Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy

by Robert Ludlum

  "Absolutely I am, sir. We all are."

  "Excellent." But his frown deepened as he glanced down at the notes on his desktop.

  "Give me an update on how you're handling Comrade Karpov?"

  "Not to worry," Hull said. "I have the Boris situation under control."

  "That's a relief. Relations between the president and his Russian counterpart are strained as it is. You've no idea what blood, sweat and tears it took to persuade Aleksandr Yevtushenko to come to the table. Can you imagine the blowup if he hears you and his top security man are ready to slit each other's throats?"

  "It'll never happen, sir."

  "Damned straight," the DCI growled. "Keep me informed 24-7."

  "Will do, sir," Hull said, signing off.

  The DCI swiveled around, ran his hand through his shock of white hair. "We're in the final stretch, Martin. Does it pain you as much as it pains me to be stuck here behind a desk while Hull is taking care of business in the field?"

  "It does, indeed, sir." Lindros, keeping his secret close to the vest for all this time, almost lost his nerve then, but duty won out over compassion. He didn't want to wound the Old Man, no matter how badly he'd been treated recently.

  He cleared his throat. "Sir, I've just come from seeing Randy Driver."

  "And?"

  Lindros took a deep breath and told the Old Man what Driver had confessed, that Conklin had brought Dr. Felix Schiffer over to the Agency from DARPA for his own dark and unknown reasons, that he had deliberately "disappeared" Schiffer and that now that Conklin was dead no one knew where Schiffer was.

  The Old Man's fist slammed down on his desk. "Sweet Christ, to have one of our directorate scientists gone missing with the summit about to start is a catastrophe of the first rank. If the bitch-woman should get wind of this, it'll be my ass in a sling, no ifs, ands or buts."

  For a moment nothing stirred in the vast corner office. The photos of world leaders past and present looked back at the two men with mute rebuke.

  At last the DCI stirred. "Are you saying that Alex Conklin stole a scientist out from under DOD's nose and stashed him with us so he could whisk him away to God knows where and for what unknown purpose?"

  Lindros, folding his hands in his lap, said nothing, but he knew better than to move his gaze away from the Old Man's.

  "Well, that's ... I mean to say, we don't do that in the Agency, and most especially Alexander Conklin wouldn't do that. He would be breaking every rule in the playbook." Lindros stirred, thinking of his research in the top-secret Four-Zero Archives. "He did it often enough in the field, sir. You know that."

  Indeed, the DCI did, only too well. "This is different," he protested. "This happened here at home. It's a personal affront to the Agency, and to me." The Old Man shook his craggy head. "I refuse to believe it, Martin. Goddammit, there must be another explanation!"

  Lindros held firm. "You know there isn't. I'm truly sorry to have been the one to bring you this news, sir."

  At that moment the Old Man's secretary entered the room, handed him a slip of paper, and went out. The DCI unfolded the note.

  "Your wife would like to speak with you," he read. "She says it's important." He crumpled the note, then looked up. "Of course there's another explanation. Jason Bourne."

  "Sir?"

  The DCI looked straight at Lindros and said bleakly, "This is Bourne's doing, not Alex's. It's the only explanation that makes sense."

  "For the record, I think you're wrong, sir," Lindros said, gathering himself for the uphill battle. "With all due respect, I think you've allowed your personal friendship with Alex Conklin to cloud your judgment. After studying the Four-Zero files, I believe that no one alive was closer to Conklin than Jason Bourne, even you." A Cheshire cat smile spread across the DCI's face. "Oh, you're right about that one, Martin. And it's because Bourne knew Alex so well that he was able to capitalize on Alex's involvement with this Dr. Schiffer. Believe me, Bourne smelled something and he went after it."

  "There's no proof—"

  "Ah, but there is." The DCI shifted in his chair. "As it happens, I know where Bourne is."

  "Sir?" Lindros fairly goggled at him.

  "106-108 Fo utca," the DCI read off a slip of paper. "That's in Budapest." The DCI threw his deputy a hard look. "Didn't you tell me that the gun used to murder Alex and Mo Panov was paid for out of an account in Budapest?"

  Lindros' heart contracted. "Yes, sir."

