The Bourne Betrayal (32 page)

Then the night lit up, he felt an intense heat on his cheek, and flames gushed out of the building.

Fire-or more accurately arson-was no stranger to Tyrone, so he couldn’t say he was shocked, merely saddened. He’d lost the use of M&N Bodywork for sure. But then a thought occurred to him, and he whispered something to DJ Tank.

When they’d snuck into the place the first time, the interior had been stocked with all manner of explosives and accelerants. If the chemicals had still been inside, the explosion would have taken out the entire block, him and DJ Tank with it.

Now he asked himself: If the explosives weren’t inside, where the fuck were they?

Secretary of Defense E. R. “Bud” Halliday took his meals at no fixed time of the day or night. But unless summoned by the president for a policy skull session or to take the current temperature of the Senate, unless jawboning with the vice president or the Joint Chiefs, he took his meals in his limousine. Save for certain necessary pit stops of various sorts, the limousine, like a shark, was never at rest, but continued to roll through the streets and avenues of D.C. undisturbed.

Matthew Lerner enjoyed certain privileges in the secretary’s company, not the least of which was to break bread with Bud, as he was about to do this evening. In the world outside the tinted-glass windows, the hour was early for dinner. But this was the secretary’s world; dinner was bang on time.

After a short prayer, they dug into their plates of Texas barbeque-massive beef ribs, a deep, glossy red; baked beans with bits of fiery chile peppers in them; and, in the lone concession to the vegetable kingdom, steak fries. All of this was washed down with bottles of Shiner Blonde, proudly brewed, as Bud would say, in Fort Worth.

Finished in jig time, the secretary wiped his hands and mouth, then grabbed another bottle of Blonde and sat back. “So the
DCI
hired you to be his personal assassin.”

“Looks that way,” Lerner said.

The secretary’s cheeks were flushed, gleaming with a lovely sheen of beef fat. “Any thoughts about that?”

“I’ve never backed down from either a job or a dare,” Lerner said.

Bud glanced down at the sheet of paper Lerner had handed him as he’d climbed into the limo. He’d already read it, of course; he did it for effect, something at which the secretary was very good.

“It took some doing, but I found out where Bourne is. His face came up on the closed-circuit security cameras at Kennedy International.” Bud looked up, sucked a shred of charred beef from between his molars. “This assignment’s going to take you to Odessa. That’s quite a far piece from CI headquarters.”

Lerner knew the secretary meant it was going to take him away from the mission Bud had sent him on in the first place. “Not necessarily,” he said. “I do this for the Old Man and he owes me big time. He’ll know it and I’ll know it. I can leverage that.”

“What about Held?”

“I’ve put someone I can trust on Anne Held.” Lerner mopped the last of the thick, spicy sauce with a slice of Wonder Bread. “He’s a dogged sonovabitch. You’d have to kill him to get him to let go.”

Bourne dreamed again. Only this time, he knew it was no dream. He was reliving a shard of memory, another piece of the puzzle clicking into place: In a filthy Odessa alleyway, Soraya is kneeling over him. He hears the bitter regret in her voice. “That bastard Tariq ibn Said had me fooled from the outset,” she says. “He was Hamid ibn Ashef’s son, Nadir al-Jamuh. He gave me the information that led us into this trap. Jason, I fucked up.”

Bourne sits up. Hamid ibn Ashef. He had to find his target, shoot him dead. Orders from Conklin.

“Do you know where Hamid ibn Ashef is now?”

“Yes, and this time the intel’s straight,” Soraya says. “He’s at Otrada Beach.”

Oleksandr stirred, nudging Bourne’s thigh with his blunt black muzzle. Bourne, blinking the memory from in front of his eyes, struggled to concentrate on the present. He must have fallen asleep, even though he’d meant to stay vigilant. Oleksandr had been vigilant for him.

Propped up on the planks in the tiny underground cell, he saw the ominous pearling of the darkness. The boxer’s neck fur bristled. Someone was coming!

Ignoring the flood of pain, Bourne swung his legs over the side. It was too soon for Soraya to be coming back. Leaning against the wall, he levered himself to his feet, stood for a moment, feeling Oleksandr’s warm, muscular form against him. He was still weak, but he’d spent his time productively, going into energizing meditation and deep breathing. His forces might be weakened by blood loss, but he was still able to marshal them.

