an open lot with weeds as high as her waist, tenacious even in winter. Tires, worn as an old man’s face, empty plastic bottles, syringes, used condoms and cell phones, one red sock with the toe cap gone. And a severed arm.

  Anne jumped, her heart pounding against the cage of her chest. A doll’s arm only. But her heart rate didn’t come down. She stared in grim fascination at that severed arm. It was like Joyce’s aborted future, lying in a slagheap of dead weeds. What exactly was the difference between Joyce’s future and her own present? she asked herself. She hadn’t cried in the longest time. Now it seemed that she had forgotten how.

  Day had descended into the grave of night, icy rain had turned to clammy fog. Moisture seemed to congeal on her hair, the backs of her hands. Now and again a siren rose in distress, only to fall again into uneasy silence.

  From behind her came the grumble of an engine. She paused, her heart hammering, waiting for the car to pass. When it didn’t, she began to walk again, more quickly. The car, emerging from the fog, kept pace just behind her.

  All at once she reversed course and, with her hand gripping the S&W, walked back toward the car. As she did so, it stopped. The driver’s-side window rolled down, revealing a long, withered face the color of old shoe leather, the bottom half of which was whiskery and gray.

  “You look like you’re lost,” the driver said in a voice gravelly with a lifetime of tar and nicotine. “Gypsy cab.” He tipped his baseball cap. “I thought you might need a ride. There’s a crew down the end a the block lickin’ their chops at the thought a you.”

  “I can take care of myself.” Sudden fear caused her to sound defensive.

  The cabbie eyed her with a downtrodden expression. “Whatever.”

  As he put the car in gear, Anne said, “Wait!” She passed a hand across her damp brow. She felt as if a raging fever had broken. Who was she kidding? She didn’t have it in her to shoot Soraya, let alone kill her.

  Grabbing the rear door handle, she slid into the gypsy cab and gave the driver her address. She didn’t want to go back to CI head-quarters. She couldn’t face either Jamil or the Old Man. She wondered whether she’d ever be able to face them again.

  Then she noticed that the cabbie had turned around to scrutinize her face.

  “What?” Anne said, a bit too defensively.

  The cabbie grunted. “You goddamn good lookin’.”

  Opting for forbearance, she took out a clutch of bills, waving them in his face. “Are you going to give me a ride or not?”

  The cabbie licked his lips, put the car in gear.

  As the car started off, she leaned forward. “Just so you know,” she said, “I’ve got a gun.”

  “So do I, sister.” The grizzled cabbie leered at her. “So do fuckin’ I.”

  The DCI met Luther LaValle at Thistle, a trendy restaurant on 19th and Q NW. He’d had Anne book a center table, because when he talked to LaValle he wanted them to be surrounded by raucous diners.

  The Pentagon’s intelligence czar was already seated when the Old Man arrived from out of the dense winter fog into the restaurant’s roar. In a navy-blue suit, crisp white shirt, and red-and-blue-striped regimental tie pierced by an American flag enamel pin, LaValle looked out of place surrounded by young men and women of the next generation.

  LaValle’s boxer’s torso ballooned the suit in the way of all overly muscled men. He looked like Bruce Banner in the process of transforming into the Hulk. Smiling thinly, he rose from his scotch and soda to give the DCI’s proffered hand a perfunctory squeeze.

  The Old Man took the chair across from him. “Good of you to meet me at such short notice, Luther.”

  LaValle spread his brutal, blunt-fingered hands. “What are you having?”

  “Oban,” the Old Man said to the waiter who had appeared at his elbow. “Make it a double, one ice cube, but only if it’s large.”

  The waiter gave a little nod, vanished into the crowd.

  “Large ice cubes are best for liquor,” the DCI said to his companion. “They take longer to melt.”

  The intelligence czar said nothing, but looked at the Old Man expectantly. When the single-malt scotch arrived, the two men raised their glasses and drank.

  “The traffic tonight is insufferable,” the DCI said.

  “It’s the fog,” LaValle responded vaguely.

  “When was the last time we got together like this?”

  “You know, I can’t recall.”

  Both seemed to be talking to the young couple at the next table. Their neutral words sat between them like pawns, already sacrificed on the field of battle. The waiter returned with menus. They opened them, made their choices, and once again were left to their own devices.

  The DCI pulled a dossier from his slim briefcase and set it on the table, unopened. His palms came down heavily on it. “I assume you’ve heard about the utility truck that went out of control outside the Corcoran.”

