The Bourne Betrayal (45 page)

The atmosphere in the War Room was tense as the images flickered across multiple screens. Every mouth was dry, every eye glued to the plasma screen that showed the progress of the four CI Chinooks over the mountainous terrain. The graphics were the same as those of a video game, but once the engagement began all similarities to a game would end.

“They’ve overflown the westernmost wadi,” the
DCI
reported. “Now all that separates them from the Dujja facility is a minor mountain chain. They’re taking the gap just to the southwest of their current position. They’ll go in two by two.”

We’ve got RF,” Marlin Dorph reported to the
DCI
. He meant radiation fog, an odd phenomenon that sometimes occurred at dawn or during the night, arising from the radiational cooling of the earth’s surface, when a layer of relatively moist air was trapped just above surface level by drier air aloft.

“Do you have visual on the target?” the DCI’s voice, thin and metallicized, buzzed in his ear.

“Negative, sir. We’re heading in for a closer look, but two of the Chinooks are holding back in perimeter formation.” He turned to Lowrie, who nodded. “Norris,” he said to the pilot in the heli on their left wing, “take ‘er down.”

He watched as the accompanying Chinook dove down, its rotors beating the RF, dissipating it.

“There!” Lowrie yelled.

Dorph could see a group of perhaps six armed men. Startled, they looked up. He allowed his eyes to follow the path they were taking, saw a cluster of low, bunkerlike buildings. They looked like structures typical of the terrorist training camps, but that’s just how Dujja would camouflage its base.

The low-flying Chinook was loosing its M230 chains: The ground erupted with a hail of 30mm rounds. The men fell, fired back, scattered, fired again, were mowed down.

“Let’s go!” Dorph spoke into his mike. “The complex is half a klick dead ahead.” The Chinook began its dive. Dorph could hear the racket increase as the other two helis left their perimeter patrol, heading in after him.

“Hellfires up!” he called. “I want one missile from each ship launched on my signal.” The different angles would cause even the most heavily reinforced walls to collapse.

He could see the other three helis as they converged on the target. “On my mark,” Dorph barked.

“Now!”

Four Hellfire missiles were loosed from the undercarriages of the Chinooks. They homed in on the building complex, detonating within seconds of one another. A ball of flame erupted. The shock wave juddered through the heli as great gouts of oily black smoke rose from the target.

Then all hell broke loose.

Soraya Moore, waiting in line to board at Atatьrk International Airport for her flight to D.C., took out her cell phone. Ever since she’d left Bourne, she’d been thinking about the situation at headquarters. Bourne was right: The false Lindros had set himself up in a perfect position. But why had he taken all this trouble to infiltrate CI? For its intel? Soraya didn’t think so. Fadi was smart enough to know that there was no way his man could smuggle the data past CI’s watertight security. He could only be there to deter Typhon’s efforts to stop Dujja. To her, that meant an offensive plan. Active disinformation. Because if CI personnel were off on a wild goose chase, Fadi and his team could sneak into the United States under the radar. It was classic misdirection, the conjuror’s oldest trick. But it was often the most effective.

She knew that Bourne had said they couldn’t approach the
DCI
, but she could do the next best thing: contact Anne Held. She could tell Anne anything; Anne would find a way to approach the Old Man without anyone else knowing. That effectively cut out the mole, whoever he might be.

Soraya moved forward in the line. The flight was boarding. She thought through her idea again, then dialed Anne’s private number. It rang and rang, and she found herself praying that Anne would answer. She didn’t dare leave a voice-mail message, not even for Anne to call her back. On the seventh ring Anne answered.

“Anne, thank God.” The line was moving in earnest now. “It’s Soraya. Listen, I have very little time. I’m on my way back to D.C. Don’t say anything until I’ve finished. I’ve discovered that the Martin Lindros whom Bourne brought back from Ethiopia is an impostor.”

“An impostor?”

“That’s what I said.”

“But that’s impossible!”

“I know it sounds crazy.”

“Soraya, I don’t know what’s happened to you over there, but believe me, Lindros is who he says he is. He even passed the retinal scan.”

“Please, let me finish. This man-whoever he is-is working for Fadi. He’s been planted to throw us off Dujja’s trail. Anne, I need you to tell the Old Man.”

“Now I know you’ve gone crackers. I tell the Old Man that Lindros is a plant and he’ll have me institutionalized.”

