The Bourne Imperative (Jason Bourne 10)

He turned the compact over and over in his hand. Then, on a sudden impulse, he snapped it open. The thin puff was there, but, when he lifted it out, there was no powder underneath, just a tiny gold flange set into the base. Using a fingernail, he lifted the flange, and the base came up, revealing an eight-gigabyte micro-SD card.

Just then he stiffened, his head cocked to one side, trying to capture the tiny noise again. There was no doubt about it, someone was outside his front door. Rising silently, he crossed to the kitchen and slid out a large-bladed carving knife.

Back in the living room, he paused in front of the door, listening. He heard the sound again, as of the scrape of shoe soles against the hallway floor. Stepping closer, he grasped the lock and turned it over slowly and quietly.

Keeping the point of the knife at the ready for an instantaneous thrust, he grasped the doorknob, and, with a quick, efficient turn, pulled open the door.

24

Dick Richards, waiting to be shown into Tom Brick’s palatial offices at the Core Energy headquarters on Sixteenth Street NW, felt like a fugitive not only from Treadstone, but from life itself. He had been waiting for what seemed like hours while a veritable parade of people were ushered in and out of the executive office suites.

For what seemed like the eighth or ninth time, he hauled himself up and reintroduced himself to the young woman behind the slab banc. She had the young person’s knack of wearing her wireless earpiece like jewelry, somehow making her look more human rather than like an alien. She smiled up at him with her bee-stung lips.

“Mr. Richards—” he was astonished that she remembered “—Mr. Lang would like a word with you.”

Stephen Lang was senior operations VP. Richards wondered why he wanted to see him. “I’m here to see Tom Brick.”

The receptionist smiled and touched the carapace of her earpiece. “He’s not in the office at the moment.”

“D’you know where he is?”

The smile stayed in place, another piece of postmodern jewelry. “I believe that’s what Mr. Lang wants to talk with you about.” She held out a shapely bare arm. “D’you know the way?”

Richards nodded. “I do.”

Passing through the pebbled translucent doors, he turned right to the end, then right again. Ahead of him lay Lang’s spacious corner office. He had been in there a handful of times when Brick had brought him in on the logistics of one project or another.

Stephen Lang was an ex-athlete running to fat. He still had the basic frame and musculature of a Michigan linebacker, but his face had broadened and his gut had deepened. The moment Richards entered his office, he came around from behind his desk, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He grinned, extended his hand in a brief, bone-crushing grip, and nodded at one of the upholstered chairs in front of his smoked-glass–topped postmodern desk.

“So I hear that the Treadstone computers are hopelessly snarled.” Perched on a corner of his desk, he nodded. “Good work, Richards.”

“Thanks. But I’m now fucked. I can’t go back there.”

“Not to worry. You’ve helped us achieve our goal at Treadstone. Time to move on.” Lang clapped his hands together. “Listen, Tom wants to congratulate you himself. He was called away at the last minute, so he’s arranged for a car and driver to take you to him.”

“Is he at the safe house?”

“Yeah, about that, the safe house is no longer safe.” Lang clapped his hands again. “As I said, time to move on.” He stood, indicating that the interview was at an end. Extending his hand again, he said, “Safe travels, Richards. You’ve become invaluable to us, so a significant bump in pay is waiting for you, not to mention a bonus.” He waved his hand. “Tom will explain it all.”

Richards, cheeks flushed, went out of the office suite. He barely felt his feet on the carpeting. Finally, he was getting the recognition he deserved. A chubby blonde greeted him with a smile on the elevator ride down to the lobby. He was so astonished when she said something to him that he scarcely heard a word she said. She looked vaguely familiar, but all he could muster was a stupid grin by way of reply. Watching her walk across the lobby, he thought, Other women will smile at me—beautiful women, because they existed—especially here inside the Beltway—to respond galvanically to money and power.

