Page 7 of The Bourne Dominion (Jason Bourne 9)

  As Peter watched Hendricks emerge from his bulletproof car, he wondered what the secretary was doing at the Folger. It wasn’t as if he’d come to write a dissertation on Shakespeare or the England of the Tudors and the Stuarts.

  Even more intriguing, none of his bodyguards accompanied Hendricks up the steps and into the building. Checking his watch, Peter saw that it was after four, which meant that the building was closed to the public for the day.

  Peter was familiar with the premises. There was a side entrance used by the staff and, on occasion, the flock of scholars and fellows who were, at any given time, in residence. He drove around the block, parked, and approached the side door, which was discreetly tucked away behind a line of sheared boxwood.

  Thick and solid, the door was made of stout oak, studded with Old World bronze roundhead nails. It reminded Peter of the door to a medieval castle keep. He drew a pick out of his inside pocket. He’d carried a couple of these, which he’d filed himself, ever since he got locked out of his apartment five years ago.

  Within thirty seconds he was inside, moving down a dimly lit corridor that smelled of filtered air and old books. The odor was both pleasant and familiar, bringing back days in his youth when he’d haunted used-book stores for hours at a time, scanning titles, reading chapters or even, sometimes, entire sections. Sometimes, it was enough just feeling the heft of a volume in his hands, imagining his older self, amid a library he himself had amassed.

  He kept an eye out for the residents or security, but saw no one. He moved through rooms filled with books in glass-fronted cases crisscrossed by security wires, down more corridors, wood-paneled and hushed.

  Gradually, he became aware of the murmur of voices and turned in that direction. As he moved closer, he recognized one of the voices: Hendricks. The other speaker was also male, his voice pitched slightly higher. As he approached closer still, it struck him as being naggingly familiar. The pitch, the cadence, the long-winded sentences without pauses for punctuation. And then, when he had crossed the room, the voices were so clear he was certain they came from the open doorway to the next room. A particular turn of phrase caused him to freeze.

  The man Hendricks was talking with was M. Errol Danziger, the vampiric current head of CI. He had sacked Soraya, one of the reasons Peter had quit—he’d seen her demise at CI coming. And now Danziger was in the process of dismantling the proud organization the Old Man had built from the scraps left to him by those who had remodeled the wartime OSS.

  Peter stole closer to the open doorway. If Hendricks is cooking up a deal with Danziger, he thought, it’s no wonder he doesn’t want us to know about it.

  He could hear them clearly now.

  “—are you?” Hendricks’s voice.

  “I couldn’t say,” Danziger replied.

  “You mean you won’t.”

  A deep sigh, probably from the director of CI.

  “I don’t understand the need for this high-school-level cloak and dagger. Why meet here? My office—”

  “We weren’t ever going to meet in your office,” Hendricks said, “for precisely the same reason you weren’t invited to the meeting in the Oval Office.”

  This was followed by what Peter could only characterize as a deathly silence.

  “What is it you want from me, Mr. Secretary?” Danziger’s voice was so drained of emotion it might be called robotic.

  “Cooperation,” Hendricks said. “It’s what we all want, and by we I mean the president. In the matter of Samaritan, I am his voice. Is that understood?”

  “Completely,” Danziger said. But even at his close remove, Peter could hear the venom in that one word.

  “Good,” Hendricks said. Whether he had noted the bitterness in the director’s voice or he’d chosen to ignore it was impossible for Peter to say. “Because I won’t be saying any of this twice.” There was a soft rustling. “Samaritan is on the strictest need-to-know basis. That means even the people you choose won’t know about it until they arrive at Indigo Ridge. Samaritan is the president’s number one priority, which means that from this moment forward it’s our number one priority. Here are your orders. Have your people rendezvous with the others at Indigo Ridge forty-eight hours from now.”

  “Forty-eight hours?” Danziger echoed. “How do you expect—I mean, for God’s sake, look at this list. What you’re asking is impossible to mobilize in that time frame.”

