The Bourne Betrayal (13 page)

Lerner stirred sugar into his cup for a moment. “So what’s this all about?”

She took a sip of the black coffee, rolled the liquid around in her mouth as if it were a fine wine, then, satisfied, swallowed and put down her cup.

“Drink up, Matthew. It’s single-estate Ethiopian. Strong and rich.”

“Another new protocol I’ve instituted, Ms. Held. We do not address each other by our Christian names.”

“The problem with some strong coffee,” she said, ignoring him, “is that it can be quite acidic. Too much acid will turn the strength against itself, upset the entire digestive system. Even burn a hole in the stomach. When that happens, the coffee must be thrown out.”

Lerner sat back. “Meaning?” He knew she wasn’t talking about coffee.

She allowed her eyes to rest on his face for a moment. “You were named
DDCI
, what, six months ago? Change is difficult for everyone. But there are certain protocols that cannot be-”

“Get to the point.”

She took another sip of coffee. “It’s not a good idea, Matthew, to be bad-mouthing Martin Lindros.”

“Yeah? What makes him so special?”

“If you’d been at this level longer, you wouldn’t need to ask.”

“Why are we talking about Lindros? Chances are he’s dead.”

“We don’t know that,” Anne said shortly.

“Anyway, we’re not really talking about Lindros’s territory, are we, Ms. Held?”

She flushed then, despite herself. “You had no good cause to lower my clearance level.”

“Whatever you might think your title entitles you to, it doesn’t. You’re still support personnel.”

“I’m the DCI’s right hand. If he needs intel, I fetch it for him.”

“I’m transferring in Reilly from Ops Directorate. He’ll be handling all the Old Man’s research from now on.” Lerner sighed. “I see the look on your face. Don’t take these changes personally. It’s standard operational procedure. Besides, if you get special treatment, the other support personnel start to resent it. Resentment breeds distrust, and that we cannot tolerate.”

He pushed his coffee cup away. “Whether you choose to believe it or not, Ms. Held, CI is moribund. It has been for years. What it needs most is a high colonic. I’m it.”

“Martin Lindros has been put in charge of revamping CI,” she said icily.

“Lindros is the Old Man’s weakness. His way isn’t the right way. Mine is.” He smiled as he rose.

“Oh, and one other thing. Don’t ever mislead me again. Support staff have no business wasting the deputy director’s time with coffee and opinions.”

Kim Lovett, in her lab at
FIU
headquarters on Vermont Avenue, was at the most crucial stage of her tests. She had to transfer the solid material she’d collected on the fifth-floor suite of the Constitution Hotel from its airtight vials for the headspace gas chromatography. The theory was this: Since all known fire accelerants were highly volatile liquid hydrocarbons, the gases that the compounds gave off often remained at the scene for hours afterward. The idea was to capture the gases in the headspace above the solid material that had been impregnated with the accelerants: bits of charred wood, carpet fibers, lines of grout she’d dug out with a dentist’s tool. She would then take a chromatogram of each of the gases based on its individual boiling point. In this way, a fingerprint of the accelerant emerged to be identified.

Kim stuck a long needle into the lid of each container, drew out the gas that had formed above the solid material, and injected it into the cylinder of the gas chromatograph without exposing it to the air. She ensured that the settings were correct, then slipped the switch that would begin the process of separation and analysis.

She was making notes as to the date, time, and sample number when she heard the lab door whoosh open and, turning, saw Detective Overton enter. He wore a fog-gray overcoat and carried two paper coffee cups in his hands. He set one down in front of her. She thanked him.

He seemed more morose than before. “What news?”

Kim savored the hot, sweet burn of the coffee in her mouth and her throat. “We’ll know in a minute what accelerant was used.”

“How’s that going to help me?”

“I thought you were handing the case over to Homeland Security?”

“Magnificent bastards. Two agents were in my captain’s office this morning, demanding my notes,” Overton said. “Not that I wasn’t expecting it. So I made two sets, because I mean to break this case and shove it in their faces.”

A beep sounded.

“Here we go.” Kim swiveled around. “The results are ready.” She peered at the chromatograph’s readout. “Carbon disulfide.” She nodded. “This is interesting. Typically, we don’t see this particular accelerant in arson cases.”

