The Bourne Sanction (8 page)

“Jason?”

The door to Moira’s bedroom was open. Despite the dimness, his keen eyes could make out her form moving slowly toward him on bare feet.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said in a throaty voice. She stopped several paces from where he lay. She was wearing a silk paisley bathrobe, belted at the waist. The lush curves of her body were unmistakable.

For a moment, they remained in silence.

“I lied to you before,” she said quietly. “I don’t want you to sleep out here.”

Bourne rose on one elbow. “I lied, too. I was thinking about what I once had and how I’ve been desperate to hang on to it. But it’s gone, Moira. All gone forever.” He drew up one leg. “I don’t want to lose you.”

She moved minutely, and a bar of light picked out the glitter of tears in her eyes. “You won’t, Jason. I promise.”

Another silence engulfed them, this one so profound they seemed to be the only two people left in the world.

At last, he held out his hand, and she came toward him. He rose from the sofa, took her in his arms. She smelled of lime and geranium. He ran his hands through her thick hair, grabbed it. Her face tilted up to him and their lips came together, and his heart shivered off another coating of ice. After a long time, he felt her hands at her waist and he stepped back.

She undid the belt and the robe parted, slid off her shoulders. Her naked flesh shone a dusky gold. She had wide hips and a deep navel; there seemed nothing about her body he didn’t love. Now it was she who took his hand, leading him to her bed, where they fell upon each other like half-starved animals.

Bourne dreamed he was standing at the window of Moira’s bedroom, peering through the wooden blinds. The streetlight fell across the sidewalk and street, casting long, oblique shadows. As he watched, one of the shadows rose up from the cobbles, walked directly toward him as if it were alive and could somehow see him through the wide wooden slats.

Bourne opened his eyes, the demarcation between sleep and consciousness instantaneous and complete. His mind was filled with the dream; he could feel his heart working in his chest harder than it should have been at this moment. Moira’s arm was draped over his hip. He moved it to her side, rolled silently out of bed. Naked, he padded into the living room. Ashes lay in a cold, gray heap in the hearth. The ship’s clock ticked toward the fourth hour of the night. He went straight toward the bars of streetlight, peered out just as he had in his dream. As in his dream the light cast oblique shadows across the sidewalk and street. No traffic passed. All was quiet and still. It took a minute or two, but he found the movement, minute, fleeting, as if someone standing had begun to shift from one foot to the other, then changed his mind. He waited to see if the movement would continue. Instead a small puff of exhaled breath flared into the light, then almost immediately vanished.

He dressed quickly. Bypassing both the front and rear doors, he slipped out of the house via a side window. It was very cold. He held his breath so it wouldn’t steam up and betray his presence, as it had the watcher.

He stopped just before he reached the corner of the building, peered cautiously around the brick wall. He could see the curve of a shoulder, but it was at the wrong height, so low Bourne might have taken the watcher for a child. In any event, he hadn’t moved. Melting back into the shadows, he went down 30th Street, NW, turned left onto Dent Place, which paralleled Cambridge Place. When he reached the end of the block, he turned left onto Cambridge, on Moira’s block. Now he could see just where the watcher was situated, crouched between two parked cars almost directly across the street from Moira’s house.

A gust of humid wind caused the watcher to huddle down, sink his head between his shoulders, like a turtle. Bourne seized the moment to cross the street to the watcher’s side. Without pausing, he advanced down the block swiftly and silently. The watcher became aware of him far too late. He was still turning his head when Bourne grabbed him by the back of his jacket, slammed him back across the hood of the parked car. This threw him into the light. Bourne saw his black face, recognized the features all in a split second. At once he hauled the young man up, hustled him back into the shadows, where he was certain they wouldn’t be seen by other prying eyes.

“Jesus Christ, Tyrone,” he said, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“Can’t say.” Tyrone was sullen, possibly from having been discovered.

“What d’you mean, you can’t say?”

“I signed a confidentiality agreement is why.”

Bourne frowned. “Deron wouldn’t make you sign something like that.” Deron was the art forger Bourne used for all his documents and, sometimes, unique new technologies or weapons Deron was experimenting with.

