The Bourne Dominion Page 15

  Separating the items, he launched himself up into the thickest pine, moving nimbly, but mindful of the payload he carried, extremely cautiously from branch to branch, rising higher and higher. As he climbed, he could hear the helicopter’s engine more clearly. It was hovering, waiting him out. Every once in a while the pilot sent a volley of machine-gun fire into the copse, perhaps hoping for a blind hit or to flush Bourne from his sanctuary.

  Bourne needed a place where he would become a visible target and also give himself sufficient room. It took him some time to find the right spot, but at last he did, a delicate crotch just beneath the tip of the pine. There he balanced himself, then raised his head, waiting to be spotted. The pilot, possibly emboldened by the fact that Bourne no longer carried the Strela-2 launcher, moved the copter in for the kill.

  With the TNT and the rocket fuel loaded into his shirt-sling, Bourne cocked his arm and waited. The few seconds as the copter maneuvered to get the kill shot were nerve racking. Bourne judged the distance; he needed the copter in closer. Just a few feet now. Three, two, one.

  The machine-gun fire started up just as Bourne swung his payload up and out of the jerry-rigged slingshot. The combined payload struck the helicopter’s shiny metal skin, where the TNT ignited, setting off the rocket fuel.

  Bourne ducked as the explosion ripped through the body of the aircraft, tearing it into pieces. He began to climb down, but the stricken copter came out of the sky with appalling speed. Its still-spinning rotors snapped off the tops of the pines and continued to saw into the trees, following the body as it crashed into the copse.

  Bourne, shaken out of his perch, felt the intense heat, the violent spray of wood chips, and heard the rotors’ rhythmic drumbeat of death as they came crashing and flailing directly for him.

  13

  INDIGO RIDGE. Peter had worked until the wee hours of the morning reading up on the California mine, how it had been started, then abruptly abandoned in the 1970s when China flooded the international market with rare earths, driving down prices and rendering Indigo Ridge too expensive a proposition. Mining rare earths was a long and complex process and was further complicated by the refining processes, which were different for each element. Flash-forward to the present, when China abruptly reversed course, cutting rare earth exports by 85 percent, stunning everyone including the supposedly bright lights at the Pentagon, the DoD, and DARPA. Now the Pentagon was screaming bloody murder. The unthinkable had occurred: The manufacture of its next-gen weaponry was being either delayed or canceled altogether because of the scarcity of rare earths essential for the components. While everyone else in the world was slumbering in ignorance, China had been buying up virtually all the rare earth mines outside the United States and Canada.

  Dismayed, Peter continued downloading everything he could find on NeoDyme, the new public company charged to mine Indigo Ridge, and its head Roy FitzWilliams. He began to read. Then he pulled the chart on the IPO. NeoDyme had gone public yesterday at 18. In its first day of trading, it had plummeted all the way to 12 before flattening out for what looked to be less than an hour. Late in the trading day, a number of huge trades brought the stock all the way back to 163⁄8, where it closed. A high-volatility stock, that was for sure, Peter thought. Reading the accompanying commentary he pulled off the CNBC and Bloomberg sites, he could readily see why. The investing gurus didn’t know what to make of NeoDyme. Some felt that since it would take years to get the rare earths out of the ground and refine them, the stock would be dead money until then. Others, who seemed to have more knowledge of the strategic importance of rare earths, gave the opposite opinion: It was time to get in now.

  Completely hooked, he continued to read, switching to a bio of Fitz-Williams. A BA in earth and mineral sciences from Penn State, an advanced degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia, then jobs in the uranium mines of Australia and Canada, a stint in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. Then he disappeared off the map for just over two years.

  Peter spent the next hour running down leads for 1967–1969 on the Internet, always finding a dead end. Just as he was about to give up, he discovered a clue. An obscure organization called the Mineralization and Rare Metals Conference Board had held a regional meeting in Qatar in the spring of 1968 at which Fitz was the guest speaker. Another frustrating forty-five minutes yielded one more interesting nugget: Fitz was listed as a consultant for El-Gabal Mining.

