Robert Ludlum’s™ The Bourne Dominion

by Robert Ludlum

  “What are the crates made of?” Bourne asked.

  Suarez shrugged. “Wood. Sometimes stainless steel.”

  Bourne considered for a moment. “Who gives you your orders?”

  “A man. A voice on the phone. I never met him. I don’t even know his name.”

  Bourne snapped his fingers. “Phone.”

  Suarez dug awkwardly in his pocket with his left hand and drew out the phone.

  “Call your contact.”

  Suarez’s head moved spastically back and forth on his shoulders. “I can’t. He’ll kill me.”

  Bourne took Suarez’s swollen right hand in his and broke the pinkie. Suarez screamed and tried unsuccessfully to pull his hand away. Bourne shook his head and took hold of the next finger on the hand.

  “Five seconds.”

  Sweat was rolling freely down Suarez’s face, staining his collar. “Dios, no.”

  “Two seconds.”

  Suarez opened his mouth but nothing came out. Bourne broke the second finger and the commander nearly passed out. His knees gave out and he slid down the tree trunk. Bourne slapped his cheek. Suarez’s eyes watered and he turned and vomited onto the ground.

  Bourne imprisoned his middle finger. “Five seconds.”

  “¡Basta!” Suarez cried. “¡Basta!”

  All the color had drained from his face and he was shaking in reaction to the trauma. He stared at his cell phone, clutched in his sweaty left hand. Then, as if snapping out of a trance, he looked up at Bourne.

  “What… what do you want me to say, hombre?”

  “I want his name,” Bourne said.

  “He’ll never give it to me.”

  Bourne tightened his grip on the middle finger of Suarez’s ruined right hand. “Find a way, hombre, or we continue where we left off.”

  Suarez licked his lips and nodded. He punched a button and a number popped up on the screen.

  “Wait!” Bourne said and, reaching over, killed the connection.

  “What?” Suarez said in that slightly dazed tone of voice that had come out of him ever since his fingers had been broken. “What is it? I did what you asked. Don’t you want me to call him?”

  Bourne sat back on his haunches, thinking. He knew who Suarez’s contact was. He recognized the digits. Suarez was calling Jalal Essai’s satellite phone.

  9

  CHEZ GEORGES, THE restaurant to which Aaron took Soraya, was a block from the Bourse—Paris’s stock exchange. As such, lunch was attended mostly by suits, talking stocks, bonds, options, derivative swaps, grain and pork belly futures. Nevertheless, the atmosphere was Old World Paris before the advent of the EU, the euro, and the slow disintegration of French culture.

  “First it was the Germans, then the Dutch,” Aaron said. “And now we are encircled by what amounts to refugees from North Africa with no hope of integration, jobs, or prospects. It’s no wonder they want to burn Paris to the ground.”

  They were sitting at the long banquette, facing each other, eating hanger steaks and the establishment’s astonishing frites.

  “The homogeneity of the French is under siege.”

  Aaron looked at her for a moment. “This is how we do,” he said, using the English slang of American cops. This is the way we do things.

  She laughed so hard she had to put a hand to her mouth in order not to spray food all over her plate.

  His eyes crinkled nicely when he smiled. Despite that, the smile made him look younger, like a little boy whose joy is unadulterated by life’s responsibilities and concerns.

  “So.” He put down his utensils and steepled his fingers. “Dinoig?” He spread his hands. “You have an explanation.”

  “I do.” Soraya licked salt off the tips of her fingers. “The word is an anagram.”

  Aaron stared hard at her for a moment. “A code?”

  Soraya nodded. “Admittedly a crude one. But it was meant as a fail-safe. In case my contact got into trouble.”

  “Terminal trouble.” Aaron took a sip of the Badoit mineral water; he’d very kindly refrained from ordering wine.

  Soraya dug in her handbag, pulled out a pen and a pad, and wrote “dinoig” on it. She looked at it for several moments before she said, “Since the anagram begins with a consonant, let’s start with the assumption that the word begins with a vowel. Two i’s and an o. There are only six letters, so the chances of both i’s being in the center are virtually nil.” Beneath “dinoig,” she wrote “I.” “Now it becomes easier because of our choices for a next letter; n makes the most sense.”

