The Bourne Imperative

  The urgency of escape weighed on him, and he negotiated her through the bend, then scuttled along the slope, which became less and less severe. Their escape route smelled of concrete, dead leaves, and rot. The bottom of it was wet and dank. Echoes of their progress followed them like ghosts fleeing into the darkness.

  He tilted his head upward, playing the beam of light across the top of the drainpipe, looking for the service junction el Enterrador had told them was three hundred yards beyond the wall of the estate and emerged onto a heavily treed area of Lincoln Park.

  The pipe was slowly narrowing, something el Enterrador had failed to mention. Bourne’s progress was slowed by the constant maneuvering of Rebeka’s body to fit the changing dimensions. He kept going, murmuring a soft litany to keep her conscious. There was still no sign of the service junction. Just then, the beam of light began to stutter. Darkness replaced light. It returned, but with a dimmer wattage. The batteries were failing.

  Bourne redoubled his efforts to move forward quickly, but the drainpipe continued to narrow, obliging him to inch along, headfirst, Rebeka’s body on top of him. He could feel the beat of her heart, the shudder of her breathing, which was becoming ragged as she fought for air. He had to get her out of the ground and into the air immediately.

  He kept going forward, inch by bloody inch, every second crucial now. The flashlight failed again, took longer to come on, the beam faded, worn-out and flickering. But in its inconstant illumination, Bourne at last saw the outline of the service junction, a vertical shaft up to the park.

  Trying to pick up speed, he dragged Rebeka along with him, his back raw and wet through his clothes from scraping along the bottom of the pipe. A semicircular rim, shimmering like a sliver of moon in a nighttime sky, beckoned to him and then winked out as the flashlight’s batteries finally failed. He was plunged into the pitch black.

  Natasha Illion?” Thorne felt the world slipping from beneath his feet. “I don’t—”

  “Understand?” Ann held her icy smile. “Poor Charles. Let’s just say Tasha and I are friends and leave it at that.”

  “You bitch!” he cried and leaped at her.

  Ann took her hand out of the dresser drawer. She gripped a small Walther PPK/S. Thorne either didn’t see it or didn’t care. Enraged, he came on, his hands raised, seeking to strangle her.

  Ann pulled the trigger once, twice, holding her hand rock-steady, squeezing the trigger. The powerful .32 ACP bullets tore through him, knocking Thorne against the wall with such force he ricocheted off.

  His eyes opened in shock and disbelief. Then came the blinding pain, and he pitched into her. For a moment he gripped her as he once had when they were lovers, desperate in their feverish lust.

  His mouth opened and closed, a speared fish gasping for air. “Why…? You…”

  Ann watched him dying with a cold, almost clinical eye. “You’re a traitor, Charles. To me, to our marriage, but most of all to our country.” He slipped to his knees. “Do you know what you were up to with the estimable Mr. Li? Estimable as a spy, that is.”

  Thorne felt as if there were no more shocks left for him to endure. The landslide had come and it was covering him completely.

  “Good-bye, Charles.” Ann pushed him away, found his blood on her. Stepping over him, she returned to the bathroom, where she stepped into the shower and began to scrub her body clean.

  Bourne kept moving forward, judging the distance from the last after-image of the shaft’s rim still shining in his mind’s eye. The pipe was now so narrow that he could feel the top by lifting his arm in his prone position. This is how he traversed the last few feet to the rim. Feeling it with his fingertips, his heart lifted.

  Setting Rebeka down, he stood up into the shaft. Reaching above his head, he felt the bottom of the hatch. There was a metal ring distended from the bottom. He turned this to the left, then pushed, and was rewarded by a rush of light and fresh air.

  Freedom!

  Ducking back down, he once more gathered Rebeka up and, lifting her into the shaft, pushed her up to the surface. A moment later, he followed her up. Daylight glowed around them. They were in the center of a copse of trees, planted in a perfectly symmetrical square, four trees deep on each side.

  Keeping Rebeka down and out of sight, he lifted his head, listening for sounds of pursuit. He heard the distant rumble of traffic from the perimeters. It was too early for any strollers to be visiting the park. They were alone.

