Page 22 of The Bourne Dominion (Jason Bourne 9)

  By that time Boris had staggered to his feet amid a chaotic mass of shouting pedestrians, blaring sirens, and stalled traffic. People in herky-jerky motion were everywhere, their umbrellas clashing into one another. Faces peered at him, hands grabbed for him, beseeching him for answers: Was he all right, what had happened? The crowd swelled into a mob that spilled out into the adjoining streets. People seemed to be running from every direction, splashing in the running gutters.

  Boris was busy wrenching himself free of the mounting chaos. That was when he spied the human machine knifing through the crowd. The human machine grinned at him and said something Boris couldn’t make out. It was Zachek, the mouthpiece for Konstantin Beria, the head of SVR. Zachek, who had detained him at Ramenskoye airport. What was he doing here? Boris asked himself.

  “Believe me when I tell you that we can make your life a living hell,” Zachek had warned him.

  In that moment he saw everything as if a curtain had been lifted, revealing the poisoned feast laid out on a table. As he reeled drunkenly away, clawing through the dense clusters of chattering gawkers, Boris knew that it was SVR. SVR was responsible for Lana Lang’s death, fucking with him here in Munich.

  Do you ever think about them?” Kaja said.

  Bourne, lying on the floor of the bathroom, stared up into her piercing blue eyes. She was sitting astride his stomach, one fist grasping the end of the nail file she had used as a makeshift knife. He felt very little pain. He suspected that the file hadn’t gone very deep, that, in fact, one of his ribs had deflected it from its path. He could have dislodged her, but what was the point? She hadn’t wanted to kill him, or even to hurt him badly. She had something to tell him, something he wanted—-possibly even needed—to hear. So he lay still, breathing deeply, his thoughts going deep, gathering his resolve.

  “The people you’ve killed?” she continued.

  And then, staring into her eyes, the past rose up and melded with the present. Her blue eyes became the eyes of the woman in the bathroom of the Nordic disco club. Lights strobed, music blared, and he was back there in time and place. She was sitting on the toilet, the small silver-plated .22—almost a plaything when it came to stopping a human being—aimed at him.

  He did what Alex Conklin had sent him to do. He knew nothing about the woman, except that she had been marked by Treadstone for termination. Those were the days when he had done what he was told, as his training dictated. Before the incident when he had lost his memory, after which he had begun to question everything, starting with Treadstone’s motives.

  Just before he had completed his mission, she had said to him, “There is no—”

  There is no… what?

  Kaja’s eyes, the dead woman’s eyes, the same eyes.

  And then Kaja said, “I saw her. The police came and took me to Frequencies in Stureplan to identify her. She was sitting there, they hadn’t moved her, God knows why…” Her head trembled. “There was no reason for you to do what you did.”

  “There is no reason.” That was what she had said just before he had killed her. “There is no reason.”

  Soraya fell into darkness. She landed on Amun’s corpse, which, in death, protected her as Amun had done in life.

  The man with the red polo was on her immediately, dragging her off Amun and throwing her to the side like a sack of garbage. For a moment, he stared down at Amun’s face. Then he kicked it. The jaw cracked and teeth flew everywhere. He kicked again and Amun’s nose collapsed. Then he went to work on Amun’s ribs, staving them in with kicks that became ever more vicious. He was panting like a dog in heat. His face was flushed with blood and his lips were drawn back from his yellow teeth.

  Soraya, coming to, heard the man’s imprecations. Because they were Arabic, she became momentarily disoriented, believing she was back in Cairo. Then her gaze fell upon Amun’s ruined face and she shrieked like a banshee. The Arab was turning toward her as she landed on him, toppling him backward.

  They hit hard on the bare concrete, and she grunted with a sudden pain flaring through her left side. The Arab tried to roll off her, but she dug in with clawed fingers. Despite an overwhelming dizziness, she held fast to him. He chopped down on one of her wrists, providing the opening she needed. Slamming the heel of her hand into his nose, she pushed herself off her left side and tried to knee him. He jerked away and she connected with his thigh instead.

