Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Sanction

Hart had lived in this particular apartment for just over two years. Not that it mattered; since coming to the district seven years ago she’d had nothing but temporary lodgings. By this point she doubted she’d be comfortable settling down and nesting. At least, those were her thoughts as she buzzed Soraya Moore into the lobby. A moment later a discreet knock sounded, and she let the other woman in.

“I’m clean,” Soraya said as she shrugged off her coat. “I made sure of that.”

Hart hung her coat in the foyer closet, led her into the kitchen. “For breakfast I have cold cereal or”-she opened the refrigerator-“cold Chinese food. Last night’s leftovers.”

“I’m not one for conventional breakfasts,” Soraya said.

“Good. Neither am I.”

Hart grabbed an array of cardboard cartons, told Soraya where to find plates, serving spoons, and chopsticks. They moved into the living room, set everything on a glass coffee table between facing sofas.

Hart began opening the cartons. “No pork, right?”

Soraya smiled, pleased that her boss remembered her Muslim strictures. “Thank you.”

Hart returned to the kitchen, put up water for tea. “I have Earl Grey or oolong.”

“Oolong for me, please.”

Hart finished brewing the tea, brought the pot and two small handleless cups back to the living room. The two women settled themselves on opposite sides of the table, sitting cross-legged on the abstract patterned rug. Soraya looked around. There were some basic prints on the wall, the kind you’d expect to find at any midlevel hotel chain. The furniture looked rented, as anonymous as anything else. There were no photos, no sense of Hart’s background or family. The only unusual feature was an upright piano.

“My only real possession,” Hart said, following Soraya’s gaze. “It’s a Steinway K-52, better known as a Chippendale hamburg. It’s got a sounding board larger than many grand pianos, so it lets out with a helluva sound.”

“You play?”

Hart went over, sat down on the stool, began to play Frйdйric Chopin’s Nocturne in B-Flat Minor. Without missing a beat she segued into Isaac Albйniz’s sensuous “Malagueсa,” and, finally, into a raucous transposition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

Soraya laughed and applauded as Hart rose, came back to sit opposite her.

“My absolute only talent besides intelligence work.” Hart opened one of the cartons, spooned out General Tso’s chicken. “Careful,” she said as she handed it over, “I order it extra hot.”

“That’s okay by me,” Soraya said, digging deep into the carton. “I always wanted to play the piano.”

“Actually, I wanted to play electric guitar.” Hart licked oyster sauce off her finger as she passed over another carton. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. According to him, electric guitar wasn’t a ‘lady’s’ instrument.”

“Strict, was he?” Soraya said sympathetically.

“You bet. He was a full-bird colonel in the air force. He’d been a fighter pilot back in his salad days. He resented being too old to fly, missed that damn oily-smelling cockpit something fierce. Who could he complain to in the force? So he took his frustration out on me and my mother.”

Soraya nodded. “My father is old-school Muslim. Very strict, very rigid. Like many of his generation he’s bewildered by the modern world, and that makes him angry. I felt trapped at home. When I left, he said he’d never forgive me.”

“Did he?”

Soraya had a faraway look in her eyes. “I see my mom once a month. We go shopping together. I speak to my father once in a while. He’s never invited me back home; I’ve never gone.”

Hart put down her chopsticks. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It is what it is. Do you still see your father?”

“I do, but he doesn’t know who I am. My mother’s gone now, which is a blessing. I don’t think she could’ve tolerated seeing him like that.”

“It must be hard for you,” Soraya said. “The indomitable fighter pilot reduced like that.”

“There’s a point in life where you have to let go of your parents.” Hart resumed eating, though more slowly. “Whoever’s lying in that bed isn’t my father. He died a long time ago.”

Soraya looked down at her food for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me how you knew about the NSA safe house.”

“Ah, that.” Hart’s face brightened. Clearly, she was happy to be on a work topic. “During my time at Black River we were often hired by NSA. This was before they trained and deployed their own home-grown black-ops details. We were good for them because they never had to specify to anyone what we’d been hired to do. It was all ‘fieldwork,’ priming the battlefield for our troops. No one on Capitol Hill was going to look farther than that.”

She dabbed her mouth, sat back. “Anyway, after one particular mission, I caught the short straw. I was the one from my squad who brought the findings back to the NSA. Because it was a black-ops mission, the debriefing took place at the safe house in Virginia. Not in the fine library you were taken to, but in one of the basement-level cubicles-windowless, featureless, just gritty reinforced concrete. It’s like a war bunker down there.”

“And what did you see?”

“It wasn’t what I saw.” Hart said. “It was what I heard. The cubicles are soundproof, except for the doors, I assume so the guards in the corridors know what’s going on. What I heard was ghastly. The sounds were barely human.”

“Did you tell your bosses at Black River?”

“What was the point? They didn’t care, and even if they did, what were they going to do? Start a congressional investigation on the basis of sounds I heard? The NSA would have cut them off at the knees, put them out of business in a heartbeat.” She shook her head. “No, these boys are businessmen, pure and simple. Their ideology revolves around milking as much money from the government as possible.”

“So now we have a chance to do what you couldn’t before, what Black River wouldn’t do.”

“That’s right,” Hart said. “I want to get photos, videos, absolute proof of what NSA is doing down there so I can present the evidence myself to the president. That’s where you and Tyrone come in.” She shoved her plate away. “I want Luther LaValle’s head on a platter, and by God I’m going to get it.”

BECAUSE OF the corpse and all the blood on the seats Bourne was forced to abandon the Volga. Before he did, though, he took Baronov’s cell phone, as well as his money. It was freezing. Within the preternatural afternoon winter darkness came the snow, swirling down in ever-heavier curtains. Bourne knew he had to get out of the area as quickly as possible. He took the SIM card out of his phone, put it in Baronov’s, then threw his own cell phone down a storm drain. In his new identity as Fyodor Ilianovich Popov he couldn’t afford to be in possession of a cell with an American carrier.

He walked, leaning into the wind and snow. After six blocks, huddled in a doorway, he used Baronov’s cell phone to call his friend Boris Karpov. The voice at the end of the line grew cold.

“Colonel Karpov is no longer with FSB.”

Bourne felt a chill go through him. Russia had not changed so much that lightning-swift dismissals on trumped-up charges were a thing of the past.

“I need to contact him,” Bourne said.

“He’s now at the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency.” The voice recited a local number before abruptly hanging up.

That explained the attitude, Bourne thought. The Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency was headed up by Viktor Cherkesov. But many believed he was much more than that, a silovik running an organization so powerful that some had taken to calling it FSB-2. Recently an internal war between Cherkesov and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, the modern-day successor to the notorious KGB, had sprung up within the government. The silovik who won that war would probably be the next president of Russia. If Karpov had gone from the FSB to FSB-2, it must be because Cherkesov had gotten the upper hand.