The Bourne Dominion (44 page)

Hendricks turned the page. Room 916 was on a long-term lease through ServicesSolutions, a company with phantom headquarters in the Caymans. Hendricks had no doubt that ServicesSolutions was a shell corporation for God alone knew who. He rubbed his forehead. Whoever owned ServicesSolutions had some very nasty enemies. He called a colleague in Treasury, gave him what info he had on ServicesSolutions, and asked him to find out who actually owned it. Then he called the head of the task force he had assigned to find Peter Marks. Following the bombing of Peter’s car in the Treadstone garage, the whole building was in lockdown. Everyone who worked or had recently worked in the building was being run down and questioned, but nothing so far. Hendricks had been extremely relieved to learn that no human remains had been found in the car. On the other hand, this concerned him, given Sal’s testimony that he and Peter had been in the same elevator minutes before the explosion. The night watchman had exited at the lobby level, but he was certain Peter had continued down to the garage. So chances were good that Peter was in the garage when the car bomb was detonated, but had not been in the vehicle. What had happened; where was he? Had he gone to ground? That would be a reasonable assumption.

Hendricks rose and crossed the office to fetch more ice for his water pitcher. He stopped stock-still as something occurred to him. What if Peter had been injured? Back at his desk, he asked one of his assistants to call around to every hospital in the Greater DC area, starting with
the ones closest to the Treadstone building. Then, as another thought occurred to him, he ordered the assistant to include all EMS and private ambulance services.

“Put every available person on it,” he concluded.

He sat back, swiveled his chair around, and stared out the window. It was a dreary, windswept day. Beads of rain slid down the panes of glass, and, beyond, on the street, people in shiny raincoats were hunched over, umbrellas trembling like leaves, as they slogged their way to and from work.

At the sound of his intercom, he turned back.

“What?” His mind was buzzing with a thousand possibilities.

“Package just arrived for you, sir. It’s been vetted by security.”

“What’s in it?”

“A DVD, sir.”

Hendricks frowned. “Bring it in.”

A moment later, one of his assistants placed the DVD on his desk. Hendricks looked up. “That’s it? No note?”

“Nothing, sir. But it was addressed to you and was stamped
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
.”

Hendricks waved the assistant out, put the DVD aside, and returned to the case of the three dead men in Room 916. He studied the crime scene photos of their faces and bodies, noting that there were no tattoos, which ruled out the Russian mob. So who were these jamokes? They were armed, but that could mean anything. It certainly gave no clue as to their country of origin, let alone their affiliation. The FBI had concluded, however, that they constituted a hit team. Did that mean the team’s target was more than one person? And where was he/she/they now? He turned another page. The FBI had questioned everyone who worked in the hotel, as well as all the guests on the ninth floor. No one had seen or heard anything. Possibly someone was lying, but the FBI report stated its operatives didn’t think so. That left the other possibility: Whoever had been in that room knew how to get into and out of a public building without being spotted. All of this was interesting speculation, but Hendricks couldn’t see how it would help them find out who these
people were and who their target was. It was imperative that he find the answers to those questions ASAP. The threat of terrorism overhung them all.

He needed something to make his day. He called a contact of his at CI.

“How are the plans proceeding with security at Indigo Ridge?”

“The place is in a fucking uproar.” The disgust in his voice was evident. “This isn’t our thing and no one knows how best to go about it.” He took a breath. “We sure could use your help, Mr. Secretary.”

“You want help, talk to Director Danziger,” Hendricks said with a poisoned glee. “That’s why he gets to sit in the big chair.”

His contact chuckled. “You’re killing us, Mr. Secretary.”

“Not me.”

“By the way, there’s a minor buzz around here concerning your new co-director of Treadstone, Peter Marks.”

Hendricks caught his breath. “What about him?”

“Word is he’s missing.”

Hendricks said nothing.

“Peter still has a lot of friends here, Mr. Secretary. If there’s anything we can do.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind,” Hendricks said before he disconnected.

He thought about how right Maggie had been in suggesting this course of action with Danziger. Phoning his Indigo Ridge security group, he told them they were back on standby. He could allow Danziger’s fucking up to go only so far. Indigo Ridge needed to be secured.

