The Bourne Betrayal Part 45

Abbud ibn Aziz had a gun at the ready, but Bourne lunged at the wheel, turning it hard to the right. Centrifugal force slammed his body into the terrorist's. The gun fired, deafening them both, but the bullet went awry, embedding itself in the doorpost. Abbud ibn Aziz squeezed off two more shots before the vehicle slammed into the concrete wall.

Bourne, who had prepared for the impact by willing his body to go completely slack, was slammed forward, then back against the seat. Beside him, Abbud ibn Aziz smashed into the top of the steering wheel, causing a great b.l.o.o.d.y gash in his forehead as well as a fracture in the bone over his right eye.

Wresting the gun from his slack fingers, Bourne slapped him hard across the cheek. He knew he had little time, but he was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of Sarah ibn Ashef's death.

"What happened that night in Odessa, Abbud?"

He deliberately left off the last half of the terrorist's name, a clear sign of contempt.

Abbud ibn Aziz's head lolled against the back of the seat. Blood, coming from several places, leaked from him. "What d'you mean?"

"You shot Sarah ibn Ashef to death."

"You're insane."

"Muta told me. He told me, Abbud. You shot Fadi's sister, not me. This whole vendetta could have been avoided if only you'd told the truth."

"The truth?" Abbud spat blood. "In the desert, there is no such thing as the truth. The sands shift constantly, like the truth."

"Why did you lie?"

He began to cough, blood vomiting out of his mouth.

"Tell me why you lied about Sarah ibn Ashef's death."

Abbud ibn Aziz spat again, almost choked on his own blood. When he'd recovered sufficiently, he muttered, "Why should I tell you anything?"

"It's over for you, Abbud. You're dying. But you already knew that, didn't you? Your death from a car accident won't get you to heaven. But if I kill you, you will have a martyr's death, filled with glory."

Abbud looked away, as if in that way he could escape the fate awaiting him. "I lied to Fadi because I had to. The truth would have destroyed him."

"Time's running out." Bourne held a knife to his throat. "I'm the only one who can help you now. In a moment, it will be too late. You will have lost your chance at shahada."

"What do you, an infidel, know of shahada?"

"I know that without jihad there can be no martyrdom. I know that jihad is the inclusive struggle for truth. Without your confession of the truth, there can be no jihad, there can be no shahada for you.

"Without my help, you won't be able to stand witness to the truth that is Allah. Therefore, your holy struggle in the cause of Allah-your entire existence-will be meaningless."

Wholly unbidden, Abbud ibn Aziz felt tears stinging his eyes. His enemy was right. He needed him now. Allah had placed this final terrible choice in front of him: testify to the truth, or be condemned to the eternal fires of d.a.m.nation. In this way, at this moment, he understood that Muta ibn Aziz had been right. It was the shifting sands of the truth that had buried him. If only he had spoken the truth at once. For now, in order to die righteously, in order to be clean in the eyes of Allah and all that he held holy, he would have to betray Fadi.

He closed his eyes for a moment, all the defiance drained out of him. Then he stared up into his enemy's face.

"I shot Sarah ibn Ashef, not Muta ibn Aziz. I had to shoot her. Six days before the evening of her death, I discovered that she was carrying on a love affair. I took her aside and confronted her. She didn't bother denying it. I told her that the law of the desert dictated that she commit suicide. She laughed at me. I told her that committing suicide would relieve her brothers of the stress of killing her themselves. She told me to get out of her sight."

Abbud paused for a moment. Clearly, reliving the shock of the confrontation had robbed him of his remaining strength. Presently, however, he gathered himself. "That night, she was late, hurrying across town to meet her lover. She had ignored me. Instead she was continuing to betray her own family. I was shocked, but not surprised. I had lost count of the times she had told me that we inverted Islam, that we twisted Allah's holy words to further our cause, to justify our... what did she call it?... Ah, yes, our death dealing. She had turned her back on the desert, on her Bedouin heritage. Now the only thing she could bring her family was shame and humiliation. I shot her. I'm proud of it. It was a virtue killing."

Bourne, sick at heart, had heard enough. Without another word, he slashed the blade of the knife across Abbud ibn Aziz's throat, slipping out of the vehicle as the gout of blood flooded the front seat.

The moment Abbud ibn Aziz had taken off against his orders, Fadi drew out a gun, aimed it at his back. Truly, if it hadn't been for the hail of gunfire, he'd have shot his second dead. So far as he was concerned, there was no excuse for insubordination. Orders were to be obeyed without either thought or question. This was not the UN; others did not get their moment to wade in with options.