  That was all the opportunity he was going to afford her. He jabbed her throat with the tips of his fingers and she reared back, gagging, gasping for breath. Calmly and methodically, he drew out a switchblade, snikked it open, and prepared to slit her throat.

  A pounding on the bathroom door caused Kaja to lock it.

  Don Fernando’s voice could be heard through the door. “Is everything all right?”

  “Perfectly fine,” Kaja said. “Jason and I are having a heart-to-heart.”

  “Don’t do anything precipitous,” Don Fernando said. “He knows nine hundred ways to kill you.”

  “You worry too much, Don Fernando,” she said.

  He rattled the doorknob. “Come out at once, Kaja. This was a mistake.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s not.”

  “He doesn’t remember, Kaja.”

  “So you told me.” Leaning down, her face close to Bourne’s, she said softly, “You won’t lay a hand on me, will you? Not until you learn what happened, and by then it will be too late.”

  He wondered what she meant by that.

  “Do you even remember her, Jason? Do you remember Frequencies, the dance club in Stockholm?”

  Bourne was still engaged in a duel with her eyes. “It was winter, snowing.”

  Kaja seemed mildly surprised. “Yes, the day she died it was snowing hard. The day you killed her.”

  Full understanding bloomed. “She was your mother.”

  For a moment, something dark and ugly swam in her eyes. “Viveka. My mother’s name was Viveka.” She leaned ever closer, their lips virtually touching. And all at once her face twisted with a demonic spasm. Her voice was clotted with emotion when she said: “Why did you kill her?”

  The knife blade swung in a shallow arc. Soraya tried to lift one arm to fend it off, to protect herself, but still gasping for air, she lacked the strength. The Arab knocked her arm away as if it belonged to a doll.

  Gripping her hair with one hand, he jerked her head back, exposing the long, vulnerable curve of her throat. He grinned. “Bitch,” he said. Then other words that made her shudder. His body curved into one long blade, a weapon bent solely to take her life, as if he had been born to that one dreadful task.

  He arched up and Soraya said a prayer, for life and for death. And then the Arab’s head was surrounded by a pair of arms. A hand cupped his chin and, even while recognition came into his eyes, jerked his head to the right in the most violent motion imaginable. His neck cracked, snapped, and, as the hands let go, he slumped sideways, down into the darkness he had meant for her.

  Soraya looked up as Aaron moved into the pale, fluttering light at the base of the stairwell. He reached down and, without a word, picked her up in his arms and took her out of the basement via the alternate route by which he had found his way in.

  There is no reason.

  He could tell her the truth or lie. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t listening. All she wanted was her pound of flesh, and now he knew what it was.

  “She was a civilian. That was what my father told us just before he left us. ‘Whatever happens to me, don’t be concerned,’ he said. ‘You’re safe. You’re civilians.’ I didn’t know what he meant, until the day of the snowstorm, the day my mother…” A spasm of deflected energy went through her. Her face looked white-hot. “Why did you kill her? Tell me! I need to know!”

  He felt briefly buffeted by her pain, as if a great gust of wind had slipped by him. What could he tell her that would mollify her? He considered the state she was in, the amount of time she’d had to work herself up.

  This was

a complicated woman, of that Bourne had no doubt; she had hidden in plain sight for a number of years, insinuated herself into Estevan Vegas’s life. More than that, however, she had made his life her own. She had lived and breathed, she had become what she seemed to be. She was no longer Swedish. She had been mauled by a margay; she was Achagua, from the serpent line.

  “You should make that tattoo permanent,” he said. “That skytale was beautiful.”

  His words seemed alchemical, working a change in her. Her hand came off his shoulder and she sat back, abruptly exhausted. The dark, ugly thing in her eyes vanished. She seemed to have gone to another place, and was now back with him in Don Fernando’s house in Cadiz.

