Page 26 of The Bourne Sanction (Jason Bourne 6)

  “What is it?”

  Bourne examined his fingertip. “Blood.”

  Gala gave a little whimper. “What’s it doing out here?”

  “Good question,” Bourne said as he crept along the hallway. He noted a tiny smear in front of a narrow door. Wrenching it open, he switched on the utility room’s light.

  “Christ,” Gala said.

  Inside was a crumpled body with a bullet in its forehead. It was nude, but there was a pile of clothes tossed in a corner, obviously those of the NSA agent. Bourne knelt down, rifled through them, hoping to find some form of ID, to no avail.

  “What are you doing?” Gala cried.

  Bourne spotted a tiny triangle of dark brown leather sticking out from under the corpse, which was only visible from this low angle. Rolling the corpse on its side, he discovered a wallet. The dead man’s ID would prove useful, since Bourne now had none of his own. His assumed identity, which he’d used to check in, was unusable, because the moment the corpse was found in Fyodor Ilianovich Popov’s room, there’d be a massive manhunt for him. Bourne reached out, took the wallet.

  Then he rose, grabbed Gala’s hand, and got them out of there. He insisted they take the service elevator down to the kitchen. From there it was a simple matter to find the rear entrance.

  Outside, it had begun to snow again. The wind, slicing in from the square, was icy and bitter. Flagging down a bombila, Bourne was about to give the cabbie the address of Gala’s friend, then realized that Yakov, the cabbie working for the NSA, knew that address.

  “Get in the taxi,” Bourne said quietly to Gala, “but be prepared to get out quickly and do exactly as I say.”

  Soraya didn’t need a couple of hours to make up her mind; she didn’t even need a couple of minutes.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get Tyrone out of here.”

  LaValle turned back to regard her. “Well, now, that kind of capitulation would do my heart good if I didn’t know you to be such a duplicitous little bitch.

  “Unfortunately,” he went on, “in your case, verbal capitulation isn’t quite as convincing as it would be in others. That being the case, the general here will make crystal clear to you the consequences of further treachery on your part.”

  Soraya rose, along with Kendall.

  LaValle stopped her with his voice, “Oh, and, Director, when you leave here you’ll have until ten tomorrow morning to make your decision. I’ll expect you back here then. I hope I’ve made myself clear.”

  The general led her out of the Library, down the corridor to the door to the basement. The moment she saw where he was taking her, she said, “No! Don’t do this. Please. There’s no need.”

  But Kendall, his back ramrod-straight, ignored her. When she hesitated at the security door, he grasped her firmly by the elbow and, as if she were a child, steered her down the stairs.

  In due course, she found herself in the same viewing room. Tyrone was on his knees, his arm behind him, bound hands on the tabletop, which was higher than shoulder level. This position was both extremely painful and humiliating. His torso was forced forward, his shoulder blades back.

  Soraya’s heart was filled with dread. “Enough,” she said. “I get it. You’ve made your point.”

  “By no means,” General Kendall said.

  Soraya could see two shadowy figures moving about the cell. Tyrone had become aware of them, too. He tried to twist around to see what they were up to. One of the men shoved a black hood over his head.

  My God, Soraya said to herself. What did the other man have in his hands?

  Kendall shoved her hard against the one-way glass. “Where your friend is concerned we’re just warming up.”

  Two minutes later, they began to fill the waterboarding tank. Soraya began to scream.

  Bourne asked the bombila driver to pass by the front of the hotel. Everything seemed calm and normal, which meant that the bodies on the seventeenth floor hadn’t been discovered yet. But it wouldn’t be long before someone went to look for the missing room-service waiter.

  He turned his attention across the street, searching for Yakov. He was still outside his car, talking to a fellow driver. Both of them were swinging their arms to keep their circulation going. He pointed out Yakov to Gala, who recognized him. When they’d passed the square, Bourne had the bombila pull over.

