“There,” she said, offering him the phone. “We’re in.”
Bourne took it, marveling at her handiwork. He input the hacked passcode into the panel’s keyboard.
“Hold on.” He punched a key, and, with a small shudder, the elevator began its smooth descent of the shaft.
They were all headed back to the villa when the sound of helos could be heard chopping up the early-morning calm. Then four silhouettes began to darken the sky, and all of them began to run.
Matamoros took hold of Maricruz’s elbow, directing her to the armored vehicle in which she had arrived from the airstrip. “There’s a forest a quarter mile to the northwest,” he said as he settled in beside her. “Once we’re hidden by the trees, we’ll be safe.” His mouth gave a twitch. “If the helos even make it that far.”
Maricruz had no idea what he was talking about, but as the armored vehicle coughed into life, moving out of the compound at a pace that astonished her, she saw through the thick bulletproof window on her side that Matamoros’s compadres were not following them. Instead two of them brought out ground-to-air missile launchers while the others loaded them.
As the armored vehicle left the area behind, she was afforded a glimpse of a pair of percussions as two white streaks took to the air. Explosions shook the vehicle, but the driver kept to his course. Two helos down, Maricruz thought.
She had no view forward, so she could not know what was ahead of them. But just after a third explosion shattered the atmosphere, the vehicle began to bump along, continually jarring her, which meant they had exchanged the paved road for a dirt track. Moments later her window was filled with thick greenery, and she sighed in relief. They had reached the forest; they were safe.
At that moment, there came a great whooshing sound and the green outside her window turned red. One of the helos had gotten past the missiles. Swooping low over the forest, its soldiers were using flamethrowers to set the trees alight. All around them came cracking and great thudding as huge trees came falling down. The flames licked higher.
The armored vehicle was trapped in what once had been a safe haven, but was now a massive conflagration.
They rode the elevator all the way down to the spa level. On the way, Yue described the hotel’s layout. When the car settled, Bourne reached out for the ladder, clambered off the elevator, and climbed up a short way to the narrow door that led out onto the restaurants-and-kitchens level.
Now that he was near the ground, Zhang’s bravado returned, and he was able to transfer himself onto the ladder and follow Bourne up. Yue took up the rear. Within moments the three of them were back inside the hotel proper.
“I still don’t see how we’re going to get out of here without Sun’s soldiers shooting us dead,” Yue said.
Bourne ignored her, headed down a utility corridor that separated the hotel’s several restaurants from the kitchens that served them, and entered an employees’ washroom, where all of them cleaned themselves up as best they could.
Then they exited, went through the kitchens, bustling, steam-laden, into a second corridor at the end of which was a double door that seemed to lead out to the street. A uniformed hotel guard stood to one side, looking vacant as he picked his teeth.
Around the corner from him were a number of large rolling carts, two of which were piled high with soiled linens from the meal services. Quickly Bourne mashed Zhang into one of them, rearranging the linens over him while the fat man crouched down as best he could. Yue was climbing into the next one when they heard footsteps approaching.
A harsh male voice said, “If this wasn’t the last pickup—”
“You’d what? Quit?” A second voice laughed. “Big talk.”
Bourne leapt into the cart with Yue, burrowing them both down, drawing the linens over the tops of their heads. Not a moment later they heard the wheels of the cart holding Zhang squealing away from them, then their own cart was moving along the corridor, around the corner. A bump and then, even through the mountain of soiled linen, Bourne could feel the humidity and temperature rise as if they were on a griddle.
They heard more voices as they were being wheeled across what must have been a loading dock. Then another bump as the carts were loaded into a large truck. Doors were slammed shut, and whatever vague light that had come to them was abruptly cut off.
Darkness. Then the grinding of gears as the truck started up. The cart started to rock back and forth as they left the hotel behind.
Out!” Matamoros shouted. “Out, out, out!”
The interior of the armored vehicle was almost as hot as an oven. One of his men broke open the door and they slipped out. The forest was an inferno, but his men led them along a corridor between trees that had not yet been consumed by flames.
