“Following orders, sir,” the soldier said fearfully.
Colonel Sun’s black eyes bored into the man with a terrible intensity. “Your orders were to aim in front of the vehicle, not at it.”
He lashed the man across the face, leaving a trail of fresh blood and ripped flesh. Thinking of what he was going to tell Ouyang, he hit the man again and again until he slid to his knees. Bourne wasn’t meant to die, not here, not now. Not yet. Colonel Sun kicked the man so hard he fell over backward.
“Get this dog out of my sight,” Sun snapped at the officer.
After the man was hustled away, Colonel Sun turned to the man who had been in the helo with him. “Captain Lim, as soon as the fire has burned itself out, get a forensics team in there. I want a definitive ID on the driver as quickly as possible.”
Wow.” Wendell Marsh, lying sweat-slick on his late boss’s bed, stared at Maricruz’s flawless back as she sat up. “When can we do that again?”
Maricruz laughed. “Don’t mistake me for one of your call girls, Wendell.”
“I’m just asking—”
“I do the asking, Wendell. You would do well to remember that.”
He watched her, a little frightened now. He was in a foreign country that gave him the willies, in a situation suddenly beyond his understanding. He waited, listening to his own breath sough in and out of his half-open mouth, until the silence weighed too heavily on him.
“I meant no disrespect, Maricruz.”
“Of course you did. That’s just your way. You never learned how to treat a woman.”
Certainly not a woman like you, he thought, but wisely kept his own counsel.
Maricruz sighed deeply. “You know, Wendell, you’ve been a bad, bad boy.”
His heart skipped a beat, forcing him to sit up, pushing the pillow behind him. “What d’you mean?”
“Do you really think I’d meet with you without gathering all the information on you I could? And what you did, Wendell, was embezzle money from my father.”
Marsh’s blood pressure went sky-high; he felt an unpleasant heat traveling through his body like an invisible serpent. “I mean to pay it back, Maricruz. Every cent of it. In fact, I’ve already started to—”
“Why did you do it?” She turned on him now, and he quailed to see the force and determination on her face. “My father trusted you.”
Marsh hung his head. “The money wasn’t for me, it was for my sister. She married a very rich, very abusive man. She thought she loved him, thought she could change him but…” He shrugged. “I finally convinced her to leave him. In retaliation, he came down on her with a legal team that threatened her, tried to strip her of all her rights. I had no choice but to find her the best defense money could buy. The problem was, that team of lawyers and private investigators was way beyond even my means.”
Maricruz considered this for a moment. She already knew he was telling the truth, but the mess he had made had to be cleaned up before they could go forward. “Why didn’t you ask my father for the money?”
“You mean a loan?”
“To fight such a man, he would have given it to you.”
Marsh looked away. “I was ashamed.”
“So instead you just took the money.”
“I was sure I could pay it back before anyone discovered it, but the divorce proceedings went on longer, and then I needed more money, and it was too late.” He looked back at her. “Is it too late with you?”
She studied him for a moment. “Wendell, do you know what aliyah means?”
He shook his head.
“I’m not surprised. Aliyah is a Hebrew word. It means ‘penance’ or ‘atonement.’ You will perform an aliyah for me, Wendell.”
He felt a cooling wave of relief flush through him that obliterated the serpent of fire. “Yes, Maricruz. Of course I will.”
“The aliyah will be difficult, Wendell, and not without a considerable amount of danger. However, when you have completed it, I will know that I can trust you again.”
Wei-Wei, the Mossad agent in place whose mysterious pressing business had caused him to postpone the meet with Bourne, lived on Jiujiaochang Road, just down the block from the gaudy facade of the China Citic Bank and Fanghua pearl shop. In the distance, a clutch of ugly pastel-colored high-rises marred the skyline like chewed nails on a dowager’s scented hand.
