The Bourne Betrayal (17 page)

They split apart, as he had foreseen. Leaning to his right, he drew his left leg back and kicked out from the hip. His thick-soled boot slammed into the chest of one of the Amhara, knocking him off his horse. By this time, the other Amhara had had time to wheel around. He’d drawn a handgun-an old but deadly 9mm PM Makarov-and was aiming it at Bourne.

A shot rang out, lifting the Amhara from his blanket saddle. Bourne turned to see Zaim rising up, a gun in his hand. He waved his free hand, and they headed as fast as they could for the outlying stand of firs.

Another shot snipped off branches above their heads as they galloped into the forest. The Amharan whom Bourne had kicked off his horse had remounted and was coming after them.

Zaim threaded them through the fir trees. It had turned markedly colder and wetter. Even here, in the shelter of the forest, the icy wind cut through them, shaking periodic snowfalls from the upper branches. Bourne, thinking of their pursuer, could not rid himself of the itching along his spine, but he kept going in the brown horse’s wake.

The ground began to fall away, at first gradually, then more steeply. The horses put their heads down, snorting, as if to more carefully feel the buried stones, their curved surfaces slick with ice, which made the footing alarmingly treacherous.

Bourne heard a cracking behind them, and he urged the gray on. He wanted to ask Zaim where they were headed and how close they were to it, but raising his voice would only serve to reveal their location in the maze of the forest. Just as he was thinking this, he glimpsed a clearing through the trees, then the heavy glitter of a sheet of ice. They were coming to a river that wound steeply from the edge of one alpine meadow to a lower one.

At that moment he heard a shot; an instant later Zaim’s horse collapsed from under him. Zaim went tumbling. Urging the gray on, Bourne reached down, dragging Zaim up behind him.

They were almost at the bank of the frozen river. Another shot, snapping nearby branches.

“Your gun!” Bourne said.

“I lost it when my horse was shot,” Zaim replied unhappily.

“We’ll be picked off like wooden ducks.”

Bourne handed Zaim down to the snowpack, then slid off the gray. A smart slap to its rump sent it crashing through the forest on a more or less parallel course to the river.

“Now what?” Zaim slapped his bum leg. “With this, we’ll be helpless out here.”

“Let’s go.” Grabbing him by his thick wool jacket, Bourne began to run down the bank to the river.

“What are you doing?” Zaim’s eyes were wide with fear.

Bourne half lifted him off his feet an instant before they hit the ice on the run. Compensating for the other man’s weight, Bourne began the long back-and-forth strides of an ice skater. Using the blades embedded in his boot soles as skates, he built up speed with the natural downward slope of the river.

He took the snaking turns expertly, but he had almost no control over his speed, and he was racing along faster and faster as the rivercourse steepened.

They flashed around another bend and Zaim uttered an inarticulate cry. A moment later Bourne saw why. Not a thousand meters away the river broke sharply downward into a waterfall, now frozen in place like a stop-motion photo.

“How high,” Bourne called over the howling of the wind in his face.

“Too high,” Zaim moaned in terror. “Oh, too, too high!”

BOURNE
TRIED
to veer to the left or right, but he couldn’t. He was flying along a fold in the ice that would not allow him to change direction. At any rate, it was too late now. The ruffled top of the waterfall was upon them, so he did the only thing he could think of: He steered for the exact center, where the water was deepest and the ice thinnest.

They hit it at speed, which combined with their weight to shatter the thin crust of ice that had formed over the streaming water. Into the waterfall they plunged, tumbling down and down, the icy water taking their breath away, freezing them from their limbs inward.

As he fell from the heights, Bourne struggled against becoming disoriented, which was his primary concern. If he lost his sense of direction, he’d either freeze to death or drown before he could break through the ice at the base of the waterfall. There was another concern: If he allowed himself to get too far from the base area, the ice would quickly thicken into a layer he’d likely find unbreakable.

Light and shadow, blue-black, gray-opal spun across his vision as he was tossed and tumbled through the churning water. Once, his shoulder smashed into a rock outcropping. Pain leapt through him like a surge of electricity, and as his downward momentum abruptly ceased, he searched for the light in the jumble of darkness. There was none! His head was spinning, his hands almost completely numb. His heart was laboring from both the physical pounding and the lack of oxygen.