As he ran toward the comm room, this last thought rolled around his head, raising echoes he didn't want to hear. In his opinion, the Aziz brothers had been acting strangely for some time. Their verbal battles had long since become legendary-so much so that they were now expected, never remarked upon by the others. Lately, however, their fights had occurred behind closed doors. Afterward, neither wanted to talk about the subject, but Fadi had noted that the growing friction between them was beginning to interfere with their work. Which was why, at this crucial juncture, he had sent Muta ibn Aziz off to Istanbul. He needed to break the brothers up, give them both s.p.a.ce to work out their enmity. Now Muta ibn Aziz was dead, and Abbud ibn Aziz had disobeyed orders. For one reason or another, he could no longer rely on either of them.

He saw the carnage the moment he turned the corner to the comm room. Soberly, angrily, he high-stepped between the corpses like a jittery Arabian horse. He checked each body, as well as the room itself. Eight men down in total, all dead. Lindros must have taken more weapons.

Cursing under his breath, he was about to return to the ramped entrance when his earpiece sizzled.

"We've sighted the fugitives," one of his men said in his ear.

Fadi's body tensed. "Where?"

"Lower level," his man said. "They're heading for the uranium labs."

The nuke, Fadi thought.

"Shall we close in?"

"Keep them in sight but under no circ.u.mstances are you to engage them, is that clear?"

"Yes sir."

This conversation had driven all considerations of revenge clear out of his head. If Lindros should find the nuke and the heli, he would have it all. After all this time, all the sacrifice, all the endless work and bloodshed, he would be left with nothing.

He ran down the corridor, turned left, then left again. The open door to a freight elevator yawned in front of him. He stepped smartly in, punching the bottom b.u.t.ton on the panel. The doors slid shut, and he began to descend.

At some point, as they advanced along the warren of lower-level labs, Lindros became aware that they were under surveillance. This disturbed him, of course, but it also frightened him. Why weren't these watchers closing in, as the first group had?

As they ran, he could see that Katya was crying. The violence and the death she'd been exposed to would have shaken anyone up, especially a civilian inexperienced with incarceration and violence. But to her credit, she kept pace with him.

All at once she pulled away and lunged out for an open doorway then, leaning over, vomited up whatever was in her stomach. Lindros put one arm around her to try to hold her steady, the b.u.t.t of the semiautomatic on his opposite hip. That was when he glanced into the lab they had come to. It was the surgery where Dr. Andursky had carved out his eye, where he had transformed Karim into a terrifying doppelganger. When he was finished with his infernal business, Andursky had trotted Lindros out to see his handiwork, so the new Martin Lindros could ask the original Martin Lindros to populate his mind with Lindros's memories-enough, anyway, to fool the CI interrogators and Jason Bourne. That's when Lindros had devised a code he hoped would reach Jason.

At first the surgery looked deserted, but then he saw cowering behind one of the two surgical tables the thin, weasely face of Dr. Andursky.

Soraya, her arms wrapped tightly around Tyrone's rock-hard waist, sat behind him on his Pa.s.sion Red Kawasaki Ninja ZX-12R. The motorcycle was on 5th Street NE, following both the reappropriated black Ford and the white Chevy. They were turning northwest onto Florida Avenue.

Tyrone was a superb driver who, Soraya could see, knew his way around D.C., not just his neighborhood. He wove in and out of traffic, never staying in the same position. One moment he was three car lengths behind their quarry, the next five. But Soraya never felt that they were in danger of losing their targets.

On Florida Avenue, they crossed over into the Northwest quadrant, turned right onto Sherman Ave NW, heading due north. At the junction of Park Road NW, they made a slight jog to the right onto the beginning of New Hampshire, then almost an immediate left onto Spring Road, which, in turn, led to 16th Street NW, onto which they made a right.

They were traveling due north once again, more or less paralleling the eastern edge of Rock Creek Park. Skirting the park's northeastern boundary, the two cars pulled into the loading bay of a large mortuary. Tyrone turned off the Ninja's engine, and they dismounted. As they watched, the inner wall of the right side of the loading bay began to slide down.

Once they crossed the street, they saw the closed-circuit TV guarding the loading bay. The camera was on a wall mount that moved it slowly back and forth to cover the entire area.

Both vehicles drove through the aperture and slowly down the concrete ramp. Soraya, one eye on the CCTV, calculated that if they followed the vehicles the camera would immediately pick them up. It was rotating away, but slowly, so slowly. The concrete wall was rising up from its slot in the floor.

They edged closer, closer. Then, with the wall halfway up, she clapped Tyrone on the back. Sprinting for the disappearing aperture, they leapt through the opening at the last instant. After landing on the concrete ramp, they picked themselves up.

Behind them, the wall slid home, encasing them in fumey darkness.

Feyd al-Saoud stood at the southwestern end of the rock-filled ravine. At last his men were in place, the charges set. Incredible as it seemed, Dujja had the technology to tap into the underground river. His men had discovered three huge pipes, clearly with wheelc.o.c.ks inside the facility, to regulate the water flow. It was these wheelc.o.c.ks they had to destroy.

