“I’m afraid that’s impossible. The source is absolutely sacrosanct.” Soraya could not tell him that her source was Jason Bourne. “However-” She reached down to her slim attachй case, pulled out several photos, handed them over.
“It’s a corpse,” LaValle said. “I fail to see the significance-”
“Look at the second photo,” Soraya said. “It’s a close-up of the inside of the victim’s elbow. What do you see?”
“A tattoo of three horses’ heads attached to-what is this? It looks like the Nazi SS death’s head.”
“And so it is.” Soraya handed him another photo. “This is the uniform patch of the Black Legion under their leader Heinrich Himmler.”
LaValle pursed his lips. Then he put sheets back in the file, returned it to Soraya. He held up the photos. “If you could find this insignia, anyone could. This could be a group that’s simply appropriated the Black Legion’s sign, like the skinheads in Germany appropriated the swastika. Besides, this isn’t proof that the intercepts came from the Black Legion. And even if they did I have a problem, Director. It’s the same as yours, I would think. You’ve told me-also according to your sacrosanct source-that the Black Legion is being fronted by the Eastern Brotherhood. If the NSA acts on this intel, we’ll have every flavor of PR nightmare visited on us. The Eastern Brotherhood, as I’m sure you’re aware, is exceedingly powerful, especially with the overseas press. We run with this and we’re wrong, it’s going to cause the president and this country an enormous amount of humiliation, which we can’t afford now. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly, Mr. LaValle. But if we ignore it and America is successfully attacked again, then how do we look?”
LaValle scrubbed his face with one hand. “So we’re between a rock and hard place.”
“Sir, you know as well as I do that action is better than inaction, especially in a volatile situation like this.”
LaValle was about to capitulate, Soraya knew it, but here came Willard again, gliding up, silent as a ghost. He bent, whispered something in LaValle’s ear.
“Thank you, Willard,” Lavalle said, “that will be all.” Then he returned his attention to Soraya. “Well, Director, it seems I’m urgently wanted elsewhere.” He stood up and smiled down at her, but spoke with a steely tone. “Please join me.”
Soraya’s heart plummeted. This invitation wasn’t a request.
Yakov, the bombila driver, who’d been ordered to park across the avenue from the front entrance of the Metropolya Hotel, had been joined forty minutes ago by a man who looked as if he’d been in a fistfight with a meat grinder. Despite efforts to cover it up, his face was swollen, dark as pounded flesh. He wore a silver patch over one eye. He was a surly bastard, Yakov decided, even before the man handed him a fistful of money. He uttered not a word of greeting, but slammed into the backseat, slithered down so even the crown of his head was invisible to anyone glancing casually in.
The atmosphere inside the bombila quickly grew so toxic that Yakov was forced to vacate the semi-warmth for the freezing Moscow night. He bought himself some food from a passing Turkish vendor, spent the next half hour eating it, talking to his friend Max, who’d pulled up behind him because Max was a lazy sonovabitch who grasped at any excuse not to work.
Yakov and Max were in the middle of heated speculation that concerned last week’s death of a high-level RAB Bank officer, who was discovered tied up, tortured, and asphyxiated in the garage of his own elitny dacha. The two of them were wondering why the General Prosecutor’s Office and the president’s newly formed Investigative Committee were fighting over jurisdiction of the death.
“It’s politics, pure and simple,” Yakov said.
“Dirty politics,” Max retorted. “There’s nothing pure and simple about that.”
It was then that Yakov spotted Jason Bourne and the sexy dyev getting out of a bombila in front of the hotel. When he struck the side of his cab three times with the flat of his hand, he sensed a stirring in the backseat.
“He’s here,” he said as the rear window rolled down.
Bourne was about to drop Gala off at the Metropolya Hotel when he looked out the bombila window, saw the taxi that had earlier taken him from The Chinese Pilot to the hotel. Yakov, the driver, was leaning against the fender of his dilapidated junkmobile, eating something greasy while talking to the cabbie parked right behind him.
Bourne saw Yakov glance over as he and Gala exited the bombila. When they’d gone through the revolving door, Bourne told her to stay put. To his left was the service door used by porters to take guests’s luggage in and out of the hotel. Bourne looked out across the street. Yakov stuck his head in the rear window, huddled with a man who’d been hidden in the backseat.
In the elevator, on the way up to their room, he said, “Are you hungry? I’m starved.” Harun Iliev, the man Semion Icoupov sent to find Jason Bourne, had expended hours in contentious negotiations and frustrating dead ends, and finally spent a great deal of money in his pursuit. It wasn’t coincidence that had led him at last to the bombila named Yakov, for Yakov was an ambitious man who knew he’d never get rich driving around Moscow, fending off other bombily, pissing them off by cutting in, snatching their fares from under their noses. What could be more lucrative than spying on other people? Especially when your chief client was the American. Yakov had many clients, but none of them knew how to throw around dollars like the Americans. It was their sincere belief that enough money bought you anything. Mostly, they were right. When they weren’t, though, it was still costly for them.
Most of Yakov’s other clients laughed at the kind of money the Americans threw around. Chiefly, though, he suspected it was because they were jealous. Laughing at what you didn’t have and never would was, he supposed, better than letting it depress you.
Icoupov’s people were the only ones who paid as well. But they used him far less than the Americans. On the other hand, they had him on retainer. Yakov knew Harun Iliev well, had dealt with him a number of times before, and both liked and trusted him. Besides, they were both Muslim. Yakov kept his religion a secret in Moscow, especially from the Americans, who, stupidly, would have dropped him like a fake ruble.
Directly after the American attachй contacted him for the job, Yakov had called Harun Iliev. As a consequence, Harun had already inserted himself in the staff of the Metropolya Hotel through a cousin of his, who worked in the kitchen as one of the expediters. He coordinated food orders for the line chefs. The moment he saw the room-service order come down from 1728, Bourne’s room, he called Harun.
“We’re short-staffed tonight,” he said. “Get down here in the next five minutes and I’ll make sure you’re the one to take the order up to him.”
Harun Iliev quickly presented himself to his cousin and was shown to a trolley, neatly covered in starched white linen, laden with covered bowls, platters, plates, silverware, and napkins. Thanking his cousin for this opportunity to get to Jason Bourne, he rolled his trolley to the service elevator. Someone was already there. Harun took him to be one of the hotel managers until, as they entered the elevator, he turned so Harun caught a fleeting glimpse of his pulped face and the silver patch over one eye.
Harun reached out, pressed the button for the seventeenth floor. The man pressed the button for the eighteenth. The elevator stopped at the fourth floor, where a maid got on with her turn-down cart. She exited a floor later.