The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

“¿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 pro-Western 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 pro-Western. 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.

Everything fit her perfectly. To her surprise, she was then escorted out of the building. It was night. It occurred to her that she’d had no idea of time passing. In the boiling street a car was waiting at the curb, its headlights illuminating plainclothes guards watching her with studied attention. When she climbed in she had another shock: Amun Chalthoum sat behind the wheel. He was all alone.

He drove very hard and very fast across the city, heading west into the desert. He said nothing, but from time to time when traffic allowed, he watched her with his avid hawk’s gaze. She was famished but was determined to keep her hunger to herself.

He took her to Wadi AlRayan. He stopped the car, told her to get out. They stood facing each other in the blue moonlight. Wadi AlRayan was so desolate, they could have been the last two humans on earth.

“Whatever you’re looking for,” she said, “I don’t have it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“It’s already been delivered.”

“My sources tell me otherwise.”

“You don’t pay your sources nearly enough. Besides, you’ve checked my clothes and everything else.”

He didn’t laugh, nor would he ever during the time she was with him. “It’s in your head. Give it to me.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “We’ll stay out here until you give me the intel.”

She recognized his threat, recognized, too, the impetus behind it. In his eyes she was an Egyptian female. As such, she was brought up to unquestioningly obey males; why should she be any different from any of the other females he knew? Because she was half American? He spit on Americans. Immediately she saw the advantage his mistake gave her. She stood up to him; she kept to her story; she defied him every step of the way; most importantly, she proved she couldn’t be intimidated.

In the end, he’d backed down, had taken her back to Cairo, to the airport. At the boarding gate he handed back her passport as a gentleman might. It was a formal and somehow touching gesture. She turned away, certain she’d never see him again.

The DCI nodded. “If you can use his attraction for you to your advantage, do so, because I have an uncomfortable feeling that Halliday is about to propose a major new military initiative based on the premise of an armed insurrection from inside Iran.”

Leonid Arkadin was sitting in a café in Campione d’Italia, a picturesque Italian tax haven tucked away in the Swiss Alps. The tiny municipality rose steeply off the glassy ultramarine-blue surface of a clear mountain lake, studded with vessels of all sizes from rowboats to multimillion-dollar yachts, complete with the helipads, the copters, and, on the largest of these, the females to go with them.

In a haze of detached amusement, Arkadin watched two long-stemmed models with the kind of perfectly bronzed skin only the privileged and wealthy know how to acquire. As he sipped a small cup of espresso, which was all but lost in his large, square hand, the two models climbed on top of a bald man with an exceedingly hairy body, stretched out on the sea-blue cushions of the yacht’s rear deck.

He lost interest because for him pleasure was such an ephemeral concept, it lacked both form and function. His mind and his body were still bound to the iron-and-fire wheel of Nizhny Tagil, which just went to prove the old saw: You can take the man out of hell but you can’t take hell out of the man.

The acrid taste of the toxic Nizhny Tagil sky was still in his mouth when, moments later, a man with skin the color of his espresso approached. Arkadin glanced up with an air close to indifference even as the man slithered into the chair across from him.

“My name is Ismael,” the espresso man said. “Ismael Bey.”

“Khoury’s right hand.” Arkadin finished off his cup, set it down on the small round table. “I’ve heard of you.”

Bey, a rather young man, thin and bony as a starving dog, sported a dreadfully haunted look. “It’s done, Arkadin. You’ve won. With the death of Abdulla Khoury, I’m now the head of t

he Eastern Brotherhood, but I value my life more than my predecessor did. What do you want?”

Arkadin took hold of his empty cup, moved it to the precise center of its saucer, all without taking his eyes from the other man’s. When he was ready, he said, “I don’t want your position, but I am going to take your power.”

His lips formed the ghost of a smile, but there was something in the expression that sent a visible shiver of presentiment down the other’s spine. “To everyone in the outside world you have assumed the mantle of your fallen leader. However, everything—every decision, every action you will take from this moment on—originates with me; every dollar the Brotherhood makes flows through me. This is the new order of battle.”

His smile turned lupine, and Bey’s face took on a green and shiny cast. “First in the order of battle is to choose a contingent of one hundred men from the Black Legion. Within the week I want them at a camp I’ve set up in the Ural Mountains.”

Bey cocked his head. “A camp?”

“They will be trained by me personally.”

“Trained for what?”

“For killing.”

“Who are they meant to kill?”

Arkadin pushed his empty cup across the table until it was sitting squarely in front of Ismael Bey. The gesture, for Bey, was unmistakable. He had nothing; he would have nothing unless he obeyed Arkadin studiously and completely.

Without another word, Arkadin rose, and left Bey confronting the bleak face of his new future.