While his back was turned, the door opened and just as quickly closed. He did not turn around, did not need to see who’d entered the cabin.
“Let me warm you up,” Zina said in honeyed tones.
A moment later he felt the press of her breasts, the heat from her loins against his back and buttocks. The exhilaration of the jump was still running high through him. It had been heightened by the final denouement to his long relationship with Annaka Vadas, making Zina’s advance irresistible.
He turned, sat back on the edge of the berth and allowed her to climb all over him. She was like an animal in heat. He saw the glitter of her eyes, heard the guttural sounds he pulled from her belly. She had lost herself in him, and he was for the moment satisfied.
Approximately ninety minutes later Jamie Hull was below street level, checking the security at the Oskjuhlid Hotel’s delivery entrance when he caught sight of Comrade Boris. The Russian security chief evinced surprise at Hull’s presence, but Hull wasn’t fooled. He’d had a feeling that Boris had been shadowing him of late, but maybe he was just being paranoid. Not that he wouldn’t be justified. All the principals were in the hotel. Tomorrow morning at eight A.M. the summit would begin and the time of maximum risk would be upon him. He dreaded the thought that somehow Comrade Boris had gotten wind of what Feyd al-Saoud had discovered, what he and the Arab security chief had concocted.
And so as not to let Comrade Boris get an inkling of the dread in his heart, he put a smile on his face, preparing himself to eat a bite or two of American crow if he had to. Anything now to keep Comrade Boris in the dark.
“Working overtime, I see, my good Mr. Hull,” Karpov said in his booming announcer’s voice. “No rest for the weary, eh?”
“Time enough for rest when the summit’s concluded and our job is done.”
“But our job is never done.” Karpov, Hull saw, was wearing one of his very bad serge suits. It looked more like a suit of armor than anything in the least bit fashionable. “No matter how much we accomplish, there is always more to do. That’s one of the charms of what we do, no?”
Hull felt himself wanting to say no just to be argumentative, but he bit his tongue instead.
“And how is security here?” Karpov was looking around with his beady raven’s eyes. “Up to your high American standards, one hopes?”
“I’ve only just begun.”
“Then you’ll welcome some help, no? Two heads are better than one, four eyes are better than two.”
Hull was abruptly weary. He could no longer remember how long he’d been here in this godforsaken country or when he’d last had a decent night’s sleep. Not even a single tree to tell you what time of year it was! A kind of disorientation had set in, the sort from which first-time submariners were said sometimes to suffer.
Hull watched the security team stop a food service truck, question the driver and climb into the back to check its load. He could find no fault with either the procedure or the methodology.
“Don’t you find this place depressing?” he asked Boris.
“Depressing? This is a fucking wonderland, my friend,” Karpov boomed. “Spend a winter in Siberia if you want a definition of depressing.”
Hull frowned. “You were sent to Siberia?”
Karpov laughed. “Yes, but not in the way you think. I was operational up there several years ago when the tension with China was at its peak. You know, secret military maneuverings, clandestine intelligence gathering, all in the darkest, coldest place you can imagine.” Karpov grunted. “Or, being American, I suppose you’re incapable of imagining such a thing.”
Hull kept the smile stitched to his face, but it cost him in both pent-up anger and self-esteem. Happily, another van was rolling in, the food service vehicle having passed muster. This one was from Reykjavik Energy. For some reason, it seemed to have piqued Comrade Boris’ interest, and Hull followed him over to where the van was stopped. Inside were two uniformed men.
Karpov took the call sheet the driver had dutifully handed over to one of the security personnel, glanced down at it. “What’s this all about?” he said in his typically overaggressive manner.
“Quarterly geothermal checkup,” the driver said blandly.
“This has to be done now?” Karpov glared at the blond driver.
“Yes, sir. Our system is interconnected throughout the city. If we don’t perform periodic maintenance, we put the entire network at risk.”
“Well, we can’t have that,” Hull said. He nodded to one of the security men. “Check inside. If it’s all clear, let them through.”
