The Bourne Treachery

by Brian Freeman

  “I’m a member of the fan club,” Vadik replied.

  “Oh, yeah? What group?”

  “Arctic Monkeys.”

  “Ah, well. We can fit you in, then.”

  The Brit opened the door for Vadik to enter, then closed and locked it again behind him. Only a few lights were on inside, leaving the pub in shadow. The red ceiling was low, and empty tables and chairs were spread across the hardwood floor. He saw five men gathered at a high-top table in the corner. They were the only people in the pub. When Vadik entered, their hushed conversation stopped. He could feel them sizing him up.

  “What can I get you to drink, mate?” the Brit with dreadlocks asked. He was lean but imposing because of his height. He wore round sunglasses despite the gloom, and he was dressed all in black leather, with silver chains and rivets dotting his shirt and pants. He had a black beard darker than his blond dreads and a prominent nose. He wore calf-high combat boots that clomped on the floor.

  “Nothing,” Vadik said.

  “Gotta have something, mate. Ain’t a charity shop here.”

  “Okay, fine. Pint of bitter.”

  “Coming up.”

  Nervously, Vadik waited while the man pulled him a drink. The bartender whistled the whole time, which was annoying, and he kept looking at Vadik from behind his sunglasses as if memorizing his face. It made Vadik uncomfortable. The bartender clearly wasn’t part of the group, and he didn’t like the idea of a stranger seeing him with the others.

  Vadik took his ale and dropped a fiver on the bar.

  “Ta,” the bartender replied. Still whistling, he wiped down the bar with a towel and popped earbuds into his ears.

  Vadik took his drink to the other side of the room. The men were silent as he approached, their faces chiseled like stone. None looked older than twenty-five, and two of them might have been teenagers. Vadik was definitely the oldest. There was one empty chair waiting for him, and he sat down.

  “Am I late?” he asked.

  A man on the opposite side of the table replied. He was obviously the leader. “You’re right on time. You’re also careless.”

  Vadik shivered with a stab of fear. “What do you mean?”

  “We had one of our team follow you from your flat. You never picked him up. If that was MI-5 or the FSB and not us, the fucking pigs would be crashing through that door right now. You reached out to us for help, and then the first thing you did was put us at risk. Do better if you want to stay alive.”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “You failed, Vadik. Own it.”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  Vadik wondered if the man was telling him the truth or simply trying to scare him about the need for security. He didn’t need the reminder. The dangers of being a part of the resistance in Moscow were far greater than the dangers in London, and staying alive meant being exceedingly careful. He didn’t think he’d been followed.

  “Speaking of precautions, what’s with the guy at the bar?” Vadik asked. “Why let an outsider see us?”

  “The pub manager is one of us. He pays his people to be deaf, blind, and forgetful.”

  “I’m just saying, I’m in jeopardy, too. Even more than you. You know who I really am, my real name, everything about me. I don’t know any of you.”

  The leader took a sip from a half-filled pint glass. “You want names? I’m Harry. This is Andrew, Charles, Louis, and Will. The royal family, that’s us.”

  Vadik didn’t smile at the joke. The false identities sent him a message. The members of the Gaia Crusade were making sure he had no leverage to betray them if he was arrested. He didn’t like it, but he’d gone too far down the road to turn back.

  “All right,” Vadik said with a frown. “What’s next?”

  “By joining us,” Harry told him, “you swear an oath to defend Mother Earth.”

  “I know that.”

  “If we die, we die. Our lives are nothing compared to saving her.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is a war against the elites. They are violating the planet to line their pockets, and the only way to win a war is to eviscerate the enemy. To fill them with fear. They must know that they are never safe. That we can always get to them and their families, no matter how much money they have, no matter how much security they have, no matter how tall their walls are. They must know we are coming for anyone who stands in the way of our climate revolution.”

  “Absolutely,” Vadik agreed.

  “Are you with us?”

  “One hundred percent. I’m a scientist. I know the stakes.”

