Page 44 of The Bourne Sanction (Jason Bourne 6)

  The Empire State Building,” Moira said as she studied the plans Bourne had managed to scoop up in Kirsch’s apartment. “I can’t believe I was wrong.”

  They were parked in a rest stop by the side of the autobahn on the way to the airport.

  “What do you mean, wrong?” Bourne said.

  She told him what Arthur Hauser, the engineer hired by Kaller Steelworks, had confessed about the flaw in LNG terminal’s software.

  Bourne thought a moment. “If a terrorist used that flaw to gain control of the software, what could he do?”

  “The tanker is so huge and the terminal is so complex that the docking is handled electronically.”

  “Through the software program.”

  Moira nodded.

  “So he could cause the tanker to crash into the terminal.” He turned to her. “Would that set off the tanks of liquid gas?”

  “Quite possibly, yes.”

  Bourne was thinking furiously. “Still, the terrorist would have to know about the flaw, how to exploit it, and how to reconfigure the software.”

  “It sounds simpler than trying to blow up a major building in Manhattan.”

  She was right, of course; and because of the questions he’d been pondering he grasped implications of that immediately.

  Moira glanced at her watch. “Jason, the NextGen plane with the coupling link is scheduled to take off in thirty minutes.” She put the car in gear, nosed out onto the autobahn. “We have to make up our minds before we get to the airport. Do we go to New York or to Long Beach?”

  Bourne said, “I’ve been trying to figure out why both Specter and Icoupov were so hell-bent on retrieving these plans.” He stared down at the blueprints as if willing them to speak to him. “The problem,” he said slowly and thoughtfully, “is that they were entrusted to Specter’s son, Pyotr, who was more interested in girls, drugs, and the Moscow nightlife than he was in his work. As a consequence, his network was peopled by misfits, junkies, and weaklings.”

  “Why in the world would Specter entrust so important a document to a network like that?”

  “That’s just the point,” Bourne said. “He wouldn’t.”

  Moira glanced at him. “What does that mean? Is the network bogus?”

  “Not as far as Pyotr was concerned,” Bourne said, “but so far as Specter saw it, yes, everyone who was a part of it was expendable.”

  “Then the plans are bogus, too.”

  “No, I think they’re real, and that’s what Specter was counting on,” Bourne said. “But when you consider the situation logically and coolly, which no one does when it comes to the threat of an imminent terrorist attack, the probability of a cell managing to get what it needs into the Empire State Building is very low.” He rolled up the plans. “No, I think this was all an elaborate disinformation scheme—leaking communications to Typhon, recruiting me because of my loyalty to Specter. It was all meant to mobilize American security forces on the wrong coast.”

  “So you think the Black Legion’s real target is the LNG terminal in Long Beach.”

  “Yes,” Bourne said, “I do.”

  Tyrone stood looking down at LaValle. A terrible silence had descended over the Library when he and Soraya had entered. He watched Soraya scoop up LaValle’s cell phone from the table.

  “Good,” she said with an audible sigh of relief. “No one’s called. Jason must be safe.” She tried him on her cell, but he wasn’t answering.

  Hart, who had stood up when they’d come over, said, “You look a little the worse for wear, Tyrone.”

  “Nothing a stint at the CI training school wouldn’t cure,” he said.

  Hart glanced at Soraya before saying, “I think you’ve earned that right.” She smiled. “In your case, I’ll forgo the usual warning about how rigorous the training program is, how many recruits drop out in the first two weeks. I know we won’t have to be concerned about you dropping out.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Just call me Director, Tyrone. You’ve earned that as well.”

  He nodded, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off LaValle.

  His interest did not go unnoticed. The DCI said, “Mr. LaValle, I think it only just that Tyrone decide your fate.”

  “You’re out of your mind.” LaValle looked apoplectic. “You can’t—”

  “On the contrary,” Hart said, “I can.” She turned to Tyrone. “It’s entirely up to you, Tyrone. Let the punishment fit the crime.”