Wei-Wei’s apartment was on the second floor, above the China Beauty shop, where women were trying on all manner of patterned silk scarves. Bourne was still slightly numb, his digits tingly, not totally at his command. On the way he stopped at another clothes shop and, for the second time, bought a new wardrobe, dropping his burned and torn jacket, shirt, and trousers into the trash bin next to the sink in the filthy toilet. He was sorry to see his military uniform go, but he had no choice; it smelled like singed hair and roasted metal.
Continuing his walk, he paused at a street vendor’s stall to eat cubes of roast pork belly on a bamboo stick, washing the protein down with two bottles of Coke so chilled, shards of ice were floating in them. By the time he was finished consuming the food, his fingers had stopped tingling and his head had cleared.
On reaching Jiujiaochang Road, he spent the next several minutes checking the immediate vicinity. While he watched the passersby, he listened to snatches of their conversations. He neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary. When a siren sounded, it was far away, headed in other directions. At length, he ducked through the front door to Wei-Wei’s building. It was narrow, as was the entryway, which smelled of hot oil and sizzling Sichuan peppercorns. The stairs rose steeply ahead of him, creaking with every step he took.
On the second-floor landing the cooking smells were stronger. Even out here, the oil from the burst peppercorns stung his eyes. Wei-Wei’s apartment was at the far end of the landing, in the back. As he passed a grime-coated window, he peered out, could see a narrow alley abutted by the overlapping tiles of steeply pitched rooftops on the neighboring buildings.
Wei-Wei’s doorbell was out of order, so he knocked on the door, then harder. There was no response. He put his ear against the door. At first he could hear nothing but what sounded like the wind soughing through the apartment, as if Wei-Wei had left the window open. Then, following his third knock, a brief rustling came to him, as of stiff clothes rubbing against flesh. Still, Wei-Wei didn’t answer.
Standing back, Bourne kicked the door in, and was immediately confronted by a Shanghainese police office pointing a gun at him.
“Who are you?” he said in an affected and officious voice. “What are you doing breaking into a private citizen’s home?”
“Wei-Wei is a friend of mine,” Bourne said. He showed the cop his Carl Halliday passport. “From time to time, we do a little business.”
The cop’s eyes narrowed. “What sort of business?” The muzzle of his service pistol never wavered from Bourne’s chest.
“Nothing major,” Bourne said. “Just, from time to time, shipments of gum.”
“Gum?”
“Chewing gum.” Bourne produced the pack he had purchased at the airport and held it out. “Chinese herbs. See? Canadians are nuts for Chinese herbs.”
Then Bourne frowned as he put away the pack of gum. “Where is my friend? Where’s Wei-Wei?”
The cop beckoned with his free hand and he and Bourne went into the tiny bedroom, where the man known as Wei-Wei was hanging from a rope looped over a wooden rafter.
“Seems a competitor got to him,” the cop said. He gestured with his gun. “I’ll have to ask you to leave. The forensics team is on its way. I can question you in the hallway.”
Bourne was about to protest when he heard a sound like that of a small box closing. The cop’s eyes opened wide, his lips pulled back from his nicotine-stained teeth, and he pitched forward into Bourne’s arms.
A tiny dart stuck out the side of his neck.
9
Dani Amit, head of Collections, entered Director Yadin’s office wi
th a grim look on his face. Across from Yadin sat Amir Ophir.
“We’ve lost Davidoff,” Amit said.
The Director frowned. “What d’you mean? He’s not in Shanghai?”
“He may be,” Amit said, “or he may not.”
“I think you’d better explain yourself,” Ophir said.
Amit gave Ophir merely a glance. Using a tablet computer, he pulled up a short video on the Director’s large monitor, which took up most of the wall opposite the desk. In it, the three men saw Bourne going through passport control.
“This comes from the Shanghai airport,” Amit said. “Bourne boarded the flight on the ticket we provided for him, deplaned, and, as you can see, arrived safely in Shanghai as Lawrence Davidoff, the legend we concocted for him.”
Yadin spread his hands. “So what’s the problem?”
