The Bourne Betrayal (50 page)

It was difficult not to believe that Fadi himself was keeping an eye on him, if not always in person, then by periodically reviewing the video tapes of him in his cell. How the terrorist must glaot every time he saw Lindros prowling back and forth. Was he looking forward to the moment when he imagined Lindros would make the break from human being to animal? Lindros was certain of it, and his fists turned white as they trembled at his side.

The door to his cell banged open, admitting Fadi, his face dark with fury. Without a word he strode to Lindros and struck him a massive blow to the side of the head. Lindros fell to the concrete floor, stunned and sickened. Fadi kicked him.

“Bourne is dead. Do you hear me, Lindros? Dead!” There was a terrifying edge to Fadi’s voice, a slight tremor that spoke of being pushed to the edge of an emotional abyss. “The unthinkable has happened. I have been cheated of the revenge I meticulously planned. All undone by the unforeseen.”

Lindros, recovering, hauled himself up on one elbow. “The future is unforeseen,” he said. “It’s unknowable.”

Fadi squatted down, his face almost touching Lindros’s. “Infidel. Allah knows the future; He shows it to the righteous.”

“Fadi, I pity you. You can’t see the truth even when it’s staring you in the face.”

His face a twisted fist of rage, Fadi grabbed Lindros and threw him to the floor of the cell. His hands closed over the other man’s throat, cutting off his breath.

“I may not be able to kill Jason Bourne with my bare hands, but here you are. I will kill you instead.” His eyes fairly bulging with fury, he squeezed Lindros’s neck in a death grip. Lindros kicked and thrashed, but he had neither the strength nor the leverage to throw Fadi off him or to displace his hands.

He was losing consciousness, his good eye rolling up in its socket, when Abbud ibn Aziz appeared in the cell’s open doorway.

“Fadi-”

“Get out of here!” Fadi cried. “Leave me alone!”

Nevertheless, Abbud ibn Aziz took a step into the cell. “Fadi, it’s Veintrop.”

Fadi’s eyes showed white all around. The Desert Wind-the killing rage-had taken possession of him.

“Fadi,” Abbud persisted. “You must come now.”

Letting go of his hold, Fadi rose, turned on his second in command. “Why? Why must I come now? Tell me this instant before I kill you as well.”

“Veintrop is finished.”

“All the safeguards are in place?”

“Yes,” Abbud said. “The nuclear device is ready to be deployed.”

Tyrone was munching on a quarter-pound burger while watching with a self-taught engineer’s eye the steady climb of a massive I-beam when the severely battered Pontiac came under attack. Two men in slick business suits ran out of a black Ford that had met the Pontiac head-on. They spoke to each other, but over the construction noise he couldn’t make out the words.

He rose from a crate, his impromptu bench, and began to walk toward the men. One of them held a weapon: neither a gun nor a knife, Tyrone saw, but a Taser.

Then, as one of the men bashed in the driver’s side window of the Pontiac, Tyrone recognized him as a guard he’d seen outside M&N Bodywork. These people were invading his turf.

Throwing aside his burger, he began to walk quickly toward the Pontiac, which looked as if some monster twenty-wheeler had tried its best to crush it. Having bashed in the safety glass, one of the men reached through it. Then the man with the Taser thrust his right arm through the opening, using the weapon on whoever was inside. A moment later, both men began to haul out the incapacitated driver.

Tyrone was close enough now to see that the victim was a woman. They manhandled her roughly to her feet, turned her so that he saw her face. He broke out into a cold sweat. Miss Spook! His mind racing, he began to run.

With the constant din of the construction site, the men did not become aware of him until he was almost upon them. One of them took the gun from Miss S’s head, aimed it at Tyrone. Tyrone, his hands in the air, came to an abrupt halt a pace away from them. It was all he could do not to look at Miss S. Her head was hanging down on her chest; her legs looked rubbery. They had zapped her but good.

“Get the fuck out of here,” the man with the gun said. “Turn around and keep walking.”

Tyrone put a frightened look on his face. “Yessir,” he said meekly.

As he began to turn away, his hands sank to his sides. The switchblade slid into his right hand; he snikked it open and, as he whirled back, drove the blade to the hilt between the man’s ribs, as he had been taught to handle the close-on street fights of turf wars.

