“Are the same as yours,” Muta ibn Aziz said with a newfound quickness. “Of this I assure you.”
Still Bourne held back, appearing undecided.
“Brother, is it not true that we have spoken of a like philosophy? Is it not true that we share a certain outlook on the world, on its future?”
“Indeed, yes.” Bourne pursed his lips. “All right then, brother. But I warn you, if you have been untrue about your intentions, then I swear I will find out, and I will mete out the proper punishment.”
“La ilaha ill allah. Every word I have spoken is the truth.”
Bourne said: “I went to school in London with Dujja’s leader.”
“I don’t know—”
“Please, I have no intention of mentioning Fadi’s real name. But knowing it myself gives me knowledge of the family others do not have.”
Muta ibn Aziz’s curiosity, once feigned, now became real. “Why is that a deterrent to becoming one with Dujja?”
“Ah, well, it’s the father, you see. Or, more specifically, his second wife. She is English. Worse, she is Christian.” Bourne shook his head, his fierce expression reinforcing the edge to his words. “It is forbidden for a true Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God and His Prophet. Yet this man married the infidel, mated with her. Fadi is the spawn. Tell me, brother, how can I follow such a creature? How can I believe a word he says, when the devil lurks inside him?”
Muta ibn Aziz was taken aback. “And yet Fadi has done so much for our cause.”
“This can hardly be denied,” Bourne said. “But it seems to me, speaking in terms of blood—which, as we know, can be neither ignored nor disowned—Fadi is like the tiger taken from the jungle, brought into a new environment, lovingly domesticated by a foster family. It’s merely a matter of time before the tiger reverts to his true nature, turns on those who have adopted him and destroys them.” He shook his head again, this time in perfectly believable sorrow. “It is a mistake to try to change the tiger’s nature, brother. Of this there can be no doubt.”
Muta ibn Aziz turned his head to stare morosely out to sea, where the image of Büyükada rose from the sea like Atlantis or the island of a long-forgotten caliph, stuck in time. He wanted to say something that would refute the other’s contention, but somehow he couldn’t find it in him to do so. Doubly depressing, he thought, to have the truth come from the mouth of this man.
Soraya’s mind was reeling, not only from the violence of her flight from the Lincoln Aviator but also from Anne Held’s betrayal. Her blood ran cold. My God, what had she and everyone else told her over the years? How many secrets had they given away to Dujja?
She drove her rolling coffin without conscious thought. The colors of the day seemed supersaturated, vibrating with a strange pulse that made the passing cars, the streets, the buildings, even the roiling clouds overhead seem unfamiliar, menacing, venomous. Her entire being was trapped within the horror of the ugly truth.
Her head ached with the doomsday possibilities, her body trembled in the aftermath of her adrenaline rush.
She needed to go to ground until she could regroup, figure out her next step. She needed an ally here in D.C. She immediately thought of her friend Kim Lovett, but almost as quickly dismissed the notion. For one thing, her situation was too precarious, too dangerous to get Kim involved. For another, people within CI, most especially Anne, knew of the friendship.
She needed someone unknown to anyone at CI. She activated her phone, punched in Deron’s number. She prayed that he was back from visiting his father in Florida, but her heart sank as she heard his recorded voice-mail message come on.
Where to now? she asked herself in desperation. She needed a port in this gathering storm, and she needed it now. Then, just before the panic set in, she remembered Tyrone. He was only a teenager, of course, but Deron had enough faith in him to use him for protection. Tyrone had also been the one to tell her that she’d been followed to Deron’s house. Still, even if Tyrone might consent to help her, even if she took the chance to trust him, how on earth would she get in touch with him?
Then she remembered him telling her that he hung out at a construction site. Where was it? She racked her brain.
“Down Florida, they puttin’ up a shitload a high-rises. I go there every chance I get, see how it all goin’ up, y’know?”
For the first time, she actually looked at where she was. In the Northeast quadrant, right where she needed to be.
Büyükada was the largest of the Princes’ Islands, so called because in ancient times the Byzantine emperors exiled the princes who had displeased or offended them to this chain of islands off Istanbul’s coast. For three years, Büyükada had been home to Leon Trotsky, who wrote The History of the Russian Revolution there.