  “One afternoon I saw a skytale in the forest not far from Estevan’s house,” she said. “It is a beautiful creature; as beautiful, in its way, as the margay. I drew it myself, using the natural plant dyes of the Achagua.”

  “It’s been a long journey,” he said. “You are no longer who you were.”

  She looked at him, as if for the first time. “That’s true for both of us, isn’t it?”

  She rose off him then and stepped back, watching him warily as he got up, took the nail file out of his side. Blood spread across his shirt, and he took it off. He turned on the hot water and soaped the wound. It wasn’t serious at all.

  “It’s bleeding a lot,” she said, from her safe distance.

  Does she think I’ll strike her now? Bourne wondered. Retaliate in some way?

  “Unlock the door,” he said as he tended to the wound. “Don Fernando is worried about both of us.”

  “Not until you tell me the truth.” She took one hesitant step toward him. “Was my mother a spy, as well?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Bourne said. He remembered now. The force of Kaja’s emotion had dislodged the shard of memory from the lost depths of his past. “Your father was sent to kill the man who was then my boss. He failed. I was sent in retaliation.”

  Kaja made a noise. She seemed to be having trouble breathing. “Why wasn’t my father—?”

  “My target?” he finished for her. “Your father was already dead.”

  “And that wasn’t enough?”

  There was no possible answer he could give that would satisfy her—or, he thought, himself.

  There is no reason.

  Viveka Norén had been right. There had been no reason for her death, save Conklin’s need for revenge. But who had Conklin been hurting? Norén’s daughters were innocents, they didn’t deserve to have their mother taken from them. Conklin’s vindictiveness sent a chill through him. He had been Conklin’s instrument, trained and sent out again and again to terminate lives.

  He rubbed his hands over his eyes. Was there no end to the sins he had compiled in the past he couldn’t remember? For the first time, he wondered whether his amnesia was a blessing.

  “This isn’t the answer I wanted,” Kaja said.

  “Welcome to the real world,” he said wearily.

  He thought she might cry then, but her eyes remained dry. Instead, she turned and unlocked the door.

  Don Fernando, standing on the threshold, wrenched it open. He stepped in with an appalled expression as he took in Bourne’s wound.

  “My house has now become a corrida? Kaja, what have you done?”

  She was silent, but Bourne said, “Everything is fine, Don Fernando.”

  “I should think not.” He frowned at Kaja, who refused to look at him. “You have abused my hospitality. You promised me—”

  “She did what she had to do.” Bourne found a sterile gauze pad in the medicine cabinet and taped it over the wound. “It’s all right, Don Fernando.”

  “On the contrary.” Don Fernando was furious. “I helped you out of the friendship I had with your mother. But it’s clear you’ve spent too long in the Colombian jungle. You’ve picked up some very nasty habits.”

  Kaja collapsed onto the edge of the tub, her palms pressed together, as if in prayer. “It was not my intention to disappoint you, Don Hernando.”

  “My dear, I’m not angry for myself—I’m angry for you.” The older man put his back against the door frame. “Imagine what your mother would think of your behavior. She raised you better than that.”

  “My sister—”

  “Don’t talk to me about your sister! If I suspected you were anything like her I wouldn’t have let you anywhere near Jason.”

  “Apologies, Don Fernando.” Kaja stared down at her hands.

  Bourne had never heard Don Fernando raise his voice before. Clearly, Kaja had hit a nerve.

  Don Fernando sighed. “If only you meant it. We are all liars here, we are all pretending to be what we’re not.” He looked from Kaja to Bourne. “Don’t you find it interesting that we all have a problem with identity?”

  At last, Kaja lifted her head. “We’re all ruled by secrets.”

  “Well, yes.” Don Fernando nodded. “But it’s the secrets that cause the problem with identity. To keep secrets is to lie, to lie is to cause a change of identity. And then time goes by, the lies become the norm, then the truth—at least our truth, and then… who are we?” His eyes cut away from Bourne’s. “Do you know, Kaja?”

