Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (37 page)

However, today Minister Ouyang had an altogether different reason for visiting the country club. As the cantilevered front gate opened to his driver’s electronic code, he saw another car waiting just inside. The man in army fatigues stood beside the car, eating a cucumber he had apparently just pulled off the vine.

When Ouyang stepped out of his limousine and approached, he saw the livid scar down the side of the man’s face.

“Colonel Ben David,” he said, donning dark glasses against the sun’s glare. “It has been some time.”

“You know,” Ben David said, lounging against the car, “I still prefer Israeli cucumbers.” He chomped on the Earth and Sky vegetable, chewing slowly. “Something about the desert sun.”

Minister Ouyang produced a curdled smile. “Bring your own food next time.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t good.”

“What happened to your face?” Ouyang said in a gross breach of Chinese etiquette.

Ben David eyed him for some time. “You know, Minister, you’re looking a little peaked. You haven’t been drinking any of your infamous watered-down milk spiked with melamine so it can pass the protein-content tests?”

“I only drink milk from the Earth and Sky Dairy,” Ouyang said coldly.

Ben David threw the stump of the cucumber onto the ground and came away from the car. “You know what occurs to me? We hate each other so much it’s a wonder we can work together.”

Ouyang bared his teeth. “Necessity creates strange bedfellows.” “Whatever.” Ben David shrugged his shoulders. “What necessitated this face-to-face so close to our mutual journey’s end?”

Minister Ouyang took out a slender file and handed it over.

Ben David opened it. His scar seemed to flare with heat as he stared at the surveillance photo of Jason Bourne. He looked up, rageful. “What the fuck is this, Ouyang?”

“You know this man,” Ouyang said with maddening calm. “Intimately.”

Ben David slapped the file. “This is why you insisted I travel over nine hours?”

Ouyang was imperturbable. “Please confirm my statement, Colonel.”

“We have met on two occasions,” Ben David said neutrally.

“Then you are the man for the job.”

Ben David blinked. “What job? You’re giving me a fucking
job
?”

A jet, winking silver in the bright sunshine, passed by overhead, a roar so distant it might have come from the other side of the world. Off to their left, a tractor ground slowly through the furrowed earth. The smell of loam was abruptly strong as the wind shifted. To the southwest the brown mass stained the sky, obscuring even the highest of Beijing’s massive buildings.

“Tell me, Colonel, how long have we been working on our joint project?”

“You know as well as I do—”

Ouyang wiggled the first two fingers of his left hand. “Indulge me.”

Ben David sighed. “Six years.”

“A long time, by Western standards. Not so long as we measure time here in the Middle Kingdom.”

Ben David looked disgusted. “Don’t give me that ‘Middle Kingdom’ crap. This is business. It’s always been business. This is not about politics, ideology, or cant. There’s nothing mystical or even mysterious about it. You and I know that money makes the world turn. This is our ride, Ouyang, what brought us together. It’s first and last on our list.” He tossed his head. “This has been our program for six long, painstaking, dangerous years. Now you want to deviate. I don’t like deviations.”

“On all you say we agree,” Minister Ouyang said. “But the world is a dynamic place, always changing. If our program cannot accommodate change, it cannot succeed.”

“But we’ve already succeeded. In two days’ time—”

“An eternity for something to go wrong.” Ouyang pointed to the photo in the file. “This man Bourne has now bent his considerable talents to stopping us.”

Ben David reared back as if struck. “How do you know this?”

“I am in contact with our other partners. You are not.”

“Fuck!” Ben David slapped the file against his thigh. “You’re not asking me to go after him.”

“No need,” Minister Ouyang said. “He’ll quite happily come to you.”

The voices of the angelic choir swelled until the massed chorale filled the Basilica de Guadelupe. 

In the rectory, Bourne stared down at the bloody corpse of
el Enterrador
, and said to Anunciata, “Now we must go.”

Her eyes flashed along with the ruby-red blade of the stiletto she still wielded. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You were part of the plan.”

“We knew nothing of the mechanisms of how we were being smuggled into Maceo Encarnación’s villa,” Bourne said. “My friend was killed because of that tracking device the Undertaker planted.”

They looked at each other as if across a great chasm. They had both experienced loss because of Maceo Encarnación. He became a lodestone that in a peculiar way now drew them together.

