Page 23 of The Bourne Dominion (Jason Bourne 9)

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  HENDRICKS WAS JUST wrapping up the eighth Samaritan strategy session in the last thirty-six hours—this one on staff deployment along the perimeter that had been established around the Indigo Ridge mine—when Davies, one of his half a dozen aides, entered the room.

  “It’s the POTUS on the secure line, sir,” Davies whispered in his ear before departing.

  “Okay, out,” Hendricks said to the participants. “But stand by for final orders. We deploy personnel in four hours.”

  After everyone had filed out and the door was closed, Hendricks swiveled his chair and, for a moment, stared out the window at the pristine, newly mowed lawn, bordered by the picket line of massive concrete anti-terrorist blockades that had been erected in 2001. Someone, perhaps in a fit of irony, had placed a row of flowerpots atop them. Like planting flowers on a battleship, he thought. The blockades stood immutable; their purpose could not be mitigated. Tourists milled on the other side of them, but the lawn was spotless, not a single weed allowed to show its face. Something about that deserted expanse depressed Hendricks.

  Sighing inwardly, he picked up the receiver connected to the secure line to the White House.

  “Chris, you there?”

  There was a hollow sound, peculiar to the encryption program that scrambled their words every ten seconds.

  “I’m right here, Mr. President.”

  “How’s the boy!”

  Hendricks’s stomach contracted. The president’s voice evinced that false heartiness it typically took on when he had some bad news to impart to the recipient.

  “Tip-top, sir.”

  “That’s the spirit. How are the plans for Samaritan progressing?”

  “Almost complete, sir.”

  “Uhm-hum,” the president said, by which he meant he wasn’t listening.

  Hendricks reached into a drawer for the box of Prilosec he always kept on hand for emergencies.

  “It’s Samaritan I want to talk to you about. It so happens that this morning I had breakfast with Ken Marshall and Billy Stokes.”

  The president paused to allow the two names to sink in. Marshall, who had been in the initial Samaritan meeting in the Oval Office, and Stokes, who had not, were, respectively, the Pentagon’s and the DoD’s most powerful generals.

  “Anyway,” the POTUS continued, “with one thing and another, the conversation eventually came around to Samaritan. Now listen here, Chris, it’s Ken and Billy’s considered opinion that as far as Samaritan is concerned, CI’s gotten the short end of the stick.”

  “You mean Danziger.”

  Hendricks could sense the president taking a breath while he counted to ten.

  “What I mean is that I agree with them. I want you to give Danziger a larger role in the operation.”

  Hendricks closed his eyes. He swallowed a Prilosec even as he felt a headache beating a tattoo against his forehead. “Sir, with all due respect, Samaritan is already set.”

  “Almost. You said it yourself, Chris.”

  Was it possible to scream at yourself? Hendricks wondered.

  “This is my operation,” he said doggedly. “You gave it to me.”

  “The Lord giveth, Chris, and the Lord taketh away.”

  Hendricks gritted his teeth. It was no use telling the president what a perfect little shit M. Errol Danziger was. The president had appointed him. Even supposing the POTUS shared Hendricks’s opinion, he would never admit that he’d made a mistake, not in the current perilous political climate. One false move would set alight the worldwide blogosphere, which would in turn ignite a firestorm of talking heads on CNN and Fox News, which would spawn endless op-ed column inches. The poll numbers the president and his advisers scrutinized every month would plummet. No, these days even the president of the United States needed to be ultra-cautious with both his choices and his statements.

  “I’ll do what I can to soothe the ruffled feathers,” Hendricks said.

  “Music to my ears, Chris. Keep me informed on your progress.”

  With that fiat, the president disconnected. Hendricks didn’t know what gave him more pain, his stomach or his head. He knew Danziger was aiming for complete control of Samaritan, which would surely end in disaster. Danziger was a career opportunist. Amassing power was his sole objective. He had come over to CI from NSA and for the past year he had been remaking CI into a carbon copy of NSA. NSA being an extension of the Pentagon, this was not good news for the American intelligence community. The military relied far too heavily on remote surveillance: eyes in the sky, spy drones, and the like. CI’s stock in trade had always been human eyes and ears in the field. The intercom buzzed, interrupting his misery.

