Page 13 of The Bourne Betrayal (Jason Bourne 5)

  Abbud spat out a date pit, white as a baby’s bottom. “I would say the same of you Americans.”

  Lindros nodded. “You wouldn’t be wrong. But where does that leave us?”

  “At each other’s throats.”

  Bourne surveyed the interior of the bar. It was much like the outside: the walls bare stone and wood, mortared together by wattle. The floor was hard-pressed dung. It smelled of fermentation, of both the alcoholic and human variety. A dung fire roared in the stone hearth, adding heat and a particular odor. There were a handful of Amhara inside, all in varying degrees of drunkenness. Otherwise Bourne’s appearance in the doorway would have kicked up more of a stir. As it was, it caused barely a ripple.

  He tromped up to the bar, trailing snow. He ordered a beer, which, promisingly, came in a bottle. While he drank the thin, oddly brackish brew, he took the measure of the place. In truth, there wasn’t much to see: just a rectangular room with a scattering of rude tables and backless chairs more like stools. Nevertheless, he marked them all in his memory, making of the area a sort of map in his head, should danger raise its head or he need a quick escape. Not long after that, he spied the man with the maimed leg. Zaim was sitting by himself in a corner, a bottle of rotgut in one hand and a filthy glass in the other. He was beetle-browed, with the burned, crusty skin of the mountain native. He looked at Bourne vaguely as the other approached his table.

  Bourne hooked a boot around one of the stool legs, pulled it out, sat down across from Alem’s father.

  “Get away from me, you fucking tourist,” Zaim muttered.

  “I’m no tourist,” Bourne responded in the same dialect.

  Alem’s father opened his eyes wide, turned his head, spat on the floor. “Still, you must want something. No one dares summit Ras Dejen in winter.”

  Bourne took a long swig of his beer. “You’re right, of course.” Noticing that Zaim’s bottle was nearly empty, he said, “What are you drinking?”

  “Dust,” Alem’s father replied. “That’s all there is to drink up here. Dust and ash.”

  Bourne went and got him another bottle, set it down on the table. As he was about to fill the glass, Zaim stayed his hand.

  “There won’t be time,” he muttered under his breath. “Not when you have brought your enemy with you.”

  “I didn’t know I had an enemy.” There was no point in telling this man the truth.

  “You came from the Site of Death, did you not?” Zaim stared hard at Bourne with watery eyes. “You climbed into the metal carcasses of the warbirds, you sifted through the bones of the warriors berthed inside. Don’t bother to deny it. Anyone who does gathers enemies the same way a rotting corpse gathers flies.” He flicked his free hand. His heavily callused palms and fingers were tattooed with dirt so ingrained, it could never be washed away. “I can smell it on you.”

  “This enemy,” Bourne said, “is at the moment unknown to me.”

  Zaim grinned, showing many dark gaps between what teeth were left in his mouth. His breath was as rank as the grave. “Then I have become valuable to you. More valuable, surely, than a bottle of liquor.”

  “My enemies were in hiding, watching the Site of Death?”

  “How much is it worth to you,” Zaim said, “to be shown the face of your enemy?”

  Bourne slid money across the table.

  Zaim took it with a practiced swipe of his clawlike hand. “Your enemy keeps watch on the Site, day and night. It’s like a spiderweb, you see? He wants to see what insects it attracts.”

  “What’s it to him?”

  Zaim shrugged. “Very little.”

  “So there’s someone else.”

  Zaim leaned closer. “We are pawns, you see. We are born pawns. What else are we good for? How else are we to scratch out a living?” He shrugged again. “Even so, one can keep the evil times at bay only so long. Sooner or later, grief comes in whatever guise will be most painful.”

  Bourne thought of Zaim’s son, buried alive in the landslide. But he could say nothing; he’d promised Alem.

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he said softly. “He was carried onto Ras Dejen by the first warbird. His body is not at the Site of Death. Therefore, I believe he’s alive. What do you know of this?”

  “I? I know nothing. Except for snatches overheard here and there.” Zaim scratched at his beard with gnarly black nails. “But there is perhaps someone who could help.”

