Текст книги "The Bourne Sanction (Санкция Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Moscow.

Bourne paid for his purchases and changed into them. Baronov took him to the Franck

Muller Cafй inside the mall, where they had coffee and sandwiches.

“Tell me about Pyotr’s last girlfriend,” Bourne said.

“Gala Nematova?” Baronov shrugged. “Not much to tell, really. She’s just another one

of those pretty girls one sees around all the latest Moscow nightclubs. These women are a

ruble a dozen.”

“Where would I find her?”

Baronov shrugged. “She’ll go where the oligarchs cluster. Really, your guess is as

good as mine.” He laughed good-naturedly. “For myself, I’m too old for places like that,

but I’ll be glad to take you on a round-robin tonight.”

“All I need is for you to lend me a car.”

“Suit yourself, miya droog.”

A few moments later, Baronov went to the men’s room, where he’d agreed to make the

switch of car keys with his friend. When he returned he handed Bourne a folded piece of

paper on which was the plan for the Moskva Bank building.

They went out a different direction from the way they’d come in, which led them to a

parking lot on the other side of the mall. They got into a vintage black Volga four-door

sedan that, to Bourne’s relief, started up immediately.

“You see? No problem.” Baronov laughed jovially. “What would you do without me,

gospadin Bourne?”

The Frunzenskaya embankment was located southwest of Moscow’s inner Garden

Ring. Mikhail Tarkanian had said that he could see the pedestrian bridge to Gorky Park

from his living room window. He hadn’t lied. His apartment was in a building not far

from Khlastekov, a restaurant serving excellent Russian food, according to Baronov.

With its two-story, square-columned portico and decorative concrete balconies, the

building itself was a prime example of the Stalinist Empire style that raped and beat into

submission a more pastoral and romantic architectural past.

Bourne instructed Baronov to stay in the Volga until he returned. He went up the stone

steps, under the colonnade, and through the glass door. He was in a small vestibule that

ended in an inner door, which was locked. On the right wall was a brass panel with rows

of bell pushes corresponding to the apartments. Bourne ran his finger down the rows until

he found the push with Tarkanian’s name. Noting the apartment number, he crossed to

the inner door and used a small flexible blade to fool the lock’s tumblers into thinking he had a key. The door clicked open, and he went inside.

There was a small arthritic elevator on the left wall. To the right, a rather grand

staircase swept up to the first floor. The first three treads were in marble, but these gave way to simple concrete steps that released a kind of talcum-like powder as the porous

treads wore away.

Tarkanian’s apartment was on the third floor, down a dark corridor, dank with the

odors of boiled cabbage and stewed meat. The floor was composed of tiny hexagonal

tiles, chipped and worn as the steps leading up.

Bourne found the door without trouble. He put his ear against it, listening for sounds

within the apartment. When he heard none, he picked the lock. Turning the glass knob

slowly, he pushed open the door a crack. Weak light filtered in past half-drawn curtains

framing windows on the right. Behind the smell of disuse was a whiff of a masculine

scent-cologne or hair cream. Tarkanian had made it clear he hadn’t been back here in

years, so who was using his apartment?

Bourne moved silently, cautiously through the rooms. Where he’d expected to find

dust, there was none; where he expected the furniture to be covered in sheets, it wasn’t.

There was food in the refrigerator, though the bread on the counter was growing mold.

Still, within the week, someone had been living here. The knobs to all the doors were

glass, just like the one on the front door, and some looked wobbly on their brass shafts.

There were photos on the wall: high-toned black-and-whites of Gorky Park in different

seasons.

Tarkanian’s bed was unmade. The covers lay pulled back in unruly waves, as if

someone had been startled out of sleep or had made a hasty exit. On the other side of the

bed, the door to the bathroom was half closed.

As Bourne stepped around the end of the bed, he noticed a five-by-seven framed photo

of a young woman, blond, with a veneer of beauty cultivated by models the world over.

