The Bourne ultimatum (89 page)

Jason ripped the gun loose, spinning, crouching back into the wall of the small alcove as the Jackal’s fusillade blew apart the gaudy paneling of the soft-drink machine and tore into the sheets of heavy plastic that fronted the broken-down ice maker. On his stomach, Bourne surged across the opening, the Graz Burya raised and firing as fast as he could squeeze the trigger. Simultaneously, there were other gunshots,
not
those of a machine pistol. Alex was firing from inside the suite! They had Carlos in their cross fire! It was possible—it could all end in a hotel corridor in Moscow! Let it happen, let
it happen
!

The Jackal roared; it was a defiant shriek at having been hit. Bourne lunged back across the opening, pivoting once again into the wall, momentarily distracted by the sounds of a now functioning ice machine. Again he crouched, inching his face toward the corner of the archway when the murderous insanity in the hallway erupted into the fever pitch of close combat. Like an enraged caged animal, the wounded Carlos kept spinning around in place, continuous bursts from his weapon exploding as if he were firing through unseen walls that were closing in on him. Two piercing, hysterical screams came from the far end of the hallway, one male, one female; a couple had been wounded or killed in the panicked fusillade of stray bullets.

“Get
down
!” Conklin’s scream from across the corridor was an instant command for what Jason could not know. “Take
cover
! Grab the fucking walls!” Bourne did as he was told, under standing only that the order meant he was to shove himself into as small a place as possible, protecting his head as much as possible. The
corner
. He lunged as the first explosion rocked the walls—somewhere—and then a second, this much nearer, far more thunderous, in the hallway itself.
Grenades
!

Smoke mingled with falling plaster and shattered glass.
Gunshots
. Nine, one after another—a Graz Burya automatic ...
Alex
! Jason spun up and away from the corner of the recess and lurched for the opening. Conklin stood outside the door of their suite in front of the upturned room-service table; he snapped out his empty clip and furiously searched his trousers pockets. “I haven’t got one!” he shouted angrily, referring to the extra clips of ammunition supplied by Krupkin. “He ran around the corner into the other corridor, and I don’t have any goddamned
shells
!”

“I do and I’m a lot faster than you,” said Jason, removing his spent magazine and inserting a fresh clip from his pocket. “Get back in there and call the lobby. Tell them to clear it.”

“Krupkin said—”

“I don’t
give
a damn what he said! Tell them to shut down the elevators, barricade all staircase exits, and stay the hell away from this floor!”

“I see what you mean—”

“
Do
it!” Bourne raced down the hallway, wincing as he approached the couple who lay on the carpet; each moved, groaning. Their clothes were spotted with blood, but they
moved
! He turned and yelled to Alex, who was limping around the room-service table. “Get help up here!” he ordered, pointing at an exit door directly down the corridor. “They’re alive! Use that exit and
only
that one!”

The hunt began, compounded and impeded by the fact that the word had been spread throughout these adjacent wings of the Metropole’s tenth floor. It took no imagination to realize that behind the closed doors, along both sides of the hallways, panicked calls were being made to the front desk as the sound of nearby gunfire echoed throughout the corridors. Krupkin’s strategy for a KGB assault team in civilian clothes had been nullified by the first burst from the Jackal’s weapon.

Where
was
he? There was another exit door at the far end of the long hallway Jason had entered, but there were perhaps fifteen to eighteen guest-room doors lining that hallway. Carlos was no fool, and a wounded Carlos would call upon every tactic he could summon from a long life of violence and survival to survive, if only long enough to achieve the kill he wanted more than life itself. ... Bourne suddenly realized how accurate his analysis was, for he was describing himself. What had old Fontaine said on Tranquility Isle, in that faraway storeroom from which they had stared down at the procession of priests knowing that one had been bought by the Jackal? “... Two aging lions stalking each other, not caring who’s killed in the cross fire”—those had been Fontaine’s words, a man who had sacrificed his life for another he barely knew because his own life was over, for the woman he loved was gone. As Jason started cautiously, silently down the hall toward the first door on the left, he wondered if he could do the same. He wanted desperately to live—with Marie and their children—but if she was gone ... if they were gone ... would life really matter? Could he throw it away if he recognized something in another man that reflected something in himself?

