The Bourne Sanction (32 page)

“My source was Bourne.”

LaValle looked startled. “Jason Bourne? Are you kidding me?”

“No, Mr. LaValle. He has knowledge of the Black Legion and that they were being fronted by the Eastern Brotherhood.”

“Where the hell did this knowledge come from?”

“He had no time to tell me, even if he had a mind to,” she said. “There were too many
NSA
agents in the vicinity.”

“The incident at the Freer,” Kendall said.

LaValle held up a hand. “You helped him to escape.”

Soraya shook her head. “Actually, he thought I’d turned on him.”

“Interesting.” LaValle tapped his lip. “Does he still think that?”

Soraya determined it was time for a little defiance, a little lie. “I don’t know. Jason has a tendency toward paranoia, so it’s possible.”

LaValle looked thoughtful. “Maybe we can use that to our ad-vantage.”

General Kendall looked disgusted. “So, in other words, this whole story about the Black Legion could be nothing more than a lunatic fantasy.”

“Or, more likely, deliberate disinformation,” LaValle said. Soraya shook her head. “Why would he do that?”

“Who knows why he does anything?” LaValle took a slow sip of his whiskey, diluted now by the melted ice cubes. “Let’s not forget that Bourne was in a rage when he told you about the Black Legion. By your own admission, he thought you’d betrayed him.”

“You have a point.” Soraya knew better than to defend Bourne to these people. The more you argued against them, the more entrenched they became in their position. They’d built a case against Jason out of fear and loathing. Not because, as they claimed, he was unstable, but because he simply didn’t care about their rules and regulations. Instead of flouting them, something the directors had knowledge of and knew how to handle, he annihilated them.

“Of course I do.” LaValle set down his glass. “Let’s move on to your friend. The case against him is airtight, open-and-shut, no hope whatsoever of appeal or commutation.”

“Let him eat cake,” Kendall said.

“Marie Antoinette never said that, by the way,” Soraya said. Kendall glared at her, while LaValle continued, “Let the punishment fit the crime would be more apropos. Or, in your case, Let the expiation fit the crime.” He waved the approaching Willard away. “What we’re going to need from you, Director, is proofincontrovertible proof-that your illegal foray into
NSA
territory was instigated by Veronica Hart.”

She knew what he was asking of her. “So, basically, we’re talking an exchange of prisoners-Hart for Tyrone.”

“You’ve grasped it entirely,” LaValle said, clearly pleased.

“I’ll have to think about it.”

LaValle nodded. “A reasonable request. I’ll have Willard prepare you a meal.” He glanced at his watch. “Richard and I have a meeting in fifteen minutes. We’ll be back in approximately two hours. You can think over your answer until then.”

“No, I need to think this over in another environment,” Soraya said.

“Director Moore, given your history of deception that would be a mistake on our part.”

“You promised I could leave if I told you my source.”

“And so you shall, when you’ve agreed to my terms.” He rose, and with him Kendall.

“You and your friend came in here together. Now you’re joined at the hip.”

Bourne waited until Gala was sufficiently recovered. She dressed, shivering, not once looking at the body of the dead agent.

“I’m sorry you got dragged into this,” Bourne said.

“No you’re not. Without me you never would’ve gotten to Ivan.” Gala angrily jammed her feet into her shoes. “This is a nightmare,” she said, as if to herself. “Any minute I’ll wake up in my own bed and none of this will have happened.”

Bourne led her toward the door.

Gala shuddered anew as she carefully skirted the body.

“You’re hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

“Ha, ha, good one,” she said, as they made their way down the hall. “That includes you.”

A moment later, he signaled her to stop. Kneeling down, he touched his fingertip to a wet spot on the carpet.

“What is it?”

Bourne examined his fingertip. “Blood.”

Gala gave a little whimper. “What’s it doing out here?”

“Good question,” Bourne said as he crept along the hallway. He noted a tiny smear in front of a narrow door. Wrenching it open, he switched on the utility room’s light.

“Christ,” Gala said.

Inside was a crumpled body with a bullet in its forehead. It was nude, but there was a pile of clothes tossed in a corner, obviously those of the
NSA
agent. Bourne knelt down, rifled through them, hoping to find some form of ID, to no avail.

“What are you doing?” Gala cried.