“Doan work fo Deron no more.”

“Who made you sign the agreement, Tyrone?” Bourne grabbed him by his jacket front.

“Who are you working for? I don’t have time to play games with you. Answer me!”

“Can’t.” Tyrone could be damn stubborn when he wanted to be, a by-product of growing up on the streets of the northeast Washington slums. “But, okay, I guess I can take yo where yo can see fo yoself.”

He led Bourne around to the unnamed alley behind Moira’s house, stopped at an anonymous-looking black Chevy. Leaving Bourne, he used his knuckle to knock on the driver’s window. The window lowered. As he bent down to speak to whoever was inside, Bourne came up, pulled him aside so he could look in. What he saw astonished even him. The person sitting behind the wheel was Soraya Moore.

WE’VE
BEEN
SURVEILLING
her for close to ten days now,” Soraya said.

“CI?” Bourne said. “Why?”

They were sitting in the Chevy. Soraya had turned on the engine to get some heat up. She’d sent Tyrone home, even though it was clear he wanted to be her protector. According to Soraya, he was now working for her in a strictly off-the-record capacity-a kind of personal black-ops unit of one.

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“No, Tyrone can’t tell me. You can.”

Bourne had worked with Soraya when he’d put together his mission to rescue Martin Lindros, the founder and director of Typhon. She was one of the few people with whom he’d worked in the field, both times in Odessa.

“I suppose I could,” Soraya admitted, “but I won’t, because it appears that you and Moira Trevor are intimate.”

She sat staring out the window at the blank sheen of the street. Her large, deep blue eyes and her aggressive nose were the centerpieces of a bold Arabian face the color of cinnamon.

When she turned back, Bourne could see that she wasn’t happy at being forced to reveal CI intel.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” Soraya said. “Her name is Veronica Hart.”

“You ever hear of her?”

“No, and neither have any of the others.” She shrugged. “I’m quite sure that was the point. She comes from the private sector: Black River. The president decided on a new broom to sweep out the hash we’d all made of the events leading up to the Old Man’s murder.”

“What’s she like?”

“Too soon to tell, but one thing I’m willing to bet on: She’s going to be a whole helluva lot better than the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Secretary of Defense Halliday has been trying to expand his domain for years now. He’s moving through Luther LaValle, the Pentagon’s intel czar. Rumor has it that LaValle tried to pry away the
DCI
job from Veronica Hart.”

“And she won.” Bourne nodded. “That says something about her.”

Soraya produced a packet of Lambert & Butler cigarettes, knocked one out, lit up.

“When did that begin?” Bourne said.

Soraya rolled down her window partway, blew the smoke into the waning night. “The day I was promoted to director of Typhon.”

“Congratulations.” He sat back, impressed. “But now we have even more of a mystery. Why is the director of Typhon on a surveillance team at four in the morning? I would’ve thought that would be a job for someone farther down the CI food chain.”

“It would be, in other circumstances.” Soraya inhaled, blew smoke out the window again. What was left of the cigarette followed. Then she turned her body toward Bourne.

“My new boss told me to handle this myself. That’s what I’m doing.”

“What does all this clandestine work have to do with Moira? She’s a civilian.”

“Maybe she is,” Soraya said, “and maybe she isn’t.” Her large eyes studied Bourne’s for a reaction. “I’ve been digging through the masses of interoffice e-mails and cell phone records going back over the last two years. I came upon some irregularities and handed them over to the new
DCI
.” She paused for a moment, as if unsure whether to continue. “The thing is, the irregularities concern Martin’s private communications with Moira.”

“You mean he told her CI classified secrets?”

“Frankly, we’re not sure. The communications weren’t intact; they had to be pieced together and enhanced electronically. Some words were garbled, others were out of order. It was clear, however, that they were collaborating on something that bypassed the normal CI channels.” She sighed. “It’s possible he was merely helping her with security issues for NextGen Energy Solutions. But especially after the multiple security breaches CI recently suffered, Hart has make it clear that we can’t afford to overlook the possibility that she’s working clandestinely for some other entity Martin knew nothing about.”

“You mean she was milking him for intel. I find that hard to believe.”

