The Bourne Dominion (29 page)

“Of course I do.” But she had answered too quickly, and now she paused, thinking. A frown invaded her face.

“Are you Swedish,” Bourne said gently, “or Achagua?”

“My blood is—”

“But blood has so little to do with it, Kaja!” Don Fernando cried. “Identity has no basis in reality. It’s pure perception. Not only how others see you and react to you, but also how you think of yourself, how you react.” He grunted in what seemed mock disgust. “I think Jason is right. You should make that snake tattoo permanent.”

Kaja jumped up. “You were listening through the door!”

Don Fernando held up a key. “How else would I know whether I needed to open it.”

“Jason hardly needed your help,” she said.

“I wasn’t thinking about him,” Don Fernando said.

She looked up. “Thank you.”

It was astonishing, Bourne thought, how far she had come from being Rosie, Estevan Vegas’s Colombian mistress.

Don Fernando gestured. “I think we all could use a drink.”

Kaja nodded and rose. As the three of them returned to the living room, she asked about Estevan.

“Sleeping off his fear, gathering his strength, which he will need.” Don Fernando shrugged. “It is unfortunate. He only knows one life, and it’s a far simpler one than the one in which he now finds himself.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Kaja bristled. “Do you think I’m going to leave him?”

“If you do,” Don Fernando said as he poured them some of his extraordinary sherry, “you are sure to break his heart.”

She accepted the glass he handed her. “Estevan’s heart was broken long before he met me.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t be again.”

Bourne accepted the sherry and sipped it slowly. He sat on the sofa. The adrenaline was wearing off and his side burned as if Kaja had stuck him with a hot poker.

“Kaja—” Bourne broke off at the shake of her head.

She came over and sat beside him. “I know Estevan and I would never have made it here without you. For this I thank you. And…” She
stared down into the golden depths of her sherry. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So. The past is the past. I have buried it.” Her head turned, her eyes engaged with his. “And so should you.”

Bourne nodded and finished his sherry. He waved Don Hernando off when he offered a refill.

“It would help me,” he said, “if you could tell me about your father.”

Kaja gave a bitter laugh, then took a long sip of her sherry. Her eyes closed for a moment. “How I wish there was someone who could tell me about him. One day, he went away. He left us as if we were a bunch of playthings he’d outgrown. I was nine. Two years later, my mother…” She could have finished that thought; she took a small sip of sherry instead. Light winked off the rim of the glass as she tipped it to her mouth. She swallowed hard. “Thirteen years ago. It feels like a lifetime.” Her shoulders slumped. “Sometimes several lifetimes.”

“He was a spy, an assassin,” Bourne said. “Who was he working for?”

“I don’t know,” Kaja said. “And believe me I tried to find out.” Her eyes cut away for a moment. “I feel certain that Mikaela, my other sister, discovered who it was.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“She was killed before she could say a word to either me or Skara.”

“Triplets,” Don Hernando cut in.

Now the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. “So you and Skara ghosted away, changing identities,” Bourne said, “hiding, as you said, in plain sight.”

“
I
did at least.” Kaja put her head down, resting the sugary rim of the glass against her forehead. “I went as far away from Stockholm as I could.”

“But your father’s organization found you anyway.”

She nodded. “Two men came. I killed one and wounded the other. I was running away from him when I surprised the margay.”

Bourne thought for a moment. “Is there anything you can tell me about the two men?”

Kaja shuddered and took another deep breath. For the first time, she looked terribly young and vulnerable, the runaway girl from Stockholm.
And in that moment, Bourne caught a glimpse of the energy it took for her to maintain her Rosie identity.

“The men spoke to each other in English,” she said at last. “But at the end, the one I killed said something just before he died. It wasn’t in English. It was in Russian.”

H
ENDRICKS WAS JUST
wrapping up the eighth Samaritan strategy session in the last thirty-six hours—this one on staff deployment along the perimeter that had been established around the Indigo Ridge mine—when Davies, one of his half a dozen aides, entered the room.

“It’s the POTUS on the secure line, sir,” Davies whispered in his ear before departing.

“Okay, out,” Hendricks said to the participants. “But stand by for final orders. We deploy personnel in four hours.”

