Alem and Bourne crept the irregular surface. “There are chimneys that go all the way down to the caves,” he said. “Many times I played hide-and-seek here with my brother. I know which chimney to use to get to your friend.”
Even through the snow, Bourne could see that the overhang was pocked with the holes that marked vertical chimneys, indications of glacial ice powerful enough to excavate through the mountain’s granitic material.
Bent over one of these, Bourne wiped away the accumulated snow and peered down. Light didn’t quite make it all the way down to the bottom, but the shaft looked to be several hundred meters in height.
Beside him, Alem said, “Your enemies were watching.”
“Your father told me this.”
Alem nodded. Clearly he was not surprised. “Your friend was then moved out of the camp so you would not find him.”
Bourne sat back, contemplating the boy. “Why are you telling me this now? Assuming it is the truth.”
“They killed my father. I think now that was always what they intended. What do they care for us, how many of us are killed or maimed, so long as they gain what they want. But they assured me that he would be safe, that he’d be protected, and I was stupid enough to believe them. So now I say fuck them. I want to help you rescue your friend.”
Bourne said nothing, made no move.
“I know I must prove myself to you, so I’ll go first down the chimney. If it is a trap, if your suspicion is right, if they think you’ll use the chimney, then they will shoot me dead. You will be safe.”
“No matter what you’ve done, Alem, I don’t want to see you hurt.”
Confusion flitted across the boy’s face. Clearly, it was the first time a stranger had expressed interest in his welfare.
“I’ve told you the truth,” Alem said. “The terrorists have no knowledge of these chimneys.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Bourne said, “You can prove your loyalty to me and to your father, but not this way.” He dug in his pocket, taking out a small octagonal object made of a dark gray rubbery plastic compound in the center of which were two buttons, one black and one red.
As he put it into Alem’s hand, he said, “I need you to go back down the overhang, heading south. You’ll no doubt come across some of Fadi’s men. As soon as you see them, press the black button. When you’re within a hundred meters of them, press the red button, then throw this at them as hard as you can. Do you have all that?”
The boy looked down at the octagon. “Is this an explosive?”
“You know it is.”
“You can count on me,” Alem said solemnly.
“Good. I’m not going to make a move until I hear the explosion. Then I’ll go down the chimney.”
“The explosion will draw them.” Alem rose to leave. “Two-thirds of the way down, the chimney branches. Take the right branch. When you reach the end, turn right. You’ll be fifty meters from where they’re holding your friend.”
Bourne watched as the boy scrambled across the top of the overhang, vanishing into the swirling snow as he went over the south side. At once, he called Davis on the Thuraya satellite phone.
“Your position is compromised,” he said. “Has there been any activity? Anything at all?”
“Quiet as a tomb,” the pilot said. “You have an ETA? There’s a helluva front forming to the northwest.”
“So I’ve heard. Listen, I need you to get out of there. I passed through an alpine meadow thirteen or fourteen klicks northwest of your current position. Head for that. But first, I want you to bury the body in the cave. You won’t be able to get anywhere with the ground, so use rocks. Make a cairn. Say a prayer over it. Oh, and one other thing—wear the radiation suit I saw in the cockpit.”
Bourne turned back to the job at hand. He had to trust that Alem was now telling him the truth. And yet he needed to take precautions in the event he was wrong. Instead of waiting for the detonation, as he’d told Alem he would, he lowered himself at once into the chimney, slithering his way down. At this moment, the boy might be handing the grenade over to one of Fadi’s men. At least Bourne wouldn’t be where Alem thought he’d be.
Knees, ankles, and elbows were the means of locomotion as Bourne descended the rock chimney. The pressure he put on them was the only thing stopping him from plummeting the full length of the channel to the rock floor below.
Just as Alem had said, the chimney diverged approximately two-thirds of the way down. Bourne hung for a moment above the crux, pondering the imponderable. Either he believed Alem or he didn’t, it was as simple as that. But of course it wasn’t simple at all. When it came to human motivations and impulses, nothing was simple.
