He handed her his mobile. “Time to call him and set up a meet.”
She shook her head. “No, not yet. I’m not…I need to see my mother first. I need to know she’s really okay.”
“Fair enough.”
Bourne went to get them coffee. They had just put the empty containers aside when a nurse appeared.
“Your mother’s awake,” the nurse said. “She’s calling for you.”
Maricruz went to follow the nurse, but when she saw Bourne stay in the waiting room, she said, “I want you with me.”
Nodding, he accompanied the two women down the corridor and into a semi-private room. A cotton privacy curtain had been pulled across, dividing the room, which was a far cry from the spacious deluxe quarters Carlos had arranged for Maricruz at Hospital Ángeles Pedregal. Light coming in through the blinds illuminated the figure on the other bed, as if through a translucent theatrical scrim.
Constanza, needles in her arm, lay on the bed, already looking better—the bluish metallic cast to her skin had been replaced by a rosier hue that, with any luck, would continue to gain leverage as the arsenic in her system was neutralized by the dimercaprol and pumped out by the fluids being delivered along with the drug.
Maricruz leaned over the bed to take her mother’s hand. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Constanza said. “Much better.” Then her eyes cut to Bourne. “You killed Maceo, didn’t you?” One hand fluttered up, then fell back onto the covers. “Don’t bother answering. I knew it the moment I first set eyes on you in the airport. It was in your scent, on your face.”
“You couldn’t know,” Bourne said.
“Oh, but I did. I tried to stop you, in my own way, but it all went wrong. Because of my involvement, Maria-Elena died, as did the woman you were with. I’ve never forgiven myself.”
“Mama.”
“No, Maricruz, this must be said. Expiation can come no other way. I am a good Catholic; I believe in confession.” She gestured. “Come closer. That’s right. Now I will tell you that each time I tried to help Maceo Encarnación it ended in tears. And yet I never stopped. That’s a form of madness, I suppose. But that’s what he engendered in me—a madness that transcended sense and reality. That was his gift—a dark gift. We’re all the better for his death, that I can tell you without fear of contradiction.” Her eyes burned into Bourne’s. “And yet, God help me, it has left an empty place inside me. This is the essential conundrum of the human condition—to continue to love someone who caused you harm.”
“Like drug addiction,” Maricruz said.
Her mother nodded. “Precisely like drug addiction.”
“It will take time,” Bourne said.
“And now,” Constanza said, “thanks to you, I’ll have time.” But there was no smile on her face, and her eyes were filled with sadness.
Maricruz turned to Bourne. “Let me have some time with her.”
Bourne nodded, went out into the corridor, stood with his back to the wall, surveying the goings-on around him. The hall was lined with gurneys pushed up against the wall, some with patients who lay asleep or half dead. Something was bothering him, something he’d either seen or smelled, something out of place.
A harried-looking doctor appeared from a patient’s room, stepped to the nurses’ station and handed over the patient’s chart. As he did so, Bourne picked up a wink of light from the overhead fluorescents, reflected off the chart’s metallic edge.
At once, he whipped around, pushed through the door into Constanza’s room, where the two women looked at him in surprise. Beyond and between them, the silhouette of the other patient in the room was moving. The wink of light came again, though dulled by the curtain, as it had the first time Bourne had been in the room.
Lunging forward, Bourne leapt over the bed, reaching through the curtain. A handgun slammed down on his wrist. He twisted, pulled the curtain around him and the person in the other bed. He wasn’t a patient at all, though he had been patient enough to wait for Constanza to be assigned a room from the ER and then somehow embed himself in it when she was wheeled in.
The man smashed Bourne just above his heart, and Bourne felt an electric shock go through him. Immediately the man was on top of Bourne, trying to pinion his arms, but Bourne pressed his thumb into the nerve bundle at the side of his neck, kneed him hard in the groin, and, snatching the SIG Sauer out of his hand, dealt him a vicious blow with the butt. The man groaned and rolled off the bed onto the floor.
