The Bourne Deception (15 page)

Nothing seemed out of place, which was precisely what worried her.
NSA
agents on the street or even in passing cars she could deal with. It was the people who might be placed behind building windows or on rooftops that concerned her. Well, there was no help for it, she thought. She’d done the best she could, now it was put one foot in front of the other and pray that she’d slipped any surveillance that might have been attached to her once the two
NSA
agents had left her at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

As an added precaution, she pried the
SIM
chip out of her phone and ground it beneath the heels of her shoe. She kicked it into a storm drain in the gutter, then chucked her cell in after it. She had the key in her hand as she approached the car from across the street. She crossed in front of it and dropped her handbag. Kneeling down, she dug out her compact, used the mirror inside to check the underside of the car as best she could. She checked under the rear as well. What was she expecting to find? Nothing, hopefully. But there was always a chance that a passing
NSA
agent had left a bug on the under chassis.

Spotting nothing suspicious, she unlocked the car and slid behind the wheel. It was a late-model silver Chrysler that her own mechanics had customized with a muscular turbocharged engine. Finding the laptop and the burner beneath the seat, she ripped off the burner’s pristine plastic wrap. Burners were disposable cell phones loaded with pre-paid minutes. As long as you didn’t use them for too long, you were safe talking on them, and no one could use the
SIM
to triangulate your position as they could with a registered cell.

Fighting an urge to fire up the computer right there, she turned the key in the ignition, put the car in gear, and nosed out into traffic. She was no longer comfortable staying in one place too long; neither did she feel safe going back to the office or even her home.

Heading back across into Virginia, she drove aimlessly for close to an hour, after which time she could no longer control her curiosity. She had to find out what was on the thumb drive she’d lifted off Jay’s corpse. Did it hold the key to what was going on between
NSA
and Black River that, according to Stevenson, held all of the DoD in thrall? Why else would Noah and the
NSA
come after Jay and now her. She had to assume the DC motorcycle cop was bogus—that he was, in fact, either
NSA
or Black River. Stevenson had been terrified. The whole scenario chilled her to the marrow.

Passing through Rosslyn, she suddenly became aware that she was famished. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, apart from whatever they’d given her this morning in the hospital. Who could eat that stuff? More to the point, what kind of chef could concoct such tasteless, overcooked mush?

She turned onto Wilson Boulevard, drove past the Hyatt, and pulled over into a parking space several car-lengths from the entrance to the Shade Grown Café, a place she knew inside and out and thus felt safe in. Taking the laptop and the burner with her, she got out, locked the car, and hurried into the steamy interior. The smells of bacon and toast made her mouth water. Slipping into a well-worn cherry-colored vinyl booth, she gave the plasticwrapped menu a cursory once-over before ordering three eggs over easy, a double portion of bacon, and wheat toast. When the waitress asked if she wanted coffee, she said, “Please. Cream on the side.”

Alone at the Formica table, she opened the notebook so that the screen faced her and the wall behind her. While it was booting up, she bent down and extracted the thumb drive from the underwire section of her bra. The tiny electronic rectangle was warm and seemed to beat like a second heart. Using her thumb on the special reader, she logged in, then answered her three security questions. Finally on, she plugged the thumb drive into one of the
USB
ports on the left side of the computer. Switching to My Computer, she navigated to the portable drive that had appeared there, then double-clicked on it.

The screen went black, and for a moment she thought the drive had crashed the operating system. But then the screen started scrolling in lines of what looked like gibberish. There were no folders, no files, just this everscrolling series of letters, numbers, and symbols. The information was encrypted. That was just like the careful Jay.

At once she hit the
ESCAPE
key and was back at the My Computer screen. Accessing the C drive, she opened the wireless access connections wizard. Either the coffee shop was Wi-Fi-enabled or someplace close was because the wizard detected an open network. That was both good and bad. It meant she could get on the Web, but there were no network encryption safeguards. Luckily, she’d had all the Heartland lap-tops fitted with their own mobile encryption package among a host of other security measures, which in this case meant that even if someone hacked her
ISP
address they wouldn’t be able to read the packets of information she sent and received; nor would they be able to locate her.