Above them, over the roar of the conflagration, they could hear the rhythmic thwop-thwop-thwop of the helo’s rotors. The aircraft seemed like it was just above them. The severe downdraft fanned the flames, spreading the fire into the corridor down which they raced. Flames licked the trees right behind them; they could feel the heat rising greedily at their backs, seemingly determined to sear the clothes off their backs.
Maricruz and Matamoros followed the soldiers as they veered to the right, trying to reach the periphery of the fire, trying to outrun the flames the personnel aboard the Federales’ helo were doing their best to spread.
“Our nemesis has wasted no time closing for the kill,” Maricruz said over the intense racket as they crashed through the dry underbrush.
“He won’t stop, either.” Matamoros had a Heckler & Koch MP5 assault rifle, handed him by one of his men. He was now looking up as they ran, trying to find a gap in the treetops through which he could fire at the low-hovering helo.
“It’s as I said,” Maricruz said. “We have to find a way to kill him before he kills us.”
Up ahead, a gap in the trees let in a beam of light that seemed harshly blue compared with the fire-red of their immediate world. Looking up, Maricruz could see the glint of metal, then the body of the helo came into view, glinting blue-green like the body of a gigantic insect.
Matamoros lifted the assault rifle and was taking aim when the blue of a missile caught the tail of the helo, blasting it into smithereens. The helo bucked with the impact, then spun around madly and plummeted straight down toward the small glade in which Maricruz and Matamoros now stood.
20
We have a proposal to make you.” Sam Zhang looked across the table to where Yue sat, hands clasped around a cup of jasmine tea, eyes cast down, staring into the limpid depths.
“You’re joking.” Bourne pointedly rubbed the side of his neck where he had been injected. “The both of you have used up any goodwill you might have accrued.”
“I understand that,” Zhang said. “And until this moment we have neglected to thank you for saving our lives back there.”
Bourne’s gaze shifted. “Why don’t we let Yue speak for herself.”
At the mention of her name, Yue flinched, but her eyes remained pinned to her cup of tea.
The trio sat at an interior table of a tumbledown tea shop on a dusty, ancient lane in Zhujiajiao, a suburb of Shanghai. Pearl Stream, as it was known by its inhabitants, was a fan-shaped village, crisscrossed by glimmering waterways spanned by innumerable bridges made variously of wood, stone, and marble, some topped with coiled dragons or fierce lions with pearls caught between their open jaws. Outside, a bruise-toned sunset glowered, reflected on the water. The heat of the long afternoon wavered, vanquished by a freshening breeze. They had arrived here after leaping off the laundry van just before it entered its facility. From there Zhang made a call using Bourne’s mobile and, some time later, a trishaw picked them up.
Zhang cocked his head. “Little sister?”
“What is it you wish to say?” Bourne asked her. “Or maybe it’s nothing at all.”
Still, Yue said nothing. She had not moved in minutes; she scarcely seemed to breathe.
Bourne looked mean
ingfully at Zhang, who said, “Excuse me. This tea has gone right through me.”
After he had left, Bourne reached out and gently unfolded Yue’s fingers from around the teacup. Only after he slid it away did she look up.
“I trusted someone once,” she said at length. “I took a vow never to trust anyone again.”
“What about Zhang?”
“Sam’s an opportunist. For him, Sam comes first, last, and always.”
Bourne said nothing. The afternoon rushed away from them and, with it, the terror and hustle of their harrowing escape. Surrounded by the slow pace and utter serenity here, it was difficult to imagine the frantic metropolis that had threatened to swallow them whole just hours before.
Yue said, “I ask myself over and over, what is it this man wants from you?”
“What do you imagine I want?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know.”
“But I’ve already told you: I’m tracking down Colonel Sun and Minister Ouyang.” He watched her for a moment. “I see. You don’t believe me.”
Yue put her hands flat on the table as if she was about to lever herself up and run away. “Why should I?”
