Page 6 of The Bourne Dominion (Jason Bourne 9)

  “A good man, your friend Boris. Did he happen to tell you why Cherkesov abdicated his powerful throne?”

  “Mysterious circumstances,” Bourne repeated.

  “Not so mysterious to me. Benjamin El-Arian contacted Cherkesov through the appropriate intermediary and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  Bourne’s muscles tensed. “Cherkesov is part of the Domna now?”

  Essai nodded. “And now I can see by your expression that you have intuited the rest of it. Cherkesov offered your friend Boris a deal: He’d give him FSB-2 in return for future favors.”

  “And the first one is killing me.”

  Essai saw that Corellos, having finished giving orders, was coming toward them. He sat forward and, lowering his voice, said with some urgency, “You see what a clever fellow Benjamin El-Arian is. The Domna is no ordinary cabal. Now you know the extent of what we are up against.”

  As Corellos pulled over a camp chair, Bourne said, “There’s still the matter of why I came here in the first place.”

  Corellos stared at him with stainless-steel eyes. Above him a tree grew with bark peeling off like strips of flayed skin. The air shimmered and danced with mosquitoes.

  “Assurances,” Bourne said. It was clear he was addressing both Essai and the drug lord.

  Corellos made a soundless laugh, bared his teeth and snapped his jaws together like a villain in a Tarantino film. “My dead partner’s sister is paranoid. I mean her no harm, all assurances given.”

  “The business was Gustavo’s and yours,” Bourne said. “Now it belongs to you.”

  “That’s the line she fed you.”

  “She has no use for blood money derived from drugs.”

  Corellos spread his hands wide. “Then why did he want her to take it over?”

  “Family. But she’s not like him.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  Bourne made no reply. There was something about the drug lord that brought out an instinctive animosity, like seeing a scorpion or a black widow spider. The creature might not be threatening you at the moment, but what about in the future? Bourne studied him. He was the polar opposite of Gustavo Moreno, whom Bourne had met years ago. Whatever else he might have been, Moreno was a gentleman—that is, when he gave his word it meant something. Bourne did not have that sense with Corellos. Berengária was right to be afraid of him.

  During this buzzing lull, Corellos sat back, lounging in his chair so that it creaked like an old man’s bones. “So. What does the puta want?”

  “Berengária wants only to be left alone.”

  Corellos threw his head back and laughed. Bourne could see the thick red welt from where he’d begun to strangle him.

  “Bueno. Okay, we go to the next step. How much does she want?”

  “I told you,” Bourne said evenly, “nothing.”

  “Now I know you’re fucking with me. Come on, give it.”

  A thin breeze stirred the swarms of mosquitoes. The forest was dense with the sounds of insects, tree frogs, and small nocturnal mammals. Bourne wanted nothing more than to bury his fist in Corellos’s face. Now that he had met him, he suspected that Moreno had left his half of the business to his sister to piss his partner off. They could not have gotten on personally.

  “You might believe the bitch,” Corellos said. “Doesn’t mean I do.”

  “Just leave her alone and this will be at an end.”

  Corellos shook his head. “She has all my contacts.”

  “This came directly off her hard drive.” Bourne handed him the computer printout Berengária had given him before he’d left Phuket.

  Corellos opened it and ran his thick, callused forefinger down the list. “All here.” He looked up and shrugged. “This is a copy.” He waved it in the air. “It means nothing.”

  Bourne handed him the hard drive from Berengária’s laptop.

  Corellos stared at it for a moment. “Fuck me.” Laughing, he nodded. “Done.”

  “If you come after her…” Bourne allowed the implied threat to hang in the humid air.

  Corellos froze for half a second. Then he opened his arms wide. “If I go after the bitch, then come the fuck on.”

  5

  GODDAMMIT!” PETER Marks pounded his fist against the steering wheel as he was stopped short at a red light.

  “Down, boy,” Soraya said. “What’s eating you?”

  “He’s lying.” Peter hit the horn with the heel of his hand. “There’s something going on and Hendricks isn’t telling us what.”

