Her eyes glittered, and even though Hendricks felt a fiery demon clawing at the lining of his gut, he was powerless to look away from her image, which shimmered like sunlight on water on the flat screen of his computer.
“You must hate me now, which I suppose is inevitable. But before you judge me, you must understand something.”
Her expression changed, and Hendricks sensed that she was reaching out for something—a remote control, as it turned out. The frame drew back from her face to reveal her naked body. It was covered in blood.
Hendricks hunched forward on the edge of his chair. “Maggie, what the fuck?” Then he realized that the woman he was looking at, the woman to whom he’d made love, had possibly given his heart to, wasn’t Maggie. “Who are you?” he whispered.
The lens moved back farther until Hendricks could see that she was standing in a hotel room. At that instant, he was overcome with what might have been a hot flash. He felt his gorge rising. And rising more, as the video camera moved lower and panned the floor behind his naked lover.
And there they were. Hendricks let out a low groan. The three members of the death squad, all dead. At his lover’s hand? His mind seemed to implode. How was that possible? As if to answer his question, Maggie continued:
“These men were sent to kill me because I protected you. And now I have to leave Room Nine Sixteen, leave DC, leave America. I’m on my final journey.” The camera returned to her, zeroing in on her face. “I was supposed to bring you here, Christopher. Room Nine Sixteen was to be our secret love nest where our every move, every word we exchanged would be recorded and then disseminated to the media. To ruin you. I couldn’t let that happen. And now instead of a love nest, Room Nine Sixteen has become a charnel house. Perhaps that’s a fitting end for the two of us, I don’t know anymore.” Her face was obscured for a few seconds as she brushed wisps of hair from her eyes. “The only thing I do know is that you’re too precious to me to hurt. If I don’t go now you will be in terrible danger.”
Her smile was rueful, almost sad. “I won’t say that I love you because it will only sound hollow and false to your ears. It sounds fatuous, stupid, even. How could I love you when we have known each other a matter of days? How could I love you when all I’ve done is lie to you? How is it that the earth is the third planet from the sun? No one knows; no one can know. Some things just are, sunk in their mystery.”
Hendricks, scrutinizing her face through the squeezing of his heart, saw that she didn’t blink, her eyes didn’t cut away, two basic tells of the liar. She wasn’t lying, or she was very, very good, better than any liar he had ever met. He looked into those eyes and was lost.
“Apart from my father, I have never loved anyone before you, and my love for him is very different than it is for you. Something happened when we met, a mysterious current went through me and changed me. There is no better way to explain it. That’s all I know.”
She leaned forward suddenly, her face blurring as she planted her lips on the lens. “My name is Skara. Good-bye, Christopher. If you can’t forgive me, then remember me. Remember me when you are protecting Indigo Ridge.”
A smear of colors, a vertiginous blur of motion as she pushed the lens aside. Then Hendricks was faced with blackness, the fizzing of the electronic void, and the painful galloping of his heart.
Dawn had broken and so had Cherkesov. Boris had done as much damage as he needed to do. Cherkesov, it turned out, was deathly afraid of going blind. A swipe of the knife blade just under his right eye had been enough for the resistance to bleed out of him. He handed over what he had been bringing from the Mosque in Munich to Damascus.
“It’s a key,” he told Boris, through thickened, bloodstained lips.
“What does it open?”
“Only Semid Abdul-Qahhar knows.”
Boris frowned. “Didn’t Semid Abdul-Qahhar give you the key to bring here?”
“Semid Abdul-Qahhar is here, not in Munich. I was to deliver the key to him in person.”
“How?” Boris said. “Where?”
“He maintains a residence.” Cherkesov’s lips quivered in the parody of a smile. “You’ll like this, Boris Illyich. His residence is in the Old City, in the former Jewish Quarter, in the last remaining synagogue still standing. It had been abandoned for years, ever since the Syrian Jews fled to America.”
“So Semid Abdul-Qahhar took it over, figuring his enemies would never think to look for him there.”
