Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (27 page)

She lifted a forefinger. “And make no mistake, going after Maceo Encarnación is walking into tiger territory. There will be no mercy, no second chances, only, if you are lucky, death.” She stubbed out her cigarillo. “
But
if you are
very
lucky and extremely clever, you may yet walk out of the tiger’s den with what you and I desire.”

TULIO VISTOSO ARRIVED in Washington, DC, with anxiety in his mind and murder in his heart.

How difficult was it, he thought, for Florin Popa to keep safe what he, Don Tulio, had so cleverly stolen on the steep, treacherous trail along the Cañon del Sumidero, outside Tuxtla Guttiérez, replacing the real thirty million with what he had been certain were undetectable counterfeit bills? And yet, Popa had failed, and his life was forfeit if he could not placate Don Maceo and his holy, all-powerful buyers within thirty-six hours.

He was still fulminating about the monumental fuck-up when he arrived at the Dockside Marina and saw the Cobalt in slip 31 crawling with cops. And not just cops, he realized with a jolt.
Federales
. He could smell them a mile away. They moved with a certain measured gait, like dray horses in their traces. He stared, horrified. The boat was well guarded, cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape.

Christ on the cross, what in the name of all that’s holy has happened?
Instinctively, he looked around, as if Popa might be lurking somewhere in the vicinity. Where the hell was Popa? Don Tulio wondered with a sinking heart. Had Popa absconded with the thirty million? Don Tulio’s thirty million. This prospect terrified him. Or, worse, did the
federales
have it? Was Popa in their custody? With a trembling hand, he began to fire off a series of text messages to his lieutenants in a frenzied endeavor to recoup the thirty million as quickly as possible.

The Aztec felt like pulling his hair out. His crazed brain kept churning out dire possibilities, but a sliver of civilized veneer stopped him cold. Instead, he turned on his heel and stalked away. He swiped a hand across his forehead. Despite the chill, he was sweating like a pig.

Up ahead, a car pulled into a parking space in the lot and, a moment later, a young man leaped out. He pushed by Don Tulio as he hurried down the gangplank, onto the dock, and out to slip 31. Sensing something unusual, the Aztec turned. Sure enough, the
federale
ants crawling all over the
Recursive
began kowtowing to the new arrival:
el jefe
. This interested Don Tulio so, instead of hightailing it, he decided to hang around as unobtrusively as possible. This meant going down the gangplank himself and onto the dock. Choosing a deserted boat as far away as practical from the activity on the
Recursive
, he climbed aboard and busied himself doing nothing at all while he spied on the new arrival.

Happily for him, the marina’s quiet atmosphere, combined with how the water carried the voices, allowed him to overhear snatches of conversation. In this way, he determined that
el jefe’s
name was Marks. Turning for a moment, he noted that the vehicle Marks had arrived in was a white Chevy Cruze. He jumped off the boat, then went at an unhurried pace back up the ramp and into the lot, where he jotted down the Cruze’s license plate number. Back on the boat, he returned his attention to Marks himself, his mind already plotting his next several moves.

It had been his experience that meeting with the chief of your enemies was preferable to working your way up the plantain tree. But meeting with
federales
, especially on their own turf, was a tricky business, one, Don Tulio knew, that needed to be thought out in considerable detail. He also knew that he would get one shot at confronting
jefe
Marks, so he was obliged to make the best of it. The danger of such a maneuver did not disturb him; he lived with danger every day of his life, had done so from the time he was ten years old and already raging through the streets of Acapulco. He had loved the sea, even before he became a cliff diver, showing off for Gringo money. He jumped from the highest cliff, dove the deepest, stayed down the longest. The churning water was his father and his mother, rocking him into a form of peace he could find nowhere else.

He became king of the divers, taking a cut from all their winnings. That might have continued indefinitely, until the moment a Gringo tourist accused him of fucking his teenage daughter. That the Gringa had initiated the liaison meant nothing in the face of her father’s colossal wealth and the authorities’ desperation to keep Acapulco a world-class tourist destination.

