Page 20 of The Bourne Sanction (Jason Bourne 6)

  These places were no more than shacks. They were mainly the pit out back, where the pitmaster lovingly smoked his cuts of meat—ribs, brisket, burnt ends, sweet and hot sausages, sometimes a whole hog—for hours on end. The old, scarred wooden picnic tables, topped with four or five sauces of varying ingredients and heat, were a kind of afterthought. Most folk had their meat wrapped up to take out. Not Kendall and Feir. They sat at a table, eating and drinking beer, while the bones piled up along with the wadded-up napkins and the slices of white bread so soft, they disintegrated under a few drops of sauce.

  Now and again Feir stopped eating to impart to Kendall some bit of fact or scuttlebutt currently going around the CI offices. Kendall noted these with his steel-trap military mind, occasionally asking questions to help Feir clarify or amplify a point, especially when it came to the movements of Veronica Hart and Soraya Moore.

  Afterward, they drove to an old abandoned library for the main event. The Renaissance-style building had been bought at fire sale prices by Drew Davis, a local businessman familiar in SE but otherwise unknown within the district, which was precisely how he liked it. He was one of those people savvy enough to fly under the Metro police radar. Not so simple a matter in SE, because like almost everyone else who lived there he was black. Unlike most of those around him, he had friends in high places. This was mainly due to the place he ran, The Glass Slipper.

  To all intents and purposes it was a legit music club, and an extremely successful one to boot, attracting many big-name R&B acts. But in the back was the real business: a high-end cathouse that specialized in women of color. To those in the know, any flavor of color, which in this case meant ethnicity, could be procured at The Glass Slipper. Rates were steep but nobody seemed to mind, partly because Drew Davis paid his girls well.

  Kendall had frequented this cathouse since his senior year in college. He’d come with a bunch of well-connected buddies one night as a hoot. Didn’t want to but they’d dared him, and he knew how much he’d be ridiculed if he failed to take them up on it. Ironically he stayed, over the years having developed a taste for, as he put it, walking on the wild side. At first he told himself that the attraction was purely physical. Then he realized he liked being there; no one bothered him, no one made fun of him. Later, his continued interest was a reaction to his role as outsider when it came to working with the power junkies like Luther LaValle. Christ, even the fallen Ron Batt had been a member of Skull & Bones at Yale. Well, The Glass Slipper is my Skull & Bones, Kendall thought as he was ushered into the back room. This was as clandestine, as outré as things got inside the Beltway. It was Kendall’s own little hideaway, a life that was his alone. Not even Luther knew about The Glass Slipper. It felt good to have a secret from LaValle.

  Kendall and Feir sat in purple velvet chairs—the color of royalty, as Kendall pointed out—and were treated to a soft parade of women of all sizes and colors. Kendall chose Imani, one of his favorites, Feir a dusky-skinned Eurasian woman who was part Indian.

  They retired to spacious rooms, furnished like bedrooms in European villas, with four-poster beds, tons of chintz, velvet, swags, drapes. There Kendall watched as, in one astonishing shimmy, Imani slid out of her chocolate silk spaghetti-strap dress. She wore nothing underneath. The lamplight burnished her dark skin.

  Then she opened her arms and, with a deep-felt groan, General Richard P. Kendall melted into the sinuous river of her flawless body.

  The moment Bourne felt his air supply cut off, he levered himself up off the front bench seat, arching his back so that he could put first one foot, then the other on the dashboard. Using his legs, he launched himself diagonally into the backseat, so that he landed right behind the ill-fated Baronov. The strangler was forced to turn to his right in order to keep the wire around Bourne’s throat. This was an awkward position for him; he now lacked the leverage he had when Bourne was directly in front of him.

  Bourne planted the heel of his shoe in the strangler’s groin and ground down as hard as he could, but his strength was depleted from the lack of oxygen.

  “Die, fucker,” the strangler said in a hard-edged Midwestern accent.