No
time
. Meditate on your
own
time, David Webb! I have no use for you, you weak, soft son of a
bitch
. Get
away
from me! I have to flush out a bird of prey I’ve wanted for thirteen years. His claws are razor-sharp and he’s killed too often, too many, and now he wants to kill my own—
your
own. Get away from me!

Bloodstains
. On the dull, dark brown carpet, wet driblets glistening in the dim overhead light. Bourne crouched and felt them; they
were
wet; they were red—bloodred. Unbroken, they passed the first door, then the second, remaining on the left—then they crossed the hall, the pattern now altered, no longer steady, instead zigzagging, as if the wound had been located, the bleeding partially stemmed. The trail passed the sixth door on the right, and the seventh ... then abruptly the shining red drops stopped—
no
, not entirely. There was a trickle heading left, barely visible, and again, across the hallway—there it
was
! A faint smudge of red just above the knob on the eighth door on the left, no more than twenty feet from the corridor’s exit staircase. Carlos was behind that door holding hostage whoever was inside.

Precision was everything now, every movement, every sound concentrated on the capture or the kill. Breathing steadily while imposing a suspension of the muscular spasms he felt everywhere throughout his body, Bourne once more walked silently, now retracing his steps up the hallway. He reached a point roughly thirty paces away from the eighth door on the left and turned around, suddenly aware of a muted chorus of sporadic sobs and cries that came from closed doorways along the hotel corridor. Orders had been given couched in language far removed from Krupkin’s instructions:
Stay inside your rooms, please. Admit no one. Our people are investigating
. It was always “our people,” never “the police,” never “the authorities”; with those names came panic. And panic was precisely what Medusa’s Delta One had in mind. Panic and diversion, eternal components for the human snare, lifelong allies in the springing trap.

He raised the Graz Burya automatic, aiming at one of the ornate hallway chandeliers, and fired twice, simultaneously shouting furiously as the earsplitting explosions accompanied the shattered glass that plummeted from the ceiling. “There he
goes
! A black suit!” His feet pounding, Bourne ran with loud emphatic strides down the corridor to the eighth door on the left, then
past
the door, shouting once again. “The exit ... the
exit
!” He abruptly stopped, firing a third shot into another chandelier, the jarring cacophony covering the absent noise of his pounding feet as he spun around, throwing his back against the opposing wall of the eighth door, then pushing himself away, hurling his body at the door and crashing into it, smashing it off its hinges as he. lurched inside, plunging to the floor, his weapon raised, prepared for rapid fire.

He was
wrong
! He knew it instantly—a final reverse trap was in the making! He heard another door opening somewhere outside—he either heard it or he instinctively
knew
it! He rolled furiously to his right, over and over again, his legs crashing into a floor lamp, sending it toward the door, his panicked darting eyes catching a glimpse of an elderly couple clutching each other, crouching in a far corner.

The white-gowned figure burst into the room, his automatic pistol spitting indiscriminately, the staccato reports deafening. Bourne fired repeatedly into the mass of white as he sprang into the left wall, knowing that if for only a split second he was positioned on the killer’s blind right flank. It was
enough
!

The Jackal was caught in his shoulder—his right shoulder! The weapon literally snapped out of his grip as he jerked up his forearm, his fingers spastically uncurled under the impact of the Graz Burya’s penetration. With no cessation of movement, the Jackal swung around, the bloody long white robe separating, billowing like a sail as he grabbed the massive flesh wound with his left hand and violently kicked the floor lamp into Jason’s face.

Bourne fired again, half blinded by the flying shade of the heavy lamp, his weapon deflected by the thick stem. The shot went wild; steadying his hand, he squeezed the trigger again, only to hear the sickening finality of a sharp metallic click—the gun’s magazine was empty! Struggling to a crouch, he lunged for the blunt, ugly automatic weapon as the white-robed Carlos raced through the shattered doorway into the corridor. Jason got to his feet, but his knee collapsed! It had buckled under his own weight. Oh,
Christ
! He crawled to the edge of the bed and dived over the pulled-down sheets toward the bedside telephone—it had been demolished, the Jackal had shot it apart! Carlos’s demented mind
was
summoning up every tactic, every counteraction he had ever used.

