The Bourne Betrayal (2 page)

Wa’i,” Fadi said. He knows.

“Surely not.” Abbud ibn Aziz stirred his position beside Fadi. Crouched behind the high butte three hundred meters above the plateau, they served as advance guard for a cadre of perhaps twenty armed men lying low against the rocky ground behind them.

“With these I can see everything. There was a leak.”

“Why weren’t we informed?”

There was no reply. None was needed. They had not been informed because of naked fear. Fadi, had he known, would have killed them all-every last one of the Ethiopian transporters. Such were the wages of absolute intimidation.

Fadi, peering through powerful 12×50 Russian military binoculars, scanned to his right to keep Martin Lindros in his sights. The 12×50s provided a dizzyingly small field of view but more than made up for it in their detail. He had seen that the leader of the group-the deputy director of CI-was using both a rad detector and a Geiger counter. This American knew what he was about.

Fadi, a tall, broad-shouldered man, possessed a decidedly charismatic demeanor. When he spoke, everyone in his presence fell silent. He had a handsome, powerful face, the color of his skin deepened further by desert sun and mountain wind. His beard and hair were long and curling, the inky color of a starless midnight. His lips were full and wide. When he smiled the sun seemed to have come down from its place in the heavens to shine directly on his disciples. For Fadi’s avowed mission was messianic in nature: to bring hope where there was no hope, to slaughter the thousands that made up the Saudi royal family, to wipe their abomination off the face of the earth, to free his people, to distribute the obscene wealth of the despots, to restore the rightful order to his beloved Arabia. To begin, he knew, he must delink the symbiotic relationship between the Saudi royal family and the government of the United States of America. And to do that he must strike at America, to make a clear statement that was as lasting as it was indelible.

What he must not do was underestimate the capacity of Americans to endure pain. This was a common mistake among his extremist comrades, this is what got them into trouble with their own people, this more than anything else was the source of a life lived without hope.

Fadi was no fool. He had studied the history of the world. Better, he had learned from it. When Nikita Khrushchev had said to America, “We will bury you!” he had meant it in his heart as well as in his soul. But who was it that had been buried? The
USSR
.

When his extremist comrades said, “We have many lifetimes to bury America,” they were referring to the endless supply of young men who gained their majority each year, from whom they could choose the martyrs to die in battle. But they gave no thought whatsoever to the deaths of these young men. Why should they? Paradise lay waiting with open arms for the martyrs. Yet what, really, had been gained? Was America living without hope? No. Did these acts push America toward a life without hope? Again, no. So what was the answer?

Fadi believed with all his heart and his soul-and most especially with his formidable intellect-that he had found it.

Keeping track of the deputy director through his 12×50s, he saw that the man seemed reluctant to leave. He felt like a bird of prey as he gazed down on the target site. The arrogant American soldiers had climbed into the helicopter, but their commander-Fadi’s intel did not extend to his name-would not allow his leader to remain on the plateau unguarded. He was a canny man. Perhaps his nose smelled something his eyes could not see; perhaps he was only adhering to well-taught discipline. In any case, as the two men stood side by side talking, Fadi knew he would not get a better chance.

“Begin,” he said softly to Abbud ibn Aziz without taking his eyes from the lenses.

Beside him, Abbud ibn Aziz took up the Soviet-made RPG-7 shoulder launcher. He was a stocky man, moon-faced with a cast in his left eye, there since birth. Swiftly and surely, he inserted the tapered, finned warhead into the rocket propulsion tube. The fins on the rotating grenade provided stability, assurance that it would hit its target with a high degree of accuracy. When he depressed the trigger, the primary system would launch the grenade at 117 meters per second. That ferocious burst of energy would, in turn, ignite the rocket propulsion system within the trailing tube, boosting the warhead speed to 294 meters per second.

Abbud ibn Aziz put his right eye against the optical sight, mounted just behind the trigger. He found the Chinook, thought fleetingly that it was a pity to lose this magnificent war machine. But such an object of desire was not for him. In any event, everything had been meticulously planned by Fadi’s brother, down to the trail of clues that had compelled the deputy director of CI out of his office and into the field, that led him a tortuous route to northwestern Ethiopia, thence here to the upper reaches of Ras Dejen.