Cherkesov nodded, and groaned. “I need to lie down. I need to sleep.”
“Not yet.” Boris grabbed him by his sodden shirtfront as he was leaning back. “Tell me the time of the rendezvous and the protocol.”
A thin line of pink spittle exited the corner of Cherkesov’s mouth. “He’s expecting me. You’ll never have a chance.”
“Leave that to me,” Boris said.
Cherkesov began to laugh until he coughed up blood. Then he looked up at Boris. “Look at me. Look what you’ve done.”
“It’s a sad day for you, Viktor. I agree, but I can’t sympathize.” Boris shook his former boss until his teeth chattered. “Now, fucker, tell me the details, and you can cry yourself to sleep.”
Soraya stood perfectly still. El-Arian’s touch was toxic, as if he had somehow exposed her to polonium-210 and now she was rotting from the inside out, weak and defenseless.
“Who are you, mademoiselle?”
Soraya said nothing and stared straight ahead. The pounding in her head made it difficult to gather her defenses.
“It seems that we’re a mystery to each other, M. El-Arian.”
He wrenched at her wrists and she gasped. “Enemies by whatever names we call ourselves.”
“Did Marchand order Laurent’s death, or did you?”
“Marchand was a bureaucrat.” El-Arian’s voice was like the scrape of sandpaper. “His mind was fixed on petty things. He lacked the vision to conceive of the traitor’s death.”
She looked at him, then, a terrible mistake. She was riveted, paralyzed. Never before had she believed in the concepts of Good and Evil, but his mesmeric eyes struck her as windows into an unbearable evil.
She grabbed the paperweight and smashed it into El-Arian’s temple. He relinquished his hold on her as he staggered back into the chair. It spun away from him on its casters and he pitched down onto the floor. Soraya turned and ran out of the office, down the hall. She heard a discreet alarm sound—El-Arian must have pressed a panic button. A security guard appeared, pulling a sidearm from a black leather holster. Rushing him, she smashed her elbow into his throat, and he went down. She bent to take his weapon, but he grabbed her and she had to kick him in the face to free herself. She passed up the elevator; it would be a death trap. Racing down the hallway, past open doors and startled faces, she reached the top of one of the staircases leading down to the ground floor. Behind her, she heard El-Arian cursing her.
She took the stairs two at a time, stumbling a bit because of the incessant pounding in her head, but managed to hold herself upright with one hand clutching the polished wooden banister. But she was less than halfway down when a pair of security guards converged from either side of the ground floor and rushed the stairs. Both men had their service revolvers out.
Soraya turned back, but El-Arian fairly flew down the stairs. He had a gun in his hand. He reached out and, as she tried to dive away from him, snatched her into his grasp.
29
BOURNE RETURNED REBEKA’S smile as he exited the plane. He could smell the light rose of her perfume all the way down the jetway. He saw the security officer standing by just as she described.
“Pardon me,” Bourne said in Arabic. “This is my first visit to Damascus. Could you recommend a good hotel to stay at?”
The officer stared at Bourne as if he were an insect, then grunted. Bourne bumped against him as he was getting out of the way of a woman being escorted off the plane in a wheelchair. Bourne apologized, the security officer shrugged while he was writing down h
is recommendations. Thanking him, Bourne walked off with his clearance card.
He was already behind the rest of the debarking passengers and now he fell farther back. Then he saw what he was looking for: a door marked NO ADMITTANCE. OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY. Beside the door was an electronic reader. He swiped the stolen card and pushed the door open. He had no idea who would be monitoring passengers going through Immigration, he only knew he didn’t want to be identified entering Damascus by anyone, especially Severus Domna.
He took the back halls of the airport, unsure of where he was going until he found a fire-drill map of the area screwed to a wall. In fifteen seconds he had memorized the map and had worked out the route he wanted to take.
Soraya felt herself being dragged backward, the cold metal of the gun’s muzzle hard against the side of her head. Seeing the security guards hesitate, she felt disoriented. Didn’t these men work for El-Arian? Then they parted and she saw Aaron, Jacques Robbinet, and a young man she didn’t recognize, who was scrutinizing her with a cold physician’s eye. The entire ground floor had been evacuated.