Bourne spotted a tiny triangle of dark brown leather sticking out from under the corpse, which was only visible from this low angle. Rolling the corpse on its side, he discovered a wallet. The dead man’s ID would prove useful, since Bourne now had none of his own. His assumed identity, which he’d used to check in, was unusable, because the moment the corpse was found in Fyodor Ilianovich Popov’s room, there’d be a massive manhunt for him. Bourne reached out, took the wallet.

Then he rose, grabbed Gala’s hand, and got them out of there. He insisted they take the service elevator down to the kitchen. From there it was a simple matter to find the rear entrance.

Outside, it had begun to snow again. The wind, slicing in from the square, was icy and bitter. Flagging down a bombila, Bourne was about to give the cabbie the address of Gala’s friend, then realized that Yakov, the cabbie working for the
NSA
, knew that address.

“Get in the taxi,” Bourne said quietly to Gala, “but be prepared to get out quickly and do exactly as I say.”

Soraya didn’t need a couple of hours to make up her mind; she didn’t even need a couple of minutes.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get Tyrone out of here.”

LaValle turned back to regard her. “Well, now, that kind of capitulation would do my heart good if I didn’t know you to be such a duplicitous little bitch.

“Unfortunately,” he went on, “in your case, verbal capitulation isn’t quite as convincing as it would be in others. That being the case, the general here will make crystal clear to you the consequences of further treachery on your part.”

Soraya rose, along with Kendall.

LaValle stopped her with his voice, “Oh, and, Director, when you leave here you’ll have until ten tomorrow morning to make your decision. I’ll expect you back here then. I hope I’ve made myself clear.”

The general led her out of the Library, down the corridor to the door to the basement. The moment she saw where he was taking her, she said, “No! Don’t do this. Please. There’s no need.”

But Kendall, his back ramrod-straight, ignored her. When she hesitated at the security door, he grasped her firmly by the elbow and, as if she were a child, steered her down the stairs.

In due course, she found herself in the same viewing room. Tyrone was on his knees, his arm behind him, bound hands on the tabletop, which was higher than shoulder level. This position was both extremely painful and humiliating. His torso was forced forward, his shoulder blades back.

Soraya’s heart was filled with dread. “Enough,” she said. “I get it. You’ve made your point.”

“By no means,” General Kendall said.

Soraya could see two shadowy figures moving about the cell. Tyrone had become aware of them, too. He tried to twist around to see what they were up to. One of the men shoved a black hood over his head.

My God, Soraya said to herself. What did the other man have in his hands?

Kendall shoved her hard against the one-way glass. “Where your friend is concerned we’re just warming up.”

Two minutes later, they began to fill the waterboarding tank. Soraya began to scream. Bourne asked the bombila driver to pass by the front of the hotel. Everything seemed calm and normal, which meant that the bodies on the seventeenth floor hadn’t been discovered yet. But it wouldn’t be long before someone went to look for the missing room-service waiter.

He turned his attention across the street, searching for Yakov. He was still outside his car, talking to a fellow driver. Both of them were swinging their arms to keep their circulation going. He pointed out Yakov to Gala, who recognized him. When they’d passed the square, Bourne had the bombila pull over.

He turned to Gala. “I want you to go back to Yakov and have him take you to Universitetskaya Ploshchad at Vorobyovy Gory.” Bourne was speaking of the top of the only hill in the otherwise flat city, where lovers and university students went to get drunk, make love, and smoke dope while looking out over the city. “Wait there for me and whatever you do, don’t get out of the car. Tell the cabbie you’re meeting someone there.”

“But he’s the one who’s been spying on us,” Gala said.

“Don’t worry,” Bourne reassured her. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The view out over Vorobyovy Gory was not so very grand. First, there was the ugly bulk of Luzhniki Stadium in the mid-foreground. Second, there were the spires of the Kremlin, which would hardly inspire even the most ardent lovers. But for all that, at night it was as romantic as Moscow could get.

Bourne, who’d had his bombila track the one Gala was in all the way there, was relieved that Yakov had orders only to observe and report back. Anyway, the
NSA
was interested in Bourne, not a young blond dyev.

Arriving at the overlook, Bourne paid the fare he’d agreed to at the beginning of the ride, strode down the sidewalk, and got into the front seat of Yakov’s taxi.

