Bourne 7 – The Bourne Deception - Страница 19

Bowles sighed. Then sat up so abruptly, he startled Firth. He grabbed Firth‘s wrist with a horribly fierce grip. -Who‘s the patient you‘ve had here for the last three months?

— What patient?

Bowles clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. -Hey, Doc, I didn‘t come here for my health. He grinned. -You‘ve got a patient stashed away here and I want to know about him.

— Why? What do you care?

The New Zealander jerked even harder on Firth‘s wrist, pulling the doctor closer to him. -You operate here without interference, but all good things come to an end. His voice lowered significantly. -Now listen up, you idiot. You‘re wanted for negligent homicide by the Perth police.

— I was drunk, Firth whispered. -I didn‘t know what I was doing.

— You operated on a patient while under the influence, Doc, and he died. That‘s it in a nutshell. He shook Firth violently. -Isn‘t it?

The doctor closed his eyes and whispered, — Yes.

— So?

— I have nothing to tell you.

Bowles moved to slide off the table. -Then off we go to the cops, bud. Your life is toast.

Firth, trying to squirm away, said, — I don‘t know anything.

— Never gave you a name, did he?

— Adam, Firth said. -Adam Stone.

— That‘s what he said? Adam Stone.

Firth nodded. -I confirmed it when I saw his passport.

Bowles dug in a pocket, produced a cell phone. -Doc, here‘s all you have to do in order to stay out of jail for life. He held out the cell. -Get me a picture of this Adam Stone. A good, clear one of his face.

Firth licked his lips. His mouth was so dry he could scarcely speak. -And if I do this you‘ll leave me alone?

Bowles winked. -Bank on it, Doc.

Firth took the cell with a hollow feeling in his chest. What else was he to do? He had no expertise with these kinds of people. He tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that at least he hadn‘t divulged Jason Bourne‘s real name, but that gesture would become meaningless the moment he gave this man Bourne‘s photo.

Bowles jumped off the table, but he still hadn‘t let go of Firth‘s wrist.

— Don‘t get any stupid ideas, Doc. You tell anyone about our little arrangement and sure as I‘m standing here someone will put a bullet in the back of your head, follow?

Firth nodded mechanically. A numbness had spread through him, rooting him to the spot.

Bowles let him go at last. -Glad you could make room for me, Doc, he said in a louder voice for anyone who might be around. -Tomorrow, same time. You‘ll have the test results by then, isn‘t that right?

8

NAGORNO-KARABAKH was in the west of Azerbaijan, a hotly contested area of the country ever since Joseph Stalin tried to ethnically cleanse this part of the former Soviet Union of Armenians. The advantage for Arkadin of staging a strike force in Azerbaijan was that it bordered on the northwestern edge of Iran. The advantage of choosing this particular area was threefold: It was rugged terrain, identical to that of Iran; it was sparsely populated; and the people here knew him because he‘d made more than a dozen runs for Dimitri Maslov and then Semion Icoupov, trading semi-automatic rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, and so forth to the Armenian tribal leaders who were waging a continuous guerrilla war against the Azerbaijani regime, just as they had against the Soviets until the fall of the Soviet empire. In exchange, Arkadin received packets of brownish morphine bricks of exceedingly high quality, which he transported overland to the port city of Baku, where they were loaded onto a merchant ship that would take them due north across the Caspian Sea to Russia.

All in all, Nagorno-Karabakh was as secure a place as Arkadin could possibly find. He and his men would be left alone, and the tribesmen would protect him with their lives. Without the weapons provided by him and the people he worked for they would have been beaten into the dry red dirt of their homeland, exterminated like vermin. Armenians had settled here, between the Kura and Araxes rivers, during Roman times and had remained here ever since. Arkadin understood their fierce homeland pride, which was why he‘d decided that Nagorno-Karabakh was the place to commence trading. It was a politically savvy move as well. Since the weapons sold to the Armenian tribesmen helped destabilize the country and thus gave it a rude shove back toward Moscow‘s orbit, the Kremlin was all too happy to turn a blind eye to the trades.

Now his strike force was going to train here.

It was hardly a surprise that when he arrived the leaders greeted him like a conquering hero.

Not that this homecoming of sorts was simply pleasant; nothing in Arkadin‘s life was simple. Possibly he had misremembered the landscape or perhaps something had changed inside him. Either way, the moment he drove into the Nagorno-Karabakh area it was as if he‘d been hurled back into Nizhny Tagil.

