The Bourne Betrayal Part 31

He grinned fiercely. It looked as if he was going to get a second shot at Bourne after all.

The captain of the ro-ro Itkursk was more than happy to accommodate Lieutenant General M. P. Tuz of the DZND and his a.s.sistant. In fact, he gave them the stateroom reserved for VIPs, a cabin with windows and its own bathroom. The walls were white, curved inward like the hull of the ship. The floor was much-scuffed wooden boards. There was a bed, a slim desk, two chairs, doors that revealed a narrow clothes closet and the bathroom.

Shaking off his coat, Bourne sat on the bed. "Are you all right?"

"Lie down." Soraya threw her overcoat onto a chair, held up a curved needle and a string of suture material. "I've got work to do."

Bourne, grateful, did as she asked. His entire body was on fire. With a professional s.a.d.i.s.t's expertise, Lerner had landed the blow to his side so as to inflict maximum pain. He gasped as she began the resuturing process.

"Lerner really did a number on you," Soraya said as she worked. "What is he doing here? And what the h.e.l.l does he think he's doing coming after you?"

Bourne stared at the low ceiling. By now he was used to CI betrayals, its attempts to terminate him. In some ways, he had made himself numb to the agency's calculated inhumanity. But another part of him found it difficult to fathom the depth of its hypocrisy. The DCI was all too ready to use him when he had no other recourse, but his enmity toward Bourne was unshakable.

"Lerner is the Old Man's personal pit bull," Bourne said. "I can only guess he's been sent to fulfill a termination order."

Soraya stared down at him. "How can you say that so calmly?"

Bourne winced as the needle went in, the suture pulled through. "Calmly is the only way to a.s.sess the situation."

"But your own agency-"

"Soraya, what you have to understand is that CI was never my agency. I was brought in through a black-ops group. I worked with my handler, not the Old Man, not anyone else in CI. The same goes for Martin. By CI's strict code, I'm a maverick, a loose end."

She left him for a moment to go into the bathroom. A moment later, she returned with a washcloth she'd soaked in hot water. She pressed this over the newly rest.i.tched wound and held it there, waiting for the bleeding to stop.

"Jason," she said. "Look at me. Why don't you look at me?"

"Because," he said, directing his gaze into her beautiful uptilted eyes, "when I look at you I don't see you at all. I see Marie."

Soraya, abruptly deflated, sat down on the edge of the bed. "Are we so alike, then?"

He resumed his study of the stateroom ceiling. "On the contrary. You're nothing like her."

"Then why-"

The deep booming of the ro-ro's horn filled the stateroom. A moment later, they felt a small lurch, then a gentle rocking. They were moving out of the port, on their journey across the Black Sea to Istanbul.

"I think you owe me an explanation," she said softly.

"Did we... I mean before?"

"No. I would never have asked that of you."

"And me? Did I ask it of you?"

"Oh, Jason, you know yourself better than that."

"I wouldn't have taken Fadi out of his cell, either. I wouldn't have been led into a trap on the beach." His gaze slid down to her patiently waiting face. "It's bad enough not being able to remember." He remembered the confetti of memories-his and... someone else's. "But having memories that lead you astray..."

"But how? Why?"

"Dr. Sunderland introduced certain proteins into the synapses of the brain." Bourne struggled to sit up, waving off her help. "Sunderland is in league with Fadi. The procedure was part of Fadi's plan."

"Jason, we've talked about this. It's insane. For one thing, how could Fadi possibly know you'd need a memory specialist? For another, how would he know which one you'd go to?"

"Both good questions. Unfortunately, I still don't have any answers. But consider: Fadi had enough information about CI to know who Lindros was. He knew about Typhon. His information was so extensive, so detailed, it allowed him to create an impostor who fooled everyone, even me, even the sophisticated CI retinal scan."

"Could he be part of the conspiracy?" she said. "Fadi's conspiracy?"

"It sound like a paranoid's dream. But I'm beginning to believe that all these incidents-Sunderland's treatment, Martin's kidnapping and replacement, Fadi's revenge against me-are related, parts of a brilliantly designed and executed conspiracy to bring me down, along with all of CI."

"How do we discover whether or not you're right? How do we make sense of it all?"

He regarded Soraya for a moment. "We need to go back to the beginning. Back to the first time I came to Odessa, when you were COS. But in order to do that, I need you to fill in the missing parts of my memory."

Soraya stood and moved to the window, staring out at the widening swatch of water, the curving haze-smeared coastline of Odessa they were leaving behind.

Painful as it was, he swung his legs around and got gingerly to his feet. The local anesthetic was wearing off; a deeper pain pulsed through him as the full extent of the damage from Lerner's calculated blow hit him like a freight train. He staggered, almost fell back in the bed, but caught himself. He deepened his breathing, slowing it. Gradually, the pain receded to a tolerable level. Then he walked across the stateroom to stand beside her.

