The Bourne Deception (19 page)

For a moment Moira was certain she felt the brief crackle of heat lightning in the room. Then Veronica Hart pushed her chair back and stood up. “What precisely do you want from me?”

“I want an admission of your guilt.”

“A signed confession? You must be joking.”

“No,” Moira said. “Just between us chickens.”

Hart shook her head. “Why would I do that?”

“So that we can have something other than the past, so that we can go on, so that there isn’t this poison between us.”

The telephone rang several times, but the
DCI
ignored it. Finally, it stopped, and only the small sounds remained: the humming of the air vents, the soft intakes of their breathing, the beating of their hearts.

Hart sighed then, a long exhalation of breath. “You don’t want to hear this.”

At last!
Moira thought. “Try me.”

“What I did,” Hart said slowly, “I did for the good of the company.”

“Bullshit, you did it for yourself!”

“You were never in any real danger,” Hart persevered, “I made sure of that.”

Instead of feeling better Moira was feeling more and more wronged. “How
could
you have made sure of it?”

“Moira, can’t we leave it at that?”

Moira was back in her attack position, leaning over the desk, resting on her white knuckles. “End it,” she said. “End it now.”

“All right.” The
DCI
raked her fingers through her hair. “I was sure you’d be okay because Noah said he’d take care of you.”

“Oh.” Moira felt the floor open up beneath her. Dizziness forced her back to the chair, where she sat heavily, staring at nothing. “Noah.” Then it hit her and she felt sick. “It was all Noah’s idea, wasn’t it?”

Hart nodded. “I was his runner. I did his dirty work for him. I was required to be the one you hated when you came back so he could keep using you when he saw fit.”

“Jesus God.” Moira stared down at her hands. “He didn’t trust me.”

“Not for that mission.” Hart said it so softly that Moira had to lean forward to hear her. “But for others, as you know perfectly well, he preferred you.”

“No matter.” Moira felt numb from the inside out. “What a shitty thing to do.”

“Yes, it was.” Hart sat back down. “In fact, it was the reason I left Black River.”

Moira looked up, her eyes focusing on the woman who had been her archenemy for so long. She felt as if her mind had been stuffed with steel wool. “I don’t understand.”

“I’d done a lot of awful things while at Black River; you’re the last person I have to explain that to. But this—what Noah had me do—” She shook her head. “Afterward I was so ashamed of myself I couldn’t bear to face you, so after the mission was completed I went to see you. I wanted to apologize—”

“I wouldn’t let you; I cursed you instead.”

“I couldn’t blame you. I wasn’t angry at the hurtful things you said, who was more entitled? And yet it was a lie. I wanted to disobey orders, to tell you the truth. Instead, I quit. It was a cowardly act, really, because then I was certain I’d never have to face you.”

“And now here we are.” Moira felt drained, sick at heart. She’d known Noah was amoral, she knew he was devious; he wouldn’t have risen to his position at Black River otherwise. But she’d never have thought him capable of fucking her over so thoroughly, of using her like a piece of meat.

“Here we are,” Hart agreed.

Moira felt a shudder run through her. “Noah is the reason I’m in this situation, the reason I’m here without a place to go.”

The
DCI
frowned. “What do you mean? You have your own organization.”

“It’s been compromised, either by Noah or by the
NSA
.”

“There’s a big difference between Black River and the
NSA
.”

Moira looked at Hart and realized she no longer knew how she felt about anyone or anything. How did one recover from a betrayal like this? All at once she was suffused with a terrible fury. If Noah had been in the room she would have grabbed the lamp off Veronica Hart’s desk and swung it into the side of his face. But no, better he wasn’t. She recalled a line from
Les
Liaisons Dangereuses,
her favorite novel because it involved drawing room spies:
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
And in this case, she thought, in a perfectly clean kitchen. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly and completely.

“Not in this case,” she said. “Jay Weston, my operative, was killed and I barely escaped being gunned down because Black River and the
NSA
are feathering the same nest, and whatever they’ve hatched is so big they’re willing to kill anyone who comes sniffing around.”

Into the ensuing shocked silence, Hart said, “I do hope you have proof of that allegation.”

