Drawing her ASP pistol, Soraya aimed and fired in one motion. The hollow-core struck the terrorist full in the face. There was an explosion of blood and bone out the open window.
They killed Sarah ibn Ashef and covered up their complicity,” Bourne managed to get out. “They did it to protect you and Fadi. Because sweet, innocent Sarah ibn Ashef was carrying on a torrid love affair.”
“Liar!”
Bourne was having trouble breathing, but he had to keep talking. He’d known going into this that psychology was his best weapon against a man like Karim, the only one that might bring him victory. “She hated what you and Fadi had become. She made her decision. She turned her back on her Bedouin heritage.”
He saw something explode onto Karim’s face.
“Shut up!” Karim cried. “These are the foulest of lies! Of course they are!”
But Bourne could sense that he was unsuccessfully trying to convince himself. He had finally put all the pieces of Sarah’s death together, and it was killing him.
“My sister was the moral core of my family! The core you destroyed! Her murder set my brother and me on this course. You brought this death and destruction on yourself!”
Bourne was already on the move. He stepped backward and planted his heel hard onto the instep of the man directly behind him. As he did so, he twisted his torso, breaking the hold of the man on his right. Burying a cocked elbow into the solar plexus of the man on his left, he struck outward with the edge of his other hand, slashing it into the side of the third man’s neck.
He heard the crack as the vertebrae fractured. The man went down. By this time the man directly behind him had thrown his arms around Bourne, gripping him tight. Bourne bent double, sending the man head-over-heels into Karim.
The man on his left was still bent over, trying to catch his breath. Scooping up a Luger that had fallen to the floor, Bourne slammed the butt into the crown of his head. The man he’d sent tumbling into Karim had drawn his gun. Bourne shot him and he collapsed in a heap.
That left Karim. He was on his knees, the attaché case directly in front of him. His eyes were red with a kind of madness that sent a shiver down Bourne’s spine. Once or twice before, Bourne had seen a man teetering on the edge of madness, and he knew that Karim was capable of anything.
As he was thinking of this, Karim produced a small stainless-steel square. Bourne recognized it instantly as a remote detonator.
Karim held the device aloft, his thumb pressed against a black button. “I know you, Bourne. And knowing you, I own you. You won’t shoot me, not while I can detonate twenty kilos of C-Four in the parking ramp under CI headquarters.”
There was no time for thought, no time for second guesses. Bourne heard Martin’s ghostly whisper in his mind. He pointed the Luger and shot Karim in the throat. The bullet passed through the soft tissue, then severed the spinal column. In near-paralyzing pain, Karim sat down hard. He stared at Bourne, disbelieving. He tried to work his fingers, but they wouldn’t respond.
His eyes, the light in them fading, found the knuckles of one of his downed men. Bourne, understanding what was about to happen, lunged toward him, but with one last effort, Karim toppled over.
The detonator slammed against the bared knuckles.
At last, Bourne was able to let Karim go. At last, Martin’s voice in his head was silent. Bourne stared down at Karim’s right eye—Martin’s eye—and thought about his dead friend. Soon enough he’d send a dozen red roses to Moira, soon enough he’d take Martin’s ashes to the Cloisters in New York.
One thing lingered in his mind, like an angler’s unbaited hook. When he had the chance, why hadn’t Karim tried to detonate the nuke? Why the limo, which would have a far more limited effect?
He turned, saw the attaché case lying on the concrete floor. The snaps were open. Had Karim done that in the vain hope of engaging the timer? He crouched down, about to close the snaps, when a chill passed through him, the force of it making his teeth chatter.
He opened the case. Peering inside, he searched for the timer, seeing that it was indeed inactive. The LED was dark, the wires disconnected. Then what…?
Probing beneath the nest of wires, he looked closer and saw something that injected the chill into his bones. A secondary timer had been activated when Karim had popped the snaps. A secondary timer that Veintrop had installed, but deliberately never told them about.
