The Bourne Betrayal (59 page)

Lindros nodded. What else could he do? They’d run out of time. He could hear a distant roaring, becoming louder, harsher, closer with each beat of his heart. Water! he thought. Good Lord, Jason’s flooding the facility!

Without another word he strode into the surgery, Katya following several paces behind, her rifle at the ready. In the last few minutes since they’d left the comm room, she’d studied Lindros, thought she had a semblance of knowledge of how to use this instrument of death.

Lindros advanced on Dr. Andursky who, through all of this, had remained in the same position, cowering behind the table on which he had taken out Lindros’s eye. His gaze was locked on Martin much as a rabbit will crouch, mesmerized, as the owl swoops silently down out of the twilight to snatch it up in its powerful talons.

As he went through the surgery, Lindros had to struggle to keep his gorge down, to keep the sickly sweet scent of the anesthetic from clogging his nostrils. He had to fight all over again the terror of helplessness and rage that had all but paralyzed him upon awakening to discover what had been stolen from him.

And yet here was Dr. Andursky in front of him, here he was gripped by Lindros’s taloned fingers, scoring the flesh of his chest.

“Hello, Doctor,” Lindros said.

“No, please don’t. I didn’t want to. They made me.”

“Please enlighten me, Doctor. After all the little boys they supplied you-they made you pluck out my eye? They insisted you do it-or what? They would refuse to service you?”

“Martin,” Katya called, wide-eyed with fear. “Our time has run out. Come on now! Please, for the love of God!”

“Yes, yes, listen to her. Have mercy.” Andursky was actually weeping now, his body quaking in much the same way as the walls around them had begun to quake. “You don’t understand. I’m weak.”

“And I,” Lindros said, “gather strength with every breath I take.” He drew Andursky to him, until they stood intimate as lovers. Now it was different. The end would not be the same.

Drawing on an enormous wellspring of strength, Lindros pressed his thumbs into Andursky’s eyes.

Andursky shrieked and thrashed about, desperately trying to get away. But Lindros had him in an unbreakable death grip. Every fiber of his being was directed toward one end. In a kind of ecstatic semi-trance, he felt the soft, springy tissue of the eyeballs beneath the pads of his thumbs. He drew in a breath, expelled it as he drove his thumbs slowly, inexorably into Andursky’s eye sockets.

The surgeon shrieked again, a sharp inhuman noise abruptly cut off as Lindros shoved his thumbs all the way in. Andursky danced for a little, his autonomous nervous system flickering with whatever galvanic energy remained inside his body. Then that, too, was gone and, released from Lindros’s grip, he slithered to the floor as if all his bones had dissolved.

FADI
HEARD
the screams of pain from the facility he had designed and helped build, saw the cracks shoot through the reinforced concrete as if lightning was streaking through it. Then a throaty roar echoed through the corridors and he knew the water was coming, gallons of water, tons of it flooding the labs, and all he could think of was the nuclear device.

He tore along the corridors past the elevator. He pushed past milling guards, who looked to him for guidance. He ordered them to the front entrance to find Bourne, then he forgot about them. They were all cannon fodder anyway. What did it matter if they died? There were more where they came from, an endless supply of young men clamoring to follow him, eager to die for him, to martyr themselves for the cause, the dream that one day they would live in a world of righteousness, a world without the infidel.

That this frankly brutal outlook had been forced on him by his enemies was a given, a watchword by which he’d lived his entire adult life. He told himself as much several times a day, although it never occurred to him that he needed to justify to himself any of his decisions or actions. His mind, his heart, and his hand were guided by Allah; this he believed absolutely. The possibility that their plan might not succeed had until now never entered his mind. Now that thought superseded all others, even his obsessive need to revenge himself for the crippling of his father or the death of his sister.

Racing down the stairs, he found the lower level already calf-deep in water. He pulled his Glock 36, checked the .45 to make sure it was fully loaded. The water lapped at his legs, rising with every step he took. He felt as if he were walking against the tide, the sensation bringing him back to the encounter with Bourne under the pier in Odessa. How he wished he’d finished him off there. Except for the damn dog, he felt certain he would have.

