Page 44 of The Bourne Betrayal (Jason Bourne 5)

  A slow smile spread across Muta’s face. “So you do want to know.” His breath sawing in and out of his punctured lungs sounded like the scream of a prehistoric beast. “The truth is important to you, after all.”

  “Tell me!” Bourne shouted at him.

  He grabbed Muta ibn Aziz, hauled him up by the front of his shirt in an attempt to rattle the answer out of him. But at that moment a cadre of Dujja terrorists swarmed through the rent in the fuselage. They hauled him off Fadi’s messenger, who lay coughing up the last of his life.

  Chaos ensued—a rushing of bodies, a jumble of spoken Arabic, clipped orders and even more clipped responses—as they dragged him half conscious across the bloody floor, out into the arid wastes of Miran Shah.

  Book Four

  Thirty-three

  SORAYA MOORE, on the corner of 7th Street NE, a well-armed Tyrone standing lookout beside her, called CI headquarters—from a pay phone, not from her cell.

  When Peter Marks heard it was her, his voice lowered to a whisper.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what the hell have you done?”

  “I haven’t done anything, Peter,” she replied hotly.

  “Then why is there an all-department directive posted to report any appearance, any phone call, any contact whatsoever with you immediately and directly to Director Lindros?”

  “Because Lindros isn’t Lindros.”

  “He’s an impostor, right?”

  Soraya’s heart lifted. “Then you know.”

  “What I know is that Deputy Director Lindros called a meeting, told us you’d gone over the edge, completely lost it. It was Bourne’s death, right? Anyway, he said you were making insane accusations about him.”

  Oh, my God, Soraya thought. He’s turned everyone at CI against me.

  She heard the naked suspicion in Marks’s voice, but plowed gamely on anyway. “He’s lied to you, Peter. The truth is too complicated to get into now, but you’ve got to listen to me. Terrorists have put into motion a plan to blow up headquarters.” She knew she sounded breathless, even a little bit mad. “Please, I’m begging you. Go to the Old Man, tell him it’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “The Old Man and Anne are at the White House, meeting with the president. They’ll be there for some time, Deputy Director Lindros said.”

  “Then contact one of the directorate chiefs—better yet, all of them. Anyone but Lindros.”

  “Listen, come in. Give yourself up. We can help you.”

  “I’m not crazy,” Soraya said, though increasingly she felt as if she was.

  “Then this conversation is over.”

  As Katya turned toward the two guards outside the infirmary, her delicate fingers undid the top two buttons of her blouse. She had never worn a bra. She had beautiful breasts, and she knew it.

  The guards were playing the same game they always did, the rules of which she could never fathom. Of course, no money changed hands; that would make it gambling, which was forbidden by Islamic law. The object seemed to be to sharpen their reaction time.

  To turn her mind away from her present situation, she conjured up the rush of her old life, the one Costin had insisted she give up. As the guards became aware of her, she stood in profile, as she would on a Perfect Ten shoot, her back slightly arched, her breasts thrust out.

  Then slowly, disarmingly, she turned toward them. Their eyes were nailed to her body.

  She felt the ache in her breastbone, where she had instructed Lindros to hit her. She opened her blouse wide enough so that they could see the bruise, so new that the skin was bright red, just starting to puff up.

  “Look,” she said, quite unnecessarily. “Look what that bastard has done to me.”

  With these words, the guards roused themselves sufficiently to rush past her into the infirmary. They saw Lindros flat on his back, his eyes closed. There was blood on his face. He seemed to be scarcely breathing.

  The taller of the two guards turned to Katya, who was standing directly behind him. “What have you done to him?”

  At that precise moment, Lindros drew back his right leg, opened his eyes, and slammed the heel of his right foot as hard as he could into the shorter guard’s crotch. The guard gave a little grunt of surprise as he collapsed in on himself.

  The taller guard, slow in turning back, received the tightly curled edge of Lindros’s knuckles in his throat. He coughed, his eyes going wide, his fingers scrabbling for his sidearm. Katya, as Lindros had instructed her, kicked the back of his left knee. As he pitched over, the side of his head made violent contact with Lindros’s fist.