She pushed the laptop aside when her breakfast arrived. It would take some time for the proprietary Heartland deciphering software to analyze the data on the thumb drive. She uploaded the encrypted data and pressed the
ENTER
key, which started the program.

By the time she’d mopped up the last of the third egg yolk with a wedge of buttered toast and the last of the bacon, she heard a soft chime. Almost choking on her final bite, she swigged down a mouthful of coffee and stacked her plates at the edge of the table.

Her forefinger hovered over the
ENTER
key for the tiniest of moments before depressing it. At once words began to flood across her screen, then marched down as the entire contents of the drive were revealed.

PINPRICKBARDEM
, she read.

She couldn’t believe it. Her eyes traveling over the scrolling lines read
PINPRICKBARDEM
over and over. The lines came to an end and she checked again. The entire drive had been filled up with these fourteen letters. She broke down the letters into the most obvious words: Pin Prick Bar Dem. Then another: PinP Rick Bar Dem. She wrote down:
Picture in Picture (on a digital
TV?), Rick’s Bar (?), Democrat.

Online, she ran a quick Google check. There was a Rick’s Bar in Chicago and one in San Francisco, an Andy & Rick’s Bar in Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, but there was no Rick’s Bar anywhere in the district or the environs. She scratched out what she had written. What on earth could those letters mean? she wondered. Were they yet another code? She was about to run them through the Heartland software program again when the sudden presence of a shadow at the periphery of her vision caused her to glance up. Two
NSA
agents were staring at her through the window. As she slammed down the laptop’s screen one of them opened the door to the coffee shop. Benjamin Firth was riding his bottle of
arak
with a vengeance when Willard strode into the surgery. Firth was up on the table, head bowed, swigging great mouthfuls of the fermented palm liquor with grim precision.

Willard stood looking at the doctor for a moment, remembering his father who drank himself into dementia and, finally, liver failure. It hadn’t been pretty, and along the way there were serious bouts of the kind of lightning Jekyll-and-Hyde personality split that afflicted some alcoholics. After his father had bounced his head off a wall during one of these fits Willard, who was eight at the time, taught himself not to be afraid. He kept his baseball bat under his bed and the next time his father, stinking of booze, lunged at him, he swung the bat in a perfectly level arc and broke two of his ribs. After that, his father never touched him again, neither in anger nor in affection. At the time, Willard thought he’d gotten what he wanted, but later, after the old man died, he began to wonder whether he’d injured himself along with his father.

With a grunt of disgust, he crossed the surgery, ripped the bottle out of Firth’s hand, and shoved a small booklet into it. For a moment the doctor looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes as if he was trying to place Willard in his memory.

“Read it, Doc. Go ahead.”

Firth glanced down and seemed surprised. “Where’s my
arak
?”

“Gone,” Willard said. “I brought you something better.”

Firth snorted noisily. “Nothing better than
arak
.”

“Want to bet?”

Willard opened the booklet for him and the doctor stared down at the passport photo of Ian Bowles, the New Zealander who’d been masquerading as a patient, who was blackmailing him into taking photos of Jason Bourne. This was why he had been getting stone-cold wasted. He couldn’t bear to think of what he had to do or what would happen to him if he didn’t.

“What…?” He shook his head, confused. “What are you doing with this?”

Willard sat down beside him. “Let’s just say Mr. Bowles will no longer be a problem for you.”

Firth sobered as if the other man had thrown a bucket of cold water in his face. “You know?”

Willard took the passport. “I heard it all.”

A shiver ran down the doctor’s spine. “There was nothing I could do.”

“It’s a good thing, then, that I was here.”

Firth nodded despondently.

“Now I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything,” Firth said. “I owe you my life.”

“Jason Bourne must never know this happened.”

“None of it?” Firth looked at him. “Someone suspects he’s here, someone is after him.”

Willard’s face was impassive. “None whatsoever, Doctor.” He held out his hand. “Do I have your word?”

Firth gripped the other’s hand, which was firm and dry and somehow comforting. “I said anything, didn’t I?”

