Khan had taken a Kalishnikov from one of the human bombs outside and he aimed it now at the female. “There’s no way out for you,” he said.
Bourne, who had been watching only her eyes, stepped forward and pushed the Kalishnikov down. “There’s always a way out,” he said.
Then he squatted down so that he was at the other’s level. Without taking his gaze from her, he said, “Can you speak? Can you tell me your name?”
For a moment there was only silence, and Bourne had to force himself to keep his gaze on her face, not to look at her finger curled and tense on the trigger.
At length her lips opened and began to tremble. Her teeth chattered and a tear slipped free, rolling down her stained cheek.
“What d’you care what her name is?” Khan’s voice was filled with contempt. “She’s not human; she’s been turned into a machine of destruction.”
“Khan, some might say the same of you.” Bourne’s voice was so gentle it was clear that what he said wasn’t a rebuke, merely a truth that might not have occurred to his son.
He turned his attention back to the terrorist. “It’s important that you tell me your name, isn’t it?”
Her lips opened and with a great effort, she said in a voice somewhere between a rattle and a gurgle, “Zina.”
“Well, Zina, we’re at the endgame,” Bourne said. “There’s nothing left now, except death and life. By the looks of things, it appears as if you’ve already chosen death. If you pull the trigger, you’ll be sent to heaven and in glory will become a houri. But I wonder whether that will happen. What is it that you’ll be leaving behind? Dead compatriots, at least one of whom you’ve shot yourself. And then there’s Stepan Spalko. Where has he gone, I wonder. No matter. What’s important is that at the crucial moment, he abandoned you.
“He’s left you to die, Zina, while he’s cut and run. So I guess you have to ask yourself if you pull that trigger, will you go to your glory or will you be cast down, found wanting by Mounkir and Nekir, the Questioners. Given your life, Zina, when they ask you ‘Who is thy creator? Who is thy Prophet?’ will you be able to answer them? Only the righteous remember, Zina, you know that.”
Zina was openly weeping now. But her breast was heaving strangely and Bourne was afraid that a sudden spasm would cause her to pull the trigger in reflex. If he was going to reach her, it had to be now.
“If you pull that trigger, if you choose death, you won’t be able to answer them. You know that. You’ve been abandoned and betrayed, Zina, by those closest to you. And, in turn, you’ve betrayed them. But it’s not too late. There can be redemption; there’s always a way out.”
At the moment Khan realized that Bourne was talking as much to him as he was to Zina; he experienced a feeling not unlike an electrical shock. This feeling raced through his body until it sparked both his extremities and his brain. He felt himself stripped naked, revealed at last, and he was terrified of nothing more or less than himself—his own true authentic self that he had buried so many years ago in the jungle of Southeast Asia. It was so long ago that he couldn’t remember exactly where or when he’d done it. The truth was that he was a stranger to himself. He hated his father for leading him to that truth, but he could no longer deny that he loved him for it, too.
He knelt, then, beside the man he knew to be his father, and putting the Kalishnikov down where Zina could see it, he extended a hand toward her.
“He’s right,” Khan said in an altogether different voice from the one he normally used. “There is a way to make up for your past sins, for the murders you’ve committed, for the betrayals to those who’ve loved you without, perhaps, you even knowing.”
He moved forward inch by inch until his hand closed over hers. Slowly and gently he pried her forefinger away from the trigger. She let go then and allowed him to take the weapon from her useless embrace.
“Thank you, Zina,” Bourne said. “Khan will take care of you now.” He rose, and giving his son’s shoulder a brief squeeze, he turned and went swiftly and silently down the passage after Spalko.
Chapter Thirty
Stepan Spalko sprinted down the bare concrete passage, Bourne’s ceramic gun at the ready. He knew that all the gunfire would bring the security people into the main section of the hotel. Up ahead, he saw the Saudi security chief, Feyd al-Saoud, and two of his men. He ducked out of sight. They hadn’t seen him yet and he used this element of surprise, waiting for them to come closer, then shooting them before they had time to react.
