The Bourne Retribution (41 page)

Eli speared a chunk of cheese with the tines of his fork, chewed on it meditatively. “Ophir is dead. We no longer have anything to fear from him.”

“You have been proved right about Bourne.”

The Director nodded.

“And Amit?”

“A found mole is a useful mole.”

“Those Americans,” his father said.

“They haven’t tumbled to our mole inside CIA, so why alert them that we’ve discovered theirs?” The Director searched around his salad for another cube of cheese. “I’ll send Amit to the Sinai to ensure the Americans don’t lose their focus.”

“He won’t find Bourne.”

“But he’ll waste time trying—and time is all I need.”

There was a silence between father and son. Eli looked at the lights of Tel Aviv flickering through the drizzle that had obscured the sunset, letting his thoughts wander in order to come to a conclusion. At length, he turned back.

“Speaking of which, it’s time for you to come to the hospital with me.”

Reuben looked somewhat taken aback. “Already?”

“I think it’s necessary.”

Reuben looked down at his plate of chicken, for which he suddenly had little appetite. The thought of accompanying his son to the hospital filled him with dread.

“The time has come so quickly.”

“For you; no one else.”

“Maybe not now,” Reuben said softly.

“Of course now.” Eli regarded his father with curiosity. “Pop, what’s gotten into you?”

“Stop with this ‘Pop’ business,” Reuben said, clearly in a bad humor.

“Whatever you say.”

His father grunted. “That’ll be the day. From the moment you were born it was never whatever I said.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

Reuben brushed his son’s apology away. “Forget it. I’m just…” He gave Eli a bleak look from across the small table. “We never took such an enormous risk when I was Director.”

“Got to move with the times,
abi
.”

“But
such
a risk. If it blows up in your face…”

The Director glanced briefly over his shoulder, but there was no use calling for the check. His father never paid here, even before he became a partner. “So what d’you say? It would mean a lot to me.”

Something unspoken passed between father and son.

Eli leaned across the table. “
Abi
, I know you’re worried about me.”

“Can you blame me?”

He took his father’s hand. “It’s going to be all right.”

Reuben’s bleak expression had never left his face. “Fuck if you can tell me that.”

43

D
imercaprol.” Dr. Hernandez, a slim, dapper man with prematurely graying hair, had about him the air of a country gentleman. “It’s a heavy metal antagonist. Your mother is responding very well to the treatment.”

“Thank God,” Maricruz said.

“Though I must caution she’s not out of the woods just yet, and we need to continue monitoring her for any sign of abnormal cardiovascular function for the duration of her treatment.”

“When can I see her?”

“At the moment, she’s sleeping and I don’t want her disturbed. I’ll instruct a nurse to fetch you when she wakes up.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I’m eternally grateful.”

“It was fortunate you got her here in time. Another week and it would have been too late.”

After he left, Maricruz collapsed onto a chair in the waiting room.

“Javvy,” she said, continuing the fiction Angél preferred. “I feel like I’ve spent these past few days digging myself out of a grave.”

“That’s not so far from the truth.” Bourne sat down beside her. “You have family now, a sense of place. You need to get on with your new life.”

“And leave everything I have in Beijing behind?”

“How difficult will that be?”

She shook her head. “To be honest, I don’t know.”

“Not until you try.”

She gave him a wry smile. “That’s you all over, I’m beginning to see—you move forward, like a shark, ever forward.”

“A man without a past has no choice.”

“It seems to me now that none of us has a choice if we want to continue living.”

“There’s one problem, Maricruz.”

She almost laughed. “Isn’t there always.”

“Matamoros is coming after you. He’s not going to let your change of heart conflict with the continuation of his drug trade. He needs Ouyang’s pipeline, and you’ve made yourself the key to it.”

He handed her his mobile. “Time to call him and set up a meet.”

She shook her head. “No, not yet. I’m not…I need to see my mother first. I need to know she’s really okay.”

“Fair enough.”

Bourne went to get them coffee. They had just put the empty containers aside when a nurse appeared.

“Your mother’s awake,” the nurse said. “She’s calling for you.”

Maricruz went to follow the nurse, but when she saw Bourne stay in the waiting room, she said, “I want you with me.”

Nodding, he accompanied the two women down the corridor and into a semi-private room. A cotton privacy curtain had been pulled across, dividing the room, which was a far cry from the spacious deluxe quarters Carlos had arranged for Maricruz at Hospital Ángeles Pedregal. Light coming in through the blinds illuminated the figure on the other bed, as if through a translucent theatrical scrim.

Constanza, needles in her arm, lay on the bed, already looking better—the bluish metallic cast to her skin had been replaced by a rosier hue that, with any luck, would continue to gain leverage as the arsenic in her system was neutralized by the dimercaprol and pumped out by the fluids being delivered along with the drug.

Maricruz leaned over the bed to take her mother’s hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Constanza said. “Much better.” Then her eyes cut to Bourne. “You killed Maceo, didn’t you?” One hand fluttered up, then fell back onto the covers. “Don’t bother answering. I knew it the moment I first set eyes on you in the airport. It was in your scent, on your face.”

“You couldn’t know,” Bourne said.

“Oh, but I did. I tried to stop you, in my own way, but it all went wrong. Because of my involvement, Maria-Elena died, as did the woman you were with. I’ve never forgiven myself.”

“Mama.”

