Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy (35 page)

"Does your mother still play?"

Annaka shook her head. "Like Chopin, her health was frail. Tuberculosis. She died when I was eighteen."

"A bad age to lose a parent."

"It changed my life forever. I was grief-stricken, of course, but much to my astonishment and shame, beneath that I was angry at her,"

"Angry?"

She nodded. "I felt abandoned, unmoored, left at sea with no way to find my way back home."

All at once Bourne understood how she could empathize with the difficulty of his loss of memory.

She frowned. "But, really, what I regret most is how shabbily I treated her. When she first proposed I take up the piano, I rebelled."

"Of course you did," he said gently. "It was her suggestion. Moreover, it was her profession." He felt a small
frisson
in the pit of his stomach, as if she had just now played one of Chopin's famous dissonances. "When I talked to my son about baseball, he turned up his nose, wanted to play soccer instead." As he dredged up the memory of Joshua, Bourne's eyes turned inward. "All his friends played soccer, but there was something else. His mother was Thai; he was schooled in Buddhism at a very early age, as was her wish. His 'American-ness' wasn't of interest to him."

Finished, Annaka pushed her plate away.

"On the contrary, I think it was probable that his 'American-ness' was very much on his mind," she said. "How could it be otherwise? Don't you think he was reminded of it every day at school?"

Unbidden came an image of Joshua in bandages, one eye black-and-blue. When he had asked Dao about it, she had told him that the child had fallen at home, but the following day she had taken Joshua to school herself, had stayed there for several hours. He'd never questioned her; at the time he'd been far too busy at work even to think it through himself.

"It never occurred to me," he said now.

Annaka shrugged and, without perceptible irony, said, "Why should it? You're American. The world belongs to you."

Was that the source of her innate animosity? he wondered. Was it simply generic, the fear of the ugly American that had lately been resurrected?'

She asked the waiter for more coffee. "At least you're able to work things out with your son," she said. "With my mother ..." She shrugged.

"My son's dead," Bourne said, "along with his sister and mother. They were killed in Phnom Penh many years ago."

"Oh." It appeared that he had finally punctured her cool, steely exterior. "I'm so sorry." He turned his head away; any talk of Joshua felt like salt being rubbed into an open wound. "Surely you came to terms with your mother before she died."

"I wish I had." Annaka stared down at her coffee, a look of concentration on her face.

"It wasn't until she introduced me to Chopin that I understood the full measure of the gift she had given me. How I loved to play the Nocturnes, even when I was far from accomplished!"

"You didn't tell her?"

"I was a teenager; we weren't exactly talking." Her eyes darkened in sorrow. "Now that she's gone, I wish I had."

"You had your father."

"Yes, of course," she said. "I had him."

The tactical Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was housed in a series of anonymouslooking red-brick buildings covered with climbing ivy that had once been a women's boarding school. The Agency had deemed it more secure to take over an existing site than to build one from scratch. That way they could gut the structures, creating from the inside the warren of labs, conference rooms and testing sites the directorate required, using their own highly skilled personnel rather than outside contractors.

Even though Lindros showed his ID he was taken inside an all-white windowless room where he was photographed, fingerprinted and his retinas scanned. He waited alone. Finally, after fifteen minutes or so, a CIA suit entered, addressed Lindros, "Deputy Director Lindros, Director Driver will see you now."

Without a word. Lindros followed the suit out of the room. They spent another five minutes marching up and down featureless corridors with indirect lighting. For all he knew, he was being led around in a circle.

At length, the suit stopped at a door that, as far as Lindros could tell, was identical to all the others they had passed. As with the others, there was no marking, no identification of any sort anywhere on or near the door, save for two small bulbs. One glowed a deep red. The suit rapped his knuckles three times on the door. A moment later the red light went out and the other bulb glowed green. The suit opened the door, stepped back for him to go through.

On the other side of it, he found Director Randy Driver, a sandy-haired individual with a Marine high-and-tight haircut, a blade-straight nose and narrow blue eyes that gave him a perpetually suspicious look. He had wide shoulders and a muscular torso he liked to show off a bit too much. He sat in a high-tech mesh swivel chair behind a smoked glass and stainless-steel desk. In the center of each white metal wall hung a reproduction of a Mark Rothko painting, each looking like swaths of colored bandages applied to a raw wound.

