The flight of stairs was short, but, for Bourne, descending them was more painful than he had expected. With every step he took, the trauma he'd received from the blow above his ribs sent jolts of agony through him. What he needed was a hot bath and some sleep, two things he couldn't yet afford.
Back in Annaka's apartment, he showed her the top of the piano bench and she swore under her breath. Together they moved it beneath the light fixture and he stood on it.
"You see?"
She shook her head. "I haven't the slightest idea what's going on." He went to the escritoire, scribbled on a pad: Do you have a ladder?
She looked at him oddly but nodded.
Go get it, he wrote.
When she brought it back into the living room, he climbed it high enough to look into the shallow frosted-glass bowl of the light fixture. And, sure enough, there it was. Carefully, he reached in, plucked up the tiny item between his fingertips. He climbed down and showed it to her in the palm of his hand.
"What—?" She broke off at the emphatic shake of his head.
"Do you have a pair of pliers?" he asked.
Again, the curious look as she opened the door of a shallow closet. She handed him the pliers. He put the tiny square between the ribbed ends, squeezed. The square shattered.
"It's a miniature electronic transmitter," he said.
"What?" Curiosity had turned to bewilderment.
"That's why the man on the roof broke in here, to plant this in the light fixture. He was listening as well as looking."
She looked around the cozy room and shivered. "Dear God, I'll never again feel the same way about this place." Then she turned to Bourne. "What does he want? Why try to record our every move?" Then she snorted. "It's Dr. Schiffer, isn't it?"
"It may be," Bourne said, "I don't know." All at once, he became dizzy and, near to blacking out, half-fell, half-sat on the sofa.
Annaka hurried to the bathroom to get him disinfectant and some bandages. He put his head back against the cushions, clearing his mind of everything that had just happened. He had to center himself, maintain his concentration, keeping his eye firmly fixed on what had to be done next.
Annaka returned from the bathroom carrying a tray on which were a shallow porcelain bowl of hot water, a sponge, some towels, an ice pack, a bottle of disinfectant and a glass of water.
"Jason?"
He opened his eyes.
She gave him the glass of water, and when he had drained it, she handed him the ice pack. "Your cheek is starting to swell."
He put the pack against his face, felt the pain slowly recede into numbness. But when he took a quick breath, his side seized up as he twisted to put the empty glass on a side table. He turned back slowly, stiffly. He was thinking of Joshua, who had been resurrected in his mind if not in reality. Maybe that was why he was so filled with blind rage at Khan, for Khan had raised the specter of the awful past, thrusting into the light a ghost so dear to David Webb he had haunted him in both his personalities. Watching Annaka as she cleaned his face of dried blood, he recalled their brief exchange at the cafe when he brought up the subject of her father and she had broken down, and yet he knew that he had it pursue it. He was a father who'd violently lost his family. She was a daughter who'd violently lost her father.
"Annaka," he began gently, "I know it's a painful subject for you, but I'd very much like to know about your father." He felt her stiffen, plowed on. "Can you talk about him?"
"What d'you want to know? How he and Alexsei met, I suppose." She concentrated on what she was doing, but he wondered whether she was deliberately not meeting his gaze.
"I was thinking more along the lines of your relationship with him." A shadow flickered across her face. "That's an odd—and intimate— question to ask."
"It's my past, you see ..." Bourne's voice trailed off. He was unable either to lie or to tell the full truth.
"The one you remember only in glimmers." She nodded. "I see." When she wrung out the sponge, the water in the bowl turned pink. "Ah, well, Janos Vadas was the perfect father. He changed me when I was an infant, read to me at night, sang to me when I was ill. He was there for all my birthdays and special occasions. Honestly, I don't know how he managed it." She wrung out the sponge a second time; he'd begun bleeding again. "I came first. Always. And he never grew tired of telling me how much he loved me."
"What a lucky child you were."
"Luckier than any of my friends, luckier than anyone I know." She was concentrating harder than ever, trying to get the bleeding to stop.
