Was it a coincidence that the Balinese didn‘t allow their children‘s feet to touch the ground for three months-and that he‘d been on Bali for precisely the same amount of time?
Now, for the first time in his defective memory, unmoored from everything and everyone he knew, he felt able to look inside himself, and what he saw was someone he didn‘t recognize-not Webb, not Bourne. It was as if Webb were a dream, or another identity assigned to him just as Bourne had been.
Kneeling outside the Bat Cave with its thousands of denizens stirring restively, with the priest‘s intonations transforming the intense Southern Hemisphere sunshine into prayer, he contemplated the chimeric landscape of his own soul, a place singularly twilit, like a deserted city an hour before dawn or the desolate seashore an hour after dusk, a place that slipped away from him, shifting like sand. And as he journeyed through this unknown country he asked himself this question:
Who am I?
5
THE JOINT NSA-DHS forensics team arrived in Cairo and, to the consternation of everyone except Soraya, was met at the airport by an elite contingent of al Mokhabarat, the national secret police. Team members and their belongings were poured into military vehicles and driven through the blistering heat, blazing sun, and urban chaos of Cairo. Heading southwest out of the city, they traveled toward the desert in glum and silent single file.
— Our destination is near Wadi AlRayan, Amun Chalthoum, the head of al Mokhabarat, said to Soraya. He had spotted her immediately, culled her out of the team to sit beside him in his vehicle, which was second behind a heavily armored halftrack that Chalthoum was doubtless using to flex his muscles in the face of the Americans.
For Chalthoum time seemed to have stood still. His hair was still thick and dark, his wide copper-colored forehead still unlined. His black crow‘s eyes deeply set above the hawk-beak of his nose still smoldered with suppressed emotion. He was large and muscular with the narrow hips of a swimmer or a climber. By contrast, he had the long, tapered fingers of a pianist or a surgeon. And yet something important had changed, because there was about him the sense of a fire barely banked. The nearer one got to him, the more one felt the quivering of his leashed rage. Now that she was sitting beside him, now that she felt the once familiar stirrings inside her, she realized why she hadn‘t told Veronica Hart the whole truth: because she wasn‘t at all certain that she could handle Amun.
— So quiet. Are you not stirred by being back home?
— Actually, I was thinking about the last time you took me to Wadi AlRayan.
— That was eight years ago and I was simply trying to get at the truth,
he said with a shake of his head. -Admit it, you were in my country passing secrets-
— I admit nothing.
– which by right belonged to the state. He tapped his chest. -And I am the state.
— Le Roi le Veut, she murmured.
— The king wills it. Chalthoum nodded. -Precisely. And momentarily he took his hands off the wheel and spread his arms wide to encompass the desert into which they were just now driving. -This is the land of absolutism, Umm al-Dunya, the Mother of the Universe , but I‘m not telling you anything you don‘t already know. After all, you‘re Egyptian, like me.
— Half Egyptian. She shrugged. -Anyway, it doesn‘t matter. I‘m here to help my people find out what happened to the airliner.
— Your people. Chalthoum spat out the words as if even the thought of them left a bitter taste in his mouth. -What about your father? What about his people? Has America so thoroughly destroyed the wild Arabian inside you?
Soraya put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. She knew she‘d better get her own feelings under control and soon, otherwise the entire mission could spiral out of control. Then she felt Amun‘s arm brush up against hers and the hair at the back of her neck stirred. Good God, she thought, I can’t feel this way about him. And then she broke out in a cold sweat. Was this why I withheld the truth from Veronica-because I knew that if I told her everything she’d never have allowed me to come back here? And all at once she felt herself in jeopardy, not because of Amun but because of herself, her own runaway emotions.
In an effort to regain some form of equilibrium she said, — My father never forgot he was Egyptian.
— So much so he changed his family name from Mohammed to Moore, Chalthoum said bitterly.
— He fell in love with America when he fell in love with my mother. The deep appreciation I have of it comes from him.
Chalthoum shook his head. -Why hide it? It was your mother‘s doing.
— Like all Americans, my mother took for granted everything her country had to offer. She couldn‘t have cared less about the Fourth of July; it was my father who took me to the fireworks celebrations on the Mall in Washington, DC, where he spoke to me about freedom and liberty.
Chalthoum bared his teeth. -I have to laugh at his naÄveté-and yours. Frankly, I assumed you had a more… shall we say pragmatic outlook on America, the country that exports Mickey Mouse, war, and occupying armed forces with equal abandon.
— How convenient of you to forget that we‘re also the country that keeps you safe from extremists, Amun.
