The Bourne Dominion Page 9

  “Excuse me, Director.”

  He looked up to see Ann standing in the doorway. “What is it?” he snapped.

  She flinched. She was not yet used to her boss’s moods. “I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a problem at school with my son and I need a couple of hours off.”

  “Of course,” he said, waving at her vaguely. “Go on.” His mind had already returned to its original train of thought.

  Ann was about to leave when she turned back. “Oh, I almost forgot. Before she left, Director Moore asked for an additional server to be added to her—”

  “She asked for what?”

  Peter had swiveled toward her and was half out of his seat. She turned pale, clearly scared half to death. Through his mounting excitement, he recognized this and willed his voice to modulate more normally. “Ann, did you say that Soraya asked for another server?”

  “Yes. It’s going to be installed tonight, so on the off chance you’re going to be working late—”

  “Thank you, Ann.” He forced himself to smile at her. “As for your son, take as much time as you need.”

  “Thank you, Director.” Slightly bewildered, she turned, grabbed her coat and handbag, and left.

  Peter, turning back to his computer screen, thought long and hard about Hendricks’s precise words. Then he had it: “Oh, by the way, I’ve been able to get the Treadstone servers access to all the clandestine services’ databases.”

  Servers. Peter’s eyes flew open. Why on earth had he said that when the servers had nothing to do with access? The Treadstone servers were where its own data was stored. He stared at the blinking box in the middle of the screen, asking its mysterious question. Jesus Christ, he thought, could it be that simple?

  His fingers trembling slightly, he typed in the word: “servers.”

  At once, the box was replaced by a file tree. Peter stared in disbelief. He was inside Hendricks’s computer. The secretary wanted him there, he was absolutely certain of that. He’d delivered a coded message to Peter. Why hadn’t he been able to tell Peter outright?

  Peter’s first thought was that Hendricks was afraid his house was bugged, but he immediately dismissed the thought. The secretary’s house and offices were electronically swept twice a week. So Hendricks was afraid of something else. Was it someone on the inside, one of his own people?

  Peter stared at the screen. He had a sense that he would find the answer somewhere within the secretary’s file tree. Leaning forward, he got to work with a feverish intensity.

  This is utter madness,” the FARC commander said as Bourne hurtled the stolen jeep down National 40.

  “How did you know I was in the tunnel?” Bourne said.

  “You will be followed to the ends of the earth.” His name was Suarez. He hadn’t been reticent about telling Bourne his name or the ways in which he was certain Bourne would die.

  Bourne smiled. “There isn’t one of your men who could get out of Colombia.”

  Suarez laughed, even though it caused him some pain in the area behind his right ear. “Do you think FARC is my only affiliation?”

  Bourne glanced at him and that was when he saw the gold ring, gleaming on the thick forefinger of his right hand.

  “You’re a member of Severus Domna.”

  “And you are a dead man,” the commander said flatly.

  All at once he grabbed at the wheel. Bourne smashed the barrel of his Makarov down on the back of his hand, and Suarez bellowed like a maddened bull. He snatched his hand away, cradling it with the other.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he cried. “You’ve broken it!”

  “Relax.” Bourne hummed to himself as they rocketed along. He deftly moved the jeep around lumbering semis and laden flatbeds.

  Suarez, rocking back and forth in pain, said, “What the hell are you so happy about, maricón?”

  For some time, Bourne occupied himself by flying past vehicles. Then he said, “I know how you knew where I was.”

  “No,” Suarez said, “you don’t.”

  “Someone at the last roadblock before the tunnel made me and radioed you, someone also with the Domna.”

  “This is true, but I am not following orders. Your death is a gift to a friend of mine, an enemy of yours.”

  He was whey-faced, the pain causing beads of sweat to break out at his hairline. He stared fixedly ahead, until his gaze strayed to the side mirror. A smile flickered across his lips and, in the space of a heartbeat, was gone. Bourne, who had been checking the rearview mirror every minute or so, saw the two motorcycles flicking in and out of the traffic behind him.