He got out just ahead of the cops, fleeing north, losing himself in the immense urban sprawl of Mexico City. But he never forgot how the Gringo had ruined his life, for he loved the ocean waters, desperately missed his old life. Years passed and a new life began to weave around him. Anarchism first. When he was older, he took out his rage at the institutional corruption with bouts of extreme violence against anyone who held a steady job. Eventually, he got smart and joined a drug cartel, working his way up the power grid by any and all means, which impressed his superiors up until the moment he directed his followers to cut their heads off with machetes.

From that bloody moment on he had been
jefe
, consolidating his power with the other cartel heads. He was uncomfortable in society. He had no expertise navigating the capital’s deep and treacherous political waters, so he had forged an alliance with Maceo Encarnación, which had served them both well.

The Aztec made himself busy all over again while he leaned his ear to the prevailing wind and discovered that Popa was dead.
Jefe
Marks had killed him, after which he had inadvertently found the key.
The fucking key
, Don Tulio thought with a savagery that shook him to his core.
He has the fucking key.
But then, his mind cooling a single degree, he dredged up this hopeful thought:
He has the fucking key, but that doesn’t mean he has the thirty million.
Which was followed by a second hopeful thought:
If the
federales
have the money, why are they searching the boat so frantically?

Fuming, the Aztec finished coiling a rope for the seventeenth time. Noting that the
federales
were breaking up, he went down into the cabin, waiting there patiently while he counted the number of rivets in the deck, perched uncomfortably on a narrow seat. Shadows passed as the
federales
left the
Recursive
and went back up the dock to the parking lot. He listened for the car engines starting up. When, like popping corn, they ceased, he knew it was time.

Emerging from the cabin, he looked at the
Recursive
. It appeared deserted, but he resisted the urge to board it. Even though the clock that now measured his life was ticking mercilessly away, he knew it would be foolish to risk everything by going over there in daylight. Better by far to show patience, to wait for night to fall. He returned to the boat, lay down on the deck, and fell instantly into a deep and untroubled sleep.

Midnight,” Constanza said. “Manny will come and collect you.” After she bade them goodnight, Bourne and Rebeka retired to the two adjoining bedrooms in the guest wing. But almost immediately she appeared on the threshold of his room.

“Are you tired?” Rebeka asked.

Bourne shook his head.

She walked in, went past him, and stood by the window, arms wrapped around herself, staring out at the inner courtyard. Bourne came and stood beside her. They could hear the wind clatter through the palms. By a sliver of moonlight, they watched the rustling of the leaves on the lime tree.

“Jason, do you ever think about death?” When he said nothing, she went on. “I think about it all the time.” She shivered. “Or maybe it’s just this place. Mexico City seems steeped in death. It gives me the creeps.”

She turned to him. “What if we don’t survive tomorrow?” 

“We will.”

“But what if we don’t?”

He shrugged.

“Then we die in darkness,” she said, answering her own question. She stirred, then said, “Put your arms around me.” When he did, holding her tight, she said, “Why don’t we feel the way other people feel, deep down, not just on the surface, like water glancing off water? What is the matter with us?”

“We can do what we do,” Bourne said softly, “only because we are what we are.” He looked down at her. “There’s no turning back for us.

There’s only one exit from the life we live, and none of us who are good at what we do want to take it.”

“Do we love what we do so much?”

He was silent. The answer was evident.

He held her that way until, with a discreet knock on the partially open door, Manny announced himself.

His name is unimportant,” Manny said as he drove them through Mexico City’s bright-night streets. “He is known as
el Enterrador
.” The Undertaker.

“Isn’t that a little over the top?” Rebeka said from the plush backseat of the armored Hummer.

Manny looked at her in the rearview mirror and smiled with his teeth. “Wait till you meet him.”

Flashing lights up ahead revealed a semicircle of cop cars, blazing headlights illuminating six cops using truncheons to beat down on a dozen teenagers armed with switchblades and broken beer bottles.

“Just another night in Mexico City,” Manny said with no apparent irony.

They traveled on, through the Zona Rosa, the Historic Center, seemingly across the entire broad expanse of a city that sprawled, octopus-like, across the mile-high plain toward the great looming volcano, Popocatépetl, brooding like an ancient Aztec god.

