The Bourne Dominion (13 page)

He stared at the wall. His eyes roved among the multitude of small cracks in the plaster, finding fanciful shapes as if they were clouds passing across the sky. Except these shapes were permanent. That being so, some of them had already become friends. There was the Roaring Lion, the Boy Holding Balloons, the Boxing Kangaroo, the Old Man with Drooping Earlobes. And then there was Houdini, the man with what to Peter looked like a lock around his waist.

“Good Lord!” Peter cried all at once.

Shaking and zipping up, he hurriedly washed his hands and virtually ran back to his computer terminal. Now, instead of going folder by folder, he scrolled down, looking for a file locked with an electronic encryption.

Sure enough, there was one, at the bottom of the folder tree. When prompted for a password, he typed in: “servers.” Nothing happened, not that he was surprised. It would have been extraordinarily stupid for Hendricks to use the same password twice.

Peter twirled a pencil between his teeth, sat back, and considered his next move. What word would Hendricks use to safeguard this file? He tried Hendricks’s birthdate, the date he was appointed secretary of defense, his address. Nada.

He sat there so long without moving his cursor that Hendricks’s screensaver came on. He was looking at a beautiful green-eyed woman with high cheekbones and an open, smiling face. Fifteen seconds later the image faded out and another of the same woman appeared. This time, she was seen with Hendricks. They were holding hands on a bridge in Venice. The woman was Amanda, Hendricks’s third wife. She had died five years ago. The scene changed again to a shot of Amanda in a formal gown, on the terrace of a huge stone mansion.

“
Idiot!
” Peter thought, smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand. He typed in: “Amanda.”

Open Sesame. He was in!

The file contained two long paragraphs and one short addendum.
The long paragraphs seemed to be notes Hendricks had taken after a recent meeting he’d had in the Oval Office with the president; General Marshall, the Pentagon’s chief of staff; Mike Holmes, the national security adviser; and someone by the name of Roy FitzWilliams. Peter was immediately reminded of the conversation between Hendricks and Danziger at the Folger he’d overheard piecemeal. “
We weren’t ever going to meet in your office
,” his boss had said, “
for precisely the same reason you weren’t invited to the meeting in the Oval Office
.”

From what Peter read, the briefing concerned the extreme strategic importance of rare earth metals. The president had decided on an interagency task force, code-named Samaritan, to safeguard the Indigo Ridge mining operation in California. Apparently, the president had put Hendricks in charge of Samaritan and had given it the highest priority.

Peter had reached the end of the second paragraph and was wondering anew why his boss hadn’t briefed him and Soraya regarding Samaritan when his gaze fell on the last, short addendum. With a shock that went through his body, he discovered that the paragraph was addressed to him:

E
stevan Vegas.”

Bourne, having consulted his map, calculated that they were less than five miles from Vegas’s home. He’d had to make a decision as to
whether to try finding him at home or at the oil field. The long, dusty afternoon was fading, the sepia light like that in an old photograph. The day was dying, and, in any event, he wanted to approach Vegas in the presence of his Indian mistress.

“Who?” Commander Suarez said in a voice bleary with pain, fear, and the sour aftermath of adrenaline. “Am I supposed to know this man?”

“He’s a member of Severus Domna.”

“So what?” Suarez couldn’t even shrug his porcine shoulders without wincing. “I told you, everything inside the Domna is tightly compartmentalized.” He smacked his lips. “I need a beer. I’ll bet you could do with one, too.”

Bourne, driving very fast, ignored him. They were still climbing through the Cordillera mountains. He had rolled down his window. The air cooled the jeep’s stinking interior; Suarez sweated like a wild boar.

“If you tell me one more time that you don’t know who Estevan Vegas is,” Bourne said, “I’ll stop the car right now and throw you down the mountain.”

“Okay, okay.” Suarez resumed his sweating. “So I know Vegas. Everyone in the area knows him. He’s a character. So fucking what?”

