Bourne 7 – The Bourne Deception jb-7 Page 6

  Khoury was born with the patience of a tortoise. Even when he was a child he had no difficulty waiting for the opportune moment to take advantage of a situation. Not surprisingly, his preternatural serenity was misinterpreted as a form of idiocy by his father, and all of his instructors save one, who saw in the boy the holy spark Allah had placed there at the moment of his conception. From that moment on, Khoury‘s life changed. He began to frequent this instructor‘s house after hours for advanced lessons. The man lived alone and welcomed Khoury as his acolyte and protégé.

  As a young adult, he had joined the Eastern Brotherhood, patiently moving up in the hierarchy. He did this in his characteristic manner, by winnowing out the wheat from the chaff. In his case the wheat was represented by those in the organization who shared his strict views of Islam. It was he who brought them the notion of fighting for change from within. His was a naturally subversive nature; he was superb at undermining the current order to make way for his own. This he accomplished slowly and carefully, always flying under the twin radars of Semion Icoupov and Asher Sever, because these were not men to be taken lightly or to engage as antagonists without every form of advantage imaginable. He was still amassing his arsenal of such advantages when they were both killed, leaving a vast and intimidating power vacuum.

  Not for Abdulla Khoury. Seizing his moment while the Eastern Brotherhood was still in shock, he took control of the organization. Ripping a page from Icoupov‘s strategic manual, he quickly installed his compatriots in all key positions within the Eastern Brotherhood, thereby ensuring both the short-and the long-term success of his coup.

  The motorcade came to a halt at the first of his three stops before he returned to his headquarters. There were lieutenants responsible for two areas of the Middle East and one for Africa whom he needed to brief on the latest developments inside Iran.

  As the motorcade took him from one briefing to another, he couldn‘t help but reflect on the recent interference from Leonid Arkadin. He‘d dealt with men like Arkadin before, people who believed that all situations could be settled with the flaming barrel of a gun, weaponized men without faith to guide them, for what use was a weapon if it wasn‘t in the service of Allah and Islam? He knew something of Leonid Danilovich Arkadin‘s background: He had come to be a killer of killers through hiring himself out to various Moscow grupperovka. It was said he was close with Dimitri Maslov, the head of the Kazanskaya, but not as close as he had been with his mentor, Semion Icoupov, before he‘d turned on Icoupov and killed him. Perhaps not surprising, since Arkadin had been born and raised in Nizhny Tagil, a hell on earth that could only exist in Russia-an industrial slimepit that manufactured tanks for the military, ringed by high-security prisons whose occupants, when they were released, stayed in Nizhny Tagil to prey upon its citizens. It was a minor miracle that Arkadin had been lucky enough to escape.

  This sordid, bloody background was why Khoury knew in his heart that Arkadin was nothing more than a man who had lost his soul, condemned to walk among the living, the best part of him already dead and buried.

  And it was for the same reason that Khoury had taken extra precautions. He was well protected by two bodyguards in his car, wallowing along beneath the weight of its armor-plated sides and bulletproof glass, as well as sharpshooters with hunting rifles in cars in front and back. He seriously doubted whether the man would be foolish enough to go after him. But since one couldn‘t read the mind of one‘s enemy it was prudent to act as if he himself were under attack, rather than the Eastern Brotherhood.

  Within fifteen minutes the motorcade pulled into the Eastern Brotherhood‘s private parking area and the men in the cars surrounding Khoury‘s leapt out, making a thorough search of the area. Only then did one of them communicate to the bodyguards traveling with Khoury through a wireless network that it was safe to exit.

  The elevator took him and four bodyguards directly up to the top floor of the private building owned by the Eastern Brotherhood. Two of the bodyguards stepped off the elevator first, secured the floor, and checked the faces of their boss‘s personal staff to make sure they were all known. Then they stepped aside and Khoury hurried across the reception area to his office. When his secretary turned toward him, his face pinched and ashen beneath the burnished color of his skin, Khoury realized something was wrong.