The change in the light was still faint, but now he could confirm that it wasn’t coming from a fixed source. It was bobbing up and down, which meant that it was being held by someone coming toward him down the tunnel.

Beside him, Oleksandr, the fur at the ruff of his neck standing straight up, licked his lips in anticipation. Bourne rubbed the place between his ears, as he’d seen Soraya do. Who was she, really? he asked himself. What had she meant to him? The little reactions to him she’d had when he’d first come into the Typhon offices, seeming odd then, now made sense. She’d expected him to remember her, to remember their time here. What had they done? Why had it taken her out of the field?

The light was no longer formless. He had no more time to ponder his fractured memory. It was time to act. But as he began to move, a wave of vertigo caused him to stagger. He grasped the stone wall as his knees buckled. The light brightened and there was nothing he could do.

Fadi, moving along the left-hand branch, kept his ears open for even the smallest sound. Each time he heard something, he swung the light in its direction. All he saw were rats, red-eyed, skittering away with a flick of their tails. There was an acute sense in him of unfinished business. The thought of his father-his brilliant, robust, powerful father-reduced to a drooling shell, bound into a wheelchair, staring at a gray infinity, was like a fire in his gut. Bourne had done that, Bourne and the woman. Not so far from here, and so close to being shot to death by him. He had no illusions when it came to Jason Bourne. The man was a magician-changing his appearance, materializing as if out of nowhere, vanishing just as mysteriously. In fact, it was Bourne who had inspired his own chameleon-like changes of identity.

His life’s work had changed the moment the shot Bourne had fired lodged in his father’s spine. The bullet had caused instant paralysis. Worse, the trauma had brought on a stroke, robbing his father of the ability to speak, or to think coherently.

Fadi had internalized his radical philosophy. As far as his followers were concerned, nothing had changed. But inside, he knew it had. Since his father’s maiming at the hands of Jason Bourne, he had his own personal agenda, which was to inflict the worst possible damage on Bourne and Soraya Moore before he killed them. A quick death for them was intolerable. He knew that, and so did his brother, Karim al-Jamil. The living death of their father had bonded them in a way nothing else could. They became one mind in two bodies, dedicated to the revenge they would wreak. And so they had applied their prodigious minds to the task.

Fadi-born Abu Ghazi Nadir al-Jamuh ibn Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib-passed a hole in the passageway on his left. Up ahead, his light picked out passageways left and right. He went several meters down each of them without finding a sign of anyone.

Deciding he’d been wrong after all, he turned back, heading toward the fork. He was hurrying now to catch up with Lieutenant Kove and his men. He desperately needed to be in on the kill. There was always the chance that in the heat of battle, his express orders to keep Bourne alive would be forgotten.

He’d just passed the hole in the passageway when he paused. Turning, he probed the darkness with his light. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but he ventured in anyway. Quite soon, he came to the debris fall. He saw the bulging walls, the substantial cracks in the stone, the groaning wooden beams. The place was a mess, undoubtedly unsafe.

Playing the beam of light over the debris, he saw that there was a small gap between the top of it and the ceiling of the chamber. He was just contemplating whether it was wide enough for a man to slither through when he heard the gunfire echoing through the catacombs.

They’ve found him! he thought. Turning on his heel, he emerged into the main passageway, heading for the fork at a dead run.

SORAYA
, flying down the passageway, felt stone fragments from the ricochets whiz by her. One struck her shoulder, almost made her cry out. She pulled it out of her on the run, dropped it for her pursuers to find. She was determined to protect Bourne, to atone for the dreadful mistake in judgment she’d made the last time they’d been in Odessa.

She had switched off her light and was traveling by memory alone, which was far from the ideal way to make her way through these catacombs. Still, she knew she had no choice. She had been counting her strides. By her calculations, rough though they might be, she was five kilometers from the fork. Another two klicks to the access nearest Dr. Pavlyna’s house.

But first she’d have to negotiate three turns, another branching. She heard something. An instant later the catacombs behind her were briefly, though dimly, lit. Someone had picked up her trail!

Taking advantage of the light to orient herself, she dashed into a tunnel on her right. Blackness, the sounds of pursuit for the moment muted.

