The Bourne Dominion (21 page)

She laughed. “ ‘Midge’! I haven’t heard that name since I stopped reading
Archie
comics.” She apparently made a decision, because she held out her hand. “Lana Lang.”

He took her hand in his. It was cool, the edges more callused than he had expected. Maybe not an amateur, he thought. “You’re joking, right?”

“Uh-uh.” Her smile could be wicked. “My dad was some huge Superman fan.”

“Hello, Lana Lang. Bryan Stonyfield.”

“I know who you are,” she said very softly.

Boris, who had not let go of her hand, tightened his grip. “How would that be? We’ve never met before.”

“I’m Wagner’s daughter.” She slipped her hand from his and put more than enough euros on the table to cover both their meals. “Now you must come with me, no questions asked.”

“Wait a minute,” Karpov said, bristling. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“But you must,” Lana said. “You’re in mortal danger. Without me, you’ll be dead before dawn.”

T
HEY MADE THE
trip down the mountain without difficulty. Bourne had been correct in trusting to Vegas’s local knowledge. His shortcut bypassed all the federal military roadblocks, as well as any of Suarez’s FARC patrols looking for their commander.

Bourne reconnoitered the airport and its environs, looking for hostiles and finding none.

“You can’t go into the terminal looking like that,” Rosie said as she got out of Vegas’s jeep.

Bourne looked at himself in the rearview mirror. There were smears of blood all over him, and his clothes were ripped.

Rosie dug into her bag and came out with a handful of money. “Stay here,” she said.

Bourne was about to protest but the look in her eye stayed him. He watched her head into the terminal and counted off the minutes. At fifteen, he resolved to go in after her.

Vegas leaned against his jeep, smoking. “Don’t worry,
hombre
. She can take care of herself.”

As it turned out, Vegas’s trust in her was well placed. Rosie emerged
from the terminal swinging a white paper shopping bag. She had bought Bourne a shirt and a pair of jeans, along with underwear and socks. As he stripped off his bloody and shredded shirt, she climbed in beside him.

“Ah, good,” she said when she eyed the bottle of disinfectant and the roll of gauze he had taken from the bathroom in Vegas’s house.

She worked expertly on his naked torso, dabbing at all the cuts, scrapes, and abrasions he had collected in his fall from the pine tree. All the while, Vegas smoked his cigarette and grinned hard at Bourne.

“
¿Ella es una maravilla, verdad?
” She’s a wonder, isn’t she? “
¡Tú debe verla en la cama!
” You should see her in bed!

“
¡Estevan, basta!
” But she was laughing, somehow pleased, just the same.

She got out of the jeep then and turned her back so Bourne could strip off the rest of his clothes and pull on the ones she had bought for him.

Two hours after their rendezvous on the road, Bourne limped over to the Perales airport check-in counter. The limp was false, as was his London accent. To his surprise, there were not one or two, but three open tickets waiting for him under the code name
Mr. Zed
. He was pleased to discover that Essai had paid for everything in cash; there were no credit card numbers on the ticket or voucher receipts. He asked for a wheelchair when the time came to pre-board his flight. He booked his ticket under the name of Lloyd Childress, a British national, according to one of the two remaining passports he carried. He had ditched the third before he had left Thailand because the Domna had found him under that identity.

Afterward, in a secluded part of the modest departures terminal, Bourne told the pair what he had discovered.

“Essai left tickets for all three of us to Bogotá with a connecting flight to Seville, via a stop in Madrid,” Bourne said quietly. “There’s also a rental car voucher for when we arrive in Seville. Essai says final instructions will be with the rental car agreement.” He looked from one to the other. “You have your passports?”

Rosie held up her satchel. “Packed days ago.”

“Good.” Bourne was relieved. He did not want to call Deron, his contact in DC, for forged passports because of the delay it would cause. Besides the Domna, he had to assume both FARC and the
federales
would at some point be after them. The fire in the tunnel and now the conflagration at Vegas’s house were signs that even the somnolent Colombian military could not ignore. On the other hand, they could not know whether Vegas and Rosie were alive or dead—the same for him, for that matter.