Bourne took the right fork. Within a short distance, the way narrowed slightly, so that at points he had to force himself through. Once, he had to turn forty-five degrees in order to get his shoulders through. Eventually, though, he emerged onto the cave floor. Makarov in hand, he looked both ways. No terrorist lurked in ambush. But a meter-and-a-half stalagmite rose from the cavern floor, a calcite deposit caused by mineral-rich water washed down the chimney.
Bourne kicked out, snapping the stalagmite a foot above its base. Taking it up in his free hand, he headed right along the cavern. It wasn’t long before the passageway curved to the left. Bourne slowed his pace, then dropped down to knee level.
What he saw when he first took a look around the corner was one of Fadi’s men standing with a Ruger semiautomatic rifle on his hip. Bourne waited, breathing slowly and deeply. The terrorist moved, and Bourne could see Martin Lindros. Bound and gagged, he was propped up against a canvas pack of some kind. Bourne’s heart beat hard in his chest. Martin was alive!
He had no time to fully assess his friend’s condition because at that moment the echo of an explosion ricocheted in the cave. Alem had proved himself; he’d lobbed Deron’s grenade, just as he’d promised.
The terrorist moved once again, cutting off Bourne’s view of Lindros. Now he could see two more terrorists as they huddled with the first, who was speaking in rapid Arabic on a satellite phone, deciding their course of action. So Fadi had left three men to guard his prisoner. Bourne now had a crucial bit of information.
The three terrorists, having come to a decision, arrayed themselves in a triangular defensive formation: one man on point, near the cave mouth, two spread out behind Lindros, near where Bourne crouched.
Bourne put away the Makarov. He couldn’t afford to use a firearm. The noise would surely bring the rest of Fadi’s men to the cave at a run. He rose, planting his feet. Holding the stalagmite in one hand, he drew out the curved blade knife. He threw that first, strong and true, so that it buried itself to the hilt in the back of the left-facing rear guard. As the other one turned, Bourne hurled the stalagmite like a spear. It struck the terrorist in the throat, piercing clean through. The man clawed briefly at it as he toppled over. Then he slumped over his comrade.
The terrorist on point had spun around and was aiming his Ruger at Bourne, who immediately raised his hands and came walking toward the other.
The terrorist said, “Halt!” in Arabic.
But Bourne had already broken into a sprint. He reached the terrorist while the man’s eyes were still wide in shock. Shoving the muzzle of the Ruger to the side, Bourne slammed the heel of his hand into the terrorist’s nose. Blood and bits of cartilage sprayed outward. Bourne chopped down on the man’s clavicle, breaking it. The terrorist was on his knees now, swaying groggily. Jason ripped the Ruger out of his hands and mashed the butt into his temple. The man pitched over, unmoving.
Bourne was already striding away. He slit the ropes that bound Lindros hand and ankle. As he pulled his friend to his feet, he stripped off the gag.
“Easy,” he said. “Are you okay?”
Lindros nodded.
“Okay. Let’s get you the hell out of here.”
As he hustled Lindros back the way he had come, Bourne untied his friend’s wrists. Martin’s face was puffy
and discolored, the most easily visible effects of his torture. What agonies of mind and body had Fadi put him through? Bourne had been a victim of articulated torture more than once. He knew that some people stood up to it better than others.
Skirting the stub of the stalagmite Bourne had broken off, they arrived at the chimney.
“We have to go up,” Bourne said. “It’s the only way out.”
“I’ll do what I have to do.”
“Don’t worry,” Bourne said. “I’ll help you.”
As he was about to hoist himself up into the chimney, Lindros put a hand on his arm.
“Jason, I never lost hope. I knew you’d find me,” he said. “I owe you a debt I can never adequately repay.”
Bourne squeezed his arm briefly. “Now come on. Follow me up.”
The ascent took longer than the descent. For one thing, the climb up was far more difficult and tiring. For another, there was Lindros. Several times, Bourne was obliged to stop and move back a meter or two to help his friend get through a particularly rough spot in the chimney. And he had to haul Lindros bodily through one of the narrow places.
