The plane gave a terrific lurch as it began to taxi out onto the runway. The blade sprayed blood as it sliced into Bourne’s skin, then it was lifted away as Khan lost his balance. Bourne took the advantage, drove his balled fist into Khan’s side. Khan swept his foot back, hooking it behind Bourne’s ankle, and Bourne went down. The plane slowed, turning onto the head of the runway.
“I didn’t run away!” Bourne shouted. “Joshua was taken from me!”
Khan pounced on him, the knife flashing down. Bourne twisted and the blade drove past his right ear. He was aware of the ceramic gun secreted at his right hip, but try as he might he wouldn’t be able to get to it without leaving himself open to a fatal attack. They struggled, their muscles bulging, their faces engorged with effort and rage. Their breath sawed from between half-open mouths, their eyes and minds searching for the most minute opening as they attacked and defended, counterattacked only to be rebuffed. They were well matched, if not in age, then in speed, strength, skill and cunning. It was as if they knew each other’s minds, as if they could anticipate each other’s moves a split second beforehand, thus neutralizing whatever advantage had been sought. They did not fight with dispassion and, therefore, they did not fight at peak level. All their emotion had been flushed out of the depths, lay stranded and squirming in the conscious mind, like an oil slick clouding water.
The plane lurched, the fuselage trembling as the plane began its race down the runway. Bourne slipped and Khan used his free hand as a cudgel to draw Bourne’s attention away from the knife. Bourne countered, striking the inside of Khan’s left wrist. But now the blade-point flashed in on him. He stepped back and to the side, inadvertently unlatching the bay door. The rising motion of the plane caused the unlocked door to swing open.
As the runway blurred by below, Bourne splayed himself out like a starfish to keep himself inside the plane, gripping the doorframe tightly with both hands. Grinning maniacally, Khan leaned in toward Bourne, the knife-blade describing a wicked shallow arc that would cut across the entire width of Bourne’s abdomen.
Khan lunged just as the plane was about to lift off the runway. At the last possible instant, Bourne let go with his right hand. His body, driven out and back by gravity, swung so violently away that his shoulder was nearly dislocated. Where his body had been was now a gaping space through which Khan fell, tumbling to the tarmac below. Bourne had one final glimpse of him, nothing more than a gray ball against the black of the runway.
Then the plane was airborne and Bourne was swinging up, farther from the open doorway. He struggled; rain whipped against him like chain-mail. The wind threatened to take his breath away, but it scrubbed the last of the jet fuel from his face, the rain rinsing his stinging red-rimmed eyes, flushing the poison from his skin and tissue. The plane banked to the right and Khan’s flashlight rolled across the cargo bay deck, tumbled out after him. Bourne knew that if he did not get himself inside within seconds, he would be lost. The terrible strain on his arm was far too intense for him to hold on much beyond that.
Swinging his leg around, he managed to hook the back of his left ankle into the doorway. Then, with a mighty effort, he heaved himself forward, the back of his knee clamped against the raised frame, giving himself both purchase and leverage enough to turn so that he was facing the fuselage. He got his right hand on the lip of the seal and in this fashion was able to work his way into the interior. His last act was to slam the door shut.
Bourne, bruised, bleeding and in a great deal of pain, collapsed into an exhausted heap. In the frightful, turbulent darkness of the shuddering interior, he saw again the small carved stone Buddha that he and his first wife had given Joshua for his fourth birthday. Dao had wanted the spirit of Buddha to be with their son from the earliest age. Joshua, who had died along with Dao and his little sister when the enemy plane had strafed the river they had been playing in.
Joshua was dead. Dao, Alyssa, Joshua—they were all dead, their bodies ripped asunder by the hail of bullets from the dive-bombing plane. His son could not be alive, he could not. To think otherwise would be to invite insanity. Then who was Khan really, and why was he playing this hideously cruel game?
