The Bourne Deception (51 page)

Never mind. In a moment, when you’re dead, it’ll be irrelevant.”

Ordnance—mortars perhaps—from the Iranians came whistling through the sky, detonating at two different flanking points not a hundred yards away. Arkadin never flinched or even blinked. He merely waited for an abatement of the screaming.

“Where was I? Oh, yes, Willard. Here’s another news flash for you: Willard knew I was alive and that I was the one who’d pulled the trigger in Bali. How did he know? The typical Treadstone way, he interrogated the man I hired to make sure you were really dead. He called me on my own man’s cell, can you believe the balls on that fuck!”

Not far away, aircraft engines whined into life. The Black Hawk’s rotors started spinning. Now Bourne knew where Perlis had gone.

“I imagine you’re wondering why he didn’t tell you? Because he was testing you—just like he was testing me. He wanted to see how long it would take you to find out about me because he already knew how long it took me to find out about you.” Arkadin sat back on his heels. “Clever little fucker, I’ll give him that.

“Well, now that we’ve gotten to know each other a little better, it’s time to end it. There’s only so much time I can spend with my doppelgänger without getting sick to my stomach.”

He got to his feet. “I’d make you crawl, but I’m quite sure in your condition you can’t manage it.”

That was when Bourne rose up as if he’d returned from the dead, and lunged at him.

Arkadin, in shock, raised the
SIG
and fired. Once again Bourne was knocked off his feet, once again he rose to one knee and then to his feet.

“Good Christ!” Arkadin said. His eyes harbored a hunted and dangerous look. “What the fuck are you?”

Bourne reached out and grabbed at the gun. At precisely that moment, a shot rang out, spinning Arkadin around. Blood leaked from a wound in his shoulder. He shouted, struck out at Bourne, then fired off two shots at Boris Karpov who, despite his broken leg, had crawled up the side of the charred crater. Arkadin’s
SIG
clicked hollowly; the magazine was empty.

The Black Hawk lifted off and, swinging around, began a raking fire of machine-gun bursts at the remaining members of Arkadin’s cadre. It made no difference to the Black River gunner aboard the helicopter that Arkadin’s men were still engaged with the Iranian guards—both were being systematically mowed down.

Throwing the useless
SIG
into Bourne’s face, Arkadin raced toward what remained of his men. Bourne took three steps after him and fell to his knees. His heart felt as if it was about to burst. Despite the Kevlar vest and packets of pig blood Karpov had insisted he put on under his jacket, the impact of the four shots Arkadin had fired at him had torn open his original wound. He could barely catch his breath.

The Black Hawk was swinging around for another run at the men on the ground, but now Arkadin had slammed a missile into the shoulder launcher. Bourne knew that it was imperative for Arkadin to protect what was left of his cadre—without them, there was nothing he could do here. He couldn’t hold the oil fields by himself. His only chance now was to bring the Black Hawk down.

With an extreme force of will, he rose and loped toward a tangle of dead soldiers. Picking up an AK-47, he aimed it at Arkadin and pulled the trigger. The magazine was empty. Throwing it aside, he wrenched a Luger from a holster on one of the soldiers, checked that it was loaded, and ran toward where Arkadin stood, spread-legged, the rocket launcher on his right shoulder.

Bursts of machine-gun fire from the Black Hawk tracered through the air as Bourne ran and squeezed the Luger’s trigger, forcing Arkadin to fire the missile at a run. Possibly the launcher had sustained damage or else the missile itself was defective because it missed the helicopter. Without breaking stride, Arkadin tossed aside the launcher and, with almost the same motion, ripped a submachine gun out of a fallen soldier’s grip. He fired at Bourne on the run, forcing Bourne to scramble for cover. Arkadin kept firing until the clip ran out, then Bourne was up and running, though he could scarcely catch his breath. He fired, still on the run, but Arkadin was lost in a plume of dense black smoke. Above their heads the Black River helicopter lifted away in the direction of the oil wells.

There were no Black River personnel left alive that Bourne could see, and Arkadin’s cadre lay strewn on the smoking ground. Bourne ran into the smoke and immediately his eyes began to tear; his breath felt ragged in his throat as his lungs labored. In that moment he sensed something coming at him from out of the swirling blackness, and he ducked, but not quite in time.