  He turned to Gala. “I want you to go back to Yakov and have him take you to Universitetskaya Ploshchad at Vorobyovy Gory.” Bourne was speaking of the top of the only hill in the otherwise flat city, where lovers and university students went to get drunk, make love, and smoke dope while looking out over the city. “Wait there for me and whatever you do, don’t get out of the car. Tell the cabbie you’re meeting someone there.”

  “But he’s the one who’s been spying on us,” Gala said.

  “Don’t worry,” Bourne reassured her. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  The view out over Vorobyovy Gory was not so very grand. First, there was the ugly bulk of Luzhniki Stadium in the mid-foreground. Second, there were the spires of the Kremlin, which would hardly inspire even the most ardent lovers. But for all that, at night it was as romantic as Moscow could get.

  Bourne, who’d had his bombila track the one Gala was in all the way there, was relieved that Yakov had orders only to observe and report back. Anyway, the NSA was interested in Bourne, not a young blond dyev.

  Arriving at the overlook, Bourne paid the fare he’d agreed to at the beginning of the ride, strode down the sidewalk, and got into the front seat of Yakov’s taxi.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Yakov said. Then he recognized Bourne and made a scramble for the Makarov he kept in a homemade sling under the ratty dash.

  Bourne pulled his hand away and held him back against the seat while taking possession of the handgun. He pointed it at Yakov. “Who do you report to?”

  Yakov said in a whiny voice, “I challenge you to sit in my seat night after night, driving around the Garden Ring, crawling endlessly down Tverskaya, being cut out of fares by kamikaze bombily and make enough to live on.”

  “I don’t care why you pimp yourself out to the NSA,” Bourne told him. “I want to know who you report to.”

  Yakov held up his hand. “Listen, listen, I’m from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. It’s not so nice there, who can make a living? So I pack my family and we travel to Russia, the beating heart of the new federation, where the streets are paved with rubles. But when I arrive here I am treated like dirt. People in the street spit on my wife. My children are beaten and called terrible names. And I can’t get a job anywhere in this city. ‘Moscow for Muscovites,’ that is the refrain I hear over and over. So I take to the bombily because I have no other choice. But this life, sir, you have no idea how difficult it is. Sometimes after twelve hours I come home with a hundred rubles, sometimes with nothing. I cannot be faulted for taking money the Americans offer.

  “Russia is corrupt, but Moscow, it’s more than corrupt. There isn’t a word for how bad things are here. The government is made up of thugs and criminals. The criminals plunder the natural resources of Russia—oil, natural gas, uranium. Everyone takes, takes, takes so they can have big foreign cars, a different dyev for every day of the week, a dacha in Miami Beach. And what’s left for us? Potatoes and beets, if we work eighteen hours a day and if we’re lucky.”

  “I have no animosity toward you,” Bourne said. “You have a right to earn a living.” He handed Yakov a fistful of dollars.

  “I see no one, sir. I swear. Just voices on my cell phone. All moneys come to a post office box in—”

  Bourne carefully placed the muzzle of the Makarov in Yakov’s ear. The cabbie cringed, turned mournful eyes on Bourne.

  “Please, please, sir, what have I done?”

  “I saw you outside the Metropolya with the man who tried to kill me.”

  Yakov squealed like a skewered rat. “Kill you? I’m employed merely to watch and report. I have no knowledge about?

??”

  Bourne hit the cabbie. “Stop lying and tell me what I want to know.”

  “All right, all right.” Yakov was shaking with fear. “The American who pays me, his name is Low. Harris Low.”

  Bourne made him give a detailed description of Low, then he took Yakov’s cell phone.

  “Get out of the car,” he said.

  “But sir, I answered all your questions,” Yakov protested. “You’ve taken everything of mine. What more do you want?”

  Bourne leaned across him, opened the door, then shoved him out. “This is a popular place. Plenty of bombily come and go. You’re a rich man now. Use some of the money I gave you to get a ride home.”

  Sliding behind the wheel he put the Zhig in gear, drove back into the heart of the city.