They witnessed fires, street gangs stalking one another, they heard raucous Gringo techno and native
ranchera
music spilling out of nightclubs, vengeful brawls, the occasional gunshot. They were passed by roaring, souped-up cars driven by drunken kids, with
cumbia
or rap blasting from custom speakers, on and on, a nightmare scenario without end.

But at last they reached Villa Gustavo a Madero, and Manny slowed the Hummer, rolling it through darkened, sleeping streets, into the heart of the city within the city. Up ahead, the bonnets of trees, black against the twinkling, indistinct skyline, rose up like a prehistoric world until, through tree-shadowed byways, they reached the very center of the heart: the Cementerio del Tepeyac.

“Of course,” Rebeka said to relieve the almost unbearable tension, “where else would
el Enterrador
hang out but in a cemetery.”

However, it wasn’t to one of the crypts that Manny took them, but to the Basilica de Guadelupe. He had no difficulty unlocking the door to the basilica and ushering them inside.

The incredibly intricate and exquisitely painted interior was ablaze, the gilt chandeliers illuminating the host of cherubs that spilled across the domed ceiling. Manny remained just inside the doorway while gesturing them down the central aisle. Long before they reached the draped altar, however, a figure appeared: a man with a pointed beard and mustache. His black eyes seemed to penetrate their clothes, their very skin, as if peering into the heart of them.

He possessed the pallor and demeanor of a ghost, speaking so softly Bourne and Rebeka were obliged to lean forward to hear him. “You come from Constanza Camargo.” It was not a question. “Follow me.”

As he turned to go, he pushed up the wide sleeves of his ecclesiastical robe, revealing forearms knotted with muscle and ropy veins, crawling with tattoos of coffins and tombstones, beautiful and horrific.

It was almost 4 am by the time the Aztec awoke, according to his unerring internal clock. He was hungry. No matter. There were thirty million reasons to ignore the gnawing in his stomach. Finding a rubberized waterproof flashlight, he took it topside.

Outside, Washington glittered, seeming far away across the water. Don Tulio looked across to where the
Recursive
lay tied up at slip 31. No one was visible. In fact, the entire marina appeared deserted. Still, the Aztec stood on the boat, aurally cataloguing the night noises—the slap of the wavelets against hulls, the creaking of masts, the pinging of rigging against those masts—these were all the normal sounds of a marina. Don Tulio listened beyond those for any anomalous sounds—the soft tread of feet, the low sound of voices, anything that would indicate the presence of human beings.

Finding none, he was at last satisfied. He climbed onto the dock, first looking to the darkened harbormaster’s hut, then swiftly and silently made his way to slip 31, stepping, at last, aboard the
Recursive
.

He went immediately to the second bumper on the starboard side and felt under it with his fingers. The nylon rope was still there! Heart pounding, he pulled in the rope, hand over hand. The weight felt just as it should; with every foot he reeled in, he became more and more certain that his thirty million was safe and secure at the nether end of the rope.

But when he had pulled it all in and switched on the flashlight, what he saw tied to the end was a lead weight.

“Looking for this?”

Don Tulio whirled, saw
jefe
Marks holding up the watertight satchel, deflated, empty, the thirty million and his life gone. Engulfed by the final wave of his murderous rage, he leaped at his tormentor, heard the explosion rocket through his ear, felt the bullet enter, then exit his left biceps. He kept going, a full-on bull-rush that took both Marks and him over the railing, both plunging down, the chill black water robbing them both of breath.

Chinatown? Really?” Charles Thorne sat down at the Formica table opposite the tall, slender man, dressed in one of those shiny Chinese suits that imitated the American style, but none too well.

“Try the moo goo gai pan,” Li Wan said, gesturing with his chopsticks. “It’s really rather good.”

“Christ, it’s four in the morning,” Thorne said with a sour face. There was no point in asking Li how he managed to get a restaurant to stay open for him in the waning hours of the night when nothing, not even the cats, was roaming Chinatown’s streets. “Besides, it’s not really a Chinese dish.”