Page 11 of The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

  Bourne made his way down the steep hillside from the warung at the summit of the rice paddies. Down below, two adolescents were just visible exiting their family compound to go to school in Tenganan village.

  He continued to descend the steep, rocky path at an almost breathtaking pace, passing the compound where the two teens had come from. A man—doubtless their father—was chopping wood, and a woman was stirring a wok-like pan over an open flame. Two skinny dogs came out to observe Bourne’s passing, but the adults couldn’t have cared less.

  The path flattened out quickly now, becoming packed dirt, somewhat wider, with the occasional rock and pile of cow manure to circumnavigate. This was the path that he and Moira had been forced to take by the “beater” who had cleverly herded them toward the killing ground in Tenganan.

  Passing through the arched gateway, he picked his way past the school and the empty badminton court. Then all at once he was in the sacred open space occupied by the three temples. Unlike the first time he had been here, the temples were empty. High above, curlicue clouds tumbled across the cerulean sky. A small breeze stirred the treetops. His steps, light and virtually silent, caused little or no stir among the herd of cows and their calves lounging against the cool stone walls of the temple at the far end, the one dappled in shade. Save for the animals, the glade was deserted.

  As he cut between the central temple and the one on the right he experienced an eerie sense of dislocation. He passed the patch of dirt where he had lain in his own blood while Moira, her face pinched with horror, had knelt over him. Time seemed to stretch into infinity, then, as he moved on, to snap back like a rubber band.

  Leaving the rear walls of the temples behind him, he soon found himself back on steeply pitched land. The forest rose like a thick green wall above him, like a many-pagodaed temple complex, reaching toward the sky. This was where the shooter must have been lying in wait for him.

  Just inside the lowest fringe of the dense forest sat a small stone shrine, its flanks wrapped in the traditional black-and-white-checked cloth, the whole protected by a small yellow parasol. The local spirit was in residence, and so was someone else. Seeing a small movement out of the corner of his eye, Bourne lunged into the foliage, wrapped his hand around a thin, brown arm, and drew out of the shadows the eldest daughter of the family that owned the warung.

  For a long moment, they stood staring silently at each other. Then Bourne knelt down so he was at her eye level.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Kasih,” she said at once.

  He smiled. “What are you doing here, Kasih?”

  The girl’s eyes were deep as pools, dark as obsidian. She had long hair that came down past her narrow shoulders. She wore a coffee-colored sarong with a pattern of frangipani blossoms just like his double ikat. Her skin was silky and unblemished.

  “Kasih—?”

  “You were hurt three full moons ago in Tenganan.”

  The smile Bourne kept on his face turned tissue-thin. “You’re mistaken, Kasih. That man died. I went to his funeral in Manggis before his body was flown back to the United States.”

  The outer corners of her eyes turned up and she gave him a curious smile, as enigmatic as the expression of the Mona Lisa. Then she reached out and her fingers opened his sweat-drenched shirt, revealing the bandaged wound.

  “You were shot, Bapak,” she said as gravely as an adult. “You didn’t die, but it’s hard for you to climb our steep hills.” She cocked her head. “Why do you do it?”

  “So that one day it won’t be hard.” He rebuttoned his shirt. “This is our secret, Kasih. No one else must find out, otherwise—”

  “The man who shot you will come back.”

  Rocked back on his heels, Bourne felt his heartbeat accelerate. “Kasih, how do you know that?”

  “Because demons always return.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Reverently approaching the shrine, she placed a handful of red and violet blossoms in the shrine’s small niche, pressing her palms together at forehead height, bowing her head in a brief prayer to protect them against the evil demons that lurked in the forest’s restless green shadows.

  When she was finished, she stepped back and, kneeling, began to dig at the rear corner of the shrine. A moment later she plucked out of the black, volcanic earth a small package of tied banana leaves. She turned and, with a fearful look in her eyes, presented it to Bourne.

  Brushing off the soft clots of dirt, he untied and peeled back the leaves, one by one. Inside, he discovered a human eyeball, made of acrylic or glass.