By this time Maricruz had joined him in the area between the second bed and the window. “I thought my father’s family had sent someone else to finish the job Bernarda had started.” She was staring down at the unconscious man. “But I recognize him.” She looked up at Bourne. “This is one of Matamoros’s men.” She ran a hand through her hair. “You’re right. Felipe won’t rest until he’s got me back.”
“We’ve got to hide him,” Bourne said.
“How the hell are we going to do that?”
“We’re going to hide him in plain sight.”
He went out of the room, and was soon back pushing one of the empty gurneys from the hallway. Maricruz helped him maneuver the body onto the gurney. Bourne strapped him down, then covered him completely. Wheeling the gurney out, he pushed it down to the end of the corridor, where he left it.
“That man,” Constanza said, when he had returned, “it never ends, does it?”
“It will now, Mama.” Maricruz took her hand. “I swear to you it will end.”
Bourne took her aside. “I have to get to Matamoros, and quickly. Both you and your mother are in danger. In another country, we could find people to protect you, but not here. No one can be trusted.”
“I’ll call him and—”
“No. Enough time has passed that he’s sure to have become suspicious. I have to find another way. Does he have a weak link in his personnel? Someone we can contact to find out what he’s planning?”
Maricruz thought a moment. “There is someone,” she said. “Let me have your mobile.”
Diego de la Luna, Felipe Matamoros’s adviser, had had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach ever since Maricruz Encarnación had told him that she had met his older brother Elizondo in Manila. Now, he sat in the Mexico City hotel room with Juan Ruiz, watching Matamoros pace back and forth like a trapped animal about to gnaw its paw off, and felt his skin begin to crawl.
After the initial call from Maricruz, they had heard nothing. Of course, Felipe had ordered him to try to trace the call, but whatever mobile device she was using not only blocked the number but refused to emit its GPS coordinates.
So here they were: deaf, dumb, and blind—a state Felipe could not long tolerate. In fact, de la Luna thought with a good degree of fear, he looked to be at the end of his very frayed rope.
“I don’t trust her,” Matamoros said.
“Who, jefe?” he said in his most obsequious voice.
“Maricruz,” Matamoros snapped. “I sent Martine out to bring her back here, but we haven’t heard from him and now he’s not answering his mobile. The exclusive with Ouyang, laundering our money through Chinese art auctions—I knew her deal was too good to be true.” He cursed. “The bitch is playing some kind of game.”
“But what?”
“I don’t know!” Matamoros thundered. “That’s the fucking problem.”
On the other side of the room Juan Ruiz was studiously paring his nails with a thin-bladed gravity knife.
Matamoros ran his hand through his hair. “But no matter what it is, she’s become a liability. She has to be eliminated. The sooner the better.”
At that moment de la Luna’s mobile emitted a tinny tune.
“Hurry up and answer that,” Matamoros said, glaring. “And change your ringtone. That one grates on my nerves.”
“Yes, jefe.” De la Luna took the call, but his blood fairly froze in his veins at the sound of Maricruz’s voice.
“Hello, Diego,” she said. “It’s
been too long.”
De la Luna was at a loss for words. He heard her chuckle at the other end of the line.
“Surprised I still haven’t been delivered to you, Diego?”
He coughed, unable for the moment to utter a single word.
“Are you somewhere where you can talk?”
“Not really,” he managed to get out in a strangled voice. His throat felt as if he had swallowed a bucket of sand.
“Then move,” she said, her voice at once steely. “Now!”
He looked at Matamoros, who had resumed his pacing. “Ruiz!” Matamoros bellowed.
Juan Ruiz looked up from his work and, seeing the storm clouds building in his boss’s face, flicked away his knife. “Yes, boss.”
“Go find that bitch. I don’t care what you have to do. Tear this fucking city apart if you have to, I don’t give a shit. Just find her.”
Juan Ruiz stood up. He seemed to occupy a third of the room. “And when I do?”
“Take your gravity knife,” Matamoros said. “I want her head!”