“Tell me about the woman he’s living with.”

“I don’t know a thing about her.”

Bourne pulled off the highway, put the jeep in neutral, and, turning, slammed his fist into Suarez’s left ear. Suarez’s head snapped back and he let out a low groan. The rich scents of plants and loamy earth pushed into the jeep.

“You’ve already pulled the guts out of me,” Suarez said. “What the fuck more d’you want,
hombre
?”

“You’re making this hard on yourself.” Bourne struck him again, and the commander gagged. He bent over with his head between his knees. Bourne hauled him back up by the collar of his sweat-stained shirt. “Shall we continue?”

“Her name is Rosalita—Vegas calls her Rosie.” He wiped blood and bile off his lips with the back of his good hand. “She’s lived with him for, I think, five years now.”

“Why?”

Suarez’s eyes flared. “How the fuck…” His voice uncharacteristically petered out. “What I hear is that Vegas saved her from a margay—a female who’d just given birth. Rosie had had the bad luck to stumble across its den. She couldn’t outrun it. It had mauled her pretty good, I heard, before Vegas, hearing her screams, shot the thing. He carried her back to his place and took care of her. She’s been taking care of him ever since, so I hear.”

“Ever meet her?”

“Who, Rosie? No, never. Why?”

“I’m wondering why he never got her pregnant.”

Suarez was silent for several moments. Ahead of them, thick thunderheads, purple and yellow, the colors of the bruises on his face, were piling up. The air had turned heavy. There was a blue-white flash of lightning, and almost immediately, the silence was cracked open by a double rumble of thunder, following faithfully… as a dog follows its master.

“This storm will be a sonovabitch,” Suarez said. He put his head back and closed his eyes.

A moment later the first fat spatters of rain rolled down the windshield. In no time at all the drumming began on the jeep’s roof.

“My question has an answer,” Bourne said. “Provide it.”

Suarez’s eyes popped open and he turned his head toward Bourne. “I hear there’s a grave out behind their house. A very small one.”

Bourne put his hands on the wheel, gripped it hard. “How long did the baby live?”

“Nine days, so I’m told.”

“Boy or girl?”

“I heard boy.”

Bourne thought about how fleeting life was, especially for some. Nine days was no life at all. But to Estevan Vegas and Rosie, it must have been everything. It had to be; that was all they had.

He put the jeep in gear and got back on the rain-pocked highway. They were very close to Vegas’s house. He put on as much speed as he dared with such poor visibility.

B
ack when Amanda was alive, Hendricks looked forward to coming home after a long, hard day’s work. These days he went jogging in Rock Creek Park. He went every day and jogged the same three-mile course. He liked jogging in the late afternoon, when the light was spent from the day’s exertions and lay along the winding path he had chosen, like a river of molten gold; he felt all the stronger for it. He also liked the repetition. He had discovered a curious comfort in passing the same trees, the same curves and esses. Of course, they were never quite the same; the seasons saw to that. He particularly liked jogging in the snow, his breath white in front of him, the frost in his nostrils and on his eyelashes.

Cleo always accompanied him, her lithe golden body bounding, her black muzzle moist with saliva from her wagging pink tongue. She watched him with her liquid brown eyes, wanting to please him and at the same time, he imagined, feeling keenly the pleasure of her working muscles. Sometimes, he wondered what it would be like to be her, to run ecstatically on all fours, to feel pure joy, to have no knowledge of your impending death.

Of course, Hendricks and Cleo had company—his National Guard detail making certain the route in front and back of him was clear. He disliked their presence in this context, in a place of serene beauty when all he wanted was to be alone with his thoughts.

In a way, his detail saw to that, though it was entirely inadvertent. Anyone on the length of his run during the time he was there was pulled aside and grilled to within an inch of their lives. Then they were held under surveillance, almost as prisoners, until he had completed the three-mile course.

Today there were precious few people caught in the security net as he jogged by, Cleo loping beside him. But the sight of one person made him stop and turn back.