But his pleasure at the prospect of riding to the rescue was short-lived, what with an attempt on Peter’s life, Peter missing, and the FBI material on the triple homicide at the Lincoln Square Hotel staring him in the face. Then his phone rang.

“No luck with any of the hospitals,” his assistant said, “and we went all the way out to Virginia and Maryland. Same with EMS.”

Hendricks closed his eyes. A headache was starting way back behind his left eye. “Have you any good news?”

“Well, that depends. One of the private ambulance companies reported a stolen vehicle not long ago.”

“Has it been found?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, dammit, find the fucking thing!”

He slammed down the phone so hard the DVD jumped off the desk. He looked at it, then picked it up, watching the rainbow rise and fall on its metallic surface. Opening the tray on his computer tower, he settled the DVD and slid the tray home. He heard the mechanism spinning up, then his video software program appeared full-screen and the DVD began to play. Out of the black screen, Maggie’s face appeared like a vision from a nighttime mist.

C
hristopher, by the time you see this I will be long gone. Please don’t try to contact me.”

She paused, as if knowing Hendricks had reached for his cell phone, which he had. He felt his fingers tremble with the slender weight of it, as if he were touching the nape of her neck.

“My name isn’t Margaret Penrod and my profession isn’t landscape architecture. Almost nothing I told you is true, though the truth began to leak out despite myself.”

Her eyes glittered, and even though Hendricks felt a fiery demon clawing at the lining of his gut, he was powerless to look away from her image, which shimmered like sunlight on water on the flat screen of his computer.

“You must hate me now, which I suppose is inevitable. But before you judge me, you must understand something.”

Her expression changed, and Hendricks sensed that she was reaching out for something—a remote control, as it turned out. The frame drew back from her face to reveal her naked body. It was covered in blood.

Hendricks hunched forward on the edge of his chair. “Maggie, what the fuck?” Then he realized that the woman he was looking at, the woman to whom he’d made love, had possibly given his heart to, wasn’t Maggie. “Who are you?” he whispered.

The lens moved back farther until Hendricks could see that she was standing in a hotel room. At that instant, he was overcome with what might have been a hot flash. He felt his gorge rising. And rising more, as the video camera moved lower and panned the floor behind his naked lover.

And there they were. Hendricks let out a low groan. The three members of the death squad, all dead. At his lover’s hand? His mind seemed to implode. How was that possible? As if to answer his question, Maggie continued:

“These men were sent to kill me because I protected you. And now I have to leave Room Nine Sixteen, leave DC, leave America. I’m on my final journey.” The camera returned to her, zeroing in on her face. “I was supposed to bring you here, Christopher. Room Nine Sixteen was to be our secret love nest where our every move, every word we exchanged would be recorded and then disseminated to the media. To ruin you. I couldn’t let that happen. And now instead of a love nest, Room Nine Sixteen has become a charnel house. Perhaps that’s a fitting end for the two of us, I don’t know anymore.” Her face was obscured for a few seconds as she brushed wisps of hair from her eyes. “The only thing I do know is that you’re too precious to me to hurt. If I don’t go now you will be in terrible danger.”

Her smile was rueful, almost sad. “I won’t say that I love you because it will only sound hollow and false to your ears. It sounds fatuous, stupid, even. How could I love you when we have known each other a matter of days? How could I love you when all I’ve done is lie to you? How is it that the earth is the third planet from the sun? No one knows; no one
can
know. Some things just are, sunk in their mystery.”

Hendricks, scrutinizing her face through the squeezing of his heart, saw that she didn’t blink, her eyes didn’t cut away, two basic tells of the liar. She wasn’t lying, or she was very, very good, better than any liar he had ever met. He looked into those eyes and was lost.

“Apart from my father, I have never loved anyone before you, and my love for him is very different than it is for you. Something happened when we met, a mysterious current went through me and changed me. There is no better way to explain it. That’s all I know.”

She leaned forward suddenly, her face blurring as she planted her lips on the lens. “My name is Skara. Good-bye, Christopher. If you can’t forgive me, then remember me. Remember me when you are protecting Indigo Ridge.”

