Page 25 of The Bourne Sanction (Jason Bourne 6)

  Bourne saw Yakov glance over as he and Gala exited the bombila. When they’d gone through the revolving door, Bourne told her to stay put. To his left was the service door used by porters to take guests’ luggage in and out of the hotel. Bourne looked out across the street. Yakov stuck his head in the rear window, huddled with a man who’d been hidden in the backseat.

  In the elevator, on the way up to their room, he said, “Are you hungry? I’m starved.” Harun Iliev, the man Semion Icoupov sent to find Jason Bourne, had expended hours in contentious negotiations and frustrating dead ends, and finally spent a great deal of money in his pursuit. It wasn’t coincidence that had led him at last to the bombila named Yakov, for Yakov was an ambitious man who knew he’d never get rich driving around Moscow, fending off other bombily, pissing them off by cutting in, snatching their fares from under their noses. What could be more lucrative than spying on other people? Especially when your chief client was the American. Yakov had many clients, but none of them knew how to throw around dollars like the Americans. It was their sincere belief that enough money bought you anything. Mostly, they were right. When they weren’t, though, it was still costly for them.

  Most of Yakov’s other clients laughed at the kind of money the Americans threw around. Chiefly, though, he suspected it was because they were jealous. Laughing at what you didn’t have and never would was, he supposed, better than letting it depress you.

  Icoupov’s people were the only ones who paid as well. But they used him far less than the Americans. On the other hand, they had him on retainer. Yakov knew Harun Iliev well, had dealt with him a number of times before, and both liked and trusted him. Besides, they were both Muslim. Yakov kept his religion a secret in Moscow, especially from the Americans, who, stupidly, would have dropped him like a fake ruble.

  Directly after the American attaché contacted him for the job, Yakov had called Harun Iliev. As a consequence, Harun had already inserted himself in the staff of the Metropolya Hotel through a cousin of his, who worked in the kitchen as one of the expediters. He coordinated food orders for the line chefs. The moment he saw the room-service order come down from 1728, Bourne’s room, he called Harun.

  “We’re short-staffed tonight,” he said. “Get down here in the next five minutes and I’ll make sure you’re the one to take the order up to him.”

  Harun Iliev quickly presented himself to his cousin and was shown to a trolley, neatly covered in starched white linen, laden with covered bowls, platters, plates, silverware, and napkins. Thanking his cousin for this opportunity to get to Jason Bourne, he rolled his trolley to the service elevator. Someone was already there. Harun took him to be one of the hotel managers until, as they entered the elevator, he turned so Harun caught a fleeting glimpse of his pulped face and the silver patch over one eye.

  Harun reached out, pressed the button for the seventeenth floor. The man pressed the button for the eighteenth. The elevator stopped at the fourth floor, where a maid got on with her turn-down cart. She exited a floor later.

  The elevator had just passed the fifteenth floor when the man reached over, pulled out the large red EMERGENCY STOP button. Harun turned to question the man’s action, but the man fired one bullet from a exceptionally quiet 9mm Welrod equipped with a suppressor. The bullet pierced Harun’s forehead, tore through his brain. He was dead before he collapsed to the elevator floor.

  Anthony Prowess mopped up what little blood there was with a napkin from the room-service cart. Then he quickly stripped the clothes off his victim, donned the uniform of the Metropolya Hotel. He pushed in the EMERGENCY STOP button again and the elevator continued its ascent to the seventeenth floor. After determining that the hallway was clear, Prowess consulted a map of the floor, dragged the corpse into a utility room, then wheeled the cart around the corner to room 1728.

  Why don’t you take shower? A long hot,” Bourne said.

  Gala’s expression was mischievous. “If I stink at least it’s not as bad as you.” She began to slip out of her mini skirt. “Why don’t we take one together?”

  “Some other time. I have business to attend to.”

  Her lower lip comically pouted. “God, what could be more boring?”

  Bourne laughed as she crossed into the bathroom, closed the door behind her. Soon after, the sound of running water came to him, along with tiny curls of steam. He turned on the TV, watched a dreadful show in Russian with the sound turned up.

