Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy (18 page)

He entered the underpass at speed, downshifting, stamping down hard on the air brakes only when he was engulfed in darkness. At the same time, he kept the heel of his hand on the air horn. The screaming noise ricocheted off the stone and concrete until it became deafening, concealing the shriek of the tires as Bourne turned the wheel hard to the left, rolling the cab of the truck over the divider so that the vehicle was turned at right angles to the road. He was out of the cab in an instant, sprinting the north wall behind the protection of the last car to come barreling through in the other direction. It had stopped for a moment as the driver rubbernecked the accident, then as more police arrived it had taken off. The semi was between him and his pursuers, stretched from wall to wall across both lanes of K Street. He scrabbled around for the steel maintenance ladder bolted to the tunnel wall, leaped up it and began to climb just as floodlights were switched on. He turned his head away, closed his eyes and kept climbing.

A few moments later he saw the lights illuminating the truck and the roadbed beneath it. Bourne, almost to the curved top of the underpass, could make out Martin Lindros. He spoke into a walkie-talkie, and floodlights came on from the opposite direction. They had the semi in a pincer grip. Agents were running toward the truck from both ends of K

Street, guns at the ready.

"Sir, there's someone in the truck's cab." The agent moved closer. "He's been shot; he's bleeding pretty bad."

Lindros was running, his face bursting into the floodlit field, lined with tension. "Is it Bourne?"

High above them, Bourne had gained the maintenance hatch. He slid back the bolt, opened it, found himself amidst the decorative trees that lined Washington Circle. All around him, traffic raced, a relentless procession of blurred motion that never ceased. In the tunnel below him, the wounded trucker was being taken to the nearby hospital. Now it was time for Bourne to save himself.

Khan had accumulated too much respect for David Webb's skill for vanishing to have wasted time trying to find him in the swirling mass of people in Old Town. Instead, he had concentrated on the Agency men, shadowing them back to Lincoln Fine Tailors, where they met with Martin Lindros for the sorry debriefing following the botched termination. He observed them talking to the tailor. In accordance with standard intimidation practices, they had taken him out of his own environment—in this case, his shop— stuffing him into the backseat of one of their cars, where he had been detained without explanation, squeezed between two stone-faced agents. From what he had gathered from the conversation he overheard between Lindros and the agents, they had gotten nothing of substance from the tailor. He claimed the agents had arrived at his shop with such speed that Webb had had no time to tell him why he had come. As a consequence, the agents recommended cutting him loose. Lindros had agreed, but after the tailor had returned to his shop, Lindros had posted two new agents in an unmarked car across the street just in case Webb tried to contact him a second time. Now, twenty minutes after Lindros had left them, the agents were bored. They'd eaten their donuts and drunk their Cokes and were sitting in their car grumbling about being stuck here on surveillance duty when their brethren were off running down the notorious agent, David Webb.

"Not David Webb," the heavier of the two agents said. "The DCI has decreed that we call him by his operational name, Jason Bourne."

Khan, who was still close enough to hear every word, went rigid. He had, of course, heard of Jason Bourne. For many years, Bourne had had the reputation of being the most accomplished international killer-for-hire on the planet. Khan, knowing his field the way he did, had discounted half the stories as fabrications, the other half as exaggeration. It was simply not possible for one man to have had the daring, the expertise, the sheer animal cunning attributed to Jason Bourne. In fact, a part of him disbelieved in Bourne's existence altogether.

And yet, here were these CIA agents speaking about David Webb as Jason Bourne!