For a breathless moment he stood over the downed men. Feyd al-Saoud groaned and Spalko shot him at close range in the forehead. The Saudi security chief flopped once and was still. Quickly Spalko took the ID tags off one of his men, changed into the man’s uniform and got rid of his colored contact lenses. As he did so, his thoughts turned inexorably to Zina. She had been fearless, true enough, but the ardor of her loyalty to him had been her fatal flaw. She had protected him from everyone—especially Arsenov. She’d enjoyed that, he could tell. But it struck him that her true passion was for him. It was this love, the repugnant weakness of sacrifice, that had driven him to abandon her.
Swift footfalls behind him brought him back to the present, and he hurried on. The fateful meeting with the Arabs had been a two-edged sword, for while it had provided him with a ready means of disguise, it had slowed him down, and now as he threw a glance over his shoulder, he saw a figure in security fatigues and cursed mightily. He felt like Ahab, who pursued his nemesis until, in an utterly unexpected reversal, his nemesis had come after him. The man in the security fatigues was Jason Bourne.
Bourne saw Spalko, now in an Arab security uniform, open a door and vanish into a stairwell. He leaped over the bodies of the men Spalko had just killed and headed after him. He emerged into the chaos of the lobby. Just a short time ago, when he and Khan had entered the hotel, this vast glassed-in space was tense but hushed, almost deserted. Now it was a welter of security personnel running to and fro. Some were rounding up the hotel personnel, sorting them into groups, depending on their jobs and where they had just been inside the premises. Others had already begun the laborious and time-consuming process of questioning the staff. Each individual had to account for every moment of his whereabouts over the course of the last two days. Still others were on their way down to the subbasement or were being deployed by wireless network to other areas of the hotel. Everyone was hustling; no one had time to question the two men who, one after the other, crossed through the mob scene toward the front door.
It was ironic to watch Spalko walking among them, blending in, becoming one of them. Briefly, Bourne considered trying to alert those around him but immediately thought better of it. Spalko would no doubt call his bluff—it was Bourne who was the internationally wanted murderer still under a CIA sanction. Spalko, of course, knew this, being the clever architect of Bourne’s dangerous predicament. And as he followed Spalko out of the front doors, he realized something else. We’re both the same now, he thought, both chameleons employing the same marking in order to keep our true identities from being revealed to those around us. It was odd and disquieting to realize that at the moment this international security force was as much his enemy as it was Spalko’s.
The moment he was outside, Bourne realized that the hotel was in absolute lockdown. He watched with fascinated dread as Spalko boldly made his way to the security services car park. Although it was within the limits of the lockdown cordon, it was deserted, as even security personnel weren’t allowed in or out.
Bourne went after him but almost immediately lost him in the ranks of vehicles. He broke into a run. There was a shout from behind him. He pulled open the door of the first vehicle he came to—an American Jeep. Yanking out the plastic panel on the bottom of the steering column, he fumbled for the wires. Just then another engine fired up and he saw Spalko in the car he’d stolen, wheeling out of the car park.
There were more shouts now and the pounding of boots against pavement. Several shots w
ere fired. Bourne, concentrating on what needed to be done, got the wires stripped and braided together. The Jeep’s engine coughed to life, and he put it in gear. Then with a hard squeal of tires, he turned out of the car park and accelerated through the security checkpoint.
The night was moonless but, then again, it wasn’t really night. An insipid darkness lay over Reykjavik as the sun, hanging just below the horizon, turned the sky the color of an oystershell. As Bourne followed Spalko’s twists and turns through the city, he realized that Spalko was heading south.
This was something of a surprise, for he’d expected Spalko to make for the airport. Surely he had an escape plan and just as surely it involved an aircraft. But the more Bourne thought about it, the less surprised he was. He was getting to know his adversary better now. Already he understood that Spalko never took the logical way in or out of a situation. His mind was unique, involved as it was in puzzle-logic. He was a man of feints and twists, someone who liked to trap his opponent rather than kill him outright.
