The Bourne Sanction (39 page)

That was the problem, really. His sense of disorientation was so complete, there were periods when he couldn’t distinguish up from down. Worse, those periods were becoming both longer and more frequent.

The pain was hardly an issue because he was used to pain, though never this intense or prolonged. It was the disorientation that was worming its way into his brain like a surgeon’s drill. It seemed that with each bout he was losing more of himself, as if he were made up of grains of salt or sand trickling away from him. And what would happen when they were all gone? What would he become?

He thought of DJ Tank and the rest of his former crew. He thought of Deron, of Kiki, but none of those tricks worked. They’d slip away like mist and he’d be left to the void into which, he was increasingly sure, he’d disappear. Then he thought of Soraya, conjured her piece by piece, as if he were a sculptor, molding her out of a lump of clay. And he found that as his mind lovingly re-created each minute bit of her, he miraculously stayed intact.

As he struggled back to a position that was tolerably painful, he heard a metallic scrape, and his head came up. Before anything else could transpire, the scents of freshly cooked eggs and bacon came to him, making his mouth water. He’d been fed nothing but plain oatmeal since he was brought here. And at inconsistent times-sometimes one meal right after the other-in order to keep his disorientation absolute. He heard the scuff of leather soles-two men, his ears told him. Then General Kendall’s voice, saying imperiously, “Set the food on the table, Willard. Right there, thank you. That will be all.”

One set of shoe soles clacked across the floor, the sound of the door closing. Silence. Then the screech of a chair being hitched across the concrete. Kendall was sitting down, Tyrone surmised.

“What have we here?” Kendall said, clearly to himself. “Ah, my favorite: eggs over easy, bacon, buttered grits, hot biscuits and gravy.” The sound of cutlery being taken up.

“You like grits, Tyrone? You like biscuits and gravy?”

Tyrone wasn’t too far gone to be incensed. “On’y ting I like betta is watermelon, sah.”

“That’s a damn fine imitation of one of your brethren, Tyrone.” He was obviously talking while eating. “This is damn fine chow. Would you like some?”

Tyrone’s stomach growled so loudly he was sure Kendall heard it.

“All you gotta do is tell me everything you and the Moore woman were up to.”

“I don’t rat anyone out,” Tyrone said bitterly.

“Um.” The sounds of Kendall swallowing. “That’s what they all say in the beginning.”

He chewed some more. “You do know this is just the beginning, don’t you, Tyrone? Sure you do. Just like you know the Moore woman isn’t going to save you. She’s going to hang you out to dry, sure as I’m sitting here eating the most mouthwatering biscuits I ever had. You know why? Because LaValle gave her a choice: you or Jason Bourne. You know her history with Bourne. She might claim she didn’t fuck him but you and I know better.”

“She never slept with him,” Tyrone said before he could stop himself.

“Sure. She told you that.” Munch, munch, munch went Kendall’s jaws, shredding the crisp bacon. “What’d you expect her to say?”

The sonovabitch was playing mind games with him, Tyrone knew that for a fact. Trouble was, he wasn’t lying. Tyrone knew how Soraya felt about Bourne-it was written all over her face every time she saw him or his name came up. Though she’d said otherwise, the question Kendall had just raised had gnawed at him like an addict at a candy bar.

It was difficult not to envy Bourne with his freedom, his encyclopedic knowledge, his friendship as equals with Deron. But all these things Tyrone dealt with in his own way. It was Soraya’s love for Bourne that was so hard to live with.

He heard the scrape of chair legs and then felt the presence of Kendall as he squatted down beside him. It was astonishing, Tyrone thought, how much heat another human being gave off.

“I have to say, Tyrone, you really have taken a beating,” Kendall said. “I think you deserve a reward for how well you’ve held up. Shit, we’ve had suspects in here who were crying for their mamas after twenty-four hours. Not you, though.” The quick click-clack of a metal utensil against a china plate. “How about some eggs and bacon? Man, this was some big plate of food, I surely can’t finish it myself. So come on. Join me.”

As the hood was raised high enough to expose his mouth Tyrone was conflicted. His mind told him to refuse the offer, but his severely shrunken stomach yearned for real food. He could smell the rich flavors of bacon and eggs, felt the food warm as a kiss against his lips.

