Page 2 of The Bourne Betrayal (Jason Bourne 5)

  Abbud ibn Aziz put his right eye against the optical sight, mounted just behind the trigger. He found the Chinook, thought fleetingly that it was a pity to lose this magnificent war machine. But such an object of desire was not for him. In any event, everything had been meticulously planned by Fadi’s brother, down to the trail of clues that had compelled the deputy director of CI out of his office and into the field, that led him a tortuous route to northwestern Ethiopia, thence here to the upper reaches of Ras Dejen.

  Abbud ibn Aziz positioned the RPG-7 so that it was aimed at the helicopter’s front rotor assembly. He was now one with the weapon, one with the goal of his cadre. He could feel the absolute resolve of his comrades flowing through him like a tide, a wave about to crash onto the enemy shore.

  “Remember,” Fadi said.

  But Abbud ibn Aziz, a highly skilled armorist, trained by Fadi’s brilliant brother in modern war machinery, needed no reminder. The one drawback of the RPG was that upon firing, it emitted a telltale trail of smoke. They would immediately become visible to the enemy. This, too, had been accounted for.

  He felt the tap of Fadi’s forefinger on his shoulder, which meant their target was in position. His finger curled around the trigger. He took a deep breath, slowly exhaled.

  There came the recoil, a hurricane of superheated air. Then the flash-and-boom of the explosion itself, the plume of smoke, the twisted rotor blades rising together from the opposite camps. Thunderous echoes, like the dull ache in Abbud ibn Aziz’s shoulder, were still resounding when Fadi’s men rose as one and rushed to the butte, a hundred meters east of where he and Abbud ibn Aziz had been perched and were now scrambling away, where the telltale smoke plume rose. As the cadre had been taught, it fired a massed fusillade of shots, the expressed rage of the faithful.

  Al-Hamdu lil-Allah! Allah be praised! The attack had begun.

  One moment Lindros had been telling Anders why he wanted two more minutes on site, the next he felt as if his skull had been crushed by a pile driver. It took him some moments to realize that he was flat on the ground, his mouth filled with dirt. He lifted his head. Burning debris swung crazily through the smoky air, but there was no sound, nothing at all but a peculiar pressure on his eardrums, an inner whooshing, as if a lazy wind had started up inside his head. Blood ran down his cheeks, hot as tears. The sharp, choking odor of burned rubber and plastics filled his nostrils, but there was something else as well: the heavy underscent of roasting meat.

  It was when he tried to roll over that he discovered Anders half lying atop him. The commander had taken the brunt of the blast in an effort to protect him. His face and bared shoulder, where his uniform was burned away, were crisped and smoking. All the hair on his head had been burned off, leaving little more than a skull. Lindros gagged, with a convulsive shudder pushed the corpse off him. He gagged again as he rose to his knees.

  A kind of whirring came to him then, strangely muted, as if heard from a great distance. Turning, he saw the members of Skorpion One piling out of the wreckage of the Chinook, firing their semiautomatics as they came.

  One of them went down under the withering hail of machine-gun fire. Lindros’s next move was instinctual. On his belly, he crawled to the dead man, snatched up his XM8, and began firing.

  The battle-hardened men of Skorpion One were both courageous and well trained. They knew when to take their shots and when to take refuge. Nevertheless, as the crossfire started up they were totally unprepared, so concentrated were they on the enemy in front of them. One by one they were shot, most multiple times.

  Lindros soldiered on, even after he was the last man standing. Curiously, no one shot at him; not one bullet even came close. He had just begun to wonder about this when his XM8 ran out of ammo. He stood with the smoking assault rifle in his hand, watching the enemy coming down from the butte above him.

  They were silent, thin as the ravaged man inside the cave, with the hollow eyes of men who had seen too much blood spilled. Two broke off from the pack and slipped into the smoldering carcass of the Chinook.

  Lindros jerked as he heard shots being fired. One of the cadre spun through the open door of the blackened Chinook, but a moment later the other man dragged the bloody pilot out by his collar.

  Was he dead or merely unconscious? Lindros longed to know, but the others had enclosed him in a circle. He saw in their faces the peculiar light of the fanatic, a sickly yellow, a flame that could be extinguished only by their own death.