  Soraya regarded him archly. “And you know this how?”

  “That crap he fed me about why I need to stay here. He’s resurrected Treadstone with your overseas network in place so—what? We can be nannies for the other clandestine services? It’s fucking make-work, there’s nothing real about it.” He shook his head. “Uh-uh, there’s something going on he doesn’t want us to know about.”

  Soraya stifled a tart rejoinder and, instead, thought about Peter’s supposition for a moment. She and Peter had worked together for a number of years in CI. They had come to trust each other with their lives. That was no little thing. And instincts had a lot to do with their mutual trust. What had Peter seen or sensed that she hadn’t? To be honest, she had been so elated at being given the go-ahead to run down the death in Paris that she hadn’t paid much attention to what went on after that. More fool, her.

  “Hey, slow down, cowboy!” she yelled as he veered around the rear of a truck. “I’d like to live until at least tonight.”

  “Sorry,” Peter muttered.

  Seeing that he was really and truly upset, she said, “What can I do to help?”

  “Go to Paris, get the investigation of your murdered source under way, find out who the hell killed him.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “I don’t like leaving you in this state.”

  “You don’t have to like it.”

  She touched his arm. “Peter, I’m concerned that you’re going to do something stupid.”

  He shot her a glare.

  “Or at the very least something dangerous.”

  He took a breath. “Do you think your being here would change any of that?”

  She frowned. “No, but—”

  “Then be on the first plane to Paris.”

  “You’re planning something.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Dammit, I know that look.”

  He bit his cheek. “And before you leave, why don’t you give Amun a call.”

  Soraya immediately bridled, thinking he was needling her. But then, when she thought further, she saw the wisdom of his suggestion. “You might be right. Amun could provide a different perspective on this mysterious group.”

  She pulled out her cell and texted: “Arr Paris tomorrow AM re: murder. Can U?”

  She found her heart beating fast. She hadn’t seen Amun in over a year, but it was only now, reaching out to him, that she realized how much she had missed him—his bright smile, his certain touch, the brilliance of his mind.

  She frowned. What time was it in Cairo? Almost 10:30 PM.

  As she was calculating, her cell buzzed: a text had come in. “Arr Paris 8:34 AM local, day after tomorrow.”

  Soraya felt a warmth suffuse her body. She flexed her hands.

  “What’s up?” Peter asked.

  “My fingertips are tingling.”

  Peter threw his head back and laughed.

  Essai drove Bourne away from Corellos’s encampment. The headlights were on, illuminating the dirt track through the dense forest of Bosque de Niebla de Chicaque, but already a pinkish blue light stole through the branches, snatching shadows from along the ground. Birdsong, which had been missing during the depths of the night, ricocheted back and forth above their heads.

  “We’re heading west instead of east,” Bourne said, “back to Bogotá.”

  “We’re going to the regional airport at Perales,” Essai said, “where I’ll take a flight to Bog

otá and you’ll take the car. You need to go farther west, to Ibagué. It’s in the mountains, about sixty miles southwest of El Colegio.”

  “And why do I want to go there?”

  “In Ibagué you will seek out a man named Estevan Vegas. He’s a member of the Domna—a weak link, as you might say in idiomatic English, yes? I was going to speak with him about defecting, but now that you’re here I expect you’ll have a better chance than I would.”

  “Explain yourself, Essai.”

  “With pleasure.”

  Now that they were away from Corellos’s camp, Essai seemed more relaxed, almost jovial, if such a word could be applied to this taciturn, revenge-obsessed man.

  “It’s simple, really. I’m a known quantity within the Domna: a pariah, a traitor. Even with a man like Vegas with shaky loyalty to the group, my presence would be problematic. In fact, it might backfire, providing him with a reason to become defensive, intractable.”

  “While I am an unknown quantity,” Bourne said. “Vegas will be more inclined to listen to me.”

  “That will depend entirely on your powers of persuasion. From what I know of you, another excellent reason for you to take my place.”