He was wondering whether this was Gala Nematova when he caught a blurred movement

out of the corner of his eye.

A man hidden behind the bathroom door made a run at Bourne. He was armed with a

thick-bladed fisherman’s knife, which he jabbed at Bourne point-first. Bourne rolled

away, the man followed. He was blue-eyed, blond, and big. There were tattoos on the

sides of his neck and the palms of his hands. Mementos of a Russian prison.

The best way to neutralize a knife was to close with your opponent. As the man lunged

after him, Bourne turned, grabbed the man by his shirt, slammed his forehead into the

bridge of the man’s nose. Blood spurted, the man grunted, cursed in guttural Russian,

“Blyad!”

He drove a fist into Bourne’s side, tried to free his hand with the knife. Bourne applied

a nerve block at the base of the thumb. The Russian butted Bourne in the sternum, drove

him back off the bed, into the half-open bathroom door. The glass knob drilled into

Bourne’s spine, causing him to arch back. The door swung fully open and he sprawled on

the cold tiles. The Russian, regaining use of his hand, pulled out a Stechkin APS 9mm.

Bourne kicked him in the shin, so he went down on one knee, then struck him on the side

of the face, and the Stechkin went flying across the tiles. The Russian launched a flurry of punches and hand strikes that battered Bourne back against the door before grabbing the

Stechkin. Bourne reached up, felt the cool octagon of the glass doorknob. Grinning, the

Russian aimed the pistol at Bourne’s heart. Wrenching off the knob, Bourne threw it at

the center of the Russian’s forehead, where it struck full-on. His eyes rolled up and he

slumped to the floor.

Bourne gathered up the Stechkin and took a moment to catch his breath. Then he

crawled over to the Russian. Of course, he had no conventional ID on him, but that didn’t

mean Bourne couldn’t find out where he’d come from.

Stripping off the big man’s jacket and shirt, Bourne took a long look at a constellation

of tattoos. On his chest was a tiger, a sign of an enforcer. On his left shoulder was a

dagger dripping blood, a sign that he was a killer. But it was the third symbol, a genie

emerging from a Middle Eastern lamp, that interested Bourne the most. This was a sign

that the Russian had been put in prison for drug-related crimes.

The professor had told Bourne that two of the Russian Mafia families, the Kazanskaya

and the Azeri, were vying for sole control of the drug market. Don’t get in their way,

Specter had warned. If they have any contact with you, I beg you not to engage them.

Instead, turn the other cheek. It’s the only way to survive there.

Bourne was about to get up when he saw something on the inside of the Russian’s left

elbow: a small tattoo of a figure with a man’s body and a jackal’s head. Anubis, Egyptian

god of the underworld. This symbol was supposed to protect the wearer from death, but it

had also latterly been appropriated by the Kazanskaya. What was a member of such a

powerful Russian grupperovka family doing in Tarkanian’s apartment? He’d been sent to

find him and kill him. Why? That was something Bourne needed to find out.

He looked around the bathroom at the sink with its dripping faucet, pots of eye cream

and powder, makeup pencils, the stained mirror. He pulled back the shower curtain,

plucked several blond hairs from the drain. They were long; from a woman’s head. Gala

Nematova’s head?

He made his way to the kitchen, opened drawers, pawed through them until he found a

blue ballpoint pen. Back in the bathroom, he took one of the eyeliner pencils. Crouching

down beside the Russian, he drew a facsimile of the Anubis tattoo on the inside of his left elbow; when he got a line wrong, he rubbed it off. When he was satisfied, he used the

blue ballpoint pen to make the final “tattoo.” He knew it wouldn’t withstand a close

inspection, but for a flash of identification he thought it would suffice. At the sink, he

delicately rinsed off the makeup pencil, then shot some hair spray over the ink outline to

further fix it on his skin.

