The Bourne Betrayal (55 page)

Anne felt as if she had been delivered a death blow. She could scarcely catch her breath. Nevertheless, she said in a perfectly normal voice, “Know what?”

“We know all about you.” He could not yet bring himself to meet her eyes. “We know that you’ve been communicating with the enemy.”

“What? I don’t-”

At last, the
DCI
lifted his gaze, impaled her with his implacable eyes. She knew that terrifying look; she’s seen it directed at others the Old Man had crossed off his list. She’d never seen or heard from any of them again.

“We know that you are the enemy.” His voice was full of rage and loathing. She knew there was nothing he despised more than a traitor.

Automatically, her eyes went to Jamil. What was he thinking? Why wasn’t he coming to her defense? And then, looking into his blank face, she understood everything-she understood how he had seduced her with both his physical presence and his philosophical manifesto. She understood how he had used her. She was cannon fodder, as expendable as anyone in his cadre.

The thing that upset her most was that she should have known-from the very beginning, she should have seen through him. But she had been so sure of herself, so willing to rebel against the fussy old-line aristocracy from which she was descended. He had seen how eager she was to throw a bag of shit in her parents’ faces. He’d taken advantage of her zeal, as well as of her body. She had committed treason for him; so many people would lose their lives because of her complicity. My God, my God!

She turned to Jamil now, said, “Fucking me was the least of it, wasn’t it?”

That was the last thing she ever said, and she never got to hear his reply, if he’d ever meant to give one, because the
DCI
had his gun out, and shot her three times in the head. He was still a crack shot, even after all these years.

Anne’s blind eyes were on Jamil as her body collapsed from under her.

“Damn her.” The Old Man turned away. His voice was full of venom. “Goddamn her.”

“I’ll take care of the disposition of the body,” Karim said. “Also, a news release with an appropriate cover story. And I’ll call her parents myself.”

“No,” the
DCI
said dully. “That’s my job.”

Karim walked over to where his former lover lay curled in a pool of blood. He looked down at her. What was he thinking? That he needed to go upstairs, open the second drawer of her dresser. Then, as he turned the corpse over with the toe of his shoe, he saw that luck was still very much with him. He wouldn’t have to go into her bedroom after all. He said a silent prayer of thanks to Allah.

Snapping on a pair of latex gloves, he pulled the S&W from its place at the small of her back. He noted the fact she’d had the presence of mind to arm herself. Staring down at her face for a moment, he tried to summon up even the tiniest bit of emotion for this infidel. Nothing came. His heart beat in the same rhythm it always did. He couldn’t say that he’d miss her. She had served her purpose, even helping him dismember Overton. Which meant, simply, that he had chosen well. She was an instrument he had trained to use against his enemies, nothing more.

He rose, stood straddling Anne’s crumpled form. The DCI’s back was still to him. “Sir,” he said.

“There’s something here you need to see.”

The Old Man took a deep breath. He wiped eyes that had been wet with tears. “What is it, Martin?” he said, turning.

And Karim shot him quite neatly through the heart with Anne Held’s S&W.

It wasn’t an accident.”

Bourne, concentrating more than he had to on his pre-landing routine, contrived to ignore this bombshell. They were overflying Zhawar Kili, a known al-Qaeda hotbed until the U.S. military bombed it in November 2001. At length, he said, “What wasn’t an accident?”

“Sarah ibn Ashef’s death. It wasn’t an accident.” Muta ibn Aziz was breathless, terrified, and liberated all at once. How he’d wanted to tell his abominable secret to someone! It had grown around his heart as the shell of an oyster excretes, layer by layer, over time becoming something humped and ugly.

“Of course it was,” Bourne insisted. He had to insist now; it was the only way to keep the spell going, keep Muta ibn Aziz talking. “I should know. I shot her.”

“No, you didn’t.” Muta ibn Aziz began to worry his lower lip with the ends of his upper teeth.

“You and your partner were too far away to make accurate shots. My brother, Abbud ibn Aziz, and I shot her.”

Bourne did turn to him now, but with a deeply skeptical look. “You’re making this up.”

Muta ibn Aziz appeared hurt. “Why would I do that?”

“Let’s go down the list, shall we? You’re continuing to screw with my head. You did it to get Fadi and his brother to come after me.” He frowned. “Have we met before? Do I know you? Do you and your brother harbor a grudge against me?”

