The Bourne Betrayal (31 page)

“Let’s can that idea, okay?” She rubbed her knuckles absently between Oleksandr’s triangular ears.

“I’m going back to the fork in the catacombs. I need to take the right fork to get to the doctor, but I’ll do it with just enough noise that they’ll follow me, assuming it’s the two of us. I’ll lead them away from you.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

She waited a moment. “Any other ideas?”

He shook his head.

“Okay, I won’t be long, I promise. I won’t leave you behind.”

“Soraya?”

She faced him in profile, her body already half turned to go.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She hesitated for a split second. “I figured it was better all around that you couldn’t remember how badly I’d fucked up.”

He watched her leave, her words echoing in his head.

A rugged fifteen-minute march brought them to a crossroads.

“We’re at a major juncture,” Lieutenant Kove said as their searchlights probed the beginnings of the Y.

Fadi didn’t like hesitation. To him, indecision was a sign of weakness. “Then we need an educated guess, Kove, as to which fork he took.” His eyes bored into the policeman’s. “You’re the expert. You tell me.”

In Fadi’s presence, it was nearly impossible either to disagree or to remain inactive. Kove said,

“The right fork. That’s the one I’d choose if I were in his position.”

“Very well,” Fadi said.

They entered the right fork. It was then that they heard the sound again, the scrape of leather on stone, more distinct this time and repeated at regular intervals. There could be no doubt that they were hearing footfalls echoing down the shaft. They were gaining on their quarry.

With a grim determination, Kove urged his men on. “Quickly, now! In a moment we’ll overtake him.”

“One moment.”

They were brought up short by the cold voice of authority.

“Sir?”

Fadi thought for a moment. “I need one of those searchlights. You continue on the course you laid out. I’m going to see what I can find down the left fork.”

“Sir, I hardly think that wise. As I told you-”

“I never need to be told anything twice,” Fadi said shortly. “This criminal is devilishly clever. The sounds might be a feint, a way to throw us off their scent. In all probability, with the man having lost so much blood, you’ll overtake him in the right fork. But I can’t leave this other possibility unexplored.”

Without another word, he took the light one of Kove’s men offered and, backtracking several paces to the juncture of the Y, headed down the left-hand fork. A moment later, his snake-bladed knife was in his hand.

KARIM
AL-JAMIL
, in thick rubber apron and heavy work gloves, pulled the cord that started the chain saw. Under cover of its horrific noise, he said, “Our objective to detonate a nuclear device in a major American city has been a decade in conception and planning.” Not that he suspected there to be a microphone in sight, but his training would not allow him to relax his strict code of security.

He approached the corpse of Detective Overton, which lay on a zinc-topped table inside the eerie hollow interior of M&N Bodywork. A trio of purplish fluorescent lights sizzled above their heads.

“But to ensure that we’d have the highest percentage for success,” Anne Held said, “you needed Jason Bourne to be able to vouch for you when you became Martin Lindros. Of course, he’d never do that willingly, so we needed to find a way to manipulate and use him. Since I had access to Bourne’s file, we were able to exploit his one weakness-his memory-as well as his many strengths, like loyalty, tenacity, and a highly intelligent, paranoid mind.”

Anne was also bound into an apron. She gripped a hammer in one gloved hand, a wide-headed chisel in the other. As Karim al-Jamil went to work on Overton’s feet and legs, she placed the chisel into the crease on the inner side of the left elbow, then brought the hammer down in a quick, accurate strike onto the chisel’s head. The body shop was once again alive with industry, as it had been in its happy heyday.

“But what was the trigger mechanism that would allow you access to Bourne’s weakness?” she asked.

He gave her a thin smile as he concentrated on his grisly work. “My research on the subject of amnesiacs provided the answer: Amnesiacs react most strongly to emotionally charged situations. We needed to give Bourne a nasty shock, one that would jar his memory.”

“Is that what you did when I told you that Bourne’s wife had died suddenly and unexpectedly?”

With his forearm, Karim al-Jamil wiped a thick squirt of blood off his face. “What do we Bedouins say. Life is but Allah’s will.” He nodded. “In his grief, Bourne’s sickness of memory threatened to overwhelm him. So I instructed you to present him with a cure.”