  Tyrone, impaling LaValle in his glare, saw there what he always saw in the eyes of white people who confronted him: a toxic mixture of contempt, aversion, and fear. Once, that would have sent him into a frenzy of rage, but that was because of his own ignorance. Perhaps what he had seen in them was a reflection of what had been on his own face. Not today, not ever again, because during his incarceration he’d finally come to understand what Deron had tried to teach him: that his own ignorance was his worst enemy. Knowledge allowed him to work at changing other people’s expectations of him, rather than confronting them with a switchblade or a handgun.

  He looked around, saw the look of expectation on Soraya’s face. Turning back to LaValle, he said: “I think something public would be in order, something embarrassing enough to work its way up to Secretary of Defense Halliday.”

  Veronica Hart couldn’t help laughing. She laughed until tears came to her eyes, and she heard the Gilbert and Sullivan lines run through her head: His object all sublime, he will achieve in time—let the punishment fit the crime!

  Forty-Two

  I SEEM TO HAVE you at quite a disadvantage, dear Semion.” Dominic Specter watched Icoupov as he dealt with the pain of sitting up straight.

  “I need to see a doctor.” Icoupov was panting like an underpowered engine struggling up a steep grade.

  “What you need, dear Semion, is a surgeon,” Specter said. “Unfortunately, there’s no time for one. I need to get to Long Beach and I can’t afford to leave you behind.”

  “This was my idea, Asher.” Having braced his back against the seat, some small amount of color was returning to Icoupov’s cheeks.

  “So was using Pyotr. What did you call my son? Oh, yes, a useless wart on fate’s ass, that was it, wasn’t it?”

  “He was useless, Asher. All he cared about was getting laid and getting high. Did he have a commitment to the cause, did he even know what the word meant? I doubt it, and so do you.”

  “You killed him, Semion.”

  “And you had Iliev murdered.”

  “I thought you’d changed your mind,” Sever said. “I assumed you’d sent him after Bourne to expose me, to gain the upper hand by telling him about the Long Beach target. Don’t look at me like that. Is it so strange? After all, we’ve been enemies longer than we’ve been allies.”

  “You’ve become paranoid,” Icoupov said, though at the time he had sent his second in command to expose Sever. He’d temporarily lost faith in Sever’s plan, had finally felt the risks to all of them were too great. From the beginning, he’d argued with Sever against bringing Bourne into the picture, but had acquiesced to Sever’s argument that CI would bring Bourne into play sooner or later. “Far better for us to preempt them, to put Bourne in play ourselves,” Sever had said, capping his argument, and that had been the end of it, until now.

  “We’ve both become paranoid.”

  “A sad fact,” Icoupov said with a gasp of pain. It was true: Their great strength in working together without anyone in either camp knowing about it was also a weakness. Because their regimes ostensibly opposed each other, because the Black Legion’s nemesis was in reality its closest ally, all other potential rivals shied away, leaving the Black Legion to operate without interference. However, the actions both men were sometimes obliged to take for the sake of appearance caused a subconscious erosion of trust between them.

  Icoupov could feel that their level of distrust had achieved its highest point yet, and he sought to defuse it. “Pyotr killed himself—and, in fact, I was o

nly defending myself. Did you know he hired Arkadin to kill me? What would you have had me do?”

  “There were other options,” Sever said, “but your sense of justice is an eye for an eye. For a Muslim you have a great deal of the Jewish Old Testament in you. And now it appears that that very justice is about to be turned on you. Arkadin will kill you, if he can get his hands on you.” Sever laughed. “I’m the only one who can save you now. Ironic, isn’t it? You kill my son and now I have the power of life and death over you.”

  “We always had the power of life and death over each other.” Icoupov still struggled to gain equality in the conversation. “There were casualties on both sides—regrettable but necessary. The more things change the more they stay the same. Except for Long Beach.”

  “There’s the problem precisely,” Sever said. “I’ve just come from interrogating Arthur Hauser, our man on the inside. As such, he was monitored by my people. Earlier today, he got cold feet; he met with a member of Black River. It took me some time to convince him to talk, but eventually he did. He told this woman—Moira Trevor—about the software flaw.”