“Hey, man, what’re you waiting for?”

Fuck it, Tyrone said to himself. The tastes of the food exploded inside his mouth. He wanted to moan in pleasure. He wolfed down the first few forkfuls fed to him, then forced himself to chew slowly and methodically, extracting every bit of flavor from the hickory-smoked meat and the rich yolk.

“Tastes good,” Kendall said. He must have regained his feet because his voice was above Tyrone when he said, “Tastes real good, doesn’t it?”

Tyrone was about to nod his assent when pain exploded in the pit of his stomach. He grunted when it came again. He’d been kicked before, so he knew what Kendall was doing. The third kick landed. He tried to hold on to his food, but the involuntary reaction had begun. A moment later he vomited up all the delicious food Kendall had fed him. The Munich courier is the last one in the network,” Devra said. “His name is Egon Kirsch, but that’s all I know. I never met him; no one I know did. Pyotr made sure that link was completely compartmentalized. So far as I know Kirsch dealt directly with Pyotr and no one else.”

“Who does Kirsch deliver his intel to?” Arkadin said. “Who’s at the other end of the network?”

“I have no idea.”

He believed her. “Did Heinrich and Kirsch have a particular meeting place?”

She shook her head.

On the Lufthansa flight from Istanbul to Munich he sat shoulder-to-shoulder with her and wondered what the hell he was doing. She’d given him all the information he was going to get from her. He had the plans; he was on the last lap of his mission. All that remained was to deliver the plans to Icoupov, find Kirsch, and persuade him to lead Arkadin back to the end of the network. Child’s play.

Which begged the question of what to do with Devra. He’d already made up his mind to kill her, as he’d killed Marlene and so many others. It was a fait accompli, a fixed point detailed in his mind, a diamond that only needed polishing to sparkle into life. Sitting in the jetliner he heard the quick report from the gun, leaves falling over her dead body, covering her like a blanket.

Devra, who was seated on the aisle, got up, made her way back to the lavatories. Arkadin closed his eyes and was back in the sooty stench of Nizhny Tagil, men with filed teeth and blurry tattoos, women old before their time, bent, swigging homemade vodka from plastic soda bottles, girls with sunken eyes, bereft of a future. And then the mass grave…

His eyes popped open. He was having difficulty breathing. Heaving himself to his feet, he followed Devra. She was the last of the passengers waiting. The accordion door on the right opened, an older women bustled out, squeezed by Devra then Arkadin. Devra went into the lavatory, closed the door, and locked it. The
OCCUPIED
sign came on. Arkadin walked to the door, stood in front of it for a moment. Then he knocked on it gently.

“Just a minute,” her voice came to him.

Leaning his head against the door, he said, “Devra, it’s me.” And after a short silence,

“Open the door.”

A moment later, the door folded back. She stood in front of him.

“I want to come in,” he said.

Their eyes locked for the space of several heartbeats as each tried to gauge the intent of the other.

Then she backed up against the tiny sink, Arkadin stepped inside, with some difficulty shut the door behind him, and turned the lock.

IT’S
STATE-OF-THE-ART
,” Gunter Mьller said. “Guaranteed.”

Both he and Moira were wearing hard hats as they walked through the series of semiautomated workshops of Kaller Steelworks Gesellschaft, where the coupling link that would receive the
LNG
tankers as they nosed into the NextGen Long Beach terminal had been manufactured.

Mьller, the team leader on the NextGen coupling link project, was a senior vice president of Kaller, a smallish man dressed impeccably in a conservatively cut threepiece chalk-striped suit, expensive shoes, and a tie in black and gold, Munich’s colors since the time of the Holy Roman Empire. His skin was bright pink, as if he’d just had his face steam-cleaned, and thick brown hair, graying at the sides. He talked slowly and distinctly in good English, though he was rather endearingly weak with modern American idioms.

At each step he explained the manufacturing process with excruciating detail, great pride. Spread out before them were the design drawings, along with the specs, to which Mьller referred time and again.