  “Of course I do.” But she had answered too quickly, and now she paused, thinking. A frown invaded her face.

  “Are you Swedish,” Bourne said gently, “or Achagua?”

  “My blood is—”

  “But blood has so little to do with it, Kaja!” Don Fernando cried. “Identity has no basis in reality. It’s pure perception. Not only how others see you and react to you, but also how you think of yourself, how you react.” He grunted in what seemed mock disgust. “I think Jason is right. You should make that snake tattoo permanent.”

  Kaja jumped up. “You were listening through the door!”

  Don Fernando held up a key. “How else would I know whether I needed to open it.”

  “Jason hardly needed your help,” she said.

  “I wasn’t thinking about him,” Don Fernando said.

  She looked up. “Thank you.”

  It was astonishing, Bourne thought, how far she had come from being Rosie, Estevan Vegas’s Colombian mistress.

  Don Fernando gestured. “I think we all could use a drink.”

  Kaja nodded and rose. As the three of them returned to the living room, she asked about Estevan.

  “Sleeping off his fear, gathering his strength, which he will need.” Don Fernando shrugged. “It is unfortunate. He only knows one life, and it’s a far simpler one than the one in which he now finds himself.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Kaja bristled. “Do you think I’m going to leave him?”

  “If you do,” Don Fernando said as he poured them some of his extraordinary sherry, “you are sure to break his heart.”

  She accepted the glass he handed her. “Estevan’s heart was broken long before he met me.”

  “That doesn’t mean it won’t be again.”

  Bourne accepted the sherry and sipped it slowly. He sat on the sofa. The adrenaline was wearing off and his side burned as if Kaja had stuck him with a hot poker.

  “Kaja—” Bourne broke off at the shake of her head.

  She came over and sat beside him. “I know Estevan and I would never have made it here without you. For this I thank you. And…” She stared down into the golden depths of her sherry. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So. The past is the past. I have buried it.” Her head turned, her eyes engaged with his. “And so should you.”

  Bourne nodded and finished his sherry. He waved Don Hernando off when he offered a refill.

  “It would help me,” he said, “if you could tell me about your father.”

  Kaja gave a bitter laugh, then took a long sip of her sherry. Her eyes closed for a moment. “How I wish there was someone who could tell me about him. One day, he went away. He left us as if we were a bunch of playthings he’d outgrown. I was nine. Two years later, my mother…” She c

ould have finished that thought; she took a small sip of sherry instead. Light winked off the rim of the glass as she tipped it to her mouth. She swallowed hard. “Thirteen years ago. It feels like a lifetime.” Her shoulders slumped. “Sometimes several lifetimes.”

  “He was a spy, an assassin,” Bourne said. “Who was he working for?”

  “I don’t know,” Kaja said. “And believe me I tried to find out.” Her eyes cut away for a moment. “I feel certain that Mikaela, my other sister, discovered who it was.”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “She was killed before she could say a word to either me or Skara.”

  “Triplets,” Don Hernando cut in.

  Now the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. “So you and Skara ghosted away, changing identities,” Bourne said, “hiding, as you said, in plain sight.”

  “I did at least.” Kaja put her head down, resting the sugary rim of the glass against her forehead. “I went as far away from Stockholm as I could.”

  “But your father’s organization found you anyway.”

  She nodded. “Two men came. I killed one and wounded the other. I was running away from him when I surprised the margay.”

  Bourne thought for a moment. “Is there anything you can tell me about the two men?”

  Kaja shuddered and took another deep breath. For the first time, she looked terribly young and vulnerable, the runaway girl from Stockholm. And in that moment, Bourne caught a glimpse of the energy it took for her to maintain her Rosie identity.

  “The men spoke to each other in English,” she said at last. “But at the end, the one I killed said something just before he died. It wasn’t in English. It was in Russian.”