He held on to the briefcase as the pilot set the helicopter down on the tarmac.
“You’re coming with us,” Bourne said to the pilot. “I need your help for a bit longer.”
The pilot rose and, together with Bourne, picked up Lindros’s body. With some difficulty, they maneuvered it off the helicopter. A larger high-speed jet was sitting on the tarmac, fueled and ready. The two men made the transfer, and Bourne spoke with the jet’s pilot. Then Bourne ordered the copter pilot to ferry the surgeon back to Miran Shah. Bourne warned him that Feyd al-Saoud’s team would be monitoring both his flight progress and his communications.
Ten minutes later, with the two men and the corpse on board, the jet rolled down the runway. Gathering speed, it lifted off into the slate-gray clouds of an oncoming storm.
Ever since he’d taken the call from Soraya, Peter Marks had found it impossible to concentrate on his work. The encrypted communications from Dujja seemed like so much Martian to him. Feigning a migraine, he finally had to hand them off to a colleague.
For some time, he sat at his desk, brooding. He couldn’t help but examine every aspect of that call, as well as his response to it. At first, he’d had to get over his anger. How dare Soraya try to get him involved in whatever mess she had made for herself? That was the moment he’d almost picked up the phone and punched Lindros’s extension, to report her call.
But with his hand halfway to the receiver, something had stopped him. What was it? On the face of it, Soraya’s story was so outlandish that it didn’t even rate considering. First, they all knew that the Dujja nuclear threat had been averted. Second, Lindros himself had warned everyone that Soraya had been unhinged by Jason Bourne’s death. And she certainly had sounded nuts on the phone.
But then there was her warning about the danger to the CI headquarters building. With all his years of training, it would be remiss of him to ignore that part of her story. For the second time, he almost punched Lindros’s extension. What stopped him was the hole in his reasoning. Namely, why would one part of her story be true and the other made up? He couldn’t believe anyone—let alone Soraya—would be that unhinged.
Which meant that he was back to square one. What to do about her call? His fingers drummed a tattoo on the desktop. Of course, he could do nothing, simply forgetting the conversation had ever taken place. But then if something did happen to headquarters, he’d never be able to forgive himself. Assuming, of course, he was still alive to feel the insupportable guilt.
Before he could second-guess himself into inaction, he grabbed the receiver and dialed his contact at the White House.
“Hey, Ken. Peter here,” he said when the other answered. “I’ve got an urgent message for the DCI. Could you scare him up for me? He’s in with the POTUS.”
“No, he’s not, Peter. The POTUS is meeting with the Joint Chiefs.”
Peter’s heart skipped a very small beat. “When did the DCI leave?”
“Hold on, I’ll access the log.” A moment later, Ken said, “You sure about your intel? The DCI hasn’t been here today, and he isn’t on the POTUS’s or anyone else’s schedule.”
“Thanks, Ken,” Peter said in a strangled voice. “My mistake.”
Oh, dear God, he thought. Soraya is as sane as I am. He looked through the open door to his cubicle. He could just see a corner of Lindros’s office. If it isn’t Lindros, who the hell is running Typhon?
He lunged for his cell phone. As soon as he could get his fingers to work properly, he punched in Soraya’s number.
Thirty-nine
TYRONE WAS WAITING patiently for Soraya when she poked her head out of the glass-paned door. As she did so, she felt her cell phone vibrate. Tyrone signaled to her and she ran silently into the shadows at the ramp’s mouth.
“The two shitbirds finished,” he said in a low voice. “They upstairs now wit they peeps.”
“We’d better go,” she said.
But before she could move back up the ramp, he took hold of her arm. “We ain’t finished here, girl.” He pointed. “See that past the Ford?”
“What is it?” She craned her neck. “A limo?”
“Not jus’ any limo. This one got government plates on her.”
“Government plates?”
“Not ony that, they’s CI plates.”
Catching her sharp glance, he said, “Deron taught me t’look out for ’em.” He motioned with his head. “Yo, check it out, yo.”
