The Bourne Retribution (13 page)

“Where is he, then?”

“How should I know?”

Lim clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I
will
find him, Zhang. This I promise you.”

“Captain, it really makes no difference to me what you do,” he said to Lim’s back as he disappeared through the open doorway.

When the police had gone and the shop was his again, Zhang pulled out an oversize handkerchief and wiped his face.

Gods and demons
, he thought.
I’m getting too damn old for this.

I
n pitch darkness Bourne grabbed the lantern and box of matches he had glimpsed before Yue closed the trapdoor. Lighting the lantern, Yue, in his arms, held it high so that they could get as much light into the basement as possible.

At the bottom of the ladder, they found themselves in cramped quarters. The ceiling was so low it was impossible for Bourne to stand up straight.

“Let me down,” Yue whispered.

As soon as her feet hit the floor, she tested her ankle. She nodded to him and mouthed, “I’m okay.”

But as they picked their way toward the tunnel’s aperture, he could see her grimace every time she put weight on her wounded ankle. Surely she wouldn’t be able to walk far, let alone run, if the situation called for it.

The basement was like a warehouse, filled with crates nailed shut and cartons bound with heavy twine. They maneuvered through a narrow aisle between two walls of stacks that rose to the ceiling. Once, Yue’s leg faltered and she put a hand on a dusty box to steady herself. She shook off Bourne’s offer to help.

“I’m not going to be a burden to anyone,” she whispered fiercely.

The mouth of the tunnel was clear enough. Once, it had been closed off and later boarded up. They saw remnants of rotten boards bound by iron no one had bothered to throw out. Gripping two of the boards, Bourne paused a moment to work one of the iron bands free. It was about eight inches long and still solid.

They reached the opening of the tunnel. Even Yue had to bend somewhat in order to enter it. It reeked of filth, metallic water, decay, and centuries of human squalor. Bourne took the lantern from her and led the way. The tunnel initially sloped steeply downward before leveling off. It appeared hand dug out of the earth, supported at intervals by thick wooden beams. Above their heads were the floorboards of adjacent basements. A trickle of water had runneled the center of the tunnel’s packed-dirt floor, making even the simple act of walking difficult. Occasionally he heard tiny scrabbling sounds and saw pairs of red eyes. A flash of light revealed rats, large and active.

Suddenly Bourne heard a different kind of sound behind him, turned to see Yue stumble again. Despite her protestations, he took her again in his arms and began to move forward.

“Damn you,” she sighed. “I’m not helpless.”

“But you’re in pain.”

“You don’t know anything about pain.”

They came to the first branching, and, as Zhang had directed, Bourne headed left.

“No?” Anything to keep her from dwelling on her physical pain. “Please tell me.”

Yue was silent for a moment. Then she said softly, falteringly, “My father was a writer, a dissident. He wrote about the corruption inside the Politburo—the special farms its members got their food from, while everyone else was eating food contaminated with heavy metals, adulterated with melamine.

“You can imagine what happened. He was arrested on trumped-up charges and sentenced to twenty years at hard labor. My mother began her protests the day he was convicted. Two weeks later, they came for her, tried her on charges of sedition, and took her away, God alone knows where.

“I was seven at the time they took her. I admire what my parents did, but they had no regard for me or my life. I was given over to my mother’s brother. He hated my father for what he had done to my mother. Having no one else to take out his hatred on, he beat me, starved me, locked me in a closet. One day, I escaped and never went back. I was eleven. Four years with him; four years in hell.”

Bourne heard her breathing hard, as if she had just finished a sprint. He came to the second fork and again went left. He thought about his own years in hell—the hell of not knowing who he was, where he was from, anything about his parents. Into his mind swam the many people who had been close to him, now all dead. But most of all, he thought of Rebeka, of their time together, of her bravery and her determination. He thought of dragging her through a drainpipe in Mexico City—so eerily similar to these moments with Yue—unable to stanch the bleeding of the knife wound in her side. He thought of her bleeding out in the back of a taxi as he sped toward help that would come too late. He felt the small star of David he had taken from her, which he could not give up at her memorial service in Tel Aviv, which he kept with him because he could not let go of her.

He had wondered about this, ruminated on it during his time of convalescence on the beach at Caesarea, but could come to no good conclusion. So much of himself was still unknown. Apart from the skills ingrained in him during his time in the original Treadstone program, he did not know who he was or what motivated him beyond an overriding sense of justice and deep-seated anger, a sadness, almost a kind of despair. There were times when he’d wondered if he suffered from a lack of empathy—a sure sign of psychosis. But then Rebeka—or someone like her—would come along and for a time he’d feel deeply and completely, and his fear would be assuaged. Then, inevitably, the person would die, and he would be left alone again, vowing never to allow himself to feel again. His life had resolved itself into a kind of seesawing back and forth between these two volatile points, depriving him of a sense of balance and serenity. He was a man adrift on a half-wrecked ship, so far out to sea no land was visible, in a perpetual fog-bound night that made any course correction impossible.

A sound from behind them brought him back to the tunnel. It sounded like someone kicking a small stone.

“There’s someone following us,” Yue whispered.

He was at a third branching; one more to go. Instead of going left this time, he went into the right-hand fork. He kicked at a couple of rats, sending them skittering away. Setting Yue carefully down in front of the lantern, so the light could not be seen by anyone behind them, he turned to face the way they had come.

R
etzach had waited until Captain Lim and his police contingent had begun their quartering of the area around The China Seas Pearl, leaving the shop to return to its business. Then he went inside, mingling with the Western women in their expensive outfits who were determined to get their bargains, despite their having been treated like cattle by the Shanghai police. In fact, it was for that very reason—to show their contempt for the civil authorities—that they crowded inside.

