“And repeated every one of those thoughts to Stepan Spalko.” His hand tightened on her throat, rattling her head from side to side. “Isn’t that right?”
“Why ask me when you already know the answer?” she said a little breathlessly.
“How long has he been playing me?”
Annaka closed her eyes for a moment. “From the beginning.”
Khan ground his teeth in fury. “What’s his game? What does he want from me?”
“That I don’t know.” She made a wheezing noise as he squeezed so hard he cut off all air to her windpipe. When he released his grip sufficiently, she said in a thin voice, “Hurt me all you want, you’ll still get the same answer, because it’s the truth.”
“The truth!” He laughed derisively. “You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you.” Nevertheless, he believed her, and was disgusted by her uselessness. “What’s your business with Bourne?”
“Keeping him away from Stepan.”
He nodded, recalling his conversation with Spalko. “That makes sense.”
The lie had come easily to her lips. It had the ring of truth not only because she’d had a lifetime of practice but because up until this last call from Spalko it had been the truth. Spalko’s plans had changed, and now that she’d had time to think it through, it suited her new purpose to tell this to Khan. Perhaps it was fortuitous that he’d come upon her like this, but only if she managed to get out of the encounter alive.
“Where’s Spalko now?” he asked her. “Here in Budapest?”
“Actually, he’s on his way back from Nairobi.”
Khan was surprised. “What was he doing in Nairobi?”
She laughed, but with his fingers painfully gripping her throat, it sounded more like a dry cough. “D’you really think he’d tell me? You know how secretive he is.”
He put his lips against her ear. “I know how secretive we used to be, Annaka—only it wasn’t secretive at all, was it?”
Her eyes engaged his in the mirror. “I didn’t tell him everything.” How strange it was not to be looking at him directly. “Some things I kept for myself.”
Khan’s lips curled in contempt. “You don’t actually expect me to believe that.”
“Believe what you want,” she said flatly, “you always have.”
He shook her again. “Meaning?”
She gasped and bit her lower lip. “I never understood the depth of my hatred for my father until I spent time with you.” He let up on his grip and she swallowed convulsively. “But you with your unswerving enmity toward your father, you showed me the light; you showed me how to bide my time, to savor the thought of revenge. And you’re right, when he was shot, I felt the bitterness of not having done it myself.”
Though he had no intention of showing it, what she said shook him. Up until a moment ago, he’d had no idea he’d revealed so much of himself to her. He felt ashamed and resentful that she’d been able to get so far under his skin without him being aware of it.
“We were together a year,” he said, “a lifetime for people like us.”
“Thirteen months, twenty-one days, six hours,” she said. “I remember the precise moment I walked out on you because it was then I knew I couldn’t control you as Stepan wanted me to.”
“And why was that?” His voice was casual, even though his interest was anything but.
Her eyes had engaged his again, refused to let them go. “Because,” she said, “when I was with you, I could no longer control myself.”
Was she telling the truth or was she playing him again? Khan, so certain about everything until Jason Bourne had come back into his life, didn’t know. Once again he felt ashamed and resentful, even a bit frightened that his vaunted powers of observation and instinct were failing him. Despite his best efforts, emotion had entered the picture, spreading its toxic haze over his mind, clouding his judgment, becalming him on an indistinct sea. He could feel his desire for her rising more strongly than it ever had before. He wanted her so badly that he couldn’t help but press his lips against the precious skin at the nape of her neck.
And in so doing he missed the shadow’s sudden fall into the interior of the Skoda, the shadow marked by Annaka, who shifted her gaze, saw the burly American wrench open the rear door and bring down the butt end of his gun onto the back of Khan’s skull.
Khan’s grip relaxed, his hand dropping away as he keeled over onto the backseat, unconscious.
“Hello, Ms. Vadas,” the burly American said in perfectly inflected Hungarian. He smiled as he swept up her gun into his huge hand. “My name’s McColl, but I’d be obliged if you called me Kevin.”
