The Bourne Betrayal Part 36

Nesim Hatun considered for a moment. "This man Bourne, they say that he is like a chameleon. If he is still alive, if he does find his way here, how will I know?"

"Fadi knifed him in the left side. Badly. His body will be battered. If he does come, it will be shortly, possibly even later today."

Nesim Hatun sensed the messenger's nervousness. The fruition of Fadi's plan must be terribly close, he surmised.

They rose, pa.s.sed through the private rooms, silent, lush as the garden outside.

"I will stay here for the remainder of the day and night. If, by then Bourne hasn't shown, he won't. And even if he does, it will be too late."

Hatun nodded. He was right, then. Fadi's attack against the United States was imminent.

Muta ibn Aziz pointed. "There is a screen at the far end of the garden, just there. This is where I will wait. If it happens that Bourne comes, he will want to see you. That you will allow, but in the middle of the interview I will send one of your sons to fetch you, and you and I will have a conversation."

"So Bourne can overhear it. I understand."

Muta ibn Aziz took a step closer, his voice reduced to a papery whisper. "I want Bourne to know who I am. I want him to know that I am returning to Fadi."

Nesim Hatun nodded. "He will follow you."

"Precisely."

Right from the outset, Jon Mueller could see where Lerner's man, Overton, had gotten himself into trouble. Shadowing Anne Held, he discovered her surveillance without too much difficulty. There was a difference between surveillance and shadowing: He was looking not to follow Held but to unearth the people who were protecting her from outside surveillance. As such, he was far back and high up. In the beginning, he used his own eyes rather than binoculars because he needed to see Held's immediate environment in the widest range possible. Binoculars would home in on only narrow sections of it. They were useful, however, once he had IDed the man surveilling her.

In fact, there were three men, working in eight-hour s.h.i.+fts. That they were on twenty-four-hour alert hardly surprised him. Overton's botched surveillance had surely made them both more fearful and more wary. Mueller had antic.i.p.ated all this, and had a plan for countering it.

For twenty-four hours, he had observed Held's complement of protectors. He noted their habits, quirks, predilections, methods of operation, all of which varied slightly. The one on the night s.h.i.+ft needed a constant supply of coffee to keep him alert, while the one on the early-morning s.h.i.+ft used his cell phone constantly. The one on the late-afternoon s.h.i.+ft smoked like a fiend. Mueller chose him because his innate nervousness made him the most vulnerable.

He knew he would only get one shot, so he made the most of the opportunity he knew would sooner or later come his way. Hours ago, he'd stolen a utility truck off the back of the Potomac Electric Power Company lot on Pennsylvania Avenue. He drove this now, as Anne Held got into a waiting taxi outside CI headquarters.

As the cab pulled out into traffic, Mueller waited, patient as death. Quite soon, he heard an engine cough into life. A white Ford sedan edged out from its spot across the street as the afternoon man took up his position two vehicles behind the taxi. Mueller followed in the heavy traffic.

Within ten minutes, the Held woman had exited the taxi and had begun to walk. Mueller knew this MO well. She was on her way to a rendezvous. The traffic was such that the afternoon man couldn't follow her in the car. Mueller had deduced this before her protector did, and so he'd pulled the truck over and parked on 17th Street NW, in a no-parking zone, knowing that no one would question someone in a public service utility truck.

Swinging out of the truck, he walked quickly to where the afternoon man had pulled over to the curb. Striding up, he tapped on the driver's-side window. When the man slid down the gla.s.s, Mueller said, "Hey, buddy," then sucker-punched him just below his left ear.

The traumatic disruption to the nerve bundle put him down for the count. Mueller set the unconscious man upright behind the wheel, then stepped up onto the sidewalk, keeping the Held woman in sight as she walked up the street.

Anne Held and Karim were strolling through the Corcoran Gallery on 17th Street, NW. The impressive collection of artwork was housed in a magnificent white Georgian marble structure that Frank Lloyd Wright had once called the best-designed building in Was.h.i.+ngton. Karim paused in front of a large canvas of the San Francisco painter Robert Bechtel, a photorealist whose artistic worth he could not fathom.

"The DCI suspects that the raid target was bogus," Karim was saying, "which means he suspects that the Dujja intel Typhon intercepted and decoded is disinformation."

Anne was shocked. "Where are these suspicions coming from?"

"The MiG pilots made a crucial mistake. They waited until after the American Chinooks leveled the abandoned complex before firing their missiles. Their orders were to allow the bombing so the Americans would believe the raid had been successful, but they were to come on the scene minutes later than they did. They thought the fog would hide them from the Chinooks, but the Americans found a way to dissipate it with their rotors. Now the Old Man wants me to look for a leak inside CI."