In response, Moira handed over the thumb drive she’d gotten from Jay Weston’s corpse. Ten minutes later the
DCI
looked up from her computer and said, “Moira, so far as I can make out all you have is a motorcycle cop no one can find, and a thumb drive full of nonsense.”

“Jay Weston didn’t die in an automobile accident,” Moira said hotly, “he was shot to death. And Steve Stevenson, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics at the DoD, confirmed that Jay was killed because he was on to something. He told me that ever since the news of the jetliner explosion hit the wires the atmosphere at DoD and the Pentagon has been shrouded in a toxic fog. Those were his words exactly.”

Still staring at Moira, Hart picked up the phone and asked her assistant to connect her to Undersecretary Stevenson at the Department of Defense.

“Don’t,” Moira said. “He was scared shitless. I had to beg him to even meet with me, and he’s a client.”

“I’m sorry,” the
DCI
said, “but it’s the only way.” She waited a moment, drumming her fingers on the desktop. Then her expression shifted. “Yes, Undersecretary Stevenson, this is—Oh, I see. When is he expected back?” Her gaze returned to Moira. “Surely you have to know when—Yes, I see. Never mind, I’ll try again later. Thank you.”

She replaced the receiver and her finger drumming began again.

“What happened?” Moira asked. “Where’s Stevenson?”

“Apparently, no one knows. He left the office at eleven thirty-five this morning.”

“That was to meet me.”

“And as yet hasn’t returned.”

Moira dug out her phone, called Stevenson’s cell, which went right to voice mail. “He’s not answering.” She put her phone away.

Hart stared hard at the screen of her computer terminal and mouthed the word
Pinprickbardem,
then returned her gaze to Moira. “I think we’d better find out what the hell has happened to the undersecretary.”

Wayan, well pleased with his sales for the day, was in the enclosed rear of his stall, preparing the one or two pigs left unsold to take back to his farm, when the man appeared. He didn’t hear him for all the shouted cacophony as the huge market began to close for the night.

“You’re the pig man named Wayan.”

“Closed,” Wayan said without looking up. “Please come back tomorrow.”

When he discerned no movement he began to turn, saying, “And in any event, you cannot come back—”

The powerful blow caught him square on the jaw, sending him reeling into the piglets, which squealed in alarm. So did Wayan. He barely had time to see the man’s rough-edged face when he was hauled upright. The second punch buried itself in his stomach, sending him breathless, to his knees.

He peered up through watering eyes, gasping and retching pitifully, at the impossibly tall man. He wore a black suit so shiny and ill fitting it was hideous. There was stubble on his face, blue as the shadows of evening, and coal-black eyes that regarded Wayan without either pity or conscience. One side of his neck was imprinted with a rather delicate scar, like a pink ribbon on a child’s birthday present, that ran up into his jaw where the muscle had been severed and was now puckered. The other side of his neck was tattooed with a clutch of three skulls: one looking straight out, the other two in profile, looking forward and behind him.

“What did you tell Bourne?”

The man spoke English with a guttural accent that Wayan, in his addled state, couldn’t place. A European, but not British or French. Perhaps a Romanian or a Serb.

“What did you tell Bourne?” he repeated.

“W-who?”

The man shook Wayan until his teeth rattled. “The man who came to see you. The American. What did you tell him?”

“I don’t know what y—”

Wayan’s attempt at a denial turned into a grunt of pain as the man took his right forefinger and bent it back until it snapped. The rush of blood from Wayan’s head almost made him lose consciousness, but the man slapped him twice so that his eyes focused on his tormentor.

The man leaned in so that Wayan could smell his sour odor, knew that he must have just flown in without having showered or changed his clothes.

“Do not fuck with me, you little prick.” He already had a grip on the middle finger of Wayan’s right hand. “You have five seconds.”

“Please, you’re wrong about this!”

He gave a little yelp as the man snapped his middle finger. All the blood seemed to have left his head. As before, the man slapped his jowls several times.

“Two down, eight to go,” the man said, trapping Wayan’s right thumb.

Wayan’s mouth opened wide, like a fish gasping for air. “All right, all right. I told him where to find Don Fernando Hererra.”