Soraya stole around the flank of the Ford. Immediately she saw the gleaming expanse of the limo and its license plates. She almost gasped out loud. Not only were they CI plates, they were the plates on the Old Man’s limo. All at once she understood why they had taken the trouble to embalm the DCI. They needed the body, which meant two things: It had to be malleable, and it must not stink.
Her cell buzzed again. She pulled it out, looked at the screen. It was Peter Marks. What the hell did he want? Crab-walking her way back to Tyrone, she said, “They’ve killed the director of CI. That’s his limo.”
“Yeah, but what they doing wit it?”
“Maybe that’s where they killed him.”
“Mebbe.” Tyrone scratched his chin. “But I seen ’em foolin’ wit the inside.”
For the third time her cell buzzed. This time, it was Bourne. She needed desperately to tell him what was going on, but she couldn’t risk a prolonged conversation now. “We’ve got to get out of here now, Tyrone.”
“Mebbe you,” he said, his eye on the limo. “But I’m gonna stay here awhile longer.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Soraya said. “We’re both leaving now.”
Tyrone raised his gun. “Doan give me no orders. I done tol yo what I was doin’. You make yo own choice.”
Soraya shook her head. “I’m not leaving you here. I don’t want you any more involved than you already are.”
“Yo, I killed two men fo yo, girl. How much more involved could I get?”
She had to admit he had a point. “What I don’t get is why you got involved in the first place.”
He gave her a grin because he knew she was done fighting him. “Yo mean what in it fo me? Hood where Deron an I brought up, homeboys only do things f’two reasons: t’make money or t’fuck sumbody over. Hopefully both. Now I watch Deron for a while. He pull hisself outta the shit; he make sumpin of his bad self. I admire that, but I always thought: That him, not me. Now wit this shit, I see I got a shot at a future.”
“You’ve also got a shot at getting killed.”
Tyrone shrugged. “Yo, ain’t no more than every day inna hood, yo.”
At that moment, he pulled out a PDA.
“I didn’t know you had anything but a burner,” she said, referring to the throwaway cell phones she’d seen him carry.
“Only one person knows bout this PET. One who give it t’me.”
“PET?”
“Yeah. Personal Electronic Thingy.”
He checked the PET, obviously reading an e-mail. “Shit.” Then he glanced up. “What a we waitin’ fo? Let’s get the fuck outta Dodge.”
They walked back up the ramp to the panel they’d found for the lights and the automatic door opener. “What changed your mind?”
Tyrone put a disgusted expression on his face. “Deron say I gotta split right this fuckin’ minute. I got yo man Bourne’s back.”
Peter Marks, lurking in the corridor near the elevator, caught Rob Batt’s eye as the Seven emerged from the conference room. Marks had worked for Batt before being chosen by Martin Lindros for Typhon. In fact, metaphorically speaking, he’d cut his eyeteeth on Batt’s methodology; he still considered the chief of operations his rabbi within CI.
So it was not surprising that Marks, having caught the older man’s eye, got his attention immediately. Batt peeled off from the others and turned a corner into the corridor where Marks stood.
“What are you doing here, Peter?”
“Waiting for you, actually.” Marks glanced nervously around. “We need t
o talk.”
“Can it wait?”
“No, sir, it can’t.”
Batt frowned. “Okay. My office.”
“Outside would be best, sir.”
The chief of operations gave him a curious glance, then shrugged.
They took the elevator down together and walked across the lobby, then out the front door. There was a rose garden on the east side of the property, which is where Marks led them. When they were a reasonably safe distance from the building, he told Batt word for word what Soraya Moore had told him.
“I didn’t believe it, either, sir,” he said, seeing the look on Batt’s face. “But then I called a buddy of mine at the White House. The Old Man isn’t there, never was there today.”
Batt rubbed his blued jowls with one hand. “Then where the fuck is he?”
“That’s just the thing, sir.” Marks, already ill at ease, was getting more nervous with every moment that passed. “I’ve spent the last forty minutes on the phone. I don’t know where he is, and neither does anyone else.”
“Anne?”
“Also AWOL.”
“Christ Jesus.”