Bourne had sunk into a state of semi-trance, thinking about Joshua— about the rest of his first family—and all the things he would never get to do with them, all the many tiny moments you noted and remembered as your child grew up.
At length, she stanched the flow of blood and now took a peek under the ice pack. Her expression didn't betray what she saw. She sat back on her haunches, hands resting in her lap.
"I think you should take off your jacket and shirt."
He stared at her.
"So we can take a look at your ribs. I saw you wince when you twisted to put the glass down."
She held out her hand and he dropped the ice pack into it. She juggled it a little. "This needs a refill."
When she returned, he was naked to the waist. A frighteningly large red welt on his left side was already puffed up and very tender as his fingertips probed it.
"My God, you need an ice bath" she exclaimed.
"At least nothing's broken."
She tossed him the ice pack. He gasped involuntarily as he put it against the swelling. She returned to her haunches, her gaze roving over him once again. He wished he knew what she was thinking.
"I suppose you can't help remembering the son who was killed so young." He gritted his teeth. "It's just that... The man on the roof—the one spying on us—has been following me all the way from the States. He says he wants to kill me, but I know he's lying. He wants me to lead him to someone, that's why he's been spying on us." Annaka's expression darkened. "Who does he want to get to?"
"A man named Spalko."
She registered surprise. "Stepan Spalko?"
"That's right. Do you know him?"
"Of course I know of him," she said. "Everyone in Hungary does. He's the head of Humanistas, Ltd., the worldwide relief organization." She frowned. "Jason, now I'm truly worried. This man's dangerous. If he's trying to get to Mr. Spalko, we should contact the authorities."
He shook his head. "What would we tell them? That we think a man we know only as Khan wants to contact Stepan Spalko? We don't even know why. And what d'you think they'll say? Why doesn't this Khan just pick up the telephone and call him?"
"Then we should at least call someone at Humanistas."
"Annaka, until I know what's going on, I don't want to contact anyone. It'll only muddy waters that are already clouded with questions for which I don't have any answers." He rose, made his way to the escritoire, sat down in front of her laptop. "I told you I had an idea. Is it okay if I use your computer?"
"By all means," she said, rising.
As Bourne turned on the machine, she gathered up the bowl, sponge and other paraphernalia, padded into the kitchen. He heard the sound of running water as he went online. He accessed the U.S. Government net, went from site to site, and by the time she returned, he'd found the one he needed.
The Agency had a whole raft of public sites, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, but there were a dozen other sites, encrypted, password protected, that were part of the CIA's fabled intranet.
Annaka registered his extreme concentration. "What is it?" She came around and stood behind him. In a moment, her eyes opened wide. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Just what it looks like," Bourne said, "I'm hacking into the CIA main database."
"Buthowd'you—"
"Don't ask," Bourne said as his fingers flew over the keyboard. "Trust me, you don't want to know."
Alex Conklin had always known the way through the front door, but that was because he'd had the updated ciphers delivered to him at six a.m. every Monday morning. It had been Deron, the artist and master forger, who'd taught Bourne the fine art of hacking into U.S Government databases. In his business, it was a necessary skill. The problem was that the CIA firewall—the software program designed to keep their data secure—was a particular bitch. In addition to its keyword changing every week, it had a floating algorithm tied into the keyword. But Deron had shown Bourne the way to fool the system into thinking you had the keyword when you didn't, so that the program itself would supply it for you.
The way to attack the firewall was through the algorithm, which was a derivation of the core algorithm that encrypted the CIA's central files. Bourne knew this formula because Deron had made him memorize it.
Bourne navigated to the CIA site, where a window popped up in which he was asked to type the current keyword. In this, he typed in the algorithm, which contained a much larger string of numbers and letters than the box was designed to take. On the other hand, after the first three sets of the components, the underlying program recognized it for what it was, and for a moment it was stymied. The trick, Deron had said, was to complete the algorithm before the program figured out what you were doing and shut down, denying you access. The formula string was very long; there was no room for error or even for an instant's hesitation, and Bourne began to sweat because he couldn't believe the software could remain frozen for this long.