He checked behind the toilet tank and in it, favorite hiding places for money,

documents, or important materials, but found nothing. He was about to leave when his

eyes fell again on the mirror. Peering more closely, he could see a trace of red here and

there. Lipstick, which had been carefully wiped off, as if someone-possibly the

Kazanskaya Russian-had sought to erase it. Why would he do that?

It seemed to Bourne the smears formed a kind of pattern. Taking up a pot of face

powder, he blew across the top of it. The petroleum-based powder sought its twin, clung

to the ghost image of the petroleum-based lipstick.

When he was done, he put the pot down, took a step backward. He was looking at a

scrawled note:

Off to the Kitaysky Lyotchik. Where R U? Gala.

So Gala Nematova, Pyotr’s last girlfriend, did live here. Had Pyotr used this apartment

while Tarkanian was away?

On his way out, he checked the Russian’s pulse. It was slow but steady. The question

of why the Kazanskaya sent this prison-hardened assassin to an apartment where Gala

Nematova had once lived with Pyotr loomed large in his mind. Was there a connection

between Semion Icoupov and the grupperovka family?

Taking another long look at Gala Nematova’s photo, Bourne slipped out of the

apartment as silently as he’d entered it. Out in the hallway he listened for human sounds,

but apart from the muted wailing of a baby in an apartment on the second floor, all was

still. He descended the stairs and went through the vestibule, where a little girl holding

her mother’s hand was trying to drag her upstairs. Bourne and the mother exchanged the

meaningless smiles of strangers passing each other. Then Bourne was outside, emerging

from under the colonnade. Save for an old woman gingerly picking her way through the

treacherous snow, no one was about. He slipped into the passenger’s seat of the Volga

and shut the door behind him.

That was when he saw the blood leaking from Baronov’s throat. At the same instant a

wire whipped around his neck, digging into his windpipe.

Four times a week after work, Rodney Feir, chief of field support for CI, worked out at

a health club a short walk from his house in Fairfax, Virginia. He spent an hour on the

treadmill, another hour weight training, then took a cold shower and headed for the steam

room.

This evening General Kendall was waiting for him. Kendall dimly saw the glass door

open, cold air briefly sucked in as tendrils of steam escaped into the men’s locker room.

Then Feir’s trim, athletic body appeared through the mist.

“Good to see you, Rodney,” General Kendall said.

Feir nodded silently, sat down beside Kendall.

Rodney Feir was Plan B, the backup the general had put in place in the event the plan

involving Rob Batt blew up. In fact, Feir had been easier to land than Batt. Feir was

someone who’d drifted into security work not for any patriotic reason, not because he

liked the clandestine life. He was simply lazy. Not that he didn’t do his job, not that he

didn’t do it damn well. It was just that government life suited him down to his black

wing-tip shoes. The key fact to remember about him was that whatever Feir did, he did

because it would benefit him. He was, in fact, an opportunist. He, more than any of the

others at CI, could see the writing on the wall, which is why his conversion to the NSA

cause had been so easy and seamless. With the death of the Old Man, the end of days had

arrived. He had none of Batt’s loyalty to contend with.

Still, it didn’t do to take anyone for granted, which is why Kendall met him here

occasionally. They would take a steam, then shower, climb into their civvies, and go to

dinner at one of several grungy barbecue joints Kendall knew in the southeast section of

the district.

These places were no more than shacks. They were mainly the pit out back, where the

pitmaster lovingly smoked his cuts of meat-ribs, brisket, burnt ends, sweet and hot

sausages, sometimes a whole hog-for hours on end. The old, scarred wooden picnic

tables, topped with four or five sauces of varying ingredients and heat, were a kind of

afterthought. Most folk had their meat wrapped up to take out. Not Kendall and Feir.

They sat at a table, eating and drinking beer, while the bones piled up along with the

wadded-up napkins and the slices of white bread so soft, they disintegrated under a few

drops of sauce.

