Page 18 of The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

  “Your conspiracy theory again.” Hart shook her head. “Okay, let’s play this game for a minute. If he was murdered, why have him found at all? They could have snatched him, killed him, and buried him where he wouldn’t be dug up for ages, if at all.”

  “Two reasons,” Moira said. “First, he’s an undersecretary at DoD. Can you imagine the scope of the manhunt the moment he was reported missing, the amount of time his name would be in the forefront of the news? No, these people wanted him dead, wanted it over and done with, which defines an accident.”

  Hart cocked her head. “What’s the second reason?”

  “They want to scare me away from whatever Weston found, whatever Stevenson was afraid of.”

  “Pinprickbardem.”

  “Precisely.”

  “You’ve become as bad as Bourne was with these conspiracy theories.”

  “All of Jason’s conspiracy theories proved correct,” Moira said hotly.

  The DCI appeared unconvinced. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?”

  They reached the door and Moira turned back to take one last look at Stevenson. Then she opened the door. When they’d entered the corridor she said, “Would we be getting ahead of ourselves if I told you that Stevenson was a reformed alcoholic?”

  “Could be his fear made him slip off the wagon.”

  “You didn’t know him,” Moira said. “He’d converted his disease into a religion. Staying sober was his watchword, the reason he stayed alive. He hadn’t had a drink in the last twenty years. Nothing could have induced him to do it.”

  The bull was coming, nothing could stop it. Bourne grabbed the knife, pulled it out of Scarface’s side, and rolled to one side. The bull, scenting fresh blood, flicked its horns, goring Scarface in the groin. The animal twisted its massive head, lifting Scarface’s bulk off the ground as if it were made of papier-mâché and tossing it against the barrier.

  Snorting and stomping its front hooves, the bull then charged the corpse, impaling it on both horns, shaking it back and forth. The beast would surely tear it to shreds within moments. Bourne rose slowly, moving toward the bull with measured steps. When he was close enough, he slapped it smartly on its glistening, black snout with the flat of the blade.

  The bull pulled up short, confused, and backed up, allowing the blood-soaked body to crumple to the ground. There it stood its ground, with forelegs spread wide, and shook its head from side to side as if it couldn’t decide where the blow came from or what it meant. Blood spiraled down the horns, dripping onto the dirt. Staring at Bourne, uncertain how to deal with this second interloper in its territory, it made a sound deep in its throat. The moment it took a step toward him, Bourne smacked it once again with the blade and it halted, blinking, snorting, shaking its head as if to rid itself of the stinging pain.

  Bourne turned, knelt beside the ragged corpse. Quickly he went through Scarface’s pockets. He needed to find out who had sent this man. According to Wayan’s description of a man with gray eyes, Scarface wasn’t the one who’d tried to kill him in Bali. Had he been sent by the same man who’d hired the marksman? He needed to find some answers because Scarface was unfamiliar to him. Had Bourne known him in the past he couldn’t remember? As always when there was the possibility of someone resurfacing, these questions were maddening, required immediate solving, otherwise he’d never rest.

  Save for a roll of blood-soaked euros, Scarface’s pockets were predictably empty. He must have stashed his false passport and other equally fake papers at a safe house or perhaps a locker at the airport or rail station—but if that was the case, where was the key?

  Then Bourne turned the body slightly, looking for it when the bull came out of its temporary stupor and made a run at him. His arm was directly in the path of the horns. At the last instant he snatched it away, but the bull twisted its head violently and the length of the horn rode up his arm, flaying off the skin in a thin ribbon.

  Grabbing on to the horn, Bourne used it as a fulcrum to swing himself onto the bull’s back. For an instant the beast did not know what happened. Then, as the weight on its back shifted, it stomped forward, charging the barrier again. But this time the bull slammed into it sideways, and if Bourne hadn’t lifted his right leg it would have been smashed between the muscle of the beast and the stucco. As it was, he was jarred halfway off the bull. Had he fallen, it would have been the end of him, the creature mindlessly stomping him to death within seconds.