  The DCI nodded. "That's why I gave this address to Kevin McColT Lindros' face went white. "Oh, Christ. I want to talk to McColl."

  "I feel your pain, Martin, really I do." The DCI nodded toward the phone. "Call him if you like, but you know McColl's record for efficiency.

  Chances are Bourne is already dead."

  Bourne kicked the door to the supply room closed, stripped off the bloody lab coat. He was about to drop it over the corpse of Kevin McColl when he noticed a small LED light blinking at McColl's hip. His cell phone. Squatting down, he picked it out of its plastic holster, opened it up. He saw the number and knew who was calling. Rage filled his heart. Opening the connection, he said to the DCI, "Keep this up and you'll be paying the undertakers overtime."

  "Bourne!" Lindros cried. "Wait!"

  But he didn't wait. Instead, he threw the cell phone so hard against the wall it split open like an oyster.

  Annaka watched him carefully. "An old enemy?"

  "An old fool," Bourne growled, retrieving his leather jacket. He grunted involuntarily as the pain struck him a hammer blow.

  "It appears that McColl gave you quite a beating," Annaka said. Bourne slipped on his jacket with its white visitor's ID tag in order to cover his slit shirt. His mind was completely focused on finding Dr. Sido. "And what about you? How badly did McColl hurt you?"

  She refused to rub the red welt at her throat. "Don't worry about me."

  "We won't worry about each other, then," Bourne said as he took a bottle of cleaner from the shelf and, using a rag, wiped the blood stains off her coat as best he could.

  "We've got to get to Dr. Sido as quickly as possible. Dr. Morintz is bound to be missed sooner or later."

  "Where's Sido?"

  "In the Epidemiological Wing." He gestured. "Come on." He peered around the doorjamb, checking to make sure no one was around. As they emerged into the corridor, he registered that an office door across the way was partially open. He took a step toward it but heard voices approaching from that direction and he hurried them away. He needed a moment to reorient himself, then he took them through a set of swinging doors into the Epidemiological Wing.

  "Sido's in 902," he said, scanning the numbers on the doors they passed. The wing was in actuality a square with an open space in its center. Doors to labs and offices were set at intervals along the four walls, the only exception being a barred metal exit door, locked from the outside which was in the center of the far wall. Obviously the Epidemiological Wing was at the back of the clinic because it was clear from the markings on the small storerooms to either side that the door was used to remove hazardous medical waste.

  "There's his lab," Bourne said, hurrying ahead.

  Annaka, just behind him, saw the fire alarm box on the wall ahead of her, precisely where Stepan said it would be. As she came abreast of it, she lifted the glass. Bourne was knocking on the door to Sido's lab. Receiving no answer, he opened the door. Just as he stepped into Dr. Sido's lab, Annaka pulled down the handle and the fire alarm went off. The wing was suddenly filled with people. Three members of the clinic's security force appeared; it was obvious that these were extremely efficient people. Bourne, desperate now, looked around Sido's empty office. He noticed a mug half-filled with coffee, the computer screen lit with a screen saver. He pressed the "Escape" key, and the upper part of the screen filled with a complex chemical equation. The lower half had the following legend: "Product must be kept at -32 degrees Celsius as it is extremely fragile. Heat of any kind renders it instantly inert." Through the mounting cha
os, Bourne was thinking furiously. Though Dr. Sido wasn't here, he had been here not long ago. All evidence pointed to him having left in a hurry.

  At that moment Annaka rushed in and pulled at him. "Jason, the clinic's security is asking questions, checking everyone's ID. We've got to get out of here now." She led him to the doorway. "If we can make it to the rear exit, we can escape that way." Out in the open space of the wing, chaos reigned. The alarm had triggered sprays of water. As there was a great deal of flammable material in the labs, including oxygen tanks, the staff was understandably panicking. Security, trying to get a grip on who was present, was having to deal with calming the clinic's personnel. Bourne and Annaka were heading toward the metal exit door when Bourne saw Khan working his way through the stampeding crowd toward them. Bourne grabbed Annaka, interposed himself between her and the oncoming Khan. What was Khan's intention, he wondered. Did he mean to kill them or to intercept them? Did he expect Bourne to tell him everything he'd discovered about Felix Schiffer and the biochemical diffuser? But no, there was something different about Khan's expression, some clockwork calculation that was missing.