After everyone had filed out and the door was closed, Hendricks swiveled his chair and, for a moment, stared out the window at the pristine, newly mowed lawn, bordered by the picket line of massive concrete anti-terrorist blockades that had been erected in 2001. Someone, perhaps in a fit of irony, had placed a row of flowerpots atop them.
Like planting flowers on a battleship
, he thought. The blockades stood immutable; their purpose could not be mitigated. Tourists milled on the other side of them, but the lawn was spotless, not a single weed allowed to show its face. Something about that deserted expanse depressed Hendricks.

Sighing inwardly, he picked up the receiver connected to the secure line to the White House.

“Chris, you there?”

There was a hollow sound, peculiar to the encryption program that scrambled their words every ten seconds.

“I’m right here, Mr. President.”

“How’s the boy!”

Hendricks’s stomach contracted. The president’s voice evinced that false heartiness it typically took on when he had some bad news to impart to the recipient.

“Tip-top, sir.”

“That’s the spirit. How are the plans for Samaritan progressing?”

“Almost complete, sir.”

“Uhm-hum,” the president said, by which he meant he wasn’t listening.

Hendricks reached into a drawer for the box of Prilosec he always kept on hand for emergencies.

“It’s Samaritan I want to talk to you about. It so happens that this morning I had breakfast with Ken Marshall and Billy Stokes.”

The president paused to allow the two names to sink in. Marshall, who had been in the initial Samaritan meeting in the Oval Office, and Stokes, who had not, were, respectively, the Pentagon’s and the DoD’s most powerful generals.

“Anyway,” the POTUS continued, “with one thing and another, the conversation eventually came around to Samaritan. Now listen here, Chris, it’s Ken and Billy’s considered opinion that as far as Samaritan is concerned, CI’s gotten the short end of the stick.”

“You mean Danziger.”

Hendricks could sense the president taking a breath while he counted to ten.

“What I mean is that I agree with them. I want you to give Danziger a larger role in the operation.”

Hendricks closed his eyes. He swallowed a Prilosec even as he felt a headache beating a tattoo against his forehead. “Sir, with all due respect, Samaritan is already set.”

“Almost. You said it yourself, Chris.”

Was it possible to scream at yourself? Hendricks wondered.

“This is my operation,” he said doggedly. “You gave it to me.”

“The Lord giveth, Chris, and the Lord taketh away.”

Hendricks gritted his teeth. It was no use telling the president what a perfect little shit M. Errol Danziger was. The president had appointed him. Even supposing the POTUS shared Hendricks’s opinion, he would never admit that he’d made a mistake, not in the current perilous political climate. One false move would set alight the worldwide blogosphere, which would in turn ignite a firestorm of talking heads on CNN and Fox News, which would spawn endless op-ed column inches. The poll numbers the president and his advisers scrutinized every month would plummet. No, these days even the president of the United States needed to be ultra-cautious with both his choices and his statements.

“I’ll do what I can to soothe the ruffled feathers,” Hendricks said.

“Music to my ears, Chris. Keep me informed on your progress.”

With that fiat, the president disconnected. Hendricks didn’t know what gave him more pain, his stomach or his head. He knew Danziger was aiming for complete control of Samaritan, which would surely end in disaster. Danziger was a career opportunist. Amassing power was his sole objective. He had come over to CI from NSA and for the past year he had been remaking CI into a carbon copy of NSA. NSA being an extension of the Pentagon, this was not good news for the American intelligence community. The military relied far too heavily on remote surveillance: eyes in the sky, spy drones, and the like. CI’s stock in trade had always been human eyes and ears in the field. The intercom buzzed, interrupting his misery.

“Sir, everyone’s out here waiting.” Davies’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Do you want to resume the briefing?”

Hendricks rubbed his forehead. A fierce streak of rebelliousness bubbled up in him. “They have their orders. Tell them to put the deployment into effect immediately.”

R
ussian,” Bourne said. “What form of Russian?”

Kaja stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Dialect. Was it southern or—”

“Moscow. He was from Moscow.”

Bourne put his glass down onto a table inlaid with Moroccan tiles. “You’re certain?”

