Bourne 7 – The Bourne Deception - Страница 30

She was a whisper-thin blonde with large blue eyes and a smile that seemed to wrap around her face. Her teeth were white and even, her nails cut straight across, her only bits of jewelry a gold wedding band and diamond stud earrings, large enough to be expensive but small enough to be discreet. She wore a flame-colored blouse under a lightweight silver silk suit with a pencil skirt and tapered jacket.

— I work at the Prado in Madrid, she‘d said. -A private collector hired me to authenticate a recently unearthed Goya that I think is a fake.

— Why do you say that? he‘d asked.

— Because it‘s purported to be one of Goya‘s Black Paintings, done later in life when he was already deaf and going mad with encephalitis. There are fourteen in the series. This collector believes he owns the fifteenth. She shook her head. -Frankly, history isn‘t on his side.

As the weather calmed, she thanked Bourne and went off to the toilet to clean up.

He waited several seconds, then reached down, unzipped her slim attachÃ©

case, and rifled through the contents. To her, he was Adam Stone, the name on the passport Willard had given him before he‘d left Dr. Firth‘s compound. According to the legend Willard had devised, he was a venture capitalist on his way to see a potential client in Seville. Ever mindful of the unknown assailant who‘d tried to kill him, he was wary of anyone sitting next to him, anyone striking up a conversation with him, anyone wanting to know where he‘d been and where he was going.

Inside the attachÃ© case were photos-some quite detailed-of the Goya painting, a horrific study of a man being drawn and quartered by four rearing, snorting stallions while army officers lounged around, smoking, laughing, and playfully poking the victim with their bayonets.

Along with these photos was a set of X-rays, also of the painting, accompanied by a letter authenticating the painting as a genuine Goya, signed by a Professor Alonzo Pecunia Zuiga, a Goya specialist at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. With nothing else of interest, Bourne returned the sheets to the attachÃ© case and rezipped it. Why had the woman lied to him about not knowing if the painting was a genuine Goya? Why had she lied about working for the Prado when, in his letter, Zuigaaddressed her as an outsider, not as an esteemed colleague of the museum? He‘d find out soon enough.

He stared out the window at the infinity of gray-white, turned his mind to his quarry. He‘d used Firth‘s computer to gather information on Don Fernando Hererra. For one thing, Hererra was Colombian, not Spanish. Born in BogotÃ¡ in 1946, the youngest child of four, he was shipped off to England for university studies, where he took a First in economics at Oxford. Then, inexplicably, for a time his life took another path entirely. He worked as a petrolero for the Tropical Oil Company, working his way up to cuńero-a pipe capper-and beyond, moving from camp to camp, each time raising the output of barrels per day. Ever restless, he pushed on, buying a camp dirt-cheap because Tropical Oil‘s experts were certain it was in decline. Sure enough, he turned it around and, within three years, sold it back to Tropical Oil for a tenfold profit.

That‘s when he got into venture capital, using his outsize profits to move into the more stable banking sector. He bought a small regional bank in BogotÃ¡, which had been on the verge of failing, changed its name, and spent the decade of the 1990s building it into a national powerhouse. He expanded into Brazil, Argentina, and, more recently, Spain. Two years ago he‘d vigorously resisted a buyout by Banco Santander, preferring to remain his own master. Now his Aguardiente Bancorp, named after the fiery local licoriceflavored liquor of his native country, had more than twenty branches, the last one opening five months before in London where, increasingly, all the international action was.

He had been married twice, had two daughters, both of whom lived in Colombia, and a son, Jaime, whom Don Fernando had installed as the managing director of Aguardiente‘s London branch. He seemed to be clever, sober, and serious; Bourne could find not the remotest hint of anything sinister about either him or AB, as it was known inside international banking circles.

He felt Tracy‘s return before her scent of fern and citrus reached him. With a whisper of silk, she slid into the seat beside him.

— Feeling better?

She nodded.

— How long have you been working at the Prado? he said.

— About seven months.

But she‘d hesitated a moment too long and he knew she was lying. Again, why? What did she have to hide?