Another sound! This loud and abrupt. The crash bar on the hallway’s stairway exit had been slammed into the opening position, the heavy metal door smashed back into the concrete wall of the landing. The Jackal was heading down the flights of steps to the lobby. If the front desk had listened to Conklin, he was
trapped
!

Bourne looked at the elderly couple in the corner, affected by the fact that the old man was covering the woman with his own body. “It’s all right,” he. said, trying to calm them by lowering his voice. “I know you probably don’t understand me—I don’t speak Russian—but you’re safe now.”

“We don’t speak Russian either,” admitted the man, an Englishman, in clipped, guarded tones, straining his neck as he looked at Jason while trying to rise. “Thirty years ago I would have been standing at that door! Eighth Army with Monty, y’know. Rather grand at El Alamein—all of us, of course. To paraphrase, age doth wither, as they say.”

“I’d rather not hear it, General—”

“No, no, merely a brigadier—”

“Fine!” Bourne crept over the bed, testing his knee; whatever it was had snapped back. “I have to get to a phone!”

“Actually, what outraged me was the goddamned robe!” went on the veteran of El Alamein. “Fucking
disgraceful
, I say—forgive me, darling.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The white
robe
, lad! It had to be Binky’s—the couple across the hall we’re traveling with—he must have copped it from that lovely Beau-Rivage in Lausanne. The rotten theft is bad enough, but to have given it to that
swine
is unforgivable!”

In seconds, Jason had grabbed the Jackal’s weapon and crashed his way into the room across the hall, immediately knowing that “Binky” deserved more admiration than the brigadier afforded him. He lay on the floor bleeding from knife wounds across his stomach and throat.

“I
can’t reach
anyone!” screamed the woman with thinning gray hair; she was on her knees above the victim, weeping hysterically. “He fought like a madman—somehow he knew that priest wouldn’t fire his gun!”

“Hold the skin together wherever you
can
,” yelled Bourne, looking over at the telephone. It was intact! He ran to it, and instead of calling the front desk or the operator, he dialed the numbers for the suite.

“
Krupkin
?” cried Alex.

“No, me!
First
: Carlos is on the staircase—the hallway I went into!
Second
: a man’s cut up, same hallway, seventh door on the right!
Hurry
.”

“As fast as I can. I’ve got a clear line to the office.”

“Where the hell is the KGB team?”

“They just got here. Krupkin called only seconds ago from the lobby—it’s why I thought you were—”

“I’m going to the staircase!”

“For God’s sake,
why
?”

“Because he’s
mine
!”

Jason raced to the door, offering no words of comfort for the hysterical wife; he could not summon them. He crashed his way through the exit door, the Jackal’s weapon in his hand. He started down the staircase, suddenly hearing the sound of his own shoes; he stopped on the seventh step and removed both, and then his ankle-length socks. The cool surface of the stone on his feet somehow reminded him of the jungles, flesh against the cold morning underbrush; for some abstract, foolish memory he felt more in command of his fears—the jungles were always the friend of Delta One.

Floor by floor he descended, following the inevitable rivulets of blood, larger now, no longer to be stemmed, for the last wound was too severe to stop by exerting pressure. Twice the Jackal had applied such pressure, once at the fifth-floor and again at the third-floor hallway doors, only to be followed by streaks of dark red, as he could not manipulate the exterior locks without the security keys.

The second floor, then the first, there were
no more
! Carlos
was
trapped! Somewhere in the shadows below was the death of the killer who would set him
free
! Silently, Bourne removed a book of Metropole matches from his pocket; he huddled against the concrete wall, tore out a single match and, cupping his hands, fired the packet. He threw it over the railing, the weapon in his hand ready to explode with continuous rounds of bullets at anything that moved below!