Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (44 page)

“But I know a different Maceo Encarnación, the one who moves in darkness, the one who makes plans like a master chess player, the one who brings disparate elements together, often without their knowledge or consent, the one who is invaluable to me.”

Maricruz, breathing softly and evenly, lowered her head into the crook of his neck. “There is no end to his cleverness, to his ruthlessness, to his ability to use anyone and everyone when it suits his purpose.”

Ouyang smiled. “Your father and I have no illusions about our relationship. We use each other. It’s symbiotic. We accomplish so much more that way.”

“And Colonel Ben David?”

“A means to an end.”

“You will make a lifelong enemy.”

Ouyang smiled as his hand encircled her breast. “This is not an issue. He won’t survive.”

She drew back with a tiny indrawn breath. “Ben David is a colonel in the Mossad. Do you really think you can get an assassin close enough to him?”

“I have already done my part,” Ouyang said, drawing her back to him. “Your father has arranged everything else.”

He smiled. “It will be Jason Bourne who terminates Colonel Ben David with extreme prejudice.”

Sam Anderson was in a foul mood when he got off the phone with Secretary Hendricks. He felt that he had let Peter down. He was angry at himself for not being able to be in two places at once, for not delegating, for not ordering one of his subordinates to keep an eye on Dick Richards.

As he climbed into his car along with an agent named James, he cursed the evil gods that raged over Treadstone. The organization had been ill-fated ever since it had first come into existence. Sometimes, as now, it seemed to him that the current Treadstone staff was paying for the missteps and sins of its founders. There was no other interpretation of both co-directors being down at the same time.

As he raced through the Washington traffic, he nodded to James. “Do it now.”

James dialed a number on his mobile, then put the call on speakerphone. When a female voice, smoothly efficient as a robot’s, answered, he asked for Tom Brick.

“May I ask who is calling?” the female voice asked.

James turned to Anderson, who nodded.

“Herb Davidoff, editor in chief of
Politics As Usual
.”

“Just a moment, please.”

There was a pause during which Anderson slewed the car around a lumbering truck. Half on the sidewalk, he hit the horn, scattering nearby pedestrians.

Take it easy, boss
, James mouthed at him.

“Mr. Davidoff?” The female voice had returned.

“Here.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Brick is currently unavailable.”

“Please tell him that I need a quote from him for a front-page story,” James hurried over her. “Time is of the essence.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, Mr. Davidoff. I’ll switch you to his voicemail. I assure you Mr. Brick accesses it several times a day.”

“Thanks very much,” James said, terminating the connection. He glanced at Anderson. “The house in Virginia?” He meant the house to which Peter had been taken by Tom Brick.

“Deploy our best COVSIC,” Anderson said as he put his foot to the accelerator. He meant a covert forensic team. James nodded and got on it.

Just then a call came in to Anderson’s mobile.

“Handle it yourself,” he barked. He was in no mood for office decisions.

“Sir, it’s Michaelson. I’m three blocks south of Founders Park in Virginia. The police just fished a body out of the Potomac. It’s Dick Richards.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Anderson said, even as he put the car into a controlled skid, making a sharp U-turn, and accelerated away.

Tell me why Colonel Ben David is at the nexus of the troika’s plan,” Don Fernando said.

“It started with SILEX.” Bourne shifted on the larger of the apartment’s two sofas. “The methodology draws on the extraordinary purity of laser light to selectively agitate uranium’s enriched form. The needed isotope is identified, culled, and extracted. If it works, the process is a game-changer. Enriched uranium for nuclear power plants could be manufactured in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost it now takes.

“The problem,” Bourne went on, “is that SILEX would also make weapons-grade uranium easily available. Yellow-cake to nuclear warheads in a matter of days.”

“But it doesn’t work,” Don Fernando said.

Bourne nodded. “GE bought the rights to SILEX in 2006, but it has yet to perfect the process.”

He turned, staring out the window at the slow river traffic. He seemed always to be looking at people going about their peaceful daily lives while the world hurtled toward the precipice of war.

“SILEX was just the beginning. Three years ago, the Israelis set up an underground research facility in northwest Lebanon, just outside a small town known as Dahr El Ahmar. The facility was guarded by a small, select unit of Mossad agents under the command of Colonel Ben David.”