  White lights danced in his vision, and a blackness was seeping up all around him. It was as if he were looking down a tunnel through the wrong end of a telescope. Nothing looked real; his sense of perspective was skewed. He could see the man, his dark hair, his cruel face, the unmistakable hundred-mile stare of the American soldier in combat. In the back of his mind, he knew the NSA had found him.

  Bourne’s lapse of concentration allowed the strangler to free himself, jerk the ends of the wire so that it dug deeper into Bourne’s throat. Bourne’s windpipe was totally cut off. Blood was running down into his collar as the wire bit through his skin. Strange animal noises bubbled up from deep inside him. He blinked away tears and sweat, used his last ounce of strength to jam his thumb into the agent’s eye. Keeping up the pressure despite blows to his midsection gained him a temporary respite: The wire slackened. He gasped in a railing breath, and dug deeper with his thumb.

  The wire slackened further. He heard the car door open. The strangler’s face wrenched away from him, and the car door slammed shut. He heard running feet, dying away. By the time he managed to unwind the wire, to cough and gasp air into his burning lungs, the street was empty. The NSA agent was gone.

  Bourne was alone in the Volga with the corpse of Lev Baronov, dizzy, weak, and sick at heart.

  Eighteen

  I CAN’T SIMPLY contact Haydar,” Devra said. “After what happened in Sevastopol they’ll know you’ll be going after him.”

  “That being the case,” Arkadin said, “the document is long gone.”

  “Not necessarily.” Devra stirred her Turkish coffee, thick as tar. “They chose this backwater because it’s so inaccessible. But that works both ways. Chances are Haydar hasn’t yet been able to pass the document along.”

  They were sitting in a tiny dust-blown café in Eskiehir. Even for Turkey this was a backward place, filled with sheep, the smells of pine, dung, and urine, and not much else. A chill wind blew across the mountain pass. There was snow on the north side of the buildings that made up the village, and judging by the lowering clouds more was on its way.

  “Godforsaken is too good a word for this hellhole,” Arkadin said. “For shit’s sake, there isn’t even a cell phone signal.”

  “That’s funny coming from you.” Devra downed her coffee. “You were born in a shithole, weren’t you.”

  Arkadin felt an almost uncontrollable urge to drag her around the back of the rickety structure and beat her. But he held his hand and his rage, husbanding them both for another day when he would gaze down at her as if from a hundred miles away, whisper into her ear, I have no regard for you. To me, your life is without meaning. If you have any hope of staying alive even a little longer, you’ll never again ask where I was born, who my parents were, anything of a personal nature whatsoever.

  As it turned out, among her other talents Marlene was an accomplished hypnotist. She told him she wanted to hypnotize him in order to get at the root of his rage.

  “I’ve heard there are people who can’t be hypnotized,” Arkadin said. “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” Marlene said.

  It turned out he was one of them.

  “You simply will not take suggestion,” she said. “Your mind has put up a wall it’s impossible to penetrate.”

  They were sitting in the garden behind Semion Icoupov’s villa. Owing to the steep lay of the land it was the size of a postage stamp. They sat on a stone bench beneath the shade afforded by a fig tree, whose dark, soon-to-be-luscious fruit was just beginning to curl the branches downward to the stony earth.

  “Well,” Arkadin said, “what are we to do?”

  “The question is what are you going to do, Leonid.” She brushed a fragment of leaf off her thigh. She was wearing American designer jeans, an open-necked shirt, sandals on her feet. “The process of examining your pa

st is designed to help you regain control over yourself.”

  “You mean my homicidal tendencies,” he said.

  “Why would you choose to say it that way, Leonid?”

  He looked deeply into her eyes. “Because it’s the truth.”

  Marlene’s eyes grew dark. “Then why are you so reluctant to talk to me about the things I feel will help you?”

  “You just want to worm your way inside my head. You think if you know everything about me you can control me.”

  “You’re wrong. This isn’t about control, Leonid.”

  Arkadin laughed. “What is it about then?”

  “What it’s always been—it’s about helping you control yourself.”