Abbud ibn Aziz positioned the RPG-7 so that it was aimed at the helicopter’s front rotor assembly. He was now one with the weapon, one with the goal of his cadre. He could feel the absolute resolve of his comrades flowing through him like a tide, a wave about to crash onto the enemy shore.

“Remember,” Fadi said.

But Abbud ibn Aziz, a highly skilled armorist, trained by Fadi’s brilliant brother in modern war machinery, needed no reminder. The one drawback of the
RPG
was that upon firing, it emitted a telltale trail of smoke. They would immediately become visible to the enemy. This, too, had been accounted for.

He felt the tap of Fadi’s forefinger on his shoulder, which meant their target was in position. His finger curled around the trigger. He took a deep breath, slowly exhaled.

There came the recoil, a hurricane of superheated air. Then the flash-and-boom of the explosion itself, the plume of smoke, the twisted rotor blades rising together from the opposite camps. Thunderous echoes, like the dull ache in Abbud ibn Aziz’s shoulder, were still resounding when Fadi’s men rose as one and rushed to the butte, a hundred meters east of where he and Abbud ibn Aziz had been perched and were now scrambling away, where the telltale smoke plume rose. As the cadre had been taught, it fired a massed fusillade of shots, the expressed rage of the faithful.

Al-Hamdu lil-Allah! Allah be praised! The attack had begun.

One moment Lindros had been telling Anders why he wanted two more minutes on site, the next he felt as if his skull had been crushed by a pile driver. It took him some moments to realize that he was flat on the ground, his mouth filled with dirt. He lifted his head. Burning debris swung crazily through the smoky air, but there was no sound, nothing at all but a peculiar pressure on his eardrums, an inner whooshing, as if a lazy wind had started up inside his head. Blood ran down his cheeks, hot as tears. The sharp, choking odor of burned rubber and plastics filled his nostrils, but there was something else as well: the heavy underscent of roasting meat.

It was when he tried to roll over that he discovered Anders half lying atop him. The commander had taken the brunt of the blast in an effort to protect him. His face and bared shoulder, where his uniform was burned away, were crisped and smoking. All the hair on his head had been burned off, leaving little more than a skull. Lindros gagged, with a convulsive shudder pushed the corpse off him. He gagged again as he rose to his knees.

A kind of whirring came to him then, strangely muted, as if heard from a great distance. Turning, he saw the members of Skorpion One piling out of the wreckage of the Chinook, firing their semiautomatics as they came.

One of them went down under the withering hail of machine-gun fire. Lindros’s next move was instinctual. On his belly, he crawled to the dead man, snatched up his XM8, and began firing.

The battle-hardened men of Skorpion One were both courageous and well trained. They knew when to take their shots and when to take refuge. Nevertheless, as the crossfire started up they were totally unprepared, so concentrated were they on the enemy in front of them. One by one they were shot, most multiple times.

Lindros soldiered on, even after he was the last man standing. Curiously, no one shot at him; not one bullet even came close. He had just begun to wonder about this when his XM8 ran out of ammo. He stood with the smoking assault rifle in his hand, watching the enemy coming down from the butte above him.

They were silent, thin as the ravaged man inside the cave, with the hollow eyes of men who had seen too much blood spilled. Two broke off from the pack and slipped into the smoldering carcass of the Chinook.

Lindros jerked as he heard shots being fired. One of the cadre spun through the open door of the blackened Chinook, but a moment later the other man dragged the bloody pilot out by his collar.

Was he dead or merely unconscious? Lindros longed to know, but the others had enclosed him in a circle. He saw in their faces the peculiar light of the fanatic, a sickly yellow, a flame that could be extinguished only by their own death.

He dropped his useless weapon and they took him, pulling his hands hard behind his back. Men took up the bodies on the ground and dumped them into the Chinook. In their wake, two others advanced with flamethrowers. With unnerving precision, they proceeded to incinerate the helicopter and the dead and wounded men inside it.

Lindros, groggy and bleeding from a number of superficial cuts, watched the supremely coordinated maneuvers. He was surprised and impressed. He was also frightened. Whoever had planned this clever ambush, whoever had trained this cadre was no ordinary terrorist. Out of sight of his captors, he worked the ring he wore off his finger and dropped it into the rocky scree, taking a step to cover it with his shoe. Whoever came after him needed to know that he’d been here, that he hadn’t been killed with the rest.

