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“It doesn’t matter,” Bourne said.
“Oh, but it does.” The Babylonian gave Bourne a smile tainted with pain. “Ben David has a thing for her. He always did.”
“And yet he sent you to kill her.”
“That’s the kind of man he is.” Halevy took several shuddering breaths. “Divided, always divided, just like our country, just like every country in the Middle East. He loves Rebeka. I don’t know what it took out of him to order her termination.” Those oddly porcine breaths again. “There’s no reason for you to believe this, but I’m glad she’s still alive.”
At that, Bourne rose, and, hauling the Babylonian up by his shirtfront, walked him back to the taxi. He shoved his face against the window.
“See her there? She’s dead, Halevy,” Bourne said. “I hold you and Ben David to account.”
“I didn’t do it. You know I didn’t.” Even as he was saying this, he whirled, a needle-like weapon in the palm of his hand. Its point glinted wetly with what must be some kind of fast-acting poison. Bourne, lifting an arm, felt the needle snag in the fabric of his jacket. The needle point scraped against his skin but did not break it. Bourne smashed the heel of his hand into Halevy’s nose. He delivered a second strike to the Babylonian’s throat, fracturing the cricoid cartilage.
Jerking his arm away from the needle, he struck Halevy flush on his ear. The Babylonian, gasping for air that would not come, staggered to his knees, still trying desperately to swipe at Bourne with the needle. Bourne grabbed him, and drove his knee into his groin, then struck him over and over again until he felt the bones in Halevy’s chest give way.
With the Babylonian dead, Bourne slipped into the old car he had chosen, hot-wired it, and drove out of the lot. At Benito Juárez International Airport, he bought a first-class ticket, then went in search of something to eat.
While he waited for his food, he took out the tiny skull studded with crystals that el Enterradorhad given him as protection against Maceo Encarnación. “He is protected by an almost mystical power,”Constanza Camargo had told him, “as if by gods.”
His food came, but he found that he was no longer hungry. As he turned the skull around and around between his fingers, he thought about everything that had happened to him and Rebeka since coming to Mexico City, all of which had been dictated, in one way or another, by Constanza Camargo. And then he began to wonder about something else. Why would Henry Rowland secrete himself in the closet of his bedroom unless he had known they were coming? But how had he known with such precision where they were?
Bourne stared at the crystal-studded skull and into his mind came thoughts of other gods—the gods of technology. Placing the skull on the table, he smashed the bottom of his fist down onto it. Carefully, he picked through the shattered bits and pieces, extracting the minuscule tracking device that had been embedded in its center. He left it amid the debris without destroying it. He wanted the signal to continue broadcasting, just as if he had never discovered the device.
He rose, paying for the meal he hadn’t touched, then exited the departure lounge, heading for the long-term parking lot, to find a suitable vehicle to drive back into the city.
There are any number of ways to remain alive after you’re dead.” Don Fernando Hererra laughed, seeing the expression on Martha Christiana’s face. “This is only one of them.”
The pilot had landed the private jet in a vast field south of Paris.
There was no runway, no windsock, no customs shed. The plane had deviated from its flight plan and, after a frantic Mayday call, was now off the grid as far as the towers at Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports were concerned.
“There are no magicians in the world, Martha. Only illusionists,” Hererra said. “The idea is to create the illusion of death. For this, we require an authentic disaster, which is why the plane has landed here, where no one will be hurt.”
“Those bodies I saw on the plane,” Martha said, “are real.” Hererra nodded as he handed her a folder.
“What’s this?”
“Look inside.”
Opening the file, she saw forensic reports on three bodies retrieved from the wreckage of the plane that had not yet crashed. The three bodies were burned beyond recognition, of course, but were identified by dental records. Hererra was named, as well as the pilot and the navigator.
Martha picked her head up. “What about their families? What will you tell them?”
Hererra nodded to the two men who were exiting the jet, whose engines were still ru
“But how—?”
“I have friends inside the Élysée Palace who will control the accident scene.”
The pilot approached Hererra. “The three corpses have been placed correctly,” he said. “We can proceed anytime.”
Hererra checked his wristwatch. “We’ve been off the radar for seven minutes. Do it now.”
The pilot nodded, then turned to his navigator, who was standing apart from them. The navigator held a small black box in his hand. When he pressed a button on the box, the jet’s engines rose in pitch until they became a scream. Another button remotely released the brakes, and the jet bucked forward, quickly gaining speed until it slammed into the line of trees at the far end of the field. A ferocious noise flared, momentarily deafening them. The ground shook, and an oily black-and-red fireball puffed out in the sky.
“We go,” Hererra said, herding them all toward a large four-wheeldrive SUV crouched at the edge of the field. “Now.”
The Cementerio del Tepeyac and, especially, the Basilica de Guadelupe looked completely different in daylight. All the sinister qualities, burned into the Mexican night, had been washed away, leaving a thin veneer of religiosity that no doubt hid a multitude of sins, both venial and mortal.
Parking his stolen car a hundred yards away, Bourne spent several minutes circumnavigating the immediate area around the basilica. There was no sign of the hearse that had conveyed him and Rebeka to the establishment of Diego de la Rivera, Maceo Encarnación’s brother-in-law. There was also no sign of the mysterious pseudopriest, el Enterrador.Bourne recalled in vivid detail the tattoos of coffins and tombstones adorning his forearms.
He went around to the entrance and slipped through. The interior was filled with echoes and incense. A choir of angelic voices lifted heavenward. Mass had commenced. Bourne made his way to the back of the apse, returning to the dimly lit corridor that led to the rectory.
Before he arrived, however, he paused, hearing voices from within the small office. One was a female alto. Moving stealthily forward, Bourne caught a sliver of the rectory, the enormous crucified Christ dominating as usual. Then into his restricted line of vision came the source of the alto. With a start, he recognized the beautiful young woman who had drifted down the staircase in Maceo Encarnación’s villa, who had cried out when she had seen what Bourne understood must have been her mother, laid out, ready for the mortician’s art. The anomaly of her coming from an upstairs bedroom where no servant ought to be, naked beneath her expensive robe, now returned to the forefront of Bourne’s mind. Upon returning upstairs, she had gone into the master suite, where Maceo Encarnación presumably lay beneath the bedcovers.
What was she doing here? Bourne moved slightly, his gaze following Maria-Elena’s daughter as she moved anxiously around the rectory. He’d heard de la Rivera, the mortician, use the dead cook’s name. A moment later, she stopped in front of a robed and hooded man. His spade beard a