  Bourne thought for a moment. “And if he does spill?”

  “Your intel on the Domna will be current. I, unfortunately, have been cut off for some time. I am now deaf and blind to the details of their plots and plans.”

  “Vegas lives in the middle of nowhere,” Bourne pointed out.

  “First of all, the term middle of nowhere doesn’t apply to the Domna,” Essai said. “Its eyes and ears are everywhere.” They bumped onto a paved section of the road, though their speed slowed considerably because it was in desperate need of repair and potholes deep enough to throw an axle seemed to be everywhere. “Second, though Vegas may not know everything we need to know, he’s bound to know someone who does. It will then be your job to find them and charm them out of the information. Then you’ll take a flight out of Perales. Tickets will be waiting for you there.”

  “And while I’m trying to poke into the Domna’s dark corners, what will you be doing?”

  “Providing a distraction to cover you.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “You’re better off not knowing, believe me.” Essai manhandled the vehicle around a dual pothole of staggering depth. “There’s a spare sat phone in the glove box, charged and ready to go. Also a detailed map of the area. Ibagué is clearly marked, as is the oil field Vegas runs.”

  Leaning forward, Bourne opened the glove box and checked the contents.

  “You’ll find my sat number pre-programmed into it,” Essai continued. “That way, we’ll never be out of touch, no matter where we are.”

  They rumbled past a gorge with sheer rock walls and, a mile or two farther, an enormous waterfall crashing down a blood-red cliff with enormous, unending energy. The tree canopy became abruptly less thick, more light flickering, a Morse code through the tangle of branches.

  They burst through the western edge of the trees. A riot of bougainvillea inhabiting a colonial stone wall shivered, shaking off the early-morning dew in the first slender shoots of sunlight.

  Bourne looked out at the countryside. Due west was a chain of formidable mountains, shaggy with dense forest. In a couple of hours that was where he’d be headed.

  “What can you tell me about this man Vegas?”

  “He’s crusty, belligerent, often intractable.”

  “Beautiful.”

  Essai ignored Bourne’s sarcasm. “But he has another side. He’s a longtime oilman. He has overseen the oil outfit out there for close to twenty years. By now, I think his veins must run with oil. In any event, he’s strictly hands-on; he believes in a hard day’s work, even at his age, which must be sixty—knowing him, possibly more. He’s hard drinking, buried two wives, lost a daughter to a Brazilian, who seduced her, then spirited her away. He’s never seen or spoken to her in thirty-odd years.”

  “Sons?”

  Essai shook his head. “He lives with a young Indian woman now, but to my knowledge she’s never been pregnant. Other than that, I don’t know anything about her.”

  “What doesn’t he like?”

  Essai shot him a look. “You mean what does he like?”

  “It’s more important to know what to avoid saying or doing,” Bourne said.

  “I understand.” Essai nodded reflectively. “He hates communists and fascists in equal measure.”

  “How about drug lords?”

  Essai glanced at him again, as if trying to figure out where this line of questioning was going. He was smart enough not to ask. “You’re on your own there.”

  Bourne thought for a moment. “What I find interesting is that he lost his child and now, when he’s in the perfect position to have more, he doesn’t.”

  Essai shrugged. “Too much heartache. I can relate to that.”

  “But would you—?”

  “My wife is too old.”

  “My point. His woman isn’t.”

  Peter Marks watched the gardener get into her SUV and drive away from Hendricks’s house. He’d observed her feeding the roses, then spraying them from a pump canister. She had worked slowly, methodically, gently, murmuring to the roses as if she were making love to them. She drove off without a glance at the security personnel.

  The four men assigned to the secretary were of great concern to him. If he was going to shadow Hendricks in an attempt to discover what he was hiding, he’d have to stay off their radar. He considered it a challenge, rather than a problem.