  Harry eased back in his chair with his beer and continued to study Vadik with suspicion. The others hadn’t said a word. Like his royal namesake, Harry had red hair, so dark it was almost brown. It was shaved down close to his skull. He had an auburn beard, too, neatly trimmed, and an angular face. His skin was heavy with freckles. He had a stud in his upper lip, a nose ring, and a gauged left earlobe with a large black ring inside the hole. His pale eyes hid behind eyelids that only looked half-open. He wore a tight-fitting navy blue T-shirt for Manchester United.

  “Tell us about Sorokin,” Harry said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “He’ll be flying into Farnborough on Sunday night. His private jet will land sometime after ten o’clock. He’s only going to be in town for twenty-four hours. We won’t have a lot of time to make our move.”

  “Why is he coming to London?” Harry asked.

  “He’s meeting someone at the WTO on Monday.”

  Harry shook his head. “Why would he take that risk? As soon as he sets foot on British soil, he’ll be arrested and extradited to face U.S. money-laundering charges. The only thing that’s kept him out of prison is staying in Russia. The Americans would love to get their hands on one of the oligarchs.”

  “British customs have been instructed to let him in,” Vadik replied. “He’s been guaranteed safe passage. The only way for that to happen is if the request came from the very top of the U.S. and British governments. That means whatever Sorokin is doing here, it’s big. And we all know that any project he gets involved with means more fossil fuels, more pipelines, more mines. Sorokin is one of the world’s top polluters. He’s untouchable! If we take him out, then every oil and gas executive from America to the Middle East will start looking over their shoulders.”

  Vadik heard himself talking too loudly. He glanced at the bar, but the bartender with the dreadlocks was whistling to the music in his ears, paying no attention to the men on the other side of the pub.

  “How do you know this?” Harry asked. “Where did you get your information?”

  “My sources are mine. You choose to stay anonymous for your safety. Some things I choose to keep anonymous, too.”

  He wasn’t going to tell them that the source was his wife.

  Tati was his mole, and she didn’t even know it.

  When he’d sought her out at a conference in Kiev, he already knew who she was. Tati was one of the country’s leading young researchers. He was just a lowly statistician, but they’d bonded over the data she’d gathered in Antarctica. However, it wasn’t her scientific knowledge that he was after. The attraction of Tati was the exclusive circle in which she’d grown up. All of the billionaires who ran the country thought of her as their daughter. Putin himself adored her. And she had access to secrets about the comings and goings of the Moscow elite.

  So Vadik had wooed her, slept with her, and then married her. He would have done it even if she’d had an ugly peasant body, but it was a bonus that she was very attractive, with her skinny limbs, purple hair, and that oh-so-serious pouty face. Getting her to fall for him was surprisingly easy. He was a numbers man, and numbers turned her on more than sex. Tati usually just lay there in bed, as if she were thinking about atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and met
hane, but when she looked like she did, Vadik didn’t care.

  Tati was the one who’d come back from a friend’s dacha in Rublyevskoye and told him the rumor that Gennady Sorokin was heading to London for some super-secret meeting at the WTO. Vadik had shared that tidbit with his network, and suddenly, they had an opportunity for a coup that would strike at the heart of Putin’s inner circle.

  But they couldn’t do it on their own. They needed local support in London to make the plan work.

  That meant the Gaia Crusade.

  “Security for Sorokin is bound to be tight,” Harry pointed out. “How are we supposed to get close to him?”

  Vadik shook his head. “Security is tight in Moscow. He’s impregnable there, but not here. This whole thing is flying under the radar, because Sorokin doesn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he’s out of the country. He’ll have a few guards, that’s all. We may never get another chance like this. We follow him, we ambush him, we kill him.”

  Harry exchanged silent glances with the other members of his royal family. Vadik tensed, but he saw approval in their eyes. Harry reached into his pocket, and with a glance at the bar to make sure the man in dreadlocks wasn’t watching, he removed a Glock pistol and pushed it across the table to Vadik.