The man dropped his gun. His eyes rolled up and his legs gave out. The other man groped for his Taser, but he had Miss S to consider. He threw her back against the crumpled side of the Pontiac just as Tyrone’s fist shattered the cartilage in his nose. Blood flew out, blinding him. Tyrone drove a knee into his groin, then took his head between his hands, slamming it into the Pontiac’s side mirror.

As the man crumpled to the ground, Tyrone delivered a vicious kick to his side, stoving in a handful of ribs. He bent, retrieved his switchblade. Then he hoisted Miss S over his shoulder, took her to the idling Ford, laid her carefully on the backseat. As soon as he slid behind the wheel, he once again checked out the construction site. Luckily, the Pontiac had blocked the workmen’s view. They’d seen nothing of the incident.

He spat out of the side window in the direction of the fallen men. Putting the
SUV
into gear, he drove off, careful not to exceed the speed limit. The last thing he needed now was for a cop to pull him over for a traffic violation.

Snaking up the hillside, Bourne passed one wooden villa after another, built in the nineteenth century by Greek and Armenian bankers. Today they were owned by the billionaires of Istanbul, whose businesses, like those of their Ottoman ancestors, spanned the known world.

While he rode, keeping track of Muta ibn Aziz, he thought about Fadi’s brother, Karim, the man who had taken Martin Lindros’s face, his right eye, his identity. On the surface, he was just about the last person anyone would expect to be directly involved in Dujja’s plan. He was, after all, the scion of the family, the man who had stepped in to run Integrated Vertical Technologies when his father had been incapacitated by Bourne’s bullet. He was the legitimate brother, the businessman, just like the businessmen who had built these modern-day palaces.

And now, for the first time, Bourne understood the depth of the obsession the two brothers felt in avenging their sister’s murder. Sarah had been the family’s shining star, the repository of the Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib honor that stretched back over the centuries, over the endless wastes of the Arabian desert, over time itself. Theirs was an honor embedded in the three-thousand-year history of the Arabian peninsula, of the Sinai, of Palestine. Their ancestors had come out of the desert, had come back from defeat after defeat, erasing ignominious retreat to take back the Arabian peninsula from their enemies. Their patriarch, Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, was one of the great Islamic reformists. In the middle 1700s, he had joined forces with Muhammad ibn Saud to create a new political entity. A hundred fifty years later, the two families captured Riyadh, and modern Saudi Arabia was born.

Difficult as it was for a Westerner to understand, Sarah ibn Ashef embodied all of that. Of course her brothers would move heaven and earth to kill her murderer. This was why they had taken the time to weave Bourne’s utter destruction-first of mind, then of body. Because it would not be enough for them merely to seek him out and put a bullet through the back of his head. No, the plan was to break him, then to have Fadi kill him with bare hands. Nothing less would do.

Bourne knew that the news of his death would send both brothers into a frenzy. In this unstable state they were more apt to make a mistake. All the better for him.

He needed to tell Soraya the identity of the man who was pretending to be Martin Lindros. Pulling out his cell phone, he punched in the country and city code, then her number. The act of dialing brought home to him that he hadn’t heard from her. He glanced at his watch. Unless it had been badly delayed, her flight would have landed in Washington by now.

Once again, she wasn’t answering, and now he began to worry. For security reasons he didn’t leave another message. After all, he was supposed to be dead. He prayed that she hadn’t fallen into enemy hands. But if the worst had happened, he had to protect himself from Karim, who would no doubt check her cell for incoming and outgoing calls. He made a mental note to try her again in an hour or so. That would be just after seven, less than an hour before Muta ibn Aziz was due to leave Bьyьkada to wherever Fadi was now.

“The endgame has begun,” the messenger had told Hatun. Bourne felt a chill run down his spine. So little time to find Fadi, to stop him from detonating the nuclear device.

According to the map he had purchased on the ferry, the island consisted of two hills separated by a valley. He was now climbing the southern hill, Yule Tepe, on top of which sat the twelfth-century St. George’s Monastery. As he rose in elevation, the road turned into a path. By this time, the palm trees had given way to thick, pine-forested swaths, shadowed, mysterious, deserted. The villas, too, had fallen away.

