The Bourne Deception (20 page)

The plane lurched sickeningly and Bourne woke with a start. Rain drummed hard against the Perspex window. He’d dozed off, dreaming of the conversation he’d had with Tracy Atherton, the young woman seated beside him. In his dream, they were talking about Holly Marie Moreau instead of Francisco Goya.

He had slept deeply and without dreaming during the twenty-three-plus-hour trip from Bali, first to Bangkok, then Madrid on Thai Air. This flight, from Madrid to Seville on Iberia, was the shortest one, but now it had turned miserable. Sudden air pockets within a lashing storm caused the plane to lurch and dip. Tracy Atherton went quiet and still, staring straight ahead while her complexion turned ashen. Bourne held her head while she vomited twice into the airsick bag he pulled from the seat back.

She was a whisper-thin blonde with large blue eyes and a smile that seemed to wrap around her face. Her teeth were white and even, her nails cut straight across, her only bits of jewelry a gold wedding band and diamond stud earrings, large enough to be expensive but small enough to be discreet. She wore a flame-colored blouse under a lightweight silver silk suit with a pencil skirt and tapered jacket.

“I work at the Prado in Madrid,” she’d said. “A private collector hired me to authenticate a recently unearthed Goya that I think is a fake.”

“Why do you say that?” he’d asked.

“Because it’s purported to be one of Goya’s Black Paintings, done later in life when he was already deaf and going mad with encephalitis. There are fourteen in the series. This collector believes he owns the fifteenth.” She shook her head. “Frankly, history isn’t on his side.”

As the weather calmed, she thanked Bourne and went off to the toilet to clean up. He waited several seconds, then reached down, unzipped her slim attaché

case, and rifled through the contents. To her, he was Adam Stone, the name on the passport Willard had given him before he’d left Dr. Firth’s compound. According to the legend Willard had devised, he was a venture capitalist on his way to see a potential client in Seville. Ever mindful of the unknown assailant who’d tried to kill him, he was wary of anyone sitting next to him, anyone striking up a conversation with him, anyone wanting to know where he’d been and where he was going.

Inside the attaché case were photos—some quite detailed—of the Goya painting, a horrific study of a man being drawn and quartered by four rearing, snorting stallions while army officers lounged around, smoking, laughing, and playfully poking the victim with their bayonets.

Along with these photos was a set of X-rays, also of the painting, accompanied by a letter authenticating the painting as a genuine Goya, signed by a Professor Alonzo Pecunia Zuiga, a Goya specialist at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. With nothing else of interest, Bourne returned the sheets to the attaché case and rezipped it. Why had the woman lied to him about not knowing if the painting was a genuine Goya? Why had she lied about working for the Prado when, in his letter, Zuigaaddressed her as an outsider, not as an esteemed colleague of the museum? He’d find out soon enough.

He stared out the window at the infinity of gray-white, turned his mind to his quarry. He’d used Firth’s computer to gather information on Don Fernando Hererra. For one thing, Hererra was Colombian, not Spanish. Born in Bogotá in 1946, the youngest child of four, he was shipped off to England for university studies, where he took a First in economics at Oxford. Then, inexplicably, for a time his life took another path entirely. He worked as a
petrolero
for the Tropical Oil Company, working his way up to
cuńero
—a pipe capper—and beyond, moving from camp to camp, each time raising the output of barrels per day. Ever restless, he pushed on, buying a camp dirt-cheap because Tropical Oil’s experts were certain it was in decline. Sure enough, he turned it around and, within three years, sold it back to Tropical Oil for a tenfold profit.

That’s when he got into venture capital, using his outsize profits to move into the more stable banking sector. He bought a small regional bank in Bogotá, which had been on the verge of failing, changed its name, and spent the decade of the 1990s building it into a national powerhouse. He expanded into Brazil, Argentina, and, more recently, Spain. Two years ago he’d vigorously resisted a buyout by Banco Santander, preferring to remain his own master. Now his Aguardiente Bancorp, named after the fiery local licoriceflavored liquor of his native country, had more than twenty branches, the last one opening five months before in London where, increasingly, all the international action was.