  Now he had to hang on as the bull made another run at the barrier in an attempt to shake him off. Bourne still had Scarface’s knife; there was a chance the blade was long enough to deliver the coup de grâce and bring the bull to its knees if he chose precisely the right spot and the correct angle. But he knew he wouldn’t do it. To kill this beast from behind when it was terrified of him seemed cowardly, craven. He thought of the wooden pig overlooking the pool in Bali, its painted face carved with the eternal smile of the mystical sage. This bull had its own life to live; Bourne had no right to take it.

  At that moment he was almost thrown off as the beast slammed into the barrier at an angle, twisting its head down and to the left in a more desperate attempt to dislodge the shifting weight on its back. Bourne, bounced painfully around, was clinging to the bull’s horns. His arm ached where Scarface had tried to break it, his back was still bleeding from the knife wound, and worst of all his head felt as if it were splitting into a thousand pieces. He knew he couldn’t last much longer, but rolling off the bull meant almost certain death.

  And then, as the massed shouts from the corrida came to an ear-shattering crescendo, the bull folded its front legs, its back canted steeply down, and Bourne was shaken loose at last, tumbling head over heels, fetching up against the barrier, which now was spiderwebbed with cracks from the force of the bull’s charges.

  He lay in a heap, half dazed. He could feel the beast’s hot breath on him; the horns were no more than a handbreadth from his face. He tried to move, but couldn’t. His breath labored in and out of his lungs and he was gripped by a terrible dizziness.

  The red eyes fixed him in their glare, the muscles beneath the glistening hide were bunching for the final lunge at him, and he knew that in the next moment he would be nothing more than a rag doll skewered like Scarface on the points of those bloody horns.

  15

  THE BULL LURCHED FORWARD, covering Bourne’s face with a spray of hot mist. The beast’s eyes rolled up and its massive head hit the floor at Bourne’s feet with a heavy thud. Bourne, struggling with clearing his fuzzy brain, wiped his eyes with his forearm, put his head back against the barrier, and saw the guard he had taken out and dragged into the anteroom.

  He stood in the classic marksman’s pose, legs spread, feet planted firmly, one hand cupping the butt of the pistol with which he’d shot the bull twice and which, now that it was dead, was aimed squarely at Bourne.

  “¡Levántese!” he ordered. “Stand up and show me your hands.”

  “All right,” Bourne said. “One moment.” Using one hand on top of the barrier to brace himself, he struggled to his feet. Placing Scarface’s knife carefully on top of the barrier, he raised his hands, palms outward.

  “What are you doing here?” The guard was livid with rage. “Son of a bitch, look what you made me do. Have you any idea what that bull cost?”

  Bourne pointed to the ripped-apart body of Scarface. “I’m nothing. It was this man, a professional assassin, I was trying to get away from.”

  The guard frowned deeply. “Who? Who do you mean?” He took several tentative steps toward Bourne, then he saw what was left of Scarface. “¡Madre de Dios!” he cried.

  Bourne leapt across the barrier into the bull pen and the guard toppled backward. For a moment, the two men grappled for the gun, then Bourne chopped down on the side of the guard’s neck and his body went limp.

  Before rolling off him, he checked the guard to make sure his pulse was steady, then climbed back over the barrier and put his head und

er the tap over the soapstone sink, using the cold water to sluice away the remainder of the bull’s blood as well as to revive himself. Using the cleanest of the rags under the sink, he wiped himself dry, then—still slightly dizzy—retraced his steps up the ramp into the colored dazzle of the corrida, where the triumphant matador was slowly and majestically parading around the perimeter of the ring with the bull’s ears held high to the screaming throng.

  The bull itself lay near the center of the corrida, mutilated, forgotten, flies buzzing around its immobile head.

  Soraya felt Amun beside her as if he were a small nuclear plant. How many lies had he told her, she wondered. Did he have powerful enemies high up in the Egyptian government, or were these the same people who had given him the order to barter a Kowsar 3 missile and bring down the American jet?