Because of their unsavory history, the islands remained deserted for years, one of the many boneyards of the Ottoman Empire’s bloody history. Nowadays, however, Büyükada had been turned into a lushly landscaped playground for the wealthy, strewn with masses of flowers, tree-shaded lanes, and villas in the ornamentally baroque Byzantine style.
Bourne and Muta ibn Aziz walked off the ferry together. On the dock they embraced, wished each other Allah’s grace and protection.
“La ilaha ill allah,” Bourne.
“La ilaha ill allah,” said Fadi’s messenger as they parted.
Bourne waited to see which way he went, then opened his map of the island. Turning his head a bit, he could see his target out of the corner of his eye. He had just rented a bicycle. Because no automotive traffic was allowed on the island, there were three modes of transportation: bicycles, horse and carriage, one’s own feet. The island was large enough that walking all the time was prohibitive.
Now that Bourne knew which mode Muta ibn Aziz had chosen, he returned his attention to the map. He knew that the messenger was leaving here at eight o’clock this evening, but the exact location and the means were still a mystery.
Entering the bike rental shop, he chose a model with a basket in front. It wouldn’t be as fast as the one Muta ibn Aziz had, but he needed the basket to hold his satchel. Paying the proprietor in advance, he set off in the direction the messenger had taken, ascending toward the interior of the island.
When he was out of sight of the dock, he pulled over and, beneath the shade of a palm, rummaged in the satchel for the transponder that went with the NET, the nano-electronic tag that Soraya had planted on him to track his movements. He’d transferred the NET itself to Muta ibn Aziz when they had embraced on the dock. In a place like this without cars, it would be impossible to shadow the messenger on a bicycle without being seen.
Switching on the transponder, he keyed in his location, saw the blip that represented his position appear on the screen. He pressed another key and, soon enough, located the signal. He got back on the bike and set off, ignoring the pain in his side, building speed until he was going at a fairly rapid clip, even though the road ahead of him wound steeply uphill.
Soraya rolled along the southern edge of the immense construction site bounded by 9th Street and Florida Avenue. The housing project that would replace the neighborhood’s rotten teeth with towering steel-and-glass implants was well under way. The metal skeletons of two of the towers were almost complete. The site was filled with gigantic cranes swinging steel beams through the air as if they were lollipop sticks. Bulldozers shoved rubble; semis were being unloaded next to a line of trailer offices to which a fistful of electrical lines ran.
Soraya drove her heap slowly along the periphery of the site. She was looking for Tyrone. In her desperation, she had remembered that this was his favorite spot. He came here every day, he’d told her.
The Pontiac’s engine wheezed like an asthmatic in Bangkok, then returned to normal. For the past ten minutes, the noises emanating from the engine had been getting louder and more frequent. She was praying that it wouldn’t give out before she found Tyrone.
Having traveled the length
of the southern perimeter, she now turned north, heading toward Florida Avenue. She was looking for likely vantage points where Tyrone might hide himself in shadow so as not to be seen by the several hundred workmen at the site. She found a couple, but at this time of the morning none were in shadow. No Tyrone. She realized that she’d have to get to the northern border before she might find him.
Florida Avenue was five hundred meters ahead when she heard a loud clank. The wounded Pontiac lurched, then shuddered pathetically. It had ended not with a roar, but with a whimper. The engine was dead. Soraya swore and slammed the dash with the heel of her hand, as if the car were a television whose reception required clearing.
It was when she unstrapped her seat belt that she saw the black Ford. It had turned the corner and was now headed directly toward her.
“God help me,” she whispered to herself.
Putting her back onto the seat, she rolled herself into a ball and slammed both feet into her side window. It was made of safety glass, of course, difficult to shatter. She drew her legs, uncoiled them again. Her soles struck the glass without effect.
She made the mistake of peeking up over the dash. The Ford was now so close that she could see the two men inside. With a little sound, she slid back down and returned to her task. Two more strikes with her feet and the glass shattered. But the pieces were held in place by the central sheet of plastic.