“No, no, and no.” He was annoyed, just as Bourne wanted him to be. “The truth is . . . I can hardly say it . . .”

He turned away for a moment, and Bourne was listening closely for what was to come. The final approach to Miran Shah the pilot had laid out was coming up. It was in the center of a narrow valley-defile would be the more accurate term, now that Bourne saw it-between two mountains just inside the wild and woolly western border of Pakistan.

The sky was clear-a deep, piercing blue-and at this time of day the sun glare was minimal. The gray-brown mountains of altered volcanic rock from the Kurram River group-limestone, dark chert, green shale-looked stripped, barren, devoid of life. Automatically, he studied the vicinity. He scrutinized the furrowed mountainsides to the south and west for cave openings, east the length of the defile for bunkers, north through ruffled hillsides broken by a deeply shadowed, rock-strewn ravine. But there were no signs of Dujja’s nuclear complex, nothing man-made, not even a hut or a campsite.

He was coming in a trifle hot. He slowed the Sovereign’s speed, saw the runway in front of him. Unlike the one he’d taken off from, this was made of tarmac. Still no sign of habitation, let alone a modern laboratory complex. Had he come to the wrong place? Was this another in Fadi’s endless bag of tricks? Was it, in fact, a trap?

Too late now to worry about that. Wheels and flaps were down. He’d reduced speed into the green zone.

“You’re coming in too low,” Muta ibn Aziz said in sudden agitation. “You’ll hit the runway too soon. Pull up! For God’s sake pull up!”

Bourne overflew the first eighth of the runway, guiding the Sovereign down until the wheels struck the tarmac. They were down, taxiing along the runway. Bourne cut the engines, much of the interior power. That was when he saw a rush of shadows coming from his right side.

He had only time to realize that Muta ibn Aziz must have phoned Bourne’s identity to the people at Miran Shah before the starboard bulkhead blew inward with a horrific roar. The Sovereign shuddered and, like a wounded elephant, fell to its knees, its front wheels and struts blown out.

Flying debris made mincemeat of almost everything in the cockpit. Dials were shattered, levers sheared off. Wires dangled from ripped-apart bays in the ceiling. The trussed Muta ibn Aziz, who’d been on the side of the plane that was now crumpled in on itself, was lying underneath a major piece of the fuselage. Bourne, strapped in on the far side of the cockpit, had escaped with a multitude of minor cuts, bruises, and what felt to his dazed brain like a mild concussion.

Instinct forced him to push the blackness from the periphery of his vision, reach up, and release his harness. He staggered over to Muta ibn Aziz, a frozen tundra of shattered glass crunching underfoot. He choked on air full of broken needles of metal, fiberglass, and superheated plastic.

Seeing that Muta was breathing, he hauled the twisted wreckage, charred and scored and still burning hot, off to the side. But when he knelt down, he saw that a shard of metal, roughly the size and shape of a sword blade, had lodged itself in Muta’s gut.

He peered down at the man, then slapped his face hard. Muta’s eyes fluttered open, focusing with difficulty.

“I wasn’t making it up,” he said in a thin, reedy voice. Blood was leaking out of his mouth, down his chin. It pooled in the hollow of his throat, dark, throwing off the scent of copper.

“You’re dying,” Bourne said. “Tell me what happened with Sarah ibn Ashef.”

A slow smile spread across Muta’s face. “So you do want to know.” His breath sawing in and out of his punctured lungs sounded like the scream of a prehistoric beast. “The truth is important to you, after all.”

“Tell me!” Bourne shouted at him.

He grabbed Muta ibn Aziz, hauled him up by the front of his shirt in an attempt to rattle the answer out of him. But at that moment a cadre of Dujja terrorists swarmed through the rent in the fuselage. They hauled him off Fadi’s messenger, who lay coughing up the last of his life.

Chaos ensued-a rushing of bodies, a jumble of spoken Arabic, clipped orders and even more clipped responses-as they dragged him half conscious across the bloody floor, out into the arid wastes of Miran Shah.

SORAYA
MOORE
, on the corner of 7th Street NE, a well-armed Tyrone standing lookout beside her, called CI headquarters-from a pay phone, not from her cell.