Now and again Feir stopped eating to impart to Kendall some bit of fact or scuttlebutt

currently going around the CI offices. Kendall noted these with his steel-trap military

mind, occasionally asking questions to help Feir clarify or amplify a point, especially

when it came to the movements of Veronica Hart and Soraya Moore.

Afterward, they drove to an old abandoned library for the main event. The

Renaissance-style building had been bought at fire sale prices by Drew Davis, a local

businessman familiar in SE but otherwise unknown within the district, which was

precisely how he liked it. He was one of those people savvy enough to fly under the

Metro police radar. Not so simple a matter in SE, because like almost everyone else who

lived there he was black. Unlike most of those around him, he had friends in high places.

This was mainly due to the place he ran, The Glass Slipper.

To all intents and purposes it was a legit music club, and an extremely successful one

to boot, attracting many big-name R&B acts. But in the back was the real business: a

high-end cathouse that specialized in women of color. To those in the know, any flavor of

color, which in this case meant ethnicity, could be procured at The Glass Slipper. Rates

were steep but nobody seemed to mind, partly because Drew Davis paid his girls well.

Kendall had frequented this cathouse since his senior year in college. He’d come with

a bunch of well-connected buddies one night as a hoot. Didn’t want to but they’d dared

him, and he knew how much he’d be ridiculed if he failed to take them up on it.

Ironically he stayed, over the years having developed a taste for, as he put it, walking on the wild side. At first he told himself that the attraction was purely physical. Then he

realized he liked being there; no one bothered him, no one made fun of him. Later, his

continued interest was a reaction to his role as outsider when it came to working with the

power junkies like Luther LaValle. Christ, even the fallen Ron Batt had been a member

of Skull & Bones at Yale. Well, The Glass Slipper is my Skull & Bones, Kendall thought as he was ushered into the back room. This was as clandestine, as outrй as things got

inside the Beltway. It was Kendall’s own little hideaway, a life that was his alone. Not

even Luther knew about The Glass Slipper. It felt good to have a secret from LaValle.

Kendall and Feir sat in purple velvet chairs-the color of royalty, as Kendall pointed

out-and were treated to a soft parade of women of all sizes and colors. Kendall chose

Imani, one of his favorites, Feir a dusky-skinned Eurasian woman who was part Indian.

They retired to spacious rooms, furnished like bedrooms in European villas, with four-

poster beds, tons of chintz, velvet, swags, drapes. There Kendall watched as, in one

astonishing shimmy, Imani slid out of her chocolate silk spaghetti-strap dress. She wore

nothing underneath. The lamplight burnished her dark skin.

Then she opened her arms and, with a deep-felt groan, General Richard P. Kendall

melted into the sinuous river of her flawless body.

The moment Bourne felt his air supply cut off, he levered himself up off the front

bench seat, arching his back so that he could put first one foot, then the other on the

dashboard. Using his legs, he launched himself diagonally into the backseat, so that he

landed right behind the ill-fated Baronov. The strangler was forced to turn to his right in order to keep the wire around Bourne’s throat. This was an awkward position for him; he

now lacked the leverage he had when Bourne was directly in front of him.

Bourne planted the heel of his shoe in the strangler’s groin and ground down as hard as

he could, but his strength was depleted from the lack of oxygen.

“Die, fucker,” the strangler said in a hard-edged Midwestern accent.

White lights danced in his vision, and a blackness was seeping up all around him. It

was as if he were looking down a tunnel through the wrong end of a telescope. Nothing

looked real; his sense of perspective was skewed. He could see the man, his dark hair, his

cruel face, the unmistakable hundred-mile stare of the American soldier in combat. In the

back of his mind, he knew the NSA had found him.

Bourne’s lapse of concentration allowed the strangler to free himself, jerk the ends of

the wire so that it dug deeper into Bourne’s throat. Bourne’s windpipe was totally cut off.

