The Bourne Retribution (27 page)

“Just as many reasons to consider otherwise. Her truth is compelling—it’s good business for all of us. I believe her when she says she wants to keep her father’s legacy alive. If you were Maceo Encarnación’s child you would want the same.”

“But, Felipe, she ran away from him, from her homeland. Now she’s back, offering us precisely what we want and need.”

“My friend, I think you’re giving Carlos Danda Carlos too much credit. He’s not Niccolò Machiavelli.”

“Agreed,” Luz said, shifting on his chair. “But what about the woman? What about Maricruz?”

27

M
aricruz lay back on her pillows after the man she knew as Javvy left her room. She fumbled for the bed’s controls but could not find the buttons. Annoyed more than she should have been by so small a frustration, she pressed the button for the nurse, who entered with her usual official stride.

“I want to lie down.”

Maricruz watched the nurse as she crossed the room and lowered the bed. She hated asking this nurse to do anything for her. At least the first couple of days, when she had to lean on her to get to the lavatory, were behind her. She shuddered at the thought; she had been as weak and helpless as a baby.

“Anything else I can do for you, señora?”

Was that a sneer on the nurse’s face? At another time, another place, Maricruz would have been incensed. Now she simply couldn’t be bothered.

“That will be all.”

She closed her eyes as the door sighed shut behind the nurse. She wanted to think about her last visit with Carlos, but instead her mind slipped its normally tight leash and kept drifting toward Javvy. He seemed a curious mixture of power and sorrow, a compelling combination in any man, but especially so in the surgeon who had restored her to health.

While she was with him she had felt a curious sense of being sexually possessed, as if she were submitting to him. That was not a feeling she had experienced before. She was used to dominating, something Jidan liked far too much, she realized with a start. This new feeling put her in terra incognita, harking back to the darkest days of her adolescence, when a potent combination of rage and raging hormones made her mutinous, barbaric, obsessed with sex. In those half-buried days and nights she had been eager to try anything and everything for the sake of needing to feel something—anything—real, that hadn’t been manufactured by her father.

As far as she was concerned, her marriage to Jidan had been something of a business transaction, though she knew full well he adored her. And yet that was part of the attraction for her—being married to a man who worshipped her, whose demeanor negated Mexican
machismo
, which, so far as she was concerned, was just another form of misogyny. On the other hand, China had once been ruled by the female emperor Wu Zetian, whose social, religious, and historical reforms outlived her. Not that there wasn’t a bias against females in China—there was, to varying degrees, outright or hidden, in all male-dominated societies the world over—but there was an undeniable history of females ruling from behind the bedchamber curtains, even when they didn’t rule outright.

All this brought her back to Javvy. He did not display the Mexican
machismo
, which, unlike her, many women inexplicably found attractive, but neither was he burdened with Jidan’s perverse form of ambiguity, which at times bordered on the androgynous.

The truth was, she had felt magnetized to him when he was near her, as if her inner sense of True North had been stripped from her, and this caused a certain fear to rise inside her like mist obscuring the ground on which she walked.

She had closed her eyes and was just falling asleep when the bustling silence of the floor was pierced by an unearthly shriek. She sat bolt-upright. The shriek came again, echoing through the corridors.

Sliding out of bed, she made her way into the corridor. The nurses’ station was deserted and, apart from Julio, one of her night guards, who was on his feet nervously shuffling from one foot to the other, so was the corridor.

“What’s happening?” she asked him.

He shrugged.

A third shriek, high-pitched, fueled by terror, seemed to emanate from a room not more than a hundred feet from hers.

“Where the hell are the nurses?”

Again, Julio shrugged. “This often happens at night,” he said. “One of the reasons the boss has us here.”

One of the reasons
, she thought as she headed down the corridor toward the room.

“Where are you going?” Julio called. “Señora,
por favor
! You’ll get me fired!”

Ignoring him, Maricruz reached the room. The door was shut. The shrieks had stopped, but now she heard deep, heart-wrenching cries, as if pulled directly from a bloody chest. Steeling herself, she pushed open the door.

Inside the room, she saw the girl from physical therapy. She was sitting up in bed, the sheets rucked around her. The stench of fresh feces filled Maricruz’s nostrils, and as she approached, she saw that the girl was sitting in her own shit. Her head was thrown back, her neck exposed. She stared at the ceiling and, as Maricruz stepped toward her, she let out another unworldly howl that spoke of an anguish beyond imagining.

In the silence between those dreadful wails, Maricruz called for her guard. When he stuck his head in the door, she said, “For the love of God, where are the nurses?”

“I don’t know, señora. Truly.”

“Christ on a crutch,” she murmured to herself.

“Señora?”

“Come here, Julio, and pick this girl up.”

“What are you doing, señora?” He held one hand over his nose and mouth. “How can you stand that stink?”

“Are you serious? Oh, for God’s sake!”

Leaning over the bed, she picked up the girl, who felt as cold and stiff as a marble statue. Ignoring the searing pain in her shoulder, she carried the girl into the bathroom, stripped off her gown, and spent the next ten minutes cleaning her up, holding her all the time, murmuring soothingly to her. The girl’s weight against her shoulder was agony, but as in physical therapy, it was a good pain, it meant something beyond the aftermath of Maricruz’s beating. It brought her out of herself.

As she worked, she felt a shift in the girl. It was so gradual that at first Maricruz, busy with the physical work, scarcely noticed. But by the time she had dried the girl off, Maricruz became aware that the girl’s death-like stiffness had softened, that her head now rested normally against the hollow of her shoulder. She had long since ceased her shrieking, but she wasn’t silent, either. Words and phrases burst from between her lips like air bubbles escaping someone drowning. Maricruz listened closely, but even so the words sounded like nonsense to her, the kind of babble that comes out of a toddler’s mouth before it learns to speak.