“Now I see.” She turned away momentarily from an eruption of gas. “Naturally, it had to come from his friend Martin Lindros. I gave Lindros the name and address of Dr. Allen Sunderland.

“But in fact the phone call came to us,” Karim said. “We set up Bourne’s appointment for a Tuesday, the day of the week when Sunderland and his staff aren’t there. We substituted our own Dr. Costin Veintrop, who posed as Sunderland.”

“Brilliant, my darling!” Anne’s eyes were shining with her admiration.

There was a large oval tub made of galvanized steel into which the body parts were dropped, one by one, like the beginnings of an experiment in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Karim al-Jamil kept one eye on Anne, but she neither flinched nor blanched at what she was doing. She was going about her business in a matter-of-fact manner that both pleased and surprised him. One thing she was right about: He had underestimated her right down the line. The fact was, he was unprepared for a woman who exhibited the attributes of a man. He had been used to his sister, meek and subservient. Sarah had been a good girl, a credit to the family; in her slim form, all their honor had resided. She had not deserved to die young. Now revenge was the only way to win back the family honor that had been buried with her.

In the culture of his father, women were excluded from anything a man had to do. Of course, Karim al-Jamil’s mother was an exception. But she hadn’t converted to Islam. Mysteriously to Karim al-Jamil, his father had neither cared nor forced her to convert. He seemed to take great pleasure in his secular wife, though she had made for him a great many enemies among the imams and the faithful. Even more mysteriously to Karim al-Jamil, he didn’t care about that, either. His mother mourned for their lost daughter, and he, the crippled old man, engulfed every day by her grief, was forced to mourn, too.

“What exactly did Veintrop do to Bourne?” Anne asked.

Happily bisecting a knee joint, Karim replied, “Veintrop is an unheralded genius in memory loss. It was he whom I consulted regarded Bourne’s amnesiac state. He used an injection of certain chemically engineered proteins he designed to stimulate synapses in parts of Bourne’s brain, subtly altering their makeup and function. The stimulation acts as a trauma, which Veintrop’s research revealed can alter memories. Veintrop’s protein injection is able to affect specific synapses, thus creating new memories. Each individual memory is designed to be triggered in Bourne’s head by certain outside stimuli.”

“I’d call that brainwashing,” Anne said.

Karim nodded. “In a sense, yes. But in a whole new sphere that doesn’t involve physical coercion, weeks of sensory deprivation, and articulated torture.”

The oval basin was almost full. Karim signaled to Anne. Together they laid their tools on Overton’s chest-which, other than his head, was about all that was left whole.

“Give me an example,” she said.

Together they hoisted the basin by its oversize handles and moved it over to a large dry well that in earlier times had been used to illegally dump used motor oil.

“The sight of Hiram Cevik triggered an ‘added’ memory in Bourne-the tactic of showing a prisoner the freedom he’d lost as a means of getting him to talk. Otherwise he would never have taken Fadi out of the cells for any reason whatsoever. His action accomplished two things at once: It allowed Fadi to escape, and it put Bourne under suspicion by his own organization.”

They tipped the basin. Out tumbled the contents, vanishing down the dry well.

“But I didn’t feel that a single added memory was enough to slow Bourne down,” Karim said, “so I had Veintrop add an element of physical discomfort-a debilitating headache whenever an added memory is triggered.”

As they were carrying the receptacle back to the table, Anne said, “This much is clear. But wasn’t it unconscionably dangerous for Fadi to allow himself to be captured in Cape Town?”

“Everything I design and do is by default dangerous,” said Karim al-Jamil. “We’re in a war for the hearts, minds, and future of our people. There’s no action too perilous for us. As for Fadi, first of all he was posing as the arms dealer Hiram Cevik. Second of all, he knew that we had arranged for Bourne to unwittingly rescue him.”

“And what if Dr. Veintrop’s procedure hadn’t worked, or hadn’t worked properly?”

“Well, then, we always had you, my darling. I would have provided you with instructions that would have extracted my brother.”

He switched on the chain saw, made short shrift of the remains. Into the dry well they went.

“Fortunately, we never had to implement that part of the plan.”