He had been married twice, had two daughters, both of whom lived in Colombia, and a son, Jaime, whom Don Fernando had installed as the managing director of Aguardiente’s London branch. He seemed to be clever, sober, and serious; Bourne could find not the remotest hint of anything sinister about either him or AB, as it was known inside international banking circles.

He felt Tracy’s return before her scent of fern and citrus reached him. With a whisper of silk, she slid into the seat beside him.

“Feeling better?”

She nodded.

“How long have you been working at the Prado?” he said.

“About seven months.”

But she’d hesitated a moment too long and he knew she was lying. Again, why? What did she have to hide?

“If I remember correctly,” Bourne said, “didn’t some of Goya’s later works come under a cloud of suspicion?”

“In 2003,” Tracy said, nodding. “But since then the fourteen Black Paintings have been authenticated.”

“But not the one you’re going to see.”

She pursed her lips. “No one has seen it yet, except for the collector.”

“And who is he?”

She looked away, abruptly uncomfortable. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Surely—”

“Why are you doing this?” Turning back to him, she was abruptly angry.

“Do you think me a fool?” Color rose up her neck into her cheeks. “I know why you’re on this flight.”

“I doubt you do.”

“Please! You’re on your way to see Don Fernando Hererra, just like I am.”

“Don Hererra is your collector?”

“You see?” The light of triumph was in her eyes. “I knew it!” She shook her head. “I’ll tell you one thing: You’re not going to get the Goya. It’s mine; I don’t care how much I have to pay.”

“That doesn’t sound like you work at the Prado,” Bourne said, “or any museum for that matter. And why do you have an unlimited budget to buy a fake?”

She crossed her arms over her breasts and bit her lip, determined to keep her own counsel.

“The Goya isn’t a fake, is it?”

Still she said nothing.

Bourne laughed. “Tracy, I promise I’m not after the Goya. In fact, until you mentioned it, I had no idea it existed.”

She shot him a look of fear. “I don’t believe you.”

He took a packet out of his breast pocket, handed it over. “Go on, read it,” he said. “I don’t mind.” Willard really did extraordinary work, he thought, as Tracy opened the document and scanned it.

After a moment, she glanced up at him. “This is a prospectus for a startup e-commerce company.”

“I need backing and I need it quickly, before our rivals get a jump on the market,” Bourne lied. “I was told Don Fernando Hererra was the man to cut through the red tape and get the balance of the seed money my group requires yesterday.” He couldn’t tell her the real reason he needed to see Hererra, and the sooner he convinced her he was an ally the faster she’d take him where he needed to go. “I don’t know him at all. If you get me in to see him I’d be grateful.”

She handed back the document, which he put away, but her expression remained wary.

“How do I know I can trust you?”

He shrugged. “How do you know anything?”

She thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. Sorry, I can’t help you.”

“But I can help you.”

She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Really?”

“I’ll get you the Goya for a song.”

She laughed. “How could you possibly do that?”

“Give me an hour when we get to Seville and I’ll show you.”

All leaves have been canceled, all personnel have been recalled from vacations,” Amun Chalthoum said. “I’ve put my entire force to work on finding how the Iranians crossed my border with a ground-to-air missile.”

This situation was bad for him, Soraya knew, even if he hadn’t already been on shaky ground with some of his superiors. This breach of security had
personal disaster
written all over it. Or did it? What if everything he’d told her was disinformation meant to distract her from the truth: that with the knowledge either of the Egyptian government or of certain ministers too afraid of raising their own voice against Iran, al Mokhabarat had chosen to use the United States as a bellicose proxy?

They’d left Delia, left the crash site, driven through the phalanx of media vultures circling the perimeter, and were now racing along the road at top speed in Amun’s four-wheel-drive vehicle. The sun was just above the horizon, filling the bowl of the sky with a pellucid light. Pale clouds lay across the western horizon as if exhausted from swimming through the darkness of the night. A wind blew the last of the morning’s coolness against their faces. Soon enough, Amun would have to crank up the windows and put the air on.

