The Bourne Deception (39 page)

He watched some heads turning in consternation, but there was no murmuring at all. Taking one last glance down at his notes, he said, “Mr. Doll, why isn’t your boss, Mr. Marks, in attendance this morning?”

Rory Doll coughed into his fist. “I believe he’s in the field, sir.”

As the Arab looked at Doll, a fair-haired wisp of a man with electric blue eyes, he smiled winningly. “You
believe
he’s in the field or you
know
he’s in the field?”

“I know it, sir. He told me himself.”

“All right, then.” Danziger’s smile hadn’t budged. ”
Where
in the field?”

“He didn’t specify, sir.”

“And I assume you didn’t ask him.”

“Sir, with all due respect, if Chief Marks wanted me to know, he would’ve told me.”

Without taking his eyes off Marks’s second, the Arab closed the file in front of him. It seemed as if the entire room were holding its collective breath. “Quite right. I approve of sound security procedure,” the new
DCI
said. “Please ensure Marks comes to see me the moment he returns.”

His gaze broke away from Doll at last and roved around the table, engaging in turn each of the senior officers. “All right, shall we proceed?

From this moment on all the resources of CI will be bent toward the undermining and destruction of the current regime in Iran.”

A frisson of excitement raced like wildfire from officer to officer.

“In a few moments I’ll outline to you the overarching operation to exploit a new pro-American indigenous Iranian underground, ready and able, with our support, to topple the regime from inside Iran.”

When it comes to the police commissioner in this town,” Willard said,

“throwing your weight around is worse than useless. I say that because the PC

is used to getting his own way, even with the mayor. He isn’t intimidated by feds, and he’s not shy about saying so.”

Willard and Peter Marks were mounting the stone steps of a brown-stone far enough off Dupont Circle not to be snooty, but close enough to be a recipient of the area’s innate urbanity. This was wholly Willard’s doing. Having ascertained that Lester Burrows, the police commissioner, was gone for the day, Willard had directed them to this block, to this specific brownstone.

“That being the case, the only smart way to play him is with psychology. Honey is a powerful incentive inside the Beltway, never more so than with the Metro police.”

“You know Commissioner Burrows?”

“Know him?” Willard said. “He and I trod the boards in college; we played
Othello
together. He was a helluva Moor, let me tell you, scary-good—I knew his rage was genuine because I knew where he came from.” He nodded, as if to himself. “Lester Burrows is one African American who has transcended the utter poverty of his childhood in every sense of the word. That’s not to say he’s forgotten it, not by a long shot, but, unlike his predecessor, who never met a bribe he didn’t take, Lester Burrows is a good man underneath the mean streak he’s cultivated to protect himself, his office, and his men.”

“So he’ll listen to you,” Marks said.

“I don’t know about that”—Willard’s eyes twinkled—”but he sure as hell won’t turn me away.”

There was a brass knocker in the shape of an elephant that Willard used to announce their presence.

“What is this place?” Marks asked.

“You’ll see soon enough. Just follow my lead and you’ll be okay.”

The door opened, revealing a young African American woman dressed in a fashionable business suit. She blinked once and said, “Freddy, is that really you?”

Willard chuckled. “It’s been a while, Reese, hasn’t it?”

“Years and years,” the young woman said, a smile creasing her face.

“Well, don’t just stand there, come on in. He’s going to be tickled beige to see you.”

“To fleece me, you mean.”

Now it was the young woman’s turn to chuckle, a warm, rich sound that seemed to caress the listener’s ear.

“Reese, this is a friend of mine, Peter Marks.”

The young woman stuck out her hand in a no-nonsense fashion. She had a rather square face with an aggressive chin and worldly eyes the color of bourbon. “Any friend of Freddy’s…” Her smile deepened. “Reese Williams.”

“The commissioner’s strong right hand,” Willard supplied.

“Oh, yes.” She laughed. “What
would
he do without me?”

She led them down a softly lit, wood-paneled hallway, decorated with photos and watercolors of African wildlife, most predominantly elephants, with a smattering of rhinos, zebras, and giraffes thrown in.