  There was a knock on the door. Bourne rose from his position on the bed, opened the door. A uniformed waiter in a short jacket and a hat with a bill pulled down over his face pushed a trolley full of food into the room. Bourne signed the bill, the waiter turned to leave. Instantly he whirled, a knife in his hand. In one blurred movement, he drew his arm back. But Bourne was ready. As the waiter threw the knife Bourne raised a domed metal top off a chafing dish, used it as a shield to deflect the knife. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning at the waiter, who ducked out of the way. The edge of the domed top caught his hat, spun it off his head, revealing the puffy face of the man who’d strangled Baronov and tried to kill Bourne, as well.

  The attacker drew a Welrod and squeezed off two shots before Bourne shoved the cart into his midsection. He staggered back. Bourne threw himself across the cart, grabbed Prowess by the front of the uniform, then wrestled him to the floor.

  Bourne managed to kick away the Welrod. The man attacked with hands and feet, moving Bourne so that he could regain possession of the gun. Bourne could see the patch over the NSA agent’s eye, could only surmise the damage he’d inflicted.

  The agent feinted one way, then caught Bourne flush on the jaw. Bourne staggered and his attacker was on him with another wire, which he whipped around Bourne’s neck. Pulling hard on it, he drew Bourne back to his feet. Bourne staggered against the cart. As it skittered away from him, he grabbed the chafing dish, hurled its contents in the agent’s face. The scalding soup struck the attacker like a torch, and he shouted but failed to drop the wire, instead pulling it tighter, jerking Bourne against his chest.

  Bourne was on his knees, his back arched. His lungs were screaming for oxygen, his muscles were rapidly losing their strength, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate. Soon, he knew, he’d pass out.

  With his remaining strength, he jabbed his elbow into the agent’s crotch. The wire slacked off enough for him to get to his feet. He slammed the back of his head into the agent’s face, heard the satisfying thunk as the man’s head struck the wall. The wire slackened a bit more, enough for Bourne to pull it from his throat, gasping in air, and reverse their positions, wrapping the wire around Prowess’s neck. He fought and kicked like a madman, but Bourne held on, working the wire tighter and tighter, until the agent’s body went slack. His head toppled to one side. Bourne didn’t slacken the wire until he’d assured himself there was no longer a pulse. Then he let the man slide to the floor.

  He was bent over, hands on thighs, taking deep, slow breaths when Gala walked out of the bathroom amid a halo of lavender-scented mist.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. Then she turned and vomited all over her bare pink feet.

  Twenty-Three

  ANY WAY you slice it or dice it,” Luther LaValle said, “he’s a dead man.”

  Soraya stared bleakly through the one-way glass at Tyrone, who was standing in a cubicle ominously outfitted with a shallow coffin-like tub that had restraints for wrists and ankles, a fire hose above it. In the center of the room a steel table was bolted down to the bare concrete floor, beneath which was a drain to sluice both water and blood away.

  LaValle held up the digital camera. “General Kendall found this on your compatriot.” He touched a button, and the photos Tyrone had taken scrolled across the camera’s screen. “This smoking gun is enough to convict him of treason.”

  Soraya couldn’t help wondering how many shots of the torture chambers Tyrone had managed to take before he was caught.

  “Off with his head,

” Kendall said, baring his teeth.

  Soraya could not rid herself of the sick feeling in her stomach. Of course, Tyrone had been in dangerous situations before, but she was directly responsible for putting him in harm’s way. If anything happened to him she knew she’d never be able to forgive herself. What was she thinking involving him in such perilous work? The enormity of her miscalculation was all too clear to her now, when it was too late to do anything about it.

  “The real pity,” LaValle went on, “is that with very little difficulty we can make a case against you, as well.”

  Soraya was solely focused on Tyrone, whom she had wronged so terribly.

  “This was my idea,” she said dully. “Let Tyrone go.”