When Peter Marks heard it was her, his voice lowered to a whisper.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “what the hell have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything, Peter,” she replied hotly.

“Then why is there an all-department directive posted to report any appearance, any phone call, any contact whatsoever with you immediately and directly to Director Lindros?”

“Because Lindros isn’t Lindros.”

“He’s an impostor, right?”

Soraya’s heart lifted. “Then you know.”

“What I know is that Deputy Director Lindros called a meeting, told us you’d gone over the edge, completely lost it. It was Bourne’s death, right? Anyway, he said you were making insane accusations about him.”

Oh, my God, Soraya thought. He’s turned everyone at CI against me.

She heard the naked suspicion in Marks’s voice, but plowed gamely on anyway. “He’s lied to you, Peter. The truth is too complicated to get into now, but you’ve got to listen to me. Terrorists have put into motion a plan to blow up headquarters.” She knew she sounded breathless, even a little bit mad. “Please, I’m begging you. Go to the Old Man, tell him it’s going to happen in the next twentyfour hours.”

“The Old Man and Anne are at the White House, meeting with the president. They’ll be there for some time, Deputy Director Lindros said.”

“Then contact one of the directorate chiefs-better yet, all of them. Anyone but Lindros.”

“Listen, come in. Give yourself up. We can help you.”

“I’m not crazy,” Soraya said, though increasingly she felt as if she was.

“Then this conversation is over.”

As Katya turned toward the two guards outside the infirmary, her delicate fingers undid the top two buttons of her blouse. She had never worn a bra. She had beautiful breasts, and she knew it.

The guards were playing the same game they always did, the rules of which she could never fathom. Of course, no money changed hands; that would make it gambling, which was forbidden by Islamic law. The object seemed to be to sharpen their reaction time.

To turn her mind away from her present situation, she conjured up the rush of her old life, the one Costin had insisted she give up. As the guards became aware of her, she stood in profile, as she would on a Perfect Ten shoot, her back slightly arched, her breasts thrust out.

Then slowly, disarmingly, she turned toward them. Their eyes were nailed to her body.

She felt the ache in her breastbone, where she had instructed Lindros to hit her. She opened her blouse wide enough so that they could see the bruise, so new that the skin was bright red, just starting to puff up.

“Look,” she said, quite unnecessarily. “Look what that bastard has done to me.”

With these words, the guards roused themselves sufficiently to rush past her into the infirmary. They saw Lindros flat on his back, his eyes closed. There was blood on his face. He seemed to be scarcely breathing.

The taller of the two guards turned to Katya, who was standing directly behind him. “What have you done to him?”

At that precise moment, Lindros drew back his right leg, opened his eyes, and slammed the heel of his right foot as hard as he could into the shorter guard’s crotch. The guard gave a little grunt of surprise as he collapsed in on himself.

The taller guard, slow in turning back, received the tightly curled edge of Lindros’s knuckles in his throat. He coughed, his eyes going wide, his fingers scrabbling for his sidearm. Katya, as Lindros had instructed her, kicked the back of his left knee. As he pitched over, the side of his head made violent contact with Lindros’s fist.

The two of them spent the next five minutes stripping the guards, then tying and gagging them. Lindros dragged first one, then the other to the utility closet, stowing them away like so much rubbish. He and Katya climbed into their clothes, she in the smaller guard’s outfit, Lindros in the taller one’s.

As they dressed, he smiled at her. She reached out and wiped the blood from his pricked finger off his cheek.

“How was that?” he said.

“We’re a long way from being free.”

“How right you are.” Lindros gathered up the guards’ weapons-sidearms and semiautomatic machine guns. “Do you know how to use these?”

“I know how to pull a trigger,” she said.

“That’ll have to do.”

He took her hand, and together they fled the infirmary.

Bourne was not treated as roughly by the terrorists as he had expected. In fact, once they’d dragged him out of the wrecked Sovereign, he wasn’t treated harshly at all. They were all Saudis, this cadre. He could tell not only by the way they looked, but by the Arabic dialect they spoke as well.

As soon as his shoe soles hit the scorched earth of the runway, they stood him up straight and frogmarched him onto the shale, where two armored military all-terrain vehicles, veiled in heavy camouflaging, stood waiting. No wonder he’d missed seeing them from the air.