The Bourne Imperative

by Eric Van Lustbader

  What was she doing here? Bourne moved slightly, his gaze following Maria-Elena’s daughter as she moved anxiously around the rectory. He’d heard de la Rivera, the mortician, use the dead cook’s name. A moment later, she stopped in front of a robed and hooded man. His spade beard announced him as el Enterrador.

  “Give me absolution for my sins,” she said softly. “I harbor murderous thoughts.”

  “Have you acted on these thoughts?” he replied in his raspy whisper.

  “No, but—”

  “Then all will be well, Anunciata.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t know what I know,” she said bitterly.

  “By all means tell me,” el Enterrador said with quiet menace.

  She quailed for a moment, then expelled a deep breath.

  “I trusted Maceo. I thought he loved me,” she said, her voice abruptly changed, deeper in register and somehow darker.

  “You can trust him. He does love you.”

  “My mother’s legacy.” She unfolded a sheet of paper, shoved it at him. “Maceo slept with my mother before he slept with me. He’s my father.”

  El Enterrador touched the crown of her head. “My child,” he said, just as if he were a real priest, continuing in that ecclesiastical vein: “Fallen from the Garden of Eden, we all come from a dark place. This is our heritage, our collective legacy. We are all sinners, navigating a sinful world. However wrongful their liaison, your parents gave you life.”

  “And if the worst happens, if he makes me pregnant?”

  “Of course we must see to it that never happens.”

  “I could cut off his cojones,” Anunciata said with no little vitriol. “That would make me happy.”

  El Enterrador said, “I knew your mother ever since she came to Mexico City. I gave her confession. I have hope that I helped her through difficult times because she needed help and did not know where else to turn. Now it’s you who comes to me for help and advice. Go to your father. Talk to him.”

  “What we have done!” Anunciata shuddered. “It’s a hideous sin. You of all people should know that.”

  “Where is Maceo now?”

  “You mean you don’t know? He’s gone. He left with Rowland for the airport.”

  “Where are they going?” Bourne said as he stepped into the rectory.

  Both Anunciata and el Enterrador turned to stare at him. The priest was clearly more surprised to see him. The young woman registered only curiosity.

  “Who are you, señor?” Anunciata said.

  “Rebeka and I were at the villa early this morning.”

  “Then you—?”

  But Bourne was already turning away from her. “I should still be at the airport. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “How would I—?”

  “The crystal-encrusted skull you gave me. I found the transmitter inside it.”

  El Enterrador withdrew a long-bladed stiletto from beneath his robes, but Bourne shook his head, leveling the handgun he had taken from Maceo Encarnación’s guard. “Put it down, Undertaker.”

  Anunciata’s eyes opened wide. She seemed even more beautiful now than she had earlier. “He is a priest. Why do you call him el Enterrador?”

  “That’s his nickname.” Bourne gestured with his head. “Show her the tattoos on your forearms, priest.”

  “Tattoos?” Anunciata echoed. She stared at her companion, clearly stunned.

  He said nothing, didn’t even look at her.

  She reached out, pushed up the sleeves of his robe, and gasped at the intricate handiwork displayed.

  “What is this?” It seemed unclear who she was addressing.

  “Tell her, Undertaker,” Bourne said. “I’d like to hear it, as well.”

  El Enterrador glared at him. “You were not supposed to come back here.”

  “You weren’t supposed to track me, either.” Bourne nodded. “Now let’s get to the truth.”

  “About what?” el Enterrador whispered. “Maceo Encarnación asked for my help. I gave it to him.”

  “Rebeka—the woman—my friend—is dead. Put the knife on the desk.”

  After a hesitation, el Enterrador complied.

  “The truth,” Bourne said. “That’s what I’m here for. How about you, Anunciata?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Ask the Undertaker. He’s the one who is in real need of forgiveness.”

  She shook her head again.

  Bourne said, “Rebeka and I got into Maceo Encarnación’s villa via a mortician’s hearse. In order for that to happen, someone inside the villa had to die.”

  “My mother.”

  Bourne nodded. “Your mother. But how would anyone know beforehand that she was going to die?” He stared directly at the priest. “People had to know your mother was going to die. Which means she was murdered.”

  Tears were standing out in Anunciata’s eyes. “The doctor said she died of a heart attack. There wasn’t a mark on her. I know. I dressed her for the…the mortician.”

  “Poison doesn’t leave an external mark,” Bourne said. “And if you’re clever you can find a poison that won’t leave an internal trace, either.” He nodded. “I think that might have been your part in the murder, Undertaker.” He turned to Anunciata. “Hence his nickname.”

  She whirled on el Enterrador. “Is that true?”

  “Of course not,” he scoffed. “The very idea that I would harm your mother is absurd.”

  “Not if Encarnación asked it of you.”

  “Did you do it?” Anunciata’s cheeks were flaming. Her entire frame was shaking.

  “I already told you—”

  “The truth!” she cried. “This is a church. I’ll have the truth!”

  He went to reach for the stiletto, but she was quicker. Or perhaps she had already prepared herself. Snatching up the knife, she strode forward, and, in one powerful swing, thrust the knife into el Enterrador’s throat.

  His eyes opened wide in shock and disbelief. He grabbed on to the edge of the desk as he was falling, but his already numb fingers slipped off, and he crashed to the floor in a rapidly spreading pool of his own blood.

  22

  The Beijing Central Committee Earth and Sky Country Club lay only five miles northwest of the capital. But it could have been a hundred. Here, beyond the massive layer of industrial smog that hung above the city like an intimation of a permanent twilight, the skies were clear. Within the twelve-foot-high spiked fence, electrified for added security, could be seen endless rows in meticulous parallels of cabbage, cucumbers, peppers and beans of all varieties, onions, scallions, gai lan, bok choy, and chilies, among many others. What made these vegetables special, necessitating the heavy security, was that they were all organic, grown pesticide-free in pristine conditions. In the northern section of Earth and Sky was the dairy farm, where cows were fed an all-organic diet, the milk processed in sterile conditions.

  It was to Earth and Sky that Minister Ouyang was being driven in his state-provided limousine for his twice-monthly visit. The produce of Earth and Sky was the sole property of the state, for consumption only by the Central Committee and those high-level ministers who, like Ouyang, were privy to its largesse. There were twenty-five levels of power within the many ministries of Beijing’s central government. Each level was entitled to a specific amount of organic food. The higher up the minister, the larger the monthly allotment. This feudal system was a holdover from Mao’s regime, made necessary by the severe pollution of China’s earth and sky, which was nearing crisis level.

  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 tha
t 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.”