"Deputy Director, an unexpected pleasure," Driver said with a tight smile that belied his words. "I confess I'm not accustomed to snap inspections. I would've preferred the courtesy of an appointment."

"Apologies," Lindros said, "but this isn't a snap inspection. I'm conducting a murder investigation."

"Alexander Conklin's murder, I presume."

"Indeed. I need to interview one of your people. A Dr. Felix Schiffer." It was as if Lindros had dropped an immobility bomb. Driver sat unmoving behind his desk, the tight smile frozen on his face like a rictus. At last, Driver seemed to regain his composure. "What on earth for?"

"I just told you," Lindros said. "It's part of our ongoing investigation." Driver spread his hands. "I can't see how."

"It's not required that you do," Lindros said shortly. Driver had made him sit and wait like a child at detention, now he was being given a verbal runaround. Lindros was rapidly losing patience with him. "All that's required is that you tell me where Dr. Schiffer is." Driver's face closed down entirely. "The moment you crossed my threshold, you entered my territory." He stood. "While you were undergoing our identification procedures, I took the liberty of calling the DCI. His office has no idea why you might be here."

"Of course not," Lindros retorted, knowing he'd already lost the battle. "The DCI debriefs me at the end of the each day."

"I've no interest whatsoever in your operations, Deputy Director. The bottom line is that no one interviews any of my personnel without express written authorization from the DCI himself."

"The DCI has empowered me to take this investigation wherever I deem it necessary."

"I've only your word for that." Driver shrugged. "You can see my point ofvi—"

"As a matter of fact, I can't," Lindros said. He knew that continuing on in this vein would get him nowhere. Worse, it wasn't politic, but Randy Driver had pissed him off and he couldn't help himself. "In my view, you're being obstinate and obstructionist." Driver leaned forward, his knuckles cracking as he pushed them down against the desk top. "Your view is irrelevant. In the absence of official signed documents, I have nothing more to say to you. This interview is at an end."

The suit must have been listening in on the conversation because just then the door opened and he stood there, waiting to escort Lindros out.

It was while riding down a perp that Detective Harris got the brainstorm. He'd received the all-points radio call about the male Caucasian in a black late model Pontiac GTO, Virginia plates, who'd run a red light outside of Falls Church, heading south on Route 649. Harris, who had been inexplicably banished by Martin Lindros from the ConklinPanov murders, was in Sleepy Hollow, following up on a convenience store robberymurder when the call came in. Right on 649. He spun his cruiser around in a ragged U-turn, then had headed off, lights going, siren blaring, heading north on 649. Almost immediately, he saw the black GTO and behind it a string of three Virginia state trooper cars.

He veered across the median in a blare of horns and screeching tires coming from the oncoming traffic and headed straight at the GTO. The driver saw him, changed lanes, and as Harris began to follow him through the jigsaw puzzle of stalled traffic, he veered off the road itself, zipping across the breakdown lane.

Harris, calculating vectors, nosed his cruiser on an intercept course, which forced the plunging GTO onto the apron of a gas station. If he didn't pull up, he'd crash right into the line of pumps.

As the GTO screamed to a halt, rocking on its oversized shocks, Harris scrambled out of his car, his service revolver drawn, headed straight at the driver.

"Get out of the car with your hands in the air!" Harris called.

"Officer—"

"Shut up and do as I say!" Harris said, advancing steadily, his eyes peeled for any sign of a weapon.

"Okay, okay!"

The driver got out of the car just as the other cruisers caught up. Harris could see that the perp was no more than twenty-two, thin as a rail. They found a pint of liquor in the car and, underneath the front seat, a gun.