At last, after a harrowing thirty minutes, they emerged onto the top of the overhang. While Martin regained his breath, Bourne took a reading of the weather. The wind had swung around. It was now coming out of the south. The light pattering of snow was all that was coming down—and clearly all that would come down: The front had shifted away. The ancient demons of Ras Dejen had been merciful this time.
Bourne pulled Lindros to his feet, and they began the trek to the waiting helicopter.
Eleven
ANNE HELD lived in a two-story Federal redbrick house a stone’s throw from Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. It had black shutters, a slate roof, and a neat privet hedge out front. The house had belonged to her late sister, Joyce. She and her husband, Peter, had died three years ago when their small plane had gone down in fog as they headed toward Martha’s Vineyard. Anne had inherited the house, which she never could have afforded on her own.
Most nights, returning home from CI, Anne didn’t miss her lover. For one thing, the DCI invariably kept her late. He’d always been a tireless worker, but after his wife had walked out on him two years ago, he had absolutely no reason to leave the office. For another, once she was home she kept herself busy up until the moment she took an Ambien, slipped beneath the covers, and snapped off the bedside lamp.
But there were other nights—like this one—when she could not turn her thoughts away from her lover. She missed the scent of him, the feel of his muscled limbs, the flutter of his flat belly against hers, the exquisite sensation as he took her—or she took him. The emptiness inside her his absence caused was a physical pain, the only anodyne more work or drugged sleep.
Her Lover. He had a name, of course. And a thousand love-names she had given him over the years. But in her mind, in her dreams, he was her Lover. She had met him in London, at a festive consular party—the ambassador of somewhere-or-other was celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday, and all of his six-hundred-odd friends had been invited, she among them. She had been working then for the director of MI6, an old and trusted friend of the DCI.
At once, she had grown dizzy and a little afraid. Dizzy at his proximity, afraid of his profound effect on her. She was, at twenty, not without experience when it came to the opposite sex. However, her experience had been with callow boys. Her Lover was a man. She missed him now with an ache that left a knot in her breast.
Her throat was parched. She crossed the entryway and entered the library, on the other side of which was the hallway to the kitchen. She had taken no more than three or four steps into the room when she stopped dead in her tracks.
Nothing was as she had left it. The sight snapped her out of the emotional pit she’d fallen into. Without taking her eyes from the scene, she opened her handbag and took out her Smith & Wesson J-frame. She was a good shot; she practiced twice a month at the CI firing range. Not that she was a big fan of guns, but the training was mandatory for all office personnel.
Thus armed, she took a closer look around. It wasn’t as if a sneak thief had broken in and rifled the place. This job was neat and tidy. In fact, if she hadn’t been such an anal retentive she might never have noticed the changes—that’s how minute most of them were. Papers on her desk not quite as neatly stacked as they had been, an old-fashioned chrome stapler at more of an angle than she had left it, her colored pencils in a slightly different order, the books on the shelves not precisely aligned as she had ordered them.
The first thing she did was go through every room and closet in the house to make sure she was alone. Then she checked all the doors and windows. None had been broken or damaged in any way. Which meant someone either had a set of keys or had picked the lock. Of the two possibilities, the second seemed far more probable.
Next, she returned to the library and slowly and methodically examined every single item there. It was important to her to get a sense of who had invaded her house. As she moved from shelf to shelf, she imagined him stalking her, poking, prodding in an attempt to ferret out her innermost secrets.
In a sense, considering the business she was in, it seemed inevitable that this would happen. However, that knowledge did not assuage the dread she felt at this rape of her private world. She was defended, of course, heavily so. And as scrupulously careful here as she was at the office. Whoever had been here had found nothing of value, of this she was certain. It was the act itself that gnawed at her. She had been attacked. Why? By whom? Questions without immediate answers.
Forget that glass of water now, she thought. Instead she poured herself a stiff single-malt scotch and, sipping it, went upstairs to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, kicked off her shoes. But the adrenaline still racing through her body would not allow her respite. She got up, padded over to her dresser, set her old-fashioned glass down. Standing before the mirror, she unbuttoned her blouse, shrugged it off. She went into the closet, swept a line of other blouses out of the way to get to the free hanger. Reaching up, she stopped in midmotion. Her heart beat like a trip-hammer and she felt a wave of nausea wash over her.