Khan felt as if his brain was about to explode. He was shaken to his very foundation. David Webb wasn't simply a college professor of linguistics as Spalko's dossier had claimed, he was one of the field's great assassins. He was the man who Khan had been playing cat-and-mouse with since yesterday. So many things came together for him, not the least of which was how Bourne had made him in the park. Changing his face and hair and even his gait had always been enough to fool people in the past. But now he was dealing with Jason Bourne, an agent whose skills and expertise at, among other things, disguise were legendary and quite possibly the equal of his own. Bourne wasn't going to be gulled by the normal tricks of the trade, clever though they might be. Khan understood that he was going to have to raise the level of his game if he was going to win. Fleetingly, he wondered if Webb's real identity was another fact Stepan Spalko had known when he had handed Khan the expurgated file. Considering it further, Khan believed that he had to have known. It was the only explanation for why Spalko had arranged to pin the murders of Conklin and Panov on Bourne. It was a classic disinformation technique. As long as the Agency believed that Bourne was responsible, they had no reason to look elsewhere for the real murderer—and surely they would have no chance to uncover the truth about why the two men were killed. Spalko was clearly trying to use Khan as a pawn in some larger game, the way he was using Bourne. Khan had to find out what Spalko was up to—he would not be anyone's pawn. To unearth the truth behind the murders, Khan knew he had to get to the tailor. Never mind what he had told the Agency. Having followed Webb—it was still difficult for Khan to think of him as Jason Bourne—he knew the tailor Fine had had plenty of time to cough up what information he possessed. Once during his observation of the scene, the tailor Fine had turned his head, staring out the car window, and Khan had taken the opportunity to look into his eyes. He knew him, then, for a proud and obstinate man. Khan's Buddhist nature caused him to look upon pride as an undesirable trait, but in this situation he could see that it had served Fine well because the harder the Agency pushed him, the deeper he had dug in his heels. The Agency would get nothing out of him, but Khan knew how to neutralize pride as well as obstinacy.

Taking off his suede jacket, he ripped part of the lining enough so that the agents on stake-out would see him as nothing more than another Lincoln Fine Tailors customer. Crossing the street, he entered the shop, the musical bell tinkling behind him. One of the Latina women looked up from reading the newspaper comics pages, her lunch, a Tupperware container of beans and rice, half-eaten in front of her. She came over, asked if she could help him. She was voluptuously built, with a firm, wide brow and large chocolate eyes. He told her that as the ripped jacket was a favorite of his, he'd come to see Mr. Fine himself. The woman nodded. She disappeared into the back and, a moment later, came out and sat down at her position without saying another word to Khan. Several minutes passed before Leonard Fine appeared. He looked much the worse for his long and thoroughly unpleasant morning. Truth to tell, such close and intimate proximity to the Agency as he had endured seemed to have drained him of vitality.

"How can I help you, sir? Maria tells me you have a jacket in need of restoration." Khan spread the suede jacket out on the counter inside out.

Fine touched it with the same delicacy with which a doctor palpates an ill patient. "Oh, it's just the lining. Lucky for you. Suede is almost impossible to repair."

"Never mind that," Khan said in a low whisper. "I am here on orders from Jason Bourne. I'm his representative."

Fine did an admirable job of keeping his face closed. "I've no idea what you're talking about."

"He thanks you for your part in his successful escape from the Agency," Khan went on as if Fine hadn't spoken. "And he wants you to know that even now two agents are spying on you."

Fine winced slightly. "I expected as much. Where are they?" His knobby fingers were kneading the jacket anxiously.

"Just across the street," Khan said. "In the white Ford Taurus." Fine was canny enough not to look. "Maria," he said just loud enough for the Latina to hear, "is there a white Ford Taurus parked across the street?" Maria turned her head. "Yes, Mr. Fine."

"Can you see if anyone's in it?"

"Two men," Maria said. "Tall, crew-cut. Very Dick Tracy, like the ones who were in here earlier."

Fine swore under his breath. His eyes rose to meet Khan's. "Tell, Mr. Bourne ... tell him that Leonard Fine says, 'May God go with him.'"

Khan's expression was impassive. He found thoroughly distasteful the American habit of invoking God in almost any instance one cared to name. "I need some information."

"Of course." Fine nodded gratefully. "Whatever you want."

Martin Lindros finally understood the meaning of the phrase 'So angry he could spit blood.' How was he ever going to face the Old Man, knowing that Jason Bourne had evaded him, not once but twice.

"What the hell d'you think you were doing disobeying my direct orders?" he screamed at the top of his lungs. Noises were echoing in the tunnel underneath Washington Circle as DOT personnel were trying to extricate the semi from the position in which Bourne had lodged it.

"Hey, listen, it was me who spotted the subject leaving the Wal-Mart."