  “Directors are trained to accomplish the impossible.” Hendricks’s implied threat was clear enough. “That will be all, Mr. Danziger.”

  Peter heard first one set of footstep echoing on the polished floorboards, then, some moments later, another. Both faded away into the distance.

  Peter leaned back against the wall. Samaritan, Indigo Ridge—two clues he would have to follow. Samaritan is the president’s number one priority, he thought. Why did Hendricks agree to let Soraya go to Paris? Why didn’t he involve us in Samaritan? These were questions Peter knew he had to answer, and the sooner the better. He had an urge to text Soraya, briefing her on what he had just learned and asking her to come back to Washington, but his trust in her stayed his hand. If she thought this death was important enough to investigate personally, that was good enough for him. He’d learned that her instincts were impeccable.

  Then his mind turned to happier thoughts. It looked like Danziger was standing at the precipice. Peter felt elated, especially because he had been given inside knowledge. Anything he could do to sabotage Danziger’s part in Samaritan—whatever that was—would be a giant step in destroying his career and getting him out of CI.

  Off with his head! Peter’s silent shout pinballed around his mind, gaining energy with each successive carom.

  Having dropped Essai off at the airport, Bourne stopped at a cantina on the western outskirts of Perales. He was hungry but he also needed time to think. The place was flyblown, with walls somewhere between mustard and adobe. The fluorescent lighting had a tic, and the heartbeat of the ancient iced drink cooler against one wall sounded erratic. There were two waiters, both young men, thin and harried. While scanning the paper menu, he noted faces, expressions, and the angles of repose of the other patrons, old men with skin like tanned hides reading the local paper, drinking coffee, talking politics, or playing chess, an exhausted-looking prostitute past her prime, and a farmer practically inhaling an enormous plate of food. A person on surveillance never held his body in the same way as a civilian. There was always a certain telltale tension in the back, neck, or shoulders. He also studied everyone who came in or out.

  Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he ordered a drink and bandeja paisa with a side of arepas. When the aguapanela—sugarcane-sweetened water with a muddle of fresh lime—came he drank half of it at once, then settled back.

  “There’s a spare sat phone in the glove box, charged and ready to go,” Essai had said. “Also a detailed map of the area. Ibagué is clearly marked, as is the oil field Vegas runs.” That much he could buy, but Essai had made a mistake when he’d added: “You’ll find my sat number pre-programmed into it.” It was entirely possible—even prudent—for Essai to have a spare sat phone, and the map was a no-brainer. But the fact that he had pre-programmed his sat phone number into it indicated to Bourne that it wasn’t a spare at all. Bourne asked himself whether it was possible that Essai had known he had been sent to find and kill Corellos. Maybe Corellos himself had told him, but, if so, it would have been long after Essai could’ve bought a second sat phone. All of this meant that it was likely Essai was lying when he said he no longer had a way to ferret out intel from the Domna. If so, then he had a man inside the group, someone who was loyal to him.

  Bourne had never been completely sold on Essai’s earnestness, but he didn’t for an instant doubt his desire to destroy Severus Domna. In this one matter, he and Essai were aligned—they needed each other. They also needed to trust each other, but the trust was compromised because it pertained solely to the matter of the Domna’s demise. After that, all

bets were off.

  The food arrived, fragrant and steaming. Bourne, suddenly ravenous, dug in, using the arepas to soak up the sauce as a combination fork and spoon. As he ate, his thoughts continued. Then there was the matter of the Domna enlisting Boris to kill him. The story was so outrageous he had been inclined to dismiss it out of hand. Until, that is, Essai had described the trap Benjamin El-Arian had laid for his friend. He knew Boris wanted to be the head of FSB-2 more than anything. In a sense, he’d dedicated his entire adult life to that end. If he had been given the choice between his heart’s desire and protecting Bourne, what would he do? Bourne was shaken by the knowledge that he didn’t know. Boris was a friend, true, and he had saved Boris’s life in the temporary war zone of northeastern Iran, but Boris was a Russian through and through. His ethos was different, which made predicting his choices difficult, if not impossible.