  Harris Low was a dapper man with a pencil mustache. He had the prematurely white hair and ruddy complexion of many blue-blooded families in the American Northeast. That he had spent the last eleven years in Moscow, working for NSA, was a testament to his father, who had trod the same perilous path. Low had idolized his father, had wanted to be like him for as long as he could remember. Like his father, he had the Stars and Stripes tattooed on his soul. He’d been a running back in college, gone through the rigorous physical training to be an NSA field agent, had tracked down terrorists in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. He wasn’t afraid to engage in hand-to-hand combat or to kill a target. He did it for God and country.

  During his eleven years in the capital of Russia, Low had made many friends, some of whom were the sons of his father’s friends. Suffice to say he had developed a network of apparatchiks and siloviks for whom a quid pro quo was the order of the day. Harris held no illusions. To further his country’s cause he would scratch anyone’s back—if they, in turn, scratched his.

  He heard about the murders at the Metropolya Hotel from a friend of his in the General Prosecutor’s Office, who’d caught the police squeal. Harris met this individual at the hotel and was consequently one of the first people on the scene.

  He had no interest in the corpse in the utility closet, but he immediately recognized Anthony Prowess. Excusing himself from the crime scene, he went into the stairwell off the seventeenth-floor hallway, punched in an overseas number on his cell. A moment later Luther LaValle answered.

  “We have a problem,” Low said. “Prowess has been rendered inoperative with extreme prejudice.”

  “That’s very disturbing,” LaValle said. “We have a rogue operative loose in Moscow who has now murdered one of our own. I think you know what to do.”

  Low understood. There was no time to bring in another of NSA’s wet-work specialists, which meant terminating Bourne was up to him.

  “Now that he’s killed an American citizen,” LaValle said, “I’ll bring the Moscow police and the General Prosecutor’s Office into the picture. They’ll have the same photo of him I’m sending to your cell within the hour.”

  Low thought a moment. “The question is tracking him. Moscow is way behind the curve in closed-circuit TVs.”

  “Bourne is going to need money,” LaValle said. “He couldn’t take enough through Customs when he landed, which means he wouldn’t try. He’ll have set up a local account at a Moscow bank. Get the locals to help with surveillance pronto.”

  “Consider it done,” Low said.

  “And Harris. Don’t make the same mistake with Bourne that Prowess did.”

  Bourne took Gala to her friend’s apartment, which was lavish even by American standards. Her friend, Lorraine, was an American of Armenian extraction. Her dark eyes and hair, her olive complexion, all served to increase her exoticism. She hugged and kissed Gala, greeted Bourne warmly, and invited him to stay for a drink or tea.

  As he took a tour through the rooms, Gala said, “He’s worried about my safety.”

  “What’s happened?” Lorraine asked. “Are you all right?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Bourne said, coming back into the living room. “This’ll all blow over in a couple of days.” Having satisfied himself of the security of the apartment, he left them with the warning not to open the door for anyone they didn’t know.

  Ivan Volkin had directed Bourne to go to Novoslobodskaya 20, where the meet with Dimitri Maslov would take place. At first Bourne thought it lucky that the bombila he flagged down knew how to find the address, but when he was dropped off he understood. Novoslobodskaya 20 was the address of Motorhome, a new club jammed with young partying Muscovites. Gigantic flat-panel screens above the center island bar showed telecasts of American baseball, basketball, football, English rugby, and World Cup soccer. The floor of the main room was dominated by tables for Russian billiards and American pool. Following Volkin’s direction, Bourne headed for the back room, which was fitted out as an Arabian Nights hookah room complete with overlapping carpets, jewel-toned cushions, and, of course, gaily colored brass hookahs being smoked by lounging men and women.

  Bourne, stopped at the doorway by two overdeveloped members of club security, told them he was here to see Dimitri Maslov. One of them pointed to a man lounging and smoking a hookah in the far left corner.

  “Maslov,” Bourne said when he reached the pile of cushions surrounding a low brass table.

  “My name is Yevgeny. Maslov isn’t here.” The man gestured. “Sit down, please.”

  Bourne hesitated a moment, then sat on a cushion opposite Yevgeny. “Where is he?”

  “Did you think it would be so simple? One call and poof! he pops into existence like a genie from a lamp?” Yevgeny shook his head, offered Bourne the pipe. “Good shit. Try some.”