  He dropped his useless weapon and they took him, pulling his hands hard behind his back. Men took up the bodies on the ground and dumped them into the Chinook. In their wake, two others advanced with flamethrowers. With unnerving precision, they proceeded to incinerate the helicopter and the dead and wounded men inside it.

  Lindros, groggy and bleeding from a number of superficial cuts, watched the supremely coordinated maneuvers. He was surprised and impressed. He was also frightened. Whoever had planned this clever ambush, whoever had trained this cadre was no ordinary terrorist. Out of sight of his captors, he worked the ring he wore off his finger and dropped it into the rocky scree, taking a step to cover it with his shoe. Whoever came after him needed to know that he’d been here, that he hadn’t been killed with the rest.

  At that moment, the knot of men around him parted and he saw striding toward him a tall, powerful-looking Arab with a bold, desert-chiseled face and large, piercing eyes. Unlike the other terrorists Lindros had interrogated, this one had the mark of civilization on him. The First World had touched him; he had drunk from its technological cup.

  Lindros stared into the Arab’s dark eyes as they stood, confronting each other.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Lindros,” the terrorist leader said in Arabic.

  Lindros continued to stare at him, unblinking.

  “Silent American, where is your bluster now?” Smiling, he added: “It’s no use pretending. I know you speak Arabic.” He relieved Lindros of both radiation detector and Geiger counter. “I must assume you found what you were looking for.” Feeling through Lindros’s pockets, he produced the metal canister. “Ah, yes.” He opened it and poured out the contents between Lindros’s boots. “Pity for you the real evidence is long gone. Wouldn’t you like to know its destination.” This last was said as a mocking statement, not as a question.

  “Your intel is first-rate,” Lindros said in impeccable Arabic, causing a considerable stir among everyone in the cadre, save two men: the leader himself and a stocky man whom Lindros took to be the second in command.

  There came the leader’s smile again. “I return the compliment.”

  Silence.

  Without warning, the leader hit Lindros so hard across the face his teeth snapped together. “My name is Fadi, the redeemer, Martin. You don’t mind if I call you Martin? Just as well, as we’re going to become intimates over the next several weeks.”

  “I don’t intend to tell you anything,” Lindros said, abruptly switching to English.

  “What you intend and what you will do are two separate things,” Fadi said in equally precise English. He inclined his head. Lindros winced as he felt the wrench on his arms, so savage it threatened to dislocate his shoulders.

  “You have chosen to pass on this round.” Fadi’s disappointment appeared genuine. “How arrogant of you, how truly unwise. But then, after all, you are American. Americans are nothing if they are not arrogant, eh, Martin. And, truly, unwise.”

  Again the thought arose that this was no ordinary terrorist: Fadi knew his name. Through the mounting pain shooting up his arms, Lindros fought to keep his face impassive. Why wasn’t he equipped with a cyanide capsule in his mouth disguised as a tooth, like agents in spy novels? Sooner or later, he suspected, he’d wish he had one. Still, he’d keep up this front for as long as he was able.

  “Yes, hide behind your stereotypes,” he said. “You accuse us of not understanding you, but you understand us even less. You don’t know me at all.”

  “Ah, in thi

s, as in most things, you’re wrong, Martin. In point of fact I know you quite well. For some time I have—how do American students put it?—ah, yes, I have made you my major. Anthropological studies or realpolitik?” He shrugged as if they were two colleagues drinking together. “A matter of semantics.”

  His smile broadened as he kissed Lindros on each cheek. “So now we move on to round two.” When he pulled away, there was blood on his lips.

  “For three weeks, you have been looking for me; instead, I have found you.”

  He did not wipe away Lindros’s blood. Instead, he licked it off.

  Book One

  One

  WHEN DID THIS particular flashback begin, Mr. Bourne?” Dr. Sunderland asked.

  Jason Bourne, unable to sit still, walked about the comfortable, homey space that seemed more like a study in a private home than a doctor’s office. Cream walls, mahogany wainscoting, a vintage dark-wood desk with claw feet, two chairs, and a small sofa. The wall behind Dr. Sunderland’s desk was covered with his many diplomas and an impressive series of international awards for breakthrough therapy protocols in both psychology and psychopharmacology related to his specialty: memory. Bourne studied them closely, then saw the photo in a silver frame on the doctor’s desk.