So. Keflavik was out. Too obvious and, as Spalko would undoubtedly have foreseen, too well guarded for him to use as an escape route. Bourne oriented himself to the map he’d studied on Oszkar’s laptop. What lay south of the city? Hafnarfjördur, a fishing village too small to land the kind of aircraft Spalko would use. The coast! They were on an island, after all. Spalko was going to escape via boat.
At this time of night there was little traffic, especially after they left the city behind them. The roads became narrower, winding through the hillsides that fronted the landward side of the sea cliffs. As Spalko’s car went around a particularly sharp curve, Bourne dropped back. Turning off his headlights, he accelerated around the turn. He could see Spalko’s vehicle up ahead, but he hoped that Spalko, peering into his rear-view mirror, wouldn’t be able to see him. It was a risk, losing sight of the car every time they went around a turn, but Bourne didn’t see that he had any alternative. He had to make Spalko believe he’d lost his pursuer.
The utter lack of trees lent the landscape a certain gravity and, with the blue ice mountains as backdrop, a sense of eternal winter as well, made all the more eerie by the intermittent swaths of verdant green. The sky was immense and, in the long false-dawn, filled with the black shapes of shore-birds, soaring and swooping. Seeing them, Bourne felt a certain freedom from his entombment in the death-laden bowels of the hotel. Despite the chill, he rolled down the windows and breathed deeply of the fresh salt-laced air. A sweet smell rose to his nostrils as he flashed past the rolling, flower-dotted carpet of a meadow.
The road narrowed further as it turned toward the sea. Bourne descended through a lushly foliated glen and then zoomed around another curve. The road steepened in its switchback descent of the cliff face. He saw Spalko, then lost him again as another curve loomed. He made the turn and saw the North Atlantic low and spangled dully in the slate-gray dawn.
Spalko’s car went around another turn and Bourne followed on. The next turn was so close that the car was already out of sight, and despite the added risk, Bourne pushed the Jeep faster.
He had already committed to the turn when he heard the sound. It was soft and familiar above the flutter of the wind, the noise his ceramic gun made when fired. His front near-side tire blew and he slewed around. He caught a glimpse of Spalko, gun in hand, running to where he’d left his car. Then his view changed, and he was too busy trying to get the Jeep under control as it skidded perilously close to the seaside edge of the road.
He downshifted into neutral, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to turn off the ignition, but without the key that was impossible. The rear tires slipped off the road. Bourne unbuckled himself and held on as the Jeep spun off the cliff. It seemed to float, turning over twice. The brash, unmistakable odor of overheated metal came to him, along with the acrid stench of rubber or plastic burning.
He leaped just before the Jeep hit, rolling away as the vehicle bounced off an outcropping of rock and burst open. Flames shot up into the air, and by their light he saw in the cove just below him the fishing boat, nosing in toward the shore.
Spalko drove like a maniac down the road to the dead end at the inner edge of the cove. Throwing a glance back at the flaming Jeep, he said to himself, To hell with Jason Bourne. He’s dead now. But not, unfortunately, soon forgotten. It was Bourne who had foiled him, and now he had neither the NX 20 nor the Chechens as cat’s-paws. So many months of careful planning come to nothing!
He got out of the car and walked across what remained of the wrack-strewn shingle. A rowboat was coming for him, even though it was high tide and the fishing boat was very close to shore. He’d called the captain the moment he’d successfully run the hotel’s security checkpoint. Only a skeleton crew of the captain and a mate were onboard. He climbed in as the captain nosed the rowboat onto the shingle, then the mate pushed off with his oar.
Spalko was fuming and not a word was said on the short, unpleasant trip back to the fishing boat. When he was aboard, Spalko said, “Make ready to leave, Captain.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” the captain replied, “but what about the rest of the crew?”
Spalko grabbed the captain by his shirtfront. “I gave you an order, Captain. I expect you to carry it out.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the captain grumbled with an evil glint in his eye. “But with only the two of us to crew, it’ll take a little longer to get under way.”
“You’d damn well better get to it then,” Spalko told him, as he headed below.