  The two of them spent the next five minutes stripping the guards, then tying and gagging them. Lindros dragged first one, then the other to the utility closet, stowing them away like so much rubbish. He and Katya climbed into their clothes, she in the smaller guard’s outfit, Lindros in the taller one’s.

  As they dressed, he smiled at her. She reached out and wiped the blood from his pricked finger off his cheek.

  “How was that?” he said.

  “We’re a long way from being free.”

  “How right you are.” Lindros gathered up the guards’ weapons—sidearms and semiautomatic machine guns. “Do you know how to use these?”

  “I know how to pull a trigger,” she said.

  “That’ll have to do.”

  He took her hand, and together they fled the infirmary.

  Bourne was not treated as roughly by the terrorists as he had expected. In fact, once they’d dragged him out of the wrecked Sovereign, he wasn’t treated harshly at all. They were all Saudis, this cadre. He could tell not only by the way they looked, but by the Arabic dialect they spoke as well.

  As soon as his shoe soles hit the scorched earth of the runway, they stood him up straight and frog-marched him onto the shale, where two armored military all-terrain vehicles, veiled in heavy camouflaging, stood waiting. No wonder he’d missed seeing them from the air.

  They took him around to the larger of the two vehicles, which on close inspection looked like a mobile command center. The rear doors banged open, two burly arms extended, and he was hauled bodily up and in. Immediately the metal doors slammed shut.

  From out of the inky darkness, a familiar voice in a beautiful clipped British accent said, “Hello, Jason.”

  Red lights flickered on, making Bourne blink as his eyes adjusted. By the odd illumination he could see banks of electronic equipment, silently emitting mysterious readouts, like communications from another planet. To one side, a young bearded Saudi sat hunched over an islet of equipment. He had on a pair of professional earphones. Occasionally, he jotted a sentence or two from whatever he was listening to.

  To his left, close to where Bourne stood, was the huge, overmuscled man who must have hoisted Bourne into the mobile command center. He stared at Bourne without any emotion whatsoever. With his shaved head, his rocklike arms crossed over his equally muscular chest, he might have been a eunuch guarding a sultan’s harem.

  However, this one was guarding the third person in the truck, who sat at the command console. He must have swiveled the chair around as soon as Bourne had been hoisted aboard. He grinned from ear to ear, which belied his regal bearing.

  “We must stop meeting like this, Jason.” His ruby-red lips pursed. “Or no, perhaps it is kismet that we do so at the most propitious times.”

  “Goddammit,” Bourne said, recognizing the slim, dark-eyed man with the beak of a nose. “Feyd al-Saoud!”

  The chief of the Saudi secret police fairly jumped out of his chair and rushed to embrace Bourne, kissing him happily and moistly on both cheeks.

  “My friend, my friend. Thank Allah you’re still alive! We had no idea you were inside. How could we? It’s Fadi’s plane!” Waggling an admonishing forefinger, he said with mock anger, “And in any event, you never tell me what you’re up to.”

  Bourne and Feyd al-Saoud had known each other for some time. They had worked together once, in Iceland.   “I’d heard a rumor that the Saudis had a line on Fadi, though they vehemently denied it.”

  “Fadi is Saudi,” Feyd al-Saoud said, sobering quickly. “He is a Saudi problem.”

  “You mean he’s a Saudi embarrassment,” Bourne said. “I’m afraid he’s made himself everyone’s problem.”

  He went on to brief his friend on Fadi’s identity, as well as on what he and his brother, Karim al-Jamil, had planned, including the infiltration of CI. “You may think you’ve homed in on Dujja’s main camp,” Bourne said in conclusion, “but I can assure you this isn’t it. What is here, somewhere, is the nuclear facility that’s enriching the uranium and manufacturing the nuclear device they plan to detonate somewhere in the United States.”

  Feyd al-Saoud nodded. “Now things are starting to make sense.” He swung around, brought up a tactical pilotage chart of the area in order to orient Bourne. Next, he switched to a series of close-up IKONOS satellite images.

