The Bourne Deception
Page 21
When he came into the living room, Tracy was pouring coffee into an enormous cup. The small kitchen was merely a niche at one end of the single open room, which was spacious but, like the bedroom, as sparsely and anonymously furnished as a hotel room. On the wooden trestle table was the typical Andalusian workingman’s breakfast: a mug of hot chocolate and a plate of churros, slender twists of fried dough, dipped in sugar crystals.
Bourne pulled up a chair and he and Tracy ate their breakfast, and she let him have all the churros, he was still hungry when he finished. He went to the refrigerator.
“There’s nothing much in there, I’m afraid,” she said. “I haven’t been here in some time.”
Still, he found some bacon in the freezer. As he fried up the strips, she said, “Write down your size and I’ll get you some fresh clothes.”
He nodded. “While you’re at it, I need you to run an errand for me.” Finding a pencil and scratch pad on the kitchen counter, he tore off a sheet and wrote out a list of items, along with his clothes size.
When he handed the slip of paper to her, Tracy glanced over it and said, “Professor Zuñiga, I presume?”
He nodded, tending the browning strips. “I gave you the addresses of the theatrical stores I found yesterday. We were on our way there when Scarface picked up our scent.”
She got up, grabbed her handbag, and went to the door. “This should take me about an hour,” she said. “In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your breakfast.”
After she left, Bourne took the skillet off the burner, laid the bacon on a sheet of paper towel. Then he returned to the scratch pad. The sheet he’d torn off was from the middle because he wanted to keep the top one intact. With the pencil at an extreme angle, he ran the lead lightly over the sheet. Letters began to form, the imprint of the writing left over from the last note someone—presumably Tracy—had made.
Don Hererra’s name and address came up, along with the time, 3 pm, just as she’d told him. He ripped off the sheet and put it in his pocket. That was when he noticed indentations on what was now the top sheet of the pad. He tore that off as well. Running the side of the pencil over this sheet brought up a line of numbers and letters all run together.
He ate the bacon standing beside the front window, staring out at the shimmering morning. It was still too early for people to be out at the feria, but the Moorish scrollwork balcony on the building across the street was garlanded in flowers and gaily colored fabric. His eyes scanned both sides of the street for anyone and anything even remotely suspicious, but nothing presented itself. He watched a young woman herd three children across the street. An old woman in black, small and bent, carried a mesh bag filled with fruit and vegetables.
Popping the last of the bacon into his mouth, he wiped his hands down on a kitchen cloth, then crossed to Tracy’s laptop, which was set up on the far end of the trestle table. It was on and he saw that she had a Wi-Fi connection to the Internet.
Sitting down in front of it, he Googled the string of numbers and letters only to get this result:
Your search—779elgamhuriaave—did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.
Then he saw his error, and placed spaces in the appropriate places: 779 El Gamhuria Avenue. An address, but where?
Returning to Google, he typed in “El Gamhuria Avenue” and up popped Khartoum, Sudan. Now, that was interesting. What was Tracy doing with a North African address?
He typed in the full address, including the number, which, as it turned out, belonged to Air Afrika Corporation. He sat back. Why did that name sound so familiar? There were a number of entries for Air Afrika, some of them from very odd sites, others from blogs of dubious nature, but the information he wanted came from an entry on the second page from Interpol, where speculation was cited from numerous sources that Air Afrika was owned and operated by Nikolai Yevsen, the legendary arms dealer. Ever since Viktor Anatoliyevich Bout had been arrested, Yevsen had taken his place as the largest and most powerful illegal arms dealer in the world.
Bourne rose from the chair, walked back to the window, on reflex checking the street again. Tracy was an art expert buying a Goya unknown until just recently. The price must be astronomical; maybe a handful of people in the world could afford it. So who was her client?
