The Bourne Betrayal (40 page)

“Excuse me, but you were asked to stay in my office until called,” he said as he confronted Lerner.

“I must ask you to return to-”

The heavy blow from the end of the silencer struck him square on the left temple, sending him to the floor in a heap, insensate. Lerner took him by the back of his collar, dragged him back to one of the empty examination rooms, and stowed him behind the door.

Without another thought, he returned to the corridor and walked the rest of the way to his destination without further interference. Standing outside the closed door, he settled his mind into the clear quiet of the kill. Grasping the doorknob with his free hand, he slowly turned it as far as he could, held it in place. The kill-state surrounded him, entered him.

Simultaneously, he let go of the knob, kicked the door open and, taking a long stride across the threshold, squeezed off three shots into the figure on the examination table.

LERNER’S
BRAIN
took a moment to make sense of what his eyes saw. It recognized the rolls of material on the examination table; as a result, he began to turn.

But that lag between action and reaction was just enough to allow Bourne, standing to one side, to drive the syringe loaded with a general anesthetic into Lerner’s neck. Still, Lerner was far from finished. He had the constitution of a bull, the determination of the damned. Breaking the syringe before Bourne had a chance to deliver the full dose, he drove his body against Bourne’s.

As Bourne delivered two blows, Lerner squeezed off a shot that ripped open the security guard’s chest.

“What are you doing?” Dr. Pavlyna screamed. “You told me-”

Lerner, driving an elbow into Bourne’s bloody wound, shot her in the head. Her body flew backward into Soraya’s arms.

Bourne dropped to his knees, pain weakening every muscle, firing every nerve ending. As Lerner grabbed him by the neck, Soraya threw the chair she’d been sitting on into his face. His death grip on Bourne broken, he staggered back, firing still, though wildly. She saw the guard’s gun across the room, thought momentarily of making a run for it, but Lerner, recovering with frightening speed, made that impossible.

Instead she lunged for Bourne, dragged him to his feet, and got both of them out of there. She heard the phut! phut! of silenced bullets splinter the wall at her elbow, and then they were racing around a corner, down the corridor, retracing their route to the side door.

Outside, she half threw, half stuffed Bourne into the passenger seat of the battered Skoda, slid behind the wheel, fired the ignition, and in a squeal of tires and spray of gravel reversed them out of there.

Lerner, half leaning against the examination table, staggered to his feet. He shook his head, trying to clear it, failed. Reaching up, he pulled the needle from the broken syringe out of his neck. What the hell had Bourne injected him with?

He stood for a moment, weaving like a landlubber on a boat in heavy weather. He gripped the countertop to steady himself. Groggily, he went over to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. The only thing that did was blur his vision even further. He found he had trouble breathing.

Moving his hand along the counter, he discovered a small glass container with one of the rubber tops that allows needles through. He picked it up, put it in front of his face. It took him a moment for his eyes to focus on the small print. Midazolam. That’s what this was. A short-term anesthetic meant to induce twilight sleep. Knowing that, he knew what he needed to counteract its effects. He went through the cabinets until he found a vial of epinephrine, the main chemical in adrenaline. Locating the syringes, he loaded one up, zipped a little of the liquid out the end of the needle to get rid of any air bubbles that might have formed, then injected himself.

That was the end of the midazolam. The cotton-wool haziness went up in a blaze of mental fire. He could breathe again. He knelt over the corpse of the late unlamented Dr. Pavlyna and fished out her ring of keys.

Minutes later, finding his way to the side door, he was out of the Polyclinic. As he approached Dr. Pavlyna’s car, he saw fresh skid marks in the gravel by a vehicle that had been parked beside it. The driver had been in a hurry. He piled into the Skoda Octavia. The skid marks led in the direction of the ferry terminal.

Having been thoroughly briefed on Ilyichevsk’s workings by Dr. Pavlyna, Lerner knew precisely where Bourne was headed. Up ahead, he saw a huge ro-ro loading. He squinted. What was it’s name? Itkursk.

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 assistant. 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 sadist’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 hell 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 assess 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 restitched 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 God, 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 butts 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 prone 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 passed for you, no matter how good a job I did on his face.”