Outside, as Lang had said, a black Lincoln Navigator was waiting for him. It was a raw, gloomy late afternoon, with drizzle slanted by the wind. Richards hurried over. There was no need to introduce himself. Bogs, recognizing him, smiled and swung open the passenger door for him. Then he climbed in behind the wheel and peeled out, driving very fast through the congested streets of the city.

Richards sat back, luxuriating in the beginning moments of his new life. He had made the right choice. Government service was for fools who were content to work unconscionably long hours, take home their meager pay packets each week, and eventually retire into obscurity, worn out, beaten down by the endless bureaucracy.

They went over the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge into Virginia, then turned north. Ten minutes later, the Navigator turned in to a side entrance to Founders Park in Alexandria, which fronted the water. The driver got out, opened the door for Richards, and guided him down a long wharf that jutted out into the Potomac. At the far end was a large weathered-wood gazebo under which he saw Tom Brick talking to a figure in shadow.

He turned when Richards and the driver entered the gazebo’s overhang. “Ah, you made it, Richards. Good deal.” He gestured toward the other figure with him, the chubby blonde who had accompanied Richards down in the elevator.

Richards had just a moment to register his surprise when he felt a ghastly pain in his side. He opened his mouth to shout, but the driver’s thick hand clamped hard over the lower half of his face. Blood ran out of him, and his knees sagged. The driver was half holding him up.

He looked at Tom Brick who, along with the blonde, was watching him without any apparent emotion.

“What?” he stammered. “Why?”

Tom Brick sighed. “The very fact that you’re asking these questions confirms that your usefulness to me is at an end.” He stepped toward Richards, grabbed his chin, and lifted his face to stare into his eyes. “You idiot, what did you think you were doing announcing yourself as the saboteur?”

“I…I…” Richards’s slowly freezing brain, already shutting down at its periphery, was desperately trying to grasp what was happening to him. And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the blonde grinning at him and he realized that she was a Treadstone employee—an assistant, someone in the unique position of watching everyone in the organization. Jesus, he thought. Jesus Christ.

“This is the price you pay for having multiple masters, Richards.” Tom Brick’s voice was gentle, rueful, understanding. “There was no other ending possible.”

Richards’s brain, robbed of blood, was turning more sluggish by the second. But still, he got it. Finally. “You recognized Peter Marks right away.”

Brick nodded. “Thanks to Tricia here, I did.”

“Then why did you let him—?”

“Once I knew he had followed me, that he knew more than I had dreamed, it was imperative to find out what his game was.” Brick pinched Richards’s chin between the pincers of his thumb and forefinger. “You didn’t tell me who he was, Richards. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I…” Richards closed his eyes, swallowed hard. He was dying, so what the hell. “I thought if he and Soraya Moore liked me, took me in, I could—”

“What? What could you have, Richards? Friends? Colleagues?” He shook his head. “No one cares about you, Richards. No one wants to work with you. You’re an insect I’m about to squash. You have a gift, but your human flaws outweigh your usefulness to us. You can’t be trusted.”

“I made my choice. I chose you.” Richards’s voice sounded pathetic, even to him. Tears leaked out of his eyes and he began to weep. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair.”

Clearly disgusted, Tom Bric

k let him go, lifted his gaze, and nodded to his driver, holding Richards up. The knife slid in farther, was twisted so violently Richards’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. The sound that emerged through the hand clamped over his mouth was not unlike that a pig makes when the slaughtering blade comes down.

The moment the door to the apartment swung open and the carving knife slashed out, Bourne caught Don Fernando’s fist.

“Easy, Don Fernando.”

Don Fernando stared at him, obviously shaken. “It was you, Jason? You were outside my door earlier?”

Bourne shook his head as he stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind him. “I only just got here.” He cocked his head. “Someone was trying to get into the apartment?”

“That or he was keeping watch on me.”

“There was no surveillance on the building,” Bourne said, taking the carving knife from the older man’s hand. “I checked.”

“Maceo Encarnación and Harry Rowland are here in Paris. I think it was Rowland at my door earlier.”