Bourne sat back on his haunches, beads of sweat rolling down his spine. It looked as if Dujja—and the doctor—were going to get their revenge after all.
Forty-one
FOUR MINUTES and one second. That was the amount of time Bourne had left, according to the readout of the secondary timer.
He closed his eyes, conjured up an image of Veintrop’s hands working on the timer. He could see every move the doctor had made, every twist of the wrist, every curl of a finger. He’d needed no tools. There were six wires: red, white, black, yellow, blue, green.
Bourne remembered where they had been attached to the primary timer and in what order Veintrop had disconnected them. Twice, Veintrop had reattached the black wire—first to the terminal on which the end of the white one had been wound, then on the terminal for the red.
Remembering what Veintrop had done wasn’t Bourne’s problem. Though he saw that the secondary timer, like the primary, was powered by another set of six color-coded wires, the two were physically different. As a consequence, none of the terminals to which the wires were attached was in the same place.
Pulling out his cell, Bourne called Feyd al-Saoud’s number in the hope that he could get Veintrop to tell him the truth about deactivating the secondary timer. There was no answer. Bourne wasn’t surprised. Miran Shah, mountainous as it was, was a disaster for cell service. Still, it had been worth a try.
3:01.
Veintrop had started with the blue wire, then the green. Bourne’s fingertips gripped the blue wire, about to unwind it from its terminal. Still, he hesitated. Why, he asked himself, would the secondary timer deactivate in the same way? Veintrop had designed this ingenious trap. The secondary timer would come into play only if the primary had been disabled. Therefore, it would make no sense to design it to be disabled in the same way.
Bourne lifted his hands free of the secondary timer.
2:01.
The question here was not how to deactivate the timer; it was how Veintrop’s fiendish mind worked. If the primary had been disabled, it would mean that someone had known the right order in which to detach the wires. In the secondary, the order in which the wires needed to be detached could be reversed, or even scrambled in so many possible combinations it would be virtually impossible to stumble upon the right one before inadvertently detonating the nuclear device.
1:19.
The time for speculation had passed. He had to make a decision, and it had to be the right one. He decided to reverse the order; he grasped the red wire, about to unwind it when his keen eye spotted something. He leaned in closer, studying the secondary timer in a different way. Pushing aside the nest of colored wires, he discovered that the timer was attached to the main part of the device in a wholly different way than was the primary.
:49.
Bourne tipped the primary out of its niche, the better to see what was underneath. Then he pulled it free of the detonator, to which it was attached by a single wire. Now he saw the secondary timer unimpeded. It was resting directly against the detonator. The trouble was, he couldn’t see where the two were attached.
:27.
He moved the wires away, careful not to detach any of them. Using a fingernail, he lifted the right edge of the secondary timer up and away from the detonator. Nothing.
:18.
He slipped his nail beneath the left edge. It wouldn’t budge. He applied more pressure and slowly, up it came. There, beneath, he saw the wire, coiled like a tiny snake. His finger touched it, moved it slightly, and like a snake, it uncoiled. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
The wire wasn’t attached to the detonator!
:10.
He heard the voice of Dr. Veintrop. “I was a prisoner,” he’d said. “You don’t understand, I…” Bourne hadn’t allowed him to finish his thought. Again, the problem was to solve the riddle of Veintrop’s mind. He was a man who enjoyed playing mind games—his research proved as much. If Fadi had held him against his will, if Fadi had used Katya against him, Veintrop would have tried to gain a measure of vengeance against him.
Bourne took up the primary, checked the wire dangling from it. The insulation was intact, but the bare copper core at the end felt loose. It came away in his fingers, no more than a couple of centimeters in length. The wire was a fake. He removed his hands from the device, sat back, watched the timer face count down its final seconds. His heart beat painfully against the cage of his chest. If he was wrong…
:00.
But he wasn’t wrong. Nothing happened. There was no detonation, no nuclear holocaust. There was only silence. Veintrop had gained his revenge against his captors. Under Fadi’s nose, he’d secretly disarmed the device.