  "Listen to me!" Khan said, trying to make himself heard above the noise. "Bourne, you've got to listen to me!"

  But Bourne, herding Annaka, had reached the metal exit door and, crashing through it, hurtled into the alley behind the clinic, where a HAZ-MAT truck was parked. Six men armed with machine-guns stood in front of it. Bourne, instantly recognizing it as a trap, turned and instinctively shouted at Khan, who was coming on behind him. Annaka, swinging around, saw Khan at last and ordered two of the men to open fire. But Khan, heeding Bourne's warning, leaped aside a split-second before the hail of bullets mowed down the clinic's security detail that had come to investigate. Now all hell broke loose inside the clinic, as staff ran, screaming, through the swinging doors, down the corridor toward the front entrance.

  Two of the men grabbed Bourne from behind. He whirled, engaging them.

  "Find him," he heard Annaka shout. "Find Khan and kill him!"

  "Annaka, what—"

  Bourne, stunned, watched the pair that had fired race past him, leaping over the wreckage of the bullet-ridden bodies.

  Bourne, pushing himself to action, smashed one man in the face, putting him down, but another took his place.

  "Careful," Annaka warned. "He's got a gun!"

  One of the men shackled Bourne's arms behind his back while a second scrabbled for the weapon. He wrestled free, chopped down hard, breaking his would-be captor's nose. Blood gushed and the man fell back, his hands cupping the center of his ruined face.

  "What the hell are you doing?"

  Then Annaka, armed with a machine pistol, stepped in, slammed him hard with its thick butt in his cracked ribs. All the breath went out of him and he canted over, losing his balance. His knees were like rubber and the agony that racked him was for a moment unbearable. Then they'd grabbed hold of him. One man punched him in the side of the head. Bourne sagged again in their arms.

  The two men returned from their recon of the clinic wing. "No sign of him," they reported to Annaka.

  "No matter," she said, and pointed to the man writhing on the ground. "Get him into the vehicle. Hurry now!"

  She turned back to Bourne, saw the man with the broken nose was pressing a gun to the side of Bourne's head. His eyes blazed with fury and he seemed intent on pulling the trigger.

  Annaka said calmly but firmly. "Put the gun down. He's to be taken alive." She stared at him, not moving a muscle. "Spalko's orders. You know that." At length the man put the gun up.

  "All right," she said. "Into the truck."

  Bourne stared at her, his mind was ablaze with her betrayal.

  Smirking, Annaka held out a hand and one of the men handed her a hypodermic filled with a clear liquid. With a swift and sure motion, she emptied the hypodermic into Bourne's vein, and slowly his eyes lost focus.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Hasan Arsenov had put Zina in charge of the physical aspect of the cadre, as if she were a stylist. She took her orders seriously as she always did, though not without a private snicker of cynicism. Like a planet to a sun, she was aligned with the Shaykh now. As was her way, she had mentally and emotionally removed herself from Hasan's orbit. It had begun that night in Budapest—though, in truth, the seeds must have been planted earlier— and had come to fruition under the burning sun of Crete. She clove to their time together on the Mediterranean island as if it were her own private legend, one she shared only with him. They'd been—what?—Theseus and Ariadne. The Shaykh had recounted the myth of the Minotaur's terrible life and bloody death to her. Together, she and the Shaykh had entered a real-life labyrinth and triumphed. In the fever of these newly precious memories, it never occurred to her that this was a Western myth in which she had inserted herself, that in aligning herself with Stepan Spalko, she had moved away from Islam, which had nurtured her, raised her like a second mother, had been her succor, her only solace in the dark days of the Russian occupation. It never occurred to her that to embrace one, she had to let go of the other. And even if it had, with her cynic's nature, she might have made the same choice.

  Because of her knowledge and diligence the men of the cadre that arrived in twilit Keflavik Airport were clean-shaven, barbered in the European style, dressed in dark Western business suits, so bland they made themselves virtually anonymous. The women were without traditional khidzhab, the scarf that covered their faces. Their bare faces were made up in the European style and they were clothed in sleek Parisian fashions. They passed through Immigration without incident, using the false identities and forged French passports Spalko had provided.