  Now the second line read “In.”

  “There.” She looked up at Aaron and turned the pad around so that it faced him. Then she handed him the pen. “You finish it.”

  Aaron frowned for a moment, then he wrote down the next four letters and turned the pad back for her to read.

  “ ‘Indigo,’ ” Soraya read aloud.

  Peter’s back was killing him. He’d been working nonstop on Hendricks’s files, opening the folders one by one since they were only marked with numerical designations: 001, 002, 003, and so forth. They were filled with memos, to-do lists, even reminders of birthdays and anniversaries. The files were remarkably devoid of anything interesting. He rose from his computer crouch, put his hands at the small of his back, and stretched backward. Then he went off to relieve his aching bladder. Peter liked to think while he peed. In fact, some of his best ideas had come to him while his bladder was emptying. There was something about the physical feeling of relief that set his brain to wandering down fruitful paths.

  He stared at the wall. His eyes roved among the multitude of small cracks in the plaster, finding fanciful shapes as if they were clouds passing across the sky. Except these shapes were permanent. That being so, some of them had already become friends. There was the Roaring Lion, the Boy Holding Balloons, the Boxing Kangaroo, the Old Man with Drooping Earlobes. And then there was Houdini, the man with what to Peter looked like a lock around his waist.

  “Good Lord!” Peter cried all at once.

  Shaking and zipping up, he hurriedly washed his hands and virtually ran back to his computer terminal. Now, instead of going folder by folder, he scrolled down, looking for a file locked with an electronic encryption.

  Sure enough, there was one, at the bottom of the folder tree. When prompted for a password, he typed in: “servers.” Nothing happened, not that he was surprised. It would have been extraordinarily stupid for Hendricks to use the same password twice.

  Peter twirled a pencil between his teeth, sat back, and considered his next move. What word would Hendricks use to safeguard this file? He tried Hendricks’s birthdate, the date he was appointed secretary of defense, his address. Nada.

  He sat there so long without moving his cursor that Hendricks’s screensaver came on. He was looking at a beautiful green-eyed woman with high cheekbones and an open, smiling face. Fifteen seconds later the image faded out and another of the same woman appeared. This time, she was seen with Hendricks. They were holding hands on a bridge in Venice. The woman was Amanda, Hendricks’s third wife. She had died five years ago. The scene changed again to a shot of Amanda in a formal gown, on the terrace of a huge stone mansion.

  “Idiot!” Peter thought, smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand. He typed in: “Amanda.”

  Open Sesame. He was in!

  The file contained two long paragraphs and one short addendum. The long paragraphs seemed to be notes Hendricks had taken after a recent meeting he’d had in the Oval Office with the president; General Marshall, the Pentagon’s chief of staff; Mike Holmes, the national security adviser; and someone by the name of Roy FitzWilliams. Peter was immediately reminded of the conversation between Hendricks and Danziger at the Folger he’d overheard piecemeal. “We weren’t ever going to meet in your office,” his boss had said, “for precisely the same reason you weren’t invited to the meeting in the Oval Office.”

  From what Peter read, the briefing concerned the extreme strategic
importance of rare earth metals. The president had decided on an interagency task force, code-named Samaritan, to safeguard the Indigo Ridge mining operation in California. Apparently, the president had put Hendricks in charge of Samaritan and had given it the highest priority.

  Peter had reached the end of the second paragraph and was wondering anew why his boss hadn’t briefed him and Soraya regarding Samaritan when his gaze fell on the last, short addendum. With a shock that went through his body, he discovered that the paragraph was addressed to him:

  Peter, I know you’re reading this; you’re more curious than George the chimp. There’s something about this FitzWilliams character that disturbs me. Can’t put my finger on it, which is why I want you to investigate him. Strictly down low and off the clock. The POTUS has read us the riot act about noncompliance with Samaritan. The work I’m asking you to do certainly falls into that category, so I urge you to be exceptionally careful. I know you will be. If you’re wondering, you’re the only one I trust with this. DO NOT use any of the normal channels to contact me re: your progress. Your findings here, ONLY. I can’t stress enough how important your conclusions could prove. Good luck.