Bourne began to laugh. Veintrop had been made to accurately rig the primary trigger, but with the backup he’d somehow cleverly fooled Fadi and Dujja’s other scientists. He closed the attaché case, took it as he rose. He laughed all the way out of the building.
Forty-two
IN THE AFTERMATH of the C-4 explosion, Soraya invoked the power of her CI credentials. The surrounding buildings, thick, hulking government edifices, had sustained superficial damage, but nothing structural. The street, however, was a disaster. An enormous hole had been blown out of it, into which the incinerated remains of the limo had dropped like a flaming meteor. The one saving grace was that at this time of the evening, there were no pedestrians in the general vicinity.
Dozens of police cars, fire engines, ambulances, and various emergency and utility agency personnel were swarming over the area, which had been cordoned off. Power was out in a two-and-a-half-square-kilometer radius, and the immediate area was without water, as the mains were ruptured.
Soraya and Tyrone had given statements to the police, but already she saw Rob Batt and Bill Hunter, chief of the Security Directorate, on the scene, taking over. Batt saw her and gave her a sit tight nod as he spoke to the police captain nominally in charge of the scene.
“All this official shit make me nervous as a priest wid the clap,” Tyrone said.
Soraya laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m here to protect you.”
Tyrone gave a snort of derision, but she saw that he stayed close to her. With the din of workers moving equipment, shouting to one another, vehicles pulling up, they seemed to be engulfed in a web of sound.
Above them, a news helicopter hovered. Soon it was joined by another. With a roar, air force jets, scrambled and weapons loaded, did a flyby. Their wingtips waggled, then they were gone into the clear evening sky.
New York was fogbound the morning Bourne arrived at the gates of the Cloisters. He passed through, holding the bronze urn containing Martin Lindros’s remains close against his chest. He’d sent the dozen roses to Moira, then discovered when she’d called him that they were a silent good-bye from Martin to her.
He’d never met Moira. Martin had only mentioned her once, when he and Bourne had gotten very, very drunk.
Bourne saw her now, a slim, shapely figure in the mist, dark hair swirled about her face. She was standing where she said she would be, in front of the tree that had been trained to spread against the stone blocks of a building wall. She had been overseas on business; had arrived home, she said, only hours before Bourne’s call. She had, it seemed, done her weeping in private.
Dry-eyed, she nodded to him, and together they walked to the south parapet. Below them were trees. Off to the right, he could see the flat surface of the Hudson River. It looked dull and sluggish, as if it were the skin of a serpent about to be shed.
“We each knew him in different ways.” Moira said this carefully, as if fearful of giving away too much of what she and Martin had had together.
Bourne said, “If you can know anyone at all.”
The flesh around her eyes was puffy. No doubt she had spent the last several days crying. Her face was strong, sharp-featured, her deep brown eyes wide apart and intelligent. There was an uncommon serenity about her, as if she was a woman content with herself. She would have been good for Martin, Bourne thought.
He opened the top of the urn. Inside was a plastic bag filled with carbon dust, the stuff of life. Moira used her long, slender fingers to open the bag. Together they lifted the urn over the top of the parapet, tipped it, watched as the gray matter floated out, became one with the mist.
Moira stared into the indistinct shapes below them. “What matters is we both loved him.”
Bourne supposed that was the perfect eulogy, one that brought a kind of peace to all three of them.
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Prologue
Phuket, Thailand
JASON BOURNE EELED his way through the mob. He was assaulted by the bone-juddering, heart-attack-inducing, soul-shattering blast of music coming from ten-foot-tall speakers set on either end of the enormous dance floor. Above the dancers’ bobbing heads an aurora borealis of lights splintered, coalesced, and then shattered against the domed ceiling like an armada of comets and shooting stars.