Kaja spoke to him in the Russian dialect used by Muscovites.

“Your father was working for the Russians,” Bourne said.

“That’s the first thing I considered when I heard him,” Kaja said, “but it doesn’t seem credible.”

“Why not?”

“Both my parents hated the Russians.”

“Perhaps your mother did,” Bourne said carefully. “But as for your father, if he was working for the Russians his hatred for them would be part of his cover.”

“Hiding in plain sight.”

Bourne nodded.

She got up then. Don Fernando caught Bourne’s eye. Bourne could see that the Spaniard didn’t want him to continue this topic. Kaja stood in front of the window, staring at her reflection much as Bourne himself had done at Vegas’s house the night before the helicopter attack.

A terrible silence invaded the room, but it was Kaja’s silence. Neither Bourne nor Don Fernando felt it wise to break it.

“Do you think it’s true?” Kaja’s voice seemed to come from another place.

At length, she turned back in to the room and looked from one to the other, repeating her question.

“From what you’ve told us,” Bourne said, “it seems the likeliest possibility.”

“Fuck,” Kaja said. “Fuck-fuck-fuck.”

Don Fernando stirred, clearly uncomfortable. “There’s always the possibility that Jason is wrong.”

Kaja laughed, but there was a bitter edge to it. “Sure. Thank you, Don Fernando, but I’m long past the age where I can believe in fairy tales.” She turned to Bourne, hands on her hips. “So. Any ideas?”

Bourne knew she meant who, specifically, her father might have worked for. He shook his head. “Since he was a foreign national working outside Russia, the SVR—Russia’s equivalent of America’s Central Intelligence—is a possibility. But frankly, he could just as easily have been recruited by one of the
grupperovka
families.”

“The Russian mob,” Kaja said.

“Yes.”

She frowned. “That would, at least, be a more logical choice for him to make.”

“Kaja,” Don Fernando said, “I caution you against trying to apply logic here.”

“Don Fernando is right,” Bourne said. “We have no idea of your father’s situation. For all we know, he may have been coerced into working for the Russians.”

But already Kaja was shaking her head. “No, I know this much about my father: He could not be coerced.”

“Even if your life and the lives of your sisters hung in the balance?”

“He left us flat.” Her expression was set firm. “He didn’t care about us; he had other things on his mind.”

“He killed for a living,” Bourne said. “It takes a special kind of human being to do it, an even more special kind to be successful at it.”

She engaged his eyes with hers. “My point exactly. No pity, no remorse, no love. Full disconnection from humanity.” She drew her shoulders back, defiant. “I mean, that’s what makes it possible to kill not once, but over and over again. Disconnection. It’s not so hard to put a bullet in the back of the head of a thing.”

Bourne knew that she was talking about him as much as her late father. “There are times when killing is necessary.”

“A necessary evil.”

He nodded. “Whatever you choose to call it doesn’t make it any less of a necessity.”

Kaja swung back to confront the night, shimmering dimly just beyond the panes of glass.

“Leave Christien Norén to the unknown,” Don Fernando said. “Trust me when I tell you that his life, his fate, are over and done with. Kaja, it’s time for you and your sister to move on.”

Kaja gave a dark laugh that was more like a bark. “You try telling Skara that, Don Fernando. She has never listened to me, and I can assure you she won’t start now.”

“Do you know where she is?” the Spaniard asked.

Kaja shook her head. “When we parted, we swore an oath not to look for each other. We have had no contact in more than ten years. We were children then, and now…” She turned back to him. “Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.”

“It would be tragic if that were true. At least, for you.” Don Fernando unfolded on creaky knees and crossed the room to stand beside her. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “There is hope for you, Kaja. There always was, I sincerely believe that. As for Skara…” His last words hung ominously in the room.

“She’s doomed, isn’t she?”

Don Fernando looked at her, a terrible sorrow informing his features.

Bourne stepped toward her. “Why do you say that?”

Kaja looked away.

“Because,” Don Fernando said, “Skara suffers from dissociative identity disorder.”

Kaja’s eyes locked on Bourne’s. “My sister has six distinct alter egos, all of them as real as any of us in this room.”