Moira was listening with only one ear. How her situation had changed now that the Firm was out of the picture, now that NextGen was on its own with the security of its terminal operations in Long Beach, now that she had been reassigned. But the more things change, she thought, the more they stay the same. The moment Noah had handed her the packet for Damascus she knew she wouldn’t disengage herself from the Long Beach terminal project. No matter what Noah or his bosses had determined she couldn’t leave NextGen or this project in jeopardy. Mьller, like everyone else at Kaller and, for that matter, nearly everyone at NextGen, had no idea she worked for the Firm. Only she knew she should be on a flight to Damascus, not here with him. She had a grace period of mere hours before her contact at NextGen would begin to ask questions as to why she was still on the
LNG
terminal project. By then, she hoped to convince NextGen’s president of the wisdom of her disobeying the Firm’s orders. Finally, they reached the loading bay where the sixteen parts of the coupling link were being packed for shipment by air to Long Beach on the NextGen 747 jet that had brought her and Bourne to Munich.

“As specified in the contract, our team of engineers will be accompanying you on the homeward journey.” Mьller rolled up the drawings, snapped a rubber band around them, and handed them to Moira. “They’ll be in charge of putting the coupling link together on site. I have every confidence that all will go smoothly.”

“It had better,” Moira said. “The
LNG
tanker is scheduled to dock at the terminal in thirty hours.” She shot Mьller an unpleasant look. “Not much leeway for your engineers.”

“Not to worry, Fraulein Trevor,” he said cheerfully. “They’re more than up to the task.”

“For your company’s sake, I sincerely hope so.” She stowed the roll under her left arm, preparatory to leaving. “Shall we speak frankly, Herr Mьller?”

He smiled. “Always.”

“I wouldn’t have had to come here at all had it not been for the string of delays that set your manufacturing process back.”

Mьller’s smile seemed immovable. “My dear Fraulein, as I explained to your superiors, the delays were unavoidable-please blame the Chinese for the temporary shortage of steel, and the South Africans for the energy shortages that is forcing the platinum mines to work at half speed.” He spread his hands. “We’ve done the best we could, I assure you.” His smile widened. “And now we are at the end of our journey together. The coupling link will be in Long Beach within eighteen hours, and eight hours later it will be in one piece and ready to receive your tanker of liquid natural gas.” He stuck out his hand. “All will have a happy ending, yes?”

“Of course it will. Thank you, Herr Mьller.”

Mьller nearly clicked his heels. “The pleasure is all mine, Fraulein.”

Moira walked back through the factory with Mьller at her side. She said good-bye to him once more at the gates to the factory, walked across the gravel drive to where her chauffeured car sat waiting for her, its precisely engineered German engine purring quietly.

They pulled out of the Kaller Steelworks property, turned left toward the autobahn back to Munich. Five minutes later, her driver said, “There’s a car following us, Fraulein.”

Turning around, Moira peered out the back window. A small Volks-wagen, no more than fifty yards behind them, flashed its headlights.

“Pull over.” She pushed aside the hem of her long skirt, took a
SIG
Sauer out of the holster strapped to her left ankle.

The driver did as he was told, and the car came to a stop on the shoulder of the road. The Volkswagen pulled in behind. Moira sat waiting for something to happen; she was too well trained to get out of the car.

At length, the Volkswagen drove off the shoulder, into the underbrush, where it disappeared from sight. A moment later a man became visible tramping out onto the side of the road. He was tall and narrow, with a pencil mustache and suspenders holding up his trousers. He was in his shirtsleeves, oblivious to the German winter chill. She could see that he had no weapons on him, which, she reasoned, was the point. When he came abreast of her car, she leaned across the backseat, opened the door for him, and he slipped inside.

“My name is Hauser, Fraulein Trevor. Arthur Hauser.” His expression was morose, bitter. “I apologize for the incivility of this impromptu meeting, but I assure you the melodrama is necessary.” As if to underscore his words, he glanced back down the road toward the factory, his expression fearful. “I do not have much time so I shall come straight to the point. There is a flaw in the coupling link-not, I hasten to add, in the hardware. That, I assure you, is absolutely sound. But there is a problem with the software. Nothing that will interfere with the operation of the link, no, not at all. It is, rather, a security flaw-a window, if you will. The chances are it might never be discovered, but all the same it’s there.”

When Hauser glanced again out the back window a car was coming toward them. He clamped his jaws shut, watched as the vehicle passed by, then visibly relaxed as it drove on down the road.