Chalthoum clenched his teeth and was about to respond when the jouncing vehicle rolled through a cordon of his men, armed with submachine guns, keeping the mass of clamoring international press at a safe remove from the crash site, and ground to a halt. Soraya was the first out, settling her sunglasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose and the lightweight hat on her head. Chalthoum had been right about one thing: The airliner had fallen out of the sky not six hundred yards from the southeastern tip of the wadi, a body of water, complete with waterfalls, all the more spectacular because it was surrounded by desert.
— Dear God, Soraya murmured as she began a tour of the crash site, which had already been cordoned off, presumably by Amun‘s people. The fuselage was in two main chunks, embedded in the sand and rock like grotesque monuments to an unknown god, but other pieces, violently disjointed from the body, were scattered about in a widening circle, along with one wing, bent in half like a green twig.
— Notice the number of fuselage sections, Chalthoum said, as he watched the American task force deploy. He pointed as they moved around the periphery of the site. -See here, and here. It‘s also clear that the plane broke up in midair, not on impact, which, considering the composition of the ground, caused minimal further damage.
— So the plane looks more or less the way it did directly after the explosion.
Chalthoum nodded. -That‘s correct.
Say what you wanted about him, when it came to his trade he was a firstrate practitioner. The trouble was that too often his trade included methods of interrogation and torture that would make even those running Abu Ghraib sick to their stomachs.
— The destruction is terrible, he said.
He wasn‘t kidding. Soraya watched as the forensics team put on plastic suits, slipped shoe coverings on. Kylie, the explosives-sniffing golden Lab, went in first with her handler. Then the task force split in two, the first group heading into the burned-out interior of the plane while the second began its examination of the ripped-open edges in an attempt to determine whether the explosion had been internal or external. Among this latter group was Delia Trane, a friend of Soraya‘s and an explosives expert from ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Though Delia was only thirty-four, her abilities were such that she was often on loan to various federal law enforcement agencies desperate for her expertise.
Dogged by Chalthoum, Soraya headed into the circle of death, skirting bits of metal so black and twisted it was impossible to determine what they had once been. Fist-size globs that looked like hail on closer inspection turned out to be plastic parts that had melted down in the fiery conflagration. When she came to a human head, she stopped and crouched down. Almost all the hair and most of the flesh had been scorched to ash, which pocked the partially revealed skull like goo
seflesh.
Just beyond, a blackened forearm rose at an angle from the sand, the hand above it like a beckoning flag signifying a land where death ruled absolutely. Soraya was sweating, and not just from the brutal heat. She took a swig of water from a plastic bottle Chalthoum gave her, then proceeded on. Just before the yawning mouth of the fuselage, a team member handed her and Chalthoum plastic suits and shoe coverings that, despite the heat, they put on.
After her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she took off her sunglasses, peered around. The seat rows were canted at a ninety-degree angle; the floor was where the left bulkhead would have been when the jetliner was right-side up and everyone inside had been alive, chatting, laughing, holding hands, or foolishly arguing until the final moment before oblivion. Bodies lay everywhere, some still in their seats, others thrown clear on impact. The explosion had completely disintegrated another section of the aircraft and those in it.
She noticed that wherever a member of the American team went, he or she was shadowed by one of Amun‘s people. It would have been comical if it weren‘t so sinister. Her companion was clearly determined that the forensics team would not make a move, including relieving themselves in the dizzying heat and fetid stench of the portable latrines, without him knowing about it immediately.
— The lack of humidity works in your favor, of course, Chalthoum said,
— slowing the decomposition of those bodies not incinerated beyond recognition.
— That will be a blessing to their families.
— Naturally so. But really, let‘s not mince words, you haven‘t given much thought to either the passengers or their families. You‘re here to find out what happened to the aircraft: mechanical malfunction or an act of extremist terrorism.
He still had the utterly un-Egyptian knack of cutting directly to the quick. The country was a bureaucratic nightmare; nothing got done, not a single answer was forthcoming until at least fifteen people in seven different divisions were consulted and agreed on it. Soraya debated only a moment as to how to answer. -It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.
Chalthoum nodded. -Yes, because the world wants to know, needs to know. But my question to you is this: What then?
A typically astute query, she thought. -I don‘t know. What happens then is not up to me.
She spotted Delia, signaled to her. Her friend nodded, picked her way through the debris and hunched-over workers, with their bright task lamps, to where she and Chalthoum stood just inside the roasting gloom.
— Anything to report? Soraya said.
— We‘re just beginning the prelim stages. Delia‘s pale eyes flicked toward the Egyptian and back to her friend.
— It‘s all right, Soraya assured her. -If you have anything, even if it‘s speculation, I need to know.
