Following her down, Bourne had almost been killed by Colonel Sun in the eternal dimness of the crypts. And then, after Rebeka and her handler, Ophir, had left, Sun had tried again, resulting in the deaths of two of his men.
Now Colonel Sun looked at his watch. It was a furtive glance, and Bourne, on the lookout for even the smallest anomaly, began to sense what was happening. While he was going after Sun, the colonel was coming after him with his superior manpower. As Bourne watched him from the shadows, Sun’s men were no doubt drawing a cordon around the area.
In any other country, simple escape would suffice, but not here in China. An extra dimension was called for. Humiliation was the name of the game: Colonel Sun needed to lose face in front of his men.
Bourne turned, for the moment no longer interested in Sun’s movements. He moved through the crowded streets. Stopping at a men’s store, he bought a dress shirt and tie, donned them, then picked out a Chinese-style cap and slammed it on his head, pulling the front down over his forehead. When he exited the store it was with a pronounced limp.
Thus disguised, he proceeded directly away from where he and Sun had seen each other, which he considered ground zero. Soon enough he came upon a police officer, one of several, he could see, advancing in what could only be a tightening cordon.
Bourne brushed against the officer as they were passing each other. The officer stopped, grabbed Bourne by the arm.
“What d’you think you’re doing?” he said gruffly.
“Have I offended you by walking down the street?” Bourne replied in the exact same tone of voice.
“I don’t like your attitude,” the cop said.
Bourne jerked his arm free. “And I don’t like yours.”
“We’ll see about that.” The cop pulled his gun and shoved Bourne into the shadows of a doorway.
The instant they were out of sight of the other officers, Bourne slammed the heel of his hand into the cop’s nose, then punched him hard in the throat. As the officer collapsed, Bourne dragged him inside the building. The entryway was narrow, dim, and smelled of stale frying oil.
Past the steep flight of stairs was a small space that led out to a rear door. Bourne went to work and, moments later, was dressed in the officer’s uniform, the cop’s ID safely tucked in his breast pocket. Nothing fit quite right, as the cop was somewhat shorter than Bourne, but it would have to do. As for the officer himself, Bourne stuffed him into the musty space behind the stairs where it was so dark no one was likely to notice him.
Back out in the street, he hurried along to take up his officer’s place in the cordon. A block later, as he approached ground zero, he broke off, heading directly for Colonel Sun’s immaculate white Mercedes. Approaching on the driver’s side, he rapped his knuckles on the driver’s smoked window. As the window slid down, Bourne leaned in, delivering three short, sharp blows that rendered the driver unconscious.
Popping open the door lock, he kicked the driver into the passenger’s foot well and slid behind the wheel. Behind him was a thick glass partition that separated him from passengers in the backseat, which was, at the moment, empty.
Firing up the engine, Bourne waited for a slot in the sluggish traffic, pulled out, and then started a U-turn. Startled shouts and a cacophony of blaring horns were instantaneous. However, drivers, perhaps intimidated by the big Mercedes sedan, braked to allow him to head in the direction of Colonel Sun.
By this time the cordon commander had appeared and was talking with Sun. If Bourne had been on the sidewalk, they would have been dead ahead. A heartbeat later, having turned the wheel sharply, he drove the Mercedes up over the curb and onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians like the bow wave of a battleship.
The cordon commander was the first to see the car hurtling toward him and his boss. In a flash, he drew his sidearm and fired. The windshield should have shattered, but this was Colonel Sun’s car, and it was specially reinforced. The bullet pinged off the glass. The commander’s eyes opened wide. He had just enough time to shove Colonel Sun aside before the Mercedes struck him full-on, hurling his broken body three feet into the air.
Immediately Bourne roared away, half on, half off the sidewalk. When the masses of pedestrians became untenable, he crossed the lanes and went up onto the median, mowing down flower beds and small ornamental evergreen bushes as he went.