Blood was running down into his collar as the wire bit through his skin. Strange animal

noises bubbled up from deep inside him. He blinked away tears and sweat, used his last

ounce of strength to jam his thumb into the agent’s eye. Keeping up the pressure despite

blows to his midsection gained him a temporary respite: The wire slackened. He gasped

in a railing breath, and dug deeper with his thumb.

The wire slackened further. He heard the car door open. The strangler’s face wrenched

away from him, and the car door slammed shut. He heard running feet, dying away. By

the time he managed to unwind the wire, to cough and gasp air into his burning lungs, the

street was empty. The NSA agent was gone.

Bourne was alone in the Volga with the corpse of Lev Baronov, dizzy, weak, and sick

at heart.

Eighteen

I CAN’T SIMPLY contact Haydar,” Devra said. “After what happened in Sevastopol

they’ll know you’ll be going after him.”

“That being the case,” Arkadin said, “the document is long gone.”

“Not necessarily.” Devra stirred her Turkish coffee, thick as tar. “They chose this

backwater because it’s so inaccessible. But that works both ways. Chances are Haydar

hasn’t yet been able to pass the document along.”

They were sitting in a tiny dust-blown cafй in Eskisёehir. Even for Turkey this was a

backward place, filled with sheep, the smells of pine, dung, and urine, and not much else.

A chill wind blew across the mountain pass. There was snow on the north side of the

buildings that made up the village, and judging by the lowering clouds more was on its

way.

“Godforsaken is too good a word for this hellhole,” Arkadin said. “For shit’s sake,

there isn’t even a cell phone signal.”

“That’s funny coming from you.” Devra downed her coffee. “You were born in a

shithole, weren’t you.”

Arkadin felt an almost uncontrollable urge to drag her around the back of the rickety

structure and beat her. But he held his hand and his rage, husbanding them both for

another day when he would gaze down at her as if from a hundred miles away, whisper

into her ear, I have no regard for you. To me, your life is without meaning. If you have

any hope of staying alive even a little longer, you’ll never again ask where I was born,

who my parents were, anything of a personal nature whatsoever.

As it turned out, among her other talents Marlene was an accomplished hypnotist. She

told him she wanted to hypnotize him in order to get at the root of his rage.

“I’ve heard there are people who can’t be hypnotized,” Arkadin said. “Is that right?”

“Yes,” Marlene said.

It turned out he was one of them.

“You simply will not take suggestion,” she said. “Your mind has put up a wall it’s

impossible to penetrate.”

They were sitting in the garden behind Semion Icoupov’s villa. Owing to the steep lay

of the land it was the size of a postage stamp. They sat on a stone bench beneath the

shade afforded by a fig tree, whose dark, soon-to-be-luscious fruit was just beginning to

curl the branches downward to the stony earth.

“Well,” Arkadin said, “what are we to do?”

“The question is what are you going to do, Leonid.” She brushed a fragment of leaf off

her thigh. She was wearing American designer jeans, an open-necked shirt, sandals on

her feet. “The process of examining your past is designed to help you regain control over

yourself.”

“You mean my homicidal tendencies,” he said.

“Why would you choose to say it that way, Leonid?”

He looked deeply into her eyes. “Because it’s the truth.”

Marlene’s eyes grew dark. “Then why are you so reluctant to talk to me about the

things I feel will help you?”

“You just want to worm your way inside my head. You think if you know everything

about me you can control me.”

“You’re wrong. This isn’t about control, Leonid.”

Arkadin laughed. “What is it about then?”

“What it’s always been-it’s about helping you control yourself.”

A light wind tugged at her hair, and she smoothed it back into place. He noticed such

things and attached to them psychological meaning. Marlene liked everything just so.

“I was a sad little boy. Then I was an angry little boy. Then I ran away from home.

There, does that satisfy you?”

Marlene tilted her head to catch a bit of sunlight that appeared through the tossed

leaves of the fig tree. “How is it you went from being sad to being angry?”

“I grew up,” Arkadin said.

“You were still a child.”

