Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (31 page)

“Maybe just the center of a balancing act.”

“That’s enough...more than enough, maybe, for one man.”

They sat silently then, their eyes locked, thinking their own thoughts, until they heard a sharp scrape. The overhead lights flickered on, revealing Diego de la Rivera.

“The call’s come in,” he said. “It’s time.”

"YOU’RE INSANE.” Martha Christiana stared up at Don Fernando. “You’re telling me we’re alone on the plane?”

“Yes.”

“The pilot and navigator have parachuted out.”

“Three minutes ago. It’s on autopilot.”

“And you plan to crash the plane—”

“Crash it, yes.” He slipped off a thick engraved gold ring with a pigeon-blood cabochon ruby in its center. “The recovery team will find this. It is unique. It will be identified as mine.”

Martha, breathless, still had trouble believing this crazy plan. “But they’ll find no body remains.”

“Oh yes, they will.”

She followed him to the rear of the plane, where, when she saw stacked up three body bags, she recoiled. She stared at him. “This is a joke, right?”

“Unzip the bags.”

He said this with such utter calmness that she felt a chill run down her spine. This was a side of him he had not revealed until now. Brushing past him, she leaned over the top body bag and, with a convulsive gesture, unzipped it. She found herself staring into the blank white face of a corpse.

“Three men,” Don Fernando said. “The pilot, the navigator, and me. That is the way it will be reported.”

She whirled on him. “And you’ll just what? Disappear from running Aguardiente Bancorp?”

“It’s a leap of faith,” he said, turning away. “Come now. Our time has run out.” He broke out a pair of parachutes and handed one to her. “Or do you want to die in the crash?”

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“But it is.” He shrugged into his harness, tightening the bands across his chest. As if noticing her hesitation for the first time, he frowned. “Are you having second thoughts?”

“I don’t understand...”

“Then kill me now and have done with it. You’re running out of time. Fulfill Maceo Encarnación’s commission. I doubt I can stop you.”

Her frown deepened. “He said you wanted to take everything away from him.”

“How much do you know about his empire?”

She shook her head.

“Well then, there is no reason for his comment to affect you.”

She thought about her meeting with Maceo Encarnación at the Place de la Concorde, encircled by constant traffic, the shouts and laughter of unknowing tourists. In the shadow of the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. “But it did.”

“And so...” He spread his hands wide. When she didn’t answer, he stepped toward her, taking the parachute out of her hands and manipulating the straps over her shoulders. But when he began to cinch the wide strap across her waist, she gripped him.

“Wait.”

Their eyes met.

“Last chance, Martha,” he said. “You must decide now. Stay with Maceo Encarnación or take the first step into that new beginning you spoke about in Gibraltar.”

He removed her hands and cinched the waist strap tight. “It seems to me that your past has been defined by following a series of men.” He led her to the door, put his hand on the huge metal bar that would unlock it. “Continue or change, Martha. Your choice is as simple as that.”

“You call this a simple choice?”

“Call it what you will, it’s yours to make.” His voice softened. “No one can help you with this decision, Martha. I wouldn’t even try.”

She took a breath. She thought about the lighthouse, her father’s grave, her mother lost in a world where Martha was still a child, still a part of her life. She stared into Don Fernando’s eyes, wanting to read something there, but he was true to his word: he wasn’t going to try to influence her. And all at once, she realized that he was the first man in her life who hadn’t sought to manipulate her.

She nodded then and replaced his hand on the door’s locking bar. “Let me,” she said.

He laughed and kissed her on both cheeks with great affection. “Best I show you something first.”

“You said we were out of time.”

He guided her back up the aisle to the front of the plane, opened the door to the cockpit, and showed her the pilot and navigator alive and well in their seats.

“Better strap in, boss,” the pilot said. “We’ll be landing in five minutes.”

Charles Thorne turned, restless in bed.

The truth of the matter was he hated and feared Li Wan, yet the two men were bound together by the stream of secrets they passed back and forth as if through a delicate membrane. They were conduits; they needed each other. Thorne turned again, trying and failing to get comfortable.