  Now, as Arsenov had ordered, they were careful to speak only Icelandic, even when they were alone together. At one of the rental companies counters in the terminal, Arsenov rented one car and three vans for the cadre, which was composed of six men and four women. While Arsenov and Zina took the car into Reykjavik, the rest of the cadre drove the vans south of the city to the town of Hafnarfjordur, the oldest trading port in Iceland, where Spalko had rented a large clapboard house on a cliff overlooking the harbor. The colorful village of small, quaint clapboard houses was surrounded on the land side by lava flows, filled with mist and a sense of being lost in time. It was possible to imagine among the brightly painted fishing boats lying side by side in the harbor warshield-bedecked Viking longships readying themselves for their next bloody campaign.

  Arsenov and Zina drove through Reykjavik, familiarizing themselves with the streets they'd previously seen only on maps, getting a sense of traffic and travel patterns. The city was picturesque, built on a peninsula so that it was possible to see the white snowencrusted mountains or the piercing blue-black North Atlantic ocean from almost any place you stood. The island itself was created from the shift of tectonic plates as the American and Eurasian landmasses pulled apart. Because of the relative youth of the island, the crust was thinner than on either of the surrounding continents, which accounted for the remarkable abundance of geothermal activity used to heat Icelandic homes. The entire city was connected to the Reykjavik Energy hot water pipeline. In City Centre, they cruised past the modern and peculiarly unsettling Hallgrimskirkja Church, looking like a rocket ship out of science fiction. It was by far the tallest structure in what was otherwise a low-rise city. They found the health services building and drove from there to the Oskjuhlid Hotel.

  "You're sure this is the route they'll take?" Zina said.

  "Absolutely." Arsenov nodded. "It's the shortest way and they'll want to get to the hotel as quickly as possible."

  The hotel's periphery was teeming with American, Arab and Russian security.

  "They've turned it into a fortress," Zina said.

  "Just as the Shaykh's photos showed us," Arsenov replied with a small smile. "How much personnel they have makes no difference to us."

  They parked and went from shop to shop, making their various purchases. Arsenov had been far h
appier inside the metal shell of their rented car. Mingling with the crowds, he was acutely aware of his own alienness. How different these slim, light-skinned, blueeyed people were! With his black hair and eyes, his big bones and swarthy skin, he felt as graceless as a Neanderthal among Cro-Magnons. Zina, he discovered, had no such difficulties. She took to new places, new people, new ideas with a frightening zeal. He worried about her, worried about her influence on the children they would one day have.

  Twenty minutes after the operation at the rear of the Eurocenter Bio-I Clinic, Khan still wondered when he'd ever felt more strongly the urge to retaliate against an enemy. Even though he'd been outmanned and outgunned, even though the rational part of his mind—

  usually so in control of every action he took—understood all too well the foolhardiness of launching a counterattack against the men Spalko had sent to get him and Jason Bourne, another part of him had been determined to fight back. Strangely, it was Bourne's warning that had brought out in him the irrational desire to hurl himself into the pitched battle and rend Spalko's men limb from limb. It was a feeling that came from the very core of him, and so powerful was it that it had taken all his rational willpower to pull back, to hide from the men Annaka had sent in to find him. He could have taken those two down, but of what use would it have been? Annaka would only have sent more of them in for him.

  He was sitting in Grendel, a cafe about a mile from the clinic, which was now crawling with police and, probably, Interpol agents. He sipped at his double espresso and thought about the primal feeling in which he still felt gripped. Once again, he saw the look of concern on Jason Bourne's face when he saw Khan about to step into the trap in which he was already ensnared. As if he'd been more concerned with keeping Khan out of danger than with his own safety. But that was impossible, wasn't it?

  Khan was not in the habit of replaying recent scenarios, but he found himself doing so now. As Bourne and Annaka had headed for the exit, he'd tried to warn Bourne about her, but he'd been too late. What had motivated him to do that? Certainly, he hadn't planned on it. It was a spur-of-themoment decision. Or was it? He recalled, with a vividness he found unsettling, his feeling when he'd seen the damage he'd done to Bourne's ribs. Had it been remorse? Impossible!