  The thought that, even at this moment, Boris might be hunting him sent a chill through him that could not be dispelled by Perales’s blazing heat. He pulled out the sat phone from Essai’s car and, placing it on the table, stared at it for a time. He resisted the urge to call Boris and ask him outright what had happened and where he stood. That would be an unforgivable mistake. If Boris was innocent he’d be mortally offended—in fact, now that Bourne considered it, he’d act mortally offended even if he was guilty. Plus, if Essai was telling the truth, Boris would have been given a warning, and Bourne would lose a vital advantage.

  He swept the sat phone off the table as if it were a chess piece. No, he thought, the best thing he could do was to go forward one step at a time into the dark. He was used to that. He had burst from the darkness of an unknown life into this shadow world where everything in front of him was black as night. There was a pain inside him—the agony of unknowing—that he had lived with so long he often forgot it was there. And yet every now and again it rushed back at him with the power of an express train. Nothing in his past was real, nothing he had once done or accomplished, nothing he had felt, no one he had known or cared about. All had been obliterated by his fall into the void. He kept looking for the things that were now impossible to find. The occasional shards that came back to him from time to time only increased his sense of isolation and helplessness. Often, they were disturbing in their own right.

  At once, he saw again the woman in the stall of the Nordic disco, the sheen of sweat on her face, the sardonic smile, the muzzle of the handgun she aimed at him. What make and model was it? He strained to remember, but all he could see was her face, devoid of fear or even resignation. He felt the fur collar against his cheeks. Her mouth had opened, those red lips parting. She had said something to him in the moment before he had killed her. What was it? What had she said? He had the impression that it was somehow important, though he was at a loss to say why. And then the memory slithered away from him, back into the blackness of a past that felt as if it belonged to someone else.

  To lose everything—your very life—was an unspeakable agony. He was wandering in an unknown land. The stars overhead were arrayed in unfamiliar constellations, and the sun never rose. He was alone, the impenetrable darkness ahead his sole companion.

  The darkness, and, of course, the pain.

  6

  SORAYA ARRIVED IN Paris early on a gray, rain-washed morning. She didn’t mind. Paris was one of the only cities she loved in the rain. The slick surfaces, the melancholy mood mysteriously heightened the beauty and romance of the city, the modern-day crust sluiced away, revealing the facades of history, turning like the pages of a book. Besides, hours from now she would be seeing Amun. In the first-class lounge, she showered and changed into fresh clothes, then spent fifteen minutes applying makeup while she drank a cup of awful coffee and ate a croissant that tasted pre-packaged.

  She rarely wore makeup other than a neutral lipstick, but she wanted to make an impression on Jacques Robbinet, whom she was also meeting today. However, it wasn’t the minister of culture who met her outside of security but a man who introduced himself as Aaron Lipkin-Renais. His credentials identified him as an inspector with the Quai d’Orsay.

  He was tall, reed-thin, with one of those unmistakable Gallic noses that rode before him like the prow of a pirate ship. He wore his hand-tailored suit as only the French can. A gentleman, she thought, because he offered his hand to her and bent low over it.

  “The secretary sends his apologies,” he said in a softly slurred English, “but a meeting at the Élysée Palace kept him from meeting you himself.” The Élysée Palace was the residence and office of the French president. It was where the Council of Ministers met. He offered a self-deprecating smile. “I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for me.”

  “Je ne crains pas le moins du monde,” she replied with a perfect Parisian accent. I don’t mind in the least.

  Aaron’s long, horsey face broke into a huge grin. “Eh bien, maintenant, tout devient clair.” Ah, well, now everything becomes clear.

