The Bourne Dominion (49 page)

He signaled to Boris to go on ahead, then worked his way up one of the beams, finding footholds in the rough wood. The beams were massive six-by-sixes, allowing him to stretch out along them as he crawled from room to room. The fabric was sheer enough to make out figures, their positions in the rooms, and their movement inside them. He saw three of Semid Abdul-Qahhar’s men, one alone in a room, preparing to pray, but no sign of either Rebeka or Semid himself. He knew that she must be as focused on Semid as he was; the men were just a temporary roadblock.

And then, in the fifth room, he saw her. She was with Semid, but there wasn’t anything about the scene he liked.

B
oris crept forward on little cat feet, as the poem went, one that he had memorized when he was a boy and repeated to himself each night before he went to bed, as if it were a prayer. Tonight, however, his heart was full of blood; all he could think of was Zachek and Beria. It occurred to him now that his line of work was defined by a chain of affronts and retributions. You just had to pray that you would survive them all… on little cat feet.

He entered a room where a man was kneeling on a prayer rug, his forehead pointing toward Mecca. A short-barreled assault rifle lay at his side. Boris could hear the muttered prayer, words falling like rain from the Arab’s mouth as his torso rose and fell. Boris waited until his forehead touched the rug. Then he stepped silently up to him and, putting all his weight into it, slammed his shoe down on the back of the man’s neck. He heard a series of sharp cracks, like someone puncturing bubble wrap, and the man collapsed.

Scooping up the assault rifle, Boris stepped over the corpse and continued on.

T
wo men were behind Rebeka. Bourne couldn’t tell whether or not she was aware of them, so he leapt off his perch, crashing down through the fabric. He landed in a crouch. The men turned, and he swung a leg out, catching one of them behind the knees. He went down in a tangle, and Bourne was on him at once with both fists.

Rebeka struck the second man on the side of the head. He staggered back, but managed to raise his assault rifle and fire off a barrage of shots. She went down at his feet, and he lifted the butt of the weapon as if to slam it onto the top of her head, but first she drove her fist into his crotch. As he doubled over, she drew a slender knife from beneath her black cloak and slit open his belly from one side to the other.

Even as his eyes opened wide in shock, she was leapfrogging over him, stretching out to grab the hem of Semid Abdul-Qahhar’s robe. He stumbled but used a wide-bladed dirk to cut away that section of cloth, freeing himself. He ran from the room.

Bourne rose from the floor and sprinted after Rebeka as she followed Semid out of the seraglio rooms and into the synagogue proper.

T
he moment Boris heard the rapid-fire blasts, he broke into a run. Beria and Zachek, both wielding AK-74 assault rifles, were spread-legged, standing side by side, as they mercilessly mowed down six of Semid Abdul-Qahhar’s men.

Zachek spotted Boris as he ran into the entry space and turned his weapon, firing indiscriminately. Boris retreated behind the doorway through which he had entered. The firing was so blistering he had to wait, crouched, heart hammering, before he could make a reappearance. By that time, only the bodies of the six men remained, twisted and bleeding from multiple wounds. No sign of either Beria or Zachek.

Keeping his rage and frustration in check, he took each room one by one, listening as well as looking. Then he heard another burst of gunfire and headed off to his left. A bullet tore into his left calf as he crossed a threshold. He went down, his left leg collapsing under him, but landed on his right shoulder, tucking it in so that he rolled, coming up onto one knee and returning fire. He nearly took Zachek’s head off, but the little prick pulled back just in time.

Boris moved, even though it pained him and his left ankle almost buckled. It was a good thing he did because Zachek’s head and shoulders popped up as he fired at the spot Boris had just vacated. Swinging his assault rifle around, Boris clipped the corner of the wall behind which Zachek hid. Wood and plaster splinters fountained up, and Boris moved again, this time in the opposite direction, and when Zachek appeared again, firing at the spot where Boris would have been if he had continued in the same direction, Boris drilled Zachek’s left shoulder.

As Zachek fell backward, Boris sprinted directly at him, holding his
fire until Zachek came into view. Zachek squeezed the trigger of his AK-74 and more bits of wood and plaster blinded Boris momentarily. Still, he came on, knowing it was fatal to stay in one place.