AS
MOIRA
LAUNCHED
HERSELF
out of the booth, she pulled the thumb drive out of the
USB
slot. By this time she’d taken off through the coffee shop, down the narrow, dingy hallway that led to the toilets and the kitchen.

Turning left into the kitchen, she was engulfed by a surge of heat, steam, and raised voices. She was heading for the pantry when the delivery entrance at the rear burst open, and an
NSA
agent came through the doorway. As he did so, she pressed her thumb into the reader twice in succession even though the computer was still on. Then she threw it at him. He raised his arms reflexively to catch it and she raced into the small pantry cubicle. Kneeling, she pulled the ring on the trapdoor. As she was raising it from its mount flush in the floor, she heard the laptop’s incendiary device explode. Shouts and the confusion caused by a fire in a confined space came to her as she slipped down the ladder, closing the trapdoor behind her. The device was a last-ditch security measure she’d had her techs install in all Heartland laptops. Pressing the thumb reader twice while the laptop was on activated the device on a ten-second delay.

At the bottom of the ladder, she found herself in the basement, where bulk deliveries were stored. She felt above her head until she found the cord and pulled it. A bare bulb illuminated her surroundings in chiaroscuro starkness. She saw the metal doors leading to street level and opened them. There was a metal ramp used to slide the cartons of canned goods into the basement. She scrambled up this, bending almost double to hold on to the sides so as not to slip on the smooth surface. To do this, she had to slip the thumb drive, which she’d been clutching for dear life, into her pocket. As she did so, the back of her hand brushed against what felt like a stiff card. Gaining the street, she found herself directly to the right of the entrance to the coffee shop, where people were piling out like boiling water. As she walked away she could hear the klaxon call of fire engines. She walked away from the melee, her hand in her pocket to check that she still had the thumb drive, and she felt again the presence of the card. Drawing it out, she saw that it had the
EMS
logo on it and Dave’s name. Below, he’d handwritten a cell phone number. Then she remembered him brushing by her and knew he’d slipped her the card then. Any port in a storm, she thought. Flipping open the burner, she punched in the number.

Just then, glancing over her shoulder, she saw one of the
NSA
agents spill out of the entrance and she walked faster. But he’d already spotted her and took off after her.

Rounding the corner, she put her phone to her ear.

“Yes?” She was relieved to hear Dave’s familiar voice.

“I’m in trouble.” She gave him her approximate location. “I’ll be at Fort Myer Drive and Seventeenth Street North in three minutes.”

“Wait for us,” he said.

“Easy for you to say,” she replied and raced around the corner onto North Nash Street.

Watching Maslov and his slope-shouldered Neanderthals climb back into their vehicle and head out, Arkadin suppressed a spasm of murderous rage. It was all he could do to stop himself from grabbing a semi-automatic off one of the stacks and spraying the vehicle with bullets until all four people inside were dead. Luckily, what was left of the rational part of his brain prevented him from making such a foolish move. He might feel better for the moment but in the larger scheme of things he would regret Maslov’s premature demise. As long as the head of the Kazanskaya was useful to him he’d allow him to live.

But not a moment longer.

He wouldn’t make the same mistake with Maslov he’d made with Stas Kuzin, the mob boss in Nizhny Tagil he’d partnered with, then killed. In those days Arkadin was young and inexperienced; he’d allowed Kuzin to live too long. Long enough to torture and kill the woman Arkadin was sleeping with. Of course, the young Arkadin hadn’t considered what would happen in the aftermath of Kuzin’s death and the death of a third of his depraved crew.

With the rest of Kuzin’s murderers out for his blood he was forced to go to ground. Since they had all the avenues out of the city covered and had turned all the terrified citizens into informers, it was imperative to find a haven as quickly as possible, which unfortunately meant inside Nizhny Tagil, somewhere they’d never find him, where they’d never even think to look. He’d shot Kuzin in the building he and Kuzin owned jointly, where Kuzin had his headquarters, where he kept the young girls Arkadin had swept off the streets for him. Of course, he found the perfect spot, one even Dimitri Maslov wouldn’t have been clever enough to think of.