Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(63)
For the next eighteen months, Crowcroft remained uninhabited while contractors for the NSA made the required repairs and modifications. These modifications spiraled out from the huge Tara-like great house itself to the various barns, which were remade as barracks for the rotating contingent of federal agents trained to guard the property, and the sheds, which now housed multiple banks of electronic equipment, generators, and back-up generators. The old stone walls that demarked the limits of Crowcroft’s fiefdom were reinforced on the inside by concrete muscle over a steel skeleton. A network of CCTV cameras was installed to complement the motion and heat detectors. Bomb-sniffing dogs on chain leashes patrolled the grounds day and night.
Arthur Lee, Crowcroft’s manager, was the one holdover from the previous regimes, absent the drug pushers, who had summarily kicked him out. He had been vouched for by the bank and vetted by NSA nerds. For the current regime, he was a necessary but invisible member of the Crowcroft estate. He was a descendant of the shipping magnate’s son and the African slave he fell in love with and elevated to live by his side in the great house. Many generations had come and gone since her only son was born. Though she subsequently gave birth to four daughters, only the son survived the war.
Arthur Lee was that man’s great-great-grandson. He had been born and raised on Crowcroft, had been witness to the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly, all of which had rolled in, done its damage to the acreage, and then ebbed away. Through it all, Arthur Lee, part English, part Angolan, part Powhatan, and who knew what else thrown into the hopper, abided, standing tall. He thought of himself as a mongrel, half jokingly, half bitter. He was decidedly antisocial, suspicious of everyone, but when it came to the crunch, it was Arthur Lee who set the broken leg of Jimmy Lang after he took a header off his tractor one autumn afternoon.
Bourne had met Jimmy Lang through Lang’s ties to the NSA, which were tenuous at best. Lang had a fifty-acre farm that abutted one side of Crowcroft. With his wife ill, his children off in college with no interest in the farming life, and no buyer for his acreage, Lang had had to use his brains to figure out how to make ends meet. What he hit upon was the flock of strangers who had taken possession of Crowcroft. God alone knew what they were doing there, but when Arthur needed his help to keep up Crowcroft’s appearance as a working farm, he called on his friend; Lang was only too happy to take the extra money. Whoever these strangers were, they paid damn well.
Bourne had come upon Jimmy when, after he had successfully fulfilled the assignment for which the Bourne identity had been created, he was tasked with figuring out what the NSA was doing with that property so far from their HQ. The Treadstone powers-that-were harbored a pathological hatred of the NSA, and were delighted to take every opportunity to undermine the agency, which was why Bourne was given this particular brief. The Treadstone people were ruthless spyocrats. They were aware of his extraordinary prowess, and they were determined to ride him as hard as they could for as long as they could. But none of them was smart enough or prescient enough to figure he’d find a way to break his psychological shackles and drop off their radar screens.
As for Crowcroft, at first it was assumed the NSA was using it to debrief defectors, and perhaps in the beginning it was. But not when Bourne first began snooping around nine years ago. It was Bourne’s practice to come upon a target indirectly, slip through an unexpected interstice, and cut to the heart of the matter. This he did by befriending Jimmy Lang. Of course, the basis of the friendship was related to Bourne’s assignment, but the two men genuinely liked each other, and afterward he and Bourne remained friends.
This was why Keyre had said, “Seriously, you won’t believe it when I tell you,” when Bourne had asked him where the NSA had stashed General MacQuerrie.
How Keyre knew of Bourne’s friendship with Jimmy Lang was yet another question about the Somalian for which Bourne needed an answer.
“How long has it been?” Lang asked when Bourne approached him in the field. He had swung off his tractor, stood beside it, wiping his hands on a rag he kept stashed in the back pocket of his old-school overalls.
“That long,” Bourne said as he put down the small satchel he was carrying and locked hands with his friend.
Lang, with wide-set eyes, a shock of light-brown hair, and a jaw like a granite boulder, had a body built for the great outdoors. Bourne supposed that with the right training Jimmy could have been a WWE fighter; he didn’t have the disposition, though. He was a hunter the way his daddy and granddaddy were hunters: to put food on the family table. He hated violence and inhumanity, which is why Bourne had told him the first time they met what the NSA was really up to in the remade and remodeled great house.
“What’ve you been up to?” Jimmy held up his hands, palms outward. “Stupid question. Don’t ask, don’t tell.” He indicated with his head. “Shall we head up to the house? Got a rocking chair with your name on it. Plus, there’s a bottle of corn whiskey idling away in the pantry just begging to be drunk.”
“As good as that sounds…”
“Ah.” Lang nodded. “A business call. I should’ve known. What can I do for you?”
“Crowcroft.”
“Again.” Lang looked off to his left, toward the thick line of trees that separated his property from the NSA black site. When his gaze swung back, he said, “I got bad news on that score. They dynamited the last of those tunnels, including the one you used to get in last time.”