  — I‘m sorry, sir, he said. -There was nothing any of us could do.

  Then Khoury looked beyond him to the three strangers, and immediately the primitive part of his brain, the fight-or-flight center, understood. Nevertheless, the civilized part of him was shocked, rooting him to the spot.

  — What is this? he said.

  As if sleepwalking, he went across the magnificent jewel-tone carpet, a present from the president of Iran, staring with stupefaction at the three men in tailored suits ranged behind his desk. The men on the left and right stood with their arms hanging loosely at their sides and produced laminated badges identifying them as agents of the US Department of Defense. The one in the middle with hair the color of iron filings and a hard, angular face said,

  — Good afternoon, Mr. Khoury. My name is Reiniger. A Bundespolizei ID card was attached to a black cord around his neck. It said Reiniger was a highranking officer in GSG 9, the elite counterterrorism unit. -I‘m here to take you into custody.

  — Custody? Khoury was taken aback. -I don‘t understand. How could you-?

  His voice died in his throat as he looked down at the dossier Reiniger had produced. To his horror he saw photo after photo, green-lit from infrared film, of him with the sixteen-year-old busboy from the See Café, whom he saw three times a week when he went to Lake Starnberg ostensibly for lunch.

  Gathering himself with a supreme effort, Khoury pushed the photos across the desk. -I have many enemies with deep resources. This smut is doctored. Anyone can see it isn‘t me performing these wicked and disgusting acts. He looked up into Reiniger‘s yellow teeth, wrapped in his fraudulent piety. -How dare you accuse me of such-

  Reiniger made a small gesture with one hand and the man on his right stepped one pace to the left, revealing the sixteen-year-old busboy from the See Café. The boy would not meet Khoury‘s dark glare, instead staring fixedly at the tops of his sneakers. In this superheated room, amid the tall, wide-shouldered Americans in their dark suits, he looked younger than his years, slender and fragile as bone china.

  — I‘d introduce you, one of the American agents said with an audible snicker, — but that would be redundant.

  Khoury‘s brain was on fire. How had this horror been visited on him? Why, if he was the chosen of Allah, had his dark secret, learned at the knee of his childhood instructor, been revealed? He had no thought for who had betrayed him, only that he could not bear to live with the shame, which would strip him of the power and prestige he‘d worked for decades to amass.

  — This is the end for you, Khoury, the other American said.

  Which one was which? They all looked alike to him. They had the evil look of dissolute infidels. He wanted to kill them both.

  — The end of you as a public figure, the American went on in his implacable cyborg voice. -But more importantly, it‘s the end of your influence. Your brand of extremism has been revealed as a sham, a joke, a goddamn hypocritical-

  Khoury growled deep in his throat as he lunged at the boy. He saw the American nearest the boy draw a Taser, but he couldn‘t stop now. The twin barbed hooks impaled themselves, one in his torso, the other in his thigh, and the pain spasmed him backward. His knees buckled and he fell, flopping and arching, but all was ringing silence, as if he had already passed to another plane. Even as the movement in the room grew frenzied, even when, some minutes later, he was transferred to a gurney, taken down in the elevator, rushed through the ground-floor lobby filled with silent and shocked blobs that must once have been faces, all was silence. All was silence out in the street, even as traffic passed by, even as paramedics and the dark-suited Americans jogged beside the gurney and mouths
opened, perhaps to shout warnings for gawping passersby to step aside or move back. Silence. Only silence.

  And then he was lifted up as if by the hand of Allah and rolled inside the ambulance. Two paramedics climbed in, along with a third man, and even as the rear doors were closing, the ambulance took off. Its siren must have been wailing, but Khoury couldn‘t hear a thing. Neither could he feel his body, which seemed to bind him to the gurney like lead weights. All he felt was the fire in his chest, the laboring of his heart, the irregular pulse of blood circulating through him.

