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“It is,” Nicodemo agreed with some animation. Speaking of death always brought him out of his brooding state. “I only wish I had been the one to kill the Aztec.”
“Tulio Vistosa was the traitor I had been looking for. It was he who stole the thirty million.” Maceo Encarnación chuckled. “The bundles of money were switched at the last minute. Very amusing, but not for him. He stole the counterfeit dollars and left me the real ones.” Maceo Encarnación shook his head. “You have to have lived among these thieving bandits to get into their heads. You have to have been one of them.”
“Like Acevedo Camargo,” Nicodemo said.
Maceo Encarnación felt gratified that he was paying attention. “Constanza Camargo was a first-class singer when I met her. She was an even better actress, but she did not want to go into films.”
“She wanted to spend more time with her husband, Don Acevedo.” Maceo Encarnación shook his head. “In a way. She was young and impressionable when she met Don Acevedo. He was rich and charismatic. He swept her off her feet. Within a month, they were married. At that time, Don Acevedo Camargo was the drug lord of the south. She was drawn to that life as strongly as she was drawn to other men, lovers she met with secretly. She loved the scheming. The plots she devised for him and behind his back! Dios Mio,that woman was bloodthirsty.”
“She was ambitious.”
Maceo Encarnación nodded. “Like Lady Macbeth. She enjoyed the role I gave her to play with Bourne and Rebeka.”
Something dark flashed in the recesses of Nicodemo’s eyes at the mention of Rebeka’s name. “It wasn’t supposed to work like that,” he said softly. “Rebeka wasn’t supposed to die. Bourne was.”
“There is no way to account for the human factor. You should not have stabbed her.”
“I had no choice!”
“It seems to me,” Maceo Encarnación said, “there is always a choice.”
“The heat of the moment precludes choice,” Nicodemo said. “It’s pure instinct.”
At that moment, the flight attendant came down the aisle on long, lithe legs and, stopping in front of Maceo Encarnación, bent over. He studied her ample cleavage while she whispered in his ear. He nodded, and she went back up the aisle. Both men watched the ballbearing movement of her shapely buttocks.
Maceo Encarnación sighed as he took out his mobile, punched in a number, and clapped it to his ear. “Someone will be coming for you,” he said into his phone. “He’ll be in Paris within the hour.”
Nicodemo, grateful to get off the subject of Rebeka’s knifing, said, “Don Fernando Hererra is dead. Blown up when his private jet crashed outside Paris. Why are we stopping off there when we should be heading on?”
Maceo Encarnación reversed the phone to show him the news stories. “Martha Christiana will be forwarding the coroner’s report to verify that Hererra was actually on the plane. She always manages to get hold of these reports, the devil knows how. This is a beautiful thing, no? It’s part of her skill set.” He slid the mobile away. “You will go to her the moment we land.”
“What do you want me to do?” Nicodemo said. “Kill her?”
“ Dios, no!” Maceo Encarnación looked appalled. “Martha Christiana is special to me, do you understand?”
“I didn’t think anyone was special to you, but what does it matter?”
Maceo Encarnación regarded him for a moment, as if he were a lower form of life. It seemed clear that the female Mossad agent had somehow gotten under his skin, an inexplicable feat he had thought near to impossible. He wondered what effect her death would have on him. To kill someone you cared about took an enormous amount of emotional fortitude, he knew from experience. Nicodemo had killed many people, of course, most of them in cold blood, some faceto-face, when you tried to catch that ineffable moment when life was transformed into death, when the soul fled into the shadows, when desire became destiny. He banished this disagreeable thought. “Martha Chrisiana is in Paris. Just bring her to me. And, Nicodemo, treat her like the lady she is.”
“A lady,” Nicodemo echoed. He turned to the window, his gaze far away.
“Nicodemo,” Maceo Encarnación said, “what is on your mind?” When Nicodemo didn’t answer, he said, “My daughter is on the other side of the world, married, and, one hopes, happy.”
“I don’t care about Maricruz.”
You despise her, Maceo Encarnación thought. “What doyou care about?” No response. Rebeka again. “I see.”
“I’m thinking about Jason Bourne,” Nicodemo said after the silence had become unendurable.
“What about him?”
“Jason Bourne represents more than just a problem. He could be the end of us.”
“Calm yourself.” This wasn’t about Jason Bourne, and Maceo Encarnación knew it.
Nicodemo, restless in his seat, continued to stare out the Perspex window. Despite the jet’s speed, the clouds seemed to drift past, as if in a dream. “We don’t even know whether Rebeka is dead.”
Now we get to it, Maceo Encarnación thought. “From what you tell me, it seems unlikely she has survived, even if Bourne somehow managed to get her to a hospital, which he hasn’t. I have people looking; they would know if she had been admitted.”
“Bourne has resources. A private doctor, maybe.”
“From how you described the wound, no doctor could have saved her. She would have needed a full-fledged trauma team, and even then...” He allowed the thought to run its own course. “Forget her. That chapter is closed.”
Nicodemo was brooding. “But not on Bourne.”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t leave me in Mexico City to deal with him.”
“Deal with him?” Maceo Encarnación echoed. “I listened to you; we tried that once. You see how that turned out. Rebeka is dead and Bourne is still at large. Now one must create a real plan, execute it, at the conclusion of which Bourne dies. This is precisely what has been put in place. Anunciata is seeing to it.”
In many ways Dick Richards’s skills mimicked the finest watchmaker’s.
The difference was that he worked in the world of cyberspace, a place of infinite area, but without dimension. He had managed to quarantine his own Trojan and was now accessing the Core Energy network, where he had stored the preliminary codes that would activate the potent virus he had inserted like a drop of ink into its cyber heart of ones and zeros. Those codes were too complex even for his memory, and there was no way he would risk being caught with a rogue thumb drive or SD card. Besides, the attack had to seem to come from outside Treadstone, traced back to the Chinese. He could only seed the false ISP trail with a code that originated outside the Treadstone intranet.
Despite the ca
This was his big test, his ticket to the major leagues of hacking. When he pulled this off, he would prove indispensable to Tom Brick and Core Energy. This, more than anything, was what he wanted. Working for the government was soul-destroying. Other people took credit for his breakthroughs, he received a puny salary, and the president treated him like a pet dog, occasionally stroked but never allowed up on the furniture where his human masters sat in daily judgment. His transfer to Treadstone had unexpectedly improved his lot. Though Soraya and, to some extent, Peter treated him with suspicion and contempt, he could not blame them. He had been sent to spy on them. He deserved their suspicion and contempt. But he also saw their willingness to give him the credit due him, if he could prove himself loyal.
True, Brick often treated him like a dog, but sometimes not. And he paid a shitload more than the government ever did—or could. Up until now, Richards had been trying to be faithful to three masters, but the tension was tearing him apart. He could no longer live this way. He needed to choose sides.