  “These were taken last week, at two-minute intervals,” he said. “You’ll notice that in the first image we see Miran Shah as we do now—barren, desolate. But here, in image two, we see two jeeplike vehicles. They’re heading more or less northwest. Now what do we see in image three? Miran Shah is once again barren, desolate. No people, no vehicles. In two minutes, where did they go? They could not possibly have driven out of the IKONOS range.” He sat back. “Given your intel, what must be our conclusion?”

  “Dujja’s nuclear facility is underground,” Bourne said.

  “One must believe so. We have been monitoring terrorist communications. From whence, we had no idea—until now. It’s coming from beneath the rocks and sand. Interestingly, it’s from within the facility. There have been no communications from the outside world for the three hours we’ve been here.”

  “Just how many men did you bring with you?” Bourne asked.

  “Including myself, twelve. As you’ve discovered, we had to pose as members of Dujja ourselves. This is North Waziristan, the most deeply conservative of Pakistan’s western provinces. The local Pashtun tribespeople have profound religious and ethnic ties to the Taliban, which is why they welcome al-Qaeda and Dujja alike. I couldn’t afford to bring more of my people in without awkward questions being raised.”

  At that moment the man with the headphones tore off the top sheet of paper on which he’d been frantically scribbling. He handed it to his chief.

  “Something in the rock or perhaps the facility’s lead shielding is interfering with the monitoring.” Feyd al-Saoud scanned the sheet quickly, then handed it to Bourne. “I think you’d better have a look at this.”

  Bourne read the Arabic transcription:

  “[?] both missing. We found the guards in [?] closet.”

  “How long?”

  “[?] twenty minutes. [?] couldn’t say for sure.”

  “Mobilize [?] you can spare. Send [?] to the entrance. Find them.”

  “And then?”

  “Kill them.”

  Lindros and Katya sprinted through the modern catacomb under Miran Shah. The alarm was blaring from loudspeakers spaced along the walls of the facility. The entrance had been in sight when the alarm had gone off, and immediately Lindros had reversed course. Now they were heading deeper into the facility.

  From snatches of overheard conversations as well as his own observations, Lindros had deduced that the Dujja facility was on two levels. The upper contained living quarters, kitchens, communications, and the like. The infirmary was on this floor. But the surgical facilities where Dr. Andursky had taken Lindros’s right eye, where he had remade Karim’s face, were below, along with the laboratories: the cavernous centrifuge room where the enriched uranium was concentrated even further, the double-walled fusion lab, and so on.

  “They know we’re missing,” Katya said. “What now?”

  “Plan B,” Lindros replied. “We have to get to the communications room.”

  “But that’s farther away from the entrance,” Katya said. “We’ll never get out.”

  They raced around a corner, were confronted by a long corridor that ran down the spine of the facility. Everything in the place—the rooms, corridors, stairwells, elevators—was oversize. No matter where you stood, you felt insignificant. There was something inherently terrifying about such a facility, as if it were designed not for people, but for a machine army. Humanity had been excluded from the premises.

  “We have to think first about survival, then escape,” Lindros said. “That means letting my people know where we are.”

  Though he was nervous, he slowed them down to a fast walk. He didn’t like this long, wide corridor stretching out in front of them. If they got trapped here, there was nowhere to hide or to run.

  As if reading his worst fear, two men appeared at the far end of the corridor. Seeing their quarry, they drew their weapons. One of them advanced down the corridor while the other held his position. His semiautomatic swung up to aim at them.

  I’ve got to find a way to warn everyone inside CI headquarters,” Soraya said.

  “But yo heard fo yoself they be illin’ on yo,” Tyrone replied. “Ain’t gonna get no props from them no matter what yo do.”

  “I can’t stop trying, can I?”

  Tyrone nodded. “True dat.”

  Which was why they were hid out, as Tyrone would say, in a tobacco shop where an old, grizzled Salvadoran was hand-rolling Cuban-seed shit he grew himself into Partagas, Montecristos, and Coronas, selling them to eager customers at a premium price over the Internet. As it happened, Tyrone owned the place, so to him went the lion’s share of the profits. It was just a ratty hole-in-the-wall on 9th Street NE, but at least it was legit.