He struck out with his arms. At once he realized that Zaim’s body was almost against him; as he drew it to one side, he saw pearlescent light shining behind it and knew which way was up. Zaim seemed to be unconscious. Blood plumed from the side of his head, and Bourne guessed that he, too, had struck a rock.

With one arm around the limp form, Bourne kicked out hard for the surface, banging the top of his head sooner than he had anticipated against the ice sheet. It didn’t give.

His head was pounding, and the ribbons of blood leaking from Zaim’s wound were obscuring his vision. He clawed against the ice, but could find no purchase. He slid along the underside, searching for a crack, a flaw he could exploit. But the ice was thicker than he’d imagined, even here at the waterfall’s base. His lungs were burning and the headache caused by the lack of oxygen was fast becoming intolerable. Perhaps Zaim was already dead. Surely he himself would be if he couldn’t break through to the surface.

A strong eddy caught him, threatening to send them swirling out to certain death in the darkness where the ice sheet was thickest. As he struggled against it, his nails bit into something-not a crack precisely, but a stress flaw in the sheet. He could see that one side was allowing more light in, and there he concentrated his efforts. But his fists, numbed into clumsy weights, were of no use.

Only one chance now. He let go of Zaim and dove down into the darkness until he felt the river bottom. Reversing himself, he coiled his legs, launching himself upward in a straight line. The top of his head struck the stress flaw and he heard it crack, then splinter apart as his shoulders followed his head into the blessed air. Bourne drew air into his lungs once, twice, three times. Then he dove back down. Zaim wasn’t where he had left him. He had been caught in the powerful eddy and was now being launched into the darkness.

Bourne kicked, fighting the current, stretching out full-length to grab Zaim by the ankle. Slowly, surely he drew him back to the light, bringing him up through the ragged hole in the ice, laying him out on the frozen riverbed before he levered himself out of the water.

They had come through just to the east of the falls, at the edge of a thick slice of the fir forest that continued unabated to the north and east.

He spent a moment hunkered down in their shadows of the trees, catching his breath. But that was all the time he could spare. He checked Zaim’s vital signs-his pulse, his breathing, his pupils. The man was alive. An examination of the wound showed it to be superficial. Zaim’s hard skull had done its job, protecting him from serious injury.

Bourne’s problem now, apart from stanching the flow of blood from Zaim’s wound, was drying him off so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Bourne himself had been partially protected by his extremeweather jumpsuit, though he saw now that it had been abraded badly in several places during his violent tumble down the falls. Water was already freezing against his skin. Unzipping the suit for a moment, he stripped off a sleeve of his shirt, packed it with snow, and wrapped it around Zaim’s wound. Then he hoisted the still-unconscious man over his unbruised shoulder, stumbling up the treacherous bank into the forest. He could feel the cold slowly seeping in at his elbows and shoulder, where the outer layer of his jumpsuit had been shredded.

Zaim was becoming heavier and heavier, but Bourne pushed on, angling north and east away from the river. A vague memory surfaced-a flash akin to the one he’d had when he’d first alit on Ras Dejen, but more detailed. If he was right, there was another village-larger than the one where he’d found Zaim-several kilometers ahead.

All at once he was brought up short by a familiar sound: the snorting of a horse. Carefully putting Zaim down against the bole of a tree, he moved cautiously toward the sound. Perhaps five hundred meters ahead, he came upon a small clearing. In it, he saw the gray, its muzzle picking through the snowpack for something to eat. Apparently the animal had followed the course of the river down to this patch of open space. It was just what Bourne needed to carry him and Zaim to safety.

Bourne was about to move into the glade when the gray’s head came up and its nostrils dilated. What had it smelled? The wind was swirling, bringing with it the scent of danger.

Bourne thought he understood, and he silently thanked the gray. Moving back into the firs, he began to circle to his left, keeping the clearing in sight as he went, keeping the wind in his face. Perhaps a quarter of the way around, he saw a spot of color, then a slight movement. Heading obliquely toward it, he saw that it was the Amhara whom he had kicked off his horse. This man must have brought the gray down here as bait, to lure them if one or both had survived the waterfall.