  “Sir, everyone’s out here waiting.” Davies’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Do you want to resume the briefing?”

  Hendricks rubbed his forehead. A fierce streak of rebelliousness bubbled up in him. “They have their orders. Tell them to put the deployment into effect immediately.”

  Russian,” Bourne said. “What form of Russian?”

  Kaja stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Dialect. Was it southern or—”

  “Moscow. He was from Moscow.”

  Bourne put his glass down onto a table inlaid with Moroccan tiles. “You’re certain?”

  Kaja spoke to him in the Russian dialect used by Muscovites.

  “Your father was working for the Russians,” Bourne said.

  “That’s the first thing I considered when I heard him,” Kaja said, “but it doesn’t seem credible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Both my parents hated the Russians.”

  “Perhaps your mother did,” Bourne said carefully. “But as for your father, if he was working for the Russians his hatred for them would be part of his cover.”

  “Hiding in plain sight.”

  Bourne nodded.

  She got up then. Don Fernando caught Bourne’s eye. Bourne could see that the Spaniard didn’t want him to continue this topic. Kaja stood in front of the window, staring at her reflection much as Bourne himself had done at Vegas’s house the night before the helicopter attack.

  A terrible silence invaded the room, but it was Kaja’s silence. Neither Bourne nor Don Fernando felt it wise to break it.

  “Do you think it’s true?” Kaja’s voice seemed to come from another place.

  At length, she turned back in to the room and looked from one to the other, repeating her question.

  “From what you’ve told us,” Bourne said, “it seems the likeliest possibility.”

  “Fuck,” Kaja said. “Fuck-fuck-fuck.”

  Don Fernando stirred, clearly uncomfortable. “There’s always the possibility that Jason is wrong.”

  Kaja laughed, but there was a bitter edge to it. “Sure. Thank you, Don Fernando, but I’m long past the age where I can believe in fairy tales.” She turned to Bourne, hands on her hips. “So. Any ideas?”

  Bourne knew she meant who, specifically, her father might have worked for. He shook his head. “Since he was a foreign national working outside Russia, the SVR—Russia’s equivalent of America’s Central Intelligence—is a possibility. But frankly, he could just as easily have been recruited by one of the grupperovka families.”

  “The Russian mob,” Kaja said.

  “Yes.”

  She frowned. “That would, at least, be a more logical choice for him to make.”

  “Kaja,” Don Fernando said, “I caution you against trying to apply logic here.”

  “Don Fernando is right,” Bourne said. “We have no idea of your father’s situation. For all we know, he may have been coerced into working for the Russians.”

  But already Kaja was shaking her head. “No, I know this much about my father: He could not be coerced.”

  “Even if your life and the lives of your sisters hung in the balance?”

  “He left us flat.” Her expression was set firm. “He didn’t care about us; he had other things on his mind.”

r />   “He killed for a living,” Bourne said. “It takes a special kind of human being to do it, an even more special kind to be successful at it.”

  She engaged his eyes with hers. “My point exactly. No pity, no remorse, no love. Full disconnection from humanity.” She drew her shoulders back, defiant. “I mean, that’s what makes it possible to kill not once, but over and over again. Disconnection. It’s not so hard to put a bullet in the back of the head of a thing.”

  Bourne knew that she was talking about him as much as her late father. “There are times when killing is necessary.”

  “A necessary evil.”

  He nodded. “Whatever you choose to call it doesn’t make it any less of a necessity.”

  Kaja swung back to confront the night, shimmering dimly just beyond the panes of glass.

  “Leave Christien Norén to the unknown,” Don Fernando said. “Trust me when I tell you that his life, his fate, are over and done with. Kaja, it’s time for you and your sister to move on.”