  He took her carry-on from her, and as they walked together through the arrivals hall Soraya had a chance to study him in more detail. She judged him to be in his midthirties, fit for a Frenchman. Though she wouldn’t call him handsome, there was nevertheless something appealing about him, a certain boyishness in his gray eyes and informal manner that countered strongly the inevitable crusty cynicism built up by intelligence work. She thought they would get along.

  Outside, the rain had become a gentle mist. The sky seemed to want to pull apart its gauzy layers. It was exceptionally mild. A light breeze ruffled her hair. Aaron led her to a dark Peugeot waiting at the curb. When the driver saw them, he got out of the car, took Soraya’s carry-on from his boss, and stowed it in the trunk. Aaron opened the rear door for her and she climbed in. As soon as he was settled in beside her, they pulled away from the curb and threaded their way out of the airport.

  “M. Robbinet has booked you into the Astor Saint-Honoré. It’s centrally located and is close to the Élysée Palace. Would you like to go there first and freshen up?”

  “Thank you, no,” Soraya said. “I’d like to view Laurent’s body and then see the forensics report.”

  He took a file out of the pocket in the driver’s-seat back and handed it to her. “You’re half Egyptian, aren’t you?”

  “Is that a problem?” She looked into his gray eyes, searching for a sign of prejudice.

  “Not for me. Is it for you?”

  “Not at all.”

  She smoothed her hackles back down. Now she understood. Aaron was Jewish. With the recent huge influx of Muslims, Jews were having a harder time in France, especially Paris. Jewish children were being particularly targeted in schools. Almost every day, there was a report of a Jewish child being beaten by a gang of Muslim children. She’d recently read an alarming report that many Jewish families were leaving France altogether because increasingly they found the charged atmosphere unsafe for their children.

  He smiled at her, and she could very clearly see herself in him—the Semitic heritage that Arabs and Jews shared but, tragically, could not bear to contemplate.

  She smiled back and hoped that he saw the same. Then she opened the file and looked through the pages. There were several photos of Laurent taken by the forensics team in situ. It was not a pretty sight.

  She sucked in her breath. “It looks to me as if the car struck him, then ran him over.”

  Aaron nodded. “Yes, it would seem so. There’s no other way to explain the two sets of injuries—the first to his sternum and rib cage, the second to his head.”

  “They couldn’t have been made in one strike.”

  “No,” he confirmed. “Our coroner says definitely not.” He tapped one of the photos. “Someone hated this man very much.”

  “Or didn’t want him to talk.”

  Aaron gave her a sharp look. “Ah, the light dawns. So that is your interest in this murder. It has international implications.”

  “I’m not saying a word.”

  “You don’t have to.??

? That boyish grin again.

  Soraya was appalled. Was she flirting with him?

  They drove onto the Périphérique, the boulevard that girdled the city, and entered Paris via the Porte de Bercy. The moment the Peugeot hit the streets, Soraya felt the welcoming warmth of the city. The familiar streets seemed to beckon to her, smiling.

  Soraya tore her gaze away from the old mansard-roofed buildings and returned to her reading. The body exhibited no marks other than those consistent with being run over. His blood work was still being parsed, but the preliminary results noted no elevated alcohol levels or noticeable foreign substances. She returned to the photos, looking more closely at the ones that showed an overall view of the crime scene.

  She pointed to a small, vaguely oblong-shaped blob in the lower right-hand corner of photo number three. “What’s this?”

  “Cell phone,” Aaron said. “We think it belonged to the victim, but the damage to it made it impossible to manually access the phone book.”

  “What about the SIM card?”

  “Bent and creased,” Aaron said, “but I took it myself to our best IT technician. He’s working on getting the information out of it.”

  Soraya thought a moment. “Change of plan. Take me to the tech, then I want to see where the murder took place.”

  Aaron took out his cell, punched in a number, then spoke softly for several seconds. “The tech needs more time,” he said when he folded away his phone.

  “He’s found something?”

  “He won’t say for certain, but I know this man—best to give him the time he needs.”

  “All right.” Soraya nodded reluctantly. “Then let’s go to the murder scene.”