All at once the window cracked with the sound of thunder. Small sheets of the shattered pieces fell in on her. Someone had cracked the glass from the outside. Then one of the men from the black Ford reached in. She launched herself at him, but as soon as she grabbed hold of his arm the second man zapped her with a Taser.
Her body went limp. Together the men hauled her roughly out of the Pontiac. Through the awful buzzing in her head, she heard a gout of rapid-fire Arabic. An explosion of laughter. Their hands were all over her helpless body.
Then one of them put a gun to her head.
Twenty-eight
MARTIN LINDROS, standing in the windowless cell deep underground in Dujja’s Miran Shah complex, ran his hand over the walls. He had done this so many times since he’d been brought here he could feel the rebar like bones that crisscrossed beneath the rough concrete, reinforcing them.
Precisely fifteen paces to a side, each side equal, the only break a pallet hinged to one wall and, opposite, a stainless steel sink and toilet. Back and forth he paced, like a caged animal going quietly mad from its confinement. Three sets of purple-blue fluorescent lights were embedded into the ceiling. They were unguarded by wire mesh, being too high up for him to reach, even with his best to the hoop leap, therefore, they glared mercilessly down sixteen hours a day.
When they were turned off, when he lay down to sleep, they had the uncanny habit of snapping on just as he was sinking down into sleep, jerking him awake like a hooked fish. From these occurrences Lindros quickly determined that he was under continuous surveillance. After some detective work, he’d discovered a tiny hole in the ceiling between two of the sets of lights—another reason for the glare, no doubt—through which a fiber-optic eye observed him with all the dispassion of a god. All this possessed a level of sophistication befitting Dujja. It was confirmation, if he needed any, that he was at the heart of the terrorist network.
It was difficult not to believe that Fadi himself was keeping an eye on him, if not always in person, then by periodically reviewing the video tapes of him in his cell. How the terrorist must gloat every time he saw Lindros prowling back and forth. Was he looking forward to the moment when he imagined Lindros would make the break from human being to animal? Lindros was certain of it, and his fists turned white as they trembled at his sides.
The door to his cell banged open, admitting Fadi, his face dark with fury. Without a word he strode to Lindros and struck him a massive blow to the side of the head. Lindros fell to the concrete floor, stunned and sickened. Fadi kicked him.
“Bourne is dead. Do you hear me, Lindros? Dead!” There was a terrifying edge to Fadi’s voice, a slight tremor that spoke of being pushed to the edge of an emotional abyss. “The unthinkable has happened. I have been cheated of the revenge I meticulously planned. All undone by the unforeseen.”
Lindros, recovering, hauled himself up on one elbow. “The future is unforeseen,” he said. “It’s unknowable.”
Fadi squatted down, his face almost touching Lindros’s. “Infidel. Allah knows the future; He shows it to the righteous.”
“Fadi, I pity you. You can’t see the truth even when it’s staring you in the face.”
His face a twisted fist of rage, Fadi grabbed Lindros and threw him to the floor of the cell. His hands closed over the other man’s throat, cutting off his breath.
“I may not be able to kill Jason Bourne with my bare hands, but here you are. I will kill you instead.” His eyes fairly bulging with fury, he squeezed Lindros’s neck in a death grip. Lindros kicked and thrashed, but he had neither the strength nor the leverage to throw Fadi off him or to displace his hands.
He was losing consciousness, his good eye rolling up in its socket, when Abbud ibn Aziz appeared in the cell’s open doorway.
“Fadi—”
“Get out of here!” Fadi cried. “Leave me alone!”
Nevertheless, Abbud ibn Aziz took a step into the cell. “Fadi, it’s Veintrop.”
Fadi’s eyes showed white all around. The Desert Wind—the killing rage—had taken possession of him.
“Fadi,” Abbud persisted. “You must come now.”
Letting go of his hold, Fadi rose, turned on his second in command. “Why? Why must I come now? Tell me this instant before I kill you as well.”
“Veintrop is finished.”
“All the safeguards are in place?”
“Yes,” Abbud said. “The nuclear device is ready to be deployed.”
