Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy (44 page)

"First of all, I want to assure you that nothing will happen to you. All you have to do is answer my questions truthfully and obey my commands to the letter." He used the pad of his thumb on a minor nerve bundle on the inside of her elbow. Just enough to let her know that he was deadly serious. "Do we understand each other?" She nodded and cried out briefly as he bore down harder on the nerves.

"I expect you to answer when I ask you a question."

She said, "I understand, yes."

"Good." He took her into the shadows of the entrance to 106-108 Fo utca. "I'm looking for Jason Bourne. Where is he?"

"I don't know."

Her knees buckled in pain as he did something terrible to the inside of her elbow.

"Shall we try it again?" he said. "Where's Jason Bourne?"

"Upstairs," she said as tears rolled down her cheeks. "In my apartment." His grip on her loosened noticeably. "See how easy that was? No fuss, no muss. Now, let's you and me go on up."

They went inside and she used her key. She turned on the light and they went up the wide staircase. When they reached the fourth floor, McColl reined her in. "Hear me now," he said softly. "As far as you're concerned, nothing's wrong. Got me?" She almost nodded, caught herself and said, "Yes."

He pulled her back against him hard. "Give him any warning sign and I'll gut you like a large-mouth bass." He shoved her forward. "Okay. Get on with it." She walked to her door, put her key in the lock and opened it. She saw to her right that Jason was slumped on the sofa, his eyes half closed.

Bourne looked up. "I thought you were—"

At that instant McColl shoved her, raised his gun. "Daddy's home!" he cried as he aimed the gun at the recumbent figure and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Annaka, who'd been biding her time, waiting for McColl's first move, drove the point of her cocked elbow into his arm, deflecting his aim. As a result, the bullet entered the wall above Bourne's head where it met the ceiling.

McColl bellowed in rage, reached out with his left hand even as he was swinging his right arm down to aim again at his recumbent target. His fingers sank into Annaka's hair, grabbed tight, jerked her back off her feet. At that moment Bourne brought his ceramic gun from beneath the eiderdown. He wanted to shoot the intruder in the chest, but Annaka was in the way. Altering his aim, he shot the intruder through the meat of his gun arm. The gun fell to the carpet, blood splattered from the wound, and Annaka screamed as the intruder dragged her back against his chest as a shield.

Bourne was up on one knee, the muzzle of his gun roaming, as the intruder, with Annaka braced against him, backed toward the open door.

"This isn't over, not by a long shot," he said, his gaze on Bourne. "I've never lost a sanction and I don't intend to start now." With that ominous pronouncement, he picked Annaka up and hurled her at Bourne.

Bourne, off the sofa, caught Annaka before she had a chance to smash into the side of it. He whirled her around, then sprinted through the open doorway in time to see the elevator door closing. He took the stairs, limping a little. His side felt as if it were on fire and his legs were weak. His breathing became labored and he wanted to stop, if only to be able to get enough oxygen in his lungs, but he kept going, taking the stairs two and three at a time. Rounding the first-floor landing, his left foot slipped on the edge of a tread and he went down, half-falling, half-sliding down the rest of the flight. He groaned as he rose, slammed through the door into the lobby. There was blood on the marble floor but no assassin. He took a step into the lobby, and his legs collapsed out from under him. He sat there, half-stunned, his gun in one hand, the other lying palm up on his thigh. His eyes were glazed with pain and it seemed to him as if he'd forgotten how to breathe.
I've got to go after the bastard,
he thought. But there was a tremendous noise in his head that he eventually identified as the thudding of his heart working overtime. For the moment, at least, he was incapable of movement. He had just enough time, before Annaka arrived, to reflect that his staged death hadn't fooled the Agency for long. When she saw him, her face turned white with concern. "Jason!" She knelt beside him, her arm around him.

"Help me up," he said.

She took his weight with her canted hip. "Where is he? Where did he go?" He should've been able to answer her. Christ, he thought, maybe she was right, maybe he really did need to see a doctor.