They arrived soon after at double pocket doors, which Reese threw open to a blue cloud of aromatic cigar smoke, the discreet clink of glassware, and the fast-paced dealing of cards on a green baize table in the center of the library. Six men—including Commissioner Burrows—and one woman sat around the table, playing poker. All of them were high up in various departments of the district’s political infrastructure. The ones Marks didn’t know on sight, Willard identified for him.

As they stood on the threshold, Reese went ahead of them, crossing to the table, where Burrows sat, patiently playing his hand. She waited just behind his right shoulder until he’d raked in the considerable pot, then leaned over and whispered in his ear.

At once the commissioner glanced up and a wide smile spread over his face. “Goddammit!” he exclaimed, pushing his chair back and rising. “Well, wash my socks and call me Andy, if it isn’t Freddy Fucking Willard!” He strode over and engulfed Willard in a bear hug. He was a massive man with a bowling-ball head, who looked like an overstuffed sausage. His freckledappled cheeks belied the master manipulator’s eyes and the pensive mouth of a seasoned politician.

Willard introduced Marks and the commissioner pumped his hand with that sinister warmth peculiar to people in public life, which flicks on and off with the quickness of a lightning strike.

“If you’ve come to play,” Burrows said, “you’ve come to the right joint.”

“Actually, we’ve come to ask you about Detectives Sampson and Montgomery,” Marks said impulsively.

The commissioner’s brow pulled down, darkening into a furry mass. “Who are Sampson and Montgomery?”

“With all due respect, sir, you know who they are.”

“Son, are you some sort of psychic?” Burrows turned on Willard. “Freddy, who the hell is he to tell me what I know?”

“Ignore him, Lester.” Willard inserted himself between Marks and the commissioner. “Peter’s been a little on edge since he went off his medication.”

“Well, get the man back on it, stat,” Burrows said. “That mouth is a fucking menace.”

“I will certainly do that,” Willard said as he grabbed Marks to keep him out of the line of fire. “In the meantime, do you have room for one more at the table?”

Noah Perlis, sitting in the lime-scented shade of the lavish rooftop garden at 779 El Gamhuria Avenue, could see all of Khartoum, smoky and indolent, laid out before him to his right, while to his left were the Blue and White Nile rivers that divided the city into thirds. In central Khartoum the hideous Chinese-built Friendship Hall, and the weird futuristic Al-Fateh building, so like the nose cone of an immense rocket, mixed uneasily with the traditional mosques and ancient pyramids of the city, but the unsettling juxtaposition was a sign of the times—hide-bound Muslim religion seeking its way in the alien modern world.

Perlis had his laptop open, the latest iteration of the Bardem program running the last of the scenarios: the incursion by Arkadin and his twentyman cadre into that section of Iran where, like Palestine, the milk and honey flowed, in the form of oil.

Perlis never did one thing when he could do two or, preferably, three at once. He was a man whose mind was so quick and restless that it needed a kind of internal web of goals, puzzles, and conjectures to keep from imploding into chaos. So while he studied the probabilities of Pinprick’s end phase the program was spitting out he thought about the devil’s deal he’d been forced to make with Dimitri Maslov and, by extension, Leonid Arkadin. First and foremost, it galled him to partner with Russians, whose corruption and dissolute lifestyle he both loathed and envied. How could a bunch of scummy pigs like that be so awash in money? While it was true that life was never fair, he mused, sometimes it could be downright malevolent. But what could he do? He’d tried many other routes but, in the end, Maslov had been the only way to get to Nikolai Yevsen, who felt about Americans the way he, Perlis, felt about Russians. Accordingly, he’d been forced to make a deal with too many partners—too many partners for whom double dealing and backstabbing had been ingrained in their nature virtually from birth. Contingencies had to be made against the threat of such treachery, and that meant triple the planning and man-hours. Of course, it also meant he’d been able to triple the fee he was charging Bud Halliday, not that the price meant anything to the secretary, the way the US Mint was printing up dollars as if they were confetti. In fact, at the last Black River board meeting, members of the steering committee were so concerned with the threat of hyperinflation that they had voted unanimously to convert their dollars into gold bullion for the next six months while they put their clients on notice that starting September 1, the company would accept fees only in gold or diamonds. What bothered him about that meeting was that Oliver Liss, one of the three founding members and the man he reported to, was absent.

