Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy (63 page)

Then so slowly and gently that it was imperceptible to her impaired senses, he slithered away. Turning, at last, from her, he stumbled over Ar-senov's corpse and his HAZMAT

suit ripped. For a moment his new-found terror returned as he imagined himself being trapped in here when Zina pulled the trigger, the virus seeping into the rent, infecting him. In his mind's eye, the city of the dead he had created in Nairobi bloomed in all its vivid, gruesome detail.

Then he'd regained his composure and he stripped off the encumbering suit altogether. Silent as a cat, he made his way to the doorway, swung out into the passage. At once the human bombs became aware of him and shifted slightly, tensing.

"La illaha ill Allah,"
he whispered.

"La illaha ill Allah,"
they whispered in return. Then, in the darkness, he stole away.

They both saw it at once, the blunt, ugly snout of Dr. Felix Schiffer's bio-diffuser pointed at them. Bourne and Khan froze.

"Spalko's gone. There's his HAZMAT suit," Bourne said. "This station has only one entrance." He thought of the movement he'd detected, the whisper, the sound of furtive footfalls he thought he'd heard. "He must've slipped out in the darkness."

"I know this one," Khan said. "It's Hasan Arsenov, but this other, the female holding the weapon, I don't know."

The female terrorist lay half-propped up on the corpse of another terrorist. How she had managed to drag herself into this position neither of them could say. She was very badly wounded, possibly fatally, though from this distance it was impossible to say for sure. She looked at them from a world filled with pain and, Bourne was quite certain, something else that went beyond mere physical hurt.

Khan had taken a Kalishnikov from one of the human bombs outside and he aimed it now at the female. "There's no way out for you," he said. Bourne, who had been watching only her eyes, stepped forward and pushed the Kalishnikov down. "There's always a way out," he said. Then he squatted down so that he was at the other's level. Without taking his gaze from her, he said, "Can you speak? Can you tell me your name?" For a moment there was only silence, and Bourne had to force himself to keep his gaze on her face, not to look at her finger curled and tense on the trigger. At length her lips opened and began to tremble. Her teeth chattered and a tear slipped free, rolling down her stained cheek.

"What d'you care what her name is?" Khan's voice was filled with contempt. "She's not human; she's been turned into a machine of destruction."

"Khan, some might say the same of you." Bourne's voice was so gentle it was clear that what he said wasn't a rebuke, merely a truth that might not have occurred to his son. He turned his attention back to the terrorist. "It's important that you tell me your name, isn't it?"

Her lips opened and with a great effort, she said in a voice somewhere between a rattle and a gurgle, "Zina."

"Well, Zina, we're at the endgame," Bourne said. "There's nothing left now, except death and life. By the looks of things, it appears as if you've already chosen death. If you pull the trigger, you'll be sent to heaven and in glory will become a
houri.
But I wonder whether that will happen. What is it that you'll be leaving behind? Dead compatriots, at least one of whom you've shot yourself. And then there's Stepan Spalko. Where has he gone, I wonder. No matter. What's important is that at the crucial moment, he abandoned you.

"He's left you to die, Zina, while he's cut and run. So I guess you have to ask yourself if you pull that trigger, will you go to your glory or will you be cast down, found wanting by Mounkir and Nekir, the Questioners. Given your life, Zina, when they ask you 'Who is thy creator? Who is thy Prophet?' will you be able to answer them? Only the righteous remember, Zina, you know that."

Zina was openly weeping now. But her breast was heaving strangely and Bourne was afraid that a sudden spasm would cause her to pull the trigger in reflex. If he was going to reach her, it had to be now.

"If you pull that trigger, if you choose death, you won't be able to answer them. You know that. You've been abandoned and betrayed, Zina, by those closest to you. And, in turn, you've betrayed them. But it's not too late. There can be redemption; there's always a way out."

At the moment Khan realized that Bourne was talking as much to him as he was to Zina; he experienced a feeling not unlike an electrical shock. This feeling raced through his body until it sparked both his extremities and his brain. He felt himself stripped naked, revealed at last, and he was terrified of nothing more or less than himself—his own true authentic self that he had buried so many years ago in the jungle of Southeast Asia. It was so long ago that he couldn't remember exactly where or when he'd done it. The truth was that he was a stranger to himself. He hated his father for leading him to that truth, but he could no longer deny that he loved him for it, too.

