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“Unlike my late husband.” She dragged several onion rings onto the crusty top of her steak. She looked up suddenly, her gaze like the thrust of a knife. “Charlie confided in you about his affairs.” It wasn’t a question, and Li didn’t take it as such. “It seemed that Charles had very few friends and no confidants,” he said. “Apart from you.” Her eyes held steady on him. “That should have been me.”
“We can’t always get what we want, Senator.” He took a slice of meat between his teeth, chewed in his dainty way, then swallowed. “But we can try.”
“I’m wondering why Charlie felt he could confide in you.” “The answer is simple enough,” Li said. “It’s easier to talk of intimate matters to a stranger.”
But that wasn’t it at all, and they both knew it. A
“Come on, Mr. Li. You and Charlie shared secrets.”
“Yes,” he said. “We did.”
A
“Your husband and I had an arrangement, Senator. An arrangement that benefitted both of us in equal measure.”
A
“It seems to me,” Li said, “that you have been listening all evening.” She laughed then, dry as wood. “Then we understand each other.”
He inclined his head fractionally. “However, we do not knowone another.” The emphasis was subtle, but clear.
“This shortcoming has not been lost on me.” She smiled without, she hoped, a trace of guile. “Which is why I would like to present you with a gift.”
Li sat perfectly still across from her, his body neither tense nor relaxed. Simply waiting.
“Something precious that will correct the deficiency between us.”
From her handbag, she took out a small manila envelope, which she passed across the table. Li spent several moments engaging her eyes with his own. Only then did he allow his gaze to fall to the envelope.
His hands moved, took up the envelope, and unsealed it. He shook out its contents, which consisted of a single sheet of paper, a photocopy of an official document. As if magnetized, his eyes were drawn to the seal at the top of the page.
“This is...monstrous, insane,” he murmured, almost to himself.
As he sca
“Your beloved Tasha is not just a beauty, Mr. Li, she’s also a beast,” A
Jackknifing his body, Bourne followed Nicodemo out the open driver’s door, but immediately had to turn back to fetch Don Fernando, who was floundering over into the front. With his hands bound behind him, Bourne used his teeth to grab at Don Fernando’s shirt. Grateful for the help, Don Fernando scissored his legs, propelling himself through the door.
It was dark under the water, and the two men positioned themselves back-to-back, their hands together so they would not lose each other. Breaching the surface, they heard screams emanating from pedestrians on the bridge, and, in the far distance, sirens. Bourne directed them to one of the bridge’s immense piers, thick with encrusted green-black weed. Beneath the weeds were barnacles, sharp as razor blades. Shoving himself back first against the pier, Bourne scraped the plastic tie against the barnacles, sawing through his bonds.
Don Fernando was beside him, treading water calmly. “Almost out of it,” Bourne said.
Don Fernando nodded. But just as Bourne reached for him, he was pulled under the water.
Nicodemo!
Bourne swiped at the pier, then kicked out powerfully as he dove beneath the water. Like a shark, he could feel Don Fernando’s thrashing, along with the kicking movement that was part of Nicodemo’s attack. Finding Don Fernando in the blackness, he used one of the barnacles he had grabbed to slice through the plastic tie, then propelled Don Fernando toward the surface.
This maneuver cost him. Nicodemo swerved underwater, caught Bourne a blow to the side of his head. Bourne canted over in the water, bubbles strewn from between his lips. Nicodemo struck him again, along the nerve bundle in the side of his neck. Bourne’s consciousness seemed to drift away from him. He tried to move, but nothing seemed to work. He was aware of Nicodemo maneuvering behind him, and he kicked out, but a slimy rope encircled his neck, a ferocious pressure converged at his throat. His lungs burned and his throat ached. Reaching around, Nicodemo pressed on his cricoid cartilage. If that shattered, he would drown within seconds.
He felt an increasingly tenuous co
With an immense effort, he raised his arm. Everything seemed to be moving at a glacial pace, though another part of his mind was aware that time was ru
Gouts of blood erupted. Nicodemo spasmed, and an inhuman strength gripped him, a long moment that almost did Bourne in. But the barnacle he gripped went to work again, slashing from left to right across Nicodemo’s throat.
Veils of blood, blacker than the river water, spiraled outward. Nicodemo’s mouth opened and closed, caught for a moment in the lights from the bridge. Then his grip on Bourne fell away, and he passed, arms outstretched in a terrible yearning, out of what light there was, into the filthy depths of the river.
27
WHEN THE LITHE flight attendant lifted her head to emit a soft moan, Maceo Encarnación pushed her head back down between her bare shoulders, exposing the soft nape of her long neck. Her uniform jacket lay puddled on the floor; her thin pearl-white blouse rippled at her narrow waist, giving him access to her swaying breasts. Her pencil skirt was rucked up to her hips, her thong hobbling her ankles.
As Maceo Encarnación repeatedly pushed into her from behind, his pleasure produced images of the old Aztec gods of Tenochtitlán. Chief among them, Tlazolteotl, the goddess of pleasure and sin. Tlazolteotl was both feared and beloved. Feared because she was associated with human sacrifice; beloved because, when summoned correctly, she would devour your sins, freeing you to continue your life without taint.
When Maceo Encarnación thought of Tlazolteotl, he saw not the various statues of her in stone and jade residing in the National Museum, but Constanza Camargo. Only Constanza had the ability to devour his many, many sins, to cleanse him, to make him whole again. And yet, as she had made clear many times, she would not absolve him of his. The sin he had committed against her was too monumental for even Tlazolteotl, ancient and powerful, to consume.
Maceo Encarnación, thrusting into the flight attendant one last time, fell upon her bare back, trembling and sweating. His heart thundered in his chest, and he felt keenly the pain of dissolution, of a vast emptiness advancing upon him like an army of eternal night, implacable and terrifying. The one thing that frightened Maceo Encarnación was the void—the nothingness that might very well last an eternity. Not for him the constricting Mass, the meaningless platitudes contained in weekly homilies, the treacherous pabulum of “God’s plan.” God had no plan; there was no God. There was only man’s abject terror of the unknown and the unfathomable.