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“I didn’t say it wasn’t good.”
“What happened to your face?” Ouyang said in a gross breach of Chinese etiquette.
Ben David eyed him for some time. “You know, Minister, you’re looking a little peaked. You haven’t been drinking any of your infamous watered-down milk spiked with melamine so it can pass the protein-content tests?”
“I only drink milk from the Earth and Sky Dairy,” Ouyang said coldly.
Ben David threw the stump of the cucumber onto the ground and came away from the car. “You know what occurs to me? We hate each other so much it’s a wonder we can work together.”
Ouyang bared his teeth. “Necessity creates strange bedfellows.” “Whatever.” Ben David shrugged his shoulders. “What necessitated this face-to-face so close to our mutual journey’s end?”
Minister Ouyang took out a slender file and handed it over.
Ben David opened it. His scar seemed to flare with heat as he stared at the surveillance photo of Jason Bourne. He looked up, rageful. “What the fuck is this, Ouyang?”
“You know this man,” Ouyang said with maddening calm. “Intimately.”
Ben David slapped the file. “This is why you insisted I travel over nine hours?”
Ouyang was imperturbable. “Please confirm my statement, Colonel.”
“We have met on two occasions,” Ben David said neutrally.
“Then you are the man for the job.”
Ben David blinked. “What job? You’re giving me a fucking job?”
A jet, winking silver in the bright sunshine, passed by overhead, a roar so distant it might have come from the other side of the world. Off to their left, a tractor ground slowly through the furrowed earth. The smell of loam was abruptly strong as the wind shifted. To the southwest the brown mass stained the sky, obscuring even the highest of Beijing’s massive buildings.
“Tell me, Colonel, how long have we been working on our joint project?”
“You know as well as I do—”
Ouyang wiggled the first two fingers of his left hand. “Indulge me.”
Ben David sighed. “Six years.”
“A long time, by Western standards. Not so long as we measure time here in the Middle Kingdom.”
Ben David looked disgusted. “Don’t give me that ‘Middle Kingdom’ crap. This is business. It’s always been business. This is not about politics, ideology, or cant. There’s nothing mystical or even mysterious about it. You and I know that money makes the world turn. This is our ride, Ouyang, what brought us together. It’s first and last on our list.” He tossed his head. “This has been our program for six long, painstaking, dangerous years. Now you want to deviate. I don’t like deviations.”
“On all you say we agree,” Minister Ouyang said. “But the world is a dynamic place, always changing. If our program ca
“But we’ve already succeeded. In two days’ time—”
“An eternity for something to go wrong.” Ouyang pointed to the photo in the file. “This man Bourne has now bent his considerable talents to stopping us.”
Ben David reared back as if struck. “How do you know this?”
“I am in contact with our other partners. You are not.”
“Fuck!” Ben David slapped the file against his thigh. “You’re not asking me to go after him.”
“No need,” Minister Ouyang said. “He’ll quite happily come to you.”
The voices of the angelic choir swelled until the massed chorale filled the Basilica de Guadelupe.
In the rectory, Bourne stared down at the bloody corpse of el Enterrador, and said to Anunciata, “Now we must go.”
Her eyes flashed along with the ruby-red blade of the stiletto she still wielded. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You were part of the plan.”
“We knew nothing of the mechanisms of how we were being smuggled into Maceo Encarnación’s villa,” Bourne said. “My friend was killed because of that tracking device the Undertaker planted.”
They looked at each other as if across a great chasm. They had both experienced loss because of Maceo Encarnación. He became a lodestone that in a peculiar way now drew them together.
She lowered the stiletto and nodded.
Bourne took her out through the small rectory entrance, through a section of the cemetery skirting the basilica itself, to where he had parked his car. They drove off slowly. A mile away, he pulled over to the curb and put the car in park, turning to her.
“If you know where Maceo Encarnación and Harry Rowland have gone, you must tell me.”
Her large coffee-colored eyes stared at him without guile. “Will you kill them?”
“If I have to.”
“You have to,” Anunciata said. “There is no other way, with either of them.”
“You know Rowland?”
She dipped her head. “He is Maceo’s favorite, the protected one. Maceo looks on him as a son. He raised him from a very early age.”
“Who are his parents?”
“That I do not know. I think Rowland is an orphan, though we do not speak. Maceo has forbidden it.”
“Is Harry Rowland his real name?”
“He has many names,” Anunciata said. “This is part of the myth.”
Something icy sliced through Bourne. “The myth?”
“Maceo is obsessed with myths. ‘Myths protect men.’ This is what he always says. ‘Myths make them safe because they separate them from other men, myths make them more than human, myths make other men fearful.’”
“How did he weave the myths around Rowland?”
Anunciata closed her eyes for a moment. “The central myth of the Aztecs is that man was created to feed the gods, otherwise the gods would rain down fire and destroy them and everything they had built. The gods ate a sacred substance in human blood.”
“You’re talking about the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice.”
She nodded. “The Aztec priests carved the beating hearts out of those sacrificed, offering them to the gods.” She stared out the window for a moment at people passing by—a woman with a basket of fruit on her head, a boy on a dented blue bicycle. “That was a long time ago, of course.” She turned back to him. “Nowadays, it’s beheadings.” She shrugged. “The blood is the same, and the gods are appeased.”
“These are the same gods who allowed the Spaniards to defeat their people.”
An enigmatic smile curled at the corners of Anunciata’s lips. “Who can fathom the purposes of the gods? Mexico survived the Spaniards.” Her gaze turned prescient. “The important thing is this: The Aztec struggle to control destiny is the same as our own. The coming of Jesus to Mexico has changed nothing. Blood is still spilled, sacrifices are still performed, destiny and desire are still the only things that matter.”
“How does this fit in with Harry Rowland?”
“He is the advance guard, the outrider.”
“The Dji
Anunciata’s eyes opened wide. “You know. Yes, Rowland is the man who performs the sacrifices that increase the myth, that separate him from others, that make men fear him.
“He is Nicodemo.”
The eagle sitting on a nopal cactus devouring a serpent is the modern-day coat of arms of Mexico,” Maceo Encarnación said, sitting opposite Nicodemo in the wide leather seat of his Bombardier Global 5000. They had been in the air for some time. “These two creatures are at the heart of Mexican and Aztec culture. The god of sun and war told his people that they should found their greatest city in the place where they see an eagle on a nopal cactus, where the heart of his brother was buried, devouring a snake. This was where Tenochtitlán was built, and on its back Mexico City rose centuries later.”
Maceo Encarnación watched Nicodemo, who hated lessons of any kind, to see his reactions. He stared at Maceo with his usual stoicism. “I tell you this tale, Nicodemo, because you are an outsider, a Colombian.” He waited, should a reply be forthcoming. When only silence presented itself, he continued. “We learn to devour in order not to be devoured. Is this not the truth of the world?”