  In any event, today its grease-streaked window afforded them a more or less clear view of the black Ford that Tyrone had stolen from the two Arabs he’d offed at the construction site. Tyrone had parked it directly across from the tobacco shop, where it now sat, waiting along with them.

  They had come up with the idea together. Since Soraya could no longer simply walk through the doors of CI headquarters, couldn’t even call anyone there without the threat of it being traced back to her, she needed another way in.

  “I know my vehicles, girl,” Tyrone had said, “an that some tricked-out beast. Them shitbirds know by now they two ain’t comin’ home. Think they just let that go? Shit, no. They be comin’ afta it an you. Ain’t gon let either a yo be. Sure as shit they be comin’ here to Northeast ’cause that’s the last place they knowd you be.” He’d grinned, wide and handsome. “When they get here, we on ’em like flies on shit.”

  It was a dangerous plan, but a good one for all that, Soraya had to admit. Besides, she couldn’t think of any alternative that wouldn’t get her either thrown in a CI cage or, more likely, killed.

  Fadi has taken prisoners,” Feyd al-Saoud said.

  “I might know one of them,” Bourne said. “My friend Martin Lindros.”

  “Ah, yes.” The security chief nodded. “The man whom Fadi’s brother is impersonating. He may still be alive, then. And the other?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Bourne said.

  “In any case, we must hurry if we’re to have any chance of saving them.” He frowned. “But we still have no idea how to gain entrance.”

  “Those vehicles on the IKONOS imagery,” Bourne said. “They had to go somewhere. Somewhere within a radius of a thousand meters of where we are now.” He pointed at the screen. “Can you make a printout of that?”

  “Of course.” Feyd al-Saoud tapped a computer keyboard. There came a soft whirring sound; then a sheet of paper was spewed out of the printer slot. The security chief handed it over.

  Bourne exited the mobile command post, followed by Feyd al-Saoud and his immense bodyguard, whose name, the security chief had told Bourne, was Abdullah.

  He stood on the southeast side of the runway, staring at the topography and comparing it with the IKONOS map.

  “The trouble is, there’s nothing he

re.” Feyd al-Saoud’s fists were on his hips. “As soon as we arrived, I sent out a recon of three men. After an hour, they returned without success.”

  “And yet,” Bourne said, “those vehicles must have gone somewhere.”

  He walked straight ahead, onto the runway. To his right was the wreck of the Sovereign, which would never fly again. To his left was the beginning of the strip. In his mind’s eye, he could see the Sovereign coming in too hot.

  All at once Muta ibn Aziz came into his mind. “You’re coming in too low,” he’d said. “You’ll hit the runway too soon.” Why had he become so agitated? The worst that would have happened was that the Sovereign’s wheels would have struck the tarmac at its near end. Why would that concern Muta ibn Aziz? Why would he even care?

  Bourne began to walk to his left, along the tarmac toward its beginning. He kept his eyes on the landing strip. He was now at the near end, the place Muta ibn Aziz was adamant he avoid. What would he be afraid of? Three things occurred when a jet touched down: high-level applications of friction, heat, and weight. Which one had worried him?

  Bourne crouched down, put his fingertips on the runway. It looked like tarmac, felt like tarmac. Except for one crucial thing.

  “Feel this,” Bourne said. “The tarmac should be burning hot from the strong sunlight.”

  “It’s not.” Feyd al-Saoud moved his hand around. “It’s not hot at all.”

  “Which means,” Bourne said, “it’s not tarmac.”

  “What could Dujja be using?”

  Bourne rose. “Don’t forget that they have access to IVT’s technology.”

  He walked farther down the runway. When he reached the place where marks showed he’d set the Sovereign down, he knelt again, put his hand to the tarmac. And snatched it away quickly.

  “Hot?” Feyd al-Saoud said.

  “This is tarmac.”

  “Then what’s back there?”

  “I don’t know, but the man I was with—Fadi’s messenger—didn’t want me to land there.”