He knelt, then, beside the man he knew to be his father, and putting the Kalishnikov down where Zina could see it, he extended a hand toward her.

"He's right," Khan said in an altogether different voice from the one he normally used.

"There is a way to make up for your past sins, for the murders you've committed, for the betrayals to those who've loved you without, perhaps, you even knowing." He moved forward inch by inch until his hand closed over hers. Slowly and gently he pried her forefinger away from the trigger. She let go then and allowed him to take the weapon from her useless embrace.

"Thank you, Zina," Bourne said. "Khan will take care of you now." He rose, and giving his son's shoulder a brief squeeze, he turned and went swiftly and silently down the passage after Spalko.

Stepan Spalko sprinted down the bare concrete passage, Bourne's ceramic gun at the ready. He knew that all the gunfire would bring the security people into the main section of the hotel. Up ahead, he saw the Saudi security chief, Feyd al-Saoud, and two of his men. He ducked out of sight. They hadn't seen him yet and he used this element of surprise, waiting for them to come closer, then shooting them before they had time to react.

For a breathless moment he stood over the downed men. Feyd al-Saoud groaned and Spalko shot him at close range in the forehead. The Saudi security chief flopped once and was still. Quickly Spalko took the ID tags off one of his men, changed into the man's uniform and got rid of his colored contact lenses. As he did so, his thoughts turned inexorably to Zina. She had been fearless, true enough, but the ardor of her loyalty to him had been her fatal flaw. She had protected him from everyone—especially Arsenov. She'd enjoyed that, he could tell. But it struck him that her true passion was for him. It was this love, the repugnant weakness of sacrifice, that had driven him to abandon her. Swift footfalls behind him brought him back to the present, and he hurried on. The fateful meeting with the Arabs had been a two-edged sword, for while it had provided him with a ready means of disguise, it had slowed him down, and now as he threw a glance over his shoulder, he saw a figure in security fatigues and cursed mightily. He felt like Ahab, who pursued his nemesis until, in an utterly unexpected reversal, his nemesis had come after him. The man in the security fatigues was Jason Bourne.

Bourne saw Spalko, now in an Arab security uniform, open a door and vanish into a stairwell. He leaped over the bodies of the men Spalko had just killed and headed after him. He emerged into the chaos of the lobby.

Just a short time ago, when he and Khan had entered the hotel, this vast glassed-in space was tense but hushed, almost deserted. Now it was a welter of security personnel running to and fro. Some were rounding up the hotel personnel, sorting them into groups, depending on their jobs and where they had just been inside the premises. Others had already begun the laborious and time-consuming process of questioning the staff. Each individual had to account for every moment of his whereabouts over the course of the last two days. Still others were on their way down to the subbasement or were being deployed by wireless network to other areas of the hotel. Everyone was hustling; no one had time to question the two men who, one after the other, crossed through the mob scene toward the front door.

It was ironic to watch Spalko walking among them, blending in, becoming one of them. Briefly, Bourne considered trying to alert those around him but immediately thought better of it. Spalko would no doubt call his bluff—it was Bourne who was the internationally wanted murderer still under a CIA sanction. Spalko, of course, knew this, being the clever architect of Bourne's dangerous predicament. And as he followed Spalko out of the front doors, he realized something else.
We're both the same now,
he thought,
both chameleons employing the same marking in order to keep our true identities from
being revealed to those around us.
It was odd and disquieting to realize that at the moment this international security force was as much his enemy as it was Spalko's. The moment he was outside, Bourne realized that the hotel was in absolute lockdown. He watched with fascinated dread as Spalko boldly made his way to the security services car park. Although it was within the limits of the lockdown cordon, it was deserted, as even security personnel weren't allowed in or out.