Zina dreamed of an orange sky, beneath which a modern-day horde—an army of Chechens brandishing NX 20s—descended from the Caucuses onto the steppes of Russia to lay waste to their bedeviling nemesis. But such was the power of Spalko’s experiment that for her it obliterated time. She was back again, a child in her parents’ miserable shell-shocked hovel, her mother staring at her from out of her ruined face, saying, “I can’t get up. Even for our water. I can’t go on….”
But someone had to go on. She was then fifteen, the oldest of the four children. When her mother’s father-in-law came, he took only her brother Kanti, the male heir of the clan; the Russians had either killed the others, including his own sons, or had sent them away to the dreaded camps in Pobedinskoe and Krasnaya Turbina.
After that, she took over her mother’s chores, collecting metal and water. But at night, exhausted as she was, sleep escaped her, fleeing from the vision of Kanti’s tear-streaked face, his terror at leaving his family, everything he’d known.
Three times a week she slipped away crossing terrain littered with unexploded landmines in order to see Kanti, to kiss his pale cheeks and give him news of home. One day she arrived to find her grandfather dead. Of Kanti there was no sign. The Russian Special Forces had come through in a sweep, killing her grandfather and taking her brother to Krasnaya Turbina.
She’d spent the next six months trying to find news of Kanti, but she was young and inexperienced in these matters. Besides, without money she could find no one willing to talk. Three years later, her mother dead, her sisters in foster homes, she joined the rebel forces. She hadn’t chosen an easy path: She’d had to endure male intimidation; she’d had to learn to be meek and subservient, to identify what she had then thought of as her meager resources and husband them. But she had always been exceptionally clever and this made her a quick learner of physical skills. It also provided her with a springboard from which to discover how the power game was played. Unlike a man, who rose through the ranks by intimidation, she was obliged to use the physical assets she was born with. A year after enduring the hardships of one handler after another, she managed to convince her controller to mount a night-time raid on Krasnaya Turbina.
This was the sole reason she had joined the rebels, had put herself through hell, but she was frankly terrified of what she might find. And yet she found nothing, no evidence of her brother’s whereabouts. It was as if Kanti had simply ceased to exist.
Zina awoke with a gasp. She sat up, looked around, realized that she was in Spalko’s jet on the way to Iceland. In her mind’s eye, still half in its dream-state, she saw Kanti’s tear-streaked face, smelled the acrid stench of lye coming from the killing pits at Krasnaya Turbina. She put her head down. It was the uncertainty that ate at her. If she knew he was dead, she could perhaps put her guilt to rest. But if, by some miracle of chance, he was still alive, she would never know, couldn’t come to his rescue, save him from the terrors to which the Russians continued to subject him.
Aware of someone approaching, she looked up. It was Magomet, one of the two lieutenants Hasan had brought with him to Nairobi to bear witness to the gateway to their freedom. Akhmed, the other lieutenant, was studiously ignoring her as he had since he’d seen her comfortable in Western dress. Magomet, a bear of a man with eyes the color of Turkish coffee and a long curling beard he combed with his
fingers when he was anxious, stood slightly bent, leaning against the seatback.
“Is everything in order, Zina?” he asked.
Her eyes searched first for Hasan, found him asleep. Then she curved her lips in the ghost of a smile. “I was dreaming of our coming triumph.”
“It’ll be magnificent, won’t it? Vindication at last! Our day in the sun!”
She could tell that he was dying to sit next to her, so she said nothing; he would have to be content with her not shooing him away. She stretched, arching her breasts, watching with amusement as his eyes opened slightly. All that’s missing is his tongue hanging out, she thought.
“Would you like some coffee?” he said.
“I suppose I wouldn’t mind.” She kept her voice carefully neutral, knowing that he was questing for hints. Her status, heightened by the important task the Shaykh had given her, the trust implicit in what he’d asked of her, was clearly not lost on him, as it was on Akhmed, who, like most Chechen males, saw her only as an inferior female. For a moment, then, her nerve failed her as she considered the enormous cultural barrier she was attempting to attack. But a moment’s clear-eyed concentration returned her to her normal state. The plan she’d formulated with the Shaykh’s instigation was sound; it would work—she knew it as surely as she drew breath. Now, as Magomet turned to go, she spoke up in furtherance of that plan. “And while you’re in the galley,” she said, “bring yourself a cup as well.”