"I thought you sold everyone on Hytner being the mole."

"Everyone, it appears, except him."

"What are we going to do?" Anne said.

"Move up the timetable."

Anne looked around covertly, but nervously.

"Not to worry," Karim said. "After we incinerated Overton, I put safeguards in place." He looked at his watch and headed for the entrance. "Come. Soraya Moore is due to land in three hours."

Jon Mueller, behind the wheel of the Potomac Electric truck, was just down the block from the Corcoran. He was now certain that Anne Held was making a rendezvous. That would have occupied Lerner, but not him. It wouldn't matter who she was meeting after he took her out.

As soon as he saw Held come out the front entrance, he pulled out into traffic. Up ahead was the light at the junction of Pennsylvania Avenue. It was still green as she came down the stairs, but as he approached, it changed to amber. There was one car ahead of him. With a crash of gears and a roar of the truck's engine, he pulled out, sideswiping the car as he barreled past it and jumped the red light, driving straight through the intersection to a chorus of curses, angry shouts, and horn blasts.

Mueller stamped the accelerator to the floor as he bore down on Anne Held.

The high-velocity bullet breaking the gla.s.s of the truck's side window sounded like a far-off chime. Mueller had no time to consider that it might be anything else because the bullet tore into one side of his head and blew out the opposite, taking half his skull with it.

A moment before the Potomac Electric truck went out of control, Karim took Anne's arm and dragged her back onto the curb. As the truck slammed into the two cars ahead of it, he began to walk with her very fast away from the scene of the deadly pileup.

"What happened?" she said.

"The man driving the truck was intent on making you the victim of a hit-and-run."

"What?"

He had to squeeze her arm hard to get her not to look back. "Keep walking," he said. "Let's get away from this place."

Three blocks down, a black Lincoln Aviator with diplomatic plates was idling at the curb. With a single fluid motion, Karim opened the rear door and urged Anne inside. He followed after her, slamming the door, and the Aviator took off.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

Anne nodded. "Just a bit shaken up. What happened?"

"I made arrangements to have you covertly watched."

Up front were a driver and his sidekick. Both appeared to be Arab diplomatic officials. For all Anne knew they were Arab diplomatic officials. She didn't know, didn't want to know. Just as she didn't want to know where they were going. In her business, too much information, just like curiosity about the wrong things, could get you killed.

"I had read up on Lerner, so the moment the Old Man told me he'd sent him to Odessa, I suspected that someone even higher up on the intelligence food chain would be put on you. I was right. A man named Jon Mueller from Homeland Security. Mueller and Lerner were whoring buddies. The interesting thing is that Mueller is on the payroll of Defense Secretary Halliday."

"Which means, chances are that Lerner's also under the defense secretary's control."

Karim nodded, leaned forward, and told the driver to slow down as the wail of the sirens from police, EMTs, and fire department vehicles rose, then fell away. "Halliday seems intent on increasing the Pentagon's power. Taking over CI, remaking it in its own image. We can use the chaos caused by this interagency warfare to our advantage."

By this time, the Aviator had reached the far northern precincts of the city. Skirting the northeastern edge of Rock Creek Park, they at last came to the rear of a large mortuary run by a Pakistani family.

The family also owned the building, courtesy of money from International Vertical Technologies, funneled through one of the independent companies in the Bahamas and the Caymans that Karim had set up over the years since he'd taken over the corporation from his father. As a result, they had gutted the structure, rebuilding it to the specifications Karim had provided.

One of those specs had provided for what appeared to be the hall's own loading bay in the rear. In fact, it was a loading bay as far as the hall's suppliers were concerned. As the driver of the Aviator turned into the bay, the concrete "wall" at the rear slid into a niche in the floor, revealing a ramp down which the vehicle rolled. It stopped in the vast sub-bas.e.m.e.nt, and they all got out.

Barrels and crates lined the wall closest to them, the former contents of M&N Bodywork. To the left of the explosives stood a black Lincoln limousine with familiar plates.

Anne walked over to it, running her fingertips across its gleaming surface. She turned to Jamil.

"Where did you get the Old Man's car?"

"It's an exact replica, down to the armor plating and special bulletproof gla.s.s." He opened a rear door. "Except for one thing."

The courtesy light had gone on when the door was opened. Peering in, Anne marveled that the interior was a perfect match, down to the plush royal-blue carpet. She watched as he pulled up a corner of the carpet that hadn't yet been glued down. Using the blade of a pocketknife, he pried up the floorboard far enough for her to see what was underneath.

The entire bottom of the replica was packed tight with neat rectangles of a light gray clay-like substance.