Marks rechecked their immediate environment. “Sir, incredible as it might seem on the face of it, I think we have to take Soraya’s story seriously.”
“Incredible is right, Peter. Not to mention insane. Don’t tell me you believe this—” Batt shook his head as words failed him. “Where the hell is she?”
“That I don’t know,” Marks conceded. “I’ve put in a couple of calls to her cell, but she hasn’t gotten back to me. She’s terrified of Lindros finding her.”
“I should hope to fuck she is. We need to get her in here, pronto, process this crap out of her before she causes a panic inside the agency.”
“If she’s wrong, then where’s the Old Man and Anne?”
Batt headed back out of the rose garden. “That’s what I’m going to find out,” he said over his shoulder.
“What about Soraya—?”
“When she calls you, make her believe you’re on her side. Get her in here, pronto.”
As the chief of operations disappeared inside headquarters, Marks’s phone sang. He checked the incoming call. Punching a button, he said, “Hi, Soraya. Look, I was thinking about what you said, and I checked at the White House. Both the Old Man and Anne are missing.”
“Of course they are,” he heard her say in his ear. “I’ve just seen the Old Man. He’s laid out on a mortuary slab with a bullet hole in his heart.”
Along with the Seven, Karim sat in the conference room adjacent to the Old Man’s suite. They were all listening to the message from the Saudi secret service informing them of the takeover of the Dujja nuclear facility in Miran Shah. Unlike the others, however, he received the communiqué with equal parts confusion and trepidation. Was this a ploy by his brother because of the heightened terror alert, or had something gone horribly wrong?
He knew there was only one way to find out. He left the conference room, but on the way to the elevator he glimpsed Peter Marks out of the corner of his eye. This was the second time he’d noticed Marks up here where he didn’t belong. A warning bell went off in his head and, instead of entering the elevator with some of the other chiefs, he turned to his left. The corner behind which he stood gave him a view of the conference room door. As Rob Batt emerged, Marks approached him. They spoke for a moment. Batt, initially cool, nodded, and together they walked back into the conference room, shutting the door behind them.
Karim walked very quickly into the DCI’s suite, past the desk where a young man from Signals was filling in for Anne. The man nodded to him as he went into the Old Man’s office.
Once behind the desk, he toggled on a switch. Two voices from the conference room became audible.
“… from Soraya,” Marks was saying. “She claims to have seen the DCI’s body in a morgue with a bullet hole through his heart.”
“What is this woman on? I spoke to Martin. He’s heard from the Old Man.”
“Where is he?”
“On personal business, with Anne,” Batt said, with what sounded like a yawn.
“Soraya’s also heard from Bourne.”
“Bourne’s dead.”
“He isn’t. He found the real nuclear facility. It’s in Miran Shah, on the border of—”
“I know where Miran Shah is, Peter,” Batt snapped. “What is this crap?”
“She said you can verify everything with Feyd al-Saoud.”
“That’s just what I need, go crawling to the chief of Saudi security for our own intel.”
“She also said Bourne killed Fadi. He’s on his way here in Fadi’s jet.”
There was more to the conversation, but Karim had heard enough. His skin felt as if ants were crawling all over it. He wanted to scream, to tear himself limb from limb.
Bolting from the office, he took the elevator down. But instead of picking up a CI vehicle in the basement parking area, for which he’d have to sign, he hurried out the front door and walked off the grounds.
The night was well advanced in the district. The low sky, full of glowering clouds, seemed to absorb the spangle of lights from the city. Shadows rose to monument height.
He stopped at the corner of 21st and Constitution and called a taxi service. Seven agonizing minutes later, the cab pulled up and he got in.
Thirteen minutes after that, he alit in front of an Avis rental and began to walk away from it. When the taxi had disappeared, he reversed course, went into the Avis office, and rented a car, using false ID. He paid cash, took possession of the GM car, asked for directions to Dulles airport, then drove off.
In fact, he had no intention of going to Dulles. His destination was the Sistain Labs airstrip south of Annandale.