But this was no time for recriminations, and he was not a man who dwelled on what-ifs. He was a pragmatist, which dictated that he get to the heli with its all-important payload. What was unfortunate was that the secret exit to the camouflaged helipad was at the rear of the lower level. This location had been deliberate, for the exit was nearest the nuclear facilities where, Fadi had surmised, he would need to be if the facility was ever discovered and raided.

What he hadn’t counted on was the raiding party discovering the underground river. The section of the facility he sought was also where the water was gushing in at the fastest rate. Once he got to his destination, however, he’d be all right, since the helipad had wide drainage apertures all around its perimeters. This thought occupied him as he ran past the open door to the surgery and saw Katya. Ludicrously, she held one of his own semiautomatics in both hands. But it wasn’t Veintrop’s wife that so arrested him. Rather, it was the sight of Martin Lindros standing, bloody-handed, over the corpse of the man who had maimed him, Dr. Andursky.

The singsong lilt of Arabic threaded through the darkness beneath the mortuary. Karim’s men were praying, their bodies bowed toward Mecca. From the bottom of the ramp illumination spread upward like the fingers of a hand. Tyrone was wearing sneakers, but Soraya had taken off her shoes to silence her footfalls.

Moving cautiously toward the lower end of the ramp, Soraya and Tyrone peered into the basement. The first thing Soraya saw were the two vehicles they had been following: the white Chevy and the black Ford. Behind them was what looked to be a gleaming black limo. On the left side of the Ford, four men were lined up, kneeling on small prayer rugs, their foreheads to the low nap. To the right was a glass-paned door. Soraya craned her neck but could not get a good angle at which to see through the door’s glass.

They waited. At length, the prayers ended. The men rose, rolled their rugs, and stowed them away. Then the group broke up. Two of the men disappeared up a stainless-steel spiral staircase to the mortuary proper. The remaining pair snapped on latex gloves, opened the Ford’s doors, and proceeded to go over it as thoroughly and meticulously as a professional forensics team.

Soraya, curious about what lay behind the glass-paned door, signed to Tyrone to stay put and cover her, if necessary. He nodded, produced a Saturday-night special, the grips wrapped in black elecrician’s tape, and stepped back into deep shadow. Not for the first time in the last several hours, Soraya felt comforted to have him with her. He was street-savvy, knew the district in far more detail than she did.

Watching the two men examine the Ford, she waited until both their backs were turned to the mouth of the ramp, then ran silently to the door. Twisting the knob, she opened it and slipped through.

At once she was suffused with a deep chill that emanated from the cold rooms where the corpses were kept. She was confronted with a short, wide corridor off which six open doorways presented themselves. Peeking around the corner of the first one, she came upon the bodies of the two men who had attacked her at the construction site. In accordance with austere Saudi Islamic tradition, they had been placed on bare wooden slabs and were draped in the simplest cloth robes. There would be no embalming of these men.

Her heart leapt. The corpses were the first hard evidence she had that Karim was working with a cadre of Dujja terrorists inside the district. How had they all missed this Dujja sleeper cell right under their noses? State-of-the-art surveillance equipment was all well and good, but even the best electronic net couldn’t catch every human being who slipped inside America’s borders.

The second and third rooms she came to were empty, but in the fourth a dark-complected man with his back to her was bent over an embalming table. He wore latex gloves and was using a machine to pump the body laid out on the table with the ghastly pink embalming fluid. He would stop every so often, put aside the probe, then use his hands to knead the fish-white flesh in order to effect the even circulation of fluids through the corpse’s veins and arteries.

As he moved from the corpse’s right side to its left, Soraya was able to see the head, then the face of the deceased. As soon as her brain passed though its shock phase and was able to process the image, she was compelled to bite her lip in order to stop herself from screaming.

No, she thought. Fear and panic fought for dominance inside her. It can’t be.

And yet it was.

Here in the mortuary owned and operated by Dujja was the corpse of the
DCI
. The Old Man was dead, a bullet hole drilled through his heart.

The moment he had memorized the schematic of the facility affixed to the wall, Bourne ran out of the parking area. At once he saw a group of armed Dujja running his way. Ducking back away from their fire, he climbed into the smallest vehicle. Fortunately it, like all the others, had the key already in it; there was no need to waste time hot-wiring the ignition.