  Peter immediately looked up El-Gabal, a Syrian company, only to discover it was now defunct. There was precious little known about it or, indeed, any business in Syria. The country was not a member of the World Trade Organization and every large business like El-Gabal was controlled by the government, so accurate assessments of Syria’s export profits, let alone a single company’s, were impossible to find or even guess at.

  A dead end, Peter thought, returning to FitzWilliams’s CV. He returned from the Middle East to run Indigo Ridge, keeping his job even when the mine went more or less dormant in the 1970s. He’d been there ever since and now, riding the stratospheric resurgence of rare earth metals, had returned to an almost princely prominence as a major player in the rapidly emerging strategic field.

  Peter sat back and pressed his thumbs into his bloodshot eyes. He was exhausted and would have dearly loved a cup of coffee, but at this hour the machine was out and, anyway, he didn’t want to get up for fear of breaking his train of thought.

  He considered for a moment more, then called one of Soraya’s assets in Syria, gave him the rundown on Fitz and El-Gabal, and asked for as much intel as he could unearth. Then he accessed Hendricks’s hard drive and posted what he had discovered to the pertinent file there.

  Peter wanted to go on, but the figures, facts, and opinions had begun to whirl inside his head like a school of reef fish. He needed sleep. Picking up his coat, he dragged himself out of the office. The corridors were silent; only the soft whir of the elevator rising disturbed the peacefulness.

  The elevator doors opened and Peter stepped in. He pressed the button for the garage level and leaned his head against the wall, already half asleep. The bell sounded as the elevator came to a halt, and as the doors opened he saw a hulking figure in the shadows of the fifth-floor corridor. The figure approached him with definite intent, and Peter’s head came away from the wall. Light spilled onto the figure as it entered the elevator. The door closed, sealing them in together. Peter saw the service revolver at one hip.

  “Evening, Director Marks.”

  “Hey, Sal.”

  Sal’s blunt finger stabbed out and pressed the button for the lobby, and the elevator resumed its quiet descent. “Burning the midnight oil, huh?”

  “As always.”

  Sal grunted. “I hear ya, but you look like you could use some sleep.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “Well, you can rest easy. Everything’s clear upstairs.”

  The doors opened at the lobby and Sal stepped out.

  “Have a better one, Director Marks.”

  “You, too.”

  Moments later Peter stepped out into the garage. The low-ceilinged space smelled of concrete, gasoline, and new leather. His footsteps echoed off the walls and ceiling. There were very few cars in evidence. As he headed toward his, he dug out his key and, because of the chill, pressed the button for the pre-starter.

  The engine roared to life. A heartbeat later the explosion knocked him flat on his back.

  Bourne fell through the pine. Just above him came the crumpled helicopter’s circling blades. But as they hit thicker and thicker wood they slowed, and then the tree’s gummy sap began to work on the blades’ central mechanism, acting as a fast-drying glue, slowing them.

  Bourne, scrambling down, half falling, half leaping, was cut, scraped, and bruised in too many places to count, his eyes, mouth, and nose filled with wood chips, sawdust, and tiny bits of metal. But in the end the beautiful pine became his ally, its sturdy lower branches holding the wreckage abov
e him long enough for him to swing the last several feet down to the ground.

  Coughing and gagging, he ran to the house. Inside, he stuck his head under the faucet in the large soapstone kitchen sink, letting a continuous stream of cold water cleanse and revive him. He found the keys to the second jeep right where Vegas had told him he’d left them. Because of Vegas’s often dangerous work in the oil fields, the bathroom was almost as well stocked as a hospital dispensary. He grabbed bottles of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol, and a roll of sterile gauze on his way out. In the main room, he poured the alcohol on the pile of wood by the fireplace, then stood back, lit a wooden match from a box in the kitchen, and chucked it onto the woodpile. The resultant whoosh of flames was gratifying. For good measure, he set the kitchen curtains aflame. The fire spread greedily. Satisfied, he left the burning house.

  Outside, the pine that had protected him was in ruins. It, too, was burning. A piece of one of the helicopter’s rotors, sheared off by the tree, had struck the second jeep, crumpling the driver’s-side front fender but leaving the engine unharmed. Putting the vehicle in gear, Bourne backed out, turned, and took Vegas and Rosie’s path, veering off to the left of the driveway, into the thick copse of trees.

