Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (42 page)

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 Brick 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 codirector of Treadstone.”

“What?” Peter said.

Soraya took a step forward. “You can’t.”

“I can,” Hendricks said. “And I am.”

“It’s my legs that are paralyzed,” Peter said, “not my brain.”

“I’m very sorry, Peter, but my mind’s made up.”

As he turned to go, Soraya said, “If Peter goes, so do I.”

Hendricks swiveled back, leveling his heavy gaze at her. “Don’t be foolish, Soraya. Don’t throw away your career for—”

“For what? My loyalty to my friend?” she countered. “Peter and I have served together from the beginning. We’re a team, end of story.”

Hendricks shook his head. “You’re confusing dedication with loyalty. That’s a terrible mistake, one you’re not likely to recover from.”

“It’s Treadstone that won’t recover from losing its co-directors,” she said with all the force she could muster.

The secretary appeared shocked. “You talk about Treadstone as if it’s a family. It’s not, Soraya. It’s a business.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Secretary, Treadstone
is
a family,” she said. “Every one of its contacts overseas belongs to me. If I leave, they’ll leave with me—”

“They won’t.”

“—just as they did when I was let go from CI during the regime change.” She stood toe to toe with Hendricks, unafraid because, really, she had nothing to lose. She had no desire to remain at Treadstone without Peter. “I told you at the time that regime change was a mistake and that’s turned out to be true. CI is a shell of its former self. It’s dysfunctional, and morale is far worse than it was in the weeks following nine-eleven.”

“I don’t react well to being threatened,” Hendricks said.

“I don’t think I’m the one doing the threatening here.”

“Look, Anderson’s in the field, even as we speak. Peter put him in charge and—”

“I like Sam as much as the next guy,” Peter said, “but he’s not seasoned enough to run field ops for Treadstone for any length of time.”

“Are either of you going to do it?” Hendricks gestured. “Look at you. Neither of you could walk out of here under your own power.”

“There’s nothing to stop us setting up a temporary HQ right here in Peter’s room,” Soraya said. “In fact, given that the Treadstone servers have been rendered useless, a substitute network seems like the best possible course of action right now.”

Peter, who had been watching the dispute like a spectator at a tennis match, now said, “Wait a minute! Soraya, that thirty million I found. I assumed it was drug money, but what if it’s not?”

She turned, frowning. “What d’you mean?”

“What if it was being used to pay for something else?”

“The money’s proved to be counterfeit,” Hendricks said dismissively.

“What?” Peter’s head turned. “Really?”

Hendricks nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. The guy who almost killed me—” “Tulio Vistoso,” Hendricks said. “Aka the Aztec. A top-line Mexican drug lord.”

“I don’t understand,” Soraya said.

“We think it was a feint,” the Secretary said. “Classic misdirection on Maceo Encarnación’s part. When he’s in Mexico City, the two are practically joined at the hip.”

Peter shook his head. “I’m not so sure. The Aztec went to extreme lengths to protect that money.”

Another short silence ensued.

“Is it possible,” Soraya mused, “that Vistoso didn’t know the money was counterfeit?”

Peter was intrigued. “That would mean he’d been scammed.”

“That doesn’t track,” Hendricks said. “Vistoso was one of the Mexican Big Three. Who would dare to scam him?”

“Someone with more juice.” Peter looked from one to the other. “Someone like Maceo Encarnación.”