Bourne had no answers. The plane dipped and rose, the pitch of the engines changing as it reached cruising altitude. It grew frigid, his breath clouding as it left his nose and mouth. He wrapped his arms around himself, rocking. It was not possible. It was not!
He gave an inarticulate animal cry, and all at once he was undone by pain and utter despair. His head sank, and he wept bitter tears of rage, disbelief and grief.
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
In the full belly of Flight 113, Jason Bourne was asleep, but in his unconscious mind his life—a far-off life he had buried long ago—was once again unspooling. His dreams were filled to overflowing with images, feelings, sights and sounds he had spent the intervening years pushing down as far from his conscious thoughts as they would go.
What had happened that hot summer’s day in Phnom Penh? No one knew. At least, no one who was still alive. This much was fact: While he sat bored and restless in his air-cooled office at the American Foreign Services complex, attending a meeting, his wife Dao had taken their two children swimming in the wide, muddy river just outside their house. From out of nowhere, an enemy plane had banked, dropping from the sky. It strafed the river where David Webb’s family swam and splashed and played.
How many times had he envisioned the terrible sight? Had Dao seen the plane first? But it had come upon them so swiftly, swooping down in a silent glide. If so, she must have gathered their children to her, pushing them beneath the water, covering them with her own body in a vain attempt to save them even while their screams echoed in her ears, their blood flecked her face, even while she felt the pain of her own impending death. This, in any event, was what he believed, what he dreamed, what had driven him to the edge of madness. For the screams he imagined Dao had heard just before the end were the same screams he heard night after night, starting awake, his heart racing, his blood pounding. Those dreams had forced him to abandon his house, all that he had held dear, for the sight of each familiar object had been like a stab in his guts. He had fled Phnom Penh for Saigon, where Alexander Conklin had taken charge of him.
If only he could have left his nightmares behind in Phnom Penh. In the dripping jungles of Vietnam, they came back to him again and again, as if they were wounds he needed to inflict on himself. Because this truth, above all others, remained: He could not forgive himself for not being there, for not protecting his wife and children.
He cried out now in his tortured dreams thirty thousand feet over the stormy Atlantic. Of what use is a husband and a father, he asked himself as he had a thousand times before, if he failed to protect his family?
The DCI was woken out of a sound sleep at five in the morning by a priority call from the National Security Advisor, summoning him to her office in one hour. Just when did this bitch-woman sleep? he wondered as he put down the phone. He sat on the edge of his bed, facing away from Madeleine. Nothing disturbed her sleep, he thought sourly. Long ago she had taught herself to sleep through the phone ringing at all hours of the night and morning.
“Wake up!” he said, shaking Madeleine awake. “There’s a flap on and I need coffee.”
Without a note of complaint, she rose, slipped on her robe and slippers and went down the hall to the kitchen.
Rubbing his face, the DCI padded into the bathroom, closed the door. Sitting on the toilet, he called the DDCI. Why the hell should Lindros be sleeping when his superior was not? To his consternation, however, Martin Lindros was wide awake.
“I’ve been spending all night in the Four-Zero archives.” Lindros was referring to the maximum-security files on CIA personnel. “I think I know all there is to know about both Alex Conklin and Jason Bourne.”
“Great. Find me Bourne then.”
“Sir, knowing what I know about the two of them, how closely they worked toge
ther, how many times they went out on a limb for each other, saved each other’s lives, I find it highly improbable that Bourne would murder Alex Conklin.”
“Alonzo-Ortiz wants to see me,” the DCI said irritably. “After that fiasco at Washington Circle, d’you think I should tell her what you’ve just told me?”
“Well, no, but—”
“You’re goddamned right, sonny boy. I’ve got to give her facts, facts that add up to good news.”
Lindros cleared his throat. “At the moment, I don’t have any. Bourne has vanished.”
“Vanished? Jesus Christ, Martin, what the hell kind of intelligence operation are you running?”
“The man’s a magician.”
