The Bourne Dominion (45 page)

“Pardon me,” Bourne said in Arabic. “This is my first visit to Damascus. Could you recommend a good hotel to stay at?”

The officer stared at Bourne as if he were an insect, then grunted. Bourne bumped against him as he was getting out of the way of a woman being escorted off the plane in a wheelchair. Bourne apologized, the security officer shrugged while he was writing down his recommendations. Thanking him, Bourne walked off with his clearance card.

He was already behind the rest of the debarking passengers and now he fell farther back. Then he saw what he was looking for: a door marked
NO ADMITTANCE. OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY
. Beside the door was an electronic reader. He swiped the stolen card and pushed the door open. He had no idea who would be monitoring passengers going through Immigration, he only knew he didn’t want to be identified entering Damascus by anyone, especially Severus Domna.

He took the back halls of the airport, unsure of where he was going
until he found a fire-drill map of the area screwed to a wall. In fifteen seconds he had memorized the map and had worked out the route he wanted to take.

S
oraya felt herself being dragged backward, the cold metal of the gun’s muzzle hard against the side of her head. Seeing the security guards hesitate, she felt disoriented. Didn’t these men work for El-Arian? Then they parted and she saw Aaron, Jacques Robbinet, and a young man she didn’t recognize, who was scrutinizing her with a cold physician’s eye. The entire ground floor had been evacuated.

“Put the weapon down,” Aaron said. He was armed, as well, with a SIG. Aaron advanced between the two guards. “Put it down, let the woman go, and we’ll all walk out of here peacefully.”

“There is no chance of peace,” El-Arian said, “here or anywhere.”

“There’s nowhere to run,” Aaron said as he took a step forward. “This can end well, or end badly.”

“It will surely end badly for her,” El-Arian said, jamming the muzzle of the pistol into Soraya’s head so hard that she made a low sound in her throat. “Unless you move aside and allow us safe passage.”

“Let the woman go and we’ll discuss it,” Robbinet said.

El-Arian’s lip curled upward. “I won’t even dignify that suggestion with a response,” he said. “I am not afraid to die.” He rubbed his cheek against Soraya’s hair. “The same cannot be said for your agent.”

“She’s not our agent,” Aaron said.

“I’m done listening to your lies.” El-Arian dragged Soraya down the stairs. “She and I are going to walk across the floor and out the door. We’ll disappear and that will be the end of it.”

As he took the last several steps down to the marble floor, Robbinet ordered the guards to move back. El-Arian smiled. Aaron looked into Soraya’s eyes.
What is he trying to tell me?
she asked herself.

El-Arian apparently saw the look, too, because he said to Aaron, “If you kill me, you’ll kill her as well. Her death will be your responsibility. Are you a gambling man? Are you willing to take on that weight?”

As he spoke, El-Arian moved across the floor. The space echoed with their footfalls, the vast empty space an arena where, Soraya supposed, the end of her life might play out. She knew that Aaron had given her a signal. If her head had been clear, if the pounding weren’t making her wince with every agonizing throb, she would know what part he wanted her to play in the endgame, because she had no doubt Aaron had an endgame in mind. She would have, if she were in his position.

They were almost to the front door now, Aaron and Robbinet shadowing their every step. She felt helpless, like every damsel in distress in every action movie ever made, and this angered her to such a degree that she shoved the pain into a dark corner, holding it at bay while she tried to figure out…

Position! That was it! Aaron was moving into position to make a kill shot. He would do it just as El-Arian reached the door—that’s when she would do it. She could see Aaron moving into position, approximately forty-five degrees to the rear of El-Arian’s right shoulder. That was the vulnerable spot—the head shot.

But she had looked into her captor’s eyes and she knew his heart, she knew that he would not go down easily, that his first instinct would be to shoot Aaron, not her. It would be the soldier’s reflex action—to fire back at his attacker—one El-Arian couldn’t control. He might shoot Aaron and then her before he went down, but for certain Aaron was in mortal danger. One man she cared about was already dead because of her. She would not allow another to die.