  Peter had always faced challenges head-on—he’d run at them with a fervor that burned brightest when he was a teenager and young adult. He hadn’t come out so much as been brought out by Father Benedict, his local parish priest. But unlike the other boys whom the father had taken behind the sacristy for holy wine and sex, Peter had told his father. He was ten when this happened, but he was a precocious boy and wanted to publicly denounce the priest the following Sunday during Mass.

  His father had forbade this. “It will be far worse for you than for him,” he’d told his son. “Everyone will know and you’ll be branded for life.” There was no mistaking the warning in his father’s voice. Peter had experienced the magnitude of his father’s anger and he wasn’t eager to trigger it again.

  That Sunday, when they went to church, another priest whom Peter had never seen before performed the Mass. He wondered where Father Benedict was. Afterward, on the church steps in the sunshine of late morning, he heard people talking. Father Benedict had been assaulted the night before on his way home from church. Beaten to a pulp was the phrase most used. He now lay in critical condition at Sisters of Mercy Hospital eight blocks away. Peter never went to see him, and Father Benedict never returned to his parish church, even though he was discharged from Sisters of Mercy six weeks later. In the intervening years, Peter had never spoken to his father about Benedict, though his suspicion was that the priest had been on the receiving end of his father’s wrath. And now, of course, it was too late to ask—his father had died eleven years ago.

  Peter’s eyes cleared. Hendricks had emerged from his house. A black Lincoln Town Car had pulled up and the driver got out, opened the door for the secretary, who climbed in. One of the security detail followed. Two others got into their nondescript Ford, and the two cars pulled out in unison. Peter, avoiding the gaze of the fourth man left behind, began the tail, his memories trailing behind.

  In high school and college, he had experimented with like-minded boys his age, always being careful because that was his nature. But then he’d become interested in the clandestine services and begun to take the appropriate courses. When he did so, his college adviser changed. He had never seen or heard of him before. In fact, he couldn’t find him on the college’s admin list. One day, the adviser called him in for a talk, the gist of which was that if Peter truly desired a career in the clandestine services he’d have to “button it up,” as the adv

iser put it.

  The subject was never raised again, but Peter, having been given a word to the wise, did, in fact, button it up, reading as he did about case after case where spies or men in sensitive positions were compromised because of their sexual proclivities. He fervently did not want to become one of those disgraced people. And he vividly recalled what had happened to Father Benedict. So he became a better celibate than Benedict had ever been.

  He loved Soraya like the sister he never had, but he certainly was never in love with her. He wondered that he’d once been jealous of her affection for Bourne. He scoffed at that now. How could he have ever been jealous of Jason Bourne? He couldn’t bear to have that man’s shadowy life.

  The cars rolled out of the tree-lined streets of Georgetown, heading due east toward the heart of Washington. Dusk was forming, filled with haze and uncertainty. He checked his car’s clock. Any moment now, Soraya would be in the air, on her way across the Atlantic to Paris and her rendezvous with Amun Chalthoum. He’d called his friend Jacques Robbinet to give him the particulars of her visit. Robbinet, whom he’d met through Jason Bourne, was the French minister of culture. Robbinet was also one of the new leading lights of the Quai d’Orsay, the French equivalent of Central Intelligence, and so wielded enormous power both inside and outside France. Robbinet had assured Peter that he’d extend Soraya every courtesy in cutting through the Gordian knot of French red tape.

  The two cars were slowing as they approached East Capitol Street. They passed 2nd Street, SE, and stopped in front of the Folger Shakespeare Library, one of the capital’s more remarkable institutions. Henry Clay Folger had been chairman of Standard Oil, now ExxonMobil. He was cut from the same cloth as the great industrialist/robber barons John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Henry E. Huntington. However, Folger spent much of his later years amassing a staggering collection of First Folios of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, the library housed, in the original edition or facsimile, every important volume on Shakespeare from the invention of the printing press to the end of the seventeenth century, including a copy of every book on history, mythology, and travel that had been available to the playwright. In fact, the library possessed 55 percent of all known books printed in the English language before 1640. But the crown jewels of the collection were the First Folios, the sole textual source of over half of Shakespeare’s plays.