Right on cue, Hytner came up and handed the paper to Bourne, who almost dropped it, such was his preoccupation with the ringing in his brain.
“It was a bitch all right,” Hytner said a bit breathlessly. “But I finally got it licked. The fifteenth algorithm I used proved to be—”
The last part of what he was going to say turned into a ragged shout of shock and pain as Cevik jammed the glowing end of his cigarette into Hytner’s left eye. At the same time he spun the agent around in front of him, locking his left forearm across his throat.
“Take one step toward me,” he said low in his throat, “and I’ll break his neck.”
“We’ll take you down, right enough.” Soraya, with a quick glance at Bourne, was advancing, her gun arm straight out, her other hand cupped beneath the gun butt, its barrel aimed, questing. Waiting for an opening. “You don’t want to die, Cevik. Think of your wife and three children.”
Bourne stood as if poleaxed. Cevik, seeing this, showed his teeth.
“Think of the five mil.”
His golden eyes flicked toward her for an instant. But he was already backing away from her and from Bourne, his bleeding human shield held tight to his chest.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Soraya said in a most reasonable tone. “Not with all the agents we have around. Not with him slowing you down.”
“I’m thinking of the five mil.” He kept edging away from them, away from the glare of the sodium lights. He was heading toward 23rd Street, beyond which rose the National Academy of Sciences.
More people there—tourists especially—to hamper the agents’ pursuit.
“No more prisons for me. Not one more day.”
Nothing to burn in the hole. Bourne wanted to scream. And then a sudden explosion of memory obliterated even those words: He was running across ancient cobblestones, a sharp mineral wind in his nostrils. The weight in his arms seemed suddenly too heavy to bear. He looked down to see Marie—no, it was the unknown woman’s bloody face! Blood everywhere, streaming from her though he frantically tried to stanch the flow…
“Don’t be an idiot,” Soraya was saying to Cevik. “Cape Town? You’ll never be able to hide from us. There or anywhere else.”
Cevik cocked his head. “But look what I’ve done to him.”
“He’s maimed, not dead,” she said through gritted teeth. “Let him go.”
“When you hand me your gun.” Cevik’s smile was ironic. “No? See? I’m already a dead man in your eyes, isn’t that true, Bourne?”
Bourne seemed to be coming very slowly out of his nightmare. He saw Cevik step into 23rd Street now with Hytner skidding off the curb like a recalcitrant child.
Just as Bourne lunged at him, Cevik pitched Hytner at them.
Then everything happened at once. Hytner staggered pitifully. Brakes screeched from a black Hummer close by. Just behind it a trailer-truck filled with new Harley-Davidson motorcycles swerved to avoid a collision. Air horns blaring, it almost struck a red Lexus, whose driver spun in terror into two other cars. In the first fraction of a second it appeared as if Hytner had stumbled over the curb, but then a plume of blood spat out of his chest and he twisted with the impact of the bullet.
“Oh, God!” Soraya moaned.
The black Hummer, rocking on its shocks, had pulled up. Its front window was partly open, the ugly gleam of a silencer briefly glimpsed. Soraya squeezed off two shots before answering fire sent her and Bourne diving for cover. The Hummer’s rear door flew open and Cevik ducked inside. It sped off even before he’d pulled the door closed behind him.
Putting up her gun, Soraya ran to her partner, cradling his head in her lap.
Bourne, hearing the echo of the gunshot in his memory, felt himself released from a velvet prison where everything around him was muffled, dim. He leapt past Soraya and the crumpled form of Hytner, ran out onto 23rd Street, one eye on the Hummer, the other on the trailer-truck. The truck’s driver had recovered and sent his gears clashing as he resumed speed. Bourne sprinted toward the back of the trailer, grabbed the chain across the lifted ramp, and hauled himself aboard.
His mind was racing as he clambered up onto the platform on which the motorcycles were chained in neat, soldierly rows. The guttering flame in the darkness, the flare of the match: Cevik lighting his cigarette had two purposes. The first, of course, was to provide him with a weapon. The second was as a signal. The black Hummer had been waiting, prepared. Cevik’s escape had been meticulously planned.
By whom? And how could they have known where he’d be, and when?
