The resulting explosion brought down a section of the wall as it blew a hole right through it. Without waiting for the plastic and wood dust to settle, Khan leaped though the wall into Stepan Spalko’s bedroom.
Sunlight slanted through the windows, and the Danube glittered below. Khan threw open all the windows in order to dissipate whatever leakage of gas found its way in. At once he could hear sirens, and glancing down, he saw the fire trucks and the police cars, the frenzied activity on street level. He stepped back from the windows, looked around, orienting himself to the architectural plans Hearn had brought up on his computer screen.
He turned to where the blank space had been, saw the gleaming wooden wall panels. Pressing his ear to each panel in turn, he rapped with his knuckles. In this way the third panel from the left revealed itself as a door. He pressed against the left side of the panel and it swung inward.
Khan stepped into the room of black concrete and white tiles. It stank of sweat and blood. He found himself facing a bloody, battered Jason Bourne. He stared at Bourne, strapped into the dentist’s chair, blood spatters in a circle around him. Bourne was bare to the waist. His arms, shoulders, chest and back were a welter of puffy wounds and blistered flesh. The two outer layers that wrapped his ribs had been stripped away, but the underlayer was still intact.
Bourne’s head swung around and regarded Khan with the look of a wounded bull, bloody but unbowed.
“I heard the second explosion,” Bourne said, in a reedy voice. “I thought you had been killed.”
“Disappointed?” Khan bared his teeth. “Where is he? Where’s Spalko?”
“I’m afraid you’re too late on that score,” Bourne said. “He’s gone, and Annaka Vadas with him.”
“She was working for him all along,” Khan said. “I tried to warn you at the clinic, but you didn’t want to listen.”
Bourne sighed, closed his eyes against the sharp rebuke. “I didn’t have time.”
“You never seem to have time to listen.”
Khan approached Bourne. His throat seemed constricted. He knew that he should go after Spalko, but something rooted him to the spot. He stared at the damage Spalko had wrought.
Bourne said, “Will you kill me now.” It was not a question, more a statement of fact.
Khan knew that he would never have a better chance. The dark thing inside him that he had nurtured, that had become his only companion, which daily feasted on his hate, and which daily had spewed its poison back out into his system, refused to die. It wanted to kill Bourne, and it almost took possession of him then. Almost. He felt the impulse coming up from his lower belly into his arm, but it had bypassed his heart and so fell short of impelling him to action.
Abruptly, he turned on his heel and went back into Spalko’s luxe bedroom. In a moment he’d returned with a glass of water and a handful of items he’d scavenged from the bathroom. He held the glass to Bourne’s mouth, tipping it slowly until it had been drained. As if of their own volition, his hands unstrapped the buckles, freeing Bourne’s wrists and ankles.
Bourne’s eyes watched him as he went about cleaning and disinfecting the wounds. Bourne didn’t lift his hands from the arms of the chair. In a sense, he felt more completely paralyzed now than he had while restrained. He stared hard at Khan, scrutinizing every curve and angle, every feature of his face. Did he see Dao’s mouth, his own nose? Or was it all an illusion? If this was his son, he needed to know; he needed to understand what had happened. But he still felt an undercurrent of uncertainty, a ripple of fear. The possibility that he was confronting his own son after so many years of believing him dead was too much for him. On the other hand, the silence into which they had now been plunged was intolerable. And so he fell back to the one neutral topic he knew was of extreme interest to both of them.
“You wanted to know what Spalko was up to,” he said, breathing slowly and deeply as each shock of the disinfectant sent bolts of pain through him. “He’s stolen a weapon invented by Felix Schiffer—a portable bio-diffuser. Somehow Spalko has coerced Peter Sido—an epidemiologist working at the clinic—to provide him with the payload.”
Khan dropped the blood-soaked piece of gauze, picked up a clean one. “Which is?”
“Anthrax, a designer hemorrhagic fever, I don’t know. The only thing for certain is that it’s quite lethal.”