He roared into the corridor, then pressed the accelerator to the floor, shooting the vehicle ahead like a bolt released from a crossbow. It plowed into the clutch of terrorists, flinging them under it or to either side. He sped down the spine of the facility until he came to the freight elevator.

As the doors opened, he drove in, crushing four more armed men. Climbing out, he pushed the button for the lower level. He grabbed one of the semiautomatics as the oversize cab began to descend.

Reaching its destination, the elevator came to a halt, but its doors refused to open. Water was leaking in from the corridor outside. Opening the panel in the side wall, he pressed the manual release. This, too, was inoperative.

Bourne climbed onto the vehicle’s roof. Bracing himself, he slammed the butt of the semiautomatic repeatedly against the small square door in the cab’s roof. Finally it gave. He shoved it out of the way and, slinging the weapon across his back, hoisted himself up. On top of the cab, he knelt down by the side of an oblong control box and opened it. Inside he found the circuit that operated the doors. He took its wires and diverted them to the lift mechanism’s power source. The doors slid open, a heavy slosh of water roiling into the elevator.

Back behind the wheel, he put the vehicle in gear, then screeched out into the waterlogged lower level. He headed toward the nuclear labs, gunning the engine as the water level rose. In a moment it would be high enough to flood the engine. Unless he kept going it would conk out altogether, and his advantage would disappear.

But a moment later, the vehicle’s use ran its course anyway. Dead ahead of him he saw Fadi standing in the center of the corridor, blocking his way. Held in front of him in the crook of Fadi’s powerful left arm was Martin Lindros. In Fadi’s right hand was a Glock 36, the muzzle pressed to Martin’s temple.

“My pursuit of you ends here, Bourne!” Fadi shouted over the roar of the incoming water and the noise of the vehicle’s engine. “Turn off the ignition! Out of the car! Now!”

Bourne did as Fadi ordered. Now, closer, he saw something in Fadi’s right ear. A wireless earpiece. He had been monitoring the communications.

“Get rid of that rifle! All your weapons! Now, keeping your hands where I can see them, walk very slowly toward me.”

Bourne sloshed through the water, his eyes on Martin’s ruined face. His one eye glared at Bourne with a fierce pride. He intuited that Lindros was going to make a move, and wanted to warn him against it; Bourne had his own plan for dealing with Fadi. But Lindros had always wanted to be a hero.

Sure enough, a scalpel appeared in Martin’s left hand. As he drove it into the meat of Fadi’s thigh, Fadi fired the Glock. He’d been aiming for Lindros’s brain, but the stab caused an involuntary spasm of shock and pain so that, instead, the bullet ran along Lindros’s jaw. Still, it was a .45. Martin’s body was launched through the doorway, into the surgery beyond.

Bourne leapt. His leading shoulder struck Fadi in the solar plexus as the terrorist was wrestling the scalpel out of his muscle. Both of them fell backward into the water, now as high as their knees. Bourne got his hand on the Glock and wrestled it upward, so that it fired harmlessly into the air. At the same time Fadi wrenched the scalpel out of his thigh and, seeking to finishing what he had started, stabbed it toward Bourne’s left side.

Bourne was ready. He lifted the Glock, and Fadi’s right hand with it, so that the blade skimmed off the gun’s thick barrel. Fadi realized the gun was useless in the water, released it, and, grabbing Bourne by the shirtfront, flipped him over onto his back. Using his right elbow, he kept Bourne’s head under the water while he stabbed downward again and again with the point of the scalpel.

Twisting and writhing his torso, Bourne sought to keep the keen-edged blade away from him. At the same time he reached up so that his hands and forearms were out of the water. Marshaling all the power of his shoulders, he slammed the heels of his hands against Fadi’s ears. The terrorist arched back, his hands clutching his right ear. Bourne’s blow had driven the wireless transceiver through his eardrum, rupturing it and the canal behind it.

Fadi lost the scalpel, then his balance. Bourne, sensing this, scissor-kicked, twisting himself onto one hip as he did so. The maneuver threw Fadi off far enough for him to rise up above the waterline.