Soraya was almost up to the boarding gate. She’d run out of time. “Anne, you’ve got to believe me. You have to find a way to convince him.”

“Not without some proof,” Anne said. “Anything of substance will do.”

“But I don’t-”

“I’ve got a pen. Give me your flight info. I’ll meet you at the airport myself. We’ll figure something out before we get to HQ.”

Soraya gave Anne her flight number and arrival time. She nodded to the attendant at the head of the gate as she handed over her boarding pass.

“Thanks, Anne, I knew I could count on you.”

The Sidewinder missiles came out of nowhere.

“Our right flank!” Dorph yelled, but the alarms were shrieking through the interior of the Chinook. He saw a missile make a direct hit on the lowest-flying heli. The Chinook burst into a fireball, at once engulfed in the fierce stream of smoke rising from the ruined buildings. A second heli, in the process of taking evasive maneuvers, was struck in its tail. The entire rear section flew apart; the rest lurched over on its side and spiraled down into the raging inferno.

Dorph forgot about the remaining heli; he needed to concentrate on his own. He staggered over to the pilot just as the Chinook heeled over in the first of its evasive maneuvers.

“Incoming locked, Skip,” the pilot said. “It’s right on our tail.” As he twisted and turned the joystick, the Chinook made a series of stomach-churning loops and dives.

“Keep on it,” Dorph said. He signed to the ordnance officer. “I need you to remote-set a multioption fuze for five seconds.”

The officer’s eyes opened. “That’s cutting it mighty close, Skip. We could be caught up in the blast.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Dorph said. “Sort of.”

He glanced out the window as the officer went to work. Not a hundred meters from him another Sidewinder missile found its target, detonating amidships. The third Chinook dropped like a stone. That left only them.

“Skip, ordnance closing on us,” the pilot said. “I can’t keep this up for much longer.”

Hopefully you won’t have to, Dorph thought. He slapped the pilot on the shoulder. “On my mark, veer to the left and down, steep as you can make it. Got it?”

The pilot nodded. “Roger that, Skip.”

“Keep a firm hand,” Dorph told him. He could hear the shrill scream as the Sidewinder tore up the air in its attempt to get to them. They were running out of time.

The ordnance officer nodded to Dorph. “All set, Skip.”

“Let ‘er rip,” Dorph said.

There was a small chirrup as the Hydra 70 rocket was fired. Dorph counted: “One-two.” He slapped the pilot. “Now!”

At once the heli dove sharply to its left, then down. The ground was coming up fast when the Hydra detonated. The blast threw everyone forward and to their right. Dorph could feel the heat even through the armored skin of the Chinook. That was the bait, and the Sidewinder-an air-to-air weapon guided by a heat-seeking mechanism-headed straight into the heart of it, blowing itself to smithereens.

The Chinook shuddered, hesitated as the pilot struggled to pull it out of the dive, then-swinging like a pendulum-righted itself.

“Nicely done.” Dorph squeezed the pilot’s shoulder. “Everyone okay?” He saw the nods and uptilted thumbs out of the corner of his eye. “Okay, now we go after the hostile aircraft that shot our guys down.”

After Soraya left for the airport, Bourne began to make his plans to find and interrogate Nesim Hatun, the man who had hired Yevgeny Feyodovich. According to Yevgeny, Hatun worked out of the Sultanahmet District, which was some distance from where he was now.

He was almost dead on his feet. He hadn’t let himself think about it, but the knife wound Fadi had inflicted was seriously sapping his strength. His fight with Matthew Lerner had done more damage to his body. He knew it would be foolish, possibly suicidal, to seek out Nesim Hatun in his present condition.

Therefore, he went looking for an El Achab. Strictly speaking, these traditional herbalists were centered in Morocco. However, Turkey’s many microclimates nurtured more than eleven thousand plant species, so it was hardly surprising that there should be among the many shops in Istanbul an apothecary overseen by a Moroccan expert in phytochemistry.

After forty-five minutes of wandering and asking passersby and shopkeepers, he found just such a place. It was in the middle of a bustling market, a tiny storefront with narrow, dusty windows and a certain flyblown air.

Inside, El Achab sat on a stool grinding herbs into powder with a mortar and pestle. He looked up as Bourne came toward him, his eyes watery and myopic.