He checked the time. They had almost two hours before their flight left and then, in Bogotá, ninety minutes more until the departure of their overseas flight at 8:10
PM
. He was certain they would make their plane here, but Bogotá might be a different story. He needed a plan.

He excused himself. Perales was a small, regional airport. He knew he would have better luck finding what he needed in Bogotá, but if the airport in the capital was being surveilled that would be too late. It was here or nowhere.

There were four shops in the departures terminal: a drugstore, a clothing store, a newsstand that also sold sundries aimed at travelers’ needs, and a souvenir shop, the bright yellow, blue, and red horizontal strips of Colombia’s flag in evidence on everything from T-shirts to bandannas to pennants. They weren’t ideal, but then nothing ever was.

He spent the next fifteen minutes limping from shop to shop buying what he thought he would need. He paid cash for all of his purchases.

When he returned to where the couple were sitting, he divvied up the purchases. Then they all went off to the restrooms.

“Is this really necessary?” Vegas said as he set out the shaving paraphernalia on the stainless-steel ledge above the line of sinks.

“Get on with it,” Bourne said.

Shrugging, Vegas splashed his face with hot water, applied shaving cream, and began to take off his beard and mustache.

“I haven’t seen this part of my face in maybe thirty years,” he said as he rinsed off the disposable razor. “I won’t recognize myself.”

“No one else will, either,” Bourne said.

He took the buzzer he had bought and began to give himself a
“high-and-tight,” the military haircut preferred by marines. Then he opened up the various pots of cosmetics he had purchased and started applying color to darken the lower half of Vegas’s newly shorn face to match the rest of it. He made his own lips ruddy, his cheeks hollow and sunken. By the time he was finished, Vegas had emerged from a stall in the new outfit Bourne had picked out for him: shorts, flip-flops, a straw porkpie hat with a yellow, blue, and red band, and a T-shirt with
MEMBER: COLOMBIAN CARTEL
emblazoned across the chest.

“
Hombre
, what have you done to me?” he complained. “I look like a fool.”

Bourne had to stifle a laugh. “All anyone will notice is the T-shirt,” he said.

Taking up a pair of scissors, he slit the left leg of his new jeans. He threw a new roll of gauze at Vegas and said, “Bind up my leg from just below the knee to the bottom of my calf.”

Vegas did as he asked.

Bourne put on the pair of magnifying glasses he had bought and said, “Let’s go see how Rosie looks.”

“I can’t wait,” Vegas said with an exaggerated grimace.

At the last moment, he pulled Bourne away from the door and said in a low voice, “
Hombre, escuchamé
. If anything should happen to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you. We’re all going to talk to Don Fernando together.”

His grip on Bourne’s elbow tightened. “You’ll take care of Rosie.”

“Estevan—”

“What happens to me is of no concern. You’ll protect her no matter what. Promise me,
amigo
.”

The intensity in Vegas’s voice struck Bourne hard. He nodded. “You have my word.”

Vegas withdrew his grip. “
Bueno. Estoy satisfecho
.”

Bourne opened the door and they stepped out into the terminal, Bourne limping noticeably.

Rosie was waiting for them. The clothes Bourne had bought for her fit her perfectly—maybe too perfectly, as Vegas’s eyes seemed about to pop out of his head when he saw her standing there, hands on shapely hips.

The clothes clung to her curves like a second skin, the low-cut shirt showing off the tops of her breasts to electrifying effect. The skirt was short enough that more than half her powerful thighs were revealed.

“
¡Madre de Dios!
” Vegas exclaimed. “With that display even dead men will get an erection.”

Rosie gave him what looked like a Marilyn Monroe moue before breaking out into giggles. “Now I’m ready, sugar,” she said to Vegas. “I feel as strong as Xena, the Warrior Princess.”

“That’s the spirit.” Bourne looked around. “Now all we need is the wheelchair.”

H
endricks, on his way to the conference room a floor below his office, was possessed with the desire to call his son, Jackie. Instead, he was stuck in his meeting with Roy FitzWilliams, the head of Indigo Ridge, who it seemed already had some problems with the details of Samaritan.