  “You mean he was only following orders,” General Kendall said. “This isn’t Nuremberg. Frankly, there’s no viable defense the two of you can put up. His conviction and execution—as well as yours—are a fait accompli.”

  They took her back to the Library, where Willard, seeing her ashen face, fetched her a fresh pot of Ceylon tea. The three of them sat by the window. The fourth chair, conspicuously empty, was an accusation to Soraya. Her grievous mismanagement of this mission was compounded by the knowledge that she had seriously underestimated LaValle. She’d been lulled by his smug, overaggressive nature into thinking he was the sort of man who’d automatically underestimate her. She was dead wrong.

  She fought the constriction in her chest, the panic welling up, the sense that she and Tyrone were trapped in an impossible situation. She used the tea ritual to refocus herself. For the first time in her life she added cream and sugar, and drank the tea as if it were medication or a form of penance.

  She was trying to get her brain unfrozen from shock, to get it working normally again. In order to help Tyrone, she knew she needed to get herself out of here. If LaValle meant to charge her as he threatened to do with Tyrone, she’d already be in an adjacent cell. The fact that they’d brought her back to the Library allowed a sliver of light into the darkness that had settled around her. She decided for now to allow this scenario to play out on LaValle’s and Kendall’s terms.

  The moment she set her teacup down, LaValle took up his ax. “As I said before, Director, the real pity is your involvement. I’d hate to lose you as an ally—though, I see now, I never really had you as an ally.”

  This little speech sounded canned, as if each word had been chewed over by LaValle.

  “Frankly,” he continued, “in retrospect, I can see that you’ve lied to me from the first. You never had any intention of switching your allegiance to NSA, did you?” He sighed, as if he were a disciplinary dean addressing a bright but chronically wayward student. “That’s why I can’t believe that you concocted this scheme on your own.”

  “If I were a betting man,” Kendall said, “I’d wager your orders came from the top.”

  “Veronica Hart is the real problem here.” LaValle spread his hands. “Perhaps through the lens of what’s happened here today you can begin to see things as we do.”

  Soraya didn’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing. Keeping her voice deliberately neutral, she said, “How can I be of service?”

  LaValle smiled genially, turned to Kendall, said, “You see, Richard, the director can be of help to us, despite your reservations.” He quickly turned back to Soraya, his expression sobering. “The general wants to prosecute you both to the full extent of the law, which I needn’t reiterate is very full indeed.”

  Their good-cop, bad-cop routine would seem clichéd, Soraya thought bitterly, except this was for real. She knew Kendall hated her guts; he’d made no effort to hide his contempt. He was a military man, after all. The possibility of having to report to a female superior was unthinkable, downright risible. He hadn’t thought much of Tyrone, either, which made his capture of the younger man that much harder to stomach.

  “I understand my position is untenable,” she said, despising having to kowtow to this despicable human being.

  “Excellent, then we’ll start from that point.”

  LaValle stared up at the ceiling, giving an impersonation of someone trying to decide how to proceed. But she suspected he knew very well what he was doing, every step of the way.

  His eyes engaged hers. “The way I see it we have a two-part problem. One concerns your friend down in the hold. The second involves you.”

  “I’m more concerned with him,” Soraya said. “How do I get him out?”

  LaValle shifted in his chair. “Let’s take your situation first. We can build a circumstantial case against you, but without direct testimony from your friend—”

  “Tyrone,” Soraya said. “His name is Tyrone Elkins.”

  To hammer home just whose conversation this was, LaValle quite deliberately ignored her. “Without direct testimony from your friend we won’t get far.”

  “Direct testimony we will get,” Kendall said, “as soon as we waterboard him.”

  “No,” Soraya said. “You can’t.”

  “Why, because it’s illegal?” Kendall chuckled.

  Soraya turned to LaValle. “There’s another way. You and I both know there is.”

  LaValle said nothing for a moment, drawing out the tension. “You told me that your source for the attribution of the Typhon intercepts was sacrosanct. Does that decision still stand?”

