Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Sanction

The general led her out of the Library, down the corridor to the door to the basement. The moment she saw where he was taking her, she said, “No! Don’t do this. Please. There’s no need.”

But Kendall, his back ramrod-straight, ignored her. When she hesitated at the security door, he grasped her firmly by the elbow and, as if she were a child, steered her down the stairs.

In due course, she found herself in the same viewing room. Tyrone was on his knees, his arm behind him, bound hands on the tabletop, which was higher than shoulder level. This position was both extremely painful and humiliating. His torso was forced forward, his shoulder blades back.

Soraya’s heart was filled with dread. “Enough,” she said. “I get it. You’ve made your point.”

“By no means,” General Kendall said.

Soraya could see two shadowy figures moving about the cell. Tyrone had become aware of them, too. He tried to twist around to see what they were up to. One of the men shoved a black hood over his head.

My God , Soraya said to herself. What did the other man have in his hands?

Kendall shoved her hard against the one-way glass. “Where your friend is concerned we’re just warming up.”

Two minutes later, they began to fill the waterboarding tank. Soraya began to scream.

Bourne asked the bombila driver to pass by the front of the hotel. Everything seemed calm and normal, which meant that the bodies on the seventeenth floor hadn’t been discovered yet. But it wouldn’t be long before someone went to look for the missing room-service waiter.

He turned his attention across the street, searching for Yakov. He was still outside his car, talking to a fellow driver. Both of them were swinging their arms to keep their circulation going. He pointed out Yakov to Gala, who recognized him. When they’d passed the square, Bourne had the bombila pull over.

He turned to Gala. “I want you to go back to Yakov and have him take you to Universitetskaya Ploshchad at Vorobyovy Gory.” Bourne was speaking of the top of the only hill in the otherwise flat city, where lovers and university students went to get drunk, make love, and smoke dope while looking out over the city. “Wait there for me and whatever you do, don’t get out of the car. Tell the cabbie you’re meeting someone there.”

“But he’s the one who’s been spying on us,” Gala said.

“Don’t worry,” Bourne reassured her. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The view out over Vorobyovy Gory was not so very grand. First, there was the ugly bulk of Luzhniki Stadium in the mid-foreground. Second, there were the spires of the Kremlin, which would hardly inspire even the most ardent lovers. But for all that, at night it was as romantic as Moscow could get.

Bourne, who’d had his bombila track the one Gala was in all the way there, was relieved that Yakov had orders only to observe and report back. Anyway, the NSA was interested in Bourne, not a young blond dyev .

Arriving at the overlook, Bourne paid the fare he’d agreed to at the beginning of the ride, strode down the sidewalk, and got into the front seat of Yakov’s taxi.

“Hey, what’s this?” Yakov said. Then he recognized Bourne and made a scramble for the Makarov he kept in a homemade sling under the ratty dash.

Bourne pulled his hand away and held him back against the seat while taking possession of the handgun. He pointed it at Yakov. “Who do you report to?”

Yakov said in a whiny voice, “I challenge you to sit in my seat night after night, driving around the Garden Ring, crawling endlessly down Tverskaya, being cut out of fares by kamikaze bombily and make enough to live on.”

“I don’t care why you pimp yourself out to the NSA,” Bourne told him. “I want to know who you report to.”

Yakov held up his hand. “Listen, listen, I’m from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. It’s not so nice there, who can make a living? So I pack my family and we travel to Russia, the beating heart of the new federation, where the streets are paved with rubles. But when I arrive here I am treated like dirt. People in the street spit on my wife. My children are beaten and called terrible names. And I can’t get a job anywhere in this city. ‘Moscow for Muscovites,’ that is the refrain I hear over and over. So I take to the bombily because I have no other choice. But this life, sir, you have no idea how difficult it is. Sometimes after twelve hours I come home with a hundred rubles, sometimes with nothing. I cannot be faulted for taking money the Americans offer.

“Russia is corrupt, but Moscow, it’s more than corrupt. There isn’t a word for how bad things are here. The government is made up of thugs and criminals. The criminals plunder the natural resources of Russia-oil, natural gas, uranium. Everyone takes, takes, takes so they can have big foreign cars, a different dyev for every day of the week, a dacha in Miami Beach. And what’s left for us? Potatoes and beets, if we work eighteen hours a day and if we’re lucky.”

“I have no animosity toward you,” Bourne said. “You have a right to earn a living.” He handed Yakov a fistful of dollars.

“I see no one, sir. I swear. Just voices on my cell phone. All moneys come to a post office box in-”

Bourne carefully placed the muzzle of the Makarov in Yakov’s ear. The cabbie cringed, turned mournful eyes on Bourne.

“Please, please, sir, what have I done?”

“I saw you outside the Metropolya with the man who tried to kill me.”

Yakov squealed like a skewered rat. “Kill you? I’m employed merely to watch and report. I have no knowledge about-”

Bourne hit the cabbie. “Stop lying and tell me what I want to know.”

“All right, all right.” Yakov was shaking with fear. “The American who pays me, his name is Low. Harris Low.”

Bourne made him give a detailed description of Low, then he took Yakov’s cell phone.

“Get out of the car,” he said.

“But sir, I answered all your questions,” Yakov protested. “You’ve taken everything of mine. What more do you want?”

Bourne leaned across him, opened the door, then shoved him out. “This is a popular place. Plenty of bombily come and go. You’re a rich man now. Use some of the money I gave you to get a ride home.”

Sliding behind the wheel he put the Zhig in gear, drove back into the heart of the city.

Harris Low was a dapper man with a pencil mustache. He had the prematurely white hair and ruddy complexion of many blue-blooded families in the American Northeast. That he had spent the last eleven years in Moscow, working for NSA, was a testament to his father, who had trod the same perilous path. Low had idolized his father, had wanted to be like him for as long as he could remember. Like his father, he had the Stars and Stripes tattooed on his soul. He’d been a running back in college, gone through the rigorous physical training to be an NSA field agent, had tracked down terrorists in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. He wasn’t afraid to engage in hand-to-hand combat or to kill a target. He did it for God and country.

During his eleven years in the capital of Russia, Low had made many friends, some of whom were the sons of his father’s friends. Suffice to say he had developed a network of apparatchiks and siloviks for whom a quid pro quo was the order of the day. Harris held no illusions. To further his country’s cause he would scratch anyone’s back-if they, in turn, scratched his.

He heard about the murders at the Metropolya Hotel from a friend of his in the General Prosecutor’s Office, who’d caught the police squeal. Harris met this individual at the hotel and was consequently one of the first people on the scene.