“Did you do it?” Anunciata’s cheeks were flaming. Her entire frame was shaking.
“I already told you—”
“The truth!” she cried. “This is a church. I’ll have the truth!”
He went to reach for the stiletto, but she was quicker. Or perhaps she had already prepared herself. Snatching up the knife, she strode forward, and, in one powerful swing, thrust the knife into el Enterrador’s throat.
His eyes opened wide in shock and disbelief. He grabbed on to the edge of the desk as he was falling, but his already numb fingers slipped off, and he crashed to the floor in a rapidly spreading pool of his own blood.
22
THE BEIJING CENTRAL Committee Earth and Sky Country Club lay only five miles northwest of the capital.
But it could have been a hundred. Here, beyond the massive layer of industrial smog that hung above the city like an intimation of a permanent twilight, the skies were clear. Within the twelve-foot-high spiked fence, electrified for added security, could be seen endless rows in meticulous parallels of cabbage, cucumbers, peppers and beans of all varieties, onions, scallions, gai lan, bok choy, and chilies, among many others. What made these vegetables special, necessitating the heavy security, was that they were all organic, grown pesticide-free in pristine conditions. In the northern section of Earth and Sky was the dairy farm, where cows were fed an all-organic diet, the milk processed in sterile conditions.
It was to Earth and Sky that Minister Ouyang was being driven in his state-provided limousine for his twice-monthly visit. The produce of Earth and Sky was the sole property of the state, for consumption only by the Central Committee and those high-level ministers who, like Ouyang, were privy to its largesse. There were twenty-five levels of power within the many ministries of Beijing’s central government. Each level was entitled to a specific amount of organic food. The higher up the minister, the larger the monthly allotment. This feudal system was a holdover from Mao’s regime, made necessary by the severe pollution of China’s earth and sky, which was nearing crisis level.
However, today Minister Ouyang had an altogether different reason for visiting the country club. As the cantilevered front gate opened to his driver’s electronic code, he saw another car waiting just inside. The man in army fatigues stood beside the car, eating a cucumber he had apparently just pulled off the vine.
When Ouyang stepped out of his limousine and approached, he saw the livid scar down the side of the man’s face.
“Colonel Ben David,” he said, donning dark glasses against the sun’s glare. “It has been some time.”
“You know,” Ben David said, lounging against the car, “I still prefer Israeli cucumbers.” He chomped on the Earth and Sky vegetable, chewing slowly. “Something about the desert sun.”
Minister Ouyang produced a curdled smile. “Bring your own food next time.”
“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 cannot accommodate change, it cannot succeed.”
“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.”