A smear of colors, a vertiginous blur of motion as she pushed the lens aside. Then Hendricks was faced with blackness, the fizzing of the electronic void, and the painful galloping of his heart.

D
awn had broken and so had Cherkesov. Boris had done as much damage as he needed to do. Cherkesov, it turned out, was deathly afraid of going blind. A swipe of the knife blade just under his right eye had been enough for the resistance to bleed out of him. He handed over what he had been bringing from the Mosque in Munich to Damascus.

“It’s a key,” he told Boris, through thickened, bloodstained lips.

“What does it open?”

“Only Semid Abdul-Qahhar knows.”

Boris frowned. “Didn’t Semid Abdul-Qahhar give you the key to bring here?”

“Semid Abdul-Qahhar is here, not in Munich. I was to deliver the key to him in person.”

“How?” Boris said. “Where?”

“He maintains a residence.” Cherkesov’s lips quivered in the parody of a smile. “You’ll like this, Boris Illyich. His residence is in the Old City, in the former Jewish Quarter, in the last remaining synagogue still standing. It had been abandoned for years, ever since the Syrian Jews fled to America.”

“So Semid Abdul-Qahhar took it over, figuring his enemies would never think to look for him there.”

Cherkesov nodded, and groaned. “I need to lie down. I need to sleep.”

“Not yet.” Boris grabbed him by his sodden shirtfront as he was leaning back. “Tell me the time of the rendezvous and the protocol.”

A thin line of pink spittle exited the corner of Cherkesov’s mouth. “He’s expecting me. You’ll never have a chance.”

“Leave that to me,” Boris said.

Cherkesov began to laugh until he coughed up blood. Then he looked up at Boris. “Look at me. Look what you’ve done.”

“It’s a sad day for you, Viktor. I agree, but I can’t sympathize.” Boris shook his former boss until his teeth chattered. “Now, fucker, tell me the details, and you can cry yourself to sleep.”

S
oraya stood perfectly still. El-Arian’s touch was toxic, as if he had somehow exposed her to polonium-210 and now she was rotting from the inside out, weak and defenseless.

“Who are you, mademoiselle?”

Soraya said nothing and stared straight ahead. The pounding in her head made it difficult to gather her defenses.

“It seems that we’re a mystery to each other, M. El-Arian.”

He wrenched at her wrists and she gasped. “Enemies by whatever names we call ourselves.”

“Did Marchand order Laurent’s death, or did you?”

“Marchand was a bureaucrat.” El-Arian’s voice was like the scrape of sandpaper. “His mind was fixed on petty things. He lacked the vision to conceive of the traitor’s death.”

She looked at him, then, a terrible mistake. She was riveted, paralyzed. Never before had she believed in the concepts of Good and Evil, but his mesmeric eyes struck her as windows into an unbearable evil.

She grabbed the paperweight and smashed it into El-Arian’s temple. He relinquished his hold on her as he staggered back into the chair. It spun away from him on its casters and he pitched down onto the floor. Soraya turned and ran out of the office, down the hall. She heard a discreet alarm sound—El-Arian must have pressed a panic button. A security guard appeared, pulling a sidearm from a black leather holster. Rushing him, she smashed her elbow into his throat, and he went down. She bent to take his weapon, but he grabbed her and she had to kick him in the face to free herself. She passed up the elevator; it would be a death trap. Racing down the hallway, past open doors and startled faces, she
reached the top of one of the staircases leading down to the ground floor. Behind her, she heard El-Arian cursing her.

She took the stairs two at a time, stumbling a bit because of the incessant pounding in her head, but managed to hold herself upright with one hand clutching the polished wooden banister. But she was less than halfway down when a pair of security guards converged from either side of the ground floor and rushed the stairs. Both men had their service revolvers out.

Soraya turned back, but El-Arian fairly flew down the stairs. He had a gun in his hand. He reached out and, as she tried to dive away from him, snatched her into his grasp.

B
OURNE RETURNED REBEKA’S
smile as he exited the plane. He could smell the light rose of her perfume all the way down the jetway. He saw the security officer standing by just as she described.