“Right. Now you know why I didn’t want to tell you about it.”

“I’d like to see these communications for myself.”

“For that you’ll have to see the
DCI
, which, quite honestly, I wouldn’t recommend. There are still high-level operatives in CI who blame you for the Old Man’s death.”

“That’s absurd,” Bourne said. “I had nothing to do with his death.”

Soraya ran a hand through her thick hair. “It was you who brought Karim al-Jamil back to CI thinking he was Martin Lindros.”

“He looked exactly like Martin, spoke exactly like him.”

“You vouched for him.”

“So did a phalanx of CI shrinks.”

“You’re an easy target around CI. Rob Batt, who’s just been promoted to deputy director, is the ringleader of a group who are convinced you’re a schizophrenic, unreliable rogue agent. I’m just saying.”

Bourne closed his eyes for a moment. He’d heard these allegations leveled against him time and again. “You’ve left off another reason why I’m an easy target. I’m a legacy left over from the Alex Conklin era. He had the Old Man’s confidence but hardly anyone else’s, mainly because no one knew what he was doing, especially with the program that created me.”

“All the more reason for you to stay in the shadows.”

Bourne glanced out the window. “I’ve got an early breakfast meeting.”

As he was about to get out of the car, Soraya put a hand on his arm. “Stay out of this, Jason. That’s my advice.”

“And I appreciate the concern.” He leaned toward her, kissed her lightly on the cheek. Then he was crossing the street. A moment later he’d vanished into shadow. As soon as he was out of her sight, Bourne flipped open the cell phone he’d lifted from her when he’d leaned in to kiss her. Quickly he scrolled through to Veronica Hart’s number, connected with it. He wondered if he’d be pulling her out of sleep, but when she answered she sounded wide awake.

“How’s the surveillance going?” She had a rich, mellow voice.

“That’s what I want to talk with you about.”

There was the briefest of silences before she answered. “Who is this?”

“Jason Bourne.”

“Where is Soraya Moore?”

“Soraya is fine, Director. I simply needed a way to contact you once I’d broken the surveillance, and I was quite certain Soraya wouldn’t give it to me willingly.”

“So you stole her phone.”

“I want to meet with you,” Bourne said. He didn’t have much time. At any moment, Soraya might reach for her phone, would know he’d hijacked it and come after him. “I want to see the evidence that led you to order the surveillance on Moira Trevor.”

“I don’t take kindly to being told what to do, especially by a rogue agent.”

“But you will meet with me, Director, because I’m the only one with access to Moira. I’m your fast track to finding out if she’s really rotten or whether you’re on a wild goose chase.”

I think I’ll stick to the proven way.” Veronica Hart, sitting in her new office with Rob Batt, mouthed the words Jason Bourne to her
DDCI
.

“But you can’t,” Bourne said in her ear. “Now that I’ve broken the surveillance I can ensure that Moira vanishes off your grid.”

Hart stood up. “I also don’t respond well to threats.”

“I have no need to threaten you, Director. I’m simply telling you the facts.”

Batt studied her expression as well as her responses, trying to get a reading of the conversation. They had been working nonstop since she’d returned from her meeting with the president. He was exhausted, on the point of leaving, but this call interested him intensely.

“Look,” Bourne said, “Martin was my friend. He was a hero. I don’t want his reputation tarnished.”

“All right,” Hart said, “come to my office later this morning, say around eleven.”

“I’m not setting foot inside CI headquarters,” Bourne said. “We’ll meet this evening at five at the entrance to the Freer Gallery.”

“What if I-?”

But Bourne had already severed the connection.

Moira was up, clad in her paisley robe, when Bourne returned. She was in the kitchen, making fresh coffee. She glanced at him without comment. She had more sense than to ask about his comings and goings.

Bourne took off his coat. “Just checking the area for tails.”

She paused. “And did you find any?”

“Quiet as the grave.” He didn’t believe that Moira had been pumping Martin for CI intel, but the inordinate sense of security-of secretiveness-instilled in him by Conklin warned him not to tell her the truth.

She relaxed visibly. “That’s a relief.” Setting the pot on the flame, she said, “Do we have time for a cup together?”