Worse, by far, was that he envied Li Wan. He had been in love with Natasha Illion, the Israeli supermodel, Li’s inamorata. And he could swear that Li knew. Each time they were together, Li presented Natasha as if she were bathed in a follow spot, or so it seemed to him. And Natasha, perhaps being in on Li’s little running joke, always wore the most provocative designer outfits—necklines down to her navel or mesh tops through which Thorne stole clandestine peeks at her small but perfect breasts, the nipples like cherry buds. Thorne moaned, imagining his mouth enclosing them.

He was certain that Li, and possibly Natasha as well, were laughing at him on their nights out, as if he were an animal they constantly taunted through the bars of his cage.

The light of the bedside clock penetrated his eyelids. Barely an hour since he had returned from his 4 am rendezvous with Li at the restaurant in Chinatown. The General Tso’s chicken lay in his stomach like a ball of wax, unmoving and indigestible.

He turned once more, then rolled to the side of the bed and sat up. Today there was to be no respite in sleep, no way out of the noose tightening inexorably around him. Of course, he could ask Soraya for immunity from the coming phone hacking tsunami, but that would mean crawling back to her on his knees, groveling like the basest supplicant. He would be in her power forever, and he knew from bitter experience that she could be merciless when she felt she had been wronged. But what if she was his only recourse? Li had made noises about helping him, but he’d rather be tied to a third rail than be in that bastard’s debt.

No, he thought now, as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, Soraya was his last best hope of getting out of the water before the Justice Department investigation sank all boats.

Then he remembered that she was in the hospital, that she was carrying his baby, and all at once, the General Tso’s chicken moved inside him in an altogether unpleasant manner.

He jumped up, and, sprinting, just made it across his bedroom, over the bathroom tiles, to the toilet before vomiting with such force that he felt as if his intestines had turned inside out.

Li Wan, luxuriating between the impossibly long legs of Natasha Illion, picked up his enciphered mobile and pressed one button. The sounds on the line went immediately hollow as the call was shunted through a series of encrypted substations that hopscotched across the country, across the Pacific, at last ping-ponging dizzily through a cluster of top secret listening posts within Beijing. The offices of the State Administration of Grain were housed in the massive Guohong Building in the Central Government District. Though the top three floors bore the same SAG logo, none of its workers on the floors below were allowedaccess.Therewasaseparateelevatorthatrosefromthecolossal lobby to those top three floors without stopping at the intervening levels. As far as the workers below were concerned, those floors above them housed the offices of the ministers who directed the State Administration of Grain, connected directly to the Politburo itself. No one harbored a desire to go up there; in fact, for them it did not exist.

But for Li Wan, and people like him, those floors were all that existed in the Guohong Building. Their interests did not include grain production, quotas, or yearly allocations. The final destination of the call he initiated that morning in Washington, between Natasha Illion’s silky legs, was a vast office on the very top floor of the Guohong Building.

It was 6 pm in Beijing, but the hour of night or day was of no import, as that office, those three floors, in fact, were fully manned 24/7.

The High Minister stood at the edge of an immense open-plan room whose fifteen hundred computers, linked through a proprietary intranet, were manned by youngsters ranging in age from ten to nineteen. These youngster were hackers all, handpicked by the Chinese military, and their sole job was to hack through the firewalls and intranets of foreign governments and multinationals supplying foreign governments and militaries with cutting-edge weaponry and technologies. To do this, they were broken up into cadres, each one working on the next generation of Trojans, worms, and viruses, be they Stuxnet, Ginjerjar, or Stikyfingers. Anyone trying to backtrace the origins of these attacks would, after a long, arduous search, find that the ISP number belonged to Fi Xu Lang, a disgraced economics professor in a backwater village in Guangdong Province.

The Minister felt an unalloyed sense of pride at the operation that he himself had argued for and set up. The intelligence stolen from a variety of sources had already proved highly valuable to his friend General Hwang Liqun and the rest of the Chinese military.