  Checking Rebeka again, he saw that the wound was already suppurating. He tried using one of the bits of cloth he’d taken from the toolbox to stanch the flow, but almost immediately the cloth was saturated. The difficult travel through the drainpipe had exacerbated the wound. He listened to her heart, then her lungs, and didn’t like what he heard. He tried to calculate how much blood she had lost—more than she had on their flight from Damascus to Dahr El Ahmar. Her face was ashen, all color drained from her eyes. She tried to speak but couldn’t manage it. If he didn’t get her to a hospital soon, she’d surely bleed out.

  She opened her mouth, said something unintelligible.

  “Save your strength,” he whispered. “Only a little way to go now until the hospital.”

  He picked his head up again. What they needed now was transportation.

  “Rebeka,” he said, “I’m going to get a car for us.” Rising, he wove his way out of the square of trees, went across the park, and down a bit, where he saw a car park. Traffic drove by. A taxi passed. He thought about hailing it, but cruising cabs were all too often driven by gang members out to mug and rob unsuspecting tourists. Instead, he stood by the side of the parked car. He was about to break in when a police cruiser drifted past. The cops marked him and the cruiser slowed. Bourne turned away. The cruiser stayed put, and he cursed under his breath.

  Another taxi turned the corner and came his way. It was free, and he flagged it down. From the corner of his eye, he saw the cruiser pull away and drive on. When the cab pulled to a halt, Bourne told the driver to wait. Retracing his steps, he returned to the grove. As he brought Rebeka across the park to the waiting vehicle, she murmured something again. This time, he put his ear close to her mouth. Her eyes opened, focusing on him with an obvious effort, and forced herself to repeat it. A name.

  They reached the waiting taxi. The driver turned, watching Bourne deposit Rebeka in the backseat and climb in after her.

  “¿Qué pasa con ella?” the driver said.

  “Ponernos al Hospital General de Mexico,” Bourne ordered.

  “Hey, she’s bleeding all over my seat!”

  “She’s been stabbed,” Bourne said, leaning forward. “¡Vamos!”

  The driver grimaced, put the taxi in gear, and pulled out into traffic. Within three blocks, Bourne knew they were going the wrong way. Hospital General de Mexico was south of here; they were heading north. He was about to say something when the driver began to pull over to where two squat Mayan-looking men were loitering on a corner, smoking furiously.

  Lunging forward, Bourne wrapped one arm around the driver’s throat and pulled hard. At the same time, his free hand groped beneath his jacket, found the pistol, and jerked it out of its shoulder holster.

  “The hospital,” Bourne said, pressing the muzzle against the side of his head, “or I pull the trigger.”

  “And risk the car going out of control?” The driver, still heading for his partners in crime, shook his head. “You won’t.”

  Bourne pulled the trigger and the driver’s head exploded in a welter of blood, brains, and bone. The taxi lurched forward, heading directly toward the two men. They recognized the oncoming vehicle, threw down their butts, and got ready to go to work. Then the taxi jumped the curb and, yelling, they scattered.

  By this time, Bourne had clambered over the front seat. Shoving the driver out the door, he slid behind the wheel, veered away to just miss a streetlight and several pedestrians before he was able to muscle the car’s trajectory back out onto the street.

>   He made a spectacular U-turn, running up and over the divider. Brakes screeched, horns blared, and angry shouts were raised. But, moments later, they were all behind him as he raced in and out of lanes, heading pell-mell south toward the hospital.

  He glanced at Rebeka in the rearview mirror, saw her extreme pallor, could not detect even a shallow breath coming from her. She was bathed in blood.

  “Rebeka,” he said. And then, more forcefully, “Rebeka!”

  She did not respond. Her eyes stared upward blankly. He sped on through the increasingly chaotic streets, past modern buildings and squares embedded in the ruins of the ancient past, into the smoky, raw-flesh–colored Mexico City dawn.