Okay,” de la Luna said. “I’m outside on the terrace. But I don’t understand. Why have you called me? Why aren’t you here?”
“Why do you think?” Maricruz’s voice seemed to rattle around in his ear.
“Matamoros was right about you? You’ve been playing us all along?”
“Circumstances change, Diego. Now you’re the one I want to talk to.”
“Oh, no,” de la Luna said. “No, no, no. I’m not going to help you.”
“Then I’ll let your brother do it for me.”
“What…what are you talking about?”
“Your brother has been looking for a way to destroy the Los Zetas drug trade for years, but has failed to do so because of the power the cartel wields inside the police, army, and government. But I’m his way in, Diego. I can give him everything he needs to bring Los Zetas down. I have his mobile number right here. Do you want me to make that call?”
De la Luna swallowed hard. “Of course…of course not.”
“Then meet me.”
De la Luna looked back over his shoulder. Juan Ruiz was gone. Maybe he’d get lucky and Juan would find her before…
“When?”
“Now.”
“Now? I can’t—”
“You can; you will.” Maricruz bit off each word as if it were the head of a fish.
De la Luna passed a hand across his face. He was appalled to discover he was sweating like a farm animal. He couldn’t possibly return to the hotel room in this state; Matamoros, with the senses of a hawk, would pick up his distress in an instant.
Closing his eyes, de la Luna acquiesced. “Where?”
“The Pyramid of the Sun.”
Teotihuacán was more or less thirty miles northwest of the city, de la Luna calculated. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Forty-five minutes,” Maricruz said. “Don’t be late.”
The moment the connection was severed, de la Luna punched a SPEED DIAL button. When Juan Ruiz answered, he said, “Any luck?”
“Too soon,” Juan Ruiz said in his usual terse style.
“No, it’s not,” de la Luna said. His skin felt prickly as the sweat dried on it. “I know where she is.”
44
Teotihuacán translated as “the place where man met the gods.” It was a gargantuan archaeological site of Mesoamerican culture, containing the Pyramid of the Sun—the largest such structure in the pre-Columbian Americas—but also enormous residential structures, the wide, central Avenue of the Dead, and the Pyramid of the Moon. The city was established around 100 BCE. Its burgeoning inhabitants continued its expansion through 250 CE until eventually it became, with a population of 125,000, one of the largest cities in the world.
This history was very much in evidence as Bourne and Maricruz went down the Avenue of the Dead toward the massive Pyramid of the Sun. Everything about Teotihuacán was on a mammoth scale, including the residences with apartments built one atop the other to accommodate the swiftly increasing population.
“Do you think he’ll come?” Maricruz said.
“I do.” Bourne was automatically scrutinizing the faces of every tourist and tour leader they passed. The place was packed with groups huddled around their guides or walking in clouds like gnats as they were led from structure to structure. “But he won’t come alone.”
“He can’t afford to let anyone know what he’s doing.”
“He doesn’t have to,” Bourne said. “All he has to do is tell someone he knows where you’ll be.”
Maricruz looked alarmed. “Then why did you tell me to set this up?”
“Matamoros can’t bring his crew here—too many foreign tourists. He can’t afford any undue attention now. No, he won’t send a crew and he won’t come himself. He’ll send someone he trusts, someone in his inner circle.”
“Juan Ruiz,” Maricruz said. “He’s Matamoros’s personal bodyguard.”
“All the better,” Bourne said as they approached the Pyramid of the Sun.
“He’s a huge man.” She described Juan Ruiz in detail. “You won’t be able to miss him.”
Bourne stopped in the middle of a gaggle of tourists, where they could stand and talk in as much protection as Teotihuacán was going to afford them.
“It’s time for you to go on alone,” Bourne said. “You understand how it will work?”
She nodded.
“Okay then.”
He watched her eel her way through the throng and then out onto its periphery where, here and there, people from the group were taking photos. She moved easily; no one could tell what was under her long coat.