Arkadin’s two-handed blow caught him on the shoulder, spinning him around. For the moment, the Luger was useless, and Arkadin delivered a punch to the side of Bourne’s head, staggering him further. Bourne felt as if both his head and his chest were about to explode, but when Arkadin lunged for the Luger, he struck out with the barrel, flaying open a long bloody wound on Arkadin’s cheek, so deep he could see bone.

Arkadin reeled backward into the thick black pall, and Bourne squeezed off the Luger’s last three rounds. He careered through the smoke, searching for his foe, coming at last out of the plume. He turned in all directions, but Arkadin was nowhere to be seen.

All at once he was on his knees, felled by the pain in his chest. His head hung down, the agony all-encompassing. In his mind he saw the fire creeping through him, threatening to consume him, and he thought of what Tracy had said as she lay in his arms, dying:
“It’s in our darkest hour that
our secrets eat us alive.”

And then in the center of that fire a face appeared—a face made of fire. It was the face of Shiva, the god of destruction and resurrection. Was it Shiva who lifted him to his feet? He’d never know, because one moment he was on the verge of collapse, the next he stood swaying on his feet.

And it was then that he saw Boris lying at the edge of the crater, his head covered in blood.

Ignoring his own pain, Bourne dug his hands under Karpov’s armpits and hauled him up. Then, with the tracers buzzing through the air overhead, he dipped his knees and threw Boris over his shoulder. Gritting his teeth, he began to pick his way past the dead and the dying, the still-smoldering remnants of human beings, toward the Russian helicopter.

Several times, he was forced to stop either by the hail of machine-gun fire or by the pain that gripped his heart like a vise cinched so tight he could scarcely breathe. Once, he went down on one knee, and the blackened hand of a soldier—of which side it was impossible to tell—grabbed at the fabric of his trousers. Bourne tried to brush it away, but the fingers stuck to him like glue. All around him half-shattered faces seemed to turn to him, shrieking in the silent agony of their death throes. They were all the same now, these victims of violence that was always, at heart, senseless. Their allegiances were rendered irrelevant by chaos, blood, and fire, erasing not only their humanity but also their beliefs—that one thing that drove them, whether it be politics, religion, or simply money. They were all jumbled together under a lowering sky filled with the ashes of their compatriots and their enemies.

Finally, he peeled the soldier’s grip off him and, rising unsteadily, continued on his agonizing journey over the blasted landscape. Visibility was now an issue, what with the oily smoke that choked the already filthy air. As if in a dream, the Russian helicopter seemed to fade in and out of focus, to be at first near at hand, then thousands of yards distant. He ran, stopped, crouched over, panting, then ran on again, feeling like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill but never getting to the top. His goal still seemed a mile away, and so he kept on, one foot in front of the other, stumbling and loping with his ungainly burden, zigzagging through the zone of death this mini-war had produced. And at last, lungs bursting, eyes tearing, he saw Boris’s men pour out of the shelter of the helicopter to meet him and their fallen commander. They took him off Bourne’s numb shoulder, and he fell to his knees. Two of Boris’s men lifted him to his feet and fed him water.

But more bad news awaited him here. Boris’s crew had been forced to abandon the Havoc, which had been rendered inoperable by the missile strike. Bourne, looking around while he tried to regain his breath, directed them to the Air Afrika jet, sitting idle three hundred yards away.

They encountered no one around the jet or on the gangway. The door gaped open. Inside, they discovered why: The crew had been bound and gagged, presumably by Arkadin and his cadre. Bourne gave the order to free them.

They lay the colonel down on the floor of the Air Afrika jet and the medic crouched over him, beginning his examination.

After five anxious minutes, when he tested and probed, he looked up at Bourne and the men hovering around. “The leg is a simple break and is no problem,” he said. “As for his wound, it could have been worse. The bullet grazed the side of his head, but didn’t crack the skull. That’s the good news.” His hands continued to work on his fallen commander. “The bad news is he’s got a serious concussion. Pressure is building in his brain; I’m going to have to relieve it by drilling a small hole”—he pointed to a spot on Boris’s right temple—”just here.” He took a closer look at Bourne and clucked his tongue. “Still and all, I can only do triage. We need to get him to a hospital as quickly as possible.”