  Book Three

  21

  Treadstone’s internal alarm sounded at precisely 7:43 AM. Anderson, the ranking Treadstone officer, called Dick Richards at 8:13 AM, after his staff had been unable to identify the Trojan that had jumped the firewall to attack the on-site servers, much less quarantine and exterminate it.

  “Get down to HQ,” Anderson said, “ASAP.”

  Richards, who had been sitting on the edge of his bed, literally biting his nails to the quick while he waited for the call, jumped up, splashed water on his face, and, grabbing his raincoat, headed out the door. On the way to work, he allowed himself a self-satisfied smile.

  When he arrived fourteen minutes later, the office was in something of a quiet uproar. No one had yet figured out how a Trojan could have invaded the on-site servers, and it was this question, just as much as how much damage it had done, that occupied the discussion around the IT department.

  After checking in with the hastily convened team, Richards set himself up at the server terminal and began his “tracking” of the Trojan he had created and set like a time bomb inside the Treadstone intranet. Creating the Trojan had been the fun part, but inserting it had proved far more difficult than even he had imagined, and he cursed himself for not paying more attention to the intricacies of the firewall during the short time he had been at Treadstone.

  He had made the mistake of assuming that the Treadstone firewall was built on the same cyber architecture as those at the DoD and the Pentagon, with which he was familiar. Much to his consternation, he had quickly discovered that it was a completely different animal, one whose algorithms were alien to him.

  He had spent hours racking his brain, trying to understand the architecture. He couldn’t find a way in until he discovered how the base algorithm functioned. Close to 4 AM, he had cracked it. In celebration he rose, took a long-delayed pee, then selected a beer and some sliced ham from the refrigerator. He rolled the slices into cigars, dipping them into hot mustard, ate them one by one, washing them down with the beer. He chewed and swallowed while considering the possible routes he could take to insert the Trojan through the firewall. It had to be done that way, as if an outside agency were responsible.

  He washed his hands and returned to his desktop, starting the tricky and delicate process of breaching the Treadstone firewall. The program he had devised was tiny but supremely powerful. Once inside, it mimicked the server, rerouting Treadstone requests for information to a dead end that would quickly bring all intranet traffic to a screeching halt.

  Now, as Richards sat typing away at the server terminal, his job was to insert the virus he had prepared while at the same time quarantining the Trojan before eliminating it. This was just as tricky as the original insertion. He had to make it appear as if the virus was triggered out of the Trojan as it was being isolated. Hair-raising enough, but then Sam Anderson pulled up a chair and sat down next to him.

  “How’s it going?”

  Richards grunted, hoping Peter’s deputy would get bored and leave. Still he sat, staring at the computer language racing across the screen. Stuxnet was so last year compared to the mutated program he had devised: an advanced viral form that incorporated the best parts of the Stuxnet algorithm and grafted it onto an entirely new architecture, known in his circles as Duqu, which, among other neat devices, used both faked and stolen digital certificates to insinuate itself into the boot program, the core of every operating system. From there, it twisted every command.

  “Making progress?”

  Richards ground his teeth together in frustration and anxiety. He hadn’t counted on being observed. “I’ve identified the Trojan.”

  “Now what?”

  On the other hand, he thought, Anderson doesn’t know dick about software programs, so what could make him suspicious? “Now I need to quarantine it.”

  “Move it, you mean?”

  “In a way.” The constant stream of idiotic questions was making it difficult for Richards to concentrate. “Although ‘moving’ in the cyber world is a relative term.”

  Anderson leaned forward. “Can you explain that to me?”

  It was all Richards could do not to let out a howl. Working for three masters was nerve-racking enough without this interference. “Some other time maybe.”

  Anderson was just about to ask another question when his mobile buzzed. Answering it, he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. “Fuck.” The more the voice spoke, the more he scowled.

  Richards risked a glance over at him. “What is it?”

  But Anderson was already striding across the room. Snatching up his coat, he raced out the door.

  Shrugging, Richards returned to his intricate sabotage.