  He followed what he sensed was a hunting path through the woods. He drove cautiously, acutely aware of the path’s tortuous twists and turns as it wound steeply down the mountainside. Every now and again, through a gap in the trees, he could see the steep drop-off, and he noted how close the path came to the near-vertical plunge down into the lower country at the foot of the Cordilleras.

  He could hear birdsong, which heartened him. Birds were the first to fall silent at any threat, whether real or perceived. If he had to bet, he’d wager that the two copters were the extent of this attack on Vegas. Why would the Domna think any more firepower was needed?

  After thirty minutes or so, the dirt path emerged from the woods into a clearing, a small meadow filled with tiny wildflowers. Beyond rose another stand of even taller trees—pines and firs, but also, as the woods continued down the mountainside, an increasing number of deciduous trees, even some tropical varieties in the hazy distance. The smoke from the mounting house fire played over this part of the mountainside like a noxious industrial smog, obscuring the rising sun, graying out the high sky.

  Cutting diagonally across the meadow, Bourne could make out the tracks of Vegas’s jeep. He followed these precisely. On the other side of the meadow, the tracks plunged through the woods for a short distance before veering to the right. Bourne could see why. Off to the left, the cliff face dropped off, possibly the result of a gigantic rockfall sometime in the past. Continuing straight on would mean certain death.

  This new trail was narrower and rougher, the jeep jouncing precariously as it twitched and whipped branches that sometimes obscured Bourne’s vision. Fifteen minutes of this ended just as abruptly as it had begun, and Bourne found himself on a snaking two-lane paved road. He recognized it as the one he and Suarez had taken up to Vegas’s house. Another jeep, with Vegas and Rosie in it, was waiting for him on the gravel of the inner shoulder.

  “¡Fantástico! En verdad, me sorprende.” Vegas was grinning. Fantastic! Truly, I’m surprised.

  Rosie smiled at him. “Pero yo no lo soy.” But I’m not. “You’ll have to tell us about your escape.”

  “But not now.” Vegas slapped the palm of his hand against the jeep’s door. “Anyone left alive?”

  “Not from their side.”

  “Cada vez mejor.” Better and better. He squinted up the mountainside to the plume of smoke. “Big fire.”

  “Your house,” Bourne said. “This way no one will know whether you or Rosie are dead or alive for days, maybe weeks.”

  “Excelente.” Vegas nodded. “Where to now, hombre?”

  “The airport at Perales,” Bourne said. “But both the federales and FARC have set up roadblocks on the main highway. Do you know a shortcut?”

  Vegas’s grin spread across the entire width of his face. “Follow me, amigo.”

  Marlon Etana, having arrived by private charter plane in Cadiz at more or less the same time Jalal Essai drove in, stood dreaming as he looked at the beautiful ancient facade of Don Fernando Hererra’s seaside house. Here in Cadiz, Etana felt the terrible weight of history in the palm of his hand. Marlon Etana—in fact, all the Etanas—were serious students of history. Marvelous businessmen in the purest sense of the word, they had the knack of spinning the knowledge they gleaned from the past into money and power. It was the Etanas who had founded the Monition Club as a way for Severus Domna to come together in various cities across the globe without attracting attention or using the group’s real name. To the outside world, the Monition Club was a philanthropic organization involved in the advancement of anthropology and ancient philosophies. It was a hermetically sealed world in which the sub-rosa members of the group could move, meet, compare work, and plan initiatives.

  The Etanas had envisioned a cross-cultural cabal of businessmen, spanning both the Eastern and Western worlds, whose combined power and influence would eventually dwarf those of even the largest of the multinational corporations. Duco ex umbra, influence from the shadows—that had been the motto of the Etana family from time immemorial.