“Put the weapon down,” Aaron said. He was armed, as well, with a SIG. Aaron advanced between the two guards. “Put it down, let the woman go, and we’ll all walk out of here peacefully.”
“There is no chance of peace,” El-Arian said, “here or anywhere.”
“There’s nowhere to run,” Aaron said as he took a step forward. “This can end well, or end badly.”
“It will surely end badly for her,” El-Arian said, jamming the muzzle of the pistol into Soraya’s head so hard that she made a low sound in her throat. “Unless you move aside and allow us safe passage.”
“Let the woman go and we’ll discuss it,” Robbinet said.
El-Arian’s lip curled upward. “I won’t even dignify that suggestion with a response,” he said. “I am not afraid to die.” He rubbed his cheek against Soraya’s hair. “The same cannot be said for your agent.”
“She’s not our agent,” Aaron said.
“I’m done listening to your lies.” El-Arian dragged Soraya down the stairs. “She and I are going to walk across the floor and out the door. We’ll disappear and that will be the end of it.”
As he took the last several steps down to the marble floor, Robbinet ordered the guards to move back. El-Arian smiled. Aaron looked into Soraya’s eyes. What is he trying to tell me? she asked herself.
El-Arian apparently saw the look, too, because he said to Aaron, “If you kill me, you’ll kill her as well. Her death will be your responsibility. Are you a gambling man? Are you willing to take on that weight?”
As he spoke, El-Arian moved across the floor. The space echoed with their footfalls, the vast empty space an arena where, Soraya supposed, the end of her life might play out. She knew that Aaron had given her a signal. If her head had been clear, if the pounding weren’t making her wince with every agonizing throb, she would know what part he wanted her to play in the endgame, because she had no doubt Aaron had an endgame in mind. She would have, if she were in his position.
They were almost to the front door now, Aaron and Robbinet shadowing their every step. She felt helpless, like every damsel in distress in every action movie ever made, and this angered her to such a degree that she shoved the pain into a dark corner, holding it at bay while she tried to figure out…
Position! That was it! Aaron was moving into position to make a kill shot. He would do it just as El-Arian reached the door—that’s when she would do it. She could see Aaron moving into position, approximately forty-five degrees to the rear of El-Arian’s right shoulder. That was the vulnerable spot—the head shot.
But she had looked into her captor’s eyes and she knew his heart, she knew that he would not go down easily, that his first instinct would be to shoot Aaron, not her. It would be the soldier’s reflex action—to fire back at his attacker—one El-Arian couldn’t control. He might shoot Aaron and then her before he went down, but for certain Aaron was in mortal danger. One man she cared about was already dead because of her. She would not allow another to die.
This decision was what drove the pain racking her skull down farther, the adrenaline pumping through her, the certain desire to do this one last thing that would give her a sense of rightness, of completion, of her life—and death—having meaning. Like El-Arian, she was not afraid to die. In fact, she had considered it an inevitability when she had chosen fieldwork. But she was not a martyr; she loved life, and there was a sadness in her even as she and El-Arian reached the door, as she saw Aaron’s SIG come up, as she slammed the back of her head against El-Arian, as she drove an elbow into his kidney, as she became his assailant, not Aaron.
She heard Aaron shout, felt the air go out of El-Arian. Then she was in the eye of a monstrous thunderstorm that blew her sideways. She tasted her own blood, she was falling, the pain in her head vanished.
Then everything was obliterated by absolute stillness.