"You should be back in bed," she said in a distant voice.

"Soraya, why is it so difficult to tell me what happened?"

For a moment, she said nothing. Then: "I thought I'd put it all behind me. That I'd never have to think of it again."

He gripped her shoulders and spun her around. "For the love of G.o.d, what happened?"

Her eyes, dark and luminous, brimmed with tears. "We killed someone, Jason. You and I. A civilian, an innocent. A young woman barely out of her teens."

He is running down the street carrying someone in his arms. His hands are covered in blood. Her blood...

"Who?" he said sharply. "Who did we kill?"

Soraya was trembling as if with a terrible chill. "Her name was Sarah."

"Sarah who?"

"That's all I know." Tears overflowed her eyes. "I know that because you told me. You told me that before she died, her last words were, 'My name is Sarah. Remember me.'"

Where am I now? Martin Lindros wondered. He had felt the heat, the gritty dust against his skin as he was led off the plane, still blinded by the hood. But he'd been exposed to neither the heat nor the dust for very long. A vehicle-a jeep or possibly a light truck-had rumbled him down a peculiarly smooth incline. Greeted by an air-cooled environment, he had walked for perhaps a thousand meters. He heard a bolt being thrown, a door opened, and then he was shoved in. After he heard the door slam, the lock bolted into place, he stood for a moment, trying to do nothing more than breathe deeply and evenly. Then he reached up and plucked the hood from his head.

He stood in more or less the center of a room, perhaps five meters on a side, constructed solidly but rather crudely of reinforced concrete. It contained a rather dated doctor's examining table, a small stainless-steel sink, a row of low cabinets on top of which were neatly lined boxes of latex gloves, cotton swabs, bottles of disinfectant, various liquids and implements.

The infirmary was windowless, which did not surprise him, since he surmised that they were underground. But where? Certainly he was in a desertlike climate, but not an actual desert-building anything underground in the desert was impossible. So, a hot, mountainous country. From the echoes that had reached him as he and his guards had made their way here, the facility was quite large. Therefore, it had to be situated in a place hidden from prying eyes. He could think of half a dozen such areas-such as Somalia-but he dismissed most of them as too close to Ras Dejen. He moved around the room in a counterclockwise motion, the better to see out of his left eye. If he had to guess, he'd say he was somewhere on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. A rugged, utterly lawless swath of real estate controlled from top to bottom by ethnic tribes whose patrons were legions of the world's most deadly terrorists.

He would have enjoyed asking Muta ibn Aziz about that, but Abbud's brother had debarked some hours before the plane had arrived here.

Hearing the bolt slide back, the door open, he turned and saw a slim, bespectacled man with bad skin and a shocking pompadour of sandy gray hair walk in. With a guttural growl, he rushed at the man, who stepped neatly aside, revealing the two guards behind him. Their presence hardly deterred his rage-filled heart, but the b.u.t.ts of their semiautomatics put him on the floor.

"I don't blame you for wanting to do me harm," Dr. Andursky said from his vantage point safely standing over Lindros's p.r.o.ne body. "I might feel the same way if I were in your shoes."

"If only you were."

This response produced in Dr. Andursky a smile that fairly radiated insincerity. "I came here to see to your health."

"Is that what you were doing when you took out my right eye?" Lindros shouted.

One of the guards pressed the muzzle of his semiautomatic to Lindros's chest, to make his point.

Dr. Andursky appeared unruffled. "As you well know, I needed your eye; I needed the retina to transplant into Karim al-Jamil's. Without that part of you, he never would have fooled the CI retinal scanner. He never would have pa.s.sed for you, no matter how good a job I did on his face."

Lindros brushed away the gun muzzle as he sat up. "You make it sound so cut-and-dried."

"Science is cut-and-dried," Dr. Andursky pointed out. "Now, why don't you go over to the examining table so I can take a look at how your eye is healing."

Lindros rose, walked back, lay down on the table. Dr. Andursky, flanked by his guards, used a pair of surgeon's scissors to cut through the filthy bandages over Lindros's right eye. He clucked to himself as he peered into the still-raw pit where Martin's eye used to be.

"They could have done better than this." Dr. Andursky was clearly miffed. "All my good work..."

He washed up at the sink, snapped on a pair of the latex gloves, and got to work cleaning the excavation. Lindros felt nothing more than the dull ache he'd become accustomed to. It was like a houseguest who showed up unexpectedly one night and never left. Now, like it or not, the pain was a permanent fixture.

"I imagine you've already adjusted to your monovision." As was his wont, Dr. Andursky worked quickly and efficiently. He knew what he needed to do, and how he wanted to do it.