She could find no other gown, so she wrapped the child in a bath towel and took her out of the room. True to form, Julio backed up when he saw the two of them coming. Maricruz wished for Tigger, who surely would have helped her.

The corridor was still deserted, but by the time she reached her own room a nurse finally appeared.

“Señora, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Maricruz said, elbowing Julio out of the doorway and stepping into her room.

The nurse hurried toward her. “Is that another patient? Señora, stop! You cannot—”

“The fuck I can’t!” Maricruz said even more vehemently than she had intended.

The nurse went immediately to the station and picked up the phone. “If you don’t stop, I’ll be forced to call security to take the girl back to her room. It’s against hospital policy—”

“Is it hospital policy,” Maricruz said, “to leave an entire floor unmanned? Is it hospital policy to leave a child howling like a wolf, sitting in her own shit and piss? Is it hospital policy to leave a pitiful, severely traumatized creature alone at night?” She glared at the nurse. “So go ahead, call security. I’ll have Julio here call Señor Carlos and we’ll see who prevails.”

The nurse held on to the phone just long enough so as not to lose maximum face. As soon as she put the receiver down, Maricruz told her to get an orderly to clean up the girl’s bed. “Better still, do it yourself. Then find a bed and put it in my room.”

“That I can’t do until tomorrow,” the nurse said icily. “The storeroom is in the basement and it’s locked for the night.”

“Then get me a fresh gown for her,” Maricruz said, taking the girl into her room and laying her on her own bed.

When the nurse came in with the gown and attempted to put it on the girl, Maricruz stopped her. “I’ll do that,” she said, taking the gown from her and unfolding it. “Go clean the room.”

When she hesitated, Julio came into the room. “Do as the señora tells you,” he said gruffly, “or it will be your job.”

Making a sound deep in her throat, the nurse turned on her heel and left. Maricruz heard the soles of her shoes squeaking against the linoleum as she went down the corridor to the girl’s room.

Julio took another step into the room. “How can I help?”

Maricruz gave him a look that set him back on his heels, and he retreated to his usual position on the folding chair outside her door. Turning back to the girl, Maricruz unwrapped her and put on the fresh gown. The girl lay passively in her bed, staring up at her.

“You’re safe now,” Maricruz whispered, bent low over her. Her lips brushed the girl’s cool, damp forehead. “Warm and safe.”

When she climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up, the girl froze, trembling like a dry leaf in a storm.

“It’s all right,” Maricruz whispered. “You’re safe now, you’re safe now.”

Gradually, the terrible tension gripping the girl’s narrow frame began to lose its grip, until, eventually, she curled her little body into Maricruz, as a dog or cat would. She was so thin, Maricruz could feel each knob of her spine as it pressed into her. She curled forward, kissed the top of the girl’s head.

Much later, Maricruz could swear she heard the child purring.

H
ale received the packet from Amir Ophir via the courier at his chicly appointed apartment in Roma, just south of the Zona Rosa. When he was alone, he slit open the arcane packaging. He smiled when he saw the sealing wax, thinking,
That’s Amir for you.

For a long time he stared at the tape with its fingerprint, then he opened Ophir’s instructions and read it twice through, committing it to memory. Drawing an ashtray to him, he struck a match, held the flame to one corner of the paper, watched as it was consumed by the fire. He rose, then, and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

Then he got to work. First, he went to his large oak cabinet, which contained thirteen long and narrow drawers of the kind artists and art dealers use to store prints. Each drawer was labeled with two letters of the alphabet. He opened the second drawer, labeled
C
–
D
, and pulled out the architectural blueprints for Carlos Danda Carlos’s palatial villa. Bringing them over to the table, he spread them out under a goosenecked lamp and devoted his complete attention to them for a solid thirty minutes. When he was certain of what needed to be done, he returned them to their drawer. Next, he crossed to his workshop and gathered the parts he needed, fitting them together beneath a strong light, a jeweler’s loupe over one eye.

Before he was finished, he took the tape Ophir had sent him and applied the fingerprint to the inside of the item he had made.

Finishing assembling it, he packed it and everything else he needed into a plumber’s tool bag, then set out. Night had fallen several hours before. The sky was roiled with low, menacing clouds, off which the lights of the city bounced, creating eerie patterns and lurid colors. Every few seconds thunder boomed, and once or twice lightning split the sky and rattled windowpanes. The air was heavy with rageful electricity.

Hale took a bus that ran alongside Chapultepec Park. Past the statue of Diana, he got off. The rain began to fall first as steaming mist then, abruptly, in sheets that bounced off the sidewalk like sleet. He traveled down Avenida Presidente Masaryk all the way to Rubén Darío. Turning down a quiet, tree-lined street, he immediately saw the plainclothes security detail staked out around Carlos Danda Carlos’s SUV and residence.
Good
, Hale thought,
Carlos is at home
. The villa rose like a spiked medieval castle behind a high stucco wall, festooned with purple bougainvillea and wicked razor wire.

Backtracking to Rubén Darío, he went along to the next street, the trees of the park across the avenue dark and forbidding in the storm. Passing cars threw up bow waves of water as they passed, headlights rearing up, then veering away.

Hale entered the street parallel to the one he’d been on. He was now nearing the rear of Carlos’s villa. In the heavily shadowed alleyway, he found the electrical box, half hidden by thick foliage, precisely where the architectural blueprints showed it would be.

Completely sheltered from both the rain and the prying eyes of the security contingent, he set down his plumber’s bag, donned rubber gloves, and wiped the bag free of prints. Then he dug out the tools he needed and went to work. Seven minutes later, the lights winked out in the villa as the power lines were cut. At once, he heard the shouts of the security team as they called to one another. Leaving the open bag where it lay, he raced back around the way he had come.