“Then why choose this one?”

“Good question. My guess is because it burns hotter and has an explosive limit of fifty percentway higher than other accelerants.” She swiveled around again. “You remember I found accelerants in two places-in the bathroom and under the windows. This interested me, and now I know why. The chromagraph gave me two separate readouts. In the bathroom, all that was used was the carbon disulfide. But at the other spot, the one in the living room near the windows, I found another compound, a rather complex and odd one.”

“Like what?”

“Not an explosive. Something more unusual. I had to do some checking, but I discovered that it’s a hydrocarbon compound that counteracts fire retardants. This explains how the curtains caught fire, this explains why the explosion blew out the windows. Between the oxygen feeding the flames and the sprinklers being disabled, the maximum amount of damage in the minimum amount of time was virtually ensured.”

“Which is why we were left with nothing, not even an intact skeleton or a set of teeth from which to make a definite ID of the body.” He rubbed the blue stubble on his chin. “The perps thought of everything, didn’t they?”

“Maybe not everything.” Kim held up the two porcelain teeth she’d extracted from the bathtub drain. She had cleaned them of the coating of ash, so that they gleamed an ivory color.

“Right,” said Overton. “We’re trying to find out through channels in Amsterdam whether Jakob or Lev Silver wore a dental bridge. At least then we could make a positive ID.”

“Well, the thing of it is,” Kim said, “I’m not at all sure this is a dental bridge.”

Overton plucked it out of her hand, studied it under a high-intensity lamp. So far as he could see, there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. “What else could it be?”

“I’ve got a call in to a friend of mine. Maybe she can tell us.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s she do?”

Kim looked at him. “She’s a spook.”

Bourne traveled from London to Addis Ababa; Addis Ababa to Djibouti. He rested very little, slept even less. He was too busy poring over the intel of Lindros’s known movements that Soraya had provided him. Unfortunately, much of it was lacking details. Not altogether surprising. Lindros had been tracking the world’s most deadly terrorist cadre. Communications of any kind would have been exceedingly difficult and would have compromised security.

When he wasn’t memorizing the data, Bourne was reviewing the video intel Anne Held had uploaded to Soraya’s cell, which now resided in the PS3, most especially Tim Hytner’s attempt to break the cipher Typhon had found on Cevik’s person. But now Bourne had to wonder about that cipher itself: Was it an authentic Dujja communication or was it a fake, planted, for some reason, for Typhon to find and decode? A bewildering labyrinth of duplicity had opened in front of him. From now on, each step he took was fraught with peril. A single false assumption could drag him under like quicksand.

It was at this moment that Bourne realized that he was up against a foe of extraordinary intelligence and will, a mastermind to rival his old nemesis Carlos.

He closed his eyes for a moment and immediately Marie’s image came to him. It was she who had been his rock, who had helped him get through the tortures of the past. But Marie was gone. Every day that passed, he felt her fading. He tried to hold on, but the Bourne identity was relentless; it would not allow him to dwell on sentimentality, on sorrow and despair. All these emotions dwelled in him, but they were shadows, held at bay by Bourne’s exceptional concentration and relentless need to solve deadly puzzles no one else could tackle. Of course, he understood the wellspring of his singular ability; he’d known it even before Dr. Sunderland had so succinctly summed it up: He was driven by his burning need to unravel the enigma of who he was.

In Djibouti a CI copter, fueled and ready, was waiting for him. He ran across the wet tarmac beneath an angry sky filled with bruised clouds and a humid, swirling wind, and climbed in. It was the morning of the third day since he’d set out from D.C. His limbs felt cramped, muscles bunched tight. He longed for action and was not looking forward to the hour-long flight to Ras Dejen.

Breakfast was served on a metal tray, and he dug in as the copter took off. But he tasted nothing and saw nothing, for he was totally inside his mind. He was, for the thousandth time, running Fadi’s cipher, looking at it as a whole, because he’d gotten nowhere following the algorithm route that Tim Hytner had chosen. If Fadi had, indeed, turned Hytner-and Bourne could not come up with another reasonable conclusion-Hytner would have no incentive to actually break the cipher. This was why Bourne had wanted the cipher and Hytner’s work. If he saw that Hytner’s work was bogus, he’d have his proof of the man’s culpability. But of course, that wouldn’t answer the question of whether the cipher contained real intel or disinformation meant to confuse and misdirect Typhon.