Amit passed a hand across his forehead. “Ever since then, he’s been going around the city, stopping here and there, in what seems to be a completely random pattern.”
“You have a printout of the stops?” Ophir said.
Amit touched the tablet’s screen and the video vanished, supplanted by a list of street addresses.
“Maybe he’s trying to shake a tail,” Ophir said.
Amit shook his head. “It’s been going on for hours now.”
Director Yadin’s frown deepened. “Our agent in place hasn’t checked in yet.” He glanced at his watch. “He and Bourne should be meeting anytime now.” He looked away from the screen to the faces of the two other men in the room. “I want to give Bourne his lead. Let’s give him some more time.”
“What if Bourne has gone off the grid?” Amit said. “It would mean he’s repeating a dangerous pattern he was known for with the Americans.”
“He knows too much of our plans, Director.” Ophir’s tone, if not his words, was a subtle rebuke of Yadin’s faith in the foreigner. “As I’ve said before, he’s not one of us.”
The Director absorbed everything that had been said. Abruptly, his expression changed. He had made up his mind.
“Amit, this is a surveillance matter. I think we ought to let Collections take charge.”
Ophir did not want to let this happen. “Sir, Retzach is an hour’s flight from Shanghai.”
“Retzach is an assassin,” Amit said.
“He’s much more,” Ophir said, pressing hard to keep the assignment. “And he has a great deal of experience in China.”
The Director pondered for some time. “For the moment, do nothing, Amir. Understand?”
“Elef Ahuz,” a thousant percent, Ophir said as, behind his back, he punched in Retzach’s number on his mobile.
There was a time, Maricruz thought, sitting next to Wendell Marsh in the backseat of a heavily defended armored vehicle, when she would have relished this kind of confrontation. When she would have, in fact, demanded that her father take her along instead of her brother, who had never been a great military mind. Now it was just business. Now her life was far away, on the Pacific Rim. Now she lived and worked and schemed with grown-ups.
These perpetual adolescents with their guns and knives and machetes were tin soldiers, preying on the weak, the cowed, the defenseless. It enraged her that they murdered women. In Ciudad Juárez alone, thousands of women and girls had either disappeared or been killed from 2008 to the present. And while it was true that some of them had been killed in family disputes, the truth was a vast majority fell easy victims to the drug cartels.
So what did the cartel leaders know of the world beyond Mexico’s bloodied borders? They would only act—and react—one way. That she could predict their moves and decisions did not necessarily make them any less deadly. Their guns were always loaded, their rage constantly at hair-trigger level. She knew they would not hesitate to kill anyone, at any time. Not only were they lawless, they were uncivilized. They simply did not give a shit.
She stared out the small, square window as she thought these thoughts. The bulletproof glass was so thick, so encoded with titanium filaments, that the world of her childhood bore no resemblance to her memories as it slid by.
She fingered the hand-hewn grips of the Bersa Thunder .380 holstered at her waist. A smaller pistol—a .25—was strapped to her leg at the top of her right boot. In fact, she carried more weapons than a Roman centurion marching onto the battlefield.
A battlefield was precisely where she was headed now. She had called Felipe Matamoros on her mobile. Matamoros was the head of Los Zetas, the one drug lord she needed to see. The Gulf cartel had been decimated by Los Zetas to the point that they were merely vestigial, and as for the Sinaloa—still the largest cartel in numbers—Los Zetas had for some months now been eating away at their traditional territory. It was only a matter of time before Raul Giron, head of the Sinaloa, would lose what control he had left. The strategies devised by the paramilitary minds at the core of Los Zetas were too much for the old-school peasant drug overlords. After she briefed Marsh, they had been met outside her father’s house by a contingent of fifteen heavily armed men, who led them to the waiting armored vehicle, and they had set off for the place Matamoros had indicated.
Marsh, stirring beside her, brought her back.
“Why did you do it?” he said.
“Do what?” Her mind was still on today’s strategies.
“Seduce me.”
She glanced over at him and shrugged. “How else was I to know what kind of man you are?”
