The Bourne Imperative

  This virus was trouble of an exponential order. Every minute the IT team delayed in identifying its basic algorithm, the virus broke through and annihilated another barrier. The on-site Treadstone servers were beginning to look like Swiss cheese; there was almost nothing to pull off them, even if the IT team could find a way around or through the virus, which, as of now, they couldn’t.

  “Keep on it,” Anderson said, and, turning to Tim Nevers, said, “Speak to me of the unspeakable.”

  “You got that right,” Nevers said. “This guy Richards is a freakin’ genius at software programming. I’m still getting a good look at the Trojan, which, by the way, he definitely coded and entered into the system.”

  “What about the virus?”

  Nevers scratched his scalp. He was just over thirty and already shaved his head because he was going bald. “Yeah, well, it’s the freakin’ velociraptor of viruses, that much I can tell you.”

  “Not helpful,” Anderson said. “You have to give me something I can export to the other IT guys.”

  “I’m doing my best,” Nevers said, fingers blurred over the keyboard.

  “Do better.”

  That was what Anderson’s father had always said to him, not unkindly, but in a way that made Anderson want to do better, not simply to please his father, though, of course, that loomed large. Doing better made him succeed, as well as learn something important about himself. Anderson’s father was a military man—intelligence—who ended up at Central Intelligence. He had revamped many of their clandestine intel gathering methods and was rewarded by being kicked out because of a bad heart. He hated idling at home and died sixteen months after he had been let go. His bosses all said, “We told you so,” but Anderson knew what his father had known: At home he couldn’t “do better.” Useless he went to sleep one night and never woke up. Anderson was quite certain his father knew that, too, as he drifted off.

  “Got something!” Nevers said. “I’ve coded out the virus algorithm from the Trojan’s. It’s endlessly regenerative. Amazing, really.”

  “What I want to know, Nevers, is whether it can be stopped.”

  “Intervention,” Nevers said, nodding. “Not the way you’d ever think to nullify a virus, which is what makes it so clever. You have to flip a switch, so to speak, from inside the algorithm.”

  Anderson hitched his chair forward in order to get a better view. “So do it.”

  “Not so fast,” Nevers said. “The virus is encoded with traps, fail-safe mechanisms, and dead ends.”

  Anderson groaned. “One step forward, two steps back.”

  “Better than being in the dark.” Nevers hit the ENTER key. “I’ve just transmitted everything I’ve discovered to the rest of the IT team.” He turned, grinned at his boss. “Let’s see if they can do better.”

  Anderson grunted.

  “Richards destroyed the software keylogger just before he activated the virus. That’s the kernel of the problem. The software recorded only the partial code, not all of it. We can’t stop it until we have the code in its entirety.”

  “Don’t you have enough information to make an informed assumption, intervene, and flip the algorithmic switch?”

  “I could,” Nevers said, “but I won’t.” He turned to Anderson. “Look, this virus is so full of thorns—triggers, in other words—that if I don’t know precisely what I’m doing, I could inadvertently set off one of these triggers and make things infinitely worse.”

  “Worse?” Anderson said, incredulous. “What could be worse than all our data being obliterated?”

  “The motherboards overloading, the servers becoming nothing more than a pile of silicon, rare earths, and fused wire circuits. Vital enciphered communications would be down for God knows how long.”

  Then he grinned. “But on the bright side…” He pulled a tiny oblong from beneath the desk and held it up. “Richards didn’t find the Bluetooth transmitter. If he downloaded anything from outside, it’ll be recorded right here. Even better, we’ll be able to back-trace it to the source.”

  When Nicodemo saw Don Fernando Hererra, he froze, still as a statue. Hererra was dead—at least, according to Martha Christiana. But she had lied, and now she herself was dead, lying on the cobbled street on the Île Saint-Louis. Whether she had jumped from the fifth-floor window or had been pushed was impossible to say. But what was irrefutable was the presence of Hererra talking to the cops while the photos were being taken and fingerprints lifted from the crime scene.