  I need a body.” Secretary Hendricks spoke to Roger Davies, his first adjutant, on his mobile. “Male, no family ties. A B&E rap sheet would be ideal. Also, I need you to send over a hand-picked clean-up crew. An apartment needs to be sterilized.” He listened briefly to the buzz of Davies’s voice on the other end of the call before he interrupted. “I understand. Just make it happen now.”

  Hendricks disconnected and looked down with distaste at the body of Charles Thorne. “That’s damn good shooting, Ann,” he said. “But I wish to God you’d found another way.”

  “So do I.” Ann stood beside him in her bedroom, a thick bathrobe tied around her. After she had called her handler, she had considered getting dressed, but Hendricks had trained her too well. She didn’t want to disturb the scene until he arrived with further orders. “But he gave me no choice. I guess he just snapped.”

  Hendricks, hands in the slash pockets of his overcoat, wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He’d had Ann pick up her dress off the floor while he checked it for blood spatters. Then he directed her to hang it in her closet. Her shoes were another story. He discovered several blood spatters and placed them in a plastic garbage bag he had brought with him. He had donned disposable gloves and booties before crossing the threshold into the apartment.

  He picked up her Walther PPK/S and began to methodically wipe it clean of her prints. “You think you can handle Li by yourself?”

  “I’ve worked for you in secret for, what? Sixteen years?” Ann nodded. “I sure as hell can handle him.” She eyed Hendricks. “But it isn’t really Li you’re concerned about.”

  “No.” Hendricks sighed. “It’s whoever he reports to.” He turned away, not wanting to look at the corpse again until Roger arrived with his burden. He could have given this dirty job to any one of a number of subordinates, but he knew that was the way leaks developed, even in the most secure of clandestine organizations. The dirtier the job, he had learned, the more imperative it was that you handled it yourself. And this was an exceptionally dirty business. He sighed. “The structure of the Chinese Secret Service is more than a bit opaque. It would be immensely helpful to know who we’re really up against.”

  He turned back to her. “That’s what I’m going to need from you now, Ann. We couldn’t ask it of poor Charles.” Of course they couldn’t. Thorne had been a dumb conduit—he was passing on disinformation to Li without knowing the intel was false. His overweening urgency for power had blinded him. Bad for him, but good for Hendricks. As Hendricks had anticipated, such urgency led to mistakes in judgment, which was just what Charles Thor
ne had made when he climbed into bed with Li in order to gain scoops for Politics As Usual. Now, sadly, that phase of the operation was prematurely terminated.

  It was possible, the secretary mused, that Ann had mismanaged her private life with him. He shrugged mentally. That was the chance you took when manipulating human beings; their behavior wasn’t always predictable.

  “Don’t worry,” Ann said.

  One thing you could say about Ann Ring, Hendricks thought, she had ice in her veins.

  “Nevertheless, you do look worried.”

  “It’s Soraya.”

  “Ah, yes. I heard.” Ann tilted her head. “How is she?”

  “She almost died,” Hendricks said with more emotion than he had intended.

  Ann regarded him coolly, her arms crossed over her chest. “But she hasn’t died, has she?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s thank our lucky stars.”

  “I should have chosen—”

  “You chose her because she was the right person for the job.”

  “Once you told me that your husband was infatuated with her.”

  “Really, Christopher, that wasn’t the reason at all. Charles’s infatuation with her just made the assignment you gave her that much easier. She would have found another way; she’s an exceptionally clever girl. And from what you’ve told me, she enjoyed passing on the bits of disinformation to Charles.”

  Hendricks nodded. “It gave her a great deal of pleasure to have a direct hand in taking down Li and his cohorts.”

  “There,” Ann said. “You see? You’re just feeling remorseful because her concussion landed her in the hospital.”

  That wasn’t it at all, Hendricks thought sadly. Or, at least, not all of it. What worried him most of all was Soraya’s pregnancy. It seemed clear to him that she was carrying Charles Thorne’s child. If that was the case, how was Ann going to react? She was his most closely held, and therefore his most precious, asset-in-place. He could not afford to lose her, especially now that they had made such definitive contact with Li.