She lowered the stiletto and nodded.

Bourne took her out through the small rectory entrance, through a section of the cemetery skirting the basilica itself, to where he had parked his car. They drove off slowly. A mile away, he pulled over to the curb and put the car in park, turning to her.

“If you know where Maceo Encarnación and Harry Rowland have gone, you must tell me.”

Her large coffee-colored eyes stared at him without guile. “Will you kill them?”

“If I have to.”

“You have to,” Anunciata said. “There is no other way, with either of them.”

“You know Rowland?”

She dipped her head. “He is Maceo’s favorite, the protected one. Maceo looks on him as a son. He raised him from a very early age.”

“Who are his parents?”

“That I do not know. I think Rowland is an orphan, though we do not speak. Maceo has forbidden it.”

“Is Harry Rowland his real name?”

“He has many names,” Anunciata said. “This is part of the myth.”

Something icy sliced through Bourne. “The myth?”

“Maceo is obsessed with myths. ‘Myths protect men.’ This is what he always says. ‘Myths make them safe because they separate them from other men, myths make them more than human, myths make other men fearful.’”

“How did he weave the myths around Rowland?”

Anunciata closed her eyes for a moment. “The central myth of the Aztecs is that man was created to feed the gods, otherwise the gods would rain down fire and destroy them and everything they had built. The gods ate a sacred substance in human blood.”

“You’re talking about the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice.”

She nodded. “The Aztec priests carved the beating hearts out of those sacrificed, offering them to the gods.” She stared out the window for a moment at people passing by—a woman with a basket of fruit on her head, a boy on a dented blue bicycle. “That was a long time ago, of course.” She turned back to him. “Nowadays, it’s beheadings.” She shrugged. “The blood is the same, and the gods are appeased.”

“These are the same gods who allowed the Spaniards to defeat their people.”

An enigmatic smile curled at the corners of Anunciata’s lips. “Who can fathom the purposes of the gods? Mexico survived the Spaniards.” Her gaze turned prescient. “The important thing is this: The Aztec struggle to control destiny is the same as our own. The coming of Jesus to Mexico has changed nothing. Blood is still spilled, sacrifices are still performed, destiny and desire are still the only things that matter.”

“How does this fit in with Harry Rowland?”

“He is the advance guard, the outrider.”

“The Djinn Who Lights The Way,” Bourne said.

Anunciata’s eyes opened wide. “You know. Yes, Rowland is the man who performs the sacrifices that increase the myth, that separate him from others, that make men fear him.

“He is Nicodemo.”

The eagle sitting on a nopal cactus devouring a serpent is the modern-day coat of arms of Mexico,” Maceo Encarnación said, sitting opposite Nicodemo in the wide leather seat of his Bombardier Global 5000. They had been in the air for some time. “These two creatures are at the heart of Mexican and Aztec culture. The god of sun and war told his people that they should found their greatest city in the place where they see an eagle on a nopal cactus, where the heart of his brother was buried, devouring a snake. This was where Tenochtitlán was built, and on its back Mexico City rose centuries later.”

Maceo Encarnación watched Nicodemo, who hated lessons of any kind, to see his reactions. He stared at Maceo with his usual stoicism. “I tell you this tale, Nicodemo, because you are an outsider, a Colombian.” He waited, should a reply be forthcoming. When only silence presented itself, he continued. “We learn to devour in order not to be devoured. Is this not the truth of the world?”

“It is,” Nicodemo agreed with some animation. Speaking of death always brought him out of his brooding state. “I only wish I had been the one to kill the Aztec.”

“Tulio Vistosa was the traitor I had been looking for. It was he who stole the thirty million.” Maceo Encarnación chuckled. “The bundles of money were switched at the last minute. Very amusing, but not for him. He stole the counterfeit dollars and left me the real ones.” Maceo Encarnación shook his head. “You have to have lived among these thieving bandits to get into their heads. You have to have been one of them.”

“Like Acevedo Camargo,” Nicodemo said.

Maceo Encarnación felt gratified that he was paying attention. “Constanza Camargo was a first-class singer when I met her. She was an even better actress, but she did not want to go into films.”

