Page 48 of The Bourne Betrayal (Jason Bourne 5)

  Feyd al-Saoud glanced at Bourne, who nodded. “Open it,” the security chief said to his man.

  The man laid the case carefully down on the concrete floor and snapped the lid open.

  “Look on the left side,” Veintrop said. “No, nearer the rear.”

  The Saudi craned his neck, then recoiled involuntarily. “A timer’s been activated.”

  “That happened when you opened the case without using the code.”

  Bourne recognized the note in his voice: It was triumph.

  “How much time?” Feyd al-Saoud said.

  “Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds.”

  “I created the circuit,” Veintrop said. “I can stop it.” He looked from one man to the other. “In return, I want my freedom. No prosecution. No negotiation. A new life, paid in full.”

  “Is that all?” Bourne hit him so hard that Veintrop bounced off the wall. He caught him on the rebound. “Knife,” he said.

  Feyd al-Saoud knew what was required now. He handed one to Bourne.

  The moment Bourne took possession of the knife he buried the blade just above Veintrop’s kneecap.

  Veintrop screamed. “What have you done?” Then he began to weep uncontrollably.

  “No, Doctor, it’s what you’ve done.” Bourne crouched down beside him, holding the bloody blade in his line of vision. “You’ve got just under four minutes to disable the timer.”

  Veintrop, holding his ruined knee, rocked back and forth on his backside. “What… what about my terms?”

  “Here are my terms.” Bourne flicked the blade and Veintrop screamed again.

  “All right, all right!”

  Bourne looked up. “Put the open case in front of him.”

  When that had been done, Bourne said, “It’s all yours, Doctor. But rest assured I’m going to be watching every move you make.”

  Bourne stood, saw Feyd al-Saoud staring at him, his heavy lips pushed out in a silent whistle of relief.

  Bourne watched while Veintrop worked on the timer. It took him just over two minutes, by Bourne’s wristwatch. At the end of that time, he sat back, arms folded protectively around his ruined knee.

  Feyd al-Saoud signed for his man to take a look.

  “The wires are cut,” the man said. “The timer’s dead. There’s no chance of detonation.”

  Veintrop had returned to his mindless rocking. “I need a painkiller,” he said dully.

  Feyd al-Saoud called for his surgeon, then went to take possession of the nuclear device. Bourne got to it before him.

  “I’m going to need this to get to Karim.”

  The security chief frowned deeply. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m taking the route Fadi would have taken to Washington,” Bourne said in a tone that brooked no interference.

  Even so, Feyd al-Saoud said, “Do you think that’s wise, Jason?”

  “I’m afraid at this juncture wise doesn’t enter into it,” Bourne replied. “Karim has put himself into a position of such power inside CI he’s all but untouchable. I’ve got to go another route.”

  “I expect you have a plan, then.”

  “I always have a plan.”

  “All right. My surgeon will take charge of your friend.”

  “No,” Bourne said. “Martin comes with me.”

  Again, Feyd al-Saoud recognized Bourne’s steely tone of voice. “Then my surgeon will accompany you.”

  “Thank you,” Bourne said.

  Feyd al-Saoud helped his friend load Martin Lindros into the helicopter. While Bourne laid down the law to Fadi’s pilot, the security chief sent his man off the copter, then knelt to help his surgeon make Lindros as comfortable as possible.

  “How long does he have?” Feyd al-Saoud said softly, for it was clear Lindros was dying.

  The surgeon shrugged. “An hour, give or take.”

  Bourne was finished talking to the pilot, who now slipped into his chair. “I need you to do something for me.”

  Feyd al-Saoud rose up. “Anything, my friend.”

  “First, I need a phone. Mine is fried.”

  The security chief was handed a cell by one of his men. Bourne transferred the chip that held all his phone numbers into the new model.

  “Thanks. Now I want you to phone your contacts in the U.S. government, tell them that the plane I’ll be taking is a Saudi diplomatic mission. As soon as I speak with the pilot, I’ll send you the flight plan. I don’t want any problems with Customs and Immigration.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Then I want you to call CI, tell them the same thing. Only give them an ETA forty minutes later than the actual one I’ll give you when the pilot has checked the weather.”