There, swinging from the chrome hanger rod, was a miniature hangman’s noose. And caught in that noose, pulled tight as if around the condemned’s neck, was a pair of her underpants.
They wanted to know what I knew. They wanted to know why I was following them.” Martin Lindros sat with his head against the specially configured airplane seat’s back, eyes half closed. “I could’ve kicked myself. They made me in Zambia, my interrogator told me. I never knew it.”
“No use beating yourself up,” Bourne said. “You aren’t used to fieldwork.”
Lindros shook his head. “No excuse.”
“Martin,” he said gently, “what’s happened to your voice?”
Lindros winced. “I must have been screaming for days. I don’t remember.” He tried to twist away from the memory. “I never saw what it was.”
His friend was still in a kind of post-rescue shock, that was clear enough to Bourne. He’d asked twice about the fate of Jaime Cowell, his pilot, as if he hadn’t heard Bourne the first time or had not been able to absorb the news. Bourne had chosen not to tell him about the second helicopter; time for that later. So much had happened so quickly, they’d hardly been able to say another word to each other, until now. The moment they’d taken off from Ras Dejen, Davis had radioed Ambouli airport in Djibouti for a CI physician. For that choppy flight, Lindros had been lying down on a stretcher, moving in and out of a fitful sleep. He was thinner than Bourne had ever seen him, his face haggard and gray. The beard altered his appearance in an unsettling way: It made him look like one of his captors.
Davis, a hotshot pilot if ever there was one, had wrestled the helicopter into the air, raced through the eye of a needle: a rent in the howling wind at the side edge of the front. He skillfully followed it down the mountain, out into clear weather. Beside him, Lindros lay, white-faced, the mask f
eeding him oxygen clamped firmly in place.
During the pulse-quickening flight, Bourne tried to keep the ruined, pitted face of Alem’s brother out of his mind. He wished he could have buried the boy himself. That had proved impossible, so he’d done the next best thing. Imagining the stone cairn Davis had erected, he said a silent prayer for the dead, as he’d done months ago over Marie’s grave.
In Djibouti, the CI physician had clambered aboard the moment they touched down. He was a young man with a stern countenance and prematurely graying hair. After spending close to an hour examining Lindros, he and Bourne stood outside the chopper and spoke.
“Clearly, he’s been badly mistreated,” the doctor had said. “Bruises, contusions, a cracked rib. And of course, dehydration. The good news is there’s no sign of internal bleeding. I have him on saline and antibiotic drips, so for the next hour or so he can’t be moved. Clean up, get yourself something proteinaceous to eat.”
He had given Bourne the ghost of a smile. “Physically, he’ll be fine. What I can’t quantify is what was done to him mentally and emotionally. The official evaluation will have to wait until we get back to D.C., but in the meantime you can do your bit. Engage his mind, when you can, during the trip back. I understand the two of you are good friends. Talk to him about the times you’ve spent together, see if you can get a sense of what changes—if any—have occurred.”
Who interrogated you?” Bourne said now to Lindros as they sat side by side in the CI jet.
His friend’s eyes closed briefly. “Their leader: Fadi.”
“So Fadi himself was there on Ras Dejen.”
“Yes.” A slight shudder went through Lindros like a gust of wind. “This shipment was too important to leave in the hands of a lieutenant.”
“So you found out before they captured you.”
“Uranium, yes. I had taken radiation detectors with me.” Lindros’s gaze slid away to the shrieking darkness outside the jet’s Perspex window. “I started out by thinking Dujja was after TSGs. But really, that didn’t make sense. I mean, why would they want triggered spark gaps unless…” His body was racked by another small spasm. “We have to assume they have it all, Jason. The TSGs and, far worse, the means to enrich the uranium. We have to assume they’re constructing a nuclear bomb.”
The Bourne Betrayal Page 17