Keeping low, Bourne came at him fast, blindsiding him. He went down with a grunt, got his left hand free as Bourne pummeled him, drew out a curving knife. It slashed down, heading straight for Bourne’s exposed side just above his kidney. Bourne rolled, his torso flicking out of range. At the same time, he locked his ankles around the tribesman’s neck, back and front. With a swift, violent twist Bourne snapped the Amhara’s neck.

He rose, took from the corpse the knife, sheath, and 9mm Makarov. Then he loped into the clearing, bringing the gray back to where Zaim lay. Slinging the other over the horse’s sturdy back, Bourne swung up and set off through the firs, down the mountainside, heading by memory for the village.

When Soraya Moore strode into the
FIU
lab, Kim Lovett was still kicking around forensic evidence with Detective Overton.

Kim, having taken care of the introductions, got right down to business by bringing Soraya up to date on their case. Then she handed her the set of two porcelain teeth.

“I found these in the suite’s bathtub drain,” she said. “At first glance, it could easily be mistaken for a dental bridge, but I don’t think it is.”

Soraya, looking at the interior hollows, knew that she had seen something very similar in Deron’s lab. Examining it more closely, she recognized the high quality of the workmanship. No doubt this was part of a world-class chameleon’s arsenal. She had no doubt what she was holding, and to whom it belonged. She’d thought she was through with all this when Lerner kicked her butt out of Typhon, but now she knew the truth. Maybe she’d known it all along. She wasn’t through with Fadi, not by a long shot.

“You’re right, Kim,” she said. “It’s a prosthetic.”

“Prosthetic?” Overton echoed. “I’m not following.”

“This is a shell,” Soraya told him, “used to slip over perfectly good teeth, not as a substitute for nonviable ones, but to alter the shape of the mouth and cheek line.” She slipped the prosthetic on. Though it was too big for her, both Kim and Overton were astonished to see how much it changed the shape of her mouth and lips. “Which means your Jakob Silver and his brother were using aliases,” she said as she spat out the teeth. To Kim, she said, “Do you mind if I borrow this?”

“Go on,” Kim said. “But I’ll have to log it out.”

Overton shook his head. “None of this makes sense.”

“It makes perfect sense if you know all the facts.” Soraya shared with them the incident outside CI headquarters. “This man who passed as a Cape Town entrepreneur named Hiram Cevik is, in actuality, a Saudi who calls himself Fadi, a terrorist leader with high-level connections to what seems to be an enormous amount of money. What his real name might be we have no idea. He disappeared within blocks of where the Hummer picked him up.” She held up the prosthetic. “Now we know where he went.”

Kim considered everything Soraya had told them. “Then the remains we found aren’t either brother.”

“I very much doubt it. The fire seems like a diversion for him slipping out of D.C. Out of the country, for that matter.” Soraya went over to the shallow metal pan in which Kim had placed the bones found in the bathtub. “I do believe we’re looking at all that’s left of Omar, the Pakistani waiter.”

“Jesus Christ!” At last we’re getting somewhere, Overton thought. “Then which brother was Fadi?”

Soraya turned to him. “Jakob, undoubtedly. It was Lev who checked into the suite. Fadi was in Cape Town, and then in our custody.”

Overton was elated. At last his luck was changing. He’d hit the mother lode with these two. Very soon now, he’d have enough intel to bring to Homeland Security. He’d become their newest recruit and their newest hero in one fell swoop.

Soraya turned back to Kim. “What else did you find?”

“Very little. Except the accelerant.” Kim picked up a sheaf of computer readouts. “It was carbon disulfide. I can’t remember the last time I encountered it. Arsonists typically use acetone, kerosene, something easily attainable like that.” She shrugged. “On the other hand, in this case carbon disulfide makes a certain kind of sense. It’s more dangerous than the others because of its low flashpoint and the probability of an explosion once it’s ignited. Fadi wanted the windows blown out so that the flames could feed on the added oxygen. But you’d have to be a real professional to use it without blowing yourself up.”

Soraya took a look at the printout Kim handed her. “That’s Fadi all over. Where would you get it?”

“You’d have to have access to a manufacturing plant or one of their sources,” Kim said. “It’s used in the manufacture of cellulose, carbon tetrachloride, and other organic sulfur compounds.”