Tyrone was munching on a quarter-pound burger while watching with a self-taught engineer’s eye the steady climb of a massive I-beam when the severely battered Pontiac came under attack. Two men in slick business suits ran out of a black Ford that had met the Pontiac head-on. They spoke to each other, but over the construction noise he couldn’t make out the words.
He rose from a crate, his impromptu bench, and began to walk toward the men. One of them held a weapon: neither a gun nor a knife, Tyrone saw, but a Taser.
Then, as one of the men bashed in the driver’s side window of the Pontiac, Tyrone recognized him as a guard he’d seen outside M&N Bodywork. These people were invading his turf.
Throwing aside his burger, he began to walk quickly toward the Pontiac, which looked as if some monster twenty-wheeler had tried its best to crush it. Having bashed in the safety glass, one of the men reached through it. Then the man with the Taser thrust his right arm through the opening, using the weapon on whoever was inside. A moment later, both men began to haul out the incapacitated driver.
Tyrone was close enough now to see that the victim was a woman. They manhandled her roughly to her feet, turned her so that he saw her face. He broke out into a cold sweat. Miss Spook! His mind racing, he began to run.
With the constant din of the construction site, the men did not become aware of him until he was almost upon them. One of them took the gun from Miss S’s head, aimed it at Tyrone. Tyrone, his hands in the air, came to an abrupt halt a pace away from them. It was all he could do not to look at Miss S. Her head was hanging down on her chest; her legs looked rubbery. They had zapped her but good.
“Get the fuck out of here,” the man with the gun said. “Turn around and keep walking.”
Tyrone put a frightened look on his face. “Yessir,” he said meekly.
As he began to turn away, his hands sank to his sides. The switchblade slid into his right hand; he snikked it open and, as he whirled back, drove the blade to the hilt between the man’s ribs, as he had been taught to handle the close-on street fights of turf wars.
The man dropped his gun. His eyes rolled up and his legs gave
out. The other man groped for his Taser, but he had Miss S to consider. He threw her back against the crumpled side of the Pontiac just as Tyrone’s fist shattered the cartilage in his nose. Blood flew out, blinding him. Tyrone drove a knee into his groin, then took his head between his hands, slamming it into the Pontiac’s side mirror.
As the man crumpled to the ground, Tyrone delivered a vicious kick to his side, stoving in a handful of ribs. He bent, retrieved his switchblade. Then he hoisted Miss S over his shoulder, took her to the idling Ford, laid her carefully on the backseat. As soon as he slid behind the wheel, he once again checked out the construction site. Luckily, the Pontiac had blocked the workmen’s view. They’d seen nothing of the incident.
He spat out of the side window in the direction of the fallen men. Putting the SUV into gear, he drove off, careful not to exceed the speed limit. The last thing he needed now was for a cop to pull him over for a traffic violation.
Snaking up the hillside, Bourne passed one wooden villa after another, built in the nineteenth century by Greek and Armenian bankers. Today they were owned by the billionaires of Istanbul, whose businesses, like those of their Ottoman ancestors, spanned the known world.
While he rode, keeping track of Muta ibn Aziz, he thought about Fadi’s brother, Karim, the man who had taken Martin Lindros’s face, his right eye, his identity. On the surface, he was just about the last person anyone would expect to be directly involved in Dujja’s plan. He was, after all, the scion of the family, the man who had stepped in to run Integrated Vertical Technologies when his father had been incapacitated by Bourne’s bullet. He was the legitimate brother, the businessman, just like the businessmen who had built these modern-day palaces.
And now, for the first time, Bourne understood the depth of the obsession the two brothers felt in avenging their sister’s murder. Sarah had been the family’s shining star, the repository of the Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib honor that stretched back over the centuries, over the endless wastes of the Arabian desert, over time itself. Theirs was an honor embedded in the three-thousand-year history of the Arabian peninsula, of the Sinai, of Palestine. Their ancestors had come out of the desert, had come back from defeat after defeat, erasing ignominious retreat to take back the Arabian peninsula from their enemies. Their patriarch, Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, was one of the great Islamic reformists. In the middle 1700s, he had joined forces with Muhammad ibn Saud to create a new political entity. A hundred fifty years later, the two families captured Riyadh, and modern Saudi Arabia was born.