No time for answers now. Bourne saw the Hummer just ahead. It was neither speeding nor weaving in and out of the traffic; its driver secure in the assumption that he and his passengers had made a clean escape.
Bourne unchained the motorcycle closest to the rear of the trailer and swung into the saddle. Where were the keys? Bending over and shielding it from the wind, he lit a match from the matchbook Cevik had tossed to him. Even so, the flame lasted only a moment, but in that time it revealed the keys taped to the underside of the gleaming black tank console.
Jamming the key into the ignition, Bourne fired up the Twin Cam 88B engine. He gunned the engine, shifted his weight to the rear. The front end of the motorcycle rose up as it shot forward off the rear edge of the trailer.
While he was still in free fall the cars behind the trailer jammed on their brakes, their front ends slewing dangerously. Bourne hit the pavement, leaned forward as the Harley bounced once, gaining traction as both wheels bit into the road. In a welter of squealing tires and stripped rubber, he made an acute U-turn and sped off after the black Hummer.
After a long, anxiety-filled moment, he spotted it going through the traffic-clogged square where 23rd Street intersected with Constitution Avenue, heading south toward the Lincoln Memorial. The Hummer’s profile was unmistakable. Bourne kicked the motorcycle into high gear, blasting into the intersection on the amber, zigzagging through it to more squeals and angry horn blasts.
He shadowed the Hummer as it followed the road to the right, describing a quarter of a circle around the arc-lit memorial slowly enough that he made up most of the distance between them. As the Hummer continued on around toward the on-ramp to the Arlington Memorial Bridge, he gunned up, nudged its passenger-side rear bumper. The vehicle shrugged off the motorcycle’s maneuver like an elephant swatting a fly. Before Bourne could drop back, the driver stamped on his brakes. The Hummer’s massive rear end collided with the motorcycle, sending Bourne toward the guardrail and the black Potomac below. A VW came up on him, horn blaring, and almost finished the job the Hummer had started—but at the last instant Bourne was able to regain control. He swerved away from the VW, snaking back through traffic after the accelerating Hummer.
Above his head he heard the telltale thwup-thwup-thwup and, glancing up, saw a dark insect with bright eyes: a CI helicopter. Soraya had been busy on her cell phone again.
As if she were in his mind, his cell phone rang. Answering it, he heard her deep-toned voice in his ear.
“I’m right above you. There’s a rotary on the center of Columbia Island just ahead. You’d better make sure the Hummer gets there.”
He swerved around a minivan. “Did Hytner make it?”
“Tim’s dead because of you, you sonovabitch.”
The chopper landed on the island rotary, and the infernal noise level dropped abruptly as the pilot cut the motor. The black Hummer kept on going as if nothing were amiss. Bourne, threading his way through the last of the traffic between him and his quarry, once again drew close to the vehicle.
He saw Soraya and two other CI agents emerge from the body of the helicopter with police riot helmets on their heads and shotguns in their hands. Swerving abruptly, he drew alongside the Hummer. With his cocked elbow, he smashed the driver’s-side window.
“Pull over!” he shouted. “Pull over onto the rotary or you’ll be shot dead!”
A second helicopter appeared over the Potomac, angl
ing in very fast toward their position. CI backup.
The Hummer gave no indication of slowing. Without taking his eyes off the road, Bourne reached behind him and opened the custom saddlebag. His scrabbling fingers found a wrench. He’d have one chance, he knew. Calculating vectors and speed, he threw the wrench. It slammed into the front of the driver’s-side rear-wheel well. The wheel, revolving at speed, went over the wrench, launched it up with sickening power into the rear-wheel assembly.
At once the Hummer began to wobble, which only jammed the wrench deeper into the assembly. Then something cracked, an axle possibly, and the Hummer decelerated in a barely controlled spin. Mostly on its own momentum, it ran up over the curb onto the rotary and came to a stop, its engine ticking like a clock.
Soraya and the other agents spread out, moving toward the Hummer with drawn guns aimed at the passenger cabin. When she was close enough, Soraya shot the two front tires flat. One of the other agents did the same with the rear tires. The Hummer wasn’t going anywhere until a CI tow truck hauled it back to HQ for forensics.