“Only in a manner of speaking.”

He studied her for a moment. Her hands were crossed on her lap. She lifted one of

them, touched his cheek with her fingertips, traced the line of his jaw until she reached

his chin. She turned his face a bit farther toward her. Then she leaned forward. Her lips,

when they touched his, were soft. They opened like a flower. The touch of her tongue

was like an explosion in his mouth.

Arkadin, damping down the dark eddy of his emotion, smiled winningly. “Doesn’t

matter. I’m never going back.”

“I second that emotion.” Devra nodded, then rose. “Let’s see if we can get proper

lodgings. I don’t know about you but I need a shower. Then we’ll see about contacting

Haydar without anyone knowing.”

As she began to turn away, he caught her by the elbow.

“Just a minute.”

Her expression was quizzical as she waited for him to continue.

“If you’re not my enemy, if you haven’t been lying to me, if you want to stay with me,

then you’ll demonstrate your fidelity.”

“I said, yes, I would do what you asked of me.”

“That might entail killing the people who are surely guarding Haydar.”

She didn’t even blink. “Give me the fucking gun.”

Veronica Hart lived in an apartment complex in Langley, Virginia. Like so many other

complexes in this part of the world, it served as temporary housing for the thousands of

federal government workers, including spooks of all stripes, who were often on

assignment overseas or in other parts of the country.

Hart had lived in this particular apartment for just over two years. Not that it mattered;

since coming to the district seven years ago she’d had nothing but temporary lodgings.

By this point she doubted she’d be comfortable settling down and nesting. At least, those

were her thoughts as she buzzed Soraya Moore into the lobby. A moment later a discreet

knock sounded, and she let the other woman in.

“I’m clean,” Soraya said as she shrugged off her coat. “I made sure of that.”

Hart hung her coat in the foyer closet, led her into the kitchen. “For breakfast I have

cold cereal or”-she opened the refrigerator-“cold Chinese food. Last night’s leftovers.”

“I’m not one for conventional breakfasts,” Soraya said.

“Good. Neither am I.”

Hart grabbed an array of cardboard cartons, told Soraya where to find plates, serving

spoons, and chopsticks. They moved into the living room, set everything on a glass

coffee table between facing sofas.

Hart began opening the cartons. “No pork, right?”

Soraya smiled, pleased that her boss remembered her Muslim strictures. “Thank you.”

Hart returned to the kitchen, put up water for tea. “I have Earl Grey or oolong.”

“Oolong for me, please.”

Hart finished brewing the tea, brought the pot and two small handleless cups back to

the living room. The two women settled themselves on opposite sides of the table, sitting

cross-legged on the abstract patterned rug. Soraya looked around. There were some basic

prints on the wall, the kind you’d expect to find at any midlevel hotel chain. The furniture looked rented, as anonymous as anything else. There were no photos, no sense of Hart’s

background or family. The only unusual feature was an upright piano.

“My only real possession,” Hart said, following Soraya’s gaze. “It’s a Steinway K-52,

better known as a Chippendale hamburg. It’s got a sounding board larger than many

grand pianos, so it lets out with a helluva sound.”

“You play?”

Hart went over, sat down on the stool, began to play Frйdйric Chopin’s Nocturne in B-

Flat Minor. Without missing a beat she segued into Isaac Albйniz’s sensuous

“Malagueсa,” and, finally, into a raucous transposition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

Soraya laughed and applauded as Hart rose, came back to sit opposite her.

“My absolute only talent besides intelligence work.” Hart opened one of the cartons,

spooned out General Tso’s chicken. “Careful,” she said as she handed it over, “I order it

extra hot.”

“That’s okay by me,” Soraya said, digging deep into the carton. “I always wanted to

play the piano.”

“Actually, I wanted to play electric guitar.” Hart licked oyster sauce off her finger as

she passed over another carton. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. According to him, electric

guitar wasn’t a ‘lady’s’ instrument.”