When he approached the cluster, one member of the detail stepped in front of him and asked him for the sake of security to kindly keep his distance.

“No, wait a minute, I know her,” Hendricks said, looking beyond him.

Stepping around the guard, Hendricks approached the young woman in jogging outfit and Nike sneakers.

“Maggie,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Good afternoon,” the woman he knew as Margaret Penrod said. “Same as you, I imagine, having a run.”

Hendricks smiled. “My mind says run but my knees insist I jog.”

“Do I have to be kept here under guard?”

“Of course not.” He lifted a hand. “You can jog with me. That is, if you can stand my relatively slow pace.”

Maggie looked around at the grim faces of the detail. “Only if your hounds will let me.”

“My hounds follow orders.” He looked at his detail.

“Already body-scanned, sir,” one of them said.

Hendricks could see the disapproval in his face. His jogging with someone not pre-approved weeks in advance was against protocol.
To hell with their protocol
, Hendricks thought.
This is my time.

By now Cleo had come over, sniffing at Maggie’s sneakers.

“Find anything interesting?” Maggie asked.

Cleo looked at her, and Maggie crouched down, rubbed the boxer behind one ear. Cleo leaned against her in ecstasy, her sides panting.

“She likes me.”

Hendricks laughed. “Cleo falls in love with anyone who scratches her ears.”

Maggie looked up at him. Her face had found the lowering sunlight and her eyes seemed to glow. “What about you?”

Hendricks felt his throat redden. “I—”

Maggie rose. “That was a joke. Just a joke.”

“Come on.” Hendricks rose up on the tips of his toes. “Let’s go.”

They moved off, Maggie careful to keep to his pace. Cleo bounded at his side or between them, maintaining contact, bumping his legs in sheer joy. The guards followed close behind. He could feel their tension and he imagined their eyes boring into Maggie’s back, on alert for any sign of hostile action. He supposed they were concerned about
Maggie suddenly turning on him and snapping his neck like a dry twig.

Every once in a while Cleo glanced at her, as if wondering what was going on. Hendricks was wondering the same thing. As they moved along the familiar path, tree branches dipping in the wind as if waving or saluting, he realized that everything looked different—the shapes sharper, the colors more vivid. He saw details he hadn’t noticed before.

He was jogging with Maggie beside him. It was happening because he wanted it to happen and, frankly, that astonished him because he hadn’t wanted something like this in a long time, probably five years, not since Amanda died. He hadn’t wanted to be with another female since then. How shabbily he had treated Jolene and the other females who flitted in and out of his life. When they said or did something that reminded him of Amanda, it threw him into despair. Worse, when they said or did something that was different from the way she’d said it or done it, he became enraged.

The embers of that despair-rage cycle were visible to him at last. And being visible, they cooled, their heat growing dim. He felt as if life had sprung up whole from the ground, had materialized before his eyes, and he thought,
What have I been doing with myself?
He felt ashamed of his behavior; that wasn’t the way Amanda would want him to act.

And now, jogging along, feeling Maggie’s heat, smelling her particular scent of cinnamon and bitter, burnt almond, he did something he hadn’t been able to do before. He looked back over those five years. He had been wandering in a desert. Maybe it was a desert of his own making, he thought, but it was no less real for that. Now, at last, he thought he was ready to leave that barren place and rejoin the world in which he and Amanda had laughed and loved and talked and just, well, enjoyed each other in the pure way that Cleo enjoyed her runs.

Hendricks, feeling lighter, became aware that he was enjoying jogging. He was enjoying not being alone. Maggie said something to him and he said something back. A moment later, he couldn’t remember what either of them had said, and, what’s more, it didn’t matter. He hadn’t
shied away from her, he didn’t feel embarrassed or a need to run away. In fact, he wished the course was five miles, instead of three. So that when they came to the end, he turned to her and said, “Would you like to have some dinner with me tonight?” as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

She must have felt the same way, because this time she said, “I would like that very much.”