He walked away from the van and Karpov followed.
“You don’t like this work,” Karpov said, “do you?”
Forgetting himself for a moment, Hull turned on his heel and confronted the Russian. “I like it just fine.” Then he remembered, and grinned boyishly. “Nah, you’re right. I’d much rather be using my more, shall we say, physical skills.”
Karpov nodded, apparently mollified. “I understand. There’s no feeling like a good kill.”
“Exactly,” Hull said, warming to his task. “Take this newest sanction, for instance. What I wouldn’t give to be the one to find Jason Bourne and put a bullet through his brain.”
Karpov’s caterpillar eyebrows lifted. “For you, this sanction sounds personal. You should beware such emotionalism, my friend. It clouds good judgment.”
“Fuck that,” Hull said. “Bourne had what I wanted most, what I should’ve had.”
Karpov considered for a moment. “It seems that I’ve misjudged you, my good friend Mr. Hull. It seems that you’re more of a warrior than I thought.” He clapped the American on the back. “What d’you say to trading war stories over a bottle of vodka?”
“I think that sounds doable,” Hull said, as the Reykjavik Energy van rolled inside the hotel.
Stepan Spalko, in a Reykjavik Energy uniform, colored contact lenses in his eyes and a piece of molded Latex making his nose wide and ugly, stepped out of the van and told the driver to wait. With a work order on a clipboard in one hand and a small toolbox in the other, he went through the labyrinth in the hotel’s belly. The plan of the hotel floated in his mind like a three-dimensional overlay. He knew his way around the vast complex better than many of the employees whose work confined them to a single area.
It took him twelve minutes to reach the section of the hotel that housed the space that would serve as the summit’s venue. In that time, he was stopped four times by security guards even though he was wearing his ID clipped to his overalls. He took the stairs, went down three levels below-ground, where he was stopped once again. He was near enough to a thermal heat junction to make his presence there plausible. Still, he was near enough to the HVAC substation that the guard insisted on accompanying him.
Spalko stopped at an electrical junction box and opened it. He could feel the guard’s scrutiny like a hand at his throat.
“You’ve been here how long?” he said in Icelandic as he opened the box he was carrying.
“D’you speak Russian, maybe?” the guard replied.
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Spalko rummaged around in the box. “You’ve been here, what, two weeks now?”
“Three,” the guard admitted.
“And in all that time, have you seen anything of my wonderful Iceland?” He found what he wanted in among all the junk and palmed it. “Do you know anything about it?”
The Russian shook his head, which was Spalko’s cue to launch into his discourse. “Well, let me enlighten you then. Iceland is an island of 103,000 square kilometers at an average height of 500 meters above sea level. Its highest peak, Hvannadalshnúkur, rises to 2,119 meters and over 11 percent of the country is covered by glaciers, including Vatnajökull, the largest in Europe. We’re governed by the Althing, whose 63 members are elected every four—”
His voice died out as the guard, unutterably bored by the guidebook babble, turned his back and moved away. Instantly he got to work, taking
the small disk and pressing it against two sets of wires until he was sure its four contacts had penetrated the insulation.
“All done here,” he said, slamming the junction box closed.
“Now where? The thermal housing?” the guard said, clearly hoping this stint would be over soon.
“Nah,” Spalko said. “I’ve got to check in with my boss first. I’m off to the van.” He waved as he left, but the guard was already walking in the other direction.
Spalko returned to the van, climbed in, and there he sat next to the driver until a security guard wandered up.
“Okay, guys, what’s up?”
“We’re finished here for the time being.” Spalko smiled winningly as he made some meaningless marks on his bogus worksheet. He checked his watch. “Hey, we were here longer than I thought. Thanks for checking up.”
“Hey, it’s my job.”
As the driver turned on the ignition and put the van in gear, Spalko said, “Here’s the value of making a dry run. We’ll have precisely thirty minutes before they come looking for us.”