With church bells pealing the hour, his gaze snapped back into focus as Tracy walked into his field of vision. She was carrying a mesh shopping sack. He watched the confident rat-a-tat of her stride, the heels of her shoes rhythmically striking the pavement. A young man appeared behind her and Bourne felt his muscles tense. Halfway down the block, the young man lifted an arm, waving, and ran across the street where a young woman waited for him. They embraced as Tracy entered the building. A moment later she came through the door, put the mesh sack down on the table.
“If you’re still hungry, I bought some Serrano ham and Garrotxa cheese.” She placed the food, wrapped in white paper, on the table. “The rest is everything you asked for.”
After he’d dressed in the light, comfortable clothes she’d chosen for him, he pored over the contents of the mesh sack, lining the items up, opening the lids, smelling the contents, and nodding to himself.
She regarded him solemnly. “Adam,” she ventured, “I don’t know what you’re involved in…”
“I already told you,” he said mildly.
“Yes, but now I see how badly you’re injured, and that man who was following us was evil looking.”
“He was evil,” Bourne acknowledged. Then he looked up at her and smiled. “It’s part of the industry I’m in, Tracy. There isn’t the capital floating around there was in 2000, so more start-ups are chasing less money. That makes for cutthroat competition.” He shrugged. “It can’t be avoided.”
“But from the looks of you, this kind of work could send you to the hospital.”
“I’ve just got to be more careful from now on.”
She frowned. “Now you’re making fun of me.” She came and sat next to him. “But there’s nothing amusing about that wound in your chest.”
He produced the photo he’d printed out at the Internet café, set it out between them. “To become Professor Alonzo Pecunia Zuñiga I’m going to need your help.”
She held quite still, her liquid eyes studying his face for a moment. Then she nodded.
Day three of Oserov’s reign of terror brought a downpour such as no one in Nizhny Tagil could remember, and this was a city where grudges were nursed, meaning memories were as long and vibrant as the winter chill. Day three also brought other deaths, ones so brutal, so horrific that there now came to the remnants of Stas Kuzin’s people a black fear. One that crept into their bones, lodging there like a grain of polonium, eroding their confidence the way the radioactive material eats away flesh.
It began in the early hours of the morning, just past two o’clock, as Oserov boasted to Arkadin afterward.
“With great stealth I broke into their head enforcer’s house, tied him up, and forced him to watch what I did to his family,” Oserov told Arkadin later.
When he was finished, he dragged his victim into the kitchen, where he went to work on him using the fire-reddened tip of a carving knife he slid from a wooden rack. The pain of what Oserov did to him hammered the enforcer out of his state of shock and he began screaming until Oserov cut out his tongue.
An hour later, Oserov was finished. He left him in a pool of his own blood and vomit, alive, but just barely. When the enforcer’s associates came for him as they did each morning to begin their daily patrol, they found the front door flung open, which led them to the abattoir inside. It was then, and only then, that Mikhail Tarkanian entered Nizhny Tagil. By then, the criminals were in such a frenzy that they’d all but forgotten about Arkadin.
“Lev Antonin, I think I can provide the solution to your problem,” Tarkanian
said to the new head of Stas’s gang when he met with him in his office. There were seven heavily armed men standing guard. “I’ll find this killer for you and take care of him.”
“Who are you, stranger? Why would you do this?” Lev Antonin squinted at him suspiciously. He had a gray face with long ears and stubble on his chin and cheeks. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.
“Who I am is of no importance, except to say that I’m intimately familiar with men such as your murderer,” Tarkanian replied without hesitation. “And as to why I’m here the answer is simple: I want Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”
At once Antonin’s expression changed from suspicious to enraged. “And why would you want that fucking whoremonger, that shit-faced miscreant?”
“That’s my business,” Tarkanian said mildly. “Your business is keeping your people alive.”