“All right!” Soraya shouted. “Out of the vehicle, all of you! Out of the vehicle now!”
As the agents closed the circle around the Hummer, Bourne could see that they were wearing body armor. After Hytner’s death, Soraya wasn’t taking any chances.
They were within ten meters of the Hummer when Bourne felt his scalp begin to tingle. Something was wrong with the scene, but he couldn’t quite put his mental finger on it. He looked again: Everything seemed right—the target surrounded, the approaching agents, the second helicopter hovering above, the noise level rising exponentially…
Then he had it.
Oh, my God, he thought, and viciously twisted the handlebar accelerator. He yelled at the agents, but over the noise of the two copters and his own motorcycle there was no chance they could hear him. Soraya was in the lead, closing in on the driver’s door as the others, spread apart, hung back, providing her with a crossfire of cover should she need it.
The setup looked fine, perfect, in fact, but it wasn’t.
Bourne leaned forward as the motorcycle sped across the rotary. He had a hundred meters to cover, a route that would take him just left of the Hummer’s gleaming flank. He took his right hand off the handlebar grip, gesturing frantically at the agents, but they were properly concentrated on their target.
He gunned the engine, its deep, guttural roar at last cutting through the heavy vibrational thwup-thwup-thwup of the hovering copter. One of the agents saw him coming, watched him gesturing. He called to the other agent, who glanced at Bourne as he roared past the Hummer.
The setup looked right out of the CI playbook, but it wasn’t, because the Hummer’s engine was ticking over—cooling—while it was still running. Impossible.
Soraya was less than five meters from the target, her body tense, in a semi-crouch. Her eyes opened wide as she became aware of him. Then he was upon her.
He swept her up in his extended right arm, swung her back behind him as he raced off. One of the other agents, now flat on the ground, had alerted the second chopper, because it abruptly rose into the spangled night, swinging away.
The ticking Bourne had heard hadn’t come from the engine at all. It was from a triggering device.
The explosion took the Hummer apart, turned its components into smoking shrapnel, shrieked behind them. Bourne, with the motorcycle at full speed, felt Soraya’s arms wrap around his ribs. He bent low over the handlebars, feeling her breasts pressing softly against his back as she molded herself to him. The howling air was blastfurnace hot; the sky, bright orange, then clogged with oily black smoke. A hail of ruptured metal whirred and whizzed all around them, plowed into the ground, struck the roadway, fizzed into the river, shriveling.
Jason Bourne, with Soraya Moore clinging tightly to him, accelerated into the light-glare of monument-laden D.C.
Four
JAKOB SILVER and his brother appeared from out of the dinnertime night, when even cities such as Washington appear deserted or, at least, lonely, a certain indigo melancholy robbing the streets of life. When the two men entered the hushed luxury of the Hotel Constitution on the northeast corner of 20th and F Streets, Thomas, the desk clerk on duty, hurried past the fluted marble columns and across the expanse of luxurious carpeting to meet them.
He had good reason to scurry. He, as well as the other desk clerks, had been given a crisp new hundred-dollar bill by Lev Silver, Jakob Silver’s brother, when he had checked in. These Jewish diamond merchants from Amsterdam were wealthy men, this much the desk clerk had surmised. The Silvers were to be treated with the utmost respect and care, befitting their exalted status.
Thomas, a small, mousy, damp-handed man, could see that Jakob Silver’s face was flushed as if in victory. It was Thomas’s job to anticipate his VIP clients’ needs.
“Mr. Silver, my name is Thomas. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said. “Is there anything I might get for you?”
“That you may, Thomas,” Jakob Silver replied. “A bottle of your best champagne.”
“And have the Pakistani,” Lev Silver added, “what’s his name—?”
“Omar, Mr. Silver.”
“Ah, yes, Omar. I like him. Have him bring up the champagne.”
“Very good.” Thomas all but bowed from the waist. “Right away, Mr. Silver.”
He hurried away as the Silver brothers entered the elevator, a plush cubicle that silently whisked them up to the executive-level fifth floor.
“How did it go?” Lev Silver said.
And Jakob Silver answered, “It worked to perfection.”