Perhaps it was the venom in his heart that had pulled Khan back from unconsciousness so quickly. In any case, he was up and out of the Skoda within minutes of the attack. His head hurt, to be sure, but it was his ego that had taken the brunt of the attack. He replayed the whole sorry scene in his mind, knew with a certainty that caused a sinking feeling in his stomach that it was only his foolish and dangerous feelings for Annaka that had made him vulnerable.

What more proof did he need that emotional attachment was to be shunned at all costs?

It had cost him dearly with his parents and, again, with Richard Wick, and now most recently with Annaka, who from the first had betrayed him to Stepan Spalko. And what of Spalko?
"We're far from strangers. We share secrets of the most intimate
nature,"
he'd said that night in Grozny.
"I'd like to think we're more than businessman
and client."

Like Richard Wick, he'd offered to take Khan in, claimed he wanted to be his friend, to make him part of a hidden—and somehow intimate— world.
"You owe your impeccable
reputation in no small part to the commissions I've given you."
As if Spalko, like Wick, believed he was Khan's benefactor. These people were under the misapprehension that they lived on a higher plane, that they belonged to the elite. Like Wick, Spalko had lied to Khan so that he could use him for his own purposes.

What had Spalko wanted from him? It almost didn't matter; he was past caring. All he wanted was his pound of flesh from Stepan Spalko, a reckoning that would set past injustices to rights. Nothing less than Spalko's death would assuage him now. Spalko would be his first and last commission from himself.

It was then, crouched in the shadows of a doorway, unconsciously massaging the back of his head where a lump had already been raised, that he heard her voice. It rose from the deep, from the shadows in which he sat, dropping down through the depths, pulled under the purling waves.

"Lee-Lee," he whispered. "Lee-Lee!"

It was her voice he heard calling to him. He knew what she wanted; she wanted him to join her in the drowned depths. He put his aching head in his hands and a terrible sob escaped his lips like the last bubble of air from his lungs. Lee-Lee. He hadn't thought of her in so long—or had he? He'd dreamed about her almost every night; it had taken him this long to realize it. Why? What was different now that she should come to him so strongly after such a long time gone?

It was then he heard the slam of the front door and his head came up in time for him to see the big man racing out of the entrance to 106-108 Fo utca. He was grasping one hand with the other, and by the trail of blood behind him Khan figured that he'd run into Jason Bourne. A small smile crept across his face, for he knew this must be the man who'd attacked him.

Khan felt an immediate urge to kill him, but with an effort he gained control and came up with a better idea. Leaving the shadows, he followed the figure as he fled down Fo utca.

Dohdny Synagogue was the largest synagogue in Europe. On its western side, the massive structure had an intricate Byzantine brickwork facade in blue, red and yellow, the heraldic colors of Budapest. Crowning the entrance was a large stained-glass window. Above this impressive sight rose two Moorish polygonal towers topped by striking copper and gilt cupolas. "I'll go in and get him," Annaka said as they got out of her Skoda. Istvan's service had tried to direct her to a covering doctor, but she'd insisted that she needed to see Dr. Ambrus, that she was an old family friend, and at length they'd directed her here. "The fewer people who see you like this, the better." Bourne agreed. "Listen, Annaka, I'm beginning to lose count of the times you've saved my life."

She looked at him and smiled. "Then stop counting."

"The man who assaulted you."

"Kevin McColl."

"He's an Agency specialist." There was no need for Bourne to have to tell her what sort of specialist McColl was. Yet another thing he liked about her. "You handled him well."

"Until he used me as a shield," she said bitterly. "I should never have allowed—"

"We got out of it. That's all that matters."

"But he's still at large, and his threat—"

"The next time I'll be ready for him."

The small smile returned to her face. She directed him to the courtyard in the rear of the synagogue, where she told him he could wait for them without fear of running into anyone.

Istvan Ambrus, the doctor of Janos Vadas' acquaintance, was inside at service, but he was amenable enough when Annaka went in and told him of the emergency.

"Of course, I'm pleased to help you in any way I can, Annaka," he said as he rose from his seat and walked with her through the magnificent chande-liered interior. Behind them was the great five-thousand-tube organ, highly unusual in a Jewish house of worship, on whose keyboard the great composers Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saens had once played.