The water was cold as ice, black as the subbasement of the hotel. Bourne knew that he needed to get onboard the fishing boat as quickly as possible. Thirty seconds after he’d pushed out from the shingle, his fingers and toes had started to go numb; thirty seconds after that, he couldn’t feel them at all.
The two minutes it took him to reach the boat seemed like the longest in his life. He reached up for an oiled hawser and hauled himself out of the sea. He shivered in the wind, moving hand over hand up the line.
As he went, he experienced an eerie dislocation. With the scent of the sea in his nostrils, the feel of the brine drying on his skin, it seemed to him as if he wasn’t in Iceland at all but in Marseilles, that he wasn’t climbing onto a fishing boat in pursuit of Stepan Spalko but was clandestinely boarding a pleasure yacht on his way to execute the international assassin for hire, Carlos. For it was in Marseilles that the nightmare had begun, where the pitched battle with Carlos had ended with him being flung overboard, the shock of being shot and almost drowned robbing him of his memory, of his very life.
As he lifted himself over the gunwale onto the deck of the fishing boat, he felt a stab of fear that was almost paralyzing in its intensity. It was in this very same situation that he’d failed. He felt abruptly exposed, as if he wore this failure on his sleeve. He almost faltered then, but into his mind sprang the image of Khan, and he remembered what he’d said to him when they’d first met in that tension-filled setting. “Who are you?” Because it occurred to him now that Khan didn’t know, and if Bourne wasn’t around to help him find out who he was, he’d have no one. He thought of Khan, on his knees in the thermal heating station, and it seemed to him that it wasn’t only the Kalishnikov he’d let go of but also, possibly, something of his own inner rage.
Bourne, taking a deep breath, settled his mind on what was before him and crept along the deck. The captain and his mate were busy in the wheelhouse and he encountered little difficulty in rendering them unconscious. There was plenty of rope around and he was in the process of binding their wrists behind their backs when Spalko said from behind him, “I think you’d better find a bit of rope for yourself.”
Bourne was crouched down. The two seamen lay on their sides, back to back. Without showing anything to Spalko, Bourne slipped out his switchblade. Immediately, he knew he’d made a fatal mistake. The mate had his back to him, but the captain did not and saw very clearly that he was now armed. His eyes looked into Bourne’s but, curiously, he mad
e no sound or movement that would alert Spalko. Instead, he closed his eyes as if in sleep.
“Stand up and turn around,” Spalko ordered.
Bourne did as he was told, keeping his right hand hidden behind the outer edge of his thigh. Spalko, in freshly pressed jeans and a black cable-knit turtleneck sweater, stood spread-legged on the deck, Bourne’s ceramic gun in his hand. And again Bourne was subjected to the strange sense of dislocation. As with Carlos years ago, Spalko now had the drop on him. All that remained was for Spalko to pull the trigger, for Bourne to be hit and cast into the water. This time, however, in the bone-chilling North Atlantic, there would be no rescue as there had been in the mild Mediterranean waters. He would quickly freeze and drown.
“You simply will not die, will you, Mr. Bourne?”
Bourne dove at Spalko, the switchblade snapping open. Spalko, startled, squeezed the trigger far too late. The bullet sang out over the water as the blade buried itself in his side. He grunted, clubbed the barrel of the gun down onto Bourne’s cheek. Blood spurted from both of them. Spalko’s left knee buckled, but Bourne crashed to the deck.
Spalko, remembering, kicked him viciously in his cracked ribs, rendering Bourne nearly unconscious. He pulled the switchblade from his side, threw it into the water. Then he bent and dragged Bourne to the gunwale. As Bourne began to stir, Spalko hit him with heel of his hand. Then he hauled him more or less upright and bent him over the side.
Bourne was phasing in and out of consciousness, but the sharp tang of the icy black water brought him around enough to know that he was on the brink of annihilation. It was happening again, just as it had so many years ago. He was in so much pain that he could barely draw breath, but there was life to think of—his life now, not the one that had been taken away from him. He wouldn’t let himself be robbed again.