Khan continued to clean Bourne’s wounds. The floor was now littered with bloody bits of gauze. “Why are you telling me this now?” he said with undisguised suspicion.
“Because I know what Spalko means to do with this weapon.”
Khan looked up from his work.
Bourne found it physically painful to look into Khan’s eyes. Taking a deep breath, he plowed on. “Spalko’s on a very tight time constraint. He needed to get moving now.”
“The terrorism summit in Reykjavik.”
Bourne nodded. “It’s the only possibility that makes sense.”
Khan stood up, rinsing off his hands at the hose. He watched the pink water swirl through the huge grate. “That is, if I believe you.”
“I’m going after them,” Bourne said. “After putting the pieces together, I finally realized that Conklin had taken Schiffer and hidden him with Vadas and Molnar because he’d learned of Spalko’s threat. I got the code name for the bio-diffuser—NX 20—from a pad in Conklin’s house.”
“And so Conklin was murdered for it.” Khan nodded. “Why didn’t he go to the Agency with his information? Surely, the CIA as a whole would’ve been better equipped to handle the threat to Dr. Schiffer.”
“There could be many reasons,” Bourne said. “He didn’t think he’d be believed, given Spalko’s reputation as a humanitarian. He didn’t have enough time; his intel wasn’t concrete enough for the Agency’s bureaucracy to move on it quickly enough. Also, it wasn’t Alex’s way. He hated sharing secrets.”
Bourne rose slowly and painfully, one hand supporting himself on the back of the chair. His legs felt like rubber from having been in one position for so long. “Spalko killed Schiffer, and I have to assume that he has Dr. Sido, alive or dead. I’ve got to stop him from killing everyone at the summit.”
Khan turned and handed Bourne the cell phone. “Here. Call the Agency.”
“Do you think they’d believe me? As far as the Agency’s concerned, I murdered Conklin and Panov in the house in Manassas.”
“I’ll do it then. Even the bureaucracy of the CIA has to take seriously an anonymous call that threatens the life of the president of the United States.”
Bourne shook his head. “The head of American security is a man named Jamie Hull. He’d be sure to find a way to screw up the intel.” His eyes gleamed. They’d already lost most of their dullness. “That leaves only one other option, but I don’t think I can do it alone.”
“Judging by the look of you,” Khan said, “you can’t do it at all.”
Bourne forced himself to look Khan in the eye. “All the more reason, then, for you to join me.”
“You’re insane!”
Bourne inured himself to the rising hostility. “You want Spalko as badly as I do. Where’s the downside?”
“All I see is downside.” Khan sneered. “Look at you! You’re a mess.”
Bourne had detached himself from the chair and was walking around the room, stretching his muscles, gaining strength and confidence in his body with every stride he took. Khan saw this and was, frankly, astonished.
Bourne turned to him and said, “I promise not to make you do all the heavy lifting.”
Khan didn’t reject the offer out of hand. Instead, he made a grudging concession, not at all certain why he was doing it. “The first thing we have to do is get out of here safely.”
“I know,” Bourne said, “you managed to start a fire and now the building is swarming with firemen and, no doubt, the police.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t started that fire.”
Bourne could see that his light bantering wasn’t easing
the tension. If anything, it was doing the opposite. They didn’t know how to talk to each other. He wondered whether they ever would. “Thank you for rescuing me,” he said.
Khan wouldn’t meet his eye. “Don’t flatter yourself. I came here to kill Spalko.”
“At last,” Bourne said, “something to thank Stepan Spalko for.”
Khan shook his head. “This can’t work. I don’t trust you and I know you don’t trust me.”
“I’m willing to try,” Bourne said. “Whatever’s between us, this is far bigger.”
“Don’t tell me what to think,” Khan said shortly. “I don’t need you for that; I never did.” He managed to raise his head and look at Bourne. “All right, here’s how it goes. I’ll agree to work together with you on one condition. You find us a way out of here.”