The camp had been set up precisely to his specifications: Ten tents made of camouflage material ringed a large oval compound. To the east was the landing strip where his plane had touched down. At the other end of it was a short L-shaped extension on which was sitting a Air Afrika Transport cargo plane. The tents had an aspect he hadn‘t anticipated: They reminded him of the ring of high-security prisons that girdled Nizhny Tagil, the town in which he‘d been born and raised, if you could call living with psychotic parents being raised.

But again, memory was not a simple matter. Twenty minutes after arriving, having entered one of the tents that had been set up as his command station, he was inspecting the impressive array of weaponry he‘d had transshipped: AK47 Lancasters, AR15 Bushmasters and LWRC SRT 6.8mm assault rifles, World War II US Marine M2A1-7 flamethrowers, armor-piercing grenades, shoulder-fired FIM-92 Stinger missiles, mobile howitzers, and, the key to his mission, three AH-64 Apache helicopters loaded with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles with specially made dual-charge nose cones of depleted uranium, unconditionally guaranteed by the seller to penetrate even the most heavily armored vehicle.

Dressed in camo fatigues, armed with a metal baton on one hip and an American Colt.45 on the other, Arkadin emerged from the largest of the tents and was met by Dimitri Maslov, the head of the Kazanskaya, the most powerful family of the Moscow mob. Maslov looked like a street fighter who was calculating how to pin you in the least amount of time and with the maximum pain. His hands were large, thick, and broad, and looked like they could wring the neck of anyone and anything. His muscular legs ended in outlandishly dainty feet, as if they‘d been grafted on from someone else‘s body. He‘d grown his hair since the last time Arkadin had seen him and, dressed in lightweight camo fatigues, had something of the anarchic air of Che Guevara.

— Leonid Danilovich, Maslov said with false heartiness, — I see you‘ve wasted no time in putting our war matÃ©riel to use. Well, good, it cost a fucking fortune.

With Maslov were two no-neck bodyguards, their fatigues sporting immense sweat rings, clearly out of their element in this hot climate.

Looking past the human weapons, Arkadin eyed the grupperovka chief with a kind of impersonal distrust. Ever since he‘d defected from being the Kazanskaya‘s main enforcer to working exclusively for Semion Icoupov, he wasn‘t sure where he stood with the man. That they were doing business now meant nothing; a combination of compelling circumstance and powerful partner thrust them together. Arkadin had the impression that they were two pit bulls deciding how to finish the other off. This was borne out when Maslov said, — I still haven‘t gotten over the loss of my Mexican pipeline. I can‘t help feeling that if you‘d been available, I wouldn‘t have lost it.

— Now I believe you‘re exaggerating, Dimitri Ilyinovich.

— But instead you dropped out of sight, Maslov continued, deliberately ignoring Arkadin. -You were unreachable.

Arkadin thought he‘d better pay attention now. Did Maslov suspect that he had taken Gustavo Moreno‘s laptop, a prize that Arkadin was certain Maslov thought was rightfully his?

Arkadin thought it best to change the subject. -Why are you here?

— I always like to see my investments firsthand. Besides, Triton, the man coordinating the entire operation, wanted a firsthand report on your progress.

— Triton need only have called me, Arkadin said.

— He‘s a cautious man, our Triton, or so I‘ve heard. I‘ve never met him myself-frankly, I don‘t know who he is, only that he‘s a man with deep pockets and the wherewithal to mount this ambitious project. And don‘t forget, Arkadin, it was I who recommended you to Triton. ‗There‘s no one better to train these men,‘ I told him in no uncertain terms.

Arkadin thanked Maslov, even though privately it pained him to do so. On the other side of the ledger, it warmed him to know that Maslov had no idea who Triton was or who he worked for, whereas he himself knew everything. Maslov‘s amassed millions had made him overconfident and sloppy, which in Arkadin‘s opinion made him ripe for the slaughter. That would come, he told himself, in time.

When Maslov had phoned him with the proposition laid out by Triton, he‘d at first refused. Now that he was the power behind the Eastern Brotherhood he neither needed nor wanted to hire himself out as a free-lancer. When Maslov‘s flattery, describing Arkadin and the Black Legion‘s crucial part in the plan, had failed to move him, the twenty-million-dollar fee was dangled in front of his face. Still, he hesitated, until he‘d learned that the target was Iran, the objective to overthrow the current regime. Then the dazzling prospect of Iran‘s oil pipeline danced through his head: untold billions, untold power. This prize took his breath away. He was canny enough to know, though Maslov was careful not to mention it, that Triton‘s aim must be the pipeline, too. His endgame was to double-cross Triton at the last minute, to snatch the pipeline for himself, but to do that he needed to properly assess his enemy‘s resources. He needed to know who Triton was.