“We assumed Soraya Moore would call the
DCI
to clear Bourne’s request to release Fadi,” Anne said. “Instead she called Tim Hytner to inform him that he should meet her outside on the grounds. She told him exactly where Fadi would be. Since I was monitoring all her calls, you were able to set the rest of the escape plan in motion.”

Karim picked up a can of gasoline, unscrewed the cap, poured a third of the contents into the dry well. “Allah even provided us with the perfect scapegoat: Hytner.”

Pulling off the car’s gas cap, he splashed most of what was left in the can into the car’s interior. No forensics team was going to get anything out of what would be left. Pointing to the rear entrance, he backed away from the car, pouring a trail from the can as he went.

They both bellied up to the oversize soapstone sink, stripped off their gloves, and washed the blood off their arms and cheeks. Then they untied their aprons and dropped them onto the floor.

When they were at the door, Anne said, “There’s still Lerner to consider.”

Karim al-Jamil nodded. “You’ll have to watch your back until I decide how to handle him. We can’t deal with him the way we did Overton.”

He lit a match and dropped it at his feet. With a whoosh, blue flame sprang up, rushed headlong toward the car.

Anne opened the door, and they walked out into ghetto darkness.

Way before M&N Bodywork burst into flames, Tyrone had the man and woman in his sights. He’d been crouched on a stone wall, deep in the shadows of an old oak that spread its gnarled branches in a domed Medusa’s nest. He had on black sweats, and his hoodie was up over the back of his head. He’d been hanging, waiting for DJ Tank to bring a pair of gloves because, damn, it was cold.

He’d been blowing on his hands when the car had drawn up in front of the ruins of M&N

Bodywork. For months, he’d had his eye on the place: He was hoping it had been abandoned, and he coveted it as a base for his crew. But six weeks ago, he’d been told of some activity there, late at night when any legitimate business was shut down, and he’d taken DJ Tank over for a look-see.

Sure enough, people were inside. Two bearded men. Even more interestingly, there was another bearded man posted outside. When he’d turned, Tyrone had clearly seen the glint of a gun at the man’s waist. He knew who wore beards like that: either Orthodox Jews or Arab extremists.

When he and DJ Tank had sneaked around to the side and peered in through a grimy window, the men were outfitting the place with canisters, tools, and some kind of machinery. Though the electricity had been restored, clearly no renovations were being contemplated, and when the men left, they’d locked the front door with an immense padlock that Tyrone’s expert eye knew was unbreakable.

On the other hand, there was the back door, hidden in a narrow back alley, which hardly anyone knew about. Tyrone did, though. There wasn’t hardly anything in his turf he didn’t know about or could get info on at a moment’s notice.

After the men had left, Tyrone had picked the lock on the back door, and they went in. What did he find? A mess of power tools, which told him nothing about the men and their intentions. But the canisters, now they were another story entirely. He inspected them one by one: trinitrotoluene, penthrite, carbon disulfide, octogen. He knew what
TNT
was, of course, but he’d never heard of the others. He’d called Deron, who’d told him. Except for carbon disulfide, they were all high-level explosives. Penthrite, also known as
PETN
, was used as the core in detonator fuses. Octogen, also known as
HMX
, was a polymer-bonded explosive, a solid like C-4. Unlike
TNT
, it wasn’t sensitive to motion or vibration.

From that night on the incident had sat in his mind like a squalling baby. Tyrone wanted to understand what that baby was saying, so he’d staked out M&N Bodyworks, and tonight his vigilance was rewarded.

Lookee here: a body on the zinc-topped table in the center of the floor. And a man and a woman in aprons and work gloves were cutting the damn thing up as if it were the carcass of a steer. What some people got up to! Tyrone shook his head as he and DJ Tank peered through the smeared glass of the side window. And then he felt a small shock ping the back of his neck. He recognized the face of the corpse on the table! It was the man who had followed Miss S a couple of days ago, the one she said she’d take care of.

He watched the man and the woman at their work, but after the shock of recognition he paid no attention to what they were doing. Instead he spent his time more advantageously memorizing their faces. He had a feeling Miss S would be very interested in what these two were up to.