  “So Black River knows.”

  “If they do,” Sever said, “they aren’t doing anything about it. Hauser also told me that they withdrew from NextGen; Black River isn’t handling their security anymore.”

  “Who is?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sever said. “The point is the tanker is less than a day away from the California coastline. My software engineer is aboard and in place. The question now is whether this Black River operative is going to act on her own.”

  Icoupov frowned. “Why should she? You know Black River as well as I do, they act as a team.”

  “True enough, but the Trevor woman should have been on to her next assignment by now; my people tell me that she’s still in Munich.”

  “Maybe she’s taking some downtime.”

  “And maybe,” Sever said, “she’s going to act on the information Hauser gave her.”

  They were nearing the airport, and with some difficulty Icoupov pointed. “The only way to find out is to check to see whether she’s on the NextGen plane that’s transshipping the coupling link to the terminal.” He smiled thinly. “You seem surprised that I know so much. I have my spies as well, many of whom you know nothing about.” He gasped in pain as he searched beneath his greatcoat. “It was texted to me, but I can’t seem to find my cell.” He looked around. “It must have fallen out of my pocket when your driver manhandled me into the car.”

  Sever waved a hand, ignoring the implied rebuke. “Never mind. Hauser gave me all the details, if we can get through security.”

  “I have people in Immigration you don’t know about.”

  Sever’s smile held a measure of the cruelty that was common to both of them. “My dear Semion, you have a use after all.”

  Arkadin found Icoupov’s cell phone in the gutter where it had fallen as Icoupov had been bundled into the Mercedes. Controlling the urge to stomp it into splinters, he opened it to see whom Icoupov had called last, and noticed that the last incoming message was a text. Accessing it, he read the information on a NextGen jet due to take off in twenty minutes. He wondered why that would be important to Icoupov. Part of him wanted to go back to Devra, the same part that had balked at leaving her to go after Icoupov. But Kirsch’s building was swarming with cops; the entire block was in the process of being cordoned off, so he didn’t look back, tried not to think of her lying twisted on the floor, her blank eyes staring up at him even after she stopped breathing.

  Do you love me, Leonid?

  How had he answered her? Even now he couldn’t remember. Her death was like a dream, something vivid that made no sense. Maybe it was a symbol, but of what he couldn’t say.

  Do you love me, Leonid?

  It didn’t matter, but he knew to her it did. He had lied then, surely he’d lied to ease the moments before her death, but the thought that he’d lied to her sent a knife through whatever passed for his heart.

  He looked down at the text message and knew this was where he’d find Icoupov. Turning around, he walked back toward the cordoned-off area. Posing as a crime reporter from the Abendzeitung newspaper, he boldly accosted one of the junior uniformed police, asking him pointed questions about the shooting, stories of gunfire he’d gleaned from residents of the neighboring buildings. As he suspected, the cop was on guard duty and knew next to nothing. But that wasn’t the point; he’d now gotten inside the cordon, leaning against one of the police cars as he conducted his phony and fruitless interview.

  At length, the cop was called away, and he dismissed Arkadin, saying the commissioner would be holding a press conference at 16:00, at which time he would be free to ask all the questions he wanted. This left Arkadin alone, leaning against the fender. It didn’t take him long to walk around the front of the vehicle, and when the medical examiner’s van arrived—creating a perfect diversion—he opened the driver’s-side door, ducked in behind the wheel. The keys were already in the ignition. He started the car and drove off. When he reached the autobahn, he put on the siren and drove at top speed toward the airport.

  I won’t have a problem getting you on board,” Moira said as she turned off onto the four-lane approach to the freight terminal. She showed her NextGen ID at the guard booth, then drove on toward the parking lot outside the terminal. During the drive to the airport she’d thought long and hard about whether to tell Jason about whom she really worked for. Revealing that she was with Black River was a direct violation of her contract, and right now she prayed there’d be no reason to tell him.