"I have an idea," Lindros said. "Why don't you take Fadi's right eye and give it to me?"

"How very Old Testament of you." Dr. Andursky rebandaged the excavation. "But you're alone, Lindros. There's no one here to help you."

Finished, he snapped off his gloves. "For you, there is no escape from this h.e.l.l-pit."

Jon Mueller caught up with Defense Secretary Halliday as he was coming out of the Pentagon. Halliday was, of course, not alone. He had with him two aides, a bodyguard, and several pilot fish-lieutenant generals eager to ingratiate themselves with the great man.

Halliday, seeing Mueller out of the corner of his eye, made a hand gesture Mueller knew well. He hung back, at the bottom of the stairs, at the last minute allowing himself to be swept up into the secretary's retinue as he ducked into his limo. They said nothing to each another until the two aides had been dropped off near the secretary's office. Then the privacy wall came down between pa.s.sengers in the rear, and driver and bodyguard in front. Mueller brought Halliday up to date.

Storm clouds of displeasure raced across the secretary's broad forehead. "Lerner a.s.sured me everything was under control."

"Matt made the mistake of farming out the job. I'll take care of the Held woman myself."

The secretary nodded. "All right. But be warned, Jon. Nothing can be traced back to me, you understand? If something goes wrong, I won't lift a finger. In fact, I may be the one to prosecute you. From this moment on, you're on your own."

Mueller grinned like a savage. "No worries, Mr. Secretary, I've been on my own for as long as I can remember. It's bred in the bone."

"Sarah. Just Sarah. You never followed it up?"

"There was nothing to follow up. I couldn't even remember her face clearly. It was night, everything happened so fast. And then you were shot. We were on the run, pursued. We holed up in the catacombs, then got out. Afterward, all I had was a name. There was no official record of her body; it was as if we'd never been in Odessa." Soraya put her head down. "But even if there had been some way, the truth is I... couldn't. I wanted to forget her, forget her death ever happened."

"But I remember running down a cobbled street, holding her in my arms, her blood everywhere."

Soraya nodded. Her face was heavy with sorrow. "You saw her moving. You picked her up. That's when you were shot. I returned fire and suddenly there was a hail of bullets. We got separated. You went to find the target, Hamid ibn Ashef. From what you told me later, when we rendezvoused in the catacombs, you found him and shot him, but were unsure whether you'd killed him."

"And Sarah?"

"By then she was long dead. You left her on the way to kill Hamid ibn Ashef."

For a long time, there was silence in the stateroom. Bourne turned, went to the water jug, poured himself half a gla.s.s. He opened the twist of paper Dr. Pavlyna had given him, swallowed one of the antibiotic pills. The water tasted flat, slightly bitter.

"How did it happen?" He had his back to her. He didn't want to see her face when she told him.

"She appeared at the spot where we met my conduit. He told us where Hamid ibn Ashef was. In return, we gave him the money he'd asked for. We were finishing the transaction when we saw her. She was running. I don't know why. Also, she had her mouth open as if shouting something. But the conduit was shouting, too. We thought he'd betrayed us-which, it turned out, he had. We shot at her. Both of us. And she fell."

Bourne, abruptly tired, sat down in the bed.

Soraya took a step toward him. "Are you all right?"

He nodded, took a deep breath. "It was a mistake," he said.

"Do you think that makes any difference to her?"

"You may not even have hit her."

"And then again I may have. In any event, would that absolve me?"

"You're drowning in your own guilt."

She gave a sad little laugh. "Then I guess we both are."

They regarded each other across the small s.p.a.ce of the stateroom. The Itkursk's horn sounded again, m.u.f.fled, mournful. The ro-ro rocked them as it plowed south across the Black Sea, but it was so quiet in the stateroom that she imagined she could hear the sound of his mind working through a deep and tangled mystery.

He said, "Soraya, listen to me, I think Sarah's death is the key to everything that's happened, everything that's happening now."

"You can't be serious." But by the expression on his face she knew he was, and she was sorry for her response. "Go on," she said.

"I think Sarah is central. I think her death set everything in motion."

"Dujja's plan to detonate a nuclear bomb in a major American city? That's a stretch."

"Not the plan per se. I have no doubt that was already being discussed," Bourne said. "But I think the timing of it changed. I think Sarah's death lit the fuse."

"That would mean that Sarah is connected with your original mission to terminate Hamid ibn Ashef."

He nodded. "That would be my guess. I don't think she was at the rendezvous point by accident."

"Why would she be there? How would she have known?"

"She could have found out from your conduit. He betrayed us to Hamid ibn Ashef's people," Bourne said. "As to why she was there, I have no idea."

Soraya frowned. "But where's the link between Hamid ibn Ashef and Fadi?"

"I've been thinking about that bit of intel you got from your forensics friend at the Fire Investigation Unit."