“Strict, was he?” Soraya said sympathetically.

“You bet. He was a full-bird colonel in the air force. He’d been a fighter pilot back in

his salad days. He resented being too old to fly, missed that damn oily-smelling cockpit

something fierce. Who could he complain to in the force? So he took his frustration out

on me and my mother.”

Soraya nodded. “My father is old-school Muslim. Very strict, very rigid. Like many of

his generation he’s bewildered by the modern world, and that makes him angry. I felt

trapped at home. When I left, he said he’d never forgive me.”

“Did he?”

Soraya had a faraway look in her eyes. “I see my mom once a month. We go shopping

together. I speak to my father once in a while. He’s never invited me back home; I’ve

never gone.”

Hart put down her chopsticks. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It is what it is. Do you still see your father?”

“I do, but he doesn’t know who I am. My mother’s gone now, which is a blessing. I

don’t think she could’ve tolerated seeing him like that.”

“It must be hard for you,” Soraya said. “The indomitable fighter pilot reduced like

that.”

“There’s a point in life where you have to let go of your parents.” Hart resumed eating,

though more slowly. “Whoever’s lying in that bed isn’t my father. He died a long time

ago.”

Soraya looked down at her food for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me how you knew

about the NSA safe house.”

“Ah, that.” Hart’s face brightened. Clearly, she was happy to be on a work topic.

“During my time at Black River we were often hired by NSA. This was before they

trained and deployed their own home-grown black-ops details. We were good for them

because they never had to specify to anyone what we’d been hired to do. It was all

‘fieldwork,’ priming the battlefield for our troops. No one on Capitol Hill was going to

look farther than that.”

She dabbed her mouth, sat back. “Anyway, after one particular mission, I caught the

short straw. I was the one from my squad who brought the findings back to the NSA.

Because it was a black-ops mission, the debriefing took place at the safe house in

Virginia. Not in the fine library you were taken to, but in one of the basement-level

cubicles-windowless, featureless, just gritty reinforced concrete. It’s like a war bunker

down there.”

“And what did you see?”

“It wasn’t what I saw.” Hart said. “It was what I heard. The cubicles are soundproof,

except for the doors, I assume so the guards in the corridors know what’s going on. What

I heard was ghastly. The sounds were barely human.”

“Did you tell your bosses at Black River?”

“What was the point? They didn’t care, and even if they did, what were they going to

do? Start a congressional investigation on the basis of sounds I heard? The NSA would

have cut them off at the knees, put them out of business in a heartbeat.” She shook her

head. “No, these boys are businessmen, pure and simple. Their ideology revolves around

milking as much money from the government as possible.”

“So now we have a chance to do what you couldn’t before, what Black River wouldn’t

do.”

“That’s right,” Hart said. “I want to get photos, videos, absolute proof of what NSA is

doing down there so I can present the evidence myself to the president. That’s where you

and Tyrone come in.” She shoved her plate away. “I want Luther LaValle’s head on a

platter, and by God I’m going to get it.”

Nineteen

BECAUSE OF the corpse and all the blood on the seats Bourne was forced to abandon

the Volga. Before he did, though, he took Baronov’s cell phone, as well as his money. It

was freezing. Within the preternatural afternoon winter darkness came the snow, swirling

down in ever-heavier curtains. Bourne knew he had to get out of the area as quickly as

possible. He took the SIM card out of his phone, put it in Baronov’s, then threw his own

cell phone down a storm drain. In his new identity as Fyodor Ilianovich Popov he

couldn’t afford to be in possession of a cell with an American carrier.

He walked, leaning into the wind and snow. After six blocks, huddled in a doorway, he

used Baronov’s cell phone to call his friend Boris Karpov. The voice at the end of the line grew cold.

“Colonel Karpov is no longer with FSB.”

Bourne felt a chill go through him. Russia had not changed so much that lightning-

swift dismissals on trumped-up charges were a thing of the past.