Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy (38 page)

He hesitated for a moment, then realized that he had no choice but to tell her the truth.

"When we came back from the caf6, there were new scratch marks on your piano bench."

"What?" Her eyes opened wide and she shook her head. "I don't understand." Bourne thought of the electronic receiver in Khan's right ear. "Let's go back to the apartment and I'll show you."

He walked toward the open doorway, but she hesitated. "I don't know." Turning back, he said wearily, "What don't you know?"

A hard look had come into her face, along with a kind of ruefulness. "You lied to me."

"I did it to protect you, Annaka."

Her eyes were large and glistening. "How can I trust you now?"

"Annaka—"

"Please tell me, because I really want to know." She stood her ground, and he knew that she wouldn't take even a step toward the staircase. "I need to have an answer I can cling to and believe."

"What d'you want me to say?"

She lifted her arms, let them fall to her side in gesture of exasperation. "Do you see what you're doing, turning everything I say back on itself?" She shook her head. "Where did you learn to make people feel like shit?"

"I wanted to keep you out of harm's way," he said. She had hurt him deeply and, despite his carefully neutral expression, he suspected she knew it. "I thought I was doing the right thing. I still think so, even if it meant keeping the truth from you, at least for a little while."

She looked at him for a long time. The gusting wind took her copper hair, floated it out like a bird's wing. Querulous voices drifted up from Fo utca, people wanting to know what those noises were, a car backfiring or something else? There were no answers, and now, save for the intermittent barking of a dog, the neighborhood was quiet.

"You thought you could handle the situation," Annaka said, "y°u thought you could handle
him"

Bourne walked stiff-legged over to the front parapet, where he leaned out. Against all odds, the rental car was still there, empty. Maybe it wasn't Khan's, or maybe Khan hadn't fled the scene. With some difficulty, Bourne stood up straight. The pain was coming in waves, breaking harder on the shore of his consciousness as the endorphins released by the shock of the trauma began to dissipate. Every bone in his body seemed to ache, but none more than his jaw and his ribs.

At last, he found it in himself to answer her truthfully. "I suppose so, yes." She lifted a hand, pulled her hair away from her cheek. "Who
is
he, Jason?" It was the first time she had called him by his given name, but it scarcely registered on him. At the moment, he was trying—and failing—to give her an answer that would satisfy himself.

Khan, splayed on the stairs of the building onto whose roof he had leaped, stared unseeing at the featureless ceiling of the stairwell. He waited for Bourne to come get him. Or, he wondered with the wandering mind of those in shock, was he waiting for Annaka Vadas to level her gun at him and pull the trigger? He should be in his car now, driving away, and yet here he was, as inert as a fly caught in a spiderweb. His buzzing mind was swept by shoulds. He should've killed Bourne when he first had him in his sights, but he had a plan then, one that made sense, one that he had meticulously outlined to himself, one that would bring him—so he believed then!—the maximum measure of revenge that was his due. He should've killed Bourne in the cargo hold of the plane bound for Paris. Surely he'd meant to, just as he'd meant to just now. It would be easy to tell himself that he'd been interrupted by Annaka Vadas, but the blinding, incomprehensible truth was that he'd had his chance before she arrived on the scene and had
made a choice not to exact his revenge.

Why? He was completely at a loss to say.

His mind, usually as calm as a lake, jumped around from memory to memory, as if it found the present unbearable. He recalled the room in which he was incarcerated during his years with the Vietnamese gunrunner, his brief moment of freedom before being saved by the missionary, Richard Wick. He remembered Wick's house, the sense of space and freedom that gradually eroded, the creeping horror of his time with the Khmer Rouge. The worst part—the part he kept trying to forget—was that initially, he'd been attracted to the Khmer Rouge philosophy. Ironically enough, because it was founded by a group of young Cambodian radicals trained in Paris, its ethos was based on French nihilism. "The past is death! Destroy everything to create a new future!" This was the Khmer Rouge mantra, repeated over and over until it ground down all other thought or points of view. It was hardly surprising that their worldview would initially draw Khan—himself an unwitting refugee, abandoned, marginalized—an outcast by circumstance rather than by design. For Khan the past
was
death— witness his recurring dream. But if he first learned to destroy from them, it was because they had destroyed him first. Not content to believe his story of abandonment, they'd slowly drained the life, the energy from him as they bled him a little every day. They wanted, so his interlocutor said, to empty his mind of everything; they required a blank slate on which to write their radical version of the new future that awaited them all. They bled him, his smiling interlocutor said, for his own good, to rid him of the toxins of the past. Every day, his interlocutor read to him from their manifesto and then recited the names of those opposing the rebel regime who had been killed. Most, of course, were unknown to Khan, but a few—monks, mainly, as well as a smattering of boys his age—he had known, if only in passing. Some, like the boys, had taunted him, settling the mantle of outcast on his immature shoulders. After a time a new item was added to the agenda. Following the interlocutor's reading of a particular section of the manifesto, Khan was required to repeat it back. This he did, in an ever-increasingly forceful manner.