  “Roberto Corellos has expended a lot of capital with us to have you killed.”

  So Corellos was taking revenge for Bourne having lost him face in front of his men. Now they were mortal enemies.

  “You’d better buckle up,” Bourne said.

  He waited for the motorcycles to break free of the other vehicles behind him, then he accelerated. Putting on speed, they closed the distance between them. At the moment of their maximum acceleration, Bourne trod on the brakes so hard that the jeep laid a layer of rubber onto the macadam of the highway. The vehicle swerved violently from side to side as he threw it into neutral, its transmission traveling down through the gears as its tires fought to grip the road.

  The motorcycles shot past him and then, swerving mightily, braked, turning in a wide circle. Bourne forced the transmission back up the ladder and stomped on the accelerator. The jeep shot forward, slamming grille-first into the right-hand motorcycle, catching it broadside, throwing it completely off the highway. Suarez’s forehead nearly went through the windshield. The motorcycle skidded wildly, the cyclist trying desperately to regain control as he skated across the width of the macadam. An instant later it crossed the narrow shoulder and disappeared over the mountainside.

  A gunshot spiderwebbed the jeep’s windshield and Bourne threw the vehicle into reverse, spun it around until it was headed directly at the second motorcycle. The biker was taking aim again with his handgun. The cycle was between the jeep and the mountainside with its vertiginous drop of hundreds of feet. Owing to the FARC roadblock, the oncoming traffic had been at a standstill. Now motorists were scrambling to get away from the chaos.

  Bourne drove directly at the cyclist, whose pistol was aimed right at him.

  “Dios mio, what the hell are you doing?” Suarez shouted. “You’re going to get us both killed.”

  “If that’s what it takes,” Bourne said.

  “The reports about you are true.” The commander stared at him. “You’re insane.”

  The motorcyclist must have thought so as well, because, after firing wildly, he took off in a spray of gravel. Braking, Bourne extended his left arm and squeezed off a shot. The motorcyclist’s arms flew outward as he was launched off the cycle’s seat. It slammed into a stalled car, which slewed into the truck in front of it.

  Bourne took off down the highway, which, owing to both the FARC blockade and the fire in the tunnel, was now entirely deserted.

  8

  THIRTY THOUSAND FEET in the air, Boris Karpov sat in the jetliner and watched the dove-gray clouds scroll past the Perspex window. As always, he had mixed feelings about leaving Russia. A Russian, he mused, was never truly comfortable outside the motherland. This was to be expected. The Russian people were special—extraordinary, really, once you took into account the terrible history they’d had to endure first under the czars, the Cossacks, then Stalin and Beria, a darkness constantly stalking his beautiful country. Altruism was not a well-known quality in the Russian mind-set—deprivation had made self-preservation the primary motivating factor for so long, it was now hardwired into the Russian psyche—but in this respect Boris was different from his fellows. His love of Russia motivated him to want a better life not just for himself but for those people who were continually looking up at a light they could never attain.

  The first-class cabin attendant asked if he had everything he needed.

&nb
sp; “We’re baking chocolate chip cookies,” she said, bending over him with a smile. She was blond and blue-eyed—Nordic, he surmised—and had a slight accent. “You can have them with milk, chocolate milk, coffee, tea, or any of a dozen liquors.”

  Cookies and milk, Karpov thought with a wry smile, how all-American. “The classic,” he said, making the attendant laugh softly.

  “Mr. Stonyfield, you Americans,” she said affectionately, using Karpov’s legend name. And with a hushed whoosh of fabric against pantyhose, she returned up the aisle.

  Karpov sank back into his ruminations. Of course Americans were born into the light, so they were used to looking down on everyone else. But what else could you expect from such a privileged people? Karpov did not know what to make of being mistaken for one of them. He waited for the reaction to come, and when it did, he realized that he was somehow humiliated, as if he were a country hick who had by some miracle been momentarily mistaken for a Yale graduate. The attendant’s error had diminished him in some way he couldn’t quite grasp, holding up to him the mirror of everything he had lacked from the moment he’d been born.