He stayed within the heart of the group, which was beginning to move on toward the Pyramid of the Sun. Keeping one eye on Maricruz and the other on the lookout for Juan Ruiz, he went down the Avenue of the Dead.
Ahead of him, Maricruz had stopped at the corner of the stone wall that wrapped around the structure. To her left were the central steps, filled with awestruck people, ascending and descending, that rose up to the pyramid’s peak.
A short time later, a slim, almost effeminate man came up to where Maricruz stood. Diego de la Luna. Maricruz, keeping her hands in the pockets of her coat, turned to him and they began to talk. De la Luna looked extremely nervous. His tongue kept flicking, serpent-like, from between his bloodless lips.
Bourne kept moving, and when he spotted the big man Maricruz had described, he moved out from the shelter of a herd of Italian tourists. He strolled until he was behind Juan Ruiz. The assassin’s presence was proof enough for Bourne that Matamoros had lost faith in Maricruz and what she promised to do for him.
Juan Ruiz might be big, but he stalked Maricruz like a cat. He had small feet, and like a dancer he seemed to glide over the ancient paving stones of the avenue as if he were death itself.
He was very good at his work. Though he had fixed on his prey, he was acutely aware of his surroundings and those people coming within his proximity. Bourne knew he needed to be extremely careful. If Juan Ruiz spotted him too soon, the plan would fail.
He kept circling, keeping himself out of range of the big man’s peripheral vision. Juan Ruiz was very close to de la Luna, who had engaged Maricruz in an argument that, as Bourne had suspected, was designed to keep her fully occupied.
Bourne had to admire Juan Ruiz, even as he was working his way toward Ruiz’s broad back. He was close enough now that Maricruz became aware of him. Her head jerked, as she began to turn, but it was too late. Juan Ruiz already had his gravity knife flicked open.
As Maricruz opened her mouth in surprise, he plunged the blade into the soft spot just beneath her sternum.
45
When Minister Ouyang was angry or at a crossroads in his life, he inevitably withdrew to the Kunlun Mountain Fist training facility in Beijing. As he traveled by car to the facility, Ouyang could not remember a moment in his life when he had been as enraged as he was now.
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Being told that he had to form an alliance with his nemesis was bad enough, but that this order came from the mouth of Deng Tsu—his mentor and, in the parlance of the West, his rabbi—was a humiliation not to be borne.
He needed to clear his mind, and the only way he knew to do that was to fight.
The Kunlun Mountain Fist training facility was located within sight of the Great Wall. This site was deliberate, as the elders were quick to point out to their novitiates. The Great Wall was a symbol, they preached, of the walls we built inside our minds to keep us from seeing the Truth—a Truth that practicing Kunlun Mountain Fist wushun would in due course illumine.
Ouyang was welcomed within the complex as the first-draft master he was. With great deliberation, he changed into the loose-fitting uniform reserved for all wushun practitioners. He chose a jian—the slender double-edged gentleman’s sword he had wielded to such fine effect in the Kunlun Mountain Fist training facility in Shanghai.
Assigned an opponent, he moved out onto the mats. He began, as he almost always did, with Sacred Stone Form, standing immobile and steadfast while the opponent attacked, employing the White Snake Form, an advanced method often favored by Ouyang himself.
At first it was interesting to counter the moves he knew so well. But it wasn’t long before his opponent’s blade started slipping through his defenses. He was half a step faster than Ouyang, and at the four-minute mark his weapon slapped Ouyang hard on the chest.
Rocked back a pace, Ouyang felt himself overcome with a blind rage. Out the window went no-mind, the sense of calm and order in a world filled with disharmony. A whirlwind of chaos devoured it all in a heartbeat. Without another thought, he switched to the little-used Fire Ghost Form, performed a vicious lunge as his opponent withdrew his sword.
Ouyang’s jian passed through his unprepared opponent’s defenses. The point of the sword pierced the man’s chest. Instead of withdrawing it, Ouyang completed the lunge, skewering his opponent upon the jian’s blade.