  “What’s her name?” Bourne said. “Your wife.”

  “Katya,” Dr. Sunderland said after a slight hesitation.

  Psychiatrists always resisted giving out any personal information about themselves and their family. But in this case, Bourne thought…

  Katya was in a ski suit. A striped knit cap was on her head, a pom-pom at its top. She was blond and very beautiful. Something about her suggested that she was comfortable in front of the camera. She was smiling into the camera, the sun in her eyes. The crinkles at their outside corners made her seem peculiarly vulnerable.

  Bourne felt tears coming. Once he would have said that they were David Webb’s tears. But the two warring personalities—David Webb and Jason Bourne, the day and night of his soul—had finally fused. While it was true that David Webb, sometime professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, was sinking deeper into shadow, it was just as true that Webb had softened Bourne’s most paranoid and antisocial edges. Bourne couldn’t live in Webb’s world of normalcy, just as Webb couldn’t survive in Bourne’s vicious shadow world.

  Dr. Sunderland’s voice intruded on his thoughts. “Please sit down, Mr. Bourne.”

  Bourne did so. There was a kind of relief in letting go of the photo.

  Dr. Sunderland’s face settled into an expression of heartfelt sympathy. “The flashbacks, Mr. Bourne, they began following your wife’s death, I imagine. Such a shock would—”

  “Not then, no,” Jason Bourne said quickly. But that was a lie. The memory shards had resurfaced the night he had seen Marie. They had woken him out of sleep—nightmares made manifest, even in the brilliance of the lights he had turned on.

  Blood. Blood on his hands, blood covering his chest. Blood on the face of the woman he is carrying. Marie! No, not Marie! Someone else, the tender planes of her neck pale through the streams of blood. Her life leaking all over him, dripping onto the cobbled street as he runs. Panting through the chill night. Where is he? Why is he running? Dear God, who is she?

  He had bolted up, and though it was the dead of the night he’d dressed and slipped out, running full-out through the Canadian countryside until his sides ached. The bone-white moonlight had followed him like the bloody shards of memory. He’d been unable to outrun either.

  Now he was lying to this doctor. Well, why not? He didn’t trust him, even though Martin Lindros—the DDCI and Bourne’s friend—had recommended him, showed Bourne his impressive credentials. Lindros had gotten Sunderland’s name from a list provided by the DCI’s office. He didn’t have to ask his friend about that: Anne Held’s name on the bottom of each page of the document verified his hypothesis. Anne Held was the DCI’s assistant, stern right hand.

  “Mr. Bourne?” Dr. Sunderland prompted him.

  Not that it mattered. He saw Marie’s face, pale and lifeless, felt Lindros’s presence beside him as he took in the coroner’s French-Canadian-accented English: “The viral pneumonia had spread too far, we couldn’t save her. You can take comfort in the fact that she didn’t suffer. She went to sleep and never woke up.” The coroner had looked from the dead woman to her grief-stricken husband and his friend. “If only she’d come back from the skiing trip sooner.”

  Bourne had bitten his lip. “She was taking care of our children. Jamie had turned an ankle on his last run. Alison was terribly frightened.”

  “She didn’t seek a doctor? Suppose the ankle was sprained—or broken.”

  “You don’t understand. My wife—her entire family are outdoors people, ranchers, hardy stock. Marie was trained from an early age to take care of herself in the wilderness. She had no fear of it whatsoever.”

  “Sometimes,” the coroner had said, “a little fear is a good thing.”

  “You have no right to judge her!” Bourne had cried out in anger and grief.

  “You’ve spent too much time with the dead,” Lindros had berated the coroner. “You need to work on your people skills.”

  “My apologies.”

  Bourne had caught his breath and, turning to Lindros, said, “She phoned me, she thought it was just a cold.”

  “A natural enough conclusion,” his friend had said. “In any event, her mind was clearly on her son and daughter.”