  His parents had had little time for him, being locked in grim and silent combat to determine who could have the most affairs during the course of their marriage. There was never any thought of divorce; that would negate the rules of the game. Consequently, they scarcely noticed when Karpov’s sister, Alix, died of an uncontrollable brain fever. Karpov had taken care of her, nursing her through her terrible and debilitating illness, first after school, then cutting school entirely to be with her. When she was transferred to the hospital he went with her. He formed the impression that his parents were relieved to have both the children out of the house.

  “So gloomy,” his mother would mutter as she made breakfast. “So damn gloomy.”

  But most mornings she failed to appear. Karpov sensed that she had never come home during the night.

  “I can’t stand it” was all his father could manage the mornings he did appear. He couldn’t look at Alix, much less go into her room. “What’s the point?” he responded to Karpov’s question one morning. “She doesn’t know I’m there.”

  On the contrary, Karpov knew that Alix knew when someone was with her. She often squeezed his hand as he sat beside the bed. He read stories to her from books he’d bought. Other times he read aloud the lessons from schoolbooks he deemed important enough to learn. Because of these sessions with his sister he discovered a love of history. What he loved best was to read to her about various periods in Russia’s storied past, though admittedly some were depressing, awfully difficult to digest.

  Karpov was at her bedside at the hospital when she died. After the doctor’s pronouncement, a suffocating silence engulfed the room. It was as if everything in the world had stopped, even his heart. His chest felt as if at any instant it would cave in. The smell of antiseptic made him want to gag. He bent over Alix’s waxen face and kissed her cool forehead. There was absolutely no outward evidence of the massive and brutal war that had gone on inside her brain.

  “Is there anything I can do?” the attending nurse had said when he exited the room.

  He shook his head; his chest was too congested with emotion to allow for speech. Echoes followed him down the linoleum-lined corridors, the pain-filled, inarticulate noises of the sick and the dying. Outside, the glowing Moscow twilight was filled with snow. People walked this way and that, chatting, smoking, even laughing. A young man and woman, their heads together as they whispered to each other, crossed the street. A mother pulled her little boy along, singing softly to him. Karpov observed these everyday occurrences as a prisoner will the sky and passing clouds outside his tiny, barred window. These things no longer belonged to him. He was cut off from them like a diseased limb cleaved from a tree.

  There was a hole in Karpov’s heart where Alix had resided for so long. The tears came and, as he walked aimlessly, watching the snow pile up, listening to the bells of St. Basil’s, muffled and indistinct, he cried for her, but also for himself, because now he was truly alone.

  “Sir?”

  The attendant had reappeared with his milk and cookies, and Karpov shook himself like a dog coming out of the rain.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Shall I come back?”

  He shook his head and she slid his tray out and set down the plate of cookies and the glass of milk.

  “Still warm,” she said. “Is there anything else?”

  Karpov smiled at her, but there was more than a hint of sadness in it. “You can sit down beside me.”

  Her soft silver bell of laughter wafted over him like a cool breeze. “What a flirt you are, Mr. Stonyfield,” she said. Shaking her head, she left him alone.

  Karpov stared down at the cookies, not seeing them at all. He was thinking of Jason Bourne, he was thinking about what he was setting out to do, he was thinking of what his decision would mean not only for the present but for the rest of his life.

  Nothing would ever be the same. The knowledge didn’t frighten him—he was too used to the unknown for that. But he did have a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if a group of moths were fluttering there, directionless, waiting for the inevitable to happen.

  It wouldn’t be long now. That was the only thing he knew for certain.

  Marcel Probst, the Quai d’Orsay IT tech to whom Inspector Lipkin-Renais had delivered Laurent’s cell phone and its SIM card, was one of those Frenchmen for whom wine, cheese, and an arrogant sneer were the essentials of life.