When he returned, she took the coffee from him, sipped it without inviting him to sit. He stood, his elbows on the seatback, holding his cup between his hands.
“Tell me,” Magomet said, “what’s he like?”
“The Shaykh? Haven’t you asked Hasan?”
“Hasan Arsenov says nothing.”
“Perhaps,” she said, looking at Magomet over the rim of her cup, “he jealously guards his favored status.”
“Do you?”
Zina laughed softly. “No. I don’t mind sharing.” She sipped more coffee. “The Shaykh’s a visionary. He sees the world not as it is but as it will be a year from now, five years! It’s quite astonishing to be around him, a man who’s so in control of every aspect of his self, a man who commands so much power across the globe.”
Magomet made a sound of relief. “Then we’re truly saved.”
“Yes, saved.” Zina put aside her cup, produced a straight razor and cream she’d found in the well-equipped toilet. “Come sit down here, opposite me.”
Magomet hesitated only an instant. When he sat, he was so close their knees touched.
“You can’t deplane in Iceland looking like that, you know.”
He watched her from out of his dark eyes as his fingers combed through his beard. Without taking her eyes off his, Zina grasped his hand in hers, drew it away from his beard. Then she opened the razor, applied cream to his right cheek. The blade scraped against his flesh. Magomet trembled a little, then, as she began to shear him, his eyes closed.
At some point she became aware that Akhmed was sitting up, watching her. By this time, half of Magomet’s face was clean-shaven. She continued what she was doing as Akhmed rose and approached her. He said nothing but stared in disbelief as Magomet’s beard was peeled away and his face was slowly revealed.
At length he cleared his throat, said to her in a soft voice, “Do you think I could be next?”
“I wouldn’t have expected this guy to be carrying such a mediocre gun,” Kevin McColl said as he hauled Annaka out of the Skoda. He made a noise of contempt as he stowed it away.
Annaka went meekly enough, happy that he’d mistaken her gun for Khan’s. She stood on the sidewalk beneath the sullen sky of afternoon, her head bowed, eyes lowered, a secret smile lighting her up inside. Like many men, he couldn’t fathom that she’d carry a weapon, let alone might know how to use it. What he didn’t know would certainly hurt him—she’d make sure of it.
“First of all, I want to assure you that nothing will happen to you. All you have to do is answer my questions truthfully and obey my commands to the letter.” He used the pad of his thumb on a minor nerve bundle on the inside of her elbow. Just enough to let her know that he was deadly serious. “Do we understand each other?”
She nodded and cried out briefly as he bore down harder on the nerves.
“I expect you to answer when I ask you a question.”
She said, “I understand, yes.”
“Good.” He took her into the shadows of the entrance to 106–108 Fo utca. “I’m looking for Jason Bourne. Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Her knees buckled in pain as he did something terrible to the inside of her elbow.
“Shall we try it again?” he said. “Where’s Jason Bourne?”
“Upstairs,” she said as tears rolled down her cheeks. “In my apartment.”
His grip on her loosened noticeably. “See how easy that was? No fuss, no muss. Now, let’s you and me go on up.”
They went inside and she used her key. She turned on the light and they went up the wide staircase. When they reached the fourth floor, McColl reined her in. “Hear me now,” he said softly. “As far as you’re concerned, nothing’s wrong. Got me?”
She almost nodded, caught herself and said, “Yes.”
He pulled her back against him hard. “Give him any warning sign and I’ll gut you like a large-mouth bass.” He shoved her forward. “Okay. Get on with it.”
She walked to her door, put her key in the lock and opened it. She saw to her right that Jason was slumped on the sofa, his eyes half closed.
