AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A large truck was parked at one of these freight entrances, made humpbacked by the oversize refrigeration unit on its top. Bourne judged distances and vectors as he crossed the street, approaching the truck from the side facing away from the building. Two men were busy unloading large crates from the open back of the truck, overseen by a grim-looking security guard. Bourne made a mental note of everyone’s position relative to the truck as he passed by.
Several hundred yards down the street, one of the city’s numerous doorway lurkers leaned in the shadows, smoking languidly. He watched with bored suspicion as Bourne approached him.
“¿Tour?” he said in very bad English. “Best guide in all of Khartoum. Anything you want to see I take, even forbidden.” His grin seemed like more of a yawn. “You like forbidden, yes?”
“How about a cigarette?”
The sound of his own language surprised the lurker so much he righted himself and his half-glazed eyes seemed to clear. He handed Bourne a cigarette, which he lit with a cheap plastic lighter.
“You like money better than you like standing in this doorway?”
The lurker nodded with a quick, disjointed bob of his head. “Show me a man who doesn’t revere money and I’ll mourn his death.”
Bourne fanned out some bills and the lurker’s eyes widened; the poor man couldn’t help it, it was a reflex action. Bourne was willing to bet he’d never imagined possessing so much money.
“Certainly.” The man licked his lips. “All the forbidden places in Khartoum will be open to you.”
“I’m only interested in one,” Bourne said. “Seven Seventy-nine El Gamhuria Avenue.”
For a moment the man blanched, then he licked his lips again and said, “Sir, there is forbidden and then there is forbidden.”
Bourne increased the number of bills he fanned out. “This amount will cover it, won’t it.” It wasn’t a question; neither was it a statement. It was, rather, a command, which caused the lurker to twitch uncomfortably. “Or should I find someone else?” Bourne added. “You did say that you were the best guide in the city.”
“That I am, sir!” The lurker snatched the bills and stuffed them away. “No one else in the entire city could get you in to Seven Seventy-nine. They are most careful about visitors, but”—he winked—“my cousin’s cousin is a guard there.” He pulled out a cell phone, made a local call, and talked rapid-fire Arabic. There ensued a short argument that seemed to concern money. Then the lurker put away his cell and grinned. “This is no problem. My cousin’s cousin is downstairs now, while the truck you see there is unloading. He says it’s an excellent time, so we go now.”
Without another word Bourne followed him back down the street.
Checking her watch one last time, Tracy strode across El Gamhuria Avenue and opened the wooden front door. Directly inside was a metal detector overseen by two grim-faced guards, which she and the wrapped Goya went through without incident. This place didn’t seem like the headquarters of any airline she’d ever encountered.
She walked up to the circular desk, as high and harsh looking as the exterior of the building itself. A young man with an unfriendly, angular face glanced up at her approach.
“Tracy Atherton. I have an appointment with Noah Per—Petersen.”
“Passport and driver’s license.” He held out a hand.
She expected him to check her ID then hand the documents back to her, but instead he said, “These will be returned to you at the end of your visit.”
She hesitated for just a moment, feeling as if she’d turned over the keys to her apartment in Belgravia. She was about to protest, but the man with the unfriendly face was already on the intrabuilding phone. The moment he cradled the receiver his demeanor changed. “Mr. Petersen will be down to fetch you momentarily, Ms. Atherton,” he said with a smile. “In the meanwhile, please make yourself comfortable. There’s tea and coffee, as well as a variety of biscuits on the sideboard against the wall. And if there’s anything else you require, just ask.”
She kept up a monologue of meaningless chatter, all the while taking in her surroundings, which seemed as oppressive in their way as the interior of a church. Instead of being dedicated to the glory of God, the architecture seemed to deify money. In just the same way churches—particularly those of the Roman Catholic religion—were meant to draw a reverence from the parishioner, to put him squarely in his lowly place vis-à-vis the divine, so the Air Afrika headquarters sought to intimidate and demean those penitents entering its portals who could not conceive of the half-a-billion-dollar cost of construction.