— If I remember correctly, Bourne said, — didn‘t some of Goya‘s later works come under a cloud of suspicion?

— In 2003, Tracy said, nodding. -But since then the fourteen Black Paintings have been authenticated.

— But not the one you‘re going to see.

She pursed her lips. -No one has seen it yet, except for the collector.

— And who is he?

She looked away, abruptly uncomfortable. -I‘m not at liberty to say.

— Surely-

— Why are you doing this? Turning back to him, she was abruptly angry.

— Do you think me a fool? Color rose up her neck into her cheeks. -I know why you‘re on this flight.

— I doubt you do.

— Please! You‘re on your way to see Don Fernando Hererra, just like I am.

— Don Hererra is your collector?

— You see? The light of triumph was in her eyes. -I knew it! She shook her head. -I‘ll tell you one thing: You‘re not going to get the Goya. It‘s mine; I don‘t care how much I have to pay.

— That doesn‘t sound like you work at the Prado, Bourne said, — or any museum for that matter. And why do you have an unlimited budget to buy a fake?

She crossed her arms over her breasts and bit her lip, determined to keep her own counsel.

— The Goya isn‘t a fake, is it?

Still she said nothing.

Bourne laughed. -Tracy, I promise I‘m not after the Goya. In fact, until you mentioned it, I had no idea it existed.

She shot him a look of fear. -I don‘t believe you.

He took a packet out of his breast pocket, handed it over. -Go on, read it, he said. -I don‘t mind. Willard really did extraordinary work, he thought, as Tracy opened the document and scanned it.

After a moment, she glanced up at him. -This is a prospectus for a startup e-commerce company.

— I need backing and I need it quickly, before our rivals get a jump on the market, Bourne lied. -I was told Don Fernando Hererra was the man to cut through the red tape and get the balance of the seed money my group requires yesterday. He couldn‘t tell her the real reason he needed to see Hererra, and the sooner he convinced her he was an ally the faster she‘d take him where he needed to go. -I don‘t know him at all. If you get me in to see him I‘d be grateful.

She handed back the document, which he put away, but her expression remained wary.

— How do I know I can trust you?

He shrugged. -How do you know anything?

She thought about this for a moment, then nodded. -You‘re right. Sorry, I can‘t help you.

— But I can help you.

She raised an eyebrow skeptically. -Really?

— I‘ll get you the Goya for a song.

She laughed. -How could you possibly do that?

— Give me an hour when we get to Seville and I‘ll show you.

All leaves have been canceled, all personnel have been recalled from vacations, Amun Chalthoum said. -I‘ve put my entire force to work on finding how the Iranians crossed my border with a ground-to-air missile.

This situation was bad for him, Soraya knew, even if he hadn‘t already been on shaky ground with some of his superiors. This breach of security had personal disaster written all over it. Or did it? What if everything he‘d told her was disinformation meant to distract her from the truth: that with the knowledge either of the Egyptian government or of certain ministers too afraid of raising their own voice against Iran, al Mokhabarat had chosen to use the United States as a bellicose proxy?

They‘d left Delia, left the crash site, driven through the phalanx of media vultures circling the perimeter, and were now racing along the road at top speed in Amun‘s four-wheel-drive vehicle. The sun was just above the horizon, filling the bowl of the sky with a pellucid light. Pale clouds lay across the western horizon as if exhausted from swimming through the darkness of the night. A wind blew the last of the morning‘s coolness against their faces. Soon enough, Amun would have to crank up the windows and put the air on.

After sifting through all the pieces of the blast site in the belly of the plane, the forensics team had put together a 3-D computer rendering of the last fifteen seconds of the flight. As Amun and Soraya huddled around a laptop inside a tent, the head of the team had begun the playback.

— The modeling is still somewhat crude, he‘d cautioned, — because of how fast we needed to put this together. When the streaking missile came into the frame, he pointed. -Also, we can‘t be one hundred percent certain of the missile‘s actual trajectory. We could be off by a degree or two.