“No, Maricruz, this must be said. Expiation can come no other way. I am a good Catholic; I believe in confession.” She gestured. “Come closer. That’s right. Now I will tell you that each time I tried to help Maceo Encarnación it ended in tears. And yet I never stopped. That’s a form of madness, I suppose. But that’s what he engendered in me—a madness that transcended sense and reality. That was his gift—a dark gift. We’re all the better for his death, that I can tell you without fear of contradiction.” Her eyes burned into Bourne’s. “And yet, God help me, it has left an empty place inside me. This is the essential conundrum of the human condition—to continue to love someone who caused you harm.”

“Like drug addiction,” Maricruz said.

Her mother nodded. “Precisely like drug addiction.”

“It will take time,” Bourne said.

“And now,” Constanza said, “thanks to you, I’ll have time.” But there was no smile on her face, and her eyes were filled with sadness.

Maricruz turned to Bourne. “Let me have some time with her.”

Bourne nodded, went out into the corridor, stood with his back to the wall, surveying the goings-on around him. The hall was lined with gurneys pushed up against the wall, some with patients who lay asleep or half dead. Something was bothering him, something he’d either seen or smelled, something out of place.

A harried-looking doctor appeared from a patient’s room, stepped to the nurses’ station and handed over the patient’s chart. As he did so, Bourne picked up a wink of light from the overhead fluorescents, reflected off the chart’s metallic edge.

At once, he whipped around, pushed through the door into Constanza’s room, where the two women looked at him in surprise. Beyond and between them, the silhouette of the other patient in the room was moving. The wink of light came again, though dulled by the curtain, as it had the first time Bourne had been in the room.

Lunging forward, Bourne leapt over the bed, reaching through the curtain. A handgun slammed down on his wrist. He twisted, pulled the curtain around him and the person in the other bed. He wasn’t a patient at all, though he had been patient enough to wait for Constanza to be assigned a room from the ER and then somehow embed himself in it when she was wheeled in.

The man smashed Bourne just above his heart, and Bourne felt an electric shock go through him. Immediately the man was on top of Bourne, trying to pinion his arms, but Bourne pressed his thumb into the nerve bundle at the side of his neck, kneed him hard in the groin, and, snatching the SIG Sauer out of his hand, dealt him a vicious blow with the butt. The man groaned and rolled off the bed onto the floor.

By this time Maricruz had joined him in the area between the second bed and the window. “I thought my father’s family had sent someone else to finish the job Bernarda had started.” She was staring down at the unconscious man. “But I recognize him.” She looked up at Bourne. “This is one of Matamoros’s men.” She ran a hand through her hair. “You’re right. Felipe won’t rest until he’s got me back.”

“We’ve got to hide him,” Bourne said.

“How the hell are we going to do that?”

“We’re going to hide him in plain sight.”

He went out of the room, and was soon back pushing one of the empty gurneys from the hallway. Maricruz helped him maneuver the body onto the gurney. Bourne strapped him down, then covered him completely. Wheeling the gurney out, he pushed it down to the end of the corridor, where he left it.

“That man,” Constanza said, when he had returned, “it never ends, does it?”

“It will now, Mama.” Maricruz took her hand. “I swear to you it will end.”

Bourne took her aside. “I have to get to Matamoros, and quickly. Both you and your mother are in danger. In another country, we could find people to protect you, but not here. No one can be trusted.”

“I’ll call him and—”

“No. Enough time has passed that he’s sure to have become suspicious. I have to find another way. Does he have a weak link in his personnel? Someone we can contact to find out what he’s planning?”

Maricruz thought a moment. “There is someone,” she said. “Let me have your mobile.”

D
iego de la Luna, Felipe Matamoros’s adviser, had had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach ever since Maricruz Encarnación had told him that she had met his older brother Elizondo in Manila. Now, he sat in the Mexico City hotel room with Juan Ruiz, watching Matamoros pace back and forth like a trapped animal about to gnaw its paw off, and felt his skin begin to crawl.

After the initial call from Maricruz, they had heard nothing. Of course, Felipe had ordered him to try to trace the call, but whatever mobile device she was using not only blocked the number but refused to emit its GPS coordinates.

So here they were: deaf, dumb, and blind—a state Felipe could not long tolerate. In fact, de la Luna thought with a good degree of fear, he looked to be at the end of his very frayed rope.

“I don’t trust her,” Matamoros said.

“Who,
jefe
?” he said in his most obsequious voice.

“Maricruz,” Matamoros snapped. “I sent Martine out to bring her back here, but we haven’t heard from him and now he’s not answering his mobile. The exclusive with Ouyang, laundering our money through Chinese art auctions—I knew her deal was too good to be true.” He cursed. “The bitch is playing some kind of game.”

“But what?”

“I don’t know!” Matamoros thundered. “That’s the fucking problem.”

On the other side of the room Juan Ruiz was studiously paring his nails with a thin-bladed gravity knife.

Matamoros ran his hand through his hair. “But no matter what it is, she’s become a liability. She has to be eliminated. The sooner the better.”

At that moment de la Luna’s mobile emitted a tinny tune.

“Hurry up and answer that,” Matamoros said, glaring. “And change your ringtone. That one grates on my nerves.”

“Yes,
jefe
.” De la Luna took the call, but his blood fairly froze in his veins at the sound of Maricruz’s voice.

“Hello, Diego,” she said. “It’s been too long.”

De la Luna was at a loss for words. He heard her chuckle at the other end of the line.

“Surprised I still haven’t been delivered to you, Diego?”

He coughed, unable for the moment to utter a single word.

“Are you somewhere where you can talk?”

“Not really,” he managed to get out in a strangled voice. His throat felt as if he had swallowed a bucket of sand.