The Bourne Retribution (24 page)

“And it needs to be
be’shu’shu
.” It has to be done secretly.

“
Gilita et America
.” Tell me something I don’t know. “Anything else I can provide?” he added with a deliberate smirk. “A tank? A fighter jet, perhaps?”

“Another time.”

Ophir waved a hand as if in surrender. “All right, all right. Let’s see.” He checked his computer screen. “I have a good man in Mexico City. His code name is J. J. Hale. Here’s what he looks like. That’s all you need to know about him.” He drew a scratch pad toward him, scribbled a couple of lines on it, tore off the sheet, and handed it across to Bourne. “Starting tomorrow, he’ll be at this café precisely at eight o’clock in the evening every day for five days. The second line is the code words to introduce yourself and his response.”

He smiled. “Anything else I can do for you?”

“I’ll let you know.” Bourne rose and left the office.

T
he moment he was alone, Ophir contacted Hale and gave him his instructions via coded email, then added the line,
Stand by for a pkg via the usual method
.

After he sent the email, he used a key he kept around his neck to open the lowest drawer on the right side of his desk. He took out a black folder and opened it. Inside was the transfer tape that his man had used to pick Bourne’s fingerprint off the glass in his hotel room in Caesarea.

Ophir stared at it for a moment, a thin smile playing across his lips. It was a good thing Bourne didn’t know enough about how Mossad worked. Those two items he assumed were so incriminating, weren’t. Their presence could be explained—though perhaps not easily—to Eli. Ophir had nothing to fear from Bourne on that score, but rather than inform him he had come to a better conclusion. One that would lead to Bourne’s undoing.

He packed the tape carefully in a small envelope, which he sealed with wax. He put this into a larger envelope then hand-wrote instructions to Hale, put these in the larger envelope with the fingerprint, sealed the larger envelope with wax, placed it in the proprietary secure packing Mossad used.

Then he called for an immediate overseas courier.

24

M
inister Ouyang, exiting the Patriarch’s building, found his white SUV waiting at the curb, its huge motor thrumming. The rear door opened as he approached and, ducking inside, he slammed the door behind him. The instant he sat, the SUV nosed out into the incessant traffic.

“All went as planned,” said the tall, thin man who sat beside him. His face bespoke his Manchu blood lineage. He had the delicate long-fingered hands of a surgeon or a pianist.

Why not? Ouyang thought. The man was an artist.

“And how did you make out at the summit of the Middle Kingdom?” From anyone else’s mouth the question would have had a sardonic edge, but not this man.

“Kai,” Ouyang began, “the Patriarch may indeed come around to our way of thinking, but for the moment he remains lost in the clouds.”

“Pity,” Kai said with a sigh. “The old man used to be a visionary of extraordinary usefulness.”

“His time may not yet be past,” Ouyang said a touch too sharply.

“Time,” Kai said, clearly not taking offense, “is what we have the least of. In less than a week the Party Congress will convene to elect a new Politburo, which will map out the next ten years of China’s future. If we do not act now—and act decisively—we will not be offered a second chance.”

Ouyang shifted uneasily in his seat. He knew he was being forced into the one dangerous position he had labored so hard to avoid.

“I hope you’re wrong, Kai, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that we must act now.”

B
ourne arrived in Mexico City on a teary morning, gray with mist and pollutants. The air stank from the human excrement used as fertilizer for fruits and vegetables.

He knew the city well. Though he was, in a way, closer to Rebeka, to the place where she had died, this knowledge brought him no solace. He experienced Mexico City as a necropolis throbbing with shadows, nightmarish memories, and an eternal sense of peril and foreboding.

By the time his taxi had reached the city streets, the sun—an ugly tannish ball—had fought its way through the mist, but had been defeated by the smog, which hung over the city like a translucent mask.

Bourne had given the driver an address in Coyoacán, a neighborhood five miles from Colonia Centro. The district name was derived from the Náhuatl Coyohuacán, an Aztec word meaning “place of coyotes,” possibly because the native people, the Tecpanecas, hated their Aztec conquerors to such a degree they welcomed in Hernán Cortés, hastening the demise of the Aztecs and their history and culture.

Bourne got out at Francisco Sosa, not far from where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera had lived, a cobblestone thoroughfare, the neighborhood’s main artery. He walked to 23 Caballo Calco, a two-story apartment building of whitewashed cement, trimmed in terra-cotta and faced with intricate white wrought-iron fencing.

He rang the bell for apartment 11, which had no name on it, and was at once buzzed in. Apartment 11 was on the second floor, facing the street. Almost directly across rose the Iglesia de Coyoacán, looking much the worse for wear, weeds and tumbledown bricks covering its feet, rude graffiti defacing its flanks.

When 808Azul opened the door, Bourne at first didn’t recognize her. She seemed a galaxy away from the girl, confused and enraged, who, with his help, had escaped Maceo Encarnación’s house in Colonia Polanco last year.

He had suggested that she run far away, over the Mexican border, but instead she had chosen to remain in her homeland, changing her name, becoming a first-rate computer hacker, as much feared as respected.

Online she was known as 808Azul, but Bourne knew her as Anunciata. Her mother had been Maceo Encarnación’s cook for many years until he had had her poisoned. That was when Bourne had helped Anunciata escape.

She was a beautiful young woman now, with an open, smiling face, wide-apart chocolate eyes, and a mane of black hair that glimmered in the lamplight of her large, airy apartment. Photos of her mother adorned shelves, as well as the shrine-like area surrounding her computers—a mix of the most powerful laptops, smartphones, and tablets. To his right, a row of wooden jalousies partially hid a long, narrow balcony that overlooked Caballo Calco.