After sifting through all the pieces of the blast site in the belly of the plane, the forensics team had put together a 3-D computer rendering of the last fifteen seconds of the flight. As Amun and Soraya huddled around a laptop inside a tent, the head of the team had begun the playback.

“The modeling is still somewhat crude,” he’d cautioned, “because of how fast we needed to put this together.” When the streaking missile came into the frame, he pointed. “Also, we can’t be one hundred percent certain of the missile’s actual trajectory. We could be off by a degree or two.”

The missile struck the airliner, breaking it in two and sending it earthward in several fiery spirals. Despite what the leader had said the effect was realistic, and chilling.

“What we do know is the Kowsar’s maximum range.” He pressed a key on the laptop, and the imaging changed to a satellite topographic map of the area. He pointed to a red X. “This is the crash site.” Pressing another key caused a blue ring to be superimposed on the area around the site. “The circle shows the missile’s maximum range.”

“Meaning the weapon had to be fired within that space,” Chalthoum said.

Soraya could see that he was impressed.

“That’s right.” The leader nodded. He was a beefy man, balding, with a typical American beer gut and too-small glasses he kept pushing back up the bridge of his nose. “But we can narrow it down for you even more.” His forefinger pressed still another key and a yellow cone appeared on the screen. “The point at the top is where the missile impacted the plane. The bottom is wider because we factored in an error of three percent for our trajectory site.”

Once again his finger depressed a key and the scene zoomed in on a square of nearby desert. “As well as we can determine, the missile was launched from somewhere within this area.”

Chalthoum took a closer look. “That’s, what, a square kilometer?”

“Just under,” the leader had said with a small smile of triumph.

This relatively small section of the desert was where they were headed now, hoping to find some sign of the terrorists and their identities. They were part of a convoy, in fact, of five jeeps filled with al Mokhabarat personnel. Soraya found it strange and vaguely disquieting that she was getting used to having them around. She had a map unfolded on her lap. The area they’d seen on the laptop was marked off, and another zoomed image had grid lines through it. A navigator in each of the other jeeps had similar material. Chalthoum’s plan was to send a jeep to each corner of the section and work inward, while he and Soraya drove straight to the center and started their part of the search there.

As they rattled along at a breathtaking pace she looked over at Amun, whose face was grim and tight as a fist. But what was he leading her to?

Surely if al Mokhabarat was involved, he wouldn’t allow her even the faintest glimmering of the truth. Were they on a wild goose chase?

“We’ll find them, Amun,” she said, more to alleviate the tension than because of any strong conviction.

His laugh was as unpleasant as a jackal’s bark. “Of course we will.” His tone was dark, sardonic. “But even if by some miracle we do, it’s already too late for me. My enemies will use this breach of security against me, they’ll say I’ve brought disgrace not only on al Mokhabarat, but on all of Egypt.”

His uncharacteristic tone of self-pity rattled her, made her harden her own voice. “Then why are you bothering with the investigation? Why not simply turn tail and run?”

His dark face turned even darker with the sudden rush of blood to his cheeks. She felt him gathering himself, his muscles tensing, and for a moment she wondered if he was going to strike her. But then, just as quickly as it came, the storm of emotion passed, and now his laugh, when it presented itself, was bright and deep. “Yes, I should have you at my side always,
azizti
.”

Once again she was rattled, this time by his use of the intimate endearment, and she felt a sudden rush of latent affection for him. She could not help wondering whether he was this good an actor, and with this thought came the flush of instant shame because she wanted him to be innocent of involvement in this heinous act. She wanted something from him she felt she couldn’t have, certainly never would have if he was guilty. Her heart said he was innocent, but her mind remained dappled in the shadows of suspicion.

He turned to her for a moment, his dark eyes alighting on her. “We
will
find these sons of camel turds, and I will bring them in front of my superiors shackled and on their knees, this I swear on the memory of my father.”

Within fifteen minutes they had arrived at a patch of desert that looked not a bit different from the bleak countryside through which they had been traveling. The other four jeeps had peeled off some time ago, their drivers in constant radio contact with Amun and one another. They gave running commentaries as they began their respective searches.