  He hoped the third man wasn‘t one of the Americans; he was afraid of them. The German he knew he could handle once he regained his voice; he had cultivated many friendships in the Bundespolizei and as long as he could keep the Americans at a remove for even an hour, he knew he‘d be all right.

  With a wave of relief, he saw that the third man was Reiniger. He could feel a tingling in his extremities, found that he could move his fingers and toes. He was about to try out his vocal cords when Reiniger bent over him and, with the flourish of a magician on stage, removed a nose and cheeks made out of silicone putty, along with a set of yellowed teeth that he‘d worn over his own. Instantly, a premonition overtook Khoury like the flutter of death‘s black wave.

  — Hello, Khoury, Reiniger said slowly.

  Khoury tried to speak, bit his tongue instead.

  Reiniger grinned as he patted the stricken man on the shoulder. -How you doing? Not well, I see. He shrugged, his grin flowering open. -No matter, because it‘s a good day to die. He placed the pad of his right thumb against Khoury‘s Adam‘s apple and pressed down until something vital popped.

  — Good for us, anyway.

  4

  WHEN SORAYA MOORE walked into the DCI‘s office, Veronica Hart got up from behind her desk and beckoned Soraya to sit beside her on a sofa against one wall. In the past year of Hart‘s tenure as DCI, the two women had become close friends as well as associates. They had been forced by circumstance to trust each other from the moment Hart had come on board following the Old Man‘s untimely death. The two of them had united against Secretary of Defense Halliday while Willard took down his attack dog, Luther LaValle, and handed Halliday the most humiliating defeat of his political career. That they‘d made a mortal enemy in the process was never far from their minds or their discussions. Neither was Jason Bourne, whom Soraya had twice worked with, and whom Hart had come to understand better than anyone else at CI save for Soraya herself.

  — So how are you? Hart said as soon as they were both seated.

  — It‘s been three months and Jason‘s death still hasn‘t sunk in. Soraya was a woman who was both strong and beautiful, her deep blue eyes contrasting strikingly with her cinnamon-colored skin and long black hair. A former CI chief of station, she had been thrust unceremoniously into the directorship of Typhon, the organization she helped create, when her mentor, Martin Lindros, had died last year. Since then, she‘d struggled with the labyrinthine political maneuvering any director in the intelligence community was forced to master. In the end, however, her struggle with Luther LaValle had taught her many important lessons. -To be honest, I keep thinking I‘m seeing him out of the corner of my eye. But when I look-really look, that is-

  it‘s always someone else.

  — Of course it‘s someone else, Hart said, not unsympathetically.

  — You didn‘t know him the way I did, Soraya said sadly. -He was able to cheat death so many times it now seems impossible that this last time he failed.

  She put her head down, and Hart squeezed her hand briefly.

  The night they heard of Bourne‘s death, she‘d taken Soraya out to dinner, then insisted she come back to her apartment, steadfastly ignoring all of Soraya‘s protestations. The evening was difficult, not the least because Soraya was Muslim; they couldn‘t go on a good old-fashioned bender. Grieving stone-cold sober was a drag, and Soraya had begged Hart to drink if she wanted to. The DCI refused. That night an unspoken bond had sprung up between them that nothing could now sunder.

  Soraya looked up then, gave the DCI a wan smile. -But you didn‘t call me in to hold my hand again.

  — No, I didn‘t. Hart told Soraya about the downing of the passenger jetliner in Egypt. -Jaime Hernandez and Jon Mueller are putting together a joint NSA-DHS forensics team to fly to Cairo.

  — Good luck with that, Soraya said caustically. -Which one of the team is going to interface with the Egyptians, speak to them in their own language, or be able to interpret their thinking by their replies?

  — As a matter of fact, you are. When she saw the look of astonishment on Soraya‘s face, she added, — I had the same reaction to the task force you did.

  — How much of a fight did Halliday put up?

  — He fired off the usual objections, including slurs directed at your heritage, Hart said.