The jet, banking low over Occoquan Bay, turned north heading toward the airstrip on the fist-shaped peninsula that jutted out into the water. The pilot, following the glide path of the lights, brought the jet down in a whisper of a landing. As they taxied along the runway, losing speed with every meter, Bourne saw Tyrone astride his Ninja, a hard-sided black leather case strapped across his back. He glanced at his watch. They were right on time, which meant he had approximately thirty-five minutes to prepare himself for Karim.
En route, he’d spoken to Soraya several times. They had brought each other up to date with news that was both shocking and gratifying. Fadi was dead, Dujja’s nuclear threat thwarted, but Karim had killed the Old Man, consolidating his power inside CI. Now he was planning to destroy CI headquarters and everyone in it, coordinating the devastating attack with the detonation of the nuke. Soraya had one ally inside CI—the Typhon agent named Peter Marks, but Marks wasn’t a rebel by nature. She didn’t know how far he would bend the regs for her.
As for the Old Man’s death, Bourne had mixed feelings. He had been made to feel like the prodigal grandson, a wayward who, on returning home, was subject to his grandfather’s spiteful wrath. More than once, the DCI had tried to have him killed. But then he’d never understood Bourne, and so had been deeply frightened of him. Bourne could blame the Old Man for many things, but not for that. Bourne had never fit into the CI scheme—he’d been shoehorned into an agency that despised individualists. He’d never asked for the association, but there it was. Or rather, there it had been.
Now he turned his attention to Karim.
The plane had come to a stop on the tarmac; the engines whined down. Bourne, taking the pilot with him, went down the cabin aisle, opened the door, and lowered the stairs for Tyrone, who had driven up beside the jet.
Tyrone came up the stairway, dropping the black leather case at Bourne’s feet.
“Hey, Tyrone. Thanks.”
“Yo, need some light in here, yo. Can’t see a thing.”
“That’s the point.”
Tyrone was peering at him. “Yo look like a fuckin’ Arab.”
Bourne laughed. He pulled the bag up, went over to a set of facing seats, opened it up. Tyrone became aware
of the Arab pilot, a dark-skinned, bearded man who glowered at him, half defiant, half fearful.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Terrorist,” Bourne said simply. He paused in unloading the bag long enough to drink in the situation. “You want to get a taste?”
Tyrone laughed. “Killed two of ’em was about to do for Miss Spook.”
“Now, who would that be?”
Tyrone’s dark eyes flashed. “I know yo an Deron are close, but doan fuck wid me.”
“I’m not fucking with you, Tyrone. Excuse me for this, but I’m on a deadline.” Bourne turned on one of the overhead seat lights, opened his cell, and brought up the photos he’d taken of Fadi’s face. Then he set about opening small pots, jars, tubes, and various oddly shaped prosthetics. “Would you please tell me what you’re talking about?”
Tyrone hesitated for a minute, studying Bourne to see if he was still fucking with him. Apparently, he decided he’d been wrong. “Talkin’ ’bout Miss Spook. Soraya.”
Bourne, glancing at the photos of Fadi, placed several prosthetics in his mouth and worked his jaws around experimentally. “Then I owe you a thank-you.”
“Yo, what the fuck happened to yo voice, man?”
Bourne said: “As you can see, I’m becoming a new man.” He continued with his transformation, finding a thick beard from the pile inside the case, shaping it with a scissors so that it was the exact replica of Fadi’s. He applied the beard, took a look at himself in the magnifying mirror he pulled from the case.
He handed his cell to Tyrone. “Do me a favor, would you? How much do I look like the man in these photos?”
Tyrone blinked, as if he couldn’t believe what Bourne had asked of him. Then he looked at the photos one by one. Before moving on to the next one, he studied Bourne’s face.
“Fuck me,” he said finally. “Yo, how yo do that shit, man?”
“It’s a gift,” Bourne said, meaning it. “Now, look. I need you to do me another favor.” He glanced at his watch. “In just over eleven minutes, this bastard Soraya’s been after is going to be coming here. I want you out of the way. I need you to take care of something for me. Something important. In the next cabin is my friend, Martin Lindros. He’s dead. I want you to contact a mortuary. His remains need to be cremated. Okay? Will you do that for me?”