“He’s flesh and blood, just like the rest of us,” the DCI thundered. “How the hell did he slip through your fingers yet again? I thought you had all the bases covered!”
“We did. He simply—”
“Vanished, I know. This is what you have for me? Alonzo-Ortiz will have my fucking head on a platter, but not before I have yours!”
The DCI cut the connection, flung the phone through the open doorway onto the bed. By the time he had showered, dressed and taken a sip of coffee from the mug Madeleine obediently held out, his car was waiting for him.
Through the pane of bullet-proof glass, he drank in the facade of his house, dark-red brick with pale stone quoins at the corners, working shutters at every window. It had once belonged to a Russian tenor, Maxim something-or-other, but the DCI liked it because it had about it a certain mathematical elegance, an aristocratic air that could no longer be found in buildings of a younger vintage. Best of all was its sense of Old World privacy, owing to a cobbled courtyard screened by leafy poplars and a hand-worked iron fence.
He sat back in the plush seat of the Lincoln Town Car, watching morosely as Washington slept on around him. Christ, at this hour only the fucking robins are up, he thought. Aren’t I due the privilege of seniority? After all these years of service, don’t I deserve to sleep past five o’clock?
They sped across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the Potomac gun-metal gray, looking flat and hard as an airport runway. On the other side, looming over the more or less Doric temple of the Lincoln Memorial, was the Washington Monument, dark and forbidding as the spears the Spartans once used to drive through the hearts of their enemies.
Each time the water closes over him, he hears a musical sound, as of the bells the monks are sounding, echoing from ridge to ridge in the forested mountains; the monks he hunted when he was with the Khmer Rouge. And the smell of, what is it? cinnamon. The water, swirling with a malevolent current, is alive with sounds and scents from he knows not where. It seeks to drag him down, and once again he’s sinking. No matter how hard he struggles, how desperately he strikes out for the surface, he feels himself spiraling down, as if weighted with lead. His hands are scrabbling at the thick rope tied around his left ankle, but it’s so slick it keeps sliding through his fingers. What is at the end of the rope? He peers down into the shadowy depths through which he’s sinking. It seems imperative to him that he know what is dragging him to his death, as if that knowledge might save him from a horror for which he has no name. He’s falling, falling, tumbling into darkness, unable to understand the nature of his desperate predicament. Below him, at the end of the taut rope, he sees a shape—the thing that will cause his death. Emotion sticks in his throat like a mouthful of nettles, and as he tries to define the shape, the musical sound comes to him again, clearer this time, not bells, something else, something at once intimate and barely remembered. At last, he identifies the thing that’s causing him to drown: It’s a human body. All at once, he begins to weep….
Khan awoke with a start, a whimper caught in his throat. He bit down hard on his lip, looked around the darkened cabin of the plane. Outside, all was black as pitch. He had fallen asleep even though he’d promised himself he wouldn’t, knowing that if he did he would be trapped in his recurring nightmare. He rose, went to the lavatory, where he used the paper towels to wipe the sweat off his face and arms. He felt more tired than when the flight had taken off. While he was staring at himself in the mirror, the pilot announced their airtime to Orly Airport: four hours, fifty minutes. An eternity for Khan.
There was a line of people waiting as he exited. He made his way back to his seat. Jason Bourne had a specific destination in mind; he knew that from the information the tailor, Fine, had provided: Bourne was now in possession of a packet meant for Alex Conklin. Was it possible, he wondered, that Bourne would now take on Conklin’s identity? It would be something Khan would consider if he were in Bourne’s shoes.
Khan stared out the window at the black sky. Bourne was somewhere in the sprawling metropolis ahead of him, this much was known, but he had no doubt that Paris was just a way station. Bourne’s final destination was yet to be learned.