"I've got a license for it!" the young man said. "Just look in the glove compartment!" The gun was, indeed, licensed. The young man was a diamond courier. Why he'd been drinking was another story, one Harris wasn't particularly interested in. Back at the station, what had caught his attention was that the license didn't check out. He made a call to the store that had supposedly sold the young man the gun. He got a foreign-sounding voice that admitted selling the young man the gun, but something in that voice nagged at Harris. So he'd taken a ride over to the store, only to find that it didn't exist. Instead, he found a single Russian with a computer server. He arrested the Russian and impounded the server.

Now he returned to the station, accessed the gun-permit database for the last six months. He plugged in the name of the bogus gun store and discovered, to his shock, more than three hundred false sales that were used to generate legitimate permits. But there was an even bigger surprise waiting for him when he accessed the files on the server he'd confiscated. When he saw the entry, he grabbed his phone and dialed Lindros'

cell.

"Hey, it's Harry."

"Oh, hello," Lindros said, as if his attention was elsewhere.

"What's the matter?" Harris asked. "You sound terrible."

"I'm stymied. Worse, I just got my teeth figuratively kicked in and now I'm wondering if I have enough ammunition to go to the Old Man with it."

"Listen, Martin, I know I'm officially off the case—"

"Jesus, Harry, I've been meaning to talk to you about that."

"Never mind now," Detective Harris interrupted. He launched into an abbreviated account of the driver of the GTO, his gun, and the scam being run on falsely registered guns. "You see how it works," he went on. "These guys can get guns for anyone they want."

"Yeah, so?" Lindros said without much enthusiasm.

"So they can also put anyone's name on the registration. Like David Webb's."

"That's a nice theory, but—"

"Martin, it isn't a theory!" Harris was fairly shouting into the receiver; everyone around him looked up from their work, surprised at the rising sound of his voice. "It's the real deal!"

"What?!"

"That's right. This same ring 'sold' a gun to one David Webb, only Webb never bought it, because the store on the permit doesn't exist."

"Okay, but how d'we know Webb didn't know about this ring and used them to get a gun illegally?"

"That's the beauty part," Harris said. "I have the electronic ledger from the ring. Every sale is meticulously recorded. Funds for the gun Webb supposedly bought were wired in from Budapest."

The monastery perched atop a mountain ridge. On the steep terraces far below, it grew oranges and olives, but up above, where the building seemed implanted like a molar in the bedrock itself, there grew only thistle and wild laudanum.
Kri-kri,
the ubiquitous Cretan mountain goat, were the only creatures able to sustain themselves at the level of the monastery.

The ancient stone construction had long been forgotten. Which of the marauding peoples from the island's storied history had built it was difficult for a lay person to say. It had, like Crete itself, passed through many hands, been mute witness to prayers and sacrifice and the spilling of blood. Even from a cursory glance, however, it was clear that it was very old.

From the dawn of time, the issue of security had been of paramount importance to warriors and monastics alike, hence the monastery's place atop the mountain. On one slope were the fragrant terraced groves; on the other was a gorge, not unlike the slash of a Saracen's cutlass, scored deep into the rock, opening up the mountain's flesh. Having encountered professional resistance at the house in Iraklion, Spalko proceeded to plan this assault with a great deal of care. Making a run at the place in daylight was out of the question. No matter in which direction they might try it, they were certain to be mowed down long before they reached the monastery's thick and crenelated outer walls. Therefore, while his men took their wounded compatriot back to the jet to be tended to by the surgeon and to assemble the needed supplies, Spalko and Zina rented motorcycles so that they could reconnoiter the area surrounding the monastery.

At the edge of the gorge, they left their vehicles and hiked down. The sky was an absorbent blue, so brilliant that it seemed to imbue every other color with its aura. Birds circled and rose on the thermals, and when the breeze picked up, the delicious scent of orange blossoms perfumed the air. Ever since she boarded his personal jet, Zina had been patiently waiting to find out why Spalko wanted to get her alone.

"There's an underground entrance to the monastery," Spalko said, as they descended the rocky scree into the end of the gorge closest to the structure. The chestnut trees on the lip of the gorge had given way to tougher cypresses, whose twisted trunks extended from the earthen crannies between boulders. They used the flexible branches as impromptu handholds as they continued down the steep slope of the gorge.