Bourne went after him but almost immediately lost him in the ranks of vehicles. He broke into a run. There was a shout from behind him. He pulled open the door of the first vehicle he came to—an American Jeep. Yanking out the plastic panel on the bottom of the steering column, he fumbled for the wires. Just then another engine fired up and he saw Spalko in the car he'd stolen, wheeling out of the car park. There were more shouts now and the pounding of boots against pavement. Several shots were fired. Bourne, concentrating on what needed to be done, got the wires stripped and braided together. The Jeep's engine coughed to life, and he put it hi gear. Then with a hard squeal of tires, he turned out of the car park and accelerated through the security checkpoint.

The night was moonless but, then again, it wasn't really night. An insipid darkness lay over Reykjavik as the sun, hanging just below the horizon, turned the sky the color of an oystershell. As Bourne followed Spalko's twists and turns through the city, he realized that Spalko was heading south.

This was something of a surprise, for he'd expected Spalko to make for the airport. Surely he had an escape plan and just as surely it involved an aircraft. But the more Bourne thought about it, the less surprised he was. He was getting to know his adversary better now. Already he understood that Spalko never took the logical way in or out of a situation. His mind was unique, involved as it was in puzzle-logic. He was a man of feints and twists, someone who liked to trap his opponent rather than kill him outright. So. Keflavik was out. Too obvious and, as Spalko would undoubtedly have foreseen, too well guarded for him to use as an escape route. Bourne oriented himself to the map he'd studied on Oszkar's laptop. What lay south of the city? Hafnarfjordur, a fishing village too small to land the kind of aircraft Spalko would use. The coast! They were on an island, after all. Spalko was going to escape via boat.

At this time of night there was little traffic, especially after they left the city behind them. The roads became narrower, winding through the hillsides that fronted the landward side of the sea cliffs. As Spalko's car went around a particularly sharp curve, Bourne dropped back. Turning off his headlights, he accelerated around the turn. He could see Spalko's vehicle up ahead, but he hoped that Spalko, peering into his rear-view mirror, wouldn't be able to see him. It was a risk, losing sight of the car every time they went around a turn, but Bourne didn't see that he had any alternative. He had to make Spalko believe he'd lost his pursuer.

The utter lack of trees lent the landscape a certain gravity and, with the blue ice mountains as backdrop, a sense of eternal winter as well, made all the more eerie by the intermittent swaths of verdant green. The sky was immense and, in the long false-dawn, filled with the black shapes of shore-birds, soaring and swooping. Seeing them, Bourne felt a certain freedom from his entombment in the death-laden bowels of the hotel. Despite the chill, he rolled down the windows and breathed deeply of the fresh salt-laced air. A sweet smell rose to his nostrils as he flashed past the rolling, flower-dotted carpet of a meadow.

The road narrowed further as it turned toward the sea. Bourne descended through a lushly foliated glen and then zoomed around another curve. The road steepened in its switchback descent of the cliff face. He saw Spalko, then lost him again as another curve loomed. He made the turn and saw the North Atlantic low and spangled dully in the slategray dawn. Spalko's car went around another turn and Bourne followed on. The next turn was so close that the car was already out of sight, and despite the added risk, Bourne pushed the Jeep faster.

He had already committed to the turn when he heard the sound. It was soft and familiar above the flutter of the wind, the noise his ceramic gun made when fired. His front nearside tire blew and he slewed around. He caught a glimpse of Spalko, gun in hand, running to where he'd left his car. Then his view changed, and he was too busy trying to get the Jeep under control as it skidded perilously close to the seaside edge of the road. He downshifted into neutral, but it wasn't enough. He needed to turn off the ignition, but without the key that was impossible. The rear tires slipped off the road. Bourne unbuckled himself and held on as the Jeep spun off the cliff. It seemed to float, turning over twice. The brash, unmistakable odor of overheated metal came to him, along with the acrid stench of rubber or plastic burning.

He leaped just before the Jeep hit, rolling away as the vehicle bounced off an outcropping of rock and burst open. Flames shot up into the air, and by their light he saw in the cove just below him the fishing boat, nosing in toward the shore.

Spalko drove like a maniac down the road to the dead end at the inner edge of the cove. Throwing a glance back at the flaming Jeep, he said to himself,
To hell with Jason
Bourne. He's dead now.
But not, unfortunately, soon forgotten. It was Bourne who had foiled him, and now he had neither the NX 20 nor the Chechens as cat's-paws. So many months of careful planning come to nothing!