He moved back several hundred meters and saw that his splendidly disciplined men ringed the ravine. Lifting his arm, he caught the attention of his two explosives experts.

In the heat and utter stillness of the moment, his mind flashed back to the moment when Jason Bourne had described the plan to him. His initial response had been incredulity. He had told Bourne that the plan was an insane one. He'd said, "We'll go in the old-fashioned way. With a frontal a.s.sault."

"You'll be committing your men to certain death," Bourne had told him. "I'm reasonably sure that Fadi monitored my conversation with Lindros, which would argue for him having monitored your communication with your recon party earlier."

"But what about you?" Feyd al-Saoud had said. "If you go in by yourself, his men will mow you down as soon as you show your face."

"That's where you're wrong," Bourne had replied. "Fadi needs to kill me himself. Anything else is unacceptable to him. Besides, his weakness is that he thinks he's gotten inside my mind. He's expecting a diversion. Lindros will give him one, to lure him into a false sense of complacency. He'll convince himself he's gotten my tactic right, that the situation is under control."

"Which is where we come in." Feyd al-Saoud nodded. "You're right. The plan is unorthodox enough that it just might work."

He glanced at his watch. Now that he was committed, he itched to get started. But Bourne had insisted they stick to the plan. "You have to give me fifteen minutes to do what must be done," he said.

Ninety seconds left.

Feyd al-Saoud stared at the jumbled bottom of the ravine, which, as it turned out, was not a ravine at all. Bourne had been right: It was a dry riverbed whose bottom was slowly collapsing into the underground waterway that had once, along ago, been on the surface. The underground river was where the Dujja facility was getting its needed supply of running water for the nuclear manufacturing. His men had set their charges at the facility end of the riverbed. The attack would serve two purposes: It would either drown or flush out every member of Dujja, and it would render the canisters of enriched uranium safe until a full complement of CI and Saudi experts could take over the facility permanently.

Fifteen seconds to go. Feyd al-Saoud took one long look around at each of his men. They'd been briefed; they knew what the stakes were. They knew what to do.

His arm swept down. The detonators were activated. The twin blasts exploded several seconds apart, but to Feyd al-Saoud and his men they sounded like one long percussion, a ripping wind, a hailstorm of rocky debris, and then the sound they were all waiting for: the deep, earthbound roar of water rushing along the course it had carved out of the bedrock.

Down in the Dujja facility, the mighty blasts felt like earthquake temblors. Everything on the shelves of the surgery smashed to the floor. Cupboard doors flew open, their contents exploding out into the room, coating the floor with a lake of liquids, shards of gla.s.s, twisted ribbons of plastic, a pickup-sticks welter of metal surgical instruments.

Katya, clinging both to Lindros and the door frame, wiped her mouth and said, "Come on! We've got to get out of here!"

Lindros knew she was right. They had very little time now to get to a place of safety where they could stay until the worst was over.

And yet he couldn't budge. His eyes were riveted on the face of Dr. Andursky. How many times during his recovery from the surgical rape Andursky had subjected him to had he dreamed of killing this man. Not simply killing. My G.o.d! The methods he had devised for Andursky's end! Some days, those increasingly elaborate fantasies were the only things that kept him from going insane. Even so, time and again he'd awaken from a dream of ravens plucking at the man, his flesh peeled back, exposing the bones of his skeleton for the windborne sand to scour clean of whatever mocking semblance of life he still clung to. This dream was so detailed, to keenly felt, so real that sometimes Lindos couldn't help feeling he'd crossed the line into insanity.

Even now, though he felt the imperative to get to safety, he knew there would be no solace for him as long as Andursky lived. And so he said to Katya, "You go. Get as close to the nuclear lab as possible, then climb up into the nearest HVAC vent and stay there."

"But you're coming with me." Katya tugged at his arm. "We're going together."

"No, Katya, there's something I have to do here."

"But you promised. You said you'd help me."

He swung around, fixed her with his one good eye. "I have helped you, Katya. But you must understand, if I don't stay here and do this, I will be like the walking dead."

She shivered. "Then I'll stay with you."

The entire facility gave a great shudder, moaning as if in terrible pain. Somewhere not so far ahead, he could hear the shriek of a wall splitting apart.

"No," he said sharply, returning his attention to her. "That's not an option."

She hefted the semiautomatic. "And I say it is."

Lindros nodded. What else could he do? They'd run out of time. He could hear a distant roaring, becoming louder, harsher, closer with each beat of his heart. Water! he thought. Good Lord, Jason's flooding the facility!