  A light wind tugged at her hair, and she smoothed it back into place. He noticed such things and attached to them psychological meaning. Marlene liked everything just so.

  “I was a sad little boy. Then I was an angry little boy. Then I ran away from home. There, does that satisfy you?”

  Marlene tilted her head to catch a bit of sunlight that appeared through the tossed leaves of the fig tree. “How is it you went from being sad to being angry?”

  “I grew up,” Arkadin said.

  “You were still a child.”

  “Only in a manner of speaking.”

  He studied her for a moment. Her hands were crossed on her lap. She lifted one of them, touched his cheek with her fingertips, traced the line of his jaw until she reached his chin. She turned his face a bit farther toward her. Then she leaned forward. Her lips, when they touched his, were soft. They opened like a flower. The touch of her tongue was like an explosion in his mouth.

  Arkadin, damping down the dark eddy of his emotion, smiled winningly. “Doesn’t matter. I’m never going back.”

  “I second that emotion.” Devra nodded, then rose. “Let’s see if we can get proper lodgings. I don’t know about you but I need a shower. Then we’ll see about contacting Haydar without anyone knowing.”

  As she began to turn away, he caught her by the elbow.

  “Just a minute.”

  Her expression was quizzical as she waited for him to continue.

  “If you’re not my enemy, if you haven’t been lying to me, if you want to stay with me, then you’ll demonstrate your fidelity.”

  “I said, yes, I would do what you asked of me.”

  “That might entail killing the people who are surely guarding Haydar.”

  She didn’t even blink. “Give me the fucking gun.”

  Veronica Hart lived in an apartment complex in Langley, Virginia. Like so many other complexes in this part of the world, it served as temporary housing for the thousands of federal government workers, including spooks of all stripes, who were often on assignment overseas or in other parts of the country.

  Hart had lived in this particular apartment for just over two years. Not that it mattered; since coming to the district seven years ago she’d had nothing but temporary lodgings. By this point she doubted she’d be comfortable settling down and nesting. At least, those were her thoughts as she buzzed Soraya Moore into the lobby. A moment later a discreet knock sounded, and she let the other woman in.

  “I’m clean,” Soraya said as she shrugged off her coat. “I made sure of that.”

  Hart hung her coat in the foyer closet, led her into the kitchen. “For breakfast I have cold cereal or”—she opened the refrigerator—“cold Chinese food. Last night’s leftovers.”

  “I’m not one for conventional breakfasts,” Soraya said.

  “Good. Neither am I.”

  Hart grabbed an array of cardboard cartons, told Soraya where to find plates, serving spoons, and chopsticks. They moved into the living room, set everything on a glass coffee table between facing sofas.

  Hart began opening the cartons. “No pork, right?”

  Soraya smiled, pleased that her boss remembered her Muslim strictures. “Thank you.”

  Hart returned to the kitchen, put up water for tea. “I have Earl Grey or oolong.”

  “Oolong for me, please.”

  Hart finished brewing the tea, brought the pot and two small handleless cups back to the living room. The two women settled themselves on opposite sides of the table, sitting cross-legged on the abstract patterned rug. Soraya looked around. There were some basic prints on the wall, the kind you’d expect to find at any midlevel hotel chain. The furniture looked rented, as anonymous as anything else. There were no photos, no sense of Hart’s background or family. The only unusual feature was an upright piano.

  “My only real possession,” Hart said, following Soraya’s gaze. “It’s a Steinway K-52, better known as a Chippendale hamburg. It’s got a sounding board larger than many grand pianos, so it lets out with a helluva sound.”

  “You play?”

  Hart went over, sat down on the stool, began to play Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in B-Flat Minor. Without missing a beat she segued into Isaac Albéniz’s sensuous “Malagueña,” and, finally, into a raucous transposition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

  Soraya laughed and applauded as Hart rose, came back to sit opposite her.

  “My absolute only talent besides intelligence work.” Hart opened one of the cartons, spooned out General Tso’s chicken. “Careful,” she said as she handed it over, “I order it extra hot.”