  “My call to CI will alert the impostor—”

  “Yes,” Bourne said. “It will.”

  Feyd al-Saoud’s face was wreathed in concern. “You play a terribly deadly game, Jason.”

  Having delivered this warning, he embraced his friend warmly.

  “Allah has given you wings. May He protect you on your mission.”

  He kissed Bourne on both cheeks, then, bending over, stepped out of the heli. The pilot threw a switch that retracted the camouflaged top of the helipad. When he was certain that all ground personnel were well clear of the rotor, he started the engine.

  Bourne knelt beside Lindros and took his hand. Martin’s good eye fluttered open. He stared up at Bourne, smiled with what was left of his mouth, and gripped Bourne’s hand all the tighter.

  Bourne felt tears come to his eyes. With an effort, he held them back. “Fadi’s dead, Martin,” he said over the mounting noise. “You’ve got your wish. You’re a hero.”

  Thirty-eight

  KARIM WAS deliberately late to the directorate admin meeting. He wanted all seven of the directorate chiefs around the table when he walked in. The conference room was by design located adjacent to the DCI’s office suite. In fact, there was a connecting door from the Old Man’s suite into the conference room. Also by design, it was through this door that Karim made his entrance. He wanted to reiterate to the Seven, without having to utter a word, where he stood vis-à-vis them in the CI hierarchy.

  “The DCI sends his regrets,” he said briskly, taking the Old Man’s seat around the table. “Anne, who’s with him, tells me that he’s still closeted with the president and the Joint Chiefs.”

  Karim opened a thick dossier, only the first five pages of which were real—if you could call real disinformation he had carried in his head for months.

  “Now that the imminent threat posed by Dujja has been eliminated, now that Dujja itself is a shell of itself, it’s time we moved on to other matters.”

  “One moment, Martin,” cut in the steely voice of Rob Batt, chief of operations. “If I may, before we close the door on this one there’s still the matter of Fadi himself to consider.”

  Karim sat back, twisting a pen through his fingers. The worst thing he could do, he knew, was cut off this line of inquiry. As the meeting several days ago had indicated, he was on Batt’s shit list. He wasn’t about to do anything to raise Batt’s level of distrust.

  “By all means,” Karim said, “let’s discuss going after Fadi.”

  “I agree with Rob,” Dick Symes, chief of the Intelligence Directorate, said. “I’m in favor of committing a significant percentage of personnel to his capture.”

  There were nods from several of the other chiefs arrayed around the table.

  In the face of this rising wave, Karim said, “In the absence of the Old Man, we’ll naturally implement what the majority thinks best. However, I’d like to point out several things. First, having wiped out Dujja’s most important base of operations, we have no idea whether Fadi is alive or dead. If he was in or near the facility in South Yemen, there’s no doubt that he was incinerated along with everyone else. Second, if he was elsewhere at the time of the raid, we have no idea where he might be. For sure, he will have gone to ground. I say we allow time to pass, see what we pic

k up on the Dujja network. Let the terrorist world believe we’ve turned our attention elsewhere. If Fadi is alive, he’ll begin to stir, and then we’ll get a line on him.”

  Karim looked from face to face. There were no frowns, no dissenting shakes of the head, no covert glances among the Seven.

  “Third, and perhaps most important, we have to get our own house in order,” he continued. “I can confirm the rumors that the Old Man has been under attack by Defense Secretary Halliday and his Pentagon lackey, Luther LaValle. Halliday knew about our mole, and he knew about the computer virus attack. It turns out that the late Matthew Lerner was also Halliday’s man.”

  This caused quite a stir around the table. Karim held up his hands, palms outward. “I know, I know, we’ve all felt the turmoil caused by Lerner’s attempt to realign CI. And now we know why the changes felt so alien to us—they were mandated by Halliday and his henchmen at NSA.

  “Well, Lerner’s dead. Whatever clandestine influence the defense secretary had here is gone. And now that the mole has been dispatched, we’re free to do what should have been done years ago. We need to remake CI into an agency better equipped than any other to wage war on global terrorism.