In the end, however, he finished entering the algorithm without the program shutting down. The window disappeared, the screen changed.
"I'm inside," Bourne said.
"Pure alchemy," Annaka whispered, fascinated.
Bourne was navigating to the Tactical Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate site. He plugged in Schiffer's name but was disappointed in the sparse material that came up. Nothing on what Schiffer was working on, nothing about his background. In fact, if Bourne didn't know better, he could believe that Dr. Felix Schiffer was a minor scientist of no import whatsoever to the TNLWD.
There was another possibility. He used the back-channel hack that Deron had made him memorize, the same one Conklin had used to keep tabs on events occurring behind the scenes at the Department of Defense.
Once in, he went to the DARPA site and navigated to the Archives. Lucky for him the government computer jockeys were notoriously slow at cleaning out old files. There was Schiffer's, which contained some background. He was MIT-trained, was given his own lab right out of grad school by one of the large pharmaceutical firms. He lasted there less than a year, but when he left, he took with him another of their scientists, Dr. Peter Sido, with whom he worked for five years before being recruited by the government and entering DARPA. No explanation was given for his giving up a private position to go into the public sector, but some scientists were like that. They were as unfit for living in society as many prisoners who, when they'd served their time, committed another crime the minute they hit the street, simply to be sent back into a clearly defined world where everything was taken care of for them.
Bourne read on and discovered that Schiffer had been attached to the Defense Sciences Office which, ominously, trafficked in bio-weapons systems. In his time at DARPA, Dr. Schiffer had been working in a way to biologically "cleanse" a room infected with anthrax.
Bourne paged through, but he couldn't find any more details. What bothered Bourne was that this piece of information wouldn't account for Conklin's intense interest. Annaka looked over his shoulder. "Is there any clue we could use to find out where Dr. Schiffer might be hiding?"
"I don't think so, no."
"All right then." She squeezed his shoulders. "The cupboard's bare and we both need to eat something."
"I think I'd rather stay here, if you don't mind, rest up a bit."
"You're right. You're in no shape to wander outside." She smiled as she drew on her coat. "I'll just pop around the corner, get us some food. Anything you particularly want?" He shook his head, watched her head for the door. "Annaka, be careful." She turned, pulled her gun partway out of her bag. "Don't worry, I'll be fine." She opened the door. "See you in a few minutes."
He heard her depart, but he'd already returned his attention to the computer screen. He felt his heart rate increase and tried to calm himself, without success. Even full of intent, he hesitated. He knew he had to go on, but he also recognized that he was terrified. Watching his hands as if they belong to someone else, he spent the next five minutes hacking his way through the U.S. Army firewall. At one point, he hit a glitch. The military IT team had upgraded the firewall recently, adding a third layer Deron either hadn't told him about or, more likely, hadn't yet seen. His fingers rose up like Annaka's over the piano keyboard and for a moment they hesitated. It was not too late to turn back, he told himself, there'd be no shame in doing that. For years he'd felt that anything to do with his first family, including the record of them held in the U.S. Army databanks was for him strictly off-limits. He was already tortured enough by their deaths, haunted by the racking guilt that he'd been unable to save them, that he'd been safe at a meeting while the diving jet sent its killing bullets into them. He couldn't help torturing himself anew, conjuring up their last terror-filled minutes. Dao, a child of war, would, of course, have heard the jet engines droning lazily in the hot summer sky. At first she wouldn't have seen it coming out of the white sun, but when its roar grew closer, when its metal bulk became larger than the sun, she would've known. Even while horror gripped her heart, she would've tried to gather her children to her in a vain attempt to protect them from the bullets that would have already begun to pock the surface of the muddy river. "Joshua!
Alyssa! Come to me!" she would've screamed, as if she could save them from what was to come.
Bourne, sitting in front of Annaka's computer, became aware that he was weeping. For a moment he allowed the tears to flow freely as they hadn't done for so many years. Then he shook himself, wiped his cheeks with his sleeve and, before he had a chance to change his mind, got on with the business at hand.