At that moment, the knot of men around him parted and he saw striding toward him a tall, powerful-looking Arab with a bold, desert-chiseled face and large, piercing eyes. Unlike the other terrorists Lindros had interrogated, this one had the mark of civilization on him. The First World had touched him; he had drunk from its technological cup.

Lindros stared into the Arab’s dark eyes as they stood, confronting each other.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lindros,” the terrorist leader said in Arabic.

Lindros continued to stare at him, unblinking.

“Silent American, where is your bluster now?” Smiling, he added: “It’s no use pretending. I know you speak Arabic.” He relieved Lindros of both radiation detector and Geiger counter. “I must assume you found what you were looking for.” Feeling through Lindros’s pockets, he produced the metal canister. “Ah, yes.” He opened it and poured out the contents between Lindros’s boots. “Pity for you the real evidence is long gone. Wouldn’t you like to know its destination.” This last was said as a mocking statement, not as a question.

“Your intel is first-rate,” Lindros said in impeccable Arabic, causing a considerable stir among everyone in the cadre, save two men: the leader himself and a stocky man whom Lindros took to be the second in command.

There came the leader’s smile again. “I return the compliment.”

Silence.

Without warning, the leader hit Lindros so hard across the face his teeth snapped together. “My name is Fadi, the redeemer, Martin. You don’t mind if I call you Martin? Just as well, as we’re going to become intimates over the next several weeks.”

“I don’t intend to tell you anything,” Lindros said, abruptly switching to English.

“What you intend and what you will do are two separate things,” Fadi said in equally precise English. He inclined his head. Lindros winced as he felt the wrench on his arms, so savage it threatened to dislocate his shoulders.

“You have chosen to pass on this round.” Fadi’s disappointment appeared genuine. “How arrogant of you, how truly unwise. But then, after all, you are American. Americans are nothing if they are not arrogant, eh, Martin. And, truly, unwise.”

Again the thought arose that this was no ordinary terrorist: Fadi knew his name. Through the mounting pain shooting up his arms, Lindros fought to keep his face impassive. Why wasn’t he equipped with a cyanide capsule in his mouth disguised as a tooth, like agents in spy novels?

Sooner or later, he suspected, he’d wish he had one. Still, he’d keep up this front for as long as he was able.

“Yes, hide behind your stereotypes,” he said. “You accuse us of not understanding you, but you understand us even less. You don’t know me at all.”

“Ah, in this, as in most things, you’re wrong, Martin. In point of fact I know you quite well. For some time I have-how do American students put it?-ah, yes, I have made you my major. Anthropological studies or realpolitik?” He shrugged as if they were two colleagues drinking together. “A matter of semantics.”

His smile broadened as he kissed Lindros on each cheek. “So now we move on to round two.”

When he pulled away, there was blood on his lips.

“For three weeks, you have been looking for me; instead, I have found you.”

He did not wipe away Lindros’s blood. Instead, he licked it off.

WHEN
DID
THIS
particular flashback begin, Mr. Bourne?” Dr. Sunderland asked.

Jason Bourne, unable to sit still, walked about the comfortable, homey space that seemed more like a study in a private home than a doctor’s office. Cream walls, mahogany wainscoting, a vintage dark-wood desk with claw feet, two chairs, and a small sofa. The wall behind Dr. Sunderland’s desk was covered with his many diplomas and an impressive series of international awards for breakthrough therapy protocols in both psychology and psychopharmacology related to his specialty: memory. Bourne studied them closely, then saw the photo in a silver frame on the doctor’s desk.

“What’s her name?” Bourne said. “Your wife.”

“Katya,” Dr. Sunderland said after a slight hesitation.

Psychiatrists always resisted giving out any personal information about themselves and their family. But in this case, Bourne thought . . .

Katya was in a ski suit. A striped knit cap was on her head, a pom-pom at its top. She was blond and very beautiful. Something about her suggested that she was comfortable in front of the camera. She was smiling into the camera, the sun in her eyes. The crinkles at their outside corners made her seem peculiarly vulnerable.