He was heading for the Dapu Tunnel that would take him across the river, out of the glittering high-rises and into the old district of ancient red-lacquered buildings, narrow streets, charcoal-cooked-food vendors, and traffic-free pedestrian malls. He chose this route because the Elevated Inner Ring Road and its attendant bridges were too exposed.
Just as he entered the tunnel, sirens rose up behind him. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw three police motorcycles screaming down the road in pursuit. He could imagine a thoroughly chagrined Colonel Sun frantically phoning police commanders in all quarters of the city in an effort to run down his own white Mercedes. In fact, turning on the communications system embedded in the front panel display he actually heard Sun’s voice, raised in anger and, if Bourne was any judge of tone, humiliation, spraying orders just as Bourne had figured. He gave off a hard bark of laughter, then settled in earnest to deal with both the traffic ahead of him and the pursuing motorcycles.
His brain instantaneously vectored the information his eyes took in. Like a chess game on a massive scale, he saw his next three or four moves as gaps in the traffic opened and closed like trapdoors. In addition, he was supremely protected within the steel-and-titanium–reinforced panels of the Mercedes.
Swerving into the left-hand lane, he stepped on the accelerator and, blaring his horn, tapped the car ahead of him. He could see a band of the terrified driver’s face in his rearview mirror, as he frantically tried to get out of the Mercedes’s way.
The motorcycles, with more maneuverability, were gaining on him. That was quite all right with him; in fact, it was what he was counting on. The car in front of him veered to the right, clipping the rear fender of another vehicle in the process.
Bourne put on another burst of speed, obliging the lead motorcycle to do the same in order to run up behind him. Checking his off-side mirror, Bourne’s brain again factored vectors of speed and distance converging on a single point.
The instant the lead motorcycle reached that point, Bourne trod hard on the brakes. The Mercedes’s tires screeched in protest as its forward momentum was stalled. The lead motorcycle was too close for the driver to have time to react. Instead, he drove the motorcycle into the rear of the Mercedes with such force that he was launched into the air as if shot from a cannon. While his motorcycle crumpled beneath the impact with the massive Mercedes, he cartwheeled head-over-heels, struck the hood of the car in front of Bourne, then slid off.
Whether the Mercedes was the first to strike him or one of the cars slewing every which way as their drivers panicked, Bourne never knew. He was off and running, taking advantage of the growing chaos to worm his way through the gaps in the traffic flow.
The traffic was now lighter as the vehicles behind him at the crash site were at a complete standstill, but he also had two more motorcycles to handle. Their drivers, having witnessed the rude demise of their comrade, had their pistols out and were not being shy about firing at the Mercedes. They might as well have been shooting at a Sherman tank for all the effect the bullets had on the bodywork.
Bourne swerved again, but now there was a vexing knot of traffic just in front of him with no discernible gaps for him to maneuver through. He was forced to slow down and, in so doing, allowed one of the remaining motorcycles to come up alongside.
The cop, lips drawn back from ivory teeth, grinned fiercely and tried to hammer out the side window with the butt of his pistol. Bourne jerked the wheel to the left, sandwiching the motorcycle between the Mercedes and the tunnel wall. Sparks flew at the grinding of metal against concrete as a line of ceramic tiles burst apart, flinging themselves like shrapnel.
The cop instinctively put his arm up to shield his face, and Bourne took advantage by pressing the side of the Mercedes harder against the motorcycle. The shrapnel kept exploding, but now the cop pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the glass of the side window.
The resulting percussion shattered the glass, but also flung the cop against the tunnel wall. He lost his balance, fell over, his left leg instantly crushed against the wall, skin and sinew flayed off.
Somehow he regained his balance and, grimacing against the pain, aimed the gun at Bourne’s head. Bourne slammed open the Mercedes’s door. It hit the cop like a thrown brick. As he rocked back his head smashed against the wall then, as he slid down, the rear wheel of his motorcycle.
Two down, one to go, Bourne thought.