“Don Fernando,” Bourne said, “Rowland is Nicodemo.”

“What? Are you certain?”

Bourne nodded. “He’s with Maceo Encarnación. I followed them here from Mexico City.”

“The woman?”

“Rebeka was a Mossad agent.” Bourne sat on a sofa. “She’s dead.”

“Ah, well, then we both lost someone.” Don Fernando sat heavily next to Bourne. “I’m sorry.”

“What happened?”

Don Fernando told him briefly about how Maceo Encarnación had sent Martha Christiana to kill him, and what had happened after he and Martha met. “She went out the bedroom window, leaped across me while I was sleeping. She could have killed me, but she didn’t.”

“You were lucky.”

Don Fernando shook his head. “No, Jason. Today I don’t feel in the least bit lucky.” He laced his fingers together. “Hers was a soul in torment. Perhaps she needed a priest. I am no priest. In this case, I might have played the role of the devil.”

“We’re all pursued by shadows, Don Fernando. There are times when they catch up to us. There’s nothing more to be done; we have to move on.”

Don Fernando nodded. He picked up Martha Christiana’s compact, popped it open, and showed Bourne the micro-SD card hidden beneath the false bottom. “I can’t help but think she left this for me to find.” He shrugged. “But perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.”

“Have you looked at what’s on the card?”

Don Fernando shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Well,” Bourne said, plucking up the card, “it’s time we did.”

Maceo Encarnación went up to the cockpit of his private jet. The door was open, the Chinese pilot going through a pre-flight checklist.

“Do you think he’ll make it back in time?” the pilot asked without looking up.

Maceo Encarnación grunted as he slipped into the navigator’s seat. “Impossible to say.”

“Your attachment to him is well known.”

Maceo Encarnación contemplated the pilot for some time. “What you mean,” he said slowly and finally, “is that Minister Ouyang disapproves of my attachment to Nicodemo.”

The pilot, who was also Minister Ouyang’s agent, said nothing. He sat very still, as if attempting to divine the air currents.

“Nicodemo is my son. I raised him, taught him.”

“You took him from her.”

The pilot spoke without judgment, his voice perfectly neutral. Nevertheless, Maceo Encarnación took offense. He could not do otherwise; it was in his nature.

“His mother was married to someone else,” Maceo Encarnación said, more to himself than to the pilot. “I loved her, but her husband was a powerful man, and I needed his power. She could not keep the child, could not even be with the husband while it was growing inside her. She took herself to Mérida, to her aunt’s estancia for the five months she was showing. I took the boy from her, raised him.”

“You said that already.”

Maceo Encarnación hated these people, but he was forced to deal with them. No one else had their power, their expertise, their deep pockets, their vision. Nevertheless, he often, as now, had to exert an iron will to keep himself from beating them to a bloody pulp. The fact that he could not treat them as he treated his own people was like a knife in his gut. He often dreamed of this Chinese agent on the edge of the Pacific, his severed head rolling fish-eyed in the surf, while his trunk twitched, spewing blood like the fountain in Chapultepec Park.

“I repeated it because it’s important in the understanding of my attachment, and I can never be certain of your grasp of Spanish.” Maceo Encarnación did not bother to wait for a response from the agent, knowing none would be forthcoming. Was there ever a poorer match in allies, he thought, than extrovert Mexican and introvert Chinese?

This agent had a name, but Maceo Encarnación never used it, assuming that it was false. Instead, he thought of him as Hey-Boy, a despicable term that amused him no end. He would tell him the story—part of it that he would take for the whole—because it amused him to do so. What he would not tell him was the private part. The identity of Nicodemo’s and his sister Maricruz’s mother remained locked inside him. Constanza Camargo had given birth to Nicodemo early in their years-long affair. Maricruz was born three years later. Constanza was the one woman he had ever loved, the one woman he could never have, first, because of Constanza’s husband, and then because of Constanza herself, who loved him, loved her two children with him, but had vowed never to see them, never to interrupt the flow of their lives with the truth, to complicate and warp their destinies in the name of her desire.