Inside their suite, he shrugged off his coat and jacket, went directly into the bathroom, and turned on all the lights. Behind him, in the sitting room, he heard the TV start up. He stripped off his sweat-stained shirt.
In the pink-marble bathroom, everything was prepared.
Jakob Silver, naked to the waist, bent over the marble sink and took out his gold eyes. Tall, with the build of a former rugby player, he was as fit as an Olympian: washboard abdomen, muscular shoulders, powerful limbs. Snapping closed the plastic case in which he had carefully placed the gold contact lenses, he looked into the bathroom mirror. Beyond his reflection, he could see a good chunk of the cream-and-silver suite. He heard the low drone of CNN. Then the channel was switched to Fox News, then MSNBC.
“Nothing.” Muta ibn Aziz’s vibrant tenor voice emerged from the other room. Muta ibn Aziz had picked his cover name—Lev—himself. “On any of the all-news stations.”
“And there won’t be,” Jakob Silver said. “CI is extremely efficient in manipulating the media.”
Now Muta ibn Aziz appeared in the mirror, one hand gripping the door frame to the bathroom, the other out of sight behind him. Dark hair and eyes, a classic Semitic face, a zealous and inextinguishable resolve, he was Abbud ibn Aziz’s younger brother.
Muta dragged a chair behind him, which he set down opposite the toilet. After glancing at himself in the mirror, he said: “We look naked without our beards.”
“This is America.” He gestured curtly with his head. “Go back inside.”
Alone again, Jakob Silver allowed himself to think like Fadi. He had jettisoned the identity of Hiram Cevik the moment he and Muta had exited the black Hummer. Muta, as previously instructed, had left the Beretta semiautomatic pistol with its ugly M9SD Suppressor on the front seat as they had tumbled onto the sidewalk. His aim had been true, but then he’d never had a doubt about Muta ibn Aziz’s marksmanship.
They had run out of sight as the Hummer sped up again, slipped around a corner, and walked quickly up 20th Street to F Street, vanishing like wraiths inside the warmly glowing facade of the hotel.
Meanwhile, not a mile away, Ahmad, with his load of C-4 explosives that had filled up the front foot well of the Hummer’s cabin, was already martyred, already in Paradise. A hero to his family, his people.
“Your objective is to take out as many of them
as you can,” Fadi had told him when Ahmad had volunteered to martyr himself. In truth, there had been many volunteers, with very little difference among them. All were absolutely reliable. Fadi had chosen Ahmad because he was a cousin. One of a great many, admittedly, but Fadi had owed his uncle a small favor, which this decision repaid.
Fadi dug into his mouth and removed the porcelain tooth sheaths he’d used to widen Hiram Cevik’s jaw. Washing them with soap and water, he returned them to the hard-sided case that merchants used to transport gems and jewelry. Muta had thoughtfully placed it on the generous rim of the bathtub so that everything in it would be within easy reach: a warren of small trays and custom compartments filled with every manner of theatrical makeup, removers, spirit gums, wigs, colored contact lenses, and various prosthetics for noses, jaws, teeth, and ears.
Squeezing a solvent onto a broad cotton pad, he methodically wiped the makeup off his face, neck, and hands. His natural, sun-darkened skin reappeared in streaks, a good decade peeled away, until the Fadi he recognized was whole again. A short time as himself, precious as a jewel, in the center of the enemy camp. Then he and Muta ibn Aziz would be gone, lifting through the clouds to their next destination.
He dried his face and hands on a towel and went back into the sitting room of the suite where Muta stood, watching The Sopranos on HBO.
“I find myself repelled by this creature Carmela, the leader’s wife,” he said.
“As well you should. Look at her bare arms!”
Carmela was standing at the open door to her obscenely huge house, watching her obscenely huge husband get into his obscenely huge Cadillac Escalade.
“And their daughter has sex before her marriage. Why doesn’t Tony kill her, as the law dictates. An honor killing, so that he and his family’s honor won’t be dragged through the mud.” In a fit of disgust, Muta ibn Aziz went over to the TV, switched it off.
“We strive to inculcate in our women the wisdom of Muhammad, the Quran, the true faith as their guides,” Fadi said. “This American woman is an infidel. She has nothing, she is nothing.”