Bourne looked up. “I thought you were—”
At that instant McColl shoved her, raised his gun. “Daddy’s home!” he cried as he aimed the gun at the recumbent figure and pulled the trigger.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Annaka, who’d been biding her time, waiting for McColl’s first move, drove the point of her cocked elbow into his arm, deflecting his aim. As a result, the bullet entered the wall above Bourne’s head where it met the ceiling.
McColl bellowed in rage, reached out with his left hand even as he was swinging his right arm down to aim again at his recumbent target. His fingers sank into Annaka’s hair, grabbed tight, jerked her back off her feet. At that moment Bourne brought his ceramic gun from beneath the eiderdown. He wanted to shoot the intruder in the chest, but Annaka was in the way. Altering his aim, he shot the intruder through the meat of his gun arm. The gun fell to the carpet, blood splattered from the wound, and Annaka screamed as the intruder dragged her back against his chest as a shield.
Bourne was up on one knee, the muzzle of his gun roaming, as the intruder, with Annaka braced against him, backed toward the open door.
“This isn’t over, not by a long shot,” he said, his gaze on Bourne. “I’ve never lost a sanction and I don’t intend to start now.” With that ominous pronouncement, he picked Annaka up and hurled her at Bourne.
Bourne, off the sofa, caught Annaka before she had a chance to smash into the side of it. He whirled her around, then sprinted through the open doorway in time to see the elevator door closing. He took the stairs, limping a little. His side felt as if it were on fire and his legs were weak. His breathing became labored and he wanted to stop, if only to be able to get enough oxygen in his lungs, but he kept going, taking the stairs two and three at a time. Rounding the first-floor landing, his left foot slipped on the edge of a tread and he went down, half-falling, half-sliding down the rest of the flight. He groaned as he rose, slammed through the door into the lobby. There was blood on the marble floor but no assassin. He took a step into the lobby, and his legs collapsed out from under him. He sat there, half-stunned, his gun in one hand, the other lying palm up on his thigh. His eyes were glazed with pain and it seemed to him as if he’d forgotten how to breathe.
I’ve got to go after the bastard, he thought. But there was a tremendous noise in his head that he eventually identified as the thudding of his heart working overtime. For the mom
ent, at least, he was incapable of movement. He had just enough time, before Annaka arrived, to reflect that his staged death hadn’t fooled the Agency for long.
When she saw him, her face turned white with concern. “Jason!” She knelt beside him, her arm around him.
“Help me up,” he said.
She took his weight with her canted hip. “Where is he? Where did he go?”
He should’ve been able to answer her. Christ, he thought, maybe she was right, maybe he really did need to see a doctor.
Perhaps it was the venom in his heart that had pulled Khan back from unconsciousness so quickly. In any case, he was up and out of the Skoda within minutes of the attack. His head hurt, to be sure, but it was his ego that had taken the brunt of the attack. He replayed the whole sorry scene in his mind, knew with a certainty that caused a sinking feeling in his stomach that it was only his foolish and dangerous feelings for Annaka that had made him vulnerable.
What more proof did he need that emotional attachment was to be shunned at all costs? It had cost him dearly with his parents and, again, with Richard Wick, and now most recently with Annaka, who from the first had betrayed him to Stepan Spalko.
And what of Spalko? “We’re far from strangers. We share secrets of the most intimate nature,” he’d said that night in Grozny. “I’d like to think we’re more than businessman and client.”
Like Richard Wick, he’d offered to take Khan in, claimed he wanted to be his friend, to make him part of a hidden—and somehow intimate—world. “You owe your impeccable reputation in no small part to the commissions I’ve given you.” As if Spalko, like Wick, believed he was Khan’s benefactor. These people were under the misapprehension that they lived on a higher plane, that they belonged to the elite. Like Wick, Spalko had lied to Khan so that he could use him for his own purposes.
What had Spalko wanted from him? It almost didn’t matter; he was past caring. All he wanted was his pound of flesh from Stepan Spalko, a reckoning that would set past injustices to rights. Nothing less than Spalko’s death would assuage him now. Spalko would be his first and last commission from himself.