  “What is particularly troubling,” he said, breaking the short silence, “is that the Iranians had to have help getting here. It would be easy enough to pass through the chaos in Iraq, but after that what choice did they have? They wouldn’t have taken the northern route, crossing into Jordan and the Sinai, because it’s too risky. The Jordanians would have shot them dead and the Sinai is too open, too heavily patrolled.” He shook his head. “No, they had to have come here via Saudi and the Red Sea, which means the most logical landfall was Al Ghardaqah.”

  Soraya was aware of this tourist city on the Red Sea, a relaxed, sun-drenched mecca for the overly stressed not unlike Miami Beach. Amun was right: Its laid-back, carnival atmosphere would make it an ideal landing place for a small terrorist group, passing as tourists or better yet Egyptian fishermen, to arrive and depart unrecognized.

  Amun floored the gas pedal, streaking past cars and trucks alike. “I’ve arranged for a small plane to take us to Al Ghardaqah as soon as we arrive at the airfield. Breakfast will be served on board. We can strategize while we eat.”

  Soraya called Veronica Hart, who answered immediately.

  When she had been updated, Hart said, “The president is addressing the UN Security Council tomorrow morning. He’ll be asking for a formal condemnation of Iran.”

  “Without definitive proof?”

  “Halliday and his NSA people have convinced the president that their written report is all the proof we need.”

  “I take it you don’t agree,” Soraya said drily.

  “I most certainly don’t. If we go out on a limb like we did with the WMDs in Iraq and are subsequently proven wrong it will be an unmitigated disaster, both politically and militarily, because we’ll have enmeshed the world in a wider war than anyone can currently handle, and that includes us, no matter what Halliday says. You’ve got to find me definitive proof of Iranian involvement.”

  “That’s just what Chalthoum and I are working on, but the situation has become more complicated.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chalthoum theorizes that the Iranians must have had help in transshipping the missile, and I agree.” She repeated the logistics that Amun had given her. “Many of the people who took part in the nine-eleven disaster were Saudis. If the same group is now involved with an Iranian terrorist network or, far more ominously, the Iranian government itself, the implications are far reaching because the Iranians are Shi’a and the overwhelming majority of Saudis are Wahhib, a branch of the Sunni sect. As you know, Shi’a and Sunni are blood enemies. This raises the possibility that they have somehow entered into either a temporary truce or an alliance of shared purpose.”

  Hart sucked in her breath. “God in heaven, we’re talking about a nightmare scenario that’s frankly terrified us and the European intelligence community for years.”

  “With good reason,” Soraya said, “because it means that a united Islam is girding itself for an all-out war with the West.”

  Bourne felt the wound near his heart throbbing so badly, he feared it might have reopened. Exiting the pen, he headed for the toilets where he could at least get the remainder of the blood off his clothes, but halfway there he saw two police rounding the corridor, heading toward the pens. Had someone in the corrida seen something and raised the alarm? Or perhaps the guard had regained consciousness. There was no time for speculation as he reversed course and headed, somewhat unsteadily, up the ramp into the spangled Seville twilight. Behind him, he heard someone calling. Was it to him? Without a backward glance, he turned to look for Tracy, but as if intuiting the increasing danger of the situation, she was already out of her seat, searching for him. The moment they saw each other, she headed not toward him but toward the nearest exit, leading him there by example.

  The clamor around the corrida was of a more general nature as the crowd stood, stretched, milled, and talked among themselves or headed for the refreshment stands and the toilets. In the ring men dragged the fallen bull’s carcass away, raked over the dirt to cover the fresh blood, and generally prepared for the next bull.

  Bourne felt the pain in his chest detonate like a bomb. He staggered and fell against two women, who turned back to glare at him as he righted himself. But even in his debilitated state he was conscious of a proliferation of police entering the stadium. There was no doubt now that the alarm had been sounded.

  One of the police officers he’d seen coming toward him in the bowels of the corrida had emerged, looking around for him. He eeled his way through the crowd, thankful that virtually everyone was on the move, making it easier for him to lose himself as he made his way toward the exit where Tracy was waiting for him.