As it had farther back, the interaction between Mercedes and motorcycle dispersed the knot of traffic ahead of him, with vehicles either pulling as far away from the incipient crash as they could or speeding up and out the far end of the tunnel.
Bourne heard the deep thrumming of the third motorcycle even before it came into view, snaking its way through the snarl of idled vehicles he’d left in his wake. People were out of their cars, staring in disbelief at the mangled motorcycle and its bloody, shredded driver.
He was reminded that he hadn’t heard Colonel Sun’s voice since he had entered the tunnel. He turned up the volume on the police radio, but heard only the occasional lightning-like crackle of static. He felt a warmth crawling down the left side of his face. Leaning to his right he glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror, saw the rivulets of blood caused by the force of the glass shards striking him.
Hearing the roar of the last motorcycle, he shifted back, saw its head-on silhouette growing in the mirror. He swerved to the right; the motorcycle followed. This driver was smart enough not to get too close; he was merely shadowing Bourne move for move, making sure he stayed with him, no matter what.
The far end of the tunnel was rapidly approaching. Something seemed to be wrong; the opening was far too bright, as if all the traffic ahead of him had been magically swept away by an immense hand.
Then the Mercedes was through the tunnel. In an instant Bourne saw the last motorcycle break off and swerve to the side. Mind racing, he understood why there had been no chatter on the police band, why the final motorcycle had shadowed him until the last moment, why there were no vehicles ahead of him.
Three minutes later, the missile fired from a shoulder-mounted launcher sped toward the Mercedes, impacting it moments later. The resulting explosion could be seen for miles.
8
Jidan was possessed of an amphibian calm, Maricruz thought, as she lay back in her father’s large and opulent bathtub. The taps and faucets were made of jade and lapis, the surround of an enormous solid slab of jasper. Far too gaudy for her tastes, but typical of Maceo Encarnación, who had done everything with breathtaking excess.
This was why, she thought now, as she arched her back, her heavy breasts crowned with dark nipples rising out of the water like questing sea creatures, she had once been in love with Jidan. He was the precise polar opposite of all the hot-blooded males, who acted first, considered afterward, among whom she had grown up.
At first, calmness was something Maricruz came to respect. Amid the incessant clamor of her cities—Mexico City and Beijing—the interior spaces Jidan designed and provided were oases of reverential silence to be cherished, only broken, now and again, by her shouts and cries of ecstasy. Those days seemed long gone.
Her large, coffee-colored eyes finally lit upon the small jade box Jidan had given her before she had left Beijing. That Jidan had discovered the identity of her mother, a mother she had never known, a mother from whose arms her father had taken her, to be raised as he alone saw fit, was miracle enough, Maricruz thought, but that she was still alive was beyond her imagining. Though she had opened the box, she had yet to unfold the paper inside and read the name of her mother. She wondered if she ever would.
Her heart was torn by complex emotions: a desire to be held by the woman who had borne her, anger at her for allowing her baby girl to be taken away, curiosity as to why, all these years, she had made no attempt to contact her daughter.
The jade box gleamed, its engraved pair of dragons seeming to mock her. Of course, her rational mind knew that no man and certainly no woman could stand against her father once he had made up his mind. Her mother had had no choice but to acquiesce to his wishes. But still…
She heard a sudden rustling in the bedroom suite beyond the closed bathroom door.
“Wendell,” she called, “is that you?”
“Yes, Maricruz, I’m sorry to disturb you. I was looking for certain papers of your father’s.”
“Perhaps I can help you.”
“Perhaps. When you’re finished with your bath.”
“I’m finished now, Wendell,” she said.
“I don’t under—”
“No reason to be shy. Come in.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, Maricruz.”
She could hear by the sound of his voice that he was just outside the door now. “But I do, Wendell.”
The doorknob turned, slowly at first, then more rapidly as he pushed the door open. He stood on the threshold, his eyes drinking in her lush, firm body.