The National Security Advisor’s assistant cleared her throat discreetly and the DCI glanced at his watch. Roberta Alonzo-Ortiz, the bitch-woman, had kept him waiting almost forty minutes. Inside the Beltway, playing games of power was standard operating procedure, but Jesus Christ, she was a woman. And weren’t they both on the National Security Council? But she was the president’s direct appointee; she had his ear like no one else. Where the hell was Brent Scowcroft when you needed him? Pasting a smile on his face, he turned away from the window out which he had been gazing while his mind had been engaged.
“She’s ready to see you now,” the assistant cooed sweetly. “Her call with the president just ended.”
The bitch-woman doesn’t miss a trick, the DCI thought. How she loves to rub my nose in her power-stink.
The National Security Advisor was entrenched behind her desk, a huge antique affair she’d had trucked in at her own expense. The DCI thought it absurd, especially since there was nothing on her desk except the brass pen-set the president had given her upon her acceptance of the appointment. He didn’t trust people with tidy desks. Behind her, on elaborate gold standards, were the American flag and the flag with the seal of the President of the United States. Between them was a view of Lafayette Park. Two high-backed upholstered chairs sat facing her. The DCI looked at them somewhat longingly.
Roberta Alonzo-Ortiz looked bright and chipper in a dark-blue knit suit and white silk blouse. In her ears were gold-backed enamel earrings of the American flag.
“I just got off the phone with the president,” she said without preamble, not even a “Good morning” or “Have a seat.”
“So your assistant told me.”
Alonzo-Ortiz glared at him, a momentary reminder that she hated being interrupted. “The conversation concerned you.”
Despite his best intentions, the DCI felt his body flush. “Perhaps I should have been here then.”
“That would not have been inappropriate.” The National Security Advisor went on before he could respond to her verbal slap in the face. “The terrorism summit will take place in five days. Every element is in place, which is why it pains me to have to reiterate that we are walking on eggshells here. Nothing can disturb the summit, especially not a CIA assassin gone criminally insane. The president is anticipating that the summit will be an unqualified success. He expects to make it the cornerstone of his drive for reelection. Even more, it will be his legacy.” She put her hands flat on the highly polished surface of her desk. “Let me be perfectly clear—I have made the summit my number-one priority. Its success will ensure that this presidency is lauded and revered for generations to come.”
The DCI had been standing throughout this discourse, not having been invited to sit down. The verbal dressing-down was especially humiliating, given its subtext. He did not care for threats, particularly veiled ones. He felt as if he was being given detention in elementary school.
“I had to brief him about the Washington Circle debacle.” She said it as if the DCI had made her deliver a shovelful of shit to the Oval Office. “There are consequences to failure; there always are. You
need to put a stake through the heart of this one so it can be buried as soon as possible. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly.”
“Because it won’t go away on its own,” the National Security Advisor said.
A vein had started to pulse in the DCI’s temple. He felt the urge to throw something at her. “I said I understood perfectly.”
Roberta Alonzo-Ortiz scrutinized him for a moment, as if she was deciding whether he was worthy of being believed. At length, she said, “Where’s Jason Bourne?”
“He’s fled the country.” The DCI’s fists were clenched and white. It was beyond him to tell the bitch-woman that Bourne had simply vanished. As it was, he could scarcely get the words out. But the moment he saw the look on her face, he realized his error.
“Fled the country?” Alonzo-Ortiz rose. “Where has he gone?”
The DCI remained silent.
“I see. If Bourne gets anywhere near Reykjavík…”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. He’s insane, remember? He’s gone rogue. He must know that sabotaging the summit security would embarrass us like nothing else.” Her fury was palpable, and for the first time the DCI was truly afraid of her.
“I want Bourne dead,” she said in a voice of steel.
“As much as I do.” The DCI was fuming. “He’s already killed twice, and one of the victims was an old friend.”
The National Security Advisor came around from behind her desk. “The president wants Bourne dead. An agent gone rogue—and let’s be honest here, Jason Bourne is a worst-case scenario—is a wild card we can’t afford. Do I make myself clear?”