  Marlon’s great-great-great-grandfather—a giant among men—had laid out long-term plans for Severus Domna, a way to help the world grow together rather than splinter apart. It was a noble dream and, certainly, if he had lived long enough it might have come to fruition. But human beings are fallible—worse, they are corruptible, and influence is the great corruptor. Exceedingly rare is the man who can ignore its glittering temptation, and even some of the Etanas succumbed. Not the least of these was Marlon’s father, who was weak-willed. In order to fend off a threat from a group inside the Domna, he had forged an alliance with Benjamin El-Arian. Rather than becoming his savior, the clever El-Arian happily arranged for the man’s downfall. El-Arian had already lined up a rival group within the Domna and, with its help, proceeded to toss the elder Etana aside. Soon after, Marlon’s father took his own life—a terrible sin. For an Islamic, the lowest level of hell is reserved for suicides, because Allah has forbidden it in many verses of the Qur’an. The one Marlon had memorized, upon looking at his father’s blank face, was: “And do not kill yourselves. Surely, Allah is Most Merciful to you.”

  Marlon did not know whether his father believed that Allah had been merciful to him, or whether he felt he had been abandoned. All he knew was that he’d used what little strength was left inside him to cause an uproar inside Severus Domna, to cause outrage and, hopefully, out of that outrage the beginnings of a difficult debate concerning the soul of the organization.

  Benjamin El-Arian, clever devil, had seen through the veil of the suicide and had forbidden any debate whatsoever. And so, Marlon, all that was left of the once mighty Etana dynasty, without whose vision the Domna would not exist, had been reduced to taking orders from Benjamin El-Arian. He had become a whipped dog, begging for whatever scraps El-Arian saw fit to throw to him.

  Just after noon, Marlon saw movement at the front door to Hererra’s house. Jalal Essai and Don Fernando emerged. They spoke for a few minutes before shaking hands in the Western style. Hererra climbed into a car parked at the curb and drove off alone. When the car was out of sight, Essai turned and began to walk toward the water. Marlon followed at a discreet distance.

  Essai’s pace was no more than a casual stroll, he gave the impression that he had nothing to do and nowhere to go. He followed Essai along the crescent waterfront, where Essai picked up several newspapers from a kiosk vendor. About a mile farther on he approached a café with a blue-and-white awning. A red anchor logo was stitched onto the awning’s center.

  Marlon Etana observed Essai seat himself at a table facing the water and proceed to order lunch. Marlon took several deep breaths, then retreated a distance so he could keep Essai in sight but also have a wider field of vision. Stepping into the shadow
s of a doorway, he checked that his pistol was loaded and functional. Then he drew a noise suppressor out of his pocket and screwed it onto the end of the barrel. He gave himself over to one of his Zen-inspired deep-breathing exercises.

  The moment he saw a figure pass by a second time, Etana walked briskly along the waterline, a man with an urgent purpose. The man followed. Benjamin El-Arian had set him on Etana to make sure he terminated Jalal Essai. And if by some chance Etana failed, the shadow would take over the mission.

  Etana led his shadow to the far end of the beachhead, beyond the piers and harbors, out along a strip of beach whose unpleasant constitution ensured it was deserted until the middle of the night, when, he had observed, kids used it to party, drink, and have clandestine sex. Etana had found it a nauseating sight, another vivid example of the corruption of the West.

  A fishing boat, turned keel-up, sat up on a block of wood. The boat was rotting, the keel line encrusted with barnacles, entwined with dried seaweed. A faint odor of decomposition floated off the impromptu structure, which, to Marlon, seemed appropriate. He chose a perch along the keel and shook out a cigarette. As he put the cigarette between his lips, he drew his pistol with its elongated barrel and, turning, shot the shadow between the eyes. There was some noise, but none at all when the body hit the sand.

  Pocketing the pistol, Etana walked over to the shadow and, grabbing him by the back of his collar, dragged him the fifty or so yards to the upturned boat. With some difficulty, he jammed the corpse into the open space beneath the craft. It already smelled bad enough that a decomposing body would not arouse any attention for days, maybe a week. By then the seagulls would surely have done their work, and no one would be able to identify the corpse.

  Dusting off his hands, Marlon Etana drew smoke deep into his lungs and started back the way he had come. There was no one around, no one to see him. Best of all, there was no one to report back to Benjamin El-Arian.