  “Will you bring me to him?”

  Zaim smiled. “That is entirely up to you.”

  Bourne pushed another wad of money across the stained table. Zaim took it, grunted, folded it away.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “we can do nothing while your enemy watches.” He pursed his lips reflectively. “The eye of your enemy sits spread-legged over your left shoulder—a foot soldier, we would say, no one higher up.”

  “Now you’re involved,” Bourne said, nodding to where the other had put the money.

  Alem’s father shrugged. “I am unconcerned. I know this man; I know his people. Nothing evil will come of me talking to you, believe me.”

  “I want him off my back,” Bourne said. “I want the eye to sleep.”

  “Of course you do.” Zaim rubbed his chin. “Anything can be arranged, even such a difficult wish.”

  Bourne slid over more money, and Zaim nodded, apparently satisfied, at least for the moment. He reminded Bourne of a Vegas slot machine: He wasn’t going to stop taking money from Bourne until Bourne walked away.

  “Wait exactly three minutes—no more, no less—then follow me out the front door.” Zaim stood. “Walk a hundred paces down the main street, then turn left into an alley, then take the first right. Of course, I cannot risk being seen to help you in this. In any event, I trust you’ll know what to do. Afterward you’ll walk away without retracing your steps. I’ll find you.”

  There’s a message for you,” Peter Marks said when Soraya returned to Typhon to clean out her desk.

  “You take it, Pete,” she said dully. “I’ve been bounced out of here.”

  “What the hell—?”

  “The acting director has spoken.”

  “He’s gonna kill everything that Lindros wanted Typhon to be.”

  “That seems to be the idea.”

  As she was about to turn away, he took hold of her arm, swung her back. He was a young man, stocky, with deep-set eyes, hair the color of corn, a faint dry Nebraska twang. “Soraya, I just want to say for me—well, for all of us, really—no one blames you for what happened to Tim. Shit happens. In this business it’s, unfortunately, all really bad.”

  Soraya took a breath, let it out slowly. “Thanks, Pete. I appreciate that.”

  “I figured you’d been beating yourself up for letting Bourne run roughshod all over you and Tim.”

  She was silent for a moment, unsure what she was feeling. “It wasn’t Bourne,” she said at last, “and it wasn’t me. It just happened, Pete. That’s all.”

  “Sure, okay. I only meant that, you know, Bourne is another outsider forced on us by the Old Man. Like that sonovabitch Lerner. If you ask me, the Old Man’s losing his grip.”

  “Not my worry anymore,” Soraya said, beginning to move toward her office.

  “But this message—”

  “Come on, Pete. Handle it yourself.”

  “But it’s marked urgent.” He held it out. “It’s from Kim Lovett.”

  After Zaim left, Bourne went into the WC, which stank like the inside of a zoo. Using the Thuraya phone, he checked in with Davis.

  “I have new intel that the site is being watched,” he said. “So keep a sharp lookout.”

  “You, too,” Davis said. “There’s a weather front moving in.”

  “I know. Is our exit strategy going to be compromised?”

  “Don’t worry,” Davis assured him. “I’ll take care of things on this end.”

  Exiting the filthy pit, Bourne paid his bill at the bar. Under cover of the transaction, he

caught a glimpse of the “eye of his enemy,” as Zaim called him, and knew at once that he was Amhara. The man didn’t bother lowering his gaze, instead glowered at Bourne with undisguised enmity. This was his territory, after all. He was confident on his home ground and, under normal circumstances, would have every right to be.

  Bourne, who’d started the three-minute clock running in his head the moment Zaim had walked out the door, realized it was time to go. He chose a path that took him directly past the Eye. He was gratified to see the man’s muscles bunch up in tension as he neared. His left hand went to his right hip, to whatever weapon he had there out of Bourne’s sight. Bourne knew then what was required of him.

  He went out of the bar. As he silently measured off the hundred paces, he became aware that the Eye had followed him out onto the street. Quickening the pace so that his tail would have to hurry to catch up, he reached the corner Zaim had described to him and turned left without warning into a narrow alley clogged with snow. Almost immediately he saw the next right, and rounded it at a brisk clip.