  Moments after she had arrived with Aaron, Probst made it clear via a sour, almost offended look that he did not like Soraya. Whether it was because she was Muslim or a woman, or both, Soraya could not say. Then again, he didn’t seem entirely enamored of Aaron, either, so who could say. In any event, his face, sour as a prune, announced his prejudices like a warning sign on a highway.

  Probst was dapper, well dressed, and in his late forties. In other words, the direct opposite of the American IT techs of Soraya’s acquaintance. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, she thought as she stepped up to his workbench. It contained, among other paraphernalia, a laptop computer and an oscilloscope flanked by a pair of high-end bookshelf speakers.

  “What do you have for us?” Aaron said.

  M. Probst pulled on his lower lip, making it into a kind of teapot spout. “The phone itself is beyond even my skills,” he said, “and the SIM card is a mess.”

  Apparently, he never met a consonant he didn’t try to swallow. Maybe, Soraya thought, they tasted like Brie.

  M. Probst cocked an eyebrow upward. “Was the instrument, by any chance, compromised while being transported here?”

  “Certainly not,” Aaron said. And then, somewhat irritably, “Have you found something or not? Get on with it, if you please.”

  M. Probst grunted. “The curious thing is that from what I can tell, the SIM card was wiped clean of information.”

  Soraya’s heart sank. “From the damage?”

  “Well, mademoiselle, that depends. You see, this SIM card was subjected to two forms of damage. The one as I have already mentioned is physical.” He tapped the oscilloscope’s spikily juddering line. “The other was electronic.”

  “What do you mean?” Aaron said.

  “I can’t be one hundred percent sure,” M. Probst said, “but there is a strong indication that the card was subjected to an electronic pulse that wiped it clean.” He cleared his throat. “Well, almost. There was only one thing salvageable,” he said. “There is no doubt that it was entered after the electronic pulse, but before the phone was rendered useless.”

  “You mean in the instant before Laurent was struck by the car,” Soraya said, and immediately regretted the interruption.

  M. Probst glared at her as if she were a rat that had crawled into his sanctum sanctorum.

  “I believe that is what I said,” he said stiffly.

  “Moving on,” Aaron said, gamely, “let’s get to what you salvaged.”
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  M. Probst sniffed like a character out of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. “It’s a good thing you came to me, Inspector. I very much doubt anyone else could have brought up so much as a kilobyte of information.”

  For the first time, a smile curved M. Probst’s bloodless lips, thin as a miser’s coat. It was clear he felt he had put the interlopers in their place. “Here is what was transferred to the SIM card in the last moment of the victim’s life.”

  On the laptop screen, a single cryptic word appeared: “dinoig.”

  Aaron shook his head and turned to Soraya. “Do you know what that means?”

  Soraya looked at him and said, “I’m starving. Take me to your favorite restaurant.”

  Miles away from La Línea, Bourne pulled off the highway into a dense copse of trees and overgrown brush. Exiting the jeep, he came around to the other side and hauled Suarez bodily out of his seat.

  “What are you doing?” Suarez said. “Where are we going?”

  He was a mess. The right side of his head was bloody, a huge bruise, standing up like a fist, scarred his forehead, and he cradled his bruised and swollen right hand.

  Bourne dragged him along, hauling him to his feet when he occasionally stumbled. When they were completely hidden from the road, Bourne shoved Suarez against the trunk of a tree.

  “Tell me about your role in Severus Domna.”

  “It won’t help you.”

  When Bourne came at him, he held up his good hand. “All right, all right! But I’m telling you it won’t do you any good. The Domna is completely compartmentalized. I move goods for the group when and if I’m asked to, but I don’t know anything else.”

  “What kinds of goods?”

  “The crates are sealed,” Suarez said. “I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”

  “What are the crates made of?” Bourne asked.