  “You know how to use this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever killed someone?”

  Vadik hesitated, but he decided to be honest. “No.”

  “It’s not like in books. It’s messy. It’s brutal. It makes you want to vomit. Are you ready for that? Because if you hesitate, we’re dead, and everything is lost.”

  “I won’t hesitate.”

  “Good.”

  “So we’re doing this?” Vadik asked, shoving the gun into his belt.

  “Assuming you can get the money transferred, like you said.”

  “Money’s not a problem.”

  “All right, then. We’ll keep in touch via the chat room. We’ll meet again on Sunday and head to Farnborough together. In the meantime, our people will start putting together a team and equipment.”

  “Praise Gaia,” Vadik said.

  “Praise Gaia,” the others replied in unison.

  Vadik pushed back his chair, and they all got up. At that moment, like a flash grenade, the pub exploded with ear-shattering music. Vadik’s brain conjured up a vision of agents crashing through the door with guns drawn. By instinct, he grabbed for the Glock, but in the next second, he realized that the noise was coming from the jukebox next to them. It had blasted to life at full volume through overhead speakers.

  He knew the song.

  “Nobody Told Me” by John Lennon.

  As suddenly as it had started, the jukebox went silent, leaving their ears ringing. A voice called to them from the bar.

  “Sorry, mates, sorry, pushed the wrong button on my app,” the bartender told them with a grin as he took out his earbuds. “Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  Vadik straightened up. His heart was still beating fast.

  He headed for the pub door with Harry and the others. Then he noticed the bartender watching from behind his sunglasses and following every move he made. The man’s frozen grin never left his mouth, as if the music had been a grand prank. Vadik seethed at being made to look like a fool.

  When they got out to the street, the men from the Crusade melted away in different directions. Vadik walked toward the Russell Square station, but before he went inside to buy a ticket, he stopped. He couldn’t get the bartender out of his mind. The man had seen his face, and Vadik didn’t want anyone who could identify him. He had a gun now, which meant he had a way of solving the problem permanently. And he didn’t want his first time pulling the trigger to be when he was face-to-face with Gennady Sorokin.

  His body bathed in sweat, Vadik retraced his steps down the alley. He tried the pub door again, but it was already locked. With one hand on the butt of the gun, he knocked hard with his other hand.

  “Hey! Hey, open up, I forgot something!”

  But the bartender didn’t reappear. Vadik heard music booming through the jukebox speakers inside the pub. The same John Lennon song. He waited and knocked again, but then he saw a group of people heading his way from the Tube station. He couldn’t afford to be seen here.

  Vadik turned from the pub, tucked his head against his chin, and walked away.

  * * *

  —

  The real bartender of the Lonely Shepherd struggled against the zip ties that bound his wrists and ankles. His T-shirt was stuffed in his mouth, and heavy tape had been wound around his face, making it impossible to do anything but grunt. He stood in his underwear atop a wheely chair in the pub office, with a belt tied tightly around his neck and the other end of the belt attached to a pipe stretching across the ceiling. He’d been standing motionless for several hours, and his legs were beginning to shake. The wheels of the chair jiggled beneath him, and if the chair rolled out, he’d hang himself.

  The office door opened, and a loud pulse of music throbbed from the pub. The man who’d assaulted him came inside, whistling in time to the song, and wiggled his fingers in a little wave.

  “It’s Trevor, isn’t it?” the man said. “You’re doing great, Trevor. Not much longer now, and I’ll be gone.”

  The man wore Trevor’s black leather clothes. He kicked off the boots and undressed in the middle of the office until he was almost naked. He removed the sunglasses he was wearing and used the mirror in the office toilet to take off his dreadlocks wig and false beard, then carve off the putty on his face and clean his skin thoroughly. As Trevor watched, the man also removed contact lenses, turning his eyes from brown back to blue.