He turned back to Don Fernando. “It was to Dahr El Ahmar that Rebeka guided me after we were both wounded in a firefight in Damascus six weeks ago. It was the closest safe haven, at least for her. She was feverish, very badly wounded. I imagine she wasn’t thinking clearly. Bringing me to Dahr El Ahmar was a breach of security.

“Colonel Ben David tried to have me killed. I managed to escape in the helo we flew in on, but as I left I caught a glimpse of the bunkered facility. Rebeka told me the rest. The Israeli scientists had a breakthrough. Their version of SILEX works.”

There was a deepening silence, into which, after a time, Don Fernando cleared his throat. “So let me get this straight. Colonel Ben David has agreed to sell this process to Maceo Encarnación?”

“To the Chinese,” Bourne said. “My guess is Maceo Encarnación is a peripheral figure in all this—maybe he’s the broker, the one who put Colonel Ben David together with the Chinese.”

“That could very well be.” Don Fernando tapped his teeth ruminatively with his forefinger. “After all, SteelTrap employs a good number of Israeli technicians. It sells its proprietary Internet security to the Israeli government, among many other huge clients.”

He shook his head. “What I don’t understand is why Colonel Ben David would betray his country.”

“Thirty million. Dangle enough money in front of a man like that, a military man, a disgruntled officer who’s probably never made more than fifty thousand dollars a year, and the crystal ball clears.”

“How did you come by that figure? Did you pull it out of the air?”

“So to speak,” Bourne said, waggling his mobile.

Don Fernando made a whistling sound. “Even for Christien and me that’s a trainload of money. I can only imagine that it would be irresistible to Ben David.”

He sat down heavily on the smaller sofa. “The problem is we’re trapped here in my apartment. Nicodemo could take me down with a sniper rifle the minute I walk out my door.”

“He won’t,” Bourne said. “Nicodemo comes from a tradition of hands-on killing. It’s a matter of honor. Killing you at a distance won’t satisfy him. He wants to take your head off.”

“Cold comfort,” Don Fernando grunted.

“Nevertheless, it works to our advantage.” Bourne, staring out the window again, lifted his view across the river to the Right Bank. “I need to bring Nicodemo into my territory.”

In the far distance, he could just make out the sugar-white dome of Sacre Coeur, atop Montmartre. “Tell me, Don Fernando, when was the last time you went to the Moulin Rouge?”

Peter and Soraya looked at each other after Secretary Hendricks left his room.

“Why did you do that?” Peter said.

Soraya smiled and came and sat on the edge of his bed. “You’re welcome.”

“Seriously?” he said.

She nodded. “I don’t want to leave.”

“Because of me.”

She shrugged. “Is that so terrible a reason?”

He studied her a moment, then took a drink of water from a plastic cup. He seemed to be debating something internally. “I have to ask myself...Soraya, you’ve been lying to me.”

“Withholding some information. That’s not the same thing.”

“If we can’t trust each other, what’s the point of either of us staying together?”

“Oh, Peter.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I trust you with my life. It’s just that...” Her eyes cut away for a moment. “I didn’t want anyone to know about my pregnancy. I figured it would jeopardize my position.”

“You thought I’d betray you to Hendricks?”

“No, I...To be honest, Peter, I don’t know what I thought.” She touched the bandaged side of her head. “Obviously, I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

He took her hand in his, and they sat like that, wordless, full of emotion, for some time. Outside, in the corridor, orderlies wheeled gurneys, nurses hurried by, doctors’ names were called. All of that seemed part of another world that had nothing to do with them.

“I want to help you,” Soraya said at length.

“I don’t need help.”

But that was an instinctive, knee-jerk response, and they both knew it. That shared knowledge seemed to break the newly formed ice, to return them to the time when they were closer than siblings, when they shared everything.

Soraya leaned closer and spoke to him in low, intimate tones while he listened intently as she outlined the top-secret mission Hendricks had given her. “Listen, Peter,” she concluded, “Charles is dead, it’s over now, but this liaison with him was strictly Hendricks’s idea. He came to me with it, said it was a matter of national security, and I felt that I...well...that I couldn’t refuse him.”