The atmosphere was dense, almost suffocatingly so, with the sharp, unfamiliar odors of dried herbs, grasses, stalks, mushrooms, leaves, spoors, flower petals, and more. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with wooden drawers and cubbyholes that held the herbalist’s vast stock. What light penetrated the dusty windows was defeated by the aromatic dust accumulated by years of grinding.

“Yes?” El Achab said in Moroccan-inflected Turkish. “How may I help?”

By way of reply, Bourne stripped to the waist, revealing his bandaged wounds, his livid bruises, his cuts etched in dried blood.

El Achab crooked a long forefinger. He was a small man, thin to the point of emaciation, with the dark, leathery skin of a desert dweller. “Closer, please.”

Bourne did as he asked.

The herbalist’s watery eyes blinked heavily. “What do you require?”

“To keep going,” Bourne said in Moroccan Arabic.

El Achab rose, went to a drawer, and took out what looked like a handful of goat hair. “Huperzia serrata. A rare moss found in northern China.” He sat down at his stool, set aside his mortar and pestle, began to tear the dried moss into small bits. “Believe it or not, everything you need is in here. The moss will counteract the inflammation that is draining your body of energy. At the same time, it will vastly heighten your mental acuity.”

He turned, took a kettle off a hot plate, poured some water just under the boiling point into a copper teapot. Then he dropped the tufts of moss into the pot, poured more water in, set the lid on the teapot, and placed the kettle beside the mortar and pestle.

Bourne, rebuttoning his shirt, sat on a wooden stool.

They waited in companionable silence for the herbal “tea” to steep. El Achab’s eyes might have been watery and myopic, but they nevertheless took in every feature of Bourne’s face. “Who are you?”

Bourne replied, “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps one day you will.”

The steeping was done. El Achab used his long fingers to pour a precise amount into a glass. It was thick, dark, impenetrable, and from it issued the odor of a bog.

“Now drink.” He held out the glass. “All of it. At once, please.”

The taste was unspeakable. Nevertheless, Bourne swallowed every last drop.

“Within an hour your body will feel stronger, your mind more vibrant,” El Achab said. “The process will continue for several days.”

Bourne rose, thanking the man as he paid. Back outside in the market, he went first into a clothing store and bought himself a traditional Turkish outfit, right down to the thin soled shoes. The proprietor directed him back to Istiklal Caddesi, across the Golden Horn from Sultanahmet. There he entered a theatrical supply shop where he chose a beard, along with a small metal can of spirit gum. In front of the shop’s mirror, he affixed the beard.

He then rummaged through the shop’s other offerings, buying what he needed, stuffing everything into a small, battered secondhand leather satchel. All the while he shopped, he was filled with an implacable rage. He couldn’t get out of his mind what Veintrop and Fadi had done to him. His enemy had insinuated himself inside his head, subtly influencing Bourne’s thoughts, destabilizing his decisions. How had Fadi planted Veintrop in the real Sunderland’s office?

Taking out his cell, he scrolled down to Sunderland’s number and punched in the overseas codes, then the eleven-digit number. The office wasn’t open at this hour, but a recorded voice asked if he wanted to make an appointment, wanted Dr. Sunderland’s office hours, wanted directions from Washington, Maryland, or Virginia. He wanted the second option, definitely. The recorded voice told him the doctor’s hours were from 10 AM to 6 PM Monday, and Wednesday through Friday. The office was closed on Tuesday. Tuesday was the day he’d seen Sunderland. Who had made the appointment for him?

Sweat broke out along his hairline as his heart beat faster. How had Fadi’s people known that he was taking Fadi out of the cage? Soraya had made the call to Tim Hytner, which was why Bourne had suspected him of being the mole. But Hytner wasn’t. Who had access to CI-net cell calls? Who could possibly be eavesdropping except the mole? That would be the same person who had made his appointment with Sunderland on the day the doctor wouldn’t be at his office.

Anne Held!

Oh, Christ, he thought. The Old Man’s right hand. It couldn’t be. And yet it was the only explanation that made sense of the recent history. Who better for Fadi, for anyone wanting to know what took place in the center of the CI web?

His fingers worked his cell phone. He needed to warn Soraya before she boarded the plane. But her voice mail picked up immediately, which meant her phone was already off. She’d boarded, was on her way to D.C., to disaster.