  When the man came back into the office, he put on his own clothes, which he’d carefully placed on a hanger in the closet. Burgundy snug-fit dress shirt. Black straight-leg slacks. Shined leather shoes. When he was done, he looked the way he had when Trevor had answered the knock at the door of the pub. He was a tall, lean stranger with short, slightly curly blond hair, a charming smile, and electric blue eyes that missed nothing.

  “Do you know the men who were here tonight?” the man asked him. “Have you met them before? Do you know their names?”

  Trevor shook his head furiously and tried to mumble No through the wad in his mouth.

  “That’s okay, mate. No worries. I have the camera feed. I just need to download the video, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  The man went to the desk and bent over awkwardly in front of a laptop computer screen.

  “Of course, I don’t have anywhere to sit,” he mused with a frown. “You’re using the chair.”

  Trevor’s eyes widened with terror, but the man laughed. “Relax. It was a joke.”

  The man booted up the computer and located the feed from a surveillance camera that was zoomed in on one of the tables in the pub. Half a dozen men were meeting there. Trevor had seen some of them before, but he didn’t know who they were. The man checked the video and sound quality on the recording and then used a thumb drive from his pocket and downloaded the file.

  “Thanks, mate. I have what I need.”

  The man stood in front of Trevor, whose legs wobbled, his knees knocking together. The chair rattled back and forth beneath him. Trevor felt sweat on his body and the tightness of the belt that clung to his neck.

  “You going to last a few more minutes? Once I’m out of here, I’ll call somebody to come over here and untie you.”

  Trevor squirmed on the chair. He tried to talk but couldn’t.

  The man patted his cheek, then headed for the office door. Trevor closed his eyes and focused all of his energy on staying absolutely still. A few more minutes. A few more minutes, that was all. He had to hang on a little while longer, but below his feet, the chair practically spun as his tired legs twitched.

  Then he hear
d a noise.

  When he opened his eyes again, the man was back. Right in front of him again. There was something awful in his eyes now, a strange sadistic glee, like life was a big joke.

  “Sorry. You know I was kidding about letting you go, right? I really can’t do that. No hard feelings.”

  As Trevor screamed into the gag, the man kicked away the chair.

  5

  When Bourne got to the Radisson Blu in London Docklands on Saturday morning, a thick manila envelope was waiting for him at the registration desk. Inside, he found a printout of Clark Cafferty’s WTO itinerary, starting with his arrival on Sunday morning and continuing to his departure on Tuesday afternoon. Clipped to the schedule was a note:

  welcome to london. if you have this, assume others do, too. holly

  Holly had also provided him with a set of identity papers made out in the name of Thomas Gillette. Gillette, according to the cover biography prepared by the CIA, was a mid-level official in the U.S. Department of State, and as such, he had authorized clearance to attend all of the WTO meetings and unlimited access to the various venues. He would be in the Painted Hall of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich on Monday at noon when Cafferty made his speech on venture capital and green energy to several hundred WTO delegates and climate scientists.

  In his hotel room, Bourne stood by the floor-to-ceiling window. He stared across the Thames at the golden spires and saucer-like dome of the O2 arena. To his left, he could see the ExCeL convention center where the WTO plenary sessions were being held. In the other direction, down the snaking curve of the river, he could see the green parkland of Greenwich. From his vantage point, he could see police blocking off intersections, trying to keep a barrier between the WTO events and the thousands of protesters crowding the streets.

  Bourne memorized the details of his cover as Thomas Gillette, Assistant Secretary for Energy Resources. Then he began reviewing everything he could find online about Clark Cafferty.

  Cafferty was a lawyer who’d grown up on Wall Street, led a dozen billion-dollar acquisitions in the energy sector before he was thirty-five, and then moved to Washington in the mid-1990s to advise on energy and finance policy during the second Clinton administration. For the next twenty-five years, he’d glided smoothly in and out of power circles from Georgetown to Brussels to Beijing, and he’d built a reputation as a lawyer who could fix just about any political problem by picking up his phone.