This decision was what drove the pain racking her skull down farther, the adrenaline pumping through her, the certain desire to do this one last thing that would give her a sense of rightness, of completion, of her life—and death—having meaning. Like El-Arian, she was not afraid to die. In fact, she had considered it an inevitability when she had chosen fieldwork. But she was not a martyr; she loved life, and there was a sadness in her even as she and El-Arian reached the door, as she saw Aaron’s SIG come up, as she slammed the back of her head against El-Arian, as she drove an elbow into his kidney, as she became his assailant, not Aaron.

She heard Aaron shout, felt the air go out of El-Arian. Then she was in the eye of a monstrous thunderstorm that blew her sideways. She tasted her own blood, she was falling, the pain in her head vanished.

Then everything was obliterated by absolute stillness.

D
amascus spread out before Bourne as he took a taxi in from the airport. The sun-washed morning bounced off the windshield and set fire to the hood as they rumbled through the streets. He had the taxi let him off several blocks from the section of Avenue Choukry Kouatly that was his destination, then walked the rest of the way, losing himself within the drifts of pedestrians. Taking a quick, covert circuit of El-Gabal’s geometric Syrian modernist building, he scoped out the three entrances and the security at each. The front entrance, all glass and hammered steel, had no overt security presence, but taking his time paid off, as at intervals of precisely three minutes, he observed a pair of uniformed guards passing in front of the glass doors. On the west side of the building was a single-door emergency exit. The metal door looked solid, made to seem impregnable, but Bourne knew that no door was impregnable. In the rear was a wide loading dock, which was currently empty. Beyond the dock were four wide doors, at the moment all closed. A uniformed security guard sat smoking and talking on his cell phone. Occasionally, he turned his narrowed eyes on the street, peering back and forth, checking for anything suspicious or out of place. Unlike the guards in the lobby, who carried sidearms only, this man had an AK-47 strapped across his back. At each angle, Bourne looked upward, studying the roofline and the possible means of gaining its height. There were no trees or telephone poles, but the building itself looked scalable.

He was about to depart when he heard a truck coming down the alley. The guard heard it, too, because he broke off his conversation and pressed a buzzer just to the left of the left-most door. Almost at once, the four doors lifted up. A wizened man peered out, the guard said something to him, he nodded and disappeared into the dimness of the interior.

By the time the truck rumbled, turned, and backed up to the loading dock, two men appeared. They wore sidearms. The driver got out and, leaping up onto the dock, opened the rear door with a key. He rolled the door up and stood back as the two men entered the truck’s rear. The guard had unstrapped his AK-47 and was now holding it at the ready. He was young and looked slightly nervous as he peered down the street.

Bourne shifted his position in time to see the two men unloading the first of the dozen long wooden crates containing the poisoned weapons he had seen in the warehouse in Cadiz. He recognized them by both their shape and the distinctive greenish color of the wood.

He needed to get inside to set the SIM cards, but that would have to wait until the darkness of night. He withdrew and went in search of the items he thought he’d need. He bought himself Syrian clothes that would allow him to better blend in, a glass cutter, a sturdy, wide-bladed knife, a length of electrical wire, two coils of rope of different lengths, and a pickax. Lastly, he purchased a duffel in which to carry everything, then took a taxi to the train station, where he stashed the duffel in a paid locker.

Then he went in search of a hotel, which proved problematic. The first three he entered had security personnel stationed around the lobbies. They might have belonged to the respective hotels, but he didn’t think so. He went farther afield and, on the southern outskirts, found a run-down hotel. Apart from two dusty armchairs, a pair of even dustier palm trees, and a curve-backed receptionist, the lobby was deserted. Bourne booked a room on the top floor and paid with cash. The receptionist scanned his passport with little apparent interest, marking down name, nationality, and number, then handing it back, along with the room key.

Bourne took a protesting elevator up to the sixth floor, went down a bare, odorous concrete hallway, and entered his room, a Spartan cubicle with bed, dresser, badly streaked mirror, tiny closet inhabited by a couple of roaches, and threadbare carpet. One window faced west. Beyond the grid of the fire escape lay the teeming street, the city’s unceasing daytime tumult boring its way through the glass. The bathroom, if you wanted to call it that, was down the hall.