“Ms. Atherton.”
She turned to see a slim man, handsome despite his hatchet face, with salt-and-pepper hair and an amiable demeanor.
“Noah Petersen.” He smiled winningly and stuck out his hand for her to shake. It was firm and dry. “I put great store in punctuality as a human trait.” He lifted a hand, indicating they should walk back the way he had come. “It says so much about an orderly mind.”
He slipped a metal key-card in a slot, and after a moment of clicks a red light turned green. He leaned on part of the wall, which turned out to be a door set flush with the massive concrete panels on either side. Inside, Tracy was obliged to put her package through an X-ray scanner, then they rode up to the third floor in a small elevator. Exiting, he took her down a corridor with twelve-foot mahogany doors. These doors had neither a name nor a number on them and, after negotiating several turns, she had the sensation of being in a labyrinth. Music was playing out of hidden speakers. Occasionally they passed a photo close-up of part of an Air Afrika plane with a half-clad model posing beside it.
The conference room into which he led her was decorated for a party, with colored balloons, the long table covered with a gaily striped cloth and groaning with a seemingly endless array of savory food, sweetmeats, and fruit.
“Having the Goya here at last is cause for celebration,” Noah said, which was apparently all the explanation she was going to get. He pulled a slim briefcase out from under the striped cloth and, setting it on the one clear space on the tabletop, twiddled the combination lock and disengaged the snaps.
Inside, Tracy saw, was the cashier’s check for the balance of her fee, made out to her. Seeing this, she stripped off the packing to reveal the Goya.
Noah barely glanced at it. “Where’s the rest?”
She handed over the document of authenticity, signed by Professor Alonzo Pecunia Zuñiga of the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Noah studied it for a moment, nodded, and put it alongside the painting.
“Excellent.” He reached into the attaché case and handed her the check. “I believe this concludes our business, Ms. Atherton.” At that moment, his cell rang and he excused himself. His brows knit together. “When?” he said into the phone. “Who? What do you mean alone? Dammit, didn’t I—All right, don’t fucking move until I get there!” He cut the connection, his face dark.
“Is something wrong?” Tracy asked.
“Nothing that need concern you.” Noah managed a smile through his annoyance. “Please make yourself comfortable here. I’ll come and fetch you when it’s safe.”
“Safe? What do you mean?”
“There’s an intruder in the building.” Noah was already hurrying across the room to the door. “Not to worry, Ms. Atherton, it seems we already have him cornered.”
We were picked up the moment we arrived in KRT,” Amun Chalthoum said as he and Soraya drove into the city. KRT was the aviation acronym for the Khartoum International Airport, which had been appropriated by the Sudanese themselves.
“I saw them,” Soraya said. “Two men.”
“They were joined by two others.” Chalthoum glanced in the rearview mirror. “All four of them are in a gray 1970s-vintage Toyota Corolla three car-lengths behind us.”
“The men at the terminal looked local.”
Chalthoum nodded.
“I find that odd, because no one locally knew we were coming to Khartoum.”/> “Not true.” A small, secretive smile played about the Egyptian’s lips. “As the head of al Mokhabarat, I was obliged to tell a superior I was leaving the country, if only temporarily. The man I chose to tell is the one I have suspected for some time of secretly undermining me.” His eyes once again flicked to the image in the rearview mirror. “Now, at last, I have my proof of his treachery. Nothing will stop me from bringing one of these miscreants back to Cairo to denounce him.”
“In other words,” Soraya said, “we need to let them catch us.”
Amun’s smile broadened. “Catch up to us,” he corrected, “so we can catch them.”
The poker game had given up the ghost an hour ago, leaving the house off Dupont Circle redolent of the scents of men—and women—hard at play: cigar ash, leftover pizza, stale but honest sweat, and the ephemeral but powerful odor of money.