“Jason, I was so happy to get your call,” she exclaimed, embracing him. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

“You stayed in touch.”

She laughed. “Good friends are rare as hen’s teeth.” She gestured. “You must be hungry, they don’t feed you well on flights. I made enchiladas and rice and black beans.”

She led him into the large kitchen where the meal was spread out on a scarred wooden table.

“You have your mother’s touch,” he said as he began to eat. She had brought a clutch of cold beers from the refrigerator.

“You’re well, Jason?”

“Well enough.”

“You look sad, but then I think that’s the way you always look.”

There was a small silence when only their eyes spoke.

“I never thanked you for killing my father.” She said these supercharged words in a matter-of-fact tone.

“No need.”

“I disagree.”

Bourne inclined his head, understanding only too well. Anunciata’s parents had conspired to hide the identity of her father. But when her mother discovered that her father had seduced her and was taking her to bed, she threatened her employer. A brave but foolish gesture.

Anunciata put down her knife and fork. “So what brings you back?”

“Something serious.”

“How could it be otherwise?”

“I’m looking for Maceo Encarnación’s daughter.”

“His daughter.” Anunciata laughed nervously. “You’re looking at her.”

“He had another one. Maricruz.”

“Ah, the one he had with Constanza Camargo.”

Bourne nodded. “You know her?”

“We never had the pleasure,” Anunciata said through bared teeth. “However, I’ve heard stories. She’s become sort of a legend.”

“She’s here,” Bourne said. “I need to find her.”

Anunciata thought for a moment. “Hold on,” she said as she rose.

She went to her workstation. Sitting down, she twisted on her headset, began typing on one of the laptops. Several moments later, she started asking questions, nodding at the answers as she continued to type.

Bourne got up and followed her in when he heard her say, “No shit. Really?”

Her eyes tracked him, her eyebrows raised for an instant, until she returned her attention to the call.

“I need someone inside…no, no,
really
inside…and reliable…of course for money.” She glanced up at Bourne again, and he nodded. “I understand. The amount’s not an issue,” she continued, “but reliability is…your assurances aside, if my client walks into an ambush I’ll hunt you down and pull your balls up into your throat…Go on, but I assure you it’s no laughing matter to suffocate on your own testicles.” She winked at Bourne. “Okay, got it. Be seeing you.”

After jotting a couple of lines on a scratch pad, she ripped off the sheet, rose, and handed it to Bourne. Then she took a picture of him with one of her phones and sent it off to her contact.

“You’re in luck. It seems my half sister got herself into a huge pile of shit,” she said. “Apparently, she came back to deal with Maceo’s cartel business and inserted herself into the war between Los Zetas and the Sinaloa. She can’t be that stupid so she must have had a plan in mind, insane as that sounds.”

Aware of Ouyang’s partnership with Maceo Encarnación to keep the raw materials for his drug pipeline coming into Mexico, Bourne didn’t think Maricruz’s plan was in the least bit insane—it was more like a necessity.

Anunciata shrugged. “I don’t know what happened but she’s been roughed up pretty badly. Currently, she’s recuperating at Hospital Ángeles Pedregal. I wrote down the address for you. Anyway, it seems that along the way she’s made some powerful friends. Her room is guarded by
Federales
and her only visitor has been Carlos Danda Carlos, the head of the anti-drug enforcement agency.”

She cocked her head at Bourne’s silent laugh. “This isn’t a joke. What’s so damn funny?”

M
aricruz was up and walking to physical therapy twice a day on her own, ignoring the wheelchair her nurse wheeled just behind her. Her legs were covered in bruises but it was her arms that needed the most help, specifically the shoulder that had been most badly damaged in the beat-down. It had needed arthroscopic surgery.

There were times when she hated Matamoros, certain that he had had his men expend their full fury on her, pounding her far more than necessary. But then would come the visits from Carlos and she would see on his face the genuine sorrow and guilt at his complicity in her terrible drubbing, and she knew that anything less severe would not have erased the suspicions crowding his mind.

No, she finally concluded, Matamoros had been a maestro at directing his men to beat her just enough to fool Carlos without doing anything to damage her permanently. And then there was the fact that apart from several scrapes and bruises, they had left her face unscathed. She had to be grateful for that.

In fact, she was grateful for it all. Matamoros was proving far more intelligent than she had given him credit for. Even better, he was desperate to defeat Carlos—almost as desperate as Carlos was to finish him off once and for all.

She was in the best possible position—directly between the two, trusted by both, with her own agenda completely uncompromised. When she reminded herself of that, she smiled to herself. She had never been naive enough to think this process would be easy, but she never could have imagined the shape it would take or the physical pain she would suffer.

These thoughts occupied her during the morning exercises her therapist put her through, which were both difficult and painful. Still, she had to admit that, though sore, she felt better afterward. Several minutes after she had started her afternoon session, an orderly wheeled in a girl of no more than seven. She looked beat up, malnourished, but worst of all her expression was a complete blank. Her cheeks were sunken, her huge eyes black and depthless. She stared into the middle distance at something no one in the room could see. Maricruz watched her clandestinely all through her own workout. Occasionally, a therapist would crouch in front of the girl, try to talk to her, even, once, taking her hand, all without receiving even the minutest response.

An hour later, when Maricruz was done, the girl still had not moved a muscle or altered her gaze. It was eerie, unsettling. Nevertheless, something about the girl stuck in Maricruz’s consciousness like a hook in a fish’s mouth and would not let go.

“That girl,” Maricruz said to her therapist, “why isn’t anyone taking care of her?”

“We’ve tried—many of us,” the woman said, wiping massage cream off her hands, “but nothing gets through to her. She’s catatonic. She was down in psychiatric, but since they can’t do anything with her, she’s been moved up to your floor.”