“She wanted to spend more time with her husband, Don Acevedo.” Maceo Encarnación shook his head. “In a way. She was young and impressionable when she met Don Acevedo. He was rich and charismatic. He swept her off her feet. Within a month, they were married. At that time, Don Acevedo Camargo was the drug lord of the south. She was drawn to that life as strongly as she was drawn to other men, lovers she met with secretly. She loved the scheming. The plots she devised for him and behind his back!
Dios Mio,
that woman was bloodthirsty.”

“She was ambitious.”

Maceo Encarnación nodded. “Like Lady Macbeth. She enjoyed the role I gave her to play with Bourne and Rebeka.”

Something dark flashed in the recesses of Nicodemo’s eyes at the mention of Rebeka’s name. “It wasn’t supposed to work like that,” he said softly. “Rebeka wasn’t supposed to die. Bourne was.”

“There is no way to account for the human factor. You should not have stabbed her.”

“I had no choice!”

“It seems to me,” Maceo Encarnación said, “there is always a choice.”

“The heat of the moment precludes choice,” Nicodemo said. “It’s pure instinct.”

At that moment, the flight attendant came down the aisle on long, lithe legs and, stopping in front of Maceo Encarnación, bent over. He studied her ample cleavage while she whispered in his ear. He nodded, and she went back up the aisle. Both men watched the ballbearing movement of her shapely buttocks.

Maceo Encarnación sighed as he took out his mobile, punched in a number, and clapped it to his ear. “Someone will be coming for you,” he said into his phone. “He’ll be in Paris within the hour.”

Nicodemo, grateful to get off the subject of Rebeka’s knifing, said, “Don Fernando Hererra is dead. Blown up when his private jet crashed outside Paris. Why are we stopping off there when we should be heading on?”

Maceo Encarnación reversed the phone to show him the news stories. “Martha Christiana will be forwarding the coroner’s report to verify that Hererra was actually on the plane. She always manages to get hold of these reports, the devil knows how. This is a beautiful thing, no? It’s part of her skill set.” He slid the mobile away. “You will go to her the moment we land.”

“What do you want me to do?” Nicodemo said. “Kill her?”

“
Dios
, no!” Maceo Encarnación looked appalled. “Martha Christiana is special to me, do you understand?”

“I didn’t think anyone was special to you, but what does it matter?”

Maceo Encarnación regarded him for a moment, as if he were a lower form of life. It seemed clear that the female Mossad agent had somehow gotten under his skin, an inexplicable feat he had thought near to impossible. He wondered what effect her death would have on him. To kill someone you cared about took an enormous amount of emotional fortitude, he knew from experience. Nicodemo had killed many people, of course, most of them in cold blood, some faceto-face, when you tried to catch that ineffable moment when life was transformed into death, when the soul fled into the shadows, when desire became destiny. He banished this disagreeable thought. “Martha Chrisiana is in Paris. Just bring her to me. And, Nicodemo, treat her like the lady she is.”

“A lady,” Nicodemo echoed. He turned to the window, his gaze far away.

“Nicodemo,” Maceo Encarnación said, “what is on your mind?” When Nicodemo didn’t answer, he said, “My daughter is on the other side of the world, married, and, one hopes, happy.”

“I don’t care about Maricruz.”

You despise her
, Maceo Encarnación thought. “What
do
you care about?” No response. Rebeka again. “I see.”

“I’m thinking about Jason Bourne,” Nicodemo said after the silence had become unendurable.

“What about him?”

“Jason Bourne represents more than just a problem. He could be the end of us.”

“Calm yourself.” This wasn’t about Jason Bourne, and Maceo Encarnación knew it.

Nicodemo, restless in his seat, continued to stare out the Perspex window. Despite the jet’s speed, the clouds seemed to drift past, as if in a dream. “We don’t even know whether Rebeka is dead.”

Now we get to it
, Maceo Encarnación thought. “From what you tell me, it seems unlikely she has survived, even if Bourne somehow managed to get her to a hospital, which he hasn’t. I have people looking; they would know if she had been admitted.”

“Bourne has resources. A private doctor, maybe.”

“From how you described the wound, no doctor could have saved her. She would have needed a full-fledged trauma team, and even then...” He allowed the thought to run its own course. “Forget her. That chapter is closed.”