  Kaja gave a dark laugh that was more like a bark. “You try telling Skara that, Don Fernando. She has never listened to me, and I can assure you she won’t start now.”

  “Do you know where she is?” the Spaniard asked.

  Kaja shook her head. “When we parted, we swore an oath not to look for each other. We have had no contact in more than ten years. We were children then, and now…” She turned back to him. “Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.”

  “It would be tragic if that were true. At least, for you.” Don Fernando unfolded on creaky knees and crossed the room to stand beside her. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “There is hope for you, Kaja. There always was, I sincerely believe that. As for Skara…” His last words hung ominously in the room.

  “She’s doomed, isn’t she?”

  Don Fernando looked at her, a terrible sorrow informing his features.

  Bourne stepped toward her. “Why do you say that?”

  Kaja looked away.

  “Because,” Don Fernando said, “Skara suffers from dissociative identity disorder.”

  Kaja’s eyes locked on Bourne’s. “My sister has six distinct alter egos, all of them as real as any of us in this room.”

  Any meeting with M. Errol Danziger was fraught with both tension and peril—the man had a hair-trigger temper and all too often took offense at even the smallest perceived slight. For some reason he could not quantify, Hendricks felt unprepared, and so he put off the meeting until late in the afternoon, when he knew he should have taken Danziger to lunch.

  He took Maggie to lunch instead. This meant—because she requested it—picking her up outside The Breadline on Pennsylvania Avenue, where she had bought enough food for their picnic on the National Mall.

  The hazy sun moved in and out of the cloud cover as they walked through the grass. Hendricks’s security detail, none too happy with their boss’s choice of venues, nevertheless dutifully followed orders, staking out a suitable patch of grass around which they formed a strict perimeter.

  Hendricks and Maggie sat facing each other, cross-legged like kids. She spread out the food she had bought. He was almost giddy with the child-like delight that comes from playing hooky. Here he was with Maggie, eating sandwiches, drinking iced tea, and basking in her smile and her scent.

  “You surprised me with your call.” She took a small, precise bite of a ham and Brie with jalapeño mustard. Her golden hair was drawn back in a thick ponytail. She was wearing a scoop-neck black-and-white polka-dot dress cinched with a wide black patent-leather belt. She had taken off her low heels, her bare toes wriggling in the grass.

  “I’m just glad you weren’t tending to my roses,” he said.

  “Who said I wasn’t?” she said with a wry smile. She took another bite, small and precise. “I would have come anyway.”

  This statement so pleased him that his sandwich caught in his throat. He took a couple of sips of tea to wash the food down. Looking at her now in this idyllic setting he realized that he was falling in love. His first instinct was to be skeptical, to admonish himself for being foolish, adolescent, and, worse, possibly vulnerable. And then the thought was washed away. Looking at her now he experienced the sensation of falling, of a delicious weightlessness that he associated with his dreams, though he could not dredge up any one in particular. He was happy, and in his life happiness was the rarest of commodities.

  Maggie cocked her head. “Christopher? What are you thinking?”

  He set his sandwich down. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I was thinking about a meeting I scheduled for the end of the day.” Hendricks hesitated. It occurred to him that a fresh perspective might help him get a grip on dealing with Danziger and the president. “The individual I’m meeting with is extremely difficult.”

  “That can mean so many things.”

  Hendricks could see by Maggie’s expression that he had her undivided attention, and he was pleased. “He’s an egomaniac,” he said. “He’s come up in the world riding other people’s coattails—mainly my predecessor’s.” This was as specific as he planned to get with her. He might seek her opinion, but he was also unfailingly security-conscious. “Now a situation has arisen where he’s insinuating himself into a position of power on an initiative of mine.”

  Maggie looked thoughtful. “I don’t see a problem. A man who makes his living riding other people’s coattails can’t be very competent.”

  “But that is the problem. If he gets what he wants he’s sure to screw the pooch.”

  “Then let him.”

  “What? You must be joking.”