  — How he hates all of us, Soraya said. -He can‘t even make the distinction between Arab and Muslim, let alone Sunni and Shi‘a.

  — Never mind, Hart said. -I presented my reasons to the president and he agreed.

  The DCI handed over a copy of the intel they‘d all been reading when news came of the air disaster.

  As Soraya looked it over, she said, — This data‘s from Black River.

  — Having worked for Black River, that‘s precisely my concern. Given the methods they use to gather intel it seems to me that Halliday is leaning on them a bit too heavily. She tipped her head toward the file. -What do you think of their intel on this proWestern dissident group in Iran?

  Soraya frowned. -There have been rumors of its existence for years, of course, but I can tell you that no one in the Western intelligence community has met a member or has ever been contacted by the group. Frankly, it always struck me as part of the right-wing neocon fantasy of a democratic Middle East. She continued to page through the file.

  — Yet there is a bona fide dissident movement in Iran that has been calling for democratic elections, Hart said.

  — Yes, but it‘s unclear whether its leader, Akbar Ganji, would be proWestern. My guess is probably not. For one thing, he‘s been canny enough to reject the administration‘s periodic offers of money in exchange for an armed insurrection. For another, he knows, even if our own people don‘t, that throwing American dollars at what we euphemistically call the ‗indigenous liberal forces‘ within Iran is a recipe for disaster. Not only would it endanger the already fragile movement and their aim of a velvet revolution, but it would encourage its leaders to become dependent on America for aid. It would alienate its constituency, as it did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and many other Middle Eastern countries, and turn the so-called freedom fighters into our implacable enemies. Time and again, ignorance of the culture, religion, and real aims of these groups has combined to defeat us.

  — Which is why you‘ll be part of the forensics team, Hart said. -However, as you can see, the Black River intel doesn‘t concern Ganji or his people. We aren‘t talking here about a velvet revolution, but one steeped in blood.

  — Ganji has said that he doesn‘t want war, but his policy has been floundering for some time. You know as well as I do that the regime wouldn‘t allow him to survive, let alone to speak out, if his power was substantial. Ganji‘s of no use to Halliday, but this new group‘s aims would suit his purposes to a T.

  Hart nodded. -That‘s just what I was thinking. So while you‘re in Egypt I want you to nose around. Use Typhon‘s Egyptian contacts to find out what you can about the legitimacy of this group.

  — That won‘t be easy, Soraya said. -I can guarantee you that the national secret police are going to be all over us-especially me.

  — Why especially you? Hart asked.

  — Because the head of al Mokhabarat is Amun Chalthoum. He and I had a heated confrontation.

  — How heated?

  Soraya‘s memory immediately clamped down. -Chalthoum is a complex character, difficult to read-his entire life seems wrapped up in his career in al Mokhabarat, an
organization of thugs and assassins to which he‘s been given a life sentence.

  — Lovely, Hart said with no little sarcasm.

  — But it would be naive to believe that‘s all there is to him.

  — Do you think you can handle him?

  — I don‘t see why not. I think he‘s got a thing for me, Soraya said, not quite understanding why she wasn‘t telling Veronica the whole truth.

  Eight years ago, on a courier mission, she‘d been captured by agents of al Mokhabarat who, unbeknownst to her, had infiltrated CI‘s local network to which she was to deliver a microdot on which was etched the network‘s new orders. She had no idea what was on the microdot, had no desire to know. She was thrown in a basement cell of al Mokhabarat‘s offices in downtown Cairo. Three days later, with no sleep and only water and a crust of moldy bread to eat once each day, she was taken upstairs and brought before Amun Chalthoum, who took one look at her and immediately ordered her cleaned up.

  She was shown to a shower, where she scrubbed every inch of her body with a soapy washcloth. When she stepped out, a set of new clothes was waiting for her. She assumed her old clothes were being ripped apart and scrutinized by an al Mokhabarat forensics team searching for the intel she was carrying.