This was true. Antonin was a pragmatic man, with none of the mad fire that had burned within his predecessor. Tarkanian could read him like a comic book: Clearly, he was all too aware that the current of fear lapping at the knees of his men was undermining both their effectiveness and his authority. He also knew that once fear made its presence felt, it spread like wildfire. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to give away the farm. Arkadin’s head on a platter was what they’d all dreamed of since Arkadin had killed Kuzin and set their world ablaze with bullets and death. Letting go of that dream wouldn’t endear him to his rank and file.
He scrubbed his face with his hands and said, “Fine, but you’ll bring me the killer’s head so all my men can see for themselves the end of this filth. And then if you can find that bastard Arkadin you can have him.”
Naturally enough, Tarkanian did not believe this Neanderthal. He recognized the greed in his yellow eyes and intuited that it was not enough for him to be given the head of the murderer; he wanted Arkadin as well. The two bloody heads would cement his power over his people for all time.
“What Lev Antonin wanted was irrelevant,” Tarkanian told Arkadin afterward. “I had planned for such a treacherous eventuality.”
It would have amused Oserov no end to “find the murderer” for the baboon named Lev Antonin and bring him the freshly cut head, but no, he was to be denied this pleasure. He scowled when Tarkanian told him that Tarkanian himself would find and deliver the “murderer” to Antonin.
“To take the fury out of your heart, I have another assignment for you,” Tarkanian told him. “A much more important job that only you can do.”
“I strongly suspect he doubted that very much,” Tarkanian told Arkadin later, “but when he heard what I wanted him to do a smirk spread across his face. Poor bastard, he couldn’t help it.”
Tarkanian needed someone to bring to Lev Antonin. But not just anyone—he had to look like a murderer. Moving through the twilit streets of Nizhny Tagil, Tarkanian scoured the bars for a likely victim. Now and again he was forced to sidestep puddles as big as small ponds, caused by the deluge that had only recently been reduced to a light mist. As it had been since dawn the claustrophobically low sky was a dull gray, but now it was marred here and there by bruises of yellow and lavender, as if the storm had brutalized the day.
Tarkanian parked himself outside the most raucous of bars and lit a harsh Turkish cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs and exhaling it in a gray cloud as thick as those above his head. Night gathered around him like an acolyte as the drunken laughter spilled out to him, along with the shattering of glass and the chunky exhalations of a fistfight. A moment later a big man, bleeding from the nose and several cuts on his face, staggered out onto the sidewalk.
As he bent over, hands on knees, wheezing and retching, Tarkanian ground out his cigarette under his boot heel, walked over, and delivered a vicious chop to the exposed back of the man’s neck. The drunk pitched forward, hitting his forehead on the pavement with a satisfying smack.
Tarkanian grabbed him under the arms and pulled him into the alley. If any passersby noticed what he was up to none of them gave the slightest indication. All of them hurried on about their business without even a glance in his direction. Life in Nizhny Tagil had trained them to ignore anything that wasn’t their business. It was the only way to keep healthy in this city.
In the deepening shadows of the stinking alley, Tarkanian checked his watch. There was no way to contact Oserov; he’d just have to hope he’d accomplished his part of the plan.
Fifteen minutes later he walked into a bakery and bought the largest layer cake in the glass case. Back in the alley, he dumped the cake and, lifting the man’s severed head by his beer- and blood-damp hair, placed it carefully in the cake box. The glassy eyes stared blankly back at him until he lowered the lid.
Across town he was admitted to Lev Antonin’s office, where the boss was still guarded by his seven heavily armed goons.
“Lev Antonin, as promised I brought you a present,” he said as he placed the box on Antonin’s desk. On the way over, it had grown surprisingly heavy.
Antonin looked from him to the box, evincing little enthusiasm. Signaling to one of his bodyguards, he had him open the box. Then he stood up and peered inside.
“Who the fuck is this?” he asked.
“The murderer.”
“What’s his name?”
“Mikhail Gorbachev,” Tarkanian said sardonically, “how the hell should I know?”
Antonin’s face was particularly ugly when he smirked. “If you don’t know his name, how d’you know he’s the one?”