  Craning his neck up, Nicodemo could see through the windows detectives treading through what must be Hererra’s apartment. More flashbulbs lit up the night, more fingerprints were being taken up there in every room. What they expected to find, Nicodemo had no idea, nor was he interested. His focus, which had been on Martha Christiana, the woman Maceo Encarnación had told him to pick up and bring back to the waiting jet, now shifted to Hererra. There was nothing Nicodemo could do for Martha Christiana anymore, but there was certainly something he must do about Hererra.

  Retreating to the shadows around the corner, he pulled out his mobile and called Maceo Encarnación.

  “I’m standing around the corner from Don Fernando Hererra’s apartment,” he said when he heard the other man on the end of the line. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but Martha Christiana is dead.”

  He pulled the mobile away from his ear at the tirade of curses that emanated from it.

  “Fell or pushed, I don’t know which,” he continued when Maceo Encarnación had expended the depths of his shock and rage. “I’m sorry, truly. But we have other matters to occupy us. Martha Christiana lied about Hererra being dead.…I know, I am too.…But he’s standing big as life.…Of course I’m sure it’s him.”

  Nicodemo spent the next few moments absorbing every word Maceo Encarnación spoke, at the end of which he said, “You’re sure that’s what you want me to do.”

  More withering talk, during which Nicodemo began his preparation for the assignment Maceo Encarnación had given him.

  “Get it done,” Maceo Encarnación concluded. “You have twenty-four hours. After that, if you haven’t appeared, I take off without you. Clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Nicodemo said. “I’ll be back before the deadline. Count on it.”

  Disconnecting, he pocketed his mobile and walked back to the crime scene. Martha Christiana had been loaded into the ambulance. Hererra was still talking with the detectives. He spoke, they nodded. One of them scribbled notes as fast as he could.

  Nicodemo flipped out a cigarette, lit up, and smoked languidly as he continued to assess the scene. When, at length, the detectives were finished with Hererra, they gave him their cards, and he turned away, returning to his building. Nicodemo watched as he pressed a four-digit code into the panel on the right side of the huge wooden doorway to the street.

  He waited until the detectives left and, amid the slowly dispersing crowd of onlookers, stood confronting the panel, which consisted of ten raised brass buttons, numbered one through zero. Taking out a small vial, he blew a white powder, finer than talcum, over the buttons. The powder adhered to the residue of oil left by Hererra’s fingerprints, revealing four whitened buttons. On the third combination, the door’s lock clicked open, and he stepped inside.

  He stood for a moment in the cobbled inner courtyard where, centuries before, horse-drawn carriages full of passengers would pull up and liveried footmen would fall over themselves to help the patricians down and into their residence. Now, of course, many people lived in the building, but the history remained, rising off the cobbles like steam from the horses’ glistening flanks.

  Two women, one young, one older, were lounging against a wall beside the front door, discussing the tragedy. The older one smoked. Nicodemo took out a cigarette and, approaching them, asked for a light.

  “Terrible thing.” The young woman shuddered. “Who can sleep after something like that?”

  “Now the street will be clogged with the morbidly curi
ous,” the older woman said, shaking her head.

  Nicodemo nodded sympathetically. “Why would someone throw themselves out a window?” he wondered out loud.

  “Who can say?” The older woman shrugged her meaty shoulders. “People are mad, that’s my position.” She sucked down more smoke. “Did you know the poor girl?”

  “A long time ago,” Nicodemo said. “We were childhood friends.”

  The older woman looked sorrowful. “She must have been so unhappy.”

  Nicodemo nodded. “I thought I could help her, but I arrived too late.”

  “Do you want to go upstairs?” the younger woman said, as if struck by a sudden idea.

  “I don’t want to disturb Señor Hererra.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he could use the sympathy. Here.” She crossed to the door, slipped her keys out of her pocket. She pressed the attached disc against a metal pad beside the door and it buzzed open.