  When Bourne declined, Yevgeny shrugged, took a toke deep into his lungs, held it, then let it out with an audible hiss. “Why do you want to see Maslov?”

  “That’s between me and him,” Bourne said.

  Yevgeny shrugged again. “As you like. Maslov is out of the city.”

  “Then why was I told to come here?”

  “To be judged, to see whether you are a serious individual. To see whether Maslov will make the decision to see you.”

  “Maslov trusts people to make decisions for him?”

  “He is a busy man. He has other things on his mind.”

  “Like how to win the war with the Azeri.”

  Yevgeny’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you can see Maslov next week.”

  “I need to see him now,” Bourne said.

  Yevgeny shrugged. “As I said, he’s out of Moscow. But he may be back tomorrow morning.”

  “Why don’t you ensure it.”

  “I could,” Yevgeny said. “But it will cost you.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand dollars to talk to Dimitri Maslov?”

  Yevgeny shook his head. “The American dollar has become too debased. Ten thousand Swiss francs.”

  Bourne thought a moment. He didn’t have that kind of money on him, and certainly not in Swiss francs. However, he had the information Baronov had given him on the safe-deposit box at the Moskva Bank. The problem was that it was in the name of Fyodor Ilianovich Popov, who was no doubt now wanted for questioning regarding the body of the man in his room at the Metropolya Hotel. There was no help for it, Bourne thought. He’d have to take the chance.

  “I’ll have the money tomorrow morning,” Bourne said.

  “That will be satisfactory.”

  “But I’ll give it to Maslov and no one else.”

  Yevgeny nodded. “Done.” He wrote something on a slip of paper, showed it to Bourne. “Please be at this address at noon tomorrow.” Then he struck a match, held it to the corner of the paper, which burned steadily until it crumbled into ash.

  Semion Icoupov, in his temporary headquarters in Grindelwald, took the news of Harun Iliev’s death very hard. He’d been a witness to death many times, but Harun had been like a brother to him. Closer, even, because the two had no sibling baggage to clutter and distort their relationship. Icoupov had relied on Harun for

his wise counsel. His was a sad loss indeed.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the orchestrated chaos around him. A score of people were staffing computer consoles hooked up to satellite feeds, surveillance networks, public transportation CCTV from major hubs all over the world. They were coming to the final buildup to the Black Legion’s attack; every screen had to be scrutinized and analyzed, the faces of suspicious people picked out and run through a nebula of software that could identify individuals. From this, Icoupov’s operatives were building a mosaic of the real-time backdrop against which the attack was scheduled to take place.

  Icoupov became aware that three of his aides were clustered around his desk. Apparently, they’d been trying to talk to him.

  “What is it?” His voice was testy, the better to cover up his grief and inattention.

  Ismail, the most senior of his aides, cleared his throat. “We wanted to know who you intend to send after Jason Bourne now that Harun…” His voice trailed off.

  Icoupov had been contemplating the same question. He’d made a mental list that included any number of people he could send, but he kept eliminating most of them, for one reason or another. But on the second and third run-through he began to realize that these reasons were in one way or another trivial. Now, as Ismail asked the question again, he knew.

  He looked up into his aides’ anxious faces and said. “It’s me. I’m going after Bourne myself.”

  Twenty-Four

  IT WAS disturbingly hot in the Alter Botanischer Garten, and as humid as a rain forest. The enormous glass panels were opaque with beads of mist sliding down their faces. Moira, who had already taken off her gloves and long winter coat, now shrugged out of the thick cable-knit sweater that helped protect her from Munich’s chill, damp morning, which could penetrate to the bone.

  When it came to German cities, she much preferred Berlin to Munich. For one thing, Berlin had for many years been on the cutting edge of popular music. Berlin was where such notable pop icons as David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Lou Reed, among many others, had come to recharge their creative batteries by listening to what musicians far younger than they were creating. For another, it hadn’t lost its legacy of the war and its aftermath. Berlin was like a living museum that was reinventing itself with every breath it took.