Without another word he strode into the surgery, Katya following several paces behind, her rifle at the ready. In the last few minutes since they'd left the comm room, she'd studied Lindros, thought she had a semblance of knowledge of how to use this instrument of death.

Lindros advanced on Dr. Andursky who, through all of this, had remained in the same position, cowering behind the table on which he had taken out Lindros's eye. His gaze was locked on Martin much as a rabbit will crouch, mesmerized, as the owl swoops silently down out of the twilight to s.n.a.t.c.h it up in its powerful talons.

As he went through the surgery, Lindros had to struggle to keep his gorge down, to keep the sickly sweet scent of the anesthetic from clogging his nostrils. He had to fight all over again the terror of helplessness and rage that had all but paralyzed him upon awakening to discover what had been stolen from him.

And yet here was Dr. Andursky in front of him, here he was gripped by Lindros's taloned fingers, scoring the flesh of his chest.

"h.e.l.lo, Doctor," Lindros said.

"No, please don't. I didn't want to. They made me."

"Please enlighten me, Doctor. After all the little boys they supplied you-they made you pluck out my eye? They insisted you do it-or what? They would refuse to service you?"

"Martin," Katya called, wide-eyed with fear. "Our time has run out. Come on now! Please, for the love of G.o.d!"

"Yes, yes, listen to her. Have mercy." Andursky was actually weeping now, his body quaking in much the same way as the walls around them had begun to quake. "You don't understand. I'm weak."

"And I," Lindros said, "gather strength with every breath I take." He drew Andursky to him, until they stood intimate as lovers. Now it was different. The end would not be the same.

Drawing on an enormous wellspring of strength, Lindros pressed his thumbs into Andursky's eyes.

Andursky shrieked and thrashed about, desperately trying to get away. But Lindros had him in an unbreakable death grip. Every fiber of his being was directed toward one end. In a kind of ecstatic semi-trance, he felt the soft, springy tissue of the eyeb.a.l.l.s beneath the pads of his thumbs. He drew in a breath, expelled it as he drove his thumbs slowly, inexorably into Andursky's eye sockets.

The surgeon shrieked again, a sharp inhuman noise abruptly cut off as Lindros shoved his thumbs all the way in. Andursky danced for a little, his autonomous nervous system flickering with whatever galvanic energy remained inside his body. Then that, too, was gone and, released from Lindros's grip, he slithered to the floor as if all his bones had dissolved.

Thirty-six.

FADI HEARD the screams of pain from the facility he had designed and helped build, saw the cracks shoot through the reinforced concrete as if lightning was streaking through it. Then a throaty roar echoed through the corridors and he knew the water was coming, gallons of water, tons of it flooding the labs, and all he could think of was the nuclear device.

He tore along the corridors past the elevator. He pushed past milling guards, who looked to him for guidance. He ordered them to the front entrance to find Bourne, then he forgot about them. They were all cannon fodder anyway. What did it matter if they died? There were more where they came from, an endless supply of young men clamoring to follow him, eager to die for him, to martyr themselves for the cause, the dream that one day they would live in a world of righteousness, a world without the infidel.

That this frankly brutal outlook had been forced on him by his enemies was a given, a watchword by which he'd lived his entire adult life. He told himself as much several times a day, although it never occurred to him that he needed to justify to himself any of his decisions or actions. His mind, his heart, and his hand were guided by Allah; this he believed absolutely. The possibility that their plan might not succeed had until now never entered his mind. Now that thought superseded all others, even his obsessive need to revenge himself for the crippling of his father or the death of his sister.

Racing down the stairs, he found the lower level already calf-deep in water. He pulled his Glock 36, checked the .45 to make sure it was fully loaded. The water lapped at his legs, rising with every step he took. He felt as if he were walking against the tide, the sensation bringing him back to the encounter with Bourne under the pier in Odessa. How he wished he'd finished him off there. Except for the d.a.m.n dog, he felt certain he would have.

But this was no time for recriminations, and he was not a man who dwelled on what-ifs. He was a pragmatist, which dictated that he get to the heli with its all-important payload. What was unfortunate was that the secret exit to the camouflaged helipad was at the rear of the lower level. This location had been deliberate, for the exit was nearest the nuclear facilities where, Fadi had surmised, he would need to be if the facility was ever discovered and raided.

What he hadn't counted on was the raiding party discovering the underground river. The section of the facility he sought was also where the water was gushing in at the fastest rate. Once he got to his destination, however, he'd be all right, since the helipad had wide drainage apertures all around its perimeters. This thought occupied him as he ran past the open door to the surgery and saw Katya. Ludicrously, she held one of his own semiautomatics in both hands. But it wasn't Veintrop's wife that so arrested him. Rather, it was the sight of Martin Lindros standing, b.l.o.o.d.y-handed, over the corpse of the man who had maimed him, Dr. Andursky.