  “A traffic accident?” LaValle shrugged. “Do you know how many of those occur in the district each hour?”

  “This one is different,” the Old Man said. “The truck was trying to run down one of my people.”

  LaValle took a sip of his scotch and soda. The Old Man thought he drank like a lady.

  “Which one?”

  “Anne Held, my assistant. Martin Lindros was with her. He saved her.”

  LaValle leaned down, came back with his own dossier. It had the Pentagon’s seal on its cover. He opened it and, without a word, reversed it, passing it across the table.

  As the Old Man began to read, LaValle said, “Someone inside your headquarters is sending and receiving periodic messages.”

  The Old Man was shocked in more ways than one. “Since when is the Pentagon monitoring CI communications? Dammit, that’s a gross breach of interagency protocol.”

  “I ordered it, with the president’s okay. We thought it necessary. When Secretary Halliday became aware of a mole inside CI—”

  “From Matthew Lerner, his creature,” the DCI said heatedly. “Halliday has no business creeping into my shorts. And without me, the president is getting improperly briefed.”

  “It was done for the agency’s own good.”

  Thunderclouds of indignation cracked open across the DCI’s face. “Are you implying that I no longer know what’s good for CI?”

  LaValle’s finger stabbed out. “You see, there. The electronic signal is piggybacking on CI carrier waves. It’s encrypted. We haven’t been able to break it. Also, we don’t know who’s doing the communicating. But from the dates it clearly can’t be Hytner, the agent you IDed as the mole. He was already dead.”

  The Old Man shifted aside the Pentagon dossier, opened his own. “I’ll take care of this leak, if that’s what it is,” he said. Likely as not what these idiots had picked up was a clandestine Typhon communiqué with one of its deep-cover overseas operatives. Of course Martin’s black-ops department wouldn’t use normal CI channels. “And you’ll take care of the defense secretary.”

  “I beg your pardon?” For the first time since they had sat down together, LaValle appeared nonplussed.

  “That utility van I mentioned earlier, the one that tried to run over Anne Held.”

  “To be candid, Secretary Halliday shared with me that he suspected Anne Held of

being the mole inside—”

  The appetizers arrived: colossal pink prawns dipped in blood-red cocktail sauce.

  Before LaValle could pick up his tiny fork, the DCI held out a single sheet of paper he’d plucked from the dossier Martin had provided him. “The van that almost killed her was driven by the late Jon Mueller.” He waited a beat. “You know Mueller, Luther, don’t bother pretending otherwise. He was with Homeland Security, but he was trained by NSA. He knew Matthew Lerner. The two were whoring and drinking buddies, in fact. Both Halliday’s creatures.”

  “Do you have any hard proof of this?” LaValle said blandly.

  The Old Man was fully prepared for this question. “You already know the answer to that. But I have enough to start an investigation. Unexplained deposits in Mueller’s bank account, a Lamborghini that Lerner couldn’t possibly afford, trips to Las Vegas where both dropped bundles of cash. Arrogance begets stupidity; it’s an axiom old as time.” He took back the sheet of paper. “I assure you that once the investigation gets to the Senate, the net that’ll be thrown out will catch not only Halliday but those close to him.”

  He folded his arms. “Frankly, I don’t fancy a scandal of this grave a scope. It would only help our enemies abroad.” He lifted a prawn. “But this time, the secretary’s gone too far. He believes he can do anything he wants, even sanctioning a murder using our government’s men.”

  He paused here to let these words sink in. As the intelligence czar’s eyes rose to meet his, the Old Man said, “Here is where I make my stand. I cannot condone such a recklessly unlawful act. Neither, I think, can you.”

  Muta ibn Aziz sat brooding, watching the sky outside the jet’s Perspex window glowing blue-black. Below him was the unruffled skin of the Caspian Sea, obscured now and again by streaks of clouds the color of a gull’s wing.

  He inhabited a dark corner of Dujja, performing the demeaning task of messenger boy, while his brother basked in the limelight of Fadi’s favor. And all because of that one moment in Odessa, the lie they had told Fadi and Karim that Abbud had forbidden him to correct. Abbud had said he must keep quiet for Fadi’s sake, but now, when Muta looked at the situation from a distance, he realized that this was yet another lie perpetrated by his brother. Abbud insisted on hiding the truth about Sarah ibn Ashef’s death for his own sake, for the consolidation of his own power within Dujja.