The man sat back on his haunches and let out a short breath. “You are so fucking unreliable.” Then he turned, picked up a length of bamboo pole, and without the slightest expression drove it through Wayan’s right eye.

FOR
THE
NEXT
eighteen hours Arkadin did nothing but train his recruits. He did not allow them to eat, to sleep, or to do more than take breaks to urinate. Thirty seconds, that’s all they had to empty their bladders into the red Azerbaijani dust. The first man who took longer received a solid whack from Arkadin’s baton behind his knee; the first man became the only man to disobey that or any other order, for that matter.

As Triton had warned him, he had five days to turn these killers into a platoon of shock troops. Easier said than done, true, but Arkadin had plenty of experience to draw from, because something similar had been done to him when he was a young man in Nizhny Tagil and on the run from having killed Stas Kuzin and a third of his gang.

Nizhny Tagil was more or less founded on iron ore so rich that an enormous quarry was immediately dug. This was in 1698. By 1722 the first copper-smelting plant was established and a town began to stretch its bones, groaning around the plant and the quarry, a vice-and crime-ridden machine to service and house exhausted workers. A hundred thirteen years later the first Russian steam locomotive was constructed there. Like most frontier towns ruled by industry and its money-hungry barons, there was a raw and lawless nature about the place that the semi-civilizing influence of the modern-day city never was able to tame, let alone eradicate. Possibly that was why the federal government had ringed the toxic site with high-security penitentiaries, blinding spotlights bleaching the night.

There were only lonely sounds in Nizhny Tagil, or else frightening, like the faraway hoot of the train whistle echoing off the Ural Mountains or the sudden shriek of one of the prison sirens; like the wail of a child lost in the filthy streets or the wet snap of bones breaking during a drunken brawl.

As Arkadin sought to evade the armada of gang members fanning out through the streets and slums of the city, he learned to follow the yellow curs slinking through shadowed alleyways, their tails curled between their legs. Then quite suddenly he ran across two men canvassing the very same network of exhausted backwaters that a moment before had seemed safe enough. Turning, he let them believe they were running him down. As he turned a corner, he snatched up a piece of splintered wood, part of a discarded bed set, and, crouching down, slammed it across the lead man’s legs. The man shouted, toppling forward. Arkadin was prepared, grabbing hold of him, pitching him down so that his face slammed into the filthy concrete. The second man was on him, but Arkadin drove a cocked elbow into his Adam’s apple. As the man began to choke, Arkadin wrested the pistol from his hand and shot him point-blank. Then he turned the gun on the first man and put a bullet through the back of his head.

From that moment on he knew the streets were too dangerous for him; he needed to find a sanctuary. He thought of getting himself arrested and thrown into one of the nearby prisons as a way of protecting himself, but quickly discarded the notion. What might have worked in another part of the country was out of the question in Nizhny Tagil, where the cops were so corrupt it was often impossible to distinguish them from the city’s criminals. Not that he was out of ideas; far from it. His experiences thus far had made clever thinking a way of life.

Continuing onward, he considered and rejected any number of possibilities, all of which were too public, too riddled with potential snitches who’d be on the lookout for him in exchange for the promise of a bottle of real liquor or a night of free rutting with underage girls. Finally, he hit upon what he was certain was the perfect solution: He’d hole up in the basement of his own building, where the gang and its maniacal new boss, Lev Antonin, were still headquartered. Lev Antonin’s avowed goal was to find and destroy the murderer of the man he’d succeeded. He wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t let his men rest until Arkadin’s severed head was brought to him.

Because Arkadin was the one who had bought it during the acquisition phase of his real estate business, he was intimately familiar with every square inch of the building. He knew, for instance, that an updated sewage system had been planned for the building, started, but never completed. Through a long-vacant municipal lot overgrown with weeds and refuse, he entered this dank and disused symbol of his birth city, a repellent underground conduit that stank of decomposition and death, emerging at length into the cavernous bowels of the building. He would have laughed at how easily this was accomplished had he not been acutely aware of his plight. He was a prisoner of the one place he wanted most desperately to leave.