Four people draped themselves over purple velvet art deco sofas: Willard, Peter Marks, Police Commissioner Lester Burrows, and Reese Williams, whose house, surprisingly, this turned out to be. Between the four principals, on a low table, sat a bottle of scotch, a bucket half full of ice, and four fat old-fashioned glasses. Everyone else had packed up what was left of their poker stakes, if any, and had staggered home. It was just after twelve on a night without either moon or stars, the clouds so thick and low that even the lights of the district were reduced to murky smudges.
“You won the last hand, Freddy,” Burrows said, addressing the ceiling as he reclined against the sofa’s curled back, “but you haven’t told me the consequences of seeing you after the final round of raises. I was tapped out, so you put in for me. Now I owe you.”
“I want you to answer Peter’s question about the two missing officers.”
“Who?”
“Sampson and Montgomery,” Marks provided helpfully.
“Oh, them.”
The commissioner was still staring absently at the ceiling while Reese Williams, her legs curled up under her, watched the scene with an enigmatic expression.
“There’s also the matter of a motorcycle cop shooting a man named Jay Weston, which caused the accident Sampson and Montgomery were dispatched to investigate,” Marks continued. “Only there was no investigation; it was strangled.”
Everyone in the room knew what “strangling an investigation” meant.
“Freddy,” Burrows said to the ceiling, “is this also part of what I owe you?”
Willard’s eyes were fixed on Reese Williams’s unexpressive face. “I ponied up a ton of money for you to see me, Lester.”
The commissioner sighed and finally relinquished his gaze from the ceiling. “Reese, you know you have a rather large crack up there.”
“There are cracks throughout this house, Les,” she said.
Burrows seemed to consider this for some time before saying to the other two men, “Be that as it may, there will be no cracks in the information shared here. Whatever I share with you gentlemen is strictly off the record, not for attribution, and however the hell else you want to say it.” He sat up abruptly. “Bottom line: Afterward I will not only repudiate the statement, I’ll go out of my way to prove it false and to run into the ground those who claimed I did say it. Are we clear?”
“Perfectly,” Marks said, while Willard nodded his assent.
“Detectives Sampson and Montgomery are currently fishing on the Snake River in Idaho.”
“Are they really fishing,” Marks asked, “or are they dead?”
“Jesus Christ, I talked to them yesterday!” Burrows said heatedly. “They wanted to know when they could come home. I told them there was no rush.”
“Lester,” Willard said, “they’re not in Idaho on your dime.”
“Uncle Sam has deeper pockets than I do,” the commissioner conceded.
Willard was watching emotions crossing like clouds across Burrows’s face. “Precisely what piece of Uncle Sam?”
“No one told me, and that’s the truth,” Burrows grumped, as if no one told him anything of any real importance. “But I remember the representative’s name, if that’s of any help.”
“At this stage,” Willard said heavily, “anything might prove useful, even a pseudonym.”
“Well, dammit, no one tells the truth in this town!” Burrows lifted an accusing finger. “And let me tell you two right now that no police officer of mine shot your Mr. Weston, of that I’m damn sure. I conducted my own investigation into that allegation.”
“Then someone was impersonating one of your police officers,” Willard said calmly, “to point everyone in the wrong direction.”
“You spooks.” Burrows shook his head. “You live in your own world with its own rules. Christ, what a tangled web!” He shrugged, as if shaking off his consternation. “That name, then. The man who made the arrangements for my detectives said his name was Noah Petersen. That ring a bell, or was he just blowing spook smoke up my ass?”
Bourne had parted company with the lurker, as his cousin’s cousin had first ensured that both truckers were inside the building, unloading crates, then furtively led the way into the building through the service entrance. Grabbing hold of the truck’s rear door handle, he vaulted up, grabbing on to the rim of the top and rolling his body onto the truck’s roof. By climbing onto the refrigeration unit, he was able to reach a concrete abutment on the building’s facade, by which means he gained the setback along the second floor. Using the spaces between the concrete slabs, he picked his way farther up the building’s side until he got to the third-floor setback, where he repeated the procedure until, reaching up, he levered himself over the parapet onto the tiled floor of the roof garden.