Clearing his vision, he saw Zachek on the floor. His back was against a wall. Blood streamed from his shattered left shoulder. He was desperately trying to reload his weapon.

Sensing Boris, his head came up and he bared his teeth like a rabid dog. Then he grinned, threw the assault rifle away, and spread his hands.

“I surrender, General. Don’t shoot, I’m unarmed.”

Boris glimpsed the tiny derringer half hidden in Zachek’s right hand. But even if the little prick had been unarmed, Boris knew it wouldn’t have mattered. He pulled the trigger on his assault rifle and Zachek briefly danced like a marionette whose strings were being cut. In a mass of blood, he slipped sideways and his eyes went dark.

S
omething significant must have happened, Boris thought, because he saw that Beria had now begun his retreat from the synagogue. Boris was intrigued. He deduced that Bourne had somehow altered the situation irretrievably, and that Beria was pragmatic enough to get out while his skin was whole.

That wasn’t going to happen.

Boris caught up with him in the entryway, already littered with six corpses. Beria, in full flight, chose the shortest distance between him and the front door. This route took him between two of the bodies. The instant he skidded in a puddle of blood, Boris, loping from behind at full speed, barreled into him. Something lurched in his left ankle and a javelin of fire scorched up his leg. The bullet from Zachek’s assault rifle had gone completely through his calf, which was good, but the wound was bleeding profusely. The leg needed to be elevated and the wound seen to. Boris’s leg gave way and he went down hard on one knee. A sea of pain swept through him. Beria, only partially recovered, swung the butt of his AK-74 across Boris’s chin, knocking him flat.

Beria aimed the assault rifle, about to pull the trigger when he heard
voices echoing suddenly and frighteningly. Unwilling to give away his position by firing, he whipped around and fled the synagogue as fast as his legs would carry him.

B
ourne saw Semid Abdul-Qahhar take a swipe at Rebeka with his gleaming dirk. She countered with her thin-bladed knife, then closed with him, slipping inside his defenses, slicing his left cheek from just beneath the eye to the corner of his mouth, which opened wide, but made no sound. He struck her in the side with his fist, then delivered a vicious kick to her ribs, which slammed her against a wall.

He came in hard and fast, leading with the dirk while fumbling beneath his robe with the other hand. Rebeka was defending herself against the stab of the dirk. She evaded it with ease, but only because it was a feint.

Bourne saw before she did that Semid gripped a Mauser in his other hand. He leapt at Semid, knocking him back, wrestling the Mauser out of his hand. As Semid turned toward Bourne’s attack, Rebeka contemptuously slapped aside the dirk and stabbed inward with her own knife. The blade penetrated Semid’s chest just below the sternum, and, with a surgeon’s deft hand, she twisted it upward and to the left, puncturing a lung, and then the heart.

Blood bubbled out of Semid’s mouth as he sighed a fetid breath. She stared hard into his eyes while she held him up with her knife blade and her tensed arm.

“Rebeka,” Bourne said.

She studied Semid as if he were a specimen pinned to a lab table.

“Rebeka,” Bourne repeated, more gently this time.

She expelled a breath and, at the same time, withdrew the knife blade, and the body fell to the floor. Bourne expected an expression of triumph on her face, but when she turned to him, there was only disgust.

She stared at him for a long moment, and Bourne had the impression that he was facing a singular creature, precisely controlled and calibrated on the outside, but possessing an untamed spirit and a wild heart.

“You ran out on me,” she said as she wiped her blade free of blood and gore, “and now I find you here.”

“Lucky you.” He smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised.”

Her eyes burned with a cold fury. “This is my territory.”

“That’s irrelevant now,” he said evenly, trying to defuse her anger. “Semid Abdul-Qahhar is dead.”

She kicked the corpse so it flopped over on its back. “Whoever the hell this is,” she said, “he’s not Semid Abdul-Qahhar.”

T
HERE WERE TIMES—
and this was one of them—when Hendricks resented the security detail that followed him around as closely as his own shadow. He resented the fact that they were surely speculating on what had caused him to drive hell-for-leather back to his house in the middle of a workday. Worse, they watched him from behind smoked-glass windows as he crossed to his rose garden, got down on his knees, and began rooting around.