  Estevan Vegas.”

  Bourne, having consulted his map, calculated that they were less than five miles from Vegas’s home. He’d had to make a decision as to whether to try finding him at home or at the oil field. The long, dusty afternoon was fading, the sepia light like that in an old photograph. The day was dying, and, in any event, he wanted to approach Vegas in the presence of his Indian mistress.

  “Who?” Commander Suarez said in a voice bleary with pain, fear, and the sour aftermath of adrenaline. “Am I supposed to know this man?”

  “He’s a member of Severus Domna.”

  “So what?” Suarez couldn’t even shrug his porcine shoulders without wincing. “I told you, everything inside the Domna is tightly compartmentalized.” He smacked his lips. “I need a beer. I’ll bet you could do with one, too.”

  Bourne, driving very fast, ignored him. They were still climbing through the Cordillera mountains. He had rolled down his window. The air cooled the jeep’s stinking interior; Suarez sweated like a wild boar.

  “If you tell me one more time that you don’t know who Estevan Vegas is,” Bourne said, “I’ll stop the car right now and throw you down the mountain.”

  “Okay, okay.” Suarez resumed his sweating. “So I know Vegas. Everyone in the area knows him. He’s a character. So fucking what?”

  “Tell me about the woman he’s living with.”

  “I don’t know a thing about her.”

  Bourne pulled off the highway, put the jeep in neutral, and, turning, slammed his fist into Suarez’s left ear. Suarez’s head snapped back and he let out a low groan. The rich scents of plants and loamy earth pushed into the jeep.

  “You’ve already pulled the guts out of me,” Suarez said. “What the fuck more d’you want, hombre?”

  “You’re making this hard on yourself.” Bourne struck him again, and the commander gagged. He bent over with his head between his knees. Bourne hauled him back up by the collar of his sweat-stained shirt. “Shall we continue?”

  “Her name is Rosalita—Vegas calls her Rosie.” He wiped blood and bile off his lips with the back of his good hand. “She’s lived with him for, I think, five years now.”

  “Why?”

  Suarez’s eyes flared. “How the fuck…” His voice uncharacteristically petered out. “What I hear is that Vegas saved her from a margay—a female who’d just given birth. Rosie had had the bad luck to stumble across its den. She couldn’t outrun it. It had mauled her pretty good, I heard, before Vegas, hearing her screams, shot the thing. He carried her back to his place and took care of her. She’s been taking care of him ever since, so I hear.”

  “Ever meet her?”

  “Who, Rosie? No, never. Why?”

  “I’m wondering why he never got her pregnant.”

  Suarez was silent for several moments. Ahead of them, thick thunderheads, purple and yellow, the colors of the bruises on his face, were piling up. The air had turned heavy. There was a blue-white flash of lightning, and almost immediately, the silence was cracked open by a double rumble of thunder, following faithfully… as a dog follows its master.

  “This storm will be a sonovabitch,” Suarez said. He put his head back and closed his eyes.

  A moment later the first fat spatters of rain rolled down the windshield. In no time at all the drumming began on the jeep’s roof.

  “My question has an answer,” Bourne said. “Provide it.”

  Suarez’s eyes popped open and he turned his head toward Bourne. “I hear there’s a grave out behind their house. A very small one.”

  Bourne put his hands on the wheel, gripped it hard. “How long did the baby live?”

  “Nine days, so I’m told.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “I heard boy.”

  Bourne thought about how fleeting life was, especially for some. Nine days was no life at all. But to Estevan Vegas and Rosie, it must have been everything. It had to be; that was all they had.

  He put the jeep in gear and got back on the rain-pocked highway. They were very close to Vegas’s house. He put on as much speed as he dared with such poor visibility.