“You mean it was a test?”
“To keep you or to send you packing, yes.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t see what you could—”
“In the throes of sex, men reveal parts of themselves even they are not aware of. There’s something in you, Wendell, something I don’t want to let go of.”
“You mean I can be of use to you.”
“That’s a poor and inaccurate way of putting it. I sensed I could trust you, that you might have learned from your transgression.”
“That I have.”
“Well then, our coupling was a success”—she smiled in that way that could shrivel another woman and send shivers down a man’s back—“for both of us.”
Marsh stared at the metal floor between his feet. She sensed him brooding and, before the fear set in, she said, “You’re perfect for your role in this little play of ours.”
“Play?” Marsh said. “Is that what you call a meeting with the most feared man in Mexico?”
She put a hand on his forearm. “Cálmate, Juanito, por favor.” She smiled in that winning way of hers. “This is all foreordained. My father’s power protects us better than these armed men.”
“Then why are they here?”
Her smile widened. “Machismo, Wendell, is the watchword by which I have lived my life. I had no choice. This is why I chose to leave Mexico, which still today is no place for a common woman. But now I come back to Mexico as a citizen of the world. This is an unknown to men like Matamoros. The world beyond Mexico is a mystery to men like him. They know what they know, and that’s all. Their knowledge of their world is complete, it’s what makes them secure. But it also limits them.”
“But Matamoros is different,” Marsh said. “He was trained by the Mexican military.”
“And you think the military is any different from the cartels?” She shook her head. “Only in how it wages war. But you see, Wendell, for all of the military’s superiority in weapons, helicopters, manpower, it is no match for the cartels, whose fervor of purpose makes them stronger. They bend the Mexican state to their will. Everything else is extraneous and of no interest to them.
“But I bring them a means to their end—drugs and money. Here in Mexico, these are the only two things that must be respected.”
By this time they had reached the northern precincts of the Distrito Federal. They made a right, then another, and finally a left. At the end of the street, they turned into a curving driveway that led to an enormous house of pale pink stucco, in the Mexican haciend
a style. The instant their vehicle began to crunch over the crushed-shell drive, men appeared from the feathered palm-frond shadows around the house. They were grim-faced and clearly armed, but they made no threatening move. It was as if they were statues strewn about the property, but Maricruz was under no illusions. At the drop of a hat they could turn into land mines.
The vehicle ground to a stop in front of a country-style portico. Her men emerged first but, following her orders, stayed within a handbreadth of the vehicle.
“Come,” Maricruz said to Marsh as she stepped out onto cartel soil. The front door was painted the particular shade of blue the Mexicans referred to as azul. It swung inward, and a massive human being stepped across the lintel. This must be Juan Ruiz, she thought, one of Matamoros’s right-hand men. He was as big as a sumo wrestler and, according to her information, as deadly as a puff adder.
Any hesitation would be perceived as a sign of weakness, she knew, so she strode purposely forward. She had not been exaggerating her father’s power and influence with these people to Marsh, but she had perhaps underplayed the innate disadvantage of being a female in this world of primal crime and animal mayhem. She had her father’s reputation to uphold, something she had vowed to do from the moment news of his death had reached her in Beijing.
“Juan Ruiz?” Maricruz said.
Juan Ruiz nodded almost imperceptibly as Maricruz stepped up to his level. Then his dead-stone eyes refocused on Wendell Marsh.
“Who?” he said. “Why?”
Language was not his forte. That, she knew, would be left to Diego de la Luna, Matamoros’s other right-hand man.
“Juan Ruiz, I am pleased to introduce Wendell Marsh.”
“Señor Matamoros said one person. Here are two.”
“Señor Marsh was my father’s longtime adviser, and now mine. Where I go, he goes.”
Juan Ruiz’s eyes seemed to close as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet. In fact, Maricruz could see that behind those lowered lids, the big man was scrutinizing Marsh. At length, he gave another scarcely perceptible nod, then stood aside, an invitation for them to enter.