  “So, Mr. Bourne, when did the memory flashes begin?” There was the distinct tinge of a Romanian accent to Dr. Sunderland’s English. Here was a man, with his high, wide forehead, strong-lined jaw, and prominent nose, that one could easily have confidence in, confide in. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and his hair was slicked back in a curious, old-fashioned style. No PDA for him, no text-messaging on the run. Above all, no multitasking. He wore a three-piece suit of heavy Harris tweed, a red-and-white polka-dot bow tie.

  “Come, come.” Dr. Sunderland cocked his large head, which made him look like an owl. “You’ll forgive me, but I feel quite sure you’re—how shall I put it—hiding the truth.”

  At once, Bourne was on the alert. “Hiding…?”

  Dr. Sunderland produced a beautiful crocodile-skin wallet, from which he slipped a hundred-dollar bill. Holding it up, he said, “I’ll wager that the memory flashes began just after you laid your wife to rest. However, this wager will be invalid if you elect not to tell the truth.”

  “What are you, a human lie detector?”

  Dr. Sunderland wisely kept his own counsel.

  “Put your money away,” Bourne said at length. He sighed. “You’re right, of course. The memory flashes began the day I saw Marie for the last time.”

  “What form did they take?”

  Bourne hesitated. “I was looking down at her—in the funeral home. Her sister and father had already identified her and had her transferred from the coroner’s. I looked down at her and—I didn’t see her at all…”

  “What did you see, Mr. Bourne?” Dr. Sunderland’s voice was soft, detached.

  “Blood. I saw blood.”

  “And?”

  “Well, there was no blood. Not really. It was the memory surfacing—without warning—without…”

  “That’s the way it always happens, isn’t it?”

  Bourne nodded. “The blood… it was fresh, glistening, made bluish by street lamps. The blood covered this face…”

  “Whose face?”

  “I don’t know… a woman… but it wasn’t Marie. It was… someone else.”

  “Can you describe this woman?” Dr. Sunderland asked.

  “That’s the thing. I can’t. I don’t know… And yet, I know her. I know I do.”

  There was a small silence, into which Dr. Sunderland interjected another seemingly unrelated question. “Tell me, Mr Bourne, what is today’s date?”

  “That’s not the kind of memory problem I have.”

  Dr. Sunderland d

ucked his head. “Indulge me, please.”

  “Tuesday, February third.”

  “Four months since the funeral, since your memory problem began. Why did you wait so long to seek help?”

  For a time, there was another silence. “Something happened last week,” Bourne said at length. “I saw—I saw an old friend of mine.” Alex Conklin, walking down the street in Alexandria’s Old Town where he’d taken Jamie and Alison for the last outing he’d have with them for a long time. They had just come out of a Baskin-Robbins, the two of them loaded with ice-cream cones, and there was Conklin big as life. Alex Conklin: his mentor, the mastermind behind the Jason Bourne identity. Without Conklin, it was impossible to imagine where he’d be today.

  Dr. Sunderland cocked his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “This friend died three years ago.”

  “Yet you saw him.”

  Bourne nodded. “I called his name, and when he turned around he was holding something in his arms—someone, actually. A woman. A bloody woman.”

  “Your bloody woman.”

  “Yes. At that moment I thought I was losing my mind.”

  That was when he’d decided to ship the kids off. Alison and Jamie were with Marie’s sister and father in Canada, where the family maintained their enormous ranch. It was better for them, though Bourne missed them terribly. It would not be good for them to see him now.

  Since then, how many times had he dreamed of the moments he dreaded most: seeing Marie’s pale face; picking up her effects at the hospital; standing in the darkened room of the funeral home with the director beside him, staring down at Marie’s body, her face still, waxen, made up in a way Marie never would have done herself. He had leaned over, his hand reaching out, and the director had offered a handkerchief, which Bourne had used to wipe the lipstick and rouge off her face. He had kissed her then, the coldness of her lips running right through him like an electric shock: She’s dead, she’s dead. That’s it, my life with her is over. With a small sound, he’d lowered the casket lid. Turning to the funeral director, he’d said, “I’ve changed my mind. No open casket. I don’t want anyone to see her like this, especially the children.”