— Okay. Delia‘s mother was an aristocratic Colombian from Bogotá, and the daughter carried much of her maternal ancestors‘ fiery blood. Her skin was as deep-toned as Soraya‘s, but there the similarity ended. She had a plain face and a boyish figure, with blunt-cut hair, strong hands, and a nononsense manner that was often interpreted as rudeness. Soraya thought it refreshing; Delia was someone with whom she could let her hair down. -My sense is that it wasn‘t a bomb. The explosion very clearly didn‘t emanate from the luggage bay.
— So, what, a mechanical failure?
— Kylie says no, Delia said. She meant the dog.
There was that hesitation again, and it made Soraya uneasy. She considered pressing her friend, but then thought better of it. She‘d have to find a way to talk to her without Amun hanging on their every word. She nodded, and Delia went back to her work.
— She knows more than she‘s telling, Chalthoum said. -I want to know what‘s going on. When Soraya said nothing, he continued. -Go talk to her. Alone.
Soraya turned to him. -And then?
He shrugged. -Report back to me, what else?
It was very late by the time Moira was ready to leave the office. With a weary hand she switched off CNN, which she‘d had on with the volume muted ever since the news of the airliner incident in Egypt broke. The incident unnerved her, as it had many people in the security field. No word on what had really happened-not even from her back-channel, not-for-attribution sources, whose terse responses were so brittle they set her teeth on edge. Meanwhile the press was having a typically monstrous field day-talking heads on TV speculating terrorist attack scenarios. And that didn‘t even count the more out-and-out fabrications posing as — the truth they don‘t want you to know on thousands of Internet sites, including the toxic chestnut trotted out since 9/11 that the American government was behind the incident in order to advance its own casus belli, its case for war.
As she took the elevator down to the underground garage, Moira‘s mind was in two places at once: here with the new organization she was building and in Bali with Bourne. His grave wounds had made it more difficult to separate herself from him. What had seemed so simple when they‘d discussed her future in the pool at the resort now seemed nebulous and vaguely anxiety producing. It wasn‘t that she felt the need to take care of him-God knows she would not have made a decent nurse-but that within the eternity when his life had hung in the balance, she‘d been forced to reassess her feelings for him. The possibility that he would be snatched from her filled her with dread. At least, she assumed it was dread, since she‘d never before felt anything like it: a suffocating blackness that blotted out the sun at noon, the stars at midnight.
Was this love? she wondered. Could love produce this madness that transcended time and space, that caused her heart to expand beyond its known limits, that turned her bones to jelly? How many times during the night had she been roused out of a shallow and restless sleep, compelled to pad into the bathroom to stare at the reflection in the mirror she did not recognize. It was as if she had been unceremoniously thrust into someone else‘s life, a life she neither wanted nor understood.
— Who are you? she said over and over to that strange reflection. -How did you get here? What is it you want?
Neither she nor her reflection had answers. In the stillness of the night she wept for the loss of who she had been, in despair of the new and incomprehensible future that had invaded her body like a transfusion.
But in the morning she was herself again: pragmatic, focused, ruthless both in her recruiting and in the stringent rules she set out for her operatives. She made each one swear allegiance to Heartland as if it were a sovereign nation-which in many respects Black River, her main rival, already was.
And yet, the moment the sun fell from the sky, twilight and uncertainty crept through her, and her thoughts returned to Bourne with whom she‘d had no contact since she had left Bali three months ago with the body of a dead Australian drifter and the paperwork identifying it as Bourne‘s. It was a recurring disease she‘d picked up on the island: The thought of his imminent death was enough to cause her to run, and keep running. Except that wherever she went she ended up at the terrifying place where she‘d started, at the moment he‘d fallen to the ground, at the moment her heart had stopped beating.
The elevator door opened onto the shadow-drenched concrete expanse of the garage, and she stepped out, her car key in her hand. She hated this latenight walk through the almost deserted garage. The smears of oil and gas, the stench of exhaust, the echoes of her heels ringing against the concrete made her feel sad and achingly lonely, as if there was no place in the world she could call home.
There were very few cars left; the parallel white lines painted on the unsealed concrete stretched away from her, ending where she‘d parked her car. She heard the cadence of her own strides, saw the movement of her crooked shadow as it passed across one square pillar after another.
She heard a car engine cough to life and came to a halt, standing still, her senses questing for the source. A dove-gray Audi pulled out from behind a pillar, turned on its headlights, and came toward her, gathering speed.
She drew her custom Lady Hawk 9mm from
its thigh holster, moved to an expert sharpshooter‘s crouch, thumbed off the safety. She was just about to pull the trigger when the passenger‘s-side window slid down and the Audi screeched to a halt, rocking on its shocks.
— Moira-!
She bent her knees more to lower her line of vision.
— Moira, it‘s me, Jay!
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