He found a work-around for the final level of the firewall, and five minutes after beginning the excruciating work, he was logged in. At once, before his nerve could fail again, he navigated to the Death Record Archives, typed in the names and date of death in the required data fields for Dao Webb, Alyssa Webb, Joshua Webb. He stared at the names, thinking, This was my family, flesh-and-blood human beings who laughed and cried, and who once held me, who called me "Darling" and "Daddy." Now what were they? Names on a computer screen. Statistics in a databank. His heart was breaking and he felt again that touch of madness that had afflicted him in the first aftermath of their deaths. I can't feel this again, he thought. It'll tear me apart. Full of a sorrow he found unsupportable, he punched the "Enter" key. He had no other choice; he could not go back. Never go back, that had been his motto from the moment Alex Conklin had recruited him, turned him into another David Webb and then into Jason Bourne. Then why was it he could still hear their voices? "Darling, I've missed you!" "Daddy, you're home!" These memories, reaching across the permeable barrier of time, had ensnared them in their web, which was why he did not at first react to what had come up on the screen. He stared at it for several minutes without seeing the terrible anomaly. He saw in horrifying detail what he'd hoped he'd never see, the photos of his beloved wife Dao, shoulders and chest riddled with bullets, her face grotesquely disfigured by the traumatic wounds. On the second page he saw the photos of Alyssa, her poor body and her head even more disfigured because of their vulnerability, their smaller size. He sat, paralyzed with grief and horror, at what lay before him. He had to go on. One page left, one last set of photos to complete the tragedy.
He scrolled to the third page, bracing himself for the photos of Joshua. Only there weren't any.
Stupefied, he did nothing for a moment. At first, he thought there had been a computer glitch, that he'd been inadvertently dire
cted to another page in the Archives. But, no, there was the name: Joshua Webb. But below it were words that seared through Bourne's consciousness like a hot needle. "Three articles of clothing, listed below, one shoe, partial (sole and heel missing) found ten meters from the corpses of Dao and Alyssa Webb. After an hour's search, Joshua Webb declared dead. NBF."
NBF. The Army acronym screamed out to him. No Body Found. Bourne was gripped by an icy cold. They searched for Joshua for an hour— only an hour? And why hadn't they told him? He'd buried three coffins, his mind excoriated with grief, remorse, and guilt. And all the while they knew, the bastards knewl He sat back. His face was white, his hands trembling. In his heart, he felt a rage he could not contain. He thought of Joshua; he thought of Khan.
His mind was ablaze, overcome by the horror of the terrible possibility that he'd buried from the moment he'd seen the carved stone Buddha around Khan's neck: What if Khan really was Joshua? If so, he'd become a killing machine, a monster. Bourne knew only too well how easy it was to find the path to madness and killing in the jungles of Southeast Asia. But there was, of course, another possibility, one his mind quite naturally gravitated toward and held onto: that the plot to plant Joshua was far more wide-ranging and complex than he'd at first considered. If so, if these records were forged, the conspiracy went all the way up to the highest levels of American government. But, oddly, filling his mind with the usual conspiratorial suspicions only increased his sense of dislocation.
In his mind's eye, he saw Khan holding out the carved stone Buddha, heard him say,
"You gave this one to me—yes, you did. And then you abandoned me to die..." Abruptly, Bourne's gorge rose into his throat and, with his stomach rebelling madly, he launched himself off the sofa, across the room, and, ignoring the pain, ran to the bathroom, where he vomited every last thing left inside him.
In the OpSit room deep in the bowels of CIA HQ, the duty officer, watching a computer screen, picked up the phone and dialed a specific number. He waited a moment while an automated voice said, "Speak." The DO asked for the DCI. His voice was analyzed, matched against the list of duty officers. The call was switched, a male voice said, "Hold, please." A moment later the clear baritone of the DCI came on the line.
Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy Page 31