Last night, after dropping Maggie off, he had spent an hour tracking Jackie down. Good thing he was secretary of defense, otherwise he would have gotten nowhere with the Pentagon concerning his son’s deployment. Jackie, as it turned out, was in Afghanistan. Even worse, he was heading up black-ops patrols scouring the cave-riddled mountains between Afghanistan and western Pakistan, which were inhabited by both Taliban tribal chieftains and the elite al-Qaeda cadres guarding bin Laden. Hendricks had lain awake the rest of the night thinking alternately about Jackie and Maggie.

Entering the conference room with his satellite aides, he settled himself at the head of the table. One of his aides laid down the sheaf of folders dedicated to Samaritan and opened them for him. Hendricks stared down at the computer printouts, trying to anticipate FitzWilliams’s objections, but his mind was elsewhere.

Jackie. Jackie in the mountains of Afghanistan. Maggie had done this to him, opened up his heart. He had kept his desires locked up tight, but now he wanted his son back. His dinner with Maggie, such a simple thing, had been a night of normalcy after years of being out of the flow of
life, of immersing himself so deeply in the sinkhole of his work. He had ignored—or was it resisted?—the current urging him onward.

FitzWilliams was late. Hendricks channeled his anger away from himself, toward the head of Indigo Ridge, so that when FitzWilliams came bustling in, all energy and bonhomie, Hendricks barked at him.

“Sit yourself down, Roy. You’re late.”

“Sorry about that,” FitzWilliams said, sinking into a chair like a punctured balloon. “It couldn’t be helped.”

“Of course it could have been helped; it can always be helped,” Hendricks said. “I’m sick of hearing people use excuses instead of taking responsibility for their actions.” He flipped the pages of the Samaritan file. “No one’s fault but your own, Roy.”

“Yessir.” FitzWilliams’s cheeks were flaming. His voice seemed caught in his throat. “Definitely my bad. Won’t happen again, I assure you.”

Hendricks cleared his throat. “Now,” he said, “what’s your problem?”

F
ive, Rue Vernet, which housed the Monition Club, was a large, vaguely medieval-looking building constructed of pale gold stone. To one side there was a sunken formal garden with curving gravel paths looping back on themselves, lined with sheared boxwood hedges. In the center was a boxwood fleur-de-lis, ancient symbol of the French royal family. There were no flowers, giving it an austere beauty all its own.

Soraya allowed Aaron to take the lead, standing just behind and to one side of him as he rang the front doorbell. Amun stood directly behind her, so close she could feel his heat. It was odd how the three of them had become a triangle simply because Amun had willed it into being.

As the door opened and they were led inside, she wondered whether her love for Amun was real or imagined. How could something that had seemed so real last week dissolve into a mirage? She was appalled at the thought of how easy it was to fool yourself into believing an emotion was authentic.

They were led through the interior of the building by a young woman
unremarkable in every way: medium height, medium build, dark hair pulled back in a severe bun, a detached expression that squeezed all personality from her face.

Soft indirect light illuminated their way down corridors lined in expensive wood and small framed illuminated manuscripts, which were hung at precise intervals. Their footfalls made no sound on the plush charcoal-colored carpet into which they sank as if in a marsh.

At length, the young woman stopped before a polished wooden door and rapped softly. She responded to an answering voice and opened the door. Stepping aside, she waved them into the suite beyond.

The first room of the suite appeared to be a study as well as an office. It was dominated by a hardwood refectory table and floor-to-ceiling library shelves filled with oversize tomes, some of which looked very old. A number of chairs upholstered in fragrant leather were scattered around the room. To one side was a large globe showing the world as it was known in the seventeenth century. Beyond this space was another distinct room that appeared to be a living room in a residence, modern and lighter in tone and decoration than the study.

When they entered, a man atop a low rolling stepladder twisted his torso, peering at them over a pair of old-fashioned half spectacles.

“Ah, Inspector Lipkin-Renais, I see you have brought reinforcements.” Chuckling lightly, he came down off his perch and approached their group. “Director Donatien Marchand, at your service.”

Amun shouldered past, interrupting before Aaron could complete introductions. “Amun Chalthoum, head of al Mokhabarat, Cairo.” His stiff, formal bow had about it a vaguely threatening aspect that caused Marchand a brief hesitation, a startle in the depths of his black eyes, before his mouth returned to its business-like smile.