Damascus spread out before Bourne as he took a taxi in from the airport. The sun-washed morning bounced off the windshield and set fire to the hood as they rumbled through the streets. He had the taxi let him off several blocks from the section of Avenue Choukry Kouatly that was his destination, then walked the rest of the way, losing himself within the drifts of pedestrians. Taking a quick, covert circuit of El-Gabal’s geometric Syrian modernist building, he scoped out the three entrances and the security at each. The front entrance, all glass and hammered steel, had no overt security presence, but taking his time paid off, as at intervals of precisely three minutes, he observed a pair of uniformed guards passing in front of the glass doors. On the west side of the building was a single-door emergency exit. The metal door looked solid, made to seem impregnable, but Bourne knew that no door was impregnable. In the rear was a wide loading dock, which was currently empty. Beyond the dock were four wide doors, at the moment all closed. A uniformed security guard sat smoking and talking on his cell phone. Occasionally, he turned his narrowed eyes on the street, peering back and forth, checking for anything suspicious or out of place. Unlike the guards in the lobby, who carried sidearms only, this man had an AK-47 strapped across his back. At each angle, Bourne looked upward, studying the roofline and the possible means of gaining its height. There were no trees or telephone poles, but the building itself looked scalable.
He was about to depart when he heard a truck coming down the alley. The guard heard it, too, because he broke off his conversation and pressed a buzzer just to the left of the left-most door. Almost at once, the four doors lifted up. A wizened man peered out, the guard said something to him, he nodded and disappeared into the dimness of the interior.
By the time the truck rumbled, turned, and backed up to the loading dock, two men appeared. They wore sidearms. The driver got out and, leaping up onto the dock, opened the rear door with a key. He rolled the door up and stood back as the two men entered the truck’s rear. The guard had unstrapped his AK-47 and was now holding it at the ready. He was young and looked slightly nervous as he peered down the street.
Bourne shifted his position in time to see the two men unloading the first of the dozen long wooden crates containing the poisoned weapons he had seen in the warehouse in Cadiz. He recognized them by both their shape and the distinctive greenish color of the wood.
He needed to get inside to set the SIM cards, but that would have to wait until the darkness of night. He withdrew and went in search of the items he thought he’d need. He bought himself Syrian clothes that would allow him to better blend in, a glass cutter, a sturdy, wide-bladed knife, a length of electrical wire, two coils of rope of different lengths, and a pickax. Lastly, he purchased a duffel in which to carry everything, then took a taxi to the train station, where he stashed the duffel in a paid locker.
Then he went in search of a hotel, which proved problematic. The first three he entered had security personnel stationed around the lobbies. They might have belonged to the respective hotels, but he didn’t think so.
He went farther afield and, on the southern outskirts, found a run-down hotel. Apart from two dusty armchairs, a pair of even dustier palm trees, and a curve-backed receptionist, the lobby was deserted. Bourne booked a room on the top floor and paid with cash. The receptionist scanned his passport with little apparent interest, marking down name, nationality, and number, then handing it back, along with the room key.
Bourne took a protesting elevator up to the sixth floor, went down a bare, odorous concrete hallway, and entered his room, a Spartan cubicle with bed, dresser, badly streaked mirror, tiny closet inhabited by a couple of roaches, and threadbare carpet. One window faced west. Beyond the grid of the fire escape lay the teeming street, the city’s unceasing daytime tumult boring its way through the glass. The bathroom, if you wanted to call it that, was down the hall.
Despite the meanness of the surroundings, Bourne had been in far worse places. He lay down and closed his eyes. It seemed like days since he had slept.
Where are you, Boris? he wondered. When are you coming for me?
He must have dozed off because the next thing he knew, the sun was thicker, deeper, slanting through the window, low in the sky. Late afternoon, shading into twilight. He lay still on the bed as if stunned. He felt groggy, which meant that he had been pulled prematurely out of deep REM sleep. He lay listening, but almost immediately identified a scratching at his door. It might be a rodent, but he didn’t think so.
Silently, he rose and went to the wall just behind where the door hinged open. Reaching out, he watched as the lock was slowly opened from the hallway. The doorknob began to turn and he steeled himself for whoever was coming in.
That’s when a shadow crossed his peripheral vision an instant before two men shattered the window as they leapt through.
Christopher Hendricks sat at his desk for fully an hour without moving or speaking to anyone. Once, his secretary came in, worried that he wasn’t answering his intercom, but one look at his ashen face and she departed.