One day, after the requisite recitation and response, his interlocutor read off the names of those newly killed in furtherance of the revolution. At the end of the list was Richard Wick, the missionary who had taken him in, thinking he'd bring Khan to civilization and to God. What roil of emotion this news elicited within Khan was impossible to say, but the overriding feeling was one of dislocation. His last link to the world at large was now gone. He was completely and utterly alone. In the relative privacy of the latrine, he had wept without knowing why. If there was ever a man he hated, it was the one who'd used and emotionally abandoned him, and now, unaccountably, he was crying over his death. Later that day his interlocutor led him from the concrete bunker in which he'd been housed ever since being taken prisoner. Even though the sky was low and it was raining heavily, he'd blinked in the light of day. Time had passed; the rainy season had begun. Lying in the stairwell, it occurred to Khan now that while he was growing up, he'd never been in control of his own life. The truly curious and disturbing thing was that he still wasn't. He'd been under the impression that he was a free agent, having gone to great pains to set himself up in a business where he'd believed—naively, as it turned out—free agents thrived. He could see now that ever since he'd taken on his first commission from Spalko, the man had been manipulating him, and never more so than now. If he was ever to break free of the chains that bound him, he'd have to do something about Stepan Spalko. He knew he'd been immoderate with him at the end of their last phone conversation, and now he regretted it. In that quick flash of anger, so uncharacteristic of him, he'd accomplished nothing save to put Spalko on his guard. But then, he realized, ever since Bourne had sat down beside him on the park bench in Old Town Alexandria, his usual icy reserve had been shattered, and now emotions he could neither name nor understand kept shooting up to the surface, roiling his consciousness, muddying his intent. He realized with a start that when it came to Jason Bourne, he no longer knew what he wanted.

He sat up, then looked around. He'd heard a sound; he was certain of it. He rose, put one hand on the bannister, his muscles tense, poised for flight. And there it was again. His head turned. What was that sound? Where had he heard it before?

His heart beat fast, his pulse in his throat as the sound rose through the stairwell, echoing in his mind, for he was calling again:
"Lee-Lee! Lee-Lee!"
But Lee-Lee couldn't answer; Lee-Lee was dead.

The underground entrance to the monastery lay hidden by shadow and time in the deepest cleft of the northernmost wall of the gorge. The lowering sun had revealed the cleft to be more of a defile, as it must have centuries ago to the monks who had chosen this location for their well-defended home. Perhaps they had been monk-warriors, for the extensive fortifications spoke of battles and bloodshed and the need to keep their home sacrosanct.

Silently the team moved into the defile, following the sun. There was no intimate talk between Spalko and Zina now, no hint whatsoever of what had transpired between them, even though it had been momentous. In a manner of speaking, it could be termed a form of benediction; in any case, it was a transference of allegiance and of power whose silence and secrecy only added to the ramifications of its effect. It was Spalko who once again had metaphorically thrown a pebble in a still pond, only to sit back and watch the effect as the resulting ripples spread outward, altering the basic nature of the pond and all who lived in it.

The sun-splashed rocks vanished behind them as they moved into shadow, and they clicked on their lights. Besides Spalko and Zina, there were two of them—the third having been taken back to the jet at Kazantza-kis Airport, where the surgeon awaited. They wore lightweight nylon backpacks, filled with all manner of paraphernalia from canisters of tear gas to balls of twine and everything in between. Spalko didn't know what they'd be up against and he was taking no chances.