"That's right," he said, reacting to her sharply indrawn breath. "There's enough C-Four explosive here to take out the entire reinforced foundation of CI headquarters."

Twenty-six.

THE DISTRICT where Nesim Hatun plied a trade as yet unknown to Bourne was named after Sultan Ahmet I who, during the first decade of the seventeenth century, built the Blue Mosque in the heart of what nineteenth-century Europeans called Stamboul. This was the center of the once immense Byzantine Empire that, at its height, extended from southern Spain to Bulgaria to Egypt.

Modern-day Sultanahmet had lost neither its spectacular architecture nor its power to awe. The center was a hillock called the Hippodrome, with the Blue Mosque on one side and the Hagia Sophia, built a century earlier, on the other. The two were linked by a small park. Nowadays the social center of the district was nearby Akbiyik Caddesi, the Avenue of the White Mustache, whose northernmost end gave out onto Topkapi Palace. This wide thoroughfare was lined with shops, bars, cafes, groceries, restaurants, and, on Wednesday mornings, a street market.

Bourne, appearing among the loudly chattering hordes packing Akbiyik Caddesi, was barely recognizable. He wore the traditional Turkish outfit, his jaw hidden behind the full beard.

He stopped at a street cart to buy simit-sesame bread-and pale yellow yogurt, eating them as he took in his surroundings. Hustlers plied their shady trade, merchants shouted out the prices of their wares, locals haggled over prices, tourists were systematically fleeced by clever Turks. Businessmen on cell phones, kids taking pictures of one another with cell phones, teens playing raucous music they'd just downloaded into their cell phones. Laughter and tears, lovers' smiles, combatants' angry shouts. The boiling stew of human emotion and life lit up the avenue like a neon sign, blazing through the clouds of aromatic smoke billowing from braziers over which sizzling lamb and vegetable kebabs browned.

After finis.h.i.+ng his makes.h.i.+ft meal, he headed straight for a rug shop, where he picked out a prayer rug, haggling good-naturedly with the owner on the price. When he left, both were satisfied with the bargain they had made.

The Blue Mosque to which Bourne now walked, his prayer rug tucked under one arm, was surrounded by six slender minarets. These had come from a mistake. Sultan Ahmet I had told his architect he wanted the mosque to have a gold minaret. Altin is the Turkish word for "gold," but the architect misheard him and instead built alti-six-minarets. Still, Ahmet I was pleased with the result, because at that time no other sultan had a mosque with so many minarets.

As befit such a magnificent edifice, the mosque had multiple doors. Most visitors went in through the north side, but Muslims entered from the west. It was through this door that Bourne walked. Just inside, he stopped, took off his shoes, and set them aside in a plastic bag handed to him by a young boy. He covered his head, then at a stone basin washed his feet, face, neck, and forearms. Padding into the mosque proper, he set out his prayer rug on the rug-strewn marble floor and knelt on it.

The interior of the mosque was, in true Byzantine fas.h.i.+on, covered with intricate artwork, filigreed carvings, halos of metalwork lamps, immense columns painted blue and gold, four stories of magnificent stained-gla.s.s windows reaching up into the heavens of the central dome. The power of it all was as moving as it was undeniable.

Bourne said the Muslim prayers, his forehead pressed to the carpet he had just bought. He was perfectly sincere in his prayers, feeling the centuries of history etched into the stone, marble, gold leaf, and lapis from which the mosque had been constructed and fervently embellished. Spirituality came in many guises, was called by many names, but they all spoke directly to the heart in a language as old as time.

When he was finished, he rose and rolled up his rug. He lingered in the mosque, allowing the reverberating near silence to wash over him. The sibilant rustle of silk and cotton, the soft hum of muttered prayers, the undercurrent of whispered voices, every human sound and movement gathered up into the mosque's great dome, swirled like granules of sugar in rich coffee, subtly altering the taste.

In fact, all the while he seemed lost in holy contemplation he was covertly watching those finis.h.i.+ng their prayers. He spotted an older man, his beard shot through with white, roll up his rug and walk slowly over to the lines of shoes. Bourne arrived at his shoes at the same time the older man was putting on his.

The old man, who had one withered arm, regarded Bourne as he stepped into his shoes. "You're new here, sir," he said in Turkish. "I haven't seen your face before."

"I just arrived, sir," Bourne replied with a deferential smile.

"And what brings you to Istanbul, my son?"

They moved out through the western door.

"I'm searching for a relative," Bourne said. "A man by the name of Nesim Hatun."

"Not so uncommon a name," the old man said. "Do you know anything about him?"

"Only that he runs his business, whatever that may be, here in Sultanahmet," Bourne said.