“So,” Maceo Encarnación said now, “Nicodemo, parted from his mother, became mine, body and soul. As soon as he was old enough, I sent him to a special school in Colombia. I felt it imperative that he learn the trade.”

“The drug trade,” the agent said, with unnecessary venom. The Middle Kingdom had been done irreparable harm by the opium trade in the 1800s. The Chinese had memories centuries long.

“That and the arms trade.” Maceo Encarnación pursed his lips. “As Minister Ouyang well knows, my prime interest is in arming those who need it most.” When speaking with the agent, he always assumed he was speaking with Ouyang, the spider in the center of his Beijing web.

“You are most altruistic.”

Maceo Encarnación’s left hand twitched. Not for the first time, Hey-Boy had crossed the line that would, in any other circumstance, have cost him, quite literally, his head. Once more it was necessary for Maceo Encarnación to remind himself of the extreme importance of Minister Ouyang and his minions. Without Ouyang’s assistance, the deal with Colonel Ben David would never have been possible.

“My altruism is matched only by Minister Ouyang’s,” he said, enunciating slowly and carefully. “You would do well to remember that.”

The agent stared out the cockpit window. “When do we leave?”

“When I tell you to start the engines.” Maceo Encarnación looked around. “Where is it?”

The pilot looked at him with his long Mandarin eyes. His spidery fingers drew out from beneath his seat an olive-drab metal box with a fingerprint lock. Maceo Encarnación pressed the end of his right forefinger onto the pressure-pad, and the lock opened.

He opened the top and looked down at the close-bonded stacks of thousand-dollar bills. “Thirty million. Amazing to look at,” he said, “even for me.”

“Colonel Ben David will be pleased,” the agent said, deadpan.

Maceo Encarnación gave a silent laugh. “We all will.”

Soraya was about to leave Peter’s hospital room when Secretary Hendricks bustled in.

“Good to see you out of bed, Soraya,” he said. Then he looked past her to where Peter lay. “How are you feeling?”

“Numb,” Peter said, “in every way imaginable.”

Hendricks dredged up a bark of a laugh. “Look, Peter, I don?

??t have a lot of time. We have a bit of a situation up at headquarters.”

“The computer network is down.”

“That’s right,” Hendricks said, at the same time Soraya said, “What?”

“Dick Richards.” Peter looked at Hendricks, who nodded. “I told Sam to pick him up.”

“Anderson made a command decision to try and definitively link Richards with Core Energy.” Hendricks gestured. “Brick has been ultra-cautious. Despite what he allegedly said to you—”

“He did say it to me, dammit!” Peter said heatedly.

Hendricks let Peter expend himself. “A court of law will rule against you,” he said, after a time. “We’ve tried to follow a money trail, but if Richards is being paid by Core Energy or any of its subsidiaries, we have yet to find any evidence of it. Anderson knew this, which was why he put a keylogger onto the terminal he set Richards up at.”

“Don’t tell me,” Peter said sourly. “It didn’t work.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I assume you have Richards in custody.”

For the first time, Hendricks appeared chagrined. “He’s gone, disappeared.”

“Find Brick,” Peter said. “That’s where Richards went, guaranteed.”

Hendricks spoke softly into his mobile. When the conversation concluded, he said, “For some reason Brick wants the Treadstone system down. Why?”

“Assuming you’re right,” Soraya said, “it’s likely our overseas monitoring he wants to go silent.”

Peter snapped his fingers. “You’re right! But what is he afraid of us finding out?” He gnawed on his thumb for a moment.

Hendricks shifted from one foot to the other. “Peter…” He looked suddenly uncomfortable. When Peter looked up, he continued. “Considering everything that’s happened to you—the serious nature of your current injury, I think it’s best if you’re relieved of duties as co-director of Treadstone.”