“Hey, what’s this?” Yakov said. Then he recognized Bourne and made a scramble for the Makarov he kept in a homemade sling under the ratty dash. Bourne pulled his hand away and held him back against the seat while taking possession of the handgun. He pointed it at Yakov. “Who do you report to?”

Yakov said in a whiny voice, “I challenge you to sit in my seat night after night, driving around the Garden Ring, crawling endlessly down Tverskaya, being cut out of fares by kamikaze bombily and make enough to live on.”

“I don’t care why you pimp yourself out to the
NSA
,” Bourne told him. “I want to know who you report to.”

Yakov held up his hand. “Listen, listen, I’m from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. It’s not so nice there, who can make a living? So I pack my family and we travel to Russia, the beating heart of the new federation, where the streets are paved with rubles. But when I arrive here I am treated like dirt. People in the street spit on my wife. My children are beaten and called terrible names. And I can’t get a job anywhere in this city. ‘Moscow for Muscovites,’ that is the refrain I hear over and over. So I take to the bombily because I have no other choice. But this life, sir, you have no idea how difficult it is. Sometimes after twelve hours I come home with a hundred rubles, sometimes with nothing. I cannot be faulted for taking money the Americans offer.

“Russia is corrupt, but Moscow, it’s more than corrupt. There isn’t a word for how bad things are here. The government is made up of thugs and criminals. The criminals plunder the natural resources of Russia-oil, natural gas, uranium. Everyone takes, takes, takes so they can have big foreign cars, a different dyev for every day of the week, a dacha in Miami Beach. And what’s left for us? Potatoes and beets, if we work eighteen hours a day and if we’re lucky.”

“I have no animosity toward you,” Bourne said. “You have a right to earn a living.” He handed Yakov a fistful of dollars.

“I see no one, sir. I swear. Just voices on my cell phone. All moneys come to a post office box in-”

Bourne carefully placed the muzzle of the Makarov in Yakov’s ear. The cabbie cringed, turned mournful eyes on Bourne.

“Please, please, sir, what have I done?”

“I saw you outside the Metropolya with the man who tried to kill me.”

Yakov squealed like a skewered rat. “Kill you? I’m employed merely to watch and report. I have no knowledge about-”

Bourne hit the cabbie. “Stop lying and tell me what I want to know.”

“All right, all right.” Yakov was shaking with fear. “The American who pays me, his name is Low. Harris Low.”

Bourne made him give a detailed description of Low, then he took Yakov’s cell phone.

“Get out of the car,” he said.

“But sir, I answered all your questions,” Yakov protested. “You’ve taken everything of mine. What more do you want?”

Bourne leaned across him, opened the door, then shoved him out. “This is a popular place. Plenty of bombily come and go. You’re a rich man now. Use some of the money I gave you to get a ride home.”

Sliding behind the wheel he put the Zhig in gear, drove back into the heart of the city. Harris Low was a dapper man with a pencil mustache. He had the prematurely white hair and ruddy complexion of many blue-blooded families in the American Northeast. That he had spent the last eleven years in Moscow, working for
NSA
, was a testament to his father, who had trod the same perilous path. Low had idolized his father, had wanted to be like him for as long as he could remember. Like his father, he had the Stars and Stripes tattooed on his soul. He’d been a running back in college, gone through the rigorous physical training to be an
NSA
field agent, had tracked down terrorists in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. He wasn’t afraid to engage in hand-to-hand combat or to kill a target. He did it for God and country.

During his eleven years in the capital of Russia, Low had made many friends, some of whom were the sons of his father’s friends. Suffice to say he had developed a network of apparatchiks and siloviks for whom a quid pro quo was the order of the day. Harris held no illusions. To further his country’s cause he would scratch anyone’s back-if they, in turn, scratched his.

He heard about the murders at the Metropolya Hotel from a friend of his in the General Prosecutor’s Office, who’d caught the police squeal. Harris met this individual at the hotel and was consequently one of the first people on the scene. He had no interest in the corpse in the utility closet, but he immediately recognized Anthony Prowess. Excusing himself from the crime scene, he went into the stairwell off the seventeenth-floor hallway, punched in an overseas number on his cell. A moment later Luther LaValle answered.