  After passing through security, Customs, and Immigration, they arrived on the tarmac and approached the 747. A set of mobile stairs rose up to the high passenger door, which stood open. On the far side of the plane, the truck from Kaller Steelworks Gesellschaft was parked, along with an airport hoist, which was lifting crated parts of the LNG coupling link into the jet’s cargo area. The truck was obviously late, and the loading process was necessarily slow and tedious. Neither Kaller nor NextGen could afford an accident at this late stage.

  Moira showed her NextGen ID to one of the crew members standing at the bottom of the stairs. He smiled and nodded, welcoming them aboard. Moira breathed a sigh of relief. Now all that stood between them and the Black Legion attack was the ten-hour flight to Long Beach.

  But as they neared the top of the stairs, a figure appeared from the plane’s interior. He stood in the doorway, staring down at her.

  “Moira,” Noah said, “what are you doing here? Why aren’t you on your way to Damascus?”

  Manfred Holger, Icoupov’s man in Immigration, met them at the checkpoint to the freight terminals, got in the car with them, and they lurched forward. Icoupov had called him using Sever’s cell phone. He’d been about to go off duty, but luckily for them had not yet changed out of his uniform.

  “There’s no problem.” Holger spoke in the officious manner that had been drummed into him by his superiors. “All I have to do is check the recent immigration records to see if she’s come through the system.”

  “Not good enough,” Icoupov said. “She may be traveling under a pseudonym.”

  “All right then, I’ll go on board and check everyone’s passports.” Holger was sitting in the front seat. Now he swiveled around to look at Icoupov. “If I find that this woman, Moira Trevor, is on board, what would you have me do?”

  “Take her off the plane,” Sever said at once.

  Holger looked inquiringly at Icoupov, who nodded. Icoupov’s face was gray again, and he was having more difficulty keeping the pain at bay.

  “Bring her here to us,” Sever said.

  Holger had taken their diplomatic passports, passed them quickly through security. Now the Mercedes was sitting just off the tarmac. The 747 with the NextGen logo emblazoned on its sides and tail was at rest, still being loaded from the Kaller Steelworks truck. The driver had pulled up so that the truck shielded them from being seen by

anyone boarding the plane or already inside it.

  Holger nodded, got out of the Mercedes, and walked across the tarmac to the rolling stairs.

  Kriminalpolizei,” Arkadin said as he stopped the police car at the freight terminal checkpoint. “We have reason to believe a man who killed two people this afternoon has fled here.”

  The guards waved him past Customs and Immigration without asking for ID; the car itself was proof enough for them. As Arkadin rolled past the parking lot and onto the tarmac, he saw the jet, crates from the NextGen truck being hoisted into the cargo bay, and the black Mercedes idling some distance away from both. Recognizing the car at once, he nosed the police cruiser to a spot directly behind the Mercedes. For a moment, he sat behind the wheel, staring at the Mercedes as if the car itself were his enemy.

  He could see the silhouettes of two male figures in the backseat; it wasn’t a stretch for him to figure that one of them was Semion Icoupov. He wondered which of the handguns he had with him he should use to kill his former mentor: the SIG Sauer 9mm, the Luger, or the .22 SIG Mosquito. It all depended on what kind of damage he wanted to inflict and to what part of the body. He’d shot Stas Kuzin in the knees, the better to watch him suffer, but this was another time and, especially, another place. The airport was public space; the adjacent passenger terminal was crawling with security personnel. Just because he had been able to get this far as a member of the kriminalpolizei, he knew better than to overstep his luck. No, this kill needed to be quick and clean. All he desired was to look into Icoupov’s eyes when he died, for him to know who’d ended his life and why.

  Unlike the moment of Kuzin’s demise, Arkadin was fully aware of this moment, keyed in to the importance of the son overtaking the father, of revenging himself for the psychological and physical advantages an adult takes with a child. That he hadn’t, in fact, been a child when Mischa had sent Semion Icoupov to resurrect him never occurred to him. From the moment the two had met, he had always seen Icoupov as a father figure. He’d obeyed him as he would a father, had accepted his judgments, had swallowed whole his worldview, had been faithful to him. And now, for the sins Icoupov had visited on him, he was going to kill him.