The men went first, semiautomatic guns on wide straps slung over their shoulders, held at the ready. The defile narrowed, forcing them to continue on in single-file. Soon, however, the sky vanished beneath a wall of rock and they found themselves in a cave. It was dank and musty, filled with the fetid odors of decay.

"It stinks like an open grave," one of the men said.

"Look!" the other cried. "Bones!"

They paused, their lights concentrated on a scattering of small mammal bones, but not a hundred meters on they came upon the thigh-bone of a much larger mammal. Zina squatted to take up the bone in her hand.

"Don't!" the first man cautioned. "It's bad luck to handle human bones."

"What are you talking about? Archaeologists do it all the time." Zina laughed. "Besides, this might not be human at all." Nevertheless, she dropped it back into the dust of the cave floor.

Five minutes later they were clustered around what was unmistakably a human skull. Their lights gleamed off the brow ridge, threw the eye sockets into deepest shadow.

"What d'you think killed him?" Zina asked.

"Exposure, probably," Spalko said. "Or thirst."

"Poor beggar."

They kept going, deeper into the bedrock upon which the monastery was built. The farther they went, the more numerous the bones became. Now they were all human, and increasingly they were broken or fractured.

"I don't think these people were killed by either exposure or thirst," Zina said.

"What then?" one of the men asked, but no one had an answer. Spalko ordered them curdy on. They had, by his calculation, just about reached the spot below the monastery's crenelated outer walls. Up ahead, their lights picked out an odd formation.

"The cave is split in two," one of the men said, shining his light on first the passageway to the left, then the one to his right.

"Caves don't bifurcate," Spalko said. He pushed his way ahead of them, stuck his head into the left-hand opening. "This one's a dead end." He ran his hand over the edges of the openings. "These are man-made," he said. "Many years ago, possibly when the monastery was first built." He stepped into the right-hand opening, his voice echoing strangely. "Yes, this one goes on, but there are twists and turns."

When he came back out, he had an odd expression on his face. "I don't think this is a passageway at all," he said. "No wonder Molnar chose this place to hide Dr. Schiffer. I believe we're headed into a labyrinth."

The two men exchanged glances.

"In that case," Zina said, "how will we ever find our way back?"

"There's no way of knowing what we'll find in there." Spalko took out a small rectangular object no larger than a deck of playing cards. He grinned as he showed her how it worked. "A global positioning system. I've just electronically marked our starting point." He nodded. "Let's go."

It didn't take them long, however, to discover the error of their ways, and not more than five minutes later, they had reconvened outside the labyrinth.

"What's the matter?" Zina asked.

Spalko was frowning. "The GPS didn't work in there."

She shook her head. "What d'you think is wrong?"

"Some mineral in the rock itself must be blocking the signal from the satellite," Spalko said. He couldn't afford to tell them that he had no idea why the GPS failed to work in the labyrinth. Instead, he opened his backpack, took out a ball of twine "We'll take a lesson from Theseus and unwind the twine as we go."

Zina eyed the ball uncertainly. "What if we run out of twine?"

"Theseus didn't," Spalko said. "And we're almost inside the monastery's walls, so let's hope we don't run out, either."

Dr. Felix Schiffer was bored. For days now he'd done nothing but follow orders as his cadre of protectors flew him under cover of night to Crete, then proceeded to periodically move him from one location to another. They never stayed in one place for more than three days. He'd liked the house in Iraklion, but that too had proved boring in the end. There was nothing for him to do. They refused to bring him a newspaper or allow him to listen to the radio. As for television, there was none available, but he had to assume they would have kept him away from it, too. Still, he thought glumly, it was a damn sight better than this moldering pile of stone, with only a cot for a bed and a fire for warmth. Heavy chests and sideboards were virtually the only furniture, though the men had brought folding chairs, cots and linens. There was no plumbing; they'd made a privy in the courtyard and its stench reached all the way into the interior of the monastery. It was gloomy and dank, even at noon, and God help them all when darkness fell. Not even a light to read by, if there'd been anything to read.