“He shouldn’t have asked that of you.”

“I’ve been through that with him. He knows he crossed the line.”

“And yet he did it,” Peter said, “and he’ll do it again. You know it and I know it.”

“Probably.”

“What will you tell him the next time?”

She touched her belly. “I have my child to think of now. Things will be different.”

“You think so?”

Her gaze drifted from him to the middle distance. “You’re right. I can’t know.”

He squeezed her hand. “None of us can—ever—no matter the circumstances.”

A small smile wreathed her lips. “True enough.” Leaning over again, she hugged him. “I’m so sorry, Peter.”

“Don’t be. Everything happens for a reason.”

She drew back, watching him. “Do you really believe that?”

He laughed without much humor. “No, but saying it helps keep my spirits up.”

She looked at him steadily. “It’s going to be a long haul, no matter what happens with your legs.”

“I know that.”

“I’ll be here.”

“I know that, too.” He sighed. “They’ll order a psych eval to determine whether I’m fit for duty.”

“So what? They’ve already ordered one for me. We’re fit for duty, Peter. End of story.”

Once more, they sat in companionable silence. Once, a tear overran Peter’s eye and slid down his cheek. “Damn it to hell,” he said, and Soraya squeezed his hand again.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Tell me something positive.”

“Let’s start with Jason Bourne,” she said, “and how he needs our help.”

LA GOULUE HAD BEEN the first of the Moulin Rouge’s famed Cancan Queens.

Each night she entered the famed theater via the well-hidden and almost unknown
entrée des artistes
, a tiny staircase that led to heaven from the grubby back alleys of Montmartre. The well-worn staircase, trod upon by generations of the Moulin’s dancers and cabaret artists for over a century, had in years past been supplanted by a newer backstage entrance. Don Fernando, however, knew not only of its existence, but the fact that it was still a useful way to gain access to the halcyon environs of the Moulin Rouge, when all other methods failed, or when one of the Doriss Girls of his acquaintance wanted to sneak him in for some backstage shenanigans between shows.

He called his current Doriss Girl, Cerise, who, he assured Bourne, was absolutely reliable.

Just after 8 pm, they exited Don Fernando’s building on the Quai de Bourbon. A driver and car from Don Fernando’s favored service were waiting.

“Tell the driver you’ve changed your mind,” Bourne said.

When Don Fernando dismissed the car and driver, he and Bourne crossed the nearby bridge to the Right Bank without incident.

“I don’t see him,” Don Fernando said.

“You won’t,” Bourne assured him. “But there was a better than even chance he had suborned someone inside the car company you frequent.”

The thing to avoid was crowds, so they headed for the taxi
tête de station
near the Hôtel de Ville and climbed into the waiting cab. Don Fernando gave the driver the address of the Moulin Rouge, and the Mercedes nosed out into traffic.

“You seem very sure of yourself, Jason,” Don Fernando said as he settled back into the seat.

“It never pays to be sure of anything,” Bourne replied, “apart from putting one foot in front of the other in the dark.”

Don Fernando nodded as he stared at the back of the driver’s head. “I never asked you about the female Mossad agent.”

“Rebeka,” Bourne said. “She and I were both after the same man, Semid Abdul-Qahhar, the head of the Mosque in Munich and one of the seminal players in the Muslim Brotherhood. We joined forces, we helped each other. She was a good person—someone trying to do the right thing, even though it might very well have cost her her position at Mossad.”

Don Fernando nodded absently. “There’s always a price to pay for doing the right thing,” he mused, “the only question is, how heavy is the price?” He rubbed his knuckles against the side of his face. “There’s also a price for not being able to do the right thing.” He sighed. “That’s the nature of life, I suppose.”

“Our life, especially.”

Their discussion was interrupted when they were rear-ended by the car behind them. It was at a slow speed and didn’t amount to much; nevertheless, their driver threw the Mercedes into park and got out and started an altercation with the driver of the other car. “Get out!” Bourne said suddenly. He pushed against Don Fernando. “Get out now!”

Bourne pulled on the door handle, but the central lock had been engaged from the driver’s console. The driver who had hit them handed the taxi driver a small packet.