  He’d only taken two steps when he turned around, flattened himself against the icy wall, and waited until the Eye came into view. Bourne grabbed him, slammed him against the corner of the building so that his teeth clacked together sharply. A blow to the side of the head rendered him unconscious.

  A moment later Zaim darted lopsidedly into the alley. “Quickly now!” he said breathlessly. “There are two others I hadn’t counted on.”

  He led Bourne to the nearest intersection of alleys, turned left. At once they found themselves on the outskirts of the village. The snow lay thickly, its crust brittle. Zaim was having difficulty negotiating the terrain, especially at the pace he had set. But quite soon they came to a ramshackle outbuilding behind which three horses stood grazing.

  “How are you at bareback riding?” he said.

  “I’ll manage.”

  Bourne put his hand on the muzzle of a gray horse, looked him in the eye, then vaulted up. Leaning over, he grabbed Zaim above the elbow, assisted him onto a brown horse. Together they turned their steeds into the wind and took off at a canter.

  The wind was rising. Bourne did not need to be a native to know that a storm was coming in from the northwest, laden with the bitter taste of serious snow. Davis was going to have a hell of a time digging the copter out. He’d have to, though; there was no other way to get off the mountain quickly.

  Zaim was making directly for the tree line but, glancing behind him, Bourne saw that it was already too late. The riders—no doubt the two Amhara whom Zaim was worried about—were pounding along behind them, closing the gap.

  Bourne, making a quick calculation, discovered that the Amhara would overtake them several hundred meters before they’d have a chance to lose themselves in the forest. Putting his head against the horse’s mane, he kicked it hard in the sides. The gray horse leapt forward, racing toward the trees. Startled for an instant, Zaim kneed his mount, taking off after Bourne.

  Halfway there, Bourne realized they weren’t going to make it. Without another thought, he squeezed his knees against the horse’s flanks and jerked its mane to the right. Without breaking stride, the gray wheeled around, and before their pursuers had time to react Bourne was galloping full-out directly at them.

  They split apart, as he had foreseen. Leaning to his right, he drew his left leg back and kicked out from the hip. His thick-soled boot slammed into the chest of one of the Amhara, knocking him off his horse. By this time, the other Amhara had had time to wheel around. He’d drawn a handgun—an old but deadly 9mm PM Makarov—and was aiming it at Bourne.

  A shot rang out, lifting the Amhara from his blanket saddle. Bourne turned to see Zaim rising up, a gun in his hand. He waved his free hand, and they headed as fast as they could for the outlying stand of firs.

  Another shot snipped off branches above their heads as they galloped into the forest. The Amharan whom Bourne had kicked off his horse had remounted and was coming after them.

  Zaim threaded them through the fir trees. It had turned markedly colder and wetter. Even here, in the shelter of the forest, the icy wind cut through them, shaking periodic snowfalls from the upper branches. Bourne, thinking of their pursuer, could not rid himself of the itching along his spine, but he kept going in the brown horse’s wake.

  The ground began to fall away, at first gradually, then more steeply. The horses put their heads down, snorting, as if to more carefully feel the buried stones, their curved surfaces slick with ice, which made the footing alarmingly treacherous.

  Bourne heard a cracking behind them, and he urged the gray on. He wanted to ask Zaim where they were headed and how close they were to it, but raising his voice would only serve to reveal their location in the maze of the forest. Just as he was thinking this, he glimpsed a clearing through the trees, then the heavy glitter of a sheet of ice. They were coming to a river that wound steeply from the edge of one alpine meadow to a lower one.

  At that moment he heard a shot; an instant later Zaim’s horse collapsed from under him. Zaim went tumbling. Urging the gray on, Bourne reached down, dragging Zaim up behind him.

  They were almost at the bank of the frozen river. Another shot, snapping nearby branches.

  “Your gun!” Bourne said.

  “I lost it when my horse was shot,” Zaim replied unhappily.

  “We’ll be picked off like wooden ducks.”

  Bourne handed Zaim down to the snowpack, then slid off the gray. A smart slap to its rump sent it crashing through the forest on a more or less parallel course to the river.