Unlike the architecture of the building itself, the garden was a delicate mosaic of colors and textures, perfectly manicured, fragrant, and shaded from the glaring sun. Bourne, crouching in a patch of the deepest shadow, breathed in the heady scent of lime as he studied the garden’s layout. Save for him, the roof was deserted.
Two small structures were cleverly integrated into the garden’s design: the door down into the building and, as he discovered, a toolshed for the staff who pruned the trees, plants, and flowers. He headed to the doorway, saw that it was protected by a standard circuit-breaker alarm. The moment he opened the door from the outside, the alarm would be triggered.
Backtracking to the toolshed, he took a pruner and a wire stripper to the parapet. There, at the crevice where it met the tiled floor of the roof, he found the wires that connected the garden’s lights. Using the pruning shears, he cut off a six-foot length of wire. As he walked back to the doorway, he stripped the insulation off both ends.
At the door, he felt above for the alarm wire, stripping off two sections of the insulation and attaching the bare ends of the length of lighting wire he’d cut to the bare alarm wire. When he was certain the connections were secure, he cut the alarm wire midway between the jerry-rigged splices he’d made.
Cautiously, he opened the door only wide enough to slip inside. The splices had worked; the alarm was silent. He crept down the narrow, steep staircase to the third floor. His first order of business was to find Arkadin, the man who’d lured him here, so he could kill him. The second was finding Tracy and getting her out.
Tracy was standing by the window, looking out at the chaotic street, when she heard the door open behind her. Assuming it was Noah, she turned back into the room, only to confront a man with a shaved head, a goatee, black shot through with white, a ring of diamonds in the lobe of one ear, and a tattoo of a fanged bat on the side of his neck. With his wide shoulders, barrel chest, and thick legs, he looked like a wrestler or one of those mutant extreme fighters she’d seen once or twice on American TV.
“So you’re the one who brought my Goya,” the Bat-man said as he sauntered over to the table where the painting lay in all its grotesque grandeur. He had a way of walking, a rolling gait one saw only on musclemen and sailors.
“That’s Noah’s,” Tracy said.
“No, my dear Ms. A
therton, it’s mine,” the Bat-man said in grating, thickly accented English. “Perlis merely bought it for me.” He held the painting up in front of him. “It’s my payment.” His chuckle was like the gurgle of a dying man. “A unique prize for unique services rendered.”
“You know my name,” she said, moving toward the table with its platters and thick glass bowls of food, “but I don’t know yours.”
“Are you certain you want to know it?” He continued to examine the Goya with a connoisseur’s practiced eye. And then, without allowing her space to answer: “Ah, well, then, it’s Nikolai Yevsen. Perhaps you’ve heard of me, I own Air Afrika, I own this building.”
“Frankly, I never heard of you or of Air Afrika. My business is art.”
“Is that so?” Yevsen placed the Goya back onto the table, across which he faced her. “Then what are you doing with Jason Bourne?”
“Jason Bourne?” She frowned. “Who’s Jason Bourne?”
“The man you brought here with you.”
Her frown deepened. “What are you talking about? I came alone. Noah can vouch for that.”
“Perlis is busy at the moment, interrogating your friend Mr. Bourne.”
“I don’t—” The rest of her words choked in her throat when she saw a snub-nosed .45 in his left hand.
28
IF YOUR BUSINESS is art,” Yevsen said, “what are you doing with an assassin, a spy, a man with no scruples, no heart? A man who would put a bullet through your head as soon as look at you.”
“But who’s threatening to shoot me?” Tracy said. “You or him?”
“You brought him here to kill me.” Yevsen had a face that conveyed brute force, blunt power. He was a man used to getting what he wanted from anyone, at any time. “I have to ask myself why you would do that.”