  “It’s the demon’s eye, Bapak,” she said, “the demon who shot you.”

  Bourne looked at her. “Where did you find this?”

  “Over there.” She pointed to the base of an immense pule or milk wood tree not more than a hundred yards away.

  “Show me,” he said, following her through the tall fan-like ferns to the tree.

  The girl would approach no closer than three paces, but Bourne hunkered down on his hams at the spot she indicated, where the ferns were broken, trampled down as if someone had left in great haste. Cocking his head up, he eyed the network of branches.

  As he made to climb up, Kasih gave a little cry. “Oh, please don’t! The spirit of Durga, the goddess of death, lives in the pule.”

  He swung one leg up, gaining a foothold on the bark, and smiled reassuringly at the girl. “Don’t worry, Kasih, I’m protected by Shiva, my own goddess of death.”

  Ascending swiftly and surely, he soon came to the thick, almost horizontal branch he had spied from the ground. Arranging himself along it on his belly, he found himself peering out through a narrow gap in the tangle of trees at the precise spot where he’d been shot. He rose up on one elbow, looked around. In a moment he found the small hollow in the place where the branch was thickest as it attached to the trunk. Something glinted dully there. Plucking it out, he saw a shell casing. Pocketing this, he shimmied back down the tree, where he grinned down at the clearly nervous girl.

  “You see, safe and sound,” he said. “I think Durga’s spirit is in another pule tree on the other side of Bali today.”

  “I didn’t know Durga could move around.”

  “Of course she can,” Bourne said. “This isn’t the only pule on Bali, is it?”

  She shook her head.

  “That proves my point,” Bourne said. “She’s not here today. It’s perfectly safe.”

  Kasih still appeared troubled. “Now that you have the demon’s eyeball, you’ll be able to find him and stop him from coming back, won’t you?”

  He knelt beside her. “The demon isn’t coming back, Kasih, that I promise you.” He rolled the eyeball between his fingers. “And, yes, with its help I hope to find the demon who shot me.”

  Moira was taken by the two NSA agents to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where she was subjected to a medical workup both harrowing and stultifying in its thoroughness. In this way, the night crawled by. When, just after ten the next morning, she was declared physically fit, materially unimpaired by the car crash, the NSA agents told her that she was free to go.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Didn’t you say you were taking me in for tampering with a crime scene?”

  “We did take you in,” one of the agents said in his clipped Midwestern accent. Then the two of them walked out, leaving her confused and not a little alarmed.

  Her alarm escalated significantly when she called four different people at the Department of Defense and State, all of whom were either “in a meeting,” “out of the building,” or, even more ominously, simply “unavailable.”

  She had just finished putting on her makeup when her cell buzzed with a text message from Steve Stevenson, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics at the DoD who’d recently hired her.

  perry 1hr, she read off her screen. Quickly erasing it, she applied lipstick, gathered up her handbag and checked out of the hospital.

&n

bsp; It was twenty-three miles from the Bethesda Naval Hospital to the Library of Congress. Google Maps claimed the ride would take thirty-six minutes, but that had to have been at two in the morning. At 11 am, when Moira took the trip by taxi, it was twenty minutes longer, which meant she got to her destination with almost no time to spare. On the way, she had phoned her office, asked for a car to meet her, giving an address three blocks from her current destination.

  “Bring a laptop and a burner,” she said before flipping her phone closed.

  It was only when she exited the taxi that she felt aches and pains spring up in all parts of her body. She felt a massive post-trauma headache coming on. Digging in her handbag, she took three Advil, swallowing them dry. The day was mild but overcast and dull, no break in the gunmetal sky, no wind to speak of. The pale pink cherry blossoms were already trampled underfoot, tulips were blooming, and there was an unmistakable earthy scent in the air as spring advanced.

