The Bourne Objective

Lloyd-Philips looked distinctly a

“Forensics?” Marks asked.

The chief inspector looked ready to bite Marks’s head off. “No suspicious fingerprints were found, and there was no sign of the murder weapon. On my orders the men fa

“And what of the other man-Adam Stone?”

“Vanished off the face of the earth.”

Which means the investigation is at a standstill, Marks thought. This is a high-profile murder investigation. No wonder he’s edgy.

“Adam Stone is the person of interest to my superiors.” Marks drew the chief inspector away from the technician. “They-and I-would consider it a personal favor if you suppressed Stone’s photo from the flyers.”

Lloyd-Philips smiled, not a pretty sight. His teeth were as nicotine-stained as his fingertips.

“I’ve made a career of not giving personal favors. That’s how I keep my nose clean and my pension intact.”

“Nevertheless, in this instance my superiors at DoD would be grateful if you made an exception.”

“Listen, laddo, I brought you in here as a courtesy.” The chief inspector’s eyes were suddenly as flinty as his voice. “I don’t care if your superiors are five-bloody-star generals, London’s my bailiwick. My superiors-Her Majesty’s Government-don’t appreciate you lot coming over here and leaning on us like we’re a bunch of colonial yobs. An’ I don’t like it one ickle bit, either.” He lifted a warning finger. “A word in your shell-like: Naff off before I get really hacked and decide to detain you as a material witness.”

“Thanks for your hospitality, Chief Inspector,” Marks said drily. “Before I go, I’d like a copy of the photos of Stone and the un-ID’d man.”

“Anything to get you out of my bloody hair.” Lloyd-Philips tapped the tech on the shoulder, the tech asked for the number of Marks’s cell, then pressed a button; a moment later a digital still from the security tape of the two men side by side appeared on Marks’s phone.

“All right, then.” The chief inspector turned to Marks. “Don’t make me regret what I’ve done. Stay well away from me and my case and you’ll get on well.”

Back out on the street, the sun was struggling to be seen through masses of streaming cloud. The city roared all around Marks. He checked the photo on his PDA. Then he punched in Willard’s private line and got right to his voice mail. Willard’s phone was off, which, calculating the hour back in Washington, Marks thought odd. He left a detailed message, asking Willard to run the photo of the man who had knifed Diego Hererra through the Treadstone data banks, which had been amassed from those of the usual alphabet soup of CI, NSA, FBI, DoD, plus some others to which Willard had gained access.

From a detective-inspector outside the club to whom he showed his ID, Marks obtained Diego Hererra’s home address. Forty minutes later he arrived just as a silver Bentley limousine turned the corner and pulled up outside Hererra’s house. The liveried driver emerged, walked smartly around the gleaming grille to open the rear door. A tall, distinguished man who looked like an older version of Diego emerged. With a somber expression and a heavy tread the man climbed the steps to Diego’s front door and inserted a key in the door.

Before he could disappear inside, Marks strode up and said, “Mr. Hererra, I’m Peter Marks.” When the older man turned around to peer at him, Marks added, “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

The elder Hererra paused for a moment. He was a handsome man, with a leonine shock of white hair, worn long over his collar in the current Catalan style, but he appeared ashen beneath his deep outdoorsman’s tan. “Did you know my son, Señor Marks?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t have that pleasure, sir.”

Hererra nodded somewhat absently. “It seemed Diego had very few male friends.” His mouth twitched in a parody of a smile. “His preference was for women.”

Marks took a step forward and held his creds up for the other to see. “Sir, I know this is a difficult time, and I apologize in advance if I’m intruding, but I need to talk to you.”

Hererra continued to look through Marks as if he hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Then he seemed to focus. “Do you know something about his death?”

“This isn’t a conversation for the street, is it, Señor Hererra.”

“No, of course not.” Hererra’s head twitched. “Please forgive my lack of ma

Marks went up the steps, across the threshold, and into the late Diego Hererra’s house. He heard the older man coming in after him, the door close behind him, and then there was a knife blade across his throat, and Diego Hererra’s father was close behind him, holding him in an astonishingly powerful grip.

“Now, you sonovabitch,” Hererra said, “you’ll tell me everything you know about my son’s murder, or by Christ’s tears I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear.”

[17]

BUD HALLIDAY SAT in a semicircular banquette at the White Knights Lounge, a bar in an out-of-the-way area of suburban Maryland where he often came to unwind. He nursed a bourbon-and-water while he tried to clear his mind of the clutter that had built up over the long day.

His parents were Mainline Philadelphians who could trace their respective families back to Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, respectively. They had been childhood sweethearts who, with the predictability of their ilk, were divorced. His mother, a society doye

Finding that he’d finished his bourbon, Halliday flagged down the waiter and ordered another.

The twins arrived at the same time as his drink, and he ordered them chocolate martinis. They sat down on either side of him. One was dressed in green, the other in blue. The one in green was a redhead, the other blond. Today, at least. They were like that, Michelle and Mandy. They liked to play off their eerie echoes of each other, but at the same time asserting their differences. They were tall, almost six feet, with figures as lush and luscious as their lips. They could have been models, or possibly even actresses, given the expert way they played roles, but were neither vain nor empty-headed. Michelle was a theoretical mathematician, and Mandy was a microbiologist at the CDC. Michelle, who could have had her pick of chairs at any of the top universities in the country, instead worked for DARPA-the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-cooking up new cryptographic algorithms that could foil even the fastest computer, even used in tandem. Her latest used heuristic techniques, meaning it learned from every attempt to break it, as if it were a self-educating entity, changing on the fly. It required a physical key to unlock it.