  “That’s why my first proposal is to hire the uniquely qualified Arabs and Muslims drummed out of the various agencies in the wake of September 11. If we have any chance of winning this new war, we have to understand the terrorists who make up our patchwork enemy. We have to stop confusing Arab with Muslim, Saudi with Syrian, Azerbaijani with Afghani, Sunni with Shia.”

  “Hard to argue with any of that,” Symes said.

  “We can still take a vote on Rob’s suggestion,” Karim said smoothly.

  All eyes turned to the chief of operations. “That won’t be necessary,” Batt said. “I hereby withdraw my suggestion in favor of Martin’s.”

  Bourne sat on the floor of the helicopter facing the Saudi surgeon and his large black bag. Between them lay the bloody body of Martin Lindros. The doctor was continuing to give Martin something intravenously for the pain.

  “The best I can do,” the surgeon had said as they had sped away from Miran Shah, “is to make him as comfortable as I can.”

  Bourne stared down into Lindros’s ruined face, conjuring up an image of his friend as he had been. He wasn’t entirely successful. The .45 bullet from Fadi’s gun had exploded along the right side of his head, destroying the eye socket and half the brow ridge. The surgeon had been able to stop the bleeding, but because the gun had been fired from close range, the damage had been massive enough to cause the shutdown of Martin’s vital organs. According to the surgeon, the cascade effect had progressed far enough as to make any attempt at saving Martin’s life fruitless.

  Martin was in a period of uneasy sleep now. Watching him, Bourne felt a combination of rage and despair. Why had this happened to Martin? Why wasn’t he able to keep him alive? He knew his distress came from helplessness. It was the same feeling he’d had on seeing Marie for the last time. Helplessness was the one emotion Bourne could not abide. It got under his skin, buried itself in his psyche like an itch he couldn’t scratch, a mocking voice he couldn’t silence.

  With a guttural growl, he turned away. They had reached a high enough altitude to be clear of the mountains, so he opened his cell phone, tried Soraya again. It rang, which was a good sign. Once again, she didn’t answer, which wasn’t. This time, he left a brief voice-mail message that evoked Odessa. It would be cryptic to anyone but Soraya herself.

  Then he called Deron’s cell. He was still down in Florida.

  “I’ve got a problem only you can handle,” Bourne said without preamble.

  “Shoot.”

  This kind of abbreviated conversation was typical with them.

  “I need a full kit.”

  “No problem. Where are you?”

  “About ten hours out of Washington.”

  “Kay. Tyrone’s got my keys. He’ll get it all together. Dulles or Reagan National?”

  “Neither. We’re scheduled to set down eighteen kilometers south of Annandale,” Bourne said, giving Deron the coordinates in Virginia he’d gotten from the pilot. “It’s on the extreme eastern edge of property owned by Sistain Labs.” Sistain was a subsidiary of IVT. “Thanks, Deron.”

  “No biggie, my man. I just wish I was there myself.”

  As Bourne disconnected, Martin stirred.

  “Jason.”

  Martin’s reedy whisper caused him to put his head beside his friend’s. The odor of lacerated flesh, of impending death, was nauseating.

  “I’m here, Martin.”

  “The man who took my place—”

  “Karim. Fadi’s brother, I know. I worked it all out, Martin. It started with the Odessa mission Conklin gave me. I was with Soraya at the meet with her contact. A young woman came running toward us. It was Sarah ibn Ashef, Karim and Fadi’s sister. I shot at her, but I didn’t hit her as I assumed I had. It was one of Fadi’s men. He shot her dead because she was having an affair.”

  Martin’s one remaining eye, red-rimmed, burning still with life, fixed on Bourne. “It’s Karim… you have… to get, Jason.” He was wheezing, his breath coming in herky-jerky gasps, clotted with pink phlegm and blood. “He’s the wily one, the… chess player… the spider sitting at the… center of the… Jesus, of the… web.”

  His eye was open wide, moving to the spasms of pain racking him. “Fadi… Fadi was just the… front, the rallying… point. Karim is the… truly… dangerous one.”