  “That’s okay by me,” Soraya said, digging deep into the carton. “I always wanted to play the piano.”

  “Actually, I wanted to play electric guitar.” Hart licked oyster sauce off her finger as she passed over another carton. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. According to him, electric guitar wasn’t a ‘lady’s’ instrument.”

  “Strict, was he?” Soraya said sympathetically.

  “You bet. He was a full-bird colonel in the air force. He’d been a fighter pilot back in his salad days. He resented being too old to fly, missed that damn oily-smelling cockpit something fierce. Who could he complain to in the force? So he took his frustration out on me and my mother.”

  Soraya nodded. “My father is old-school Muslim. Very strict, very rigid. Like many of his generation he’s bewildered by the modern world, and that makes him angry. I felt trapped at home. When I left, he said he’d never forgive me.”

  “Did he?”

  Soraya had a faraway look in her eyes. “I see my mom once a month. We go shopping together. I speak to my father once in a while. He’s never invited me back home; I’ve never gone.”

  Hart put down her chopsticks. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It is what it is. Do you still see your father?”

  “I do, but he doesn’t know who I am. My mother’s gone now, which is a blessing. I don’t think she could’ve tolerated seeing him like that.”

  “It must be hard for you,” Soraya said. “The indomitable fighter pilot reduced like that.”

  “There’s a point in life where you have to let go of your parents.” Hart resumed eating, though more slowly. “Whoever’s lying in that bed isn’t my father. He died a long time ago.”

  Soraya looked down at her food for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me how you knew about the NSA safe house.”

  “Ah, that.” Hart’s face brightened. Clearly, she was happy to be on a work topic. “During my time at Black River we were often hired by NSA. This was before they trained and deployed their own home-grown black-ops details. We were good for them because they never had to specify to anyone what we’d been hired to do. It was all ‘fieldwork,’ priming the battlefield for our troops. No one on Capitol Hill was going to look farther than that.”

  She dabbed her mouth, sat back. “Anyway, after one particular mission, I caught the short straw. I was the one from my squad who brought the findings back to the NSA. Because it was a black-ops mission, the debriefing took place at the safe house in Virginia. Not in the fine library you were taken to, but in one of the basement-level cubicles—windowless, featureless, just gritty reinforced concrete. It’s like a war bunker down there.”  “And what did you see?”

  “It wasn’t what I saw.” Hart said. “It was what I heard. The cubicles are soundproof, except for the doors, I assume so the guards in the corridors know what’s going on. What I heard was ghastly. The sounds were barely human.”

  “Did you tell your bosses at Black River?”

  “What was the point? They didn’t care, and even if they did, what were they going to do? Start a congressional investigation on the basis of sounds I heard? The NSA would have cut them off at the knees, put them out of business in a heartbeat.” She shook her head. “No, these boys are businessmen, pure and simple. Their ideology revolves around milking as much money from the government as possible.”

  “So now we have a chance to do what you couldn’t before, what Black River wouldn’t do.”

  “That’s right,” Hart said. “I want to get photos, videos, absolute proof of what NSA is doing down there so I can present the evidence myself to the president. That’s where you and Tyrone come in.” She shoved her plate away. “I want Luther LaValle’s head on a platter, and by God I’m going to get it.”

  Nineteen

  BECAUSE OF the corpse and all the blood on the seats Bourne was forced to abandon the Volga. Before he did, though, he took Baronov’s cell phone, as well as his money. It was freezing. Within the preternatural afternoon winter darkness came the snow, swirling down in ever-heavier curtains. Bourne knew he had to get out of the area as quickly as possible. He took the SIM card out of his phone, put it in Baronov’s, then threw his own cell phone down a storm drain. In his new identity as Fyodor Ilianovich Popov he couldn’t afford to be in possession of a cell with an American carrier.

  He walked, leaning into the wind and snow. After six blocks, huddled in a doorway, he used Baronov’s cell phone to call his friend Boris Karpov. The voice at the end of the line grew cold.