  But the police officer must have caught a glimpse of him, because he was hurrying after Bourne, expertly threading his way through the people. Bourne tried to judge the distance to the exit and wondered whether he was going to make it, because the officer was closing fast. A moment later he saw Tracy appear out of the throng. Without a glance at him, she rushed past him, heading in the opposite direction. What was she doing?

  Still picking his way forward, he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw her confront the police officer. In snatches he heard her voice, raised and plaintive, complaining of having her cell phone snatched from her handbag. The officer was understandably impatient with her, but when he tried to brush her off Tracy’s voice rose to such a pitch that everyone around her turned to stare and the officer was forced to deal with her.

  Through his growing pain Bourne managed a small smile. Three strides later he came to the exit, but as soon as he turned into it, he felt a deeper stab of pain in his chest and fell against the rough concrete wall, gasping for breath as people pushed past him, coming and going.

  “Come on,” Tracy urged in his ear as she slid her arm through his and drew him into the flow of the crowd, down the ramp, and into the enormous vestibule, where a mass of people were smoking and chattering away about the merits of the matador. Beyond the crowd, the glass doors to the street were directly ahead.

  Somehow she’d disentangled herself from the officer to find him. It took all his concentration to breathe deeply, to breathe through the pain.

  “Christ, what happened to you in there?” she said. “How badly are you hurt?”

  “Not badly.”

  “Really? You look like you’re already dead.”

  At that moment, three police came crashing through the corrida’s front doors.

  Moira and Veronica Hart decided to take the sedan Moira had rented, since the white Buick was as anonymous a car as possible. They found Humphry Bamber, the late Undersecretary Stevenson’s closest friend, at his health club. He had just finished his workout, and one of the attendants had fetched him from the sauna. He padded out in sky-blue flip-flops, a towel wrapped around his waist and another, smaller one around his neck, which he used to wipe sweat off his face.

  Really, Moira thought, he had no reason to wear anything more. His body was rock-hard, as well formed as a professional athlete’s. In fact, he looked as if he spent the majority of his time in the gym maintaining his washboard abs and hillock biceps.

  He greeted them with a quizzical smil

e. He had thick blond hair that fell over his forehead, making him seem boyish. His wide-apart, clear eyes took them in with a cool precision that seemed oddly neutral to Moira.

  “Ladies,” he said, “what can I do for you? Marty said it was urgent.” He meant the attendant.

  “It is urgent,” Hart said. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?”

  Bamber’s expression sobered. “Are you cops?”

  “What if we are?”

  He shrugged. “I’d be more curious than I am now.”

  Hart flashed her credentials, which sent his eyebrows up.

  “Do you suspect me of passing secrets to the enemy?”

  “Which enemy?” Moira said.

  He laughed. “I like you,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Moira Trevor.”

  “Uh-oh.” At once, Bamber’s expression grew dark. “I was warned about you.”

  “Warned?” Moira said. “By whom?” But she thought she already knew.

  “A man named Noah Petersen.”

  Moira recalled Noah taking Jay Weston’s cell phone from her at the scene of the killing. It was a sure bet that’s how he found Bamber.

  “He said—”

  “His real name’s Perlis,” Moira interrupted. “Noah Perlis. You shouldn’t trust anything he told you.”

  “He said you’d say that.”

  Moira laughed bitterly. Hart said, “A private place, Mr. Bamber. Please.”

  He nodded and walked them to an unused office. They went in and he closed the door. When they were all seated, Hart said, “I’m afraid we have some bad news. Steve Stevenson is dead.”

  Bamber looked stricken. “What?”

  Hart continued: “Did Mr. Peter—Perlis tell you that?”

  Bamber shook his head. He put the smaller towel around his shoulders as if he’d suddenly grown cold. Moira couldn’t blame him.

  “My God.” He shook his head in disbelief, then he looked at them in a kind of pleading way. “It must be a mistake of some kind, one of those idiotic bureaucratic snafus Steve was always complaining about.”