Ahead of him, across the restless sea of bodies, the woman with the thick mane of blond hair made her way around gyrating couples of all possible combinations. Bourne pressed after her; it was like trying to push his way through a soft mattress. The heat was palpable. Already the snow on the fur collar of his thick coat had melted away. His hair was slick with it. The woman darted in and out of the light, like a minnow under the sun-beaten skin of a lake. She seemed to move in a shuddering jerk-step, visible first here, then there. Bourne pushed after her, overamplified bass and drums having highjacked the feel of his own pulse.
At length, he confirmed that she was making for the ladies’ room, and, having already plotted out a shortcut, he broke off his direct pursuit and plowed the new route through the melee. He arrived at the door just as she disappeared inside. Through the briefly open door the smells of weed, sex, and sweat emerged to swirl around him.
He waited for a pair of young women to stumble out in a cloud of perfume and giggles, then he slid inside. Three women with long, tangled hair and chunky, jangling jewelry huddled at the line of sinks, so engrossed in snorting coke they didn’t see him. Crouching down to peer under the doors, he went quickly past the line of stalls. Only one was occupied. Drawing his Glock, he screwed the noise suppressor onto the end of the barrel. He kicked open the door and, as it slammed back against the partition, the woman with ice-blue eyes and a mane of blond hair aimed a small silver-plated .22 Beretta at him. He put a bullet through her heart, a second in her right eye.
He was smoke by the time her forehead hit the tiles…
Bourne opened his eyes to the diamond glare of tropical sunshine. He looked out onto the deep azure of the Andaman Sea, at the sail- and motorboats bobbing at anchor just offshore. He shivered, as if he were still in his memory shard instead of on Patong Beach in Phuket. Where was that disco? Norway? Sweden? When had he killed that woman? And who was she? A target assigned to him by Alex Conklin before the trauma that had cast him into the Mediterranean with a severe concussion. That was all he could be certain of. Why had Treadstone targeted her? He racked his brain, trying to gather all the details of his dream, but like smoke they drifted through his fingers. He remembered the fur collar of his coat, his hair, wet with snow. But what else? The woman’s face? That appeared and reappeared with the echo of the flickering star-bursts of light. For a moment the music throbbed through him, then it winked out like the last ra
ys of the sun.
What had triggered the memory shard?
He rose from the blanket. Turning, he saw Moira and Berengária Moreno Skydel silhouetted against the burning blue sky, the blindingly white clouds, the vertical finger hills, umber and green. Moira had invited him down to Berengária’s estancia in Sonora, but he had wanted to get farther away from civilization, so they had met up at this resort on the west coast of Thailand, and here they had spent the last three days and nights. During that time, Moira had explained what she was doing in Sonora with the sister of the late drug czar Gustavo Moreno, the two women had asked for his help, and he had agreed. Moira said time was of the essence and, after hearing the details, he had agreed to leave for Colombia tomorrow.
Turning back, he saw a woman in a tiny orange bikini high-stepping like a cantering horse through the surf. Her thick mane of hair shone pale blond in the sunlight. Bourne followed her, drawn by the echo of his memory shard. He stared at her brown back, where the muscles worked between her shoulder blades. She turned slightly, then, and he saw her pull smoke into her lungs from a hand-rolled joint. For a moment, the tang of the sea breeze was sweetened by the drug. Then he saw her flinch and drop the joint into the surf, and his eyes followed hers.
Three police were coming down the beach. They wore suits, but there was no doubt as to their identity. She moved, thinking they were coming for her, but she was wrong. They were coming for Bourne.
Without hesitation, he waded into the surf. He needed to get them away from Moira and Berengária because Moira would surely try to help him and he didn’t want her involved. Just before he dived into an on-coming wave, he saw one of the detectives raise his hand, as if in a salute. When he emerged onto the surface, far beyond the surf line, he saw that it had been a signal. A pair of WaveRunner FZRs were converging on him from either side. There were two men on each, the driver and the man behind him clad in scuba. These people were covering all avenues of escape.