  “If I tell you will you let Tyrone go?”

  “No,” LaValle said, “but you’ll be free to leave.”

  “What about Tyrone?”

  LaValle crossed one leg over another. “Let’s take one thing at a time, shall we?”

  Soraya nodded. She knew that as long as she was sitting here she had no wiggle room. “My source was Bourne.”

  LaValle looked startled. “Jason Bourne? Are you kidding me?”

  “No, Mr. LaValle. He has knowledge of the Black Legion and that they were being fronted by the Eastern Brotherhood.”

  “Where the hell did this knowledge come from?”

  “He had no time to tell me, even if he had a mind to,” she said. “There were too many NSA agents in the vicinity.”

  “The incident at the Freer,” Kendall said.

  LaValle held up a hand. “You helped him to escape.”

  Soraya shook her head. “Actually, he thought I’d turned on him.”

  “Interesting.” LaValle tapped his lip. “Does he still think that?”

  Soraya determined it was time for a little defiance, a little lie. “I don’t know. Jason has a tendency toward paranoia, so it’s possible.”

  LaValle looked thoughtful. “Maybe we can use that to our advantage.”

  General Kendall looked disgusted. “So, in other words, this whole story about the Black Legion could be nothing more than a lunatic fantasy.”

  “Or, more likely, deliberate disinformation,” LaValle said.

  Soraya shook her head. “Why would he do that?”

  “Who knows why he does anything?” LaValle took a slow sip of his whiskey, diluted now by the melted ice cubes. “Let’s not forget that Bourne was in a rage when he told you about the Black Legion. By your own admission, he thought you’d betrayed him.”

  “You have a point.” Soraya knew better than to defend Bourne to these people. The more you argued against them, the more entrenched they became in their position. They’d built a case against Jason out of fear and loathing. Not because, as they claimed, he was unstable, but because he simply didn’t care about their rules and regulations. Instead of flouting them, something the directors had knowledge of and knew how to handle, he annihilated them.

  “Of course I do.” LaValle set down his glass. “Let’s move on to your friend. The case against him is airtight, open-and-shut, no hope whatsoever of appeal or commutation.”

  “Let him eat cake,” Kendall said.

  “Marie Antoinette never said that, by the way,” Soraya said.

  Kendall glared at her, while LaValle continued, “Let the punishment fit the crime would be mo

re apropos. Or, in your case, Let the expiation fit the crime.” He waved the approaching Willard away. “What we’re going to need from you, Director, is proof—incontrovertible proof—that your illegal foray into NSA territory was instigated by Veronica Hart.”

  She knew what he was asking of her. “So, basically, we’re talking an exchange of prisoners—Hart for Tyrone.”

  “You’ve grasped it entirely,” LaValle said, clearly pleased.

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  LaValle nodded. “A reasonable request. I’ll have Willard prepare you a meal.” He glanced at his watch. “Richard and I have a meeting in fifteen minutes. We’ll be back in approximately two hours. You can think over your answer until then.”

  “No, I need to think this over in another environment,” Soraya said.

  “Director Moore, given your history of deception that would be a mistake on our part.”

  “You promised I could leave if I told you my source.”

  “And so you shall, when you’ve agreed to my terms.” He rose, and with him Kendall. “You and your friend came in here together. Now you’re joined at the hip.”

  Bourne waited until Gala was sufficiently recovered. She dressed, shivering, not once looking at the body of the dead agent.

  “I’m sorry you got dragged into this,” Bourne said.

  “No you’re not. Without me you never would’ve gotten to Ivan.” Gala angrily jammed her feet into her shoes. “This is a nightmare,” she said, as if to herself. “Any minute I’ll wake up in my own bed and none of this will have happened.”

  Bourne led her toward the door.

  Gala shuddered anew as she carefully skirted the body.

  “You’re hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

  “Ha, ha, good one,” she said, as they made their way down the hall. “That includes you.”

  A moment later, he signaled her to stop. Kneeling down, he touched his fingertip to a wet spot on the carpet.