The chartered jet flung itself through the sky. Across from Bourne sat Khan, staring straight ahead, looking, it seemed, at nothing. Bourne closed his eyes. The overhead lights had been turned off. A few reading lights cast oval pools of illumination in the dark. In an hour they’d be touching down at Keflavik Airport.
Bourne sat very still. He wanted to put his head in his hands and weep bitter tears for the sins of the past, but with Khan across the aisle he couldn’t show anything that might be misinterpreted as weakness. The tentative detente they’d managed to achieve seemed as fragile as an eggshell. There were so many things that had the potential to crush it. Emotions churned in his chest, making it difficult to breathe. The pain he felt all through his tortured body was as nothing compared to the anguish that threatened to rend his heart asunder. He grasped the armrests so hard that his knuckles cracked. He knew he had to gain control of himself, just as he knew that he couldn’t sit in his seat a moment longer.
He rose and, like a sleepwalker, slipped across the aisle and lowered himself into the seat next to Khan. The young man did not in any way register the fact of Bourne’s presence. He might have been deep in meditation, save for the rapid rate of his breathing.
With his heart hammering painfully against his cracked ribs, Bourne said softly, “If you’re my son, I want to know it. If you really are Joshua, I need to know it.”
“In other words, you don’t believe me.”
“I want to believe you,” Bourne said, trying to ignore the by-now familiar knife-edge of Khan’s voice. “Surely you must know that.”
“When it comes to you, I know less than nothing.” Khan turned to him, the hammer of his rage all in his face. “Don’t you remember me at all?”
“Joshua was six, just a child.” Bourne felt his emotions rising again, ready to choke him. “And then some years ago I suffered amnesia.”
“Amnesia?” This revelation seemed to startle Khan.
Bourne told him what had happened. “I remember little of my life as Jason Bourne before that time,” he concluded, “and virtually nothing about my life as David Webb, except when now and again a scent or the sound of a voice dislodges something and I recall a fragment. But that’s all it is, discontinuous from a whole that’s forever lost to me.”
Bourne tried to find Khan’s dark eyes in the low light, searched for the hint of an expression, even the barest clue as to what Khan might be thinking or feeling. “It’s true. We’re complete strangers to each other. So before we go on…” He broke off, for the moment unable to continue. Then he steeled himself, forcing himself to speak because the silence that was so quick to build between them was worse than the explosion that would surely come. “Try to understand. I need some tangible proof, something irrefutable.”
“Fuck you!”
Khan stood up, about to step over Bourne into the aisle, but again, as in Spalko’s interrogation room, something held him fast. And then, unbidden, he heard Bourne’s voice in his head, spoken on a rooftop in Budapest: “That’s your plan, isn’t it? This whole sick story about you being Joshua…. I won’t lead you to this Spalko or whoever it is you’re planning to get to. I won’t be anyone’s cat’s-paw again.”
Khan gripped the carved stone Buddha around his neck and sat back down. They’d both been Stepan Spalko’s cat’s-paws. It was Spalko who’d brought them together and now, ironically, it was their shared enmity of Spalko that might conceivably keep them together, at least for the time being.
“There is something,” he said in a voice he barely recognizable. “A recurring nightmare I have of being underwater. I’m being drowned, pulled deeper because I’m tied to her dead body. She’s calling to me, I hear her voice calling to me, or else it’s my voice calling to her.”
Bourne recalled Khan’s thrashing in the Danube, the panic that had swirled him deeper into the pull of the current. “What does the voice say?”
“It’s my voice. I’m saying ‘Lee-Lee, Lee-Lee.’”
Bourne felt his heart skip a beat, for up from the depths of his own damaged memory swam Lee-Lee. For one precious moment only he could see her oval face with his light eyes and Dao’s straight black hair. “Oh, God,” Bourne whispered. “Lee-Lee was Joshua’s nickname for Alyssa. No one else called her that. No one else but Dao knew.”
Lee-Lee.
“One of the powerful memories of those days that, with a great deal of help, I’ve been able to recall is how your sister looked up to you,” Bourne went on. “She’d always wanted to be close to you. At night, when she went through a bout of night-terrors, you were the only one who could calm her down. You called her Lee-Lee and she called you Joshy.”