Despite the meanness of the surroundings, Bourne had been in far worse places. He lay down and closed his eyes. It seemed like days since he had slept.

Where are you, Boris?
he wondered.
When are you coming for me?

He must have dozed off because the next thing he knew, the sun was thicker, deeper, slanting through the window, low in the sky. Late afternoon, shading into twilight. He lay still on the bed as if stunned. He felt groggy, which meant that he had been pulled prematurely out of deep REM sleep. He lay listening, but almost immediately identified a scratching at his door. It might be a rodent, but he didn’t think so.

Silently, he rose and went to the wall just behind where the door hinged open. Reaching out, he watched as the lock was slowly opened from the hallway. The doorknob began to turn and he steeled himself for whoever was coming in.

That’s when a shadow crossed his peripheral vision an instant before two men shattered the window as they leapt through.

C
hristopher Hendricks sat at his desk for fully an hour without moving or speaking to anyone. Once, his secretary came in, worried that he wasn’t answering his intercom, but one look at his ashen face and she departed.

Alone at his desk, the image of Skara frozen on the screen in front of him, he felt an existential coldness creep over him. Maggie: Her face was now a matter of colored pixels, informed by a series of 0s and 1s. This was Maggie, a mirage, a dream, an electronic fantasy. Who, then, was Skara? How had she so successfully penetrated the government’s vetting process, how had she pierced his own armor, how had she grabbed hold of his heart? Even now, with the shock of her revelations still running through him, his heart beat on to the rhythm she had set for it.

“
I have never loved anyone before you
.”

He did not know whether to believe what she said in the video.

“
Something happened when we met, a mysterious current went through me and changed me
.”

At last, at the end, had she told him the truth, or was that wishful thinking? Was her last message another lie, one to keep him from sending his people after her?

“
I’m on my final journey.
” What the hell did she mean by that? The words tolled in his head like funeral bells, sending a shiver down his spine.

His head hurt, his thoughts frantically pinwheeling, getting nowhere. He no longer knew truth from fiction because he wanted what she said to be the truth, wanted it so badly it left a metallic taste like blood in his mouth.

She was an agent, that was clear enough, and a demonically clever one. But who was she working for, and how did she know about Indigo Ridge? His mind raced backward, reliving in reverse their short but intense time together. He thought of their picnic, of what he had revealed to her—a helluva lot less than she already knew, as it turned out. It had been her idea for him to dump security for Indigo Ridge into Danziger’s lap, though he had, of course, not revealed names or places.

Why had she made that suggestion? He ran a hand across his eyes, but at once he snatched it away. He felt magnetized to her eyes, pulled toward the image on the screen. He wanted so badly to reach out and touch her—no, not merely touch her, he ached to hold her.

She had protected him, she said. What did that mean? “
Remember me when you are protecting Indigo Ridge
.”

And then he understood. She had tried to protect him by taking him off Indigo Ridge. But how had she known he was on it? The depth and accuracy of her intel boggled his mind. No wonder she had been able to fool the vetting process. He made a mental note to overhaul the entire process.

A setup. He was meant to take a fall via a video taken in Room 916 that she would disseminate. Disgraced, he would be summarily removed from Indigo Ridge and, momentarily, at least, the security would be in turmoil.

That’s when the people she was working for were going to strike!

He lunged for the phone and jabbed the red button.

“
Remember me when you are protecting Indigo Ridge
.”

I will
, he thought as he waited for the president to come on the line.
I swear I will.

T
he two men were on Bourne even as he was turning to face them. The third man came through the door unimpeded. The three men converged on Bourne. They were big, grizzly men who stank of beer and fried corn.

They might be big, but they were undisciplined—street fighters, rough and tumble. They were partial to roundhouse punches with brass knuckles and swipes with switchblades. Ripping the mirror off the wall, Bourne slammed its edge into a brass knuckle. The mirror cracked into a dozen shards, and Bourne grabbed one of the larger ones, unmindful of how it sliced into his palm, and jabbed the pointed end into one of the men’s arms. The man reeled backward into one of his compatriots.