  Stevenson’s text message, perry, referred to Roland Hinton Perry who, at the tender age of twenty-seven, had created the Fountain of the Court of Neptune sculpture on the far west side of the entrance to the Library of Congress. It was on the pavement level, rather than at the elevated level of the porte-cochere main entrance. Set into three niches of the stone retaining wall that was flanked by the entryway staircases, the fountain—with its twelve-foot bronze sculpture of the Roman god of the sea as a fearsome centerpiece—emitted a raw and restless energy that contrasted dramatically with the sedate exterior of the building itself. Most visitors to the library never even knew it existed. Moira and Stevenson did, however. It was one of the half a dozen meeting places scattered in and around the district they had agreed upon.

  She saw him right away. He was in a navy-blue blazer and gray lightweight wool trousers, his shoulders hunched up around his brick-red ears. He was facing away from her, staring at the rather violent countenance of Neptune, which meant that his head was slightly thrown back, his bald spot coming into prominence.

  He didn’t move when she came up and stood beside him. They might have been two totally unconnected tourists, not the least because he displayed an open copy of Fodor’s guidebook to Washington, DC, the way a pheasant announces its presence by spreading its tail.

  “Not a happy day for you, is it?” he said without turning in her direction or even seeming to move his lips.

  “What the hell is going on?” Moira asked. “No one in DoD, including you, is taking my calls.”

  “It seems, my dear, that you’ve stepped in a great steaming pile of shit.” Stevenson flipped a page of the guidebook. He was one of those old-school government functionaries who went to a barber for a shave every day, had a manicure once a week, belonged to all the right clubs, and made sure his opinions were held by the majority before he voiced them. “No one wants to be contaminated with the stink.”

  “Me? I haven’t done a damn thing.” Except piss off my former bosses, she said to herself.

  She thought about the trouble Noah had gone to in order to get Jay’s cell phone and to have her detained. Because she worked that part out on the way over here. The only reason for the NSA agents to say they were taking her in for tampering at the accident site and then let her go without charging her was that for some reason Noah needed her out of commission overnight. Why? Maybe she’d find out once she downloaded the files on the thumb drive she’d found sewn into the lining of Jay’s jacket, but for now her best strategy was to pretend she knew absolutely nothing.

  “No.” Stevenson shook his head. “What we have here is something more. I think someone at your company trod on a nerve. The late Jay Weston, perhaps?”

  “Do you know what Weston dug up?”

  “If I did,” Stevenson said slowly and carefully, “I’d be roadkill by now.”

  “That big?”

  He rubbed his immaculate red cheek. “Bigger.”

  “What the hell is going on between the NSA and Black River?” she said.

  “You’re a Black River ex-employee, you tell me.” He pursed his lips. “No, on second thought, I don’t want to know anything, not even speculation. Ever since the news of the jetliner explosion hit the wires, the atmosphere at DoD and the Pentagon has been shrouded in a toxic fog.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Nobody’s talking.”

  “Nobody ever talks up there.”

  Stevenson nodded. “True enough, but this is different. Everyone’s walking around on eggshells. Even the secretaries seem terrified. In my twenty years of government service I’ve never experienced anything like it. Except—”

  Moira felt a ball of ice form in her stomach. “Except what?”

  “Except right before we invaded Iraq.”

  9

  WILLARD WATCHED Ian Bowles as he exited Firth’s surgery. He’d marked him the second time he’d showed up at the compound and, as with every other of the doctor’s patients, he’d made inquiries. Bowles was the only one about whom nothing was known locally. Willard hadn’t spent the last three months simply training Bourne. Like all good agents, he’d immediately begun to acquaint himself with his environment. He’d become friendly with all the key people in the area who, de facto, became his eyes and ears. The advantage of being in Manggis was that neither the village nor the surrounding area was highly populated. Unlike Kuta and Ubud, only a smattering of tourists found their way to the area, so it wasn’t difficult to identify the patients who came to see the doctor. By this homespun method, Ian Bowles stood out like a sore thumb. However, Willard wouldn’t act until Bowles revealed himself one way or the other.