It was a valid question for which Bourne had no answer. A small boat, fragrant with tea and spices, glided past, trailing an indigo wake. He continued to watch her, considering how to proceed. “Having faith in nothing at all is a terrible burden for anyone to carry,” he said at last, “especially someone as young as you.”
A tear leaked out of her eye before she turned away. Brusquely, almost angrily, she brushed it off her cheek.
“Sun and Ouyang are responsible for the death of someone I cared a great deal about,” Bourne continued. “I can’t go on until my debt to her is paid.”
“You’ve put yourself in jeopardy for her; not even for her—her memory.”
“My memory of her is all I have.”
She looked away for a moment, as she often did when she was considering revealing a hidden part of herself. “It must be so painful to care about another person that deeply.”
Bourne was filled with sadness for her. “Sometimes there’s a satisfaction, if not pleasure, in pain.”
Yue watched the female waiters gliding to and fro, balancing their trays of fragrant teas and steaming dim sum in wicker baskets like dancers in a ballet. For some time she seemed lost in thought. Finally, her gaze returned to Bourne.
“Love is a form of faith, is that it?”
“I never thought of it that way, but maybe it is.”
She filled her cup with fresh tea, but did not touch it. “Living in China makes it easy to lose faith,” she said in a whisper. “If you’re born with any at all, it slowly squeezes the life out of it.”
“Were you born with any?”
“It’s too long ago to remember,” she said shortly.
“I don’t believe you.”
When she turned back to him, her expression was as fierce as that of the carved stone lions on the village’s bridges. “I choose not to remember, all right?”
“No,” he said, “it’s not all right.” Ignoring the glare she gave him, he continued. “I consider memory a privilege, a precious thing. I have almost none. I’m an amnesiac.”
Yue’s expression underwent a fundamental shift. “You don’t know who your parents are or where you came from?”
“That’s right.”
She snorted. “I’d say that’s a fucking gift.”
“I doubt you’d say that if your memory vanished in an instant.”
Yue looked away for a moment, then her gaze swung back to Bourne. “Maybe you’re right—but I doubt it.”
“At last,” he said, “a break in the clouds.”
She smiled. It was a shy smile, the expression of a child. Almost at once, her expression sobered, the smile beating a hasty retreat behind the clouds of her armor.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, just before Zhang returned.
He looked from one to the other. “I notice a marked lack of tension.” He rubbed his hands together. “Does that mean we’re cleared to continue?”
“Always the deal-maker,” Yue said.
Zhang seemed pleased by her remark. “You know that film, Glengarry Glen Ross? My favorite character is Blake. Why? Because his mantra is ABC: Always be closing.” He tapped his chest with a pudgy forefinger. “Blake and I, we’re—what d’you call it—soul brothers.”
He called for another pot of jasmine tea, along with several plates of dim sum, without asking if anyone else was hungry.
“So.” He spread his hands. “Shall we get down to brass tacks? You want information on Colonel Sun and Minister Ouyang. In return, we want to get out of China. That’s our quid pro quo.”
“Ask for something that’s not impossible,” Bourne said.
Zhang leaned forward. “Listen to me. You want to get close to Colonel Sun. That’s impossible now. You’ve got to get out of Shanghai as fast as we do. In this, we’re all in the same boat. I have contacts; for me it’s a snap. Getting out of the country is another matter entirely.”
“And you think it will be easy for me?”
“Easier for you than for us.”
The conversation ceased for a moment as a waiter brought the tea and food.
“The thing is,” Zhang resumed after he had popped a shui mai into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, “Ouyang is no longer here. He flew back to Beijing last night, and as long as he stays there, he’s invulnerable. Neither you nor any other Westerner will be able to get to him to do him harm.”
“Then what do I need you for, Zhang?”
“Ouyang has many enemies. I can find a Cho sympathizer in Beijing who will be up to the job.”
“First, I very much doubt that. Second, the debt I owe must be repaid personally.”