  “Now what?” Zaim slapped his bum leg. “With this, we’ll be helpless out here.”

  “Let’s go.” Grabbing him by his thick wool jacket, Bourne began to run down the bank to the river.

  “What are you doing?” Zaim’s eyes were wide with fear.

  Bourne half lifted him off his feet an instant before they hit the ice on the run. Compensating for the other man’s weight, Bourne began the long back-and-forth strides of an ice skater. Using the blades embedded in his boot soles as skates, he built up speed with the natural downward slope of the river.

  He took the snaking turns expertly, but he had almost no control over his speed, and he was racing along faster and faster as the rivercourse steepened.

  They flashed around another bend and Zaim uttered an inarticulate cry. A moment later Bourne saw why. Not a thousand meters away the river broke sharply downward into a waterfall, now frozen in place like a stop-motion photo.

  “How high,” Bourne called over the howling of the wind in his face.

  “Too high,” Zaim moaned in terror. “Oh, too, too high!”

  Nine

  BOURNE TRIED to veer to the left or right, but he couldn’t. He was flying along a fold in the ice that would not allow him to change direction. At any rate, it was too late now. The ruffled top of the waterfall was upon them, so he did the only thing he could think of: He steered for the exact center, where the water was deepest and the ice thinnest.

  They hit it at speed, which combined with their weight to shatter the thin crust of ice that had formed over the streaming water. Into the waterfall they plunged, tumbling down and down, the icy water taking their breath away, freezing them from their limbs inward.

  As he fell from the heights, Bourne struggled against becoming disoriented, which was his primary concern. If he lost his sense of direction, he’d either freeze to death or drown before he could break through the ice at the base of the waterfall. There was another concern: If he allowed himself to get too far from the base area, the ice would quickly thicken into a layer he’d likely find unbreakable.

  Light and shadow, blue-black, gray-opal spun across his vision as he was tossed and tumbled through the churning water. Once, his shoulder smashed into a rock outcropping. Pain leapt through him like a surge of electricity, and as his downward momentum abruptly ceased, he searched for the light in the jumble of darkness. There was none! His head was spin

ning, his hands almost completely numb. His heart was laboring from both the physical pounding and the lack of oxygen.

  He struck out with his arms. At once he realized that Zaim’s body was almost against him; as he drew it to one side, he saw pearlescent light shining behind it and knew which way was up. Zaim seemed to be unconscious. Blood plumed from the side of his head, and Bourne guessed that he, too, had struck a rock.

  With one arm around the limp form, Bourne kicked out hard for the surface, banging the top of his head sooner than he had anticipated against the ice sheet. It didn’t give.

  His head was pounding, and the ribbons of blood leaking from Zaim’s wound were obscuring his vision. He clawed against the ice, but could find no purchase. He slid along the underside, searching for a crack, a flaw he could exploit. But the ice was thicker than he’d imagined, even here at the waterfall’s base. His lungs were burning and the headache caused by the lack of oxygen was fast becoming intolerable. Perhaps Zaim was already dead. Surely he himself would be if he couldn’t break through to the surface.

  A strong eddy caught him, threatening to send them swirling out to certain death in the darkness where the ice sheet was thickest. As he struggled against it, his nails bit into something—not a crack precisely, but a stress flaw in the sheet. He could see that one side was allowing more light in, and there he concentrated his efforts. But his fists, numbed into clumsy weights, were of no use.

  Only one chance now. He let go of Zaim and dove down into the darkness until he felt the river bottom. Reversing himself, he coiled his legs, launching himself upward in a straight line. The top of his head struck the stress flaw and he heard it crack, then splinter apart as his shoulders followed his head into the blessed air. Bourne drew air into his lungs once, twice, three times. Then he dove back down. Zaim wasn’t where he had left him. He had been caught in the powerful eddy and was now being launched into the darkness.

  Bourne kicked, fighting the current, stretching out full-length to grab Zaim by the ankle. Slowly, surely he drew him back to the light, bringing him up through the ragged hole in the ice, laying him out on the frozen riverbed before he levered himself out of the water.