One of them, Richards, he thought, exited his car and strode to where he knelt.

“Sir, are you feeling well?”

“Perfectly,” Hendricks said with a distracted air.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You can return to your car.”

“Yes, sir,” Richards said, after a short pause.

Hendricks, glancing over his shoulder, saw Richards shrug, signing to his compatriots that he had no idea what the boss was up to. Returning to his work, Hendricks tried to calm himself, but he found to his horror that his hands were trembling uncontrollably. The moment he’d picked
up Skara’s business card and seen the rose imprinted on it, he’d become certain that she had left the card for him to find. Only he would understand the rose’s significance.

“
I’m on my final journey.
”

He was terribly afraid that Skara was going to do something irrevocable. He could not imagine her killing herself, but then he knew so little about her. And yet, strangely, he felt that he had known her all his life. It was a complete mystery to him how someone could become a part of his life so quickly. She had crawled under his skin and, lodged there, refused to budge. Her sudden disappearance only made him more acutely aware of how she affected him.

“
I’m on my final journey.
”

Was she going to do something terrible, some final act that one way or another would snuff out her life? This was the scenario that terrified him.

“
I’m on my final journey.
”

He had convinced himself that she’d left him a clue to what she was about to do, that she wanted him to stop her, that he was the only one with the ability to do so. He desperately wanted to believe that she felt about him the way he felt about her. Hadn’t she said as much on the DVD? But he harbored a suspicion that it had been a performance, that she had not really revealed what was in her hidden heart, and that now he would never know, because within days, or even hours, her life would be extinguished like a candle flame.

His shaking hands were covered with soil, his nails dark with grit. Starting at the left side of the rose garden, he was making his methodical way toward the right. At the base of each plant, his fingers dug into the soil, hoping to find something she had buried there for him to find after she had gone. But he came to the last rose and, digging in, found nothing.

He sat back on his haunches, resting his wrists on his knees while he stared at the flowers. He loved his roses, their colors and scents, but now all he saw were the thorns. Perhaps this time a rose was just a rose. He didn’t want to believe it, but now he had to, because there was nothing else for him to believe.

Bitter tears rose into his eyes, and, ashamed and despairing, he covered his face with his filthy hands.

B
oris was nowhere to be found. Bourne, making a quick inventory of the dead and dying, found no trace of either Boris, for which he was profoundly grateful, or the SVR chief, Konstantin Beria. Briefly, he wondered whether they had gone, but he had his own agenda to consider.

“I’ve been after Semid Abdul-Qahhar for three years,” Rebeka said as they exited the synagogue the way they both had entered it. “He employs half a dozen doubles who look like him and talk like him. More often than not, they’re the ones who appear in public. Semid Abdul-Qahhar himself can be seen in the periodic taped messages his people send to Al Jazeera. I’ve studied those tapes in detail. I know what the real Semid Abdul-Qahhar looks like. Virtually no one else outside his circle of lieutenants does.”

That there might be body doubles changed Bourne’s plan radically. Boris had told him Semid Abdul-Qahhar was in Damascus. Now he sensed that the synagogue was a ruse. If so, then he knew that the leader of the Mosque must be at El-Gabal. This had many implications, not the least of which was that the planning phase of the terrorist attack was at an end, the operations phase had begun, and Bourne had little time to infiltrate El-Gabal, plant the cloned SIM cards, and set off the charges inside the twelve crates of FN SCAR-M, Mark 20 assault rifles Don Fernando had spiked.

He wanted to go into El-Gabal alone, but he realized now that having Rebeka with him was vital. Only she could recognize Semid Abdul-Qahhar. If he really was in the building, Bourne was not going to let this opportunity to kill him pass. Semid was the real danger. With El-Arian dead, he was now the heart and soul of Severus Domna; without his support the organization would be so severely weakened that it could be dealt with by Soraya, Peter, and their team. But if Semid somehow survived, his grip on the Domna would become a stranglehold, and with its members in legitimate positions in business and politics, Semid’s
potential for launching terrorist attacks expanded exponentially. Bourne could not allow that to happen.