  Back when Amanda was alive, Hendricks looked forward to coming home after a long, hard day’s work. These days he went jogging in Rock Creek Park. He went every day and jogged the same three-mile course. He liked jogging in the late afternoon, when the light was spent from the day’s exertions and lay along the winding path he had chosen, like a river of molten gold; he felt all the stronger for it. He also liked the repetition. He had discovered a curious comfort in passing the same trees, the same curves and esses. Of course, they were never quite the same; the seasons saw to that. He particularly liked jogging in the snow, his breath white in front of him, the frost in his nostrils and on his eyelashes.

  Cleo always accompanied him, her lithe golden body bounding, her black muzzle moist with saliva from her wagging pink tongue. She watched him with her liquid brown eyes, wanting to please him and at the same time, he imagined, feeling keenly the pleasure of her working muscles. Sometimes, he wondered what it would be like to be her, to run ecstatically on all fours, to feel pure joy, to have no knowledge of your impending death.

  Of course, Hendricks and Cleo had company—his National Guard detail making certain the route in front and back of him was clear. He disliked their presence in this context, in a place of serene beauty when all he wanted was to be alone with his thoughts.

  In a way, his detail saw to that, though it was entirely inadvertent. Anyone on the length of his run during the time he was there was pulled aside and grilled to within an inch of their lives. Then they were held under surveillance, almost as prisoners, until he had completed the three-mile course.

  Today there were precious few people caught in the security net as he jogged by, Cleo loping beside him. But the sight of one person made him stop and turn back.

  When he approached the cluster, one member of the detail stepped in front of him and asked him for the sake of security to kindly keep his distance.

  “No, wait a minute, I know her,” Hendricks said, looking beyond him.

  Stepping around the guard, Hendricks approached the young woman in jogging outfit and Nike sneakers.

  “Maggie,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Good afternoon,” the woman he knew as Margaret Penrod said. “Same as you, I imagine, having a run.”

  Hendricks smiled. “My mind says run but my knees insist I jog.”

  “Do I have to be kept here under guard?”

  “Of course not.” He lifted a hand. “You can jog with me. That is, if you can stand my relatively slow pace.”

  Maggie looked around at the grim faces of the detail. “Only if your hounds will let me.”

  “My hounds follow orders.” He looked at his detail.

  “Already
body-scanned, sir,” one of them said.

  Hendricks could see the disapproval in his face. His jogging with someone not pre-approved weeks in advance was against protocol. To hell with their protocol, Hendricks thought. This is my time.

  By now Cleo had come over, sniffing at Maggie’s sneakers.

  “Find anything interesting?” Maggie asked.

  Cleo looked at her, and Maggie crouched down, rubbed the boxer behind one ear. Cleo leaned against her in ecstasy, her sides panting.

  “She likes me.”

  Hendricks laughed. “Cleo falls in love with anyone who scratches her ears.”

  Maggie looked up at him. Her face had found the lowering sunlight and her eyes seemed to glow. “What about you?”

  Hendricks felt his throat redden. “I—”

  Maggie rose. “That was a joke. Just a joke.”

  “Come on.” Hendricks rose up on the tips of his toes. “Let’s go.”

  They moved off, Maggie careful to keep to his pace. Cleo bounded at his side or between them, maintaining contact, bumping his legs in sheer joy. The guards followed close behind. He could feel their tension and he imagined their eyes boring into Maggie’s back, on alert for any sign of hostile action. He supposed they were concerned about Maggie suddenly turning on him and snapping his neck like a dry twig.

  Every once in a while Cleo glanced at her, as if wondering what was going on. Hendricks was wondering the same thing. As they moved along the familiar path, tree branches dipping in the wind as if waving or saluting, he realized that everything looked different—the shapes sharper, the colors more vivid. He saw details he hadn’t noticed before.

  He was jogging with Maggie beside him. It was happening because he wanted it to happen and, frankly, that astonished him because he hadn’t wanted something like this in a long time, probably five years, not since Amanda died. He hadn’t wanted to be with another female since then. How shabbily he had treated Jolene and the other females who flitted in and out of his life. When they said or did something that reminded him of Amanda, it threw him into despair. Worse, when they said or did something that was different from the way she’d said it or done it, he became enraged.