Zhang’s mouth opened and closed. He picked at the remaining dim sum as an awkward silence engulfed them.
Yue piped up, “Well, but there’s another way to get to Ouyang.” The two men looked at her. “One I very much doubt you know about.” Now Zhang goggled at her; he knew everything, didn’t he?
“And what’s that?” Bourne said.
Zhang gestured. “Have a shui mai. They’re really superior specimens.”
Reaching across the table, Bourne grabbed Zhang’s shirtfront and jerked him forward. “I’ve had enough of you, Zhang. Shut up and let the lady speak.”
Bourne turned his attention back to Yue to find the hint of an admiring smile on her face. He nodded at her.
“Ouyang has a wife.”
Bourne nodded. “A Western woman named Maricruz, right?”
“Yes. She’s Mexican.”
“Little sister, what are you doing?” Zhang cut in. “You’re undermining our bargaining position.”
“This is no longer a negotiation,” Yue said. Then, turning back to Bourne, “What isn’t widely known is that Maricruz is the daughter of Maceo Encarnación.”
Bourne sat stock-still, his heart beating fast. “Maceo Encarnación had one child—a son, now dead along with his father.”
“No,” Yue said. “He had another child by a woman named Constanza Camargo, a daughter whom he hid. Maricruz is that daughter.”
“Yue, stop!” Zhang cried. “Giving out free information is madness.”
Bourne’s attention was concentrated solely on Yue. “And this is the Western woman married to Ouyang Jidan.”
“It is.”
If she was right, Bourne understood the true nature of Maceo Encarnación’s involvement with Ouyang. “How does that help me?” he asked.
“Ouyang adores Maricruz; she’s his weak spot.” Yue now ventured a real smile, again as shy as a child’s. “As it happens, she’s currently not in Beijing with her husband.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I do. She’s in Mexico City, dealing with the fallout from her father’s death on his drug business with the cartels.”
Zhang rocked back and forth in obvious agony. �
��Oh, little sister, such vital information and you’ve thrown it all away. Why?”
“Because,” Yue said, finally addressing him, “I trust this man. Sometimes in life you have to have at least a little bit of faith.”
The two soldiers that were accompanying them were buried within seconds of the helo crashing into the forest glade. Luckily for Matamoros and Maricruz, its trajectory took it into the trees on one side of the glade. The men were killed as it flew apart, shearing off the tops of the trees, a huge section of the fuselage striking them.
Matamoros and Maricruz were spared such a fate, as they shrank backward, away from the ring of falling debris. But as they turned to run, a shard of metal, spinning hotly, struck a tree trunk and ricocheted into Matamoros’s shoulder, knocking him off his feet.
Maricruz turned, dodged more flying debris, crabbed her way back to where Matamoros lay. Blood oozed from the wound in his shoulder and his eyes were glazed with shock. Stripping off his jacket, she tore off the sleeve of his shirt, fashioned it into a makeshift bandage.
A sudden burst of flames caused her to duck down, covering him with her body. He seemed to wake from his stupor, saw her protecting him from the fire, then winced as the pain lanced through him.
“Come on!” Maricruz helped him to his feet. He was unsteady, but by force of will and by dint of leaning on her, he moved forward blindly through the flames and rising smoke toward the far edge of the forest. Several times they were forced to stop to catch their breath, the thick, piney smoke rolling over them in waves that threatened to suffocate them. At one point the smoke became so dense that Maricruz forced him down on hands and knees, and though the position filled him with agony, at least, as they crawled forward, they were able to breathe relatively clean air.
Ahead of them, she heard voices, some raised in shouts, and she took possession of Matamoros’s assault rifle, aiming it at the shadows. Then, through the underbrush that had not yet been touched by the fire, she saw more of Matamoros’s men—no doubt the cadre that had brought down the four government helos. They recognized her at once, which was fortunate, because when they saw one of their leaders injured they were inclined to shoot first and ask questions afterward.
The Bourne Retribution Page 14