"And subsequently let him get away!"

"That was you, Lindros. I had an irate district commander chewing up my ass!"

"And that's another thing!" Lindros yelled. "What the fuck was he doing there?"

"You tell me, wise guy, you're the one who fucked things up in Alexandria. If you'd bothered to clue me in, I could've helped you canvass Old Town. I know it like I know my own face. But no, you're the fed, you know better, you're the one running the show."

"Damn right, I am! I've already directed my people to call all personnel stationed at the airports, train terminals, bus stations, rental car agencies to be on the lookout for Bourne."

"Don't be absurd, even if you hadn't tied my hands behind my back, I lack the authority to make those kinds of calls. But I do have my men scouring the area and let's not forget that it was my detailed last best description of Bourne you disseminated to all the transportation egress points."

Even though Harris was right, Lindros continued to fume. "I demand to know why the hell you dragged the D.C. Metro Police into it? If you needed more backup, you should've come to me."

"Why the fuck should I come to you, Lindros? Can you give me a reason? Are you my asshole buddy or something? Are we collaborating, anything along that line? Fuck no." Harris had a disgusted look on his lugubrious face. "And for the record, I didn't send for the D.C. I told you, he was on my ass from the second he showed up, frothing at the mouth about my poaching on his jurisdiction."

Lindros barely heard him. The ambulance, its light flashing, its siren screaming, was taking off, ferrying the truck driver he had inadvertently shot to George Washington University Hospital. It had taken them nearly forty-five minutes to secure the area, mark it off as a crime scene and extricate him from the cab. Would he live or die? Lindros didn't want to think about that now. It would be easy to say that his injury was Bourne's fault— he knew the Old Man would see it that way. But the DCI had a crust formed of two parts pragmatism and one part bitterness that Lindros knew he could never match, and thank God for that. Whatever the trucker's fate now, he knew he was responsible, and this knowledge served as the perfect fuel for his antagonism. He may not have had the DCFs cynical crust, but he was not in the market of beating himself up for actions long past remedy. Instead, he spewed the poisonous feeling outward.

"Forty-five minutes!" Harris grunted as an ambulance cut its way through the backedup traffic. "Christ, that poor bastard could've died ten times over!"

"Civil servants!"

"You're a civil servant, Harry, if memory serves," Lindros said nastily.

"And you aren't?"

The venom rose up in Lindros. "Listen, you over-the-hill fuck, I am made of different cloth than the rest of you. My training—"

"All your training didn't help you to catch Bourne, Lindros! You had two chances and you blew them both!"

"And what did
you
do to help?"

Khan watched Lindros and Harris going at it. In his DOT overalls, he looked like everyone else on the scene. No one questioned his comings or goings. He had been passing close by the rear of the semi, ostensibly examining the damage done by the car that had rammed into it when he had noticed in the shadows the iron ladder that rose along the side of the tunnel. He looked up, craning his neck. He wondered where it led. Had Bourne wondered the same thing, or had he already known? Now, glancing around to make sure no one was looking in his direction, he quickly climbed the ladder, out of the range of the police spotlights, where no one could see him. He found the hatch and was not surprised to discover the slide bolt newly opened. He pushed the hatch open, went up.

From the vantage point of Washington Circle, he turned slowly in a clockwise direction, scanning all things near and far. A gathering wind whipped about his face. The sky had darkened further, looking bruised by the hammerblows of thunder, muffled by distance, that rolled now and again through the canyons and wide European-style avenues of the city. To the west was Rock Creek Parkway, Whitehurst Freeway and Georgetown. To the north rose the modern towers of Hotel Row—the ANA, Grand, Park Hyatt, and Marriott, and Rock Creek beyond. To the west was K Street, running past McPherson Square and Franklin Park. To the south was Foggy Bottom, sprawling George Washington University, the massive monolith of the State Department. Farther out, where the Potomac River bent to the east, widening out to form the placid bywaters of the Tidal Basin, he saw a silver mote, a plane hanging almost motionless, shining like a mirror, caught high up above the thickening clouds by a last bolt of sunlight before it began its descent into Washington National Airport.