"Your father's death has hit us all very hard." He took her hand, squeezed it briefly. He had the blunt, strong fingers of a surgeon or a bricklayer. "How are you holding up, my dear?"

"As well as can be expected," she said softly, leading him outside.

Bourne was sitting in the courtyard under whose earth lay the corpses of five thousand Jews who had perished in the brutal winter of 1944-45, when Adolph Eichmann turned the synagogue into a concentration point from which he sent ten times that number to camps where they were exterminated. The courtyard, contained between the arches of the inner loggia, was filled with pale memorial stones through which dark-green ivy crept. The trunks of the trees with which it had been planted were similarly wound with the vines. A cold wind ruffled the leaves, a sound that in this place could have been mistaken for distant voices.

It was difficult to sit here and not think of the dead and of the terrible suffering that had gone on here during that dark time. He wondered whether another dark time was gathering itself to overwhelm them once again. He looked up from his contemplation to see Annaka in the company of a round-faced, dapper individual with a pencil mustache and apple cheeks. He was dressed in a brown three-piece suit. The shoes on his small feet were highly polished.

"So you're the disaster in question," he said after Annaka had made the introductions, assuring him that Bourne could speak their native tongue. "No, don't get up," he went on as he sat down beside Bourne and began his examination. "Well, sir, I don't believe Annaka's description did your injuries justice. You look like you've been put through a wurst-grinder."

"That's just how I feel, Doctor." Bourne winced despite himself as Dr. Ambrus' fingers probed a particularly painful spot.

"As I walked out into the courtyard, I saw you deep in thought," Dr. Ambrus said in a conversational tone. "In a sense, this is a terrible place, this courtyard, reminding us of those we've lost and, in a larger sense, what humanity as a whole lost during the Holocaust." His fingers were surprisingly light as well as agile as they roamed over the tender flesh of Bourne's side. "But the history of that time isn't all so grim, you know. Just before Eichmann and his staff marched in, several priests helped the rabbi remove the twenty-seven scrolls of the Torah from the Ark inside the synagogue. They took them, these priests, and buried them in a Christian cemetery, where they remained safe from the Nazis until after the war was ended." He smiled thinly. "So what does this tell us? There remains the potential for light even in the darkest places. Compassion can come from the most unexpected places. And you have two cracked ribs."

He rose now. "Come. I have at my house all the equipment necessary to bind you up. In a matter of just a week or so the pain will recede, and you'll be on the mend." He waggled a thick forefinger. "But in the interim you must promise me you'll rest. No strenuous exercise for you. In fact, no exercise at all would be best."

"I can't promise you that, Doctor."

Dr. Ambrus sighed as he shot Annaka a quick glance. "Now why doesn't that surprise me?"

Bourne got to his feet. "In fact, I'm very much afraid I'm going to have to do everything you've just warned me against, in which case I've got to ask you to do what you can in order to protect the damaged ribs."

"How about a suit of armor?" Dr. Ambrus chuckled at his own joke, but his amusement quickly dropped away as he saw the expression on Bourne's face. "Good God, man, what do you expect to be going up against?"

"If I could tell you," Bourne said bleakly, "I imagine we'd all be better off."

Though clearly taken aback, Dr. Ambrus was as good as his word, leading them to his house in the Buda Hills where he had a small examining room where others might have had a study. Outside the window were climbing roses, but the geranium pots were still bare, awaiting warmer weather. Inside, were cream walls, white moldings, and on top of the cabinets, framed snapshots of Dr. Ambrus' wife and his two sons. Dr. Ambrus sat Bourne down on the table, humming to himself as he went methodically through his cabinets, picking out one item here, two more there. Returning to his patient who he'd bade strip to the waist, he swung an armatured light around, snapped it on the field of battle. Then he went to work binding Bourne's ribs tightly in three different layers of material—cotton, spandex and a rubberlike material he said contained Kevlar.

"Better than that no one could do," he declared when he was finished.

"I can't breathe," Bourne gasped.

"Good, that means the pain will be kept to a minimum." He rattled a small brown plastic bottle. "I'd give you some painkillers, but for a man such as yourself—urn, no, I think not. The drug will interfere with your senses, your reflexes will be off, and the next time I see you, you might be on a slab."