  “Martin, I heard every word you said, and it’s time to rest now,” Bourne said.

  “No, no…” Lindros seemed to have been seized by a peculiar frenzy. The energy of a small star radiated from him, bathing Bourne in its glow. “Plenty of time to… rest when… I’m… dead.”

  He had started to bleed again. The surgeon leaned over, wiped it away with a gauze pad that soon enough was soaked through.

  “For Karim it isn’t… simply America, Jason. It’s CI itself. He hates us—all of us with… every fiber of his… being. That… that’s why he… was willing to… gamble… everything, his entire… life and soul to… get… inside.”

  “What does he mean to do? Martin, what does he mean to do?”

  “Destroy CI.” Martin looked up at Bourne. “I wish I knew more. Christ, Jason, how I fucked up.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Martin.” Bourne’s expression was stern. “If you blame yourself for any of this, I’ll be extremely angry with you.”

  Lindros tried to laugh, but with all the blood he brought up he didn’t quite make it. “We can’t have that, now, can we?”

  Bourne wiped his mouth.

  Like a momentary loss of electricity through a power grid, something flickered across Lindros’s face—a window to a dark, cold place. He began to shiver.

  “Jason, listen, when this… is all… over, I want you to send a dozen red roses to Moira. You’ll find her address in… my cell phone at home. Cremate my body. Take my ashes to the Cloisters in New York City.”

  Bourne felt a burning behind his eyes. “Of course, I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “I’m glad you’re… here.”

  “You’re my best friend, Martin. My only friend.”

  “It’s sad, then, for… both of us.” Lindros tried to smile again, gave up, exhausted. “You know… the thing… between us, Jason… what bound us? You… can’t remember your past and… I can’t… bear to remember… mine.”

  The moment came, then, and Bourne could feel it. An instant ago Martin’s good eye was regarding him with grave intelligence; now it was fixed in the middle distance, staring at something Bourne had sensed many times, but never seen.

  Soraya, horrified not only by what she saw but also by its implications, stood transfixed, staring at the half-embalmed corpse of the Old Man. It was like seeing your father dead, she thought. You knew it had to happen someday, but when that day came you couldn’t wrap your mind around it. To her, as to everyone else at CI, h

e had seemed indestructible as well as invincible. He had been their moral compass, the font of their worldwide power for so long that now with him gone she felt naked and horribly vulnerable.

  In the wake of the first shock, she felt a cold panic grip her. With the Old Man dead, who was running CI? Of course, there were the directorate chiefs, but everyone from the upper echelons on down knew that Martin Lindros was the DCI’s anointed successor.

  Which meant that the false Lindros was heading up CI. God in heaven, she thought. He’s going to take CI down—this was part of the plan all along. What a coup for Fadi and Dujja to be able to destroy America’s most effective espionage agency just before they detonated a nuclear bomb on American soil.

  In the blink of an eye, she saw it all. The barrels of C-4 Tyrone had seen were meant for CI headquarters. But how on earth was Dujja going to get the explosives past security? She knew Fadi had devised a method to do so. Perhaps it would be easy now that the false Lindros had effected a coup.

  All at once Soraya snapped back into the here and now. Given the Old Man’s murder, it was imperative she gain access to CI headquarters. She had to inform the seven directorate chiefs of the truth, her own safety be damned. But how? The false Lindros would have her picked up the moment she showed her ID to CI security. And there was absolutely no way to sneak into HQ undetected.

  As the helicopter descended through the clouds toward the private airstrip in Mazar-i-Sharif, Bourne sat beside Martin Lindros, his head bowed. His mind was filled with connections, some to memories, others that went nowhere because the memories were lost to him. In that very important respect, connections were of paramount importance to him. Now a key one was gone. It was only now, in the aftermath, that Bourne understood how important Martin had been to him. Amnesia could engender many things in the mind, including insanity—or at least the semblance of it, which more or less amounted to the same thing.

  Being able to connect with Martin after Conklin was murdered had been a lifeline. Now Martin was dead. He no longer had Marie to come home to. When the stress level became too great, what would prevent him from slipping into the madness that came from the forest of broken connections within his brain?