Unfortunately, he was no closer to solving the cipher’s algorithm or even knowing whether Hytner had been on the right track. He had, however, spent two restless nights filled not with dreams, but memory shards. He was disappointed that Dr. Sunderland’s treatment had had such a short-term effect, but he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Worse, by far, was the sense of impending calamity. All the shards revolved around the tall trees, the mineral scent of the water, the desperate flight across sand. Desperate not only for him, but for someone else as well. He’d violated one of his own cardinal rules, and now he was going to pay for it. Something had set off this series of memory fragments, and he had a strong suspicion that this origin was the key to understanding what had happened to him before. It was maddening to have no-or at best limited-access to his past. His life was a blank slate, each day like the day he’d been born. Knowledge denied-essential knowledge. How could he begin to know himself when his past had been taken away from him?

The copter, soaring below the thick cloud layer, swung northwest, heading toward the Simien mountain range. When Bourne finished his breakfast, he climbed into an extreme-weather jumpsuit and specially made snow boots with extra-thick soles studded with metal blades meant to give him support on icy and rocky terrain.

As he stared out the curved window, his thoughts turned inward again, this time toward his friend Martin Lindros. He’d met Lindros after his old mentor, Alex Conklin, was found murdered. It was Lindros who’d stood behind Bourne, believed in him when the Old Man had put out a worldwide sanction against him. Ever since, Lindros had been his faithful backup at CI. Bourne steeled himself. Whatever had happened to Lindros-whether he was alive or dead-Bourne was determined to bring him home.

Just over an hour later, he arrived on the north slope of Ras Dejen. Brilliant sunlight made shadows sharp as razor blades on the mountainside, which seemed to exist in a curling sea of cloud through which, now and again, vultures could be seen, soaring on the thermals.

Bourne was just behind Davis’s right shoulder when the young pilot pointed down. There was the wreckage of both Chinooks, pillowed in fresh snow, streaked with black, metal stripped back, twisted off as if with a mammoth can opener wielded by a maniacal demon.

“Damage is consistent with ground-to-air missiles,” Davis said.

So Soraya had been right. This kind of war matйriel was expensive, a high cost only an alliance with organized crime could pay for. Bourne peered more closely as they neared the site. “But there’s a difference. The one on the left-”

“From what’s left of the markings, the chopper carrying Skorpion One.”

“Look at the rotors. That one was shot as it was about to take off. The second chopper hit the ground with a great deal of force. It must’ve been hit as it was coming in for a landing.”

Davis nodded. “Roger that. The opposition’s well armed, all right. Odd for this neck of the woods.”

Bourne couldn’t have agreed more.

Taking up a pair of field glasses, he directed Davis to circle the site. The moment the terrain came into focus, he was gripped with an intense feeling of dйjа vu. He’d been to this part of Ras Dejen before, he was certain of it. But when? And why? He knew, for instance, where to look for hiding enemies. Directing the pilot, he searched every nook and crevice, every shadowed place around the periphery of the landing site.

He knew also that Ras Dejen, the highest peak in the Simien mountain chain, was within Amhara, one of the nine ethnic divisions within Ethiopia. The Amhara people made up 30 percent of the country’s population. Amharic was Ethiopia’s official language. In fact, after Arabic, it was the world’s second most spoken Semitic language.

He was familiar with the Amhara mountain tribes. None of them had the means-either financially or technically-to inflict such sophisticated damage. “Whoever it was isn’t here now. Take her down.”

Davis brought the copter to rest just north of the wreckage. It slipped sideways a bit on the ice beneath the layer of fresh powder; then he had it under control. The moment they were on solid ground, he handed Bourne a Thuraya satellite phone. Just slightly larger than a normal cell phone, it was the only kind that would work in this mountainous terrain, where normal
GSM
signals were unavailable.

“Stay here,” Bourne said as the pilot began to unstrap himself. “No matter what, wait for me. I’ll check in every two hours. Six hours go by without hearing from me, you take off.”