Then the toe of her right shoe struck something. She stumbled, pitched forward onto hands and knees. She could feel the ground rise irregularly just in front of her, and her heart clenched. It could only mean a new debris fall. But how extensive was it? She’d have to risk turning on her light, if only for a second or two.

This she did, clambering up and over the new fall, continuing on. She heard no more sounds of pursuit. It was entirely possible that she’d eluded the police, but she couldn’t count on it.

She kept going, pushing herself. Around the second turn to the left she went, then the third. Approximately a kilometer ahead, she knew, was the second branching. After that, she was home free.

Fadi discovered that the police had not only caught sight of Bourne but fired at him. Without asking Kove’s permission, he struck the offending officer a terrible blow that nearly cracked his skull. Kove stood red-faced, biting his lip. He said nothing, even when Fadi ordered them on. Several hundred meters farther, Fadi spotted a stone shard, shiny with blood in the floodlights. He picked it up, closed his fist around it, and was heartened.

But now, this far into the catacombs, he knew that following in a pack made no sense. He turned to Kove and said, “The longer he stays in the catacombs, the greater his chance of eluding us. Split up the men, let them fan out singly as they would in a forest in enemy territory.”

He could see that Kove’s men were rapidly losing their nerve-and that their anxiety was spreading to their commander. He had to get them moving now or it would happen not at all.

He drew close to Kove, whispering in the lieutenant’s ear: “We’re losing the race against time. Give the order now, or I will.”

Kove jerked as if coming in contact with a live wire. He retreated a pace, licked his lips. For a moment, he seemed mesmerized by Fadi. Then, with a minute shiver, he turned to his men and delivered the order for them to fan out, one man to a passageway or arm.

Soraya sensed the branching up ahead. A wisp of fresh air brushed her cheek like a lover’s caress: the access point. Darkness behind her. It was very damp. She could smell the rot as the underground water worked on the earth and wood, decomposing it bit by bit. She risked another flicker of light. She ignored the weeping walls, because she saw the Y juncture less than twenty meters directly ahead. Here she needed to take the left branch.

At that moment a splinter of light probed the passage behind her. At once she extinguished her light. Her pulse throbbed in her temples; her heart raced. Had her pursuer seen the light up ahead and realized she was here? Though she needed to continue, she nevertheless could not allow Dr. Pavlyna to be compromised. The doctor was CI, under deep cover.

She stood still, turned so that she could see the way she had come. The light was gone. No, there it was again, a tiny beacon in the pitch blackness, less diffuse now. Someone was, indeed, coming down this part of the catacombs.

Slowly, she began to back up, edging away from her pursuer, moving cautiously toward the Y

juncture, never taking her eyes from the bobbing stab of light. She kept moving, trying to decide what to do. Then it was too late.

Her back foot broke the soft surface of the catacomb floor. She tried to shift her weight forward, but the suck of the disintegrated floor pulled her backward, and down. She flung out her arms for balance, but it wasn’t enough. She had already sunk into the ooze to the level of her thighs. She began to struggle.

A sharp brightening brought the passageway into sudden focus. A black blob resolved itself into a familiar shape: a Ukrainian policeman, massive looking in the confided space.

He saw her, his eyes widened, and he drew his gun.

At precisely 10:45 PM Karim al-Jamil’s computer terminal chimed softly, reminding him that the second of his twice-daily briefings with the
DCI
was fifteen minutes away. This concerned him less than the mysterious disappearance of Matthew Lerner. He’d asked the Old Man, but the bastard had only said that Lerner was “on assignment.” That could mean anything. Like all the best schemers, Karim al-Jamil hated loose ends, which was precisely what Matthew Lerner had become. Even Anne didn’t know where the man was, an oddity in itself. Normally, she would have booked Lerner’s itinerary personally. The
DCI
was up to something. Karim al-Jamil could not discount the possibility that Lerner’s sudden disappearance had something to do with Anne. He’d have to find out, as quickly as possible. That meant dealing directly with the
DCI
.

The monitor chimed again: time to go. He scooped up the translations of the latest Dujja chatter the Typhon team had compiled, picking up a couple more as he stepped out of his office. He read them on his way up to the DCI’s suite.