“Done.” Bourne’s smile confounded Khan. “Unlike you, I’ve had a great many hours to think about escaping from this room. I had assumed that even if I somehow managed to free myself from the chair, I wouldn’t get far using conventional methods. At the time I was quite unable to go up against a squadron of Spalko’s guards. So I came up with another solution.”
Khan’s expression registered annoyance. He hated that this man knew more than he did. “Which is?”
Bourne nodded in the direction of the grate.
“The drain?” Khan said incredulously.
“Why not?” Bourne knelt beside the grate. “The diameter is large enough to get through.” He gestured as he snapped open the switchblade and inserted the blade between the grate and its flush housing. “Why don’t you give me a hand?”
As Khan knelt on the opposite side of the grate, Bourne used the knifeblade to raise it slightly. Khan lifted it up. Putting aside the switchblade, Bourne joined him and, together, they heaved the grate all the way up.
Khan could see Bourne wince with the effort. At that moment an eerie sensation rose in him, both strange and familiar, a kind of pride he was able to identify only at length and with considerable pain. It was an emotion he’d felt when he was a boy, before he’d wandered in shock, lost and abandoned, out of Phnom Penh. Since then, he’d so successfully walled it off that it hadn’t been a problem for him. Until now.
They rolled the grate aside and Bourne took up some of the bloody bandage that Spalko had ripped off him and wrapped his cell phone. Then he put it and the closed switchblade in his pocket. “Who’ll go first?” he asked.
Khan shrugged, giving no sign that he was in any way impressed. He had a good idea where the drain led, and he believed Bourne did, too. “It’s your idea.”
Bourne levered himself into the circular hole. “Wait ten seconds, then follow me down,” he said just before he vanished from sight.
Annaka was elated. As they sped toward the airport in Spalko’s armor-plated limousine, she knew no one and nothing could stop them. Her last-minute ploy with Ethan Hearn hadn’t been necessary, as it turned out, but she didn’t regret the overture. It always paid to err on the side of caution, and at the time she’d decided to confront Hearn, Spalko’s fate seemed to have hung in the balance. Looking over at him now, she knew that she never should have doubted him. He had the courage, skills and worldwide resources to pull off anything, even this audacious power coup. She had to admit that when he’d first told her what he planned, she’d been skeptical, and she’d remained so until he had engineered their successful emergence on the other side of the Danube through an old air-raid tunnel he’d discovered when he’d bought the building. When he’d started to renovate it, he’d successfully erased any notation of it from the architectural plans so that it remained, up until the moment he’d shown it to her, his personal secret.
The limo and driver had been waiting for them on the far side in the fiery glow of the late afternoon sunshine, and now they were speeding along the motorway toward Ferihegy Airport. She moved closer to Stepan, and when his charismatic face turned toward her, she took his hand briefly in hers. He’d stripped off the bloody butcher’s apron and the Latex gloves somewhere in the tunnel. He wore jeans, a crisp white shirt and loafers. You’d never know he’d been up all night.
He smiled. “I think a glass of champagne is called for, don’t you?”
She laughed. “You think of everything, Stepan.”
He indicated the flutes sitting in their niches on the inside panel of her door. They were crystal, not plastic. As she leaned forward to take them, he removed a split of champagne from a refrigerated compartment. Outside, the high-rises on either side of the motorway sped by, reflecting the orb of the lowering sun.
Spalko ripped off the foil, popped the cork and poured the foaming champagne into first one flute, then the other. He put down the bottle and they clinked glasses in a silent toast. They sipped together and she looked into his eyes. They were like brother and sister, closer even because neither carried with them the baggage of sibling rivalry. Of all the men she had known, she reflected, Stepan came closest to fulfilling her desires. Not that she’d ever longed for a mate. As a girl, a father would have suited her, but it was not to be. Instead, she’d chosen Stepan, strong, competent, invincible. He was everything a daughter would want from her father.
The high-rises were becoming less numerous as they passed through the outermost ring of the city. The light continued to lower as the sun set. The sky was high and ruddy and there was very little wind, conditions ripe for a perfect takeoff.