My sister, yes. Lee-Lee. Khan closed his eyes and immediately he was under the murky water of the river in Phnom Penh. Half-drowned, in shock, he’d seen her tumbling toward him the shot-up corpse of his little sister. Lee-Lee. Four years old. Dead. Her light eyes—their Daddy’s eyes—staring sightlessly at him, accusingly. Why you? she seemed to say. Why was it you and not me? But he knew that was his own guilt talking. If Lee-Lee could have spoken, she would’ve said, I’m glad you didn’t die, Joshy. I’m so happy one of us stayed to be with Daddy.
Khan put his hand to his face, turned away toward the Perspex window. He wanted to die, he wished he had died in the river, that it had been Lee-Lee who’d survived. He couldn’t stand this life one second more. There was, after all, nothing left for him. In death, at least, he would join her….
“Khan.”
It was Bourne’s voice. But he couldn’t face him, couldn’t even look him in the eye. He hated him and he loved him. He couldn’t understand how this could be; he was ill equipped to deal with this emotional anomaly. With a strangled sound, he rose and pushed past him, staggering up to the front of the aircraft where he wouldn’t have to see Bourne.
With an inexpressible sorrow, Bourne watched his son go. It took an enormous effort to rein in the impulse to pull him back, to put his arms around him and hug him to his chest. He sensed that would be the worst thing he could do now, that, given Khan’s history, it might lead to renewed violence between them.
He had no illusions. They both had a hard road to travel before they could accept each other as family. It could even be an impossible task. But because he wasn’t in the habit of thinking anything was impossible, he set that frightening thought aside.
In a rush of anguish he realized at last why he’d spent so much time denying that Khan might, in fact, be his son. Annaka, damn her, had nailed it perfectly.
At that moment he looked up. Khan was standing over him, his hands gripping the seatback in front of him as if for dear life.
“You said that you just found out that I was MIA.”
Bourne nodded.
“How long did they look for me?” Khan said.
“You know I can’t answer that. No one can.” Bourne had lied on instinct. There was nothing to be gained and
much to be lost by telling Khan that the authorities had only searched for one hour. He was acutely conscious of wanting to protect his son from the truth.
An ominous stillness had come over Khan, as if he were preparing for an act of terrible consequence. “Why didn’t you check?”
Bourne heard the accusatory tone and sat as if poleaxed. His blood ran cold. Ever since it became clear that Khan could be Joshua, he’d been asking himself the same question.
“I was half-mad with grief,” he said, “but I don’t think now that’s a good enough excuse. I couldn’t face the fact that I’d failed you all as a father.”
Something in Khan’s face shifted, showing what was akin to a spasm of pain, as an ominous thought wormed its way up to the surface. “You must’ve had…difficulties when you and my mother were together in Phnom Penh.”
“What d’you mean?” Bourne, alarmed by Khan’s expression, responded in a tone that was perhaps sharper than in ought to have been.
“You know. Didn’t you hear it from your colleagues because you were married to a Thai?”
“I loved Dao with all my heart.”
“Marie isn’t Thai, is she?”
“Khan, we don’t choose whom we fall in love with.”
There was a short pause, and then, into the charged silence that had sprung up between them, Khan said, as casually as if it were an afterthought, “And then there was the matter of your two mixed-race children.”
“I never saw it that way,” Bourne said flatly. His heart was breaking, for he heard the silent cry that underlay this line of questioning. “I loved Dao, I loved you and Alyssa. My God, you were all my life. In the weeks and months afterward, I nearly lost my mind. I was devastated, uncertain whether or not I wanted to go on. If not for meeting Alex Conklin, I might not have. Even so, it took years of agonizingly hard work to recover sufficiently.”
He fell silent for a moment, listening to them both breathe. Then he took a deep breath and said, “What I’ve always believed, always struggled with is that I should’ve been there to protect you.”