"Ah, then perhaps I can be of help." The old man squinted in the sunlight. "There is a Nesim Hatun who, along with his twelve children, runs the Miraj Hammam on Bayramfirini Sokak, a street not so far from here. The directions are simple enough."

Bayramfirini Sokak-the Street of the Festival Oven, midway along Akbiyik Caddesi-was a shade calmer than the frantic avenues of Istanbul. Nevertheless, the sharp, raised calls of merchants, the chanting of itinerant food sellers, the particular bleat-and-squeal, a product of negotiating a sale, collected in the narrow street like a dense fog. Bayramfirini Sokak, as severely pitched as a mountainside, ran all the way down to the Sea of Marmara. It was home to a number of small guesthouses and the hammam of Nesim Hatun, the man who had hired Yevgeny Feyodovich at the behest of Fadi to help lead Bourne to the killing ground on the Odessa beach.

The hammam's door was a thick, dark wooden affair, carved with Byzantine designs. It was flanked by a pair of colossal stone urns, originally used to store oil for lamps. The whole made for an impressive entrance.

Bourne stashed his leather satchel behind the left-hand urn. Then he opened the door and entered the dimly lit forecourt. At once the constant bawling of the city vanished, and Bourne was enfolded in the silence of a snow-cloaked forest. It took a moment for the ringing in his ears to settle. He found himself in a hexagonal s.p.a.ce in the center of which was a marble fountain gracefully spewing water. There were graven arches held up by fluted columns on four sides, beyond which were a combination of lush enclosed gardens and hushed, lamplit corridors.

This could have been the vestibule of a mosque or a medieval monastery. As in all important Islamic buildings, the architecture was paramount. Because Islam forbade the use of images of Allah or, indeed, of any living thing, the Islamic artisan's desire to carve was channeled into the building itself and its many embellishments.

It was no coincidence that the hammam was reminiscent of a mosque. Both were places of reverence as well as of community. Since much of the religion was based on the purification of the body, a special place was reserved for the hammam in the lives of Muslims.

Bourne was met by a tellak-a ma.s.seur-a slim young man with the face of a wolf. "I would very much like to meet Nesim Hatun. He and I have a mutual business a.s.sociate. Yevgeny Feyodovich."

The tellak did not react to the name. "I will see if my father is available."

Soraya, striding past the security area of Was.h.i.+ngton National Airport, was about to thumb on her cell phone when she saw Anne Held wave to her. Soraya felt a flood of relief when she embraced the other woman.

"It's so good to have you back," Anne said.

Soraya craned her neck, looked around. "Were you followed?"

"Of course not. I made certain of that."

Soraya fell into step with Anne as they headed out of the terminal. Her nerves were tw.a.n.ging unpleasantly. It was one thing to be in the field working against the enemy, quite another to be coming home to a viper in your nest. She began to work her emotions as any good actor would, thinking of a tragedy long ago: the day her dog, Ranger, got run over in front of her. Ah, good, she thought, here come the tears.

Anne's face clouded with concern. "What is it?"

"Jason Bourne is dead."

"What?" Anne was so shocked she stopped them in the midst of the bustling concourse. "What happened?"

"The Old Man sent Lerner after Bourne, like a personal a.s.sa.s.sin. The two fought. They ended up killing each other." Soraya shook her head. "The reason I came back was to keep an eye on the man posing as Martin Lindros. Sooner or later, he's bound to make a mistake."

Anne held her at arm's length. "Are you certain about your intel about Lindros? He just masterminded an all-out attack on the Dujja nuclear facility in South Yemen. It's been totally destroyed."

Blood flushed Soraya's face. "My G.o.d, I was right! It's why Dujja went to all this trouble to infiltrate CI. If Lindros spearheaded it, you can be d.a.m.n sure the facility was a decoy. CI is dead wrong if they believe they've averted the threat."

"In that case, the sooner we get back to headquarters, the better, don't you think?" Anne threw an arm around Soraya's shoulders, hurrying her through the electric doors into the damp chill of the Was.h.i.+ngton winter. Glow from the floodlit monuments engraved a majestic pattern on the dark, low clouds. Anne guided Soraya into a CI-issue Pontiac sedan, then slid behind the wheel.

They joined the long line of vehicles circling like fish around a reef, heading toward the exit. On the way into Was.h.i.+ngton, Soraya, leaning slightly forward, glanced in the side mirror. It was habit, long ago ingrained in her. She did it as a matter of course, whether or not she was on a field mission. She saw the black Ford behind them, thought nothing of it, until her second glance. It was now one car behind them, but keeping pace in the right-hand lane. Not enough to say anything yet, but when it was still in place on her third look, she felt under the circ.u.mstances she had enough evidence to consider that they were being followed.