  Maggie carefully rewrapped the uneaten half of her sandwich. “Consider, Christopher. This man screws the pooch, as you so colorfully put it—”

  “But it’s my pooch he’ll be screwing.”

  “—and you ride in to the rescue.” Maggie took out a chocolate chip cookie and broke off a small piece, which she held between her fingertips. “The people who are backing this individual will be so humiliated they’re sure to withdraw their support of him.” She popped the bit of cookie into her mouth, chewed slowly and luxuriantly. “In chess it’s known as retreating one square to take the board.”

  Hendricks sat back, watching as she broke off another piece of cookie and handed it to him. He chewed thoughtfully, the chocolate melting in his mouth. What she was proposing ran against every protocol he had set for himself. Give in? Give Danziger his head? What a hellish thought.

  He swallowed, and Maggie handed him more. But then again why not? he asked himself. After all, it was what the president wanted. Not only was the POTUS’s head on the block, but so were those of Marshall and Stokes. Hendricks thought it would feel mighty fine to take them all down a couple of pegs, especially the two generals who were a constant pain in his ass. And think of the humiliation Danziger himself would suffer.

  Thinking of Danziger and Indigo Ridge reminded him: Why the hell hadn’t he heard from Peter Marks?

  Far beyond the periphery of the straining mob, Karpov paused long enough in his flight to take inventory. His leg hurt like hell, but otherwise he was unhurt. If he were a God-fearing man he would have said a prayer for Lana Lang, who’d had the foresight to buy a car with side air bags.

  The rain had abated. Water still sluiced along the gutters, but the clouds were lifting and only a slight drizzle remained of the storm. He looked around and realized that he had no idea where he was. He must still be in the Mosque’s district, but that bit of information did him scant good.

  He was in Munich, under attack from the SVR, and he still had no idea why Severus Domna had sent Cherkesov to the Mosque. Perhaps, he thought in a moment of weakness, it was time to cut his losses and escape this godforsaken city. He had only days to complete Cherkesov’s mission. He should call Bourne, set up a meet, and get the hell out of here. But then, leaning against a brick wall, his mind jumped to a different track. Running would do him no good and might actually hurt him.

The SVR would still make his life miserable and he’d be no closer to finding out what Cherkesov was up to. He needed leverage to get himself out from under Cherkesov’s thumb. He was hoping to find that leverage here in Munich.

  Then he thought about that bastard Zachek. Of course he’s still tracking me, he thought. And then he realized that Zachek, who got him into this shitstorm, could be the one to get him out of it.

  He went on through the narrow streets, which had, if not exactly an Arab flavor, then a distinctly Muslim one. Halal butchers proliferated. He could smell the spices of the Middle East. Women were modestly dressed, their heads covered.

  His winding route led him to circle blocks until he found what he wanted. He then loitered on a corner as if waiting for a friend—which wasn’t so far from the truth. He was waiting for Zachek, who did not disappoint him. When Boris saw him, he took off, his limp a good deal more pronounced than it needed to be.

  It was odd, he thought, as he picked up his pace, how much better his leg felt the more he used it. He ducked into a clothing store, went through, and stepped out the back, a simplistic maneuver he fully expected Zachek to anticipate. He limped down the back alley lined with those same galvanized-steel garbage cans with the spiked lids. Zachek emerged from the rear of the clothing store. Boris was already nearing the end of the alley. He heard a shout behind him and, an instant later, one of Zachek’s hatchet men stepped into the end of the alley toward which Boris was limping. He pulled out a Tokarev pistol and aimed it at Boris’s chest.

  Without missing a beat, Karpov snatched up one of the garbage can lids and jammed the spikes into the hatchet man’s face. The gun went off; the bullet pierced the lid, but missed Boris. As the hatchet man staggered back, Karpov grabbed the Tokarev, but before he had a chance to curl his forefinger around the trigger he felt the cold deadweight of a gun muzzle against his right temple.

  A second hatchet man, who had appeared out of nowhere, said in guttural Russian, “Go ahead. Give me the chance to blow your brains out.”