  Ever since he’d been released from his undercover duties at the NSA safe house in rural Virginia, Willard had pondered long and hard how he could be of best use to the clandestine service, which functioned as his mother, father, sister, and brother. Treadstone had been Alexander Conklin’s dream. Only Conklin and Willard himself knew Treadstone’s ultimate purpose.

  He went about this work with extreme caution because he was laboring under a handicap Conklin never had to deal with. In Alex’s day the Old Man had signed off on Treadstone. All Conklin had to do was to fly below the CI radar, to make good on the goals he’d promised the Old Man, while working on his own agenda deep in the shadows. Willard did not have the advantage of such support. As far as Veronica Hart and CI were concerned Treadstone was as dead and buried as Conklin himself. Willard was far too canny to believe Hart would allow him a restart, which meant that he had to work clandestinely within one of the world’s largest clandestine organizations. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

  As he followed Bowles out of the compound and down a deserted lane he reflected on how fortuitous Moira Trevor’s phone call had been, since this remote island off the CI grid was the perfect place to begin the resurrection of Treadstone.

  Up ahead of him, Bowles had stopped beside a motor scooter, parked beneath the shade of a frangipani tree. Bowles took out his cell phone. As he pressed the speed dial key, Willard unfurled a thin metal wire with wooden handles on either end. Stepping quickly up behind Bowles, he whipped the wire around the other’s throat and pulled so hard on the handles Bowles was lifted onto the tips of his toes.

  The New Zealander dropped his cell, reaching around behind him to make a grab at his unseen assailant. Dancing out of the way, Willard maintained the lethal pressure on the wire. Bowles’s gestures became more frantic. He tore into the flesh of his own neck in his frenzy to breathe, his eyes bulged in their sockets, red threads mottling the whites. Then there was a sudden foul stench and he collapsed.

  Unwinding the wire, Willard scooped up the cell and, as he walked briskly away, checked the number Bowles had been dialing. He recognized the first digits as those of a Russian cell phone. The call had failed, and he walked into Manggis to a spot he knew to be cell-receptive and hit redial. A moment later a familiar male voice answered.

  Willard, momentarily stunned, nevertheless gathered himself and said, “Your man Bowles is dead. Don’t s

end another,” then hung up before Leonid Danilovich Arkadin could say a word.

  When Moira left Stevenson she walked opposite the direction she needed to go. She spent twenty minutes following circuitous routes, checking in car side-mirrors and plate-glass windows, looking for a tail, and when she had assured herself that she wasn’t being followed, she walked back to where the car was waiting for her three blocks west of the Fountain of Poseidon.

  The driver saw her coming and got out of the car. Not looking at her or acknowledging her in any way, he walked toward her. They passed each other close enough for him to hand off the keys without stopping or even breaking stride.

  She went past the parked car, crossed the street, and stood looking around as if unsure which way to go. In fact, she was scrutinizing the environment, breaking it down into vectors, which she inspected for anyone in the least bit suspicious. A boy and a girl, presumably his sister, played with a golden Lab under the watchful eye of their father. A mother wheeled her baby carriage; two sweaty joggers dodged in and out, listening through in-ear plugs to iPods attached to armbands.

  Nothing seemed out of place, which was precisely what worried her. NSA agents on the street or even in passing cars she could deal with. It was the people who might be placed behind building windows or on rooftops that concerned her. Well, there was no help for it, she thought. She’d done the best she could, now it was put one foot in front of the other and pray that she’d slipped any surveillance that might have been attached to her once the two NSA agents had left her at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  As an added precaution, she pried the SIM chip out of her phone and ground it beneath the heels of her shoe. She kicked it into a storm drain in the gutter, then chucked her cell in after it. She had the key in her hand as she approached the car from across the street. She crossed in front of it and dropped her handbag. Kneeling down, she dug out her compact, used the mirror inside to check the underside of the car as best she could. She checked under the rear as well. What was she expecting to find? Nothing, hopefully. But there was always a chance that a passing NSA agent had left a bug on the under chassis.