Bourne went up front and gave the Air Afrika pilot and navigator orders to take them back to Khartoum. At once, they began their preflight checklist. The engines came on one by one.

“Please strap yourself in,” the medic said when Bourne returned. “I’ll see to you as soon as I’ve got Colonel Karpov’s condition stabilized.”

Bourne was in no condition to argue. He collapsed into a seat, stripped off his jacket and the spent packets of pig blood Arkadin’s bullets had ripped open. He said a silent prayer to the spirit of the pig who’d given its life to spare his own, and could not help seeing in his mind’s eye the great carved pig at the pool in Bali.

He unstrapped the Kevlar vest and buckled up, but his gaze never left Karpov’s prone form. He looked deathly pale, there was blood all over him, and for the first time in Bourne’s spotty memory he looked truly vulnerable. Bourne found himself wondering whether he’d looked like that to Moira after he’d been shot in Tenganan.

As they began to roll down the runway, he had the presence of mind to call Soraya on his sat phone and tell her what happened.

“I’ll get to General LeBowe, who’s commanding the allied forces, and tell him to stand down,” Soraya said. “He’s a good man, he’ll listen. Especially when I tell him that by tomorrow morning we’ll have enough hard evidence to prove it was Black River, not Iranian terrorists, who fired the Kowsar 3.”

“A lot of people in the US government are going to have egg on their faces,” Bourne said wearily.

“With what we have, I’m hoping more than egg for some of them,” Soraya said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time and it sure as hell won’t be the last.”

He heard three huge blasts from somewhere outside. Looking through the Perspex window he saw Perlis’s parting gift: the Black Hawk had fired missiles into each of the wells. They were now all on fire. Doubtless this was his way of ensuring that, even if he survived, Arkadin wouldn’t get his hands on them.

“Jason, you told me Colonel Karpov will be okay, but are you all right?”

Bourne, sitting in the cabin of the jet that was just now airborne, had no idea what to say.

How many times do you have to die,
he thought,
before you learn how to live?

The moment Moira ripped open the package Soraya had sent her and pulled out the titanium tags, she knew she had the last piece of physical evidence to take Noah and Black River down. The tags were Black River, all right. After she had decoded them, had gotten the names and serial numbers of the four operatives, she took the tags and Humphry Bamber’s laptop with Bardem to the only person she knew she could absolutely trust: Frederick Willard.

Willard accepted her evidence with a controlled amount of glee and, it seemed to her, a curious equanimity that spoke of a degree of foreknowledge. In due course Willard presented the evidence against Black River to a multiplicity of sources, to ensure the evidence would not somehow be deliberately mislaid or otherwise disposed of.

Soraya and Amun Chalthoum returned to Cairo. Despite the fact that Soraya’s people had gathered compelling evidence on the identity of Chalthoum’s enemy, it was not a happy time for them personally. Soraya knew that he’d never leave Egypt, that he felt comfortable only in his homeland. Besides, he still had political battles to fight here, and she knew that even if she hadn’t helped him, he’d never run away from them. She also knew that she’d never leave America to live here with him.

“What are we going to do, Amun?” she said.

“I don’t know,
azizti
. I love you in a way I’ve never loved anyone in my life. The thought of losing you is unbearable.” He took her hand. “Move here. Live with me. We’ll get married and you’ll have babies and we’ll raise them together.”

She laughed and shook her head. “You know I wouldn’t be happy here.”

“But think how beautiful our children will be,
azizti
!”

She laughed again. “Idiot!” She kissed him on the lips. She’d meant it as a friendly kiss, but it turned into something else, something deeper, something ecstatic, and it lasted a long time.

When at last they broke apart, she said, “I have an idea. We’ll meet once a year for a week, a different place each year, or wherever you wish.”

He looked at her for a long time. ”
Azizti,
there is nothing else for us, is there?”

“Isn’t this enough? This has to be enough, you must see that.”

“I see very clearly.” He sighed and held her tight. “We’ll make it enough, won’t we?”

Three days later the Black River scandal hit the Internet and newswires with the force of a hurricane, overshadowing even the disbanding of the allied forces on Iran’s borders, which had already been parsed to death by the news media’s talking heads.