  Nicodemo thanked her and went into the vertical vestibule. A large iron staircase curved upward, and he ascended. The building was eerily still, as if everyone in it were holding their breath in horror. No one was on the stairs, all the apartment doors were firmly closed, as if against a rapidly spreading disease.

  Don Fernando’s floor was likewise deserted. He went soundlessly down the landing to stand in front of the apartment. He listened but heard nothing.

  Then he put his ear to the door.

  Inside the apartment, Don Fernando could still smell the stale clothes of the cops and detectives. He felt as if his home had been broken into. He didn’t want to smell anything but Martha Christiana’s distinctive scent, and he resented deeply the official invasion. He stood stiffly, his back ramrod-straight, and tried to separate his thoughts from his emotions.

  He was responsible for Martha Christiana’s death, he had no doubts on that score. He had manipulated her, put her in what turned out to be an untenable position, pitting himself against Maceo Encarnación. He had twisted the screws on her, slowly to be sure, but in the end that hadn’t mattered. In the end, she hadn’t been able to follow either him or her employer. She had taken the only way out that would give her surcease. Perhaps this had been her destiny from the moment she was born into a loveless home and ran away, she thought, to save herself. Instead, she had run pell-mell toward her destiny, toward this apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, toward her death on the cobbles of the Quai de Bourbon.

  Perhaps it had nothing to do with him, but he did not believe that. In Martha Christiana desire had warped her destiny. Now she was dead. Turning in a slow circle, he felt the lack of her, as if there were more shadows in these rooms he had come to know so well, as if there were suddenly another room he had never noticed and hadn’t explored, a room whose contents frightened him.

  He checked once more to be certain he was alone even though the rational part of his brain told him that he was. Padding silently into the bathroom, he knelt down on creaky joints and extracted Martha Christiana’s handbag from the narrow space between the claw-foot tub and the marble-tiled floor, where he had shoved it before the cops had asked for entrance.

  Putting down the toilet seat cover, he sat, placing the handbag on his thighs. He stayed like that for long minutes, his fingers exploring the soft leather, his nostrils dilated to take in her scent, which rose from the handbag’s interior and caused tears to form in his eyes.

  Though he had been acting out of self-preservation, he had genuinely liked Martha. He had also felt sorry for her, trapped as she was. But what good had his empathy done, except to drive her the last few yards to her destiny?

  He sighed, and his head came up abruptly. He had heard a sound, and he listened, as if for her soft bare footfalls, as if she might still be alive, as if the last several hours had been a nightmare from which he had just this second awakened, her handbag in his lap. Then he looked down and knew with absolute clarity that what he held between his hands was all that was left of her.

  Slowly, he opened the bag and, with a curious trepidation, peered inside. He encountered the usual tools of the female trade: lipstick, compact, eyeliner, a small pack of tissues, her wallet, astonishingly thin, as if what little was inside might evaporate as quickly as her life. He opened it briefly, then fished out her mobile phone.

  It was locked, but he knew many of the things she liked, and he tried several of them on the keypad until he stumbled upon the right one, and the mobile opened to him as it had so many times to her. This door opening, as it were, moved him deeply. It was as if she were inviting him into the guarded part of herself.

  “Mea culpa, Martha,” he said. “I wish you were here.”

  Just outside the front door, Nicodemo heard these words as they wafted through the apartment, and he pressed his ear harder against the door. In doing so, he caused the old wooden panels to creak.

  He froze, scarcely allowing himself to breathe.

  Don Fernando’s head came up, and, like a dog on point, his body began to quiver. The creak from the front door had arrowed through the apartment, piercing his heart like a presentiment of death.

  Placing Martha’s handbag aside, he rose and, leaving the bathroom, went through the bedroom to the living area. There he stood for a moment, immobile, scenting the air for a new spoor. He stared hard at the front door, which he had been careful to lock the moment the last of the detectives had vacated the premises. He watched the wooden boards, as if they might tell him what or who was on the other side of the door.