His mouth opened. “Oh, God,” he said softly.
“Wendell, it occurs to me,” Maricruz said, ignoring his gaping mouth, “I know nothing about you personally. I’ve read your CV, of course, but there’s more to a man than his academic achievements, don’t you think?”
Marsh said nothing. Having gazed upon the goddess Medusa, he looked as if he had been turned to stone.
“I see the cat’s got your tongue,” she said with a knowing smile. “No matter. I fancy myself an excellent judge of character. I’ll tell you what you’re like. You only have to answer yes or no.” She cocked her head, her full lips in a moue. “Surely you’re up to the task.”
He coughed drily, tried to say something, failed.
Maricruz looked him up and down before settling her eyes again on his face. “Let’s see, either you’re divorced or you’ve never married. Either way, you’ve no children.”
“Divorced,” Marsh managed to croak. “No children.”
“No girlfriend, either,” Maricruz said. “At least, not for some time.”
Marsh swallowed, nodded mechanically. His eyes never left the glistening hemispheres of her naked breasts.
“Hmmm. So how do you get your rocks off, Wendell?” She stared pointedly at the bulge in his trousers. “You’re not asexual, I can see that.” She sat up suddenly, her breasts bobbing provocatively. “Whores, prostitutes, call girls, escorts. They’re your sort of thing, aren’t they?”
Marsh did not reply, but his reddened face revealed the truth of her statement.
“No need to be embarrassed, Wendell. Sex is a natural human desire.” She rose out of the bath and, without toweling off, back arched, shoulders squared, powerful thighs propelling her forward, crossed the tile floor and pressed her gleaming naked body against his.
He gave a strangled cry but did not recoil. With a languid smile, Maricruz snaked her right arm between them and squeezed the growing lump between his thighs.
“Nice and thick, Wendell,” she whispered in his ear. “I like that.”
She pushed forward and Marsh took a step back. They continued this way, stuck together, his clothes now sopping wet, as she maneuvered him across her father’s vast bedroom. When the back of Marsh’s legs came up against the bed, Maricruz leaned her upper torso forward, applying enough pressure that he tumbled backward.
Sitting astride him, she began to pluck off his clothes. Water dripped from her hair, off the erect tips of her breasts. Slowly, his trembling hands rose up to cup her breasts.
“Do you like that, Wendell?” She stripped off his sodden shirt. “I’ll just bet you do.”
He squeezed her nipples an
d her eyes closed briefly.
Her hands worked faster, then, pulling down his zipper, unbuckling his belt, peeling his trousers away. She unfolded him like an origami sculpture.
She leaned into him, her flat belly fluttering.
“Here’s what I like, Wendell.”
The percussion blast wave that burst outward when the missile impacted with Colonel Sun’s white Mercedes slammed into Bourne as he rolled across the pavement, shoved him off the road entirely and into a drainage ditch, where he was protected from the terrible effects of the shredded car, bits like shrapnel, like miniature missiles themselves, radiating out from the point of impact.
Numb and temporarily deaf, Bourne lay in the ditch unmoving. He watched the sky turn from orange to yellow to smoky gray, and then to the clear blue it had been in the first moments he had exited the tunnel.
He tried to shake off the numbness, felt only a rumble deep in his bones. Then all of a sudden his hearing returned with an unpleasant pop and, looking up, he saw the approaching police helo.
Scrambling out of the ditch, he ran toward the red-lacquered buildings, gilt signs, and narrow streets of Huangpu.
What was left of the white Mercedes was still burning hotly when the helo landed a safe distance away. The moment it alit, Colonel Sun pushed open the door and leapt out. He was followed closely by another man in army uniform.
“Who’s responsible for this?” he cried, pointing to the fire. “Give me a name!”
An officer appeared, saluted, and pointed to the soldier who had fired the missile. Colonel Sun stalked over to the man, who seemed to turn to water as Sun closed on him.
“What did you think you were doing?”