“How about a little music,” Spalko said, “to go with our champagne moment?” His hand was raised to the multi-CD player embedded over his head. “What would please you most? Bach? Beethoven? No, of course. Chopin.”
He chose the corresponding CD and his forefinger pressed a button. But instead of the lyrical melody typical of her favorite composer, she heard her own voice:
“It isn’t Interpol you work for—you don’t have their habits. CIA, no, I don’t think so. Stepan would know if the Americans were trying to penetrate his organization. So who then, hmm?”
Annaka, her flute halfway to her partly open lips, froze.
“Don’t look so ashen, Ethan.”
She saw, to her horror, Stepan grinning at her over the rim of his flute.
“I don’t care, really. I simply want an insurance policy in case things turn sour here. That insurance policy is you.”
Spalko’s finger hit the “Stop” button, and save for the muffled thrumming of the limo’s powerful engine, silence overtook them.
“I imagine you’re wondering how I came by your treachery.”
Annaka found that she had temporarily lost the ability to speak. Her mind was frozen in place at the precise moment Stepan had very kindly asked her what music would please her most. More than anything in the world, she wanted to go back to that moment. Her shocked mind could only reflect on the split in her reality that had opened up like a yawning abyss at her feet. There was only her perfect life before Spalko had played the digital recording and the disaster it had become after he’d played it.
Was Stepan still smiling that awful crocodile smile? She found that she was having difficulty focusing. Without thinking, she swiped at her eyes.
“My God, Annaka, are those genuine tears?” Spalko shook his head ruefully. “You’ve disappointed me, Annaka, though, to be perfectly honest, I’d been wondering when you’d betray me. On that point, your Mr. Bourne was quite correct.”
“Stepan, I—” She stopped of her own accord. She hadn’t recognized her own voice, and the last thing she would do was beg. Her life was miserable enough as it was.
He was holding something up between thumb and finger, a tiny disk, smaller even than a watch battery. “An electronic listening device planted in Hearn’s office.” He laughed shortly. “The irony is that I didn’t particularly suspect him. One of these is in every new employee’s office, at least for the first six months.” He pocketed the disk with the flourish of a magician. “Bad luck for you, Annaka. Good luck for me.”
Swallowing the rest of his champagne
, he set the flute down. She still hadn’t moved. Her back was straight, her right elbow cocked. Her fingers surrounded the rim of the flute’s flared bottom.
He looked at her tenderly. “You know, Annaka, if you were anyone else, you’d be dead by now. But we share a history, we share a mother, if you want to stretch a definition to its limit.” He cocked his head, putting the surface of his face in the last of the afternoon’s light. The side of his face that was as poreless as plastic shone like the glass windows of the high-rises that were now far behind them. Very little in the way of habitation lay before them until they turned into the airport proper.
“I love you, Annaka.” One hand held her by her waist. “I love you in a way I could never love anyone else.” The bullet from Bourne’s gun made surprisingly little noise. Annaka’s torso was thrown back into his welcoming arm and her head came up all at once. He could feel the tremor run through her and knew that the bullet must have lodged near her heart. His eyes never left hers. “It really is a pity, isn’t it?”
He felt the heat of her running over his hand, down onto the leather seat as her blood pooled. Her eyes seemed to be smiling, but there was no expression anywhere else on her face. Even at the point of death, he reflected, she had no fear. Well, that was something, wasn’t it?
“Is everything all right, Mr. Spalko?” his driver asked from up front.
“It is now,” Stepan Spalko said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Danube was cold and dark. The grievously injured Bourne hit the river-water first, where the drain emptied out, but it was Khan who had difficulty. The extreme chill of the water was of no import to him, but the darkness brought to him the nightmarish horror of his recurring dream.
The shock of the water, the surface so distant above his head, caused him to feel as if his ankle was tied to the white semi-decomposed body, spinning slowly below him in the depth. Lee-Lee was calling to him, Lee-Lee wanted him to join her….