The monastery consisted of a series of chapels over three levels, along with several outbuildings. The blip that represented Muta ibn Aziz’s position had remained stationary for some minutes. The way became too rocky and uneven for the bike. Plucking his satchel from the basket, Bourne set the bicycle aside, continuing on foot.

He saw no tourists, no caretakers; no one at all. But then the hour was growing late; darkness had descended. Skirting the ramshackle main building itself, he made his way farther up the hillside. According to the transponder, Muta ibn Aziz was inside the small building dead ahead. Lamplight glowed through the windowpanes.

As he approached, the blip started to move. Shrinking back under the protection of a towering pine, he watched as Fadi’s messenger, holding an old-fashioned oil lantern, came out of the building and headed off between two colossal chunks of stone into the thicket of the pine forest.

Bourne made a quick recon of the area, assuring himself that no one was watching the building. Then he slipped in through the scarred wooden door into the cool interior. Oil lamps had been lit against the darkness. His map identified this building as having once been used as an asylum for the criminally insane. The interior was fairly bare; clearly it was unused now. However, evidence of its grisly past was evident. The stone floor was studded with iron rings, which presumably had been used to bind the inmates when they became violent. An open doorway to the left led into a small room, empty save for some tarps and various workers’ implements.

He returned to the main room. Against a line of windows facing north toward the woods was a long refectory table of dark wood. On the table, within a generous oval of lamplight, lay unfolded a large sheet of thick paper. Going over to it, Bourne saw that it was a map with a flight plan plotted on it. He studied it, fascinated. The air route led southeast across almost the entire length of Turkey, the southernmost tip of Armenia and Azerbaijan, out over the Caspian Sea, then, transversing a section of Iran, diagonally across the width of Afghanistan, with a landing in the mountainous region just across the border, in terrorist-infested western Pakistan.

So it wasn’t a boat Muta ibn Aziz was going to use to leave Bьyьkada. It was a private jet with permission to enter Iranian airspace and enough fuel capacity to make the thirty-five-hundredkilometer trip without refueling.

Bourne looked out the window at the dense pine forest into which Muta ibn Aziz had disappeared. He was wondering where in that mass a landing strip suitable for a jet could be hidden when he heard a noise. He was in the process of turning around when pain exploded in the back of his head. He had the sensation of falling. Then blackness.

ANNE
HAD
NEVER
seen Jamil so angry. He was angry at the
DCI
. He was angry at her. He didn’t hit her or scream at her. He did something far worse: He ignored her.

As she went about her work, Anne grieved inside with a desperation she had thought she had left behind. There was a certain mind-set to being a mistress, something you had to get used to, like the dull pain of a dying tooth. You had to learn to be without your lover on birthdays, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, the anniversary of your meeting, the first time you slept together, the first time he stayed the night, the first breakfast, eaten with the naked delight of children. All these things were denied a mistress.

At first, Anne had found this peculiar aloneness intolerable. She tried to call him when he could not be with her on the days-and nights!-she craved him the most. Until he explained to her carefully but firmly that she could not. When he wasn’t physically with her, she was to forget he existed. How can I do that? she had wailed inside her head while she smiled, nodding her assent. It was vital, she knew, that he believe she understood. Instinct warned her that if he didn’t, he would turn away from her. If he did, she would surely die.

So she pretended for him, for her own survival. And gradually she learned how to cope. She didn’t forget he existed, of course. That was impossible. But she came to see her time with him as if it were a movie she went to see now and again. In between, she could keep the movie in her head, as anyone does with the movies they adore, ones they long to see again and again. In this way, she was able to live her life in a more or less normal manner. Because deep down where she dared to look only infrequently, she knew that without him at her side her life was only half lived.

And now, because she had allowed Soraya to escape, he wasn’t speaking to her at all. He passed by her desk on his way to and from meetings with the Old Man as if she didn’t exist, ignored the swelling of her left cheek where Soraya’s elbow had connected. The worst had happened, the one thing that had terrified her from the moment she had fallen deeply, madly, irretrievably in love with him: She had failed him.