Retzach slipped in with them. Immediately he saw that the two saleswomen were so overtaxed, it would be child’s play to slip past them without being seen or challenged.

He didn’t bother to knock on the office door, but instead shoved it open and went inside. Zhang looked up, startled to see someone else in his office. For a moment he didn’t recognize Retzach, then he sighed.

“What is it, Mr. Long? I’ve been having a trying day.”

“So I understand.” Retzach stepped across the room. “Well, I won’t keep you but a moment.”

As he came around the side of the desk, Zhang said, “What are you doing?”

“Do you know the meaning of blunt-force trauma?” Retzach said as he slammed the side of his snub-nosed Beretta Px4 Storm against the top of the fat man’s head.

Zhang rocked so far back in his chair, Retzach was forced to grab him to keep him from falling out. As Zhang’s bloodshot eyes cleared, Retzach leaned over and placed the muzzle of the 9 mm against his temple and, finger on the trigger, said, “Bourne came into this shop, but he didn’t come out. Where the fuck is he hiding?”

Zhang looked up at him. “Like I told Captain Lim—”

“I’m not Captain Lim. I will fucking spatter your brains all over the walls of this office and then I’ll tear the place apart.”

Zhang tried to take a breath, failed. “I don’t want Yue hurt.”

“Who’s Yue?”

“She’s like my daughter. She’s with this man.”

“I don’t give a shit about her.”

“She can’t get hurt.”

“This isn’t a negotiation.”

“Yes, but it is,” Zhang said. “I would gladly give my life for her.”

Retzach studied the fat man’s face, looking deep into his eyes for any hint of prevarication. He found none. “I will make sure Yue isn’t hurt, okay?”

In his turn, Zhang studied the man in whose hands his life lay. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“How do we know either of us can trust the other? Sometimes we have to rely on faith.” This was, of course, a lie. Lacking empathy, Retzach had no faith in anything or anyone. However, he would do his best to keep the girl out of it.

“Push me back,” Zhang said, having made up his mind.

“What?”

“The chair. I can’t move it with that thing to my head.”

Retzach removed the muzzle of the Beretta, and the fat man rolled his chair away.

“Underneath the rug, and keep to the left,” he said with a despairing sigh.

“Flashlight,” Retzach said, staring down at the blackness.

Zhang had no recourse but to give it to him.

B
ourne, crouched down, remained absolutely still. After that first sound, he’d heard nothing more, beyond the doleful drip of water somewhere nearby and the incessant scurrying of rats. But there was now a subtle shift in the flow of air along the tunnel, indicative of a moving body blocking a section of it. A moment later he saw the silverfish brilliance of a flashlight beam advancing toward them. He had positioned himself far enough back in the right-hand fork to remain invisible in the periphery of the circle of light trained on the left-hand fork.

As the light, bobbing slightly with each footstep, came ever closer, Bourne prepared himself. At the last moment, the beam swung away to illuminate the left-hand turning, and Bourne could just make out the silhouette of the human form behind the dazzling light.

Whoever was following them proceeded down the adjacent tunnel at a steady pace. Bourne counted to fifteen, then rose, silently returned to the branching, and followed to the left. He was going by scent now, but there was none. Not a hint of a human scent—just the mineral rock, the seeping water, the black earth.

It’s not possible
, Bourne thought.
He must be here; he must be close at hand
.

At that moment something metallic swung into the side of his head and a shot went off.

13

M
aricruz and Felipe Matamoros were traveling in his private plane. Three of her men and three of his, plus the pilot, made up the others on board. The plane, which had taken off from a private, hidden airstrip a mile from his villa in Malacates, was headed north to San Luis Potosí.

“This place we fly into,” Matamoros was saying, “is the site of the worst of our turf wars with Raul Giron and the Sinaloa cartel.”

“So now,” Maricruz said, “it will be the last battleground and the first area of the new alliance.”

He stared out the Perspex window at the shell-like sky and, below, the rolling geography of the land north of the Distrito Federal. Maricruz wondered whether he felt like a god—the Aztec winged serpent Quetzalcoatl.

“For so many years the Sinaloa were the kings of Mexico,” he mused. “The cartel was riding high with no one to mount a serious challenge. Then the Gulf cartel made a group of us an offer we didn’t want to refuse and we defected from the elite forces of the army. Right idea, wrong result.

“For a time we worked for them, killing Sinaloa soldiers and gobbling up territories, until we had a complete picture of the lay of the land. Then we broke away and formed our own cartel and turned on our former bosses. Now the Gulf is a shadow of its former self. We have taken over their territory and an increasing amount of the Sinaloa’s as well. But the Sinaloa are stronger, better established, their leadership smarter, hooked into the right politicos. They know how to resist us. Still, slowly but surely, we keep pushing them back, gaining more and more territory.” He turned back to her. “But you’re right, now that you have given us an alternative, the price we have been paying is too high. Now we have you, your foolproof method of money laundering, and your pipeline to unlimited drugs direct from the source. My
compadres
agree with me absolutely.

“We’re with you now,
mi princesa
. No longer do we have to make deals with the disgusting pigs who call themselves politicians, with police leaders so greedy they all but drool when I seal my pacts with them. Now we can fuck all of them, as we’ve been longing to do for years.”

The main thing about greed, Maricruz thought now, was that it made you stupid. Even worse, it made you careless. The gloss on Matamoros’s eyes was pure greed. Again, he had given himself away without knowing it. Maricruz was grateful, but she knew better than to gloat. She was still in extreme peril; she’d need all her wits and guile to navigate through the next several hours.