  At length, he crept to the door and, with his back arched, bent to put his ear to the old wood. He heard breathing, but whether it was the building or someone standing on the other side of the door, he could not tell. He felt, if not frightened, then profoundly uneasy. He did not keep a handgun in the apartment, which was lucky for him. The cops would have confiscated it, and it might have aroused their suspicions that Martha Christiana’s death was murder rather than suicide. Now, though, he regretted not having stashed one somewhere. He did not feel safe.

  After taking another fruitless listen through the door, he backed away, returning to the bathroom, where he took up Martha’s handbag and resumed his melancholy journey through its contents.

  He checked her mobile’s call log first. The last incoming call had been made perhaps fifty minutes before she went out the window. Considering the hour it had been made, he thought that significant, especially because it was from a number in Martha’s phonebook. The name attached had been reduced to initials, but there was no doubt to whom “ME” belonged: Maceo Encarnación.

  What had Maceo Encarnación said to her that had made her snap, caused her to decide to kill herself? There was no doubt in his mind that she had felt trapped between himself and Encarnación with no way out.

  He checked her voicemails, texts, all the usual stuff that almost invariably clogged up people’s mobiles, but there was nothing. Martha Christiana had been too careful. As he was scrolling through her phonebook, his own mobile buzzed. He picked it up. Christien was calling.

  “Are you still dead?” Christien said with a chuckle.

  “Sadly, no.” Don Fernando took a breath. “But Martha Christiana is.”

  “What happened?”

  Don Fernando told him.

  “Well, at least she won’t be a threat to you anymore. I’ll take care of the press release correcting the news of your death.” There was a slight pause. “Do you know where Bourne is?”

  “I thought you were keeping track of him?”

  “No one can keep track of him, Don Fernando. You know that better than anyone.”

  Don Fernando grunted. Without thinking, he slid Martha’s mobile back into her handbag. His fingers found the compact, smooth and warm, as from contact with Martha’s skin. He found that circling his thumb over its lacquered surface gave him a measure of solace.

  “Our enemies are on the move,” Christien said. “Maceo Encarnación and Harry Rowland have left Mexico City. They landed in Paris over an hour ago. I thought I’d better warn
you.”

  “Something’s happening.”

  “Yes, but I hope it’s not what we have been afraid of.”

  Don Fernando ran a hand across his face. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “With Maceo Encarnación in Paris, I’m concerned about you.”

  “Maceo Encarnación knows better than to show his face in Paris. I have too many eyes and ears on the ground. Rowland is, however, another matter.”

  “Jason and that Mossad woman, Rebeka, were following Rowland.”

  Don Fernando stared at his bare feet on the bathroom tiles. Martha had liked his feet. She said they were sexy. “If that’s the case, then they’ve failed.”

  “I don’t want to think about Jason failing.”

  “Neither do I.” Don Fernando’s heart grew even heavier as he stared at the lapis face of Martha’s compact. “Listen, Christien, there must be something we can do for Jason.”

  “It’s progressed too rapidly, gone too far. It’s out of our hands,” Christien said. “All we can do now is have faith that Bourne will come through.”

  “If anyone can…” Vaya con Dios, hombre, Don Fernando thought as he disconnected.

  He was tired—beyond tired. He rose and, still holding the compact, padded back to the bedroom. It was early morning, when the city, still wrapped in sleep, began to shudder with the rumble of the first of the day’s traffic, when people queued up at bakeries to buy breakfast baguettes and croissants, when bicyclists crossed the bridges, taking their owners to work.

  He lay down on his bed, the covers rucked beneath him, but that only brought into view the window Martha Christiana had ruined on her way out of his life. Rolling over, he sat up, his gaze once again fixated on the compact. It was odd, he thought, that Martha carried a compact when he had never seen powder on her cheeks or forehead. She used lipstick and lash color; her natural beauty required nothing more. And yet…