“I caught him in the act,” Tarkanian said. “He had broken into your house, he was about to kill your wife and children.”
Antonin’s face darkened and, snatching up the phone, he dialed a number. His face relaxed somewhat when he heard his wife’s voice.
“Are you all right? Is everyone safe?” He frowned. “What do you mean? What—? Who the fuck is this? Where’s my wife?” His face had grown dark again and he looked at Tarkanian. “What the fuck is going on?”
Tarkanian kept his voice calm and even. “Your family is safe, Lev Antonin, and they’ll remain safe as long as I have free passage to take Arkadin. If you interfere in any way—”
“I’ll surround the house, my men will break in—”
“And your wife and three children will die.”
Antonin whipped out a Stechkin handgun and aimed it at Tarkanian. “I’ll shoot you right here where you stand, and I promise your death won’t be quick.”
“In that event, your wife and children will die.” Tarkanian’s voice had an edge now. “Whatever you do to me will be done to them.”
Antonin glared at Tarkanian, then dropped the Stechkin on the desktop next to the cake box. He looked ready to tear his hair out.
“The idea with Neanderthals,” Tarkanian said to Arkadin later, “is to lead them by the hand through all their possible responses, showing them the futility of each one.”
He said, “Listen to me, Lev Antonin, you have what we bargained for. If you still want everything, try to remember that pigs get slaughtered.”
Then Tarkanian left the office to find Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.
Tracy Atherton and Alonzo Pecunia Zuñiga presented themselves on the front steps of Don Fernando Hererra’s house at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, bathed in brilliant sunshine amplified by a virtually cloudless sky.
Bourne, with his spade beard and new hairstyle, had shopped for clothes suitable for a distinguished professor from Madrid. Their last stop was an optician’s, where he purchased a pair of contact lenses the color of the professor’s eyes.
Hererra lived in the Santa Cruz barrio of Seville, in a beautiful three-story stucco house painted white and yellow, whose upper-story windows were guarded by magnificent wrought-iron balconies. Its facade formed one side of a small plaza in the center of which was an old well that had been turned into an octagonal fountain. Small haberdashery and crockery shops lined the other three sides, their quaint fronts shaded by palm and orange trees.
A piano melody, soft and sinuous, came to them. They could see an Old World drawing room with a wall of ebony bookshelves illuminated by raking light from a line of French doors that led out onto an inner courtyard. There was an elegant escritoire, a matching pair of sofas of cinnamon-colored leather, a sideboard on which were arranged five delicate orchids, like girls at a beauty pageant. But the drawing room was dominated by an antique spinet piano behind which sat a large man with an enormous shock of luxuriant white hair brushed straight back off his wide, intelligent forehead. His body was bent in an attitude of exacting concentration, and there was a pencil gripped between his teeth so that he looked like he was in pain. In fact, he was composing a song with a rather florid melody that owed a debt to any number of Iberian virtuosos, as well as to certain flamenco folk tunes.
As they entered, he looked up. Don Hererra had startling blue, slightly exophthalmic eyes, making him look something like a praying mantis as he rose, unfolding from the piano bench in stages. He had dark, leathery skin, wind-burned and sun-wrinkled, marking him as an inveterate outdoorsman. His body was lean and flat, as if he had been constructed in two dimensions instead of three. He appeared to wear the years he’d spent in the Colombian oil fields as a second skin.
Taking the pencil from between his teeth, he smiled warmly. “Ah, my distinguished guests, what a pleasure.” He kissed the back of Tracy’s hand and shook Bourne’s. “Dear lady. And Professor, it’s an honor to welcome you both to my house.” He gestured toward one of the leather sofas. “Please make yourselves comfortable.” He was dressed in an open-neck white shirt under an immaculate cream-colored suit of lightweight silk that looked soft as a baby’s cheek. “Would you care for sherry, or something stronger, perhaps?”