The Bourne Betrayal Part 51

2:01.

The question here was not how to deactivate the timer; it was how Veintrop's fiendish mind worked. If the primary had been disabled, it would mean that someone had known the right order in which to detach the wires. In the secondary, the order in which the wires needed to be detached could be reversed, or even scrambled in so many possible combinations it would be virtually impossible to stumble upon the right one before inadvertently detonating the nuclear device.

1:19.

The time for speculation had pa.s.sed. He had to make a decision, and it had to be the right one. He decided to reverse the order; he grasped the red wire, about to unwind it when his keen eye spotted something. He leaned in closer, studying the secondary timer in a different way. Pushing aside the nest of colored wires, he discovered that the timer was attached to the main part of the device in a wholly different way than was the primary.

:49.

Bourne tipped the primary out of its niche, the better to see what was underneath. Then he pulled it free of the detonator, to which it was attached by a single wire. Now he saw the secondary timer unimpeded. It was resting directly against the detonator. The trouble was, he couldn't see where the two were attached.

:27.

He moved the wires away, careful not to detach any of them. Using a fingernail, he lifted the right edge of the secondary timer up and away from the detonator. Nothing.

:18.

He slipped his nail beneath the left edge. It wouldn't budge. He applied more pressure and slowly, up it came. There, beneath, he saw the wire, coiled like a tiny snake. His finger touched it, moved it slightly, and like a snake, it uncoiled. He couldn't believe his eyes.

The wire wasn't attached to the detonator!

:10.

He heard the voice of Dr. Veintrop. "I was a prisoner," he'd said. "You don't understand, I..." Bourne hadn't allowed him to finish his thought. Again, the problem was to solve the riddle of Veintrop's mind. He was a man who enjoyed playing mind games-his research proved as much. If Fadi had held him against his will, if Fadi had used Katya against him, Veintrop would have tried to gain a measure of vengeance against him.

Bourne took up the primary, checked the wire dangling from it. The insulation was intact, but the bare copper core at the end felt loose. It came away in his fingers, no more than a couple of centimeters in length. The wire was a fake. He removed his hands from the device, sat back, watched the timer face count down its final seconds. His heart beat painfully against the cage of his chest. If he was wrong...

:00.

But he wasn't wrong. Nothing happened. There was no detonation, no nuclear holocaust. There was only silence. Veintrop had gained his revenge against his captors. Under Fadi's nose, he'd secretly disarmed the device.

Bourne began to laugh. Veintrop had been made to accurately rig the primary trigger, but with the backup he'd somehow cleverly fooled Fadi and Dujja's other scientists. He closed the attache case, took it as he rose. He laughed all the way out of the building.

Forty-two.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the C-4 explosion, Soraya invoked the power of her CI credentials. The surrounding buildings, thick, hulking government edifices, had sustained superficial damage, but nothing structural. The street, however, was a disaster. An enormous hole had been blown out of it, into which the incinerated remains of the limo had dropped like a flaming meteor. The one saving grace was that at this time of the evening, there were no pedestrians in the general vicinity.

Dozens of police cars, fire engines, ambulances, and various emergency and utility agency personnel were swarming over the area, which had been cordoned off. Power was out in a two-and-a-half-square-kilometer radius, and the immediate area was without water, as the mains were ruptured.

Soraya and Tyrone had given statements to the police, but already she saw Rob Batt and Bill Hunter, chief of the Security Directorate, on the scene, taking over. Batt saw her and gave her a sit tight nod as he spoke to the police captain nominally in charge of the scene.

"All this official s.h.i.t make me nervous as a priest wid the clap," Tyrone said.

Soraya laughed. "Don't worry. I'm here to protect you."

Tyrone gave a snort of derision, but she saw that he stayed close to her. With the din of workers moving equipment, shouting to one another, vehicles pulling up, they seemed to be engulfed in a web of sound.

Above them, a news helicopter hovered. Soon it was joined by another. With a roar, air force jets, scrambled and weapons loaded, did a flyby. Their wingtips waggled, then they were gone into the clear blue sky.

New York was fogbound the morning Bourne arrived at the gates of the Cloisters. He pa.s.sed through, holding the bronze urn containing Martin Lindros's remains close against his chest. He'd sent the dozen roses to Moira, then discovered when she'd called him that they were a silent good-bye from Martin to her.

He'd never met Moira. Martin had only mentioned her once, when he and Bourne had gotten very, very drunk.

Bourne saw her now, a slim, shapely figure in the mist, dark hair swirled about her face. She was standing where she said she would be, in front of the tree that had been trained to spread against the stone blocks of a building wall. She had been overseas on business; had arrived home, she said, only hours before Bourne's call. She had, it seemed, done her weeping in private.

Dry-eyed, she nodded to him, and together they walked to the south parapet. Below them were trees. Off to the right, he could see the flat surface of the Hudson River. It looked dull and sluggish, as if it were the skin of a serpent about to be shed. "We each knew him in different ways." Moira said this carefully, as if fearful of giving away too much of what she and Martin had had together.

Bourne said, "If you can know anyone at all."

The flesh around her eyes was puffy. No doubt she had spent the last several days crying. Her face was strong, sharp-featured, her deep brown eyes wide apart and intelligent. There was an uncommon serenity about her, as if she was a woman content with herself. She would have been good for Martin, Bourne thought.

He opened the top of the urn. Inside was a plastic bag filled with carbon dust, the stuff of life. Moira used her long, slender fingers to open the bag. Together they lifted the urn over the top of the parapet, tipped it, watched as the gray matter floated out, became one with the mist.

Moira stared into the indistinct shapes below them. "What matters is we both loved him."

Bourne supposed that was the perfect eulogy, one that brought a kind of peace to all three of them.