The Bourne Sanction (24 page)

BOURNE
AND
BARONOV
sped down Volokolamskoye Highway. Crocus City was an enormous high-end mall. Built in 2002, it was a seemingly endless array of glittering boutiques, restaurants, car showrooms, and marble fountains. It was also an excellent place to lose a tail.

While Bourne shopped for suitable clothes, Baronov was busy on his cell phone. There was no point in going to the trouble of losing the tail inside the maze of the mall only to have him pick them up again when they returned to the Zil. Baronov was calling a colleague to come to Crocus City. They’d take his car, and he’d drive the Zil into 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 fourposter 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.