Simultaneously, he was thinking of Moira. Like a cinder in his eye, she had become an irritant. She was firmly lodged in a corner of his mind ever since she had abruptly quit Black River and, after a short hiatus, had started her own company in direct competition with him. Because, make no mistake, Perlis had taken her defection and subsequent treachery personally. It hadn’t been the first time, but he vowed to himself that it would be the last. The first time… well, there were good reasons not to think about the first time. He hadn’t for years and he wasn’t about to start now.

Besides, how else should he take actions that directly drained him of his best personnel? Like a jilted lover, he seethed for revenge, his longwithheld affection for her curdled into outright hatred—not only of her, but of himself. While she was under his control, he’d played his cards too close to the vest—had, he had to admit bitterly, misplayed them altogether. And now she was gone, out of his control and in complete opposition to him. He took whatever solace he could salvage from the fact that her lover, Jason Bourne, was dead. He wished her only ill now, he wanted to see her not simply defeated but humiliated beyond redemption; nothing less would appease his appetite for vengeance.

When his satellite phone rang, he assumed it was Bud Halliday, giving him the signal to launch the final phase of Pinprick, but instead he discovered Humphry Bamber on the line.

“Bamber,” he shouted, “where the hell are you?”

“Back at my office, thank God.” Bamber’s voice sounded thin and metallic.

“I finally managed to escape because the woman Moira Something was too badly hurt in the explosion to hold on to me for long.”

“I heard about the explosion,” Noah said truthfully, though of course he didn’t add that he’d ordered it to keep Veronica Hart and Moira from finding out about Bardem from Bamber. “Are you all right?”

“Nothing a few days’ rest won’t cure,” Bamber said, “but listen, Noah, there’s a glitch in the version of Bardem you’re running.”

Noah stared out at the rivers, the beginning and the end of life in North Africa. “What kind of a glitch? If the program needs another security patch, forget it, I’m almost finished using it.”

“No, nothing like that. There’s a calculation error; the program isn’t producing accurate data.”

Now Noah was alarmed. “How the hell did that happen, Bamber? I paid through the nose for this software and now you tell me that—”

“Calm down, Noah, I’ve already solved the internal error and corrected it. All I need to do now is to upload it to you, but you’ll have to shut down all your programs.”

“I know, I know, and Jesus, I ought to know the protocol by now considering how many versions of Bardem we’ve been through.”

“Noah, you have no idea how complex this program is—I mean, come on, literally millions of factors had to be incorporated into the software’s architecture, and per your orders at the speed of light, too.”

“Can it, Bamber. The last thing I need now is a lecture from you. Just get the fucking thing done.” Perlis’s fingers were running over his laptop’s keyboard, shutting down programs. “Now, you’re sure the latest parameters I’ve loaded into the program will be there when I bring up the new version?”

“Absolutely, Noah. That’s why Bardem has one monster-size cache.”

“Nothing better be missing,” Noah said, and silently he added,
Not at
this late date. We’re almost at the finish line.

“Just let me know when you’re ready,” Bamber prompted.

All the programs were closed, but it took several minutes of going through one deliberately convoluted protocol after another until he exited the proprietary Black River security software. While this was happening, he muted his line with Bamber and dialed a number on a second satellite phone.

“Someone needs to be put to sleep,” he said. “Yes, right away. Hold on and I’ll transfer the particulars in a minute.”

He unmuted the line with Bamber. “All set,” he said.

“Then here we go!”

KHARTOUM
HAD
about it the air of a disreputable mortuary. The sweet rot of death was everywhere, mingled with the sharp odor of gun barrels. Baleful shadows hid men smoking as they observed the night-lit street with the inscrutable look of a hunter searching for prey. Bourne and Tracy, in a jangling three-wheeled
raksha,
going at a hellish speed against traffic, rushed down avenues filled with donkey-pulled carts, wheezing minibuses, men in both traditional and Western dress, and vehicles belching blue smoke.

They were both tired and on edge—Bourne had had no luck contacting either Moira or Boris, and, despite what she’d claimed, Tracy’s experience in Seville seemed to have made her anxious about meeting Noah.