The Minster felt the vibration of his mobile phone and went out of the cyber sweatshop, down to the far end of the hall, and into his office. He sat behind an ebony-wood desk, inlaid with elephant ivory, that was entirely clear of clutter. There was a rank of six corded phones on one side, a paperweight made of a thick chunk of rhino horn adorning the other side. In front of him was an open dossier marked top secret. The Minister, perhaps fifty, was possessed of the long, elegant face of a conductor or a choreographer. His black hair was slicked back from his wide, intelligent forehead. His hands, long and spidery-thin, were as carefully groomed as his hair and face. As he answered his mobile, he stared at a photo stapled to the inside cover of the dossier. He waited patiently as Li Wan’s call was routed to one of his phones. He held the phone to his ear without letting his gaze leave the photo, which was a black-and-white surveillance snapshot made with a long lens.

As soon as the encrypted connection opened, he said, “Speak.” His voice was high and keening, like that of a child being punished.

“Minister Ouyang, there has been a significant development.”

Ouyang’s eyelids dropped halfway. He was imagining the room his agent was calling from. It was five in the morning along America’s East Coast. He wondered whether Li Wan was alone or with his longlegged girlfriend.

“This could have a positive or negative impact on my evening, Li. What is it?”

“Through the auspices of stupidity, we have been given an extraordinary opportunity.”

“With Mr. Thorne?”

“Yes.”

“He and his coven of executives at
Politics As Usual
have been caught in a phone-hacking scandal that netted them some extraordinary exclusives over the past nineteen months, boosting their bottom line, but leaving them open to investigation by the American Justice Department.”

“This is not unknown to me.” In fact, Ouyang had a contact inside Justice. “Please continue, Citizen Li.”

“From day one, my mission in establishing a mutual conduit with Charles Thorne has been to get to his wife.”

“As chair of the newly formed Homeland Strategic Appropriations Committee, Senator Ann Ring is of extraordinary importance to us.” Ouyang kept staring at the photo, as if trying to unlock the secrets inside the brain of the man caught by one of his surveillance teams. Then he said pointedly, “So far, however, you have failed to engage her on any level apart from the superficial.”

“That time is at an end,” Li said. “Thorne’s back is against the wall. He needs my—our—help. I believe now is the time to extend our hand to support him in his hour of need.”

Ouyang grunted softly, delicately. “In return for what?”

“In return for Senator Ann Ring.”

“I was under the impression—an impression you gave me, I might remind you—that Thorne’s marital relationship is not all it might be, all it
should
be.”

The insane implication, via the stressed word, was that the couple’s personal troubles were somehow Li’s fault. This was Minister Ouyang through and through. Li set his mind to navigating the increasingly choppy waters.

“That slight estrangement will now work in our favor,” Li said.

Ouyang, running his fingertips ever so lightly over the face of the man in the photo, said, “Please explain.”

“If Thorne and Ann Ring were closer, I feel certain he would have confided in her about the impending investigation. He has told me nothing could be further from the truth. But if I—we—can provide him with a way out, a method of inoculating and indemnifying himself against implication, he would be grateful—and so would she.

“Senator Ring has an exemplary congressional record. Any hint of scandal—even from her husband—could be devastating to her position as chair of the Homeland Strategic Appropriations Committee. If she is disgraced and steps down, we will be back to square one. We will have lost valuable time. We cannot afford to start all over.”

No
, Minister Ouyang thought,
we most certainly cannot
.

“I despise stupidity,” he said.

Li wisely held his tongue.

“There is danger in exposing ourselves to the extent required to extricate Thorne from his predicament.” At the moment, Ouyang appeared to be talking to himself, trying to work out the pros and cons of Li’s suggestion. “As you know, Li, there is a very thin line between an asset and a liability.”

His eyes never left the face he now knew so well, a face he saw in long, drawn-out nightmares to which he returned again and again, an endless repetition that infuriated him.

“I understand, Minister. But I have trained Thorne. He is our unwitting conduit.”

“The best kind,” Ouyang acknowledged.