As he’d done in Nairobi, he opened the loading chamber on the diffuser and placed the vial into it. He closed and locked the chamber, took the NX 20 from Zina’s arms and curled his finger around the smaller of the two triggers. Once he squeezed it, the virus, still sealed in its special vial, would be injected into the firing chamber. After that, all that was required was for him to press the button on the left side of the stock, which would lock the firing chamber, and, when it was aimed correctly, pull the main trigger.
He cradled the bio-diffuser in his arms as Zina had done. This weapon needed to be given the proper respect, even from him.
He looked into Zina’s eyes, which were shining with her love for him and her patriot’s zeal. “Now we wait,” he said, “for the sensor alarm.”
They heard it then, the sound faint but its vibrations unmistakable, magnified by the bare concrete corridors. The Shaykh and Zina smiled into each other’s faces. He could feel the tension come into the room, fueled by righteous anger and an expectation of redemption long denied.
“Our moment is at hand,” he said, and they all heard him, all reacted. He could almost hear their ululation of victory begin.
With the unstoppable force of destiny propelling him forward, the Shaykh pulled the small trigger, and with an ominous whisper, the payload clicked home into the firing chamber, where it rested, waiting for the moment of its release.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“They’re all Chechens, isn’t that right, Boris?” Hull said.
Karpov nodded. “All, according to the records, members of Hasan Arsenov’s terrorist group.”
“This is a coup for the good guys,” Hull exulted.
Feyd al-Saoud, shivering in the damp and chill, said, “With the amount of C4 in that time bomb, they would’ve taken out almost the entire weight-bearing substructure. The forum above would’ve collapsed of its own weight, killing everyone inside.”
“Lucky for us they tripped the motion sensor,” Hull said.
As the minutes passed, Karpov’s frown had grown only deeper as he echoed Bourne’s query, “Why set the bomb so far in advance? I think we had a good chance of finding it before the summit started.”
Feyd al-Saoud turned to one of his men. “Is there some way to turn up the heat down here? We’re going to be here for some time and I’m already freezing.”
“That’s it!” Bourne said, turning to Khan. He took his laptop, turned it on, scrolling through the schematics until he found the one he wanted. He traced a route from where they were back toward the main section of the hotel. Snapping the computer closed, he said, “Come on! Let’s go!”
“Where are we headed?” Khan asked as they made their way through the maze of the sublevel.
“Think about it. We saw a Reykjavik Energy van pull into the hotel; the entire hotel is heated by the thermal system that services the city as a whole.”
“That’s why Spalko sent those Chechens to the HVAC subsystem now,” Khan said as they raced around a corner. “They were never meant to succeed in planting the bomb. We were right, it was a diversion, but not for later this morning when the summit is scheduled to start. He’s going to activate the bio-diffuser now!”
“Right,” Bourne said. “Not through the HVAC subsystem. His target is the main thermal heating system. At this time of night all the dignitaries are in their rooms, right where he’s going to release the virus.”
“Someone coming,” one of the female Chechens said.
“Kill them,” the Shaykh commanded.
“But it’s Hasan Arsenov!” cried the other female guard.
Spalko and Zina exchanged a bewildered look. What had gone wrong? The sensor had been tripped, the alarm had gone off, and shortly thereafter they’d heard the satisfying bursts of automatic gunfire. How had Arsenov escaped?
“I said kill him!” Spalko shouted.
What haunted Arsenov, what had made him turn tail at the instant he smelled the trap, thus saving himself from the sudden death suffered by his compatriots, was the terror that had been lurking inside him, the thing that had given him nightmares for the past week. He had told himself that it was his guilt at having betrayed Khalid Murat—a hero’s guilt at having made the hard choice that would save his people. But the truth of the matter was his terror had to do with Zina. He had not been able to admit to seeing her withdrawal, gradual but inexorable, her emotional distance that, in retrospect, had become glacial. She had been slipping away from him for some time, though even up to a few moments ago he had refused to believe it. But now Akhmed’s revelation had thrown it into the light of consciousness. She had lived behind a glass wall, always keeping part of herself aloof and hidden. He couldn’t touch that part of her, and it seemed to him now that the harder he’d tried, the further away she pulled herself.
Zina didn’t love him—he wondered now whether she ever had. Even if their mission was a complete success, there would be no life with her, no children they could share together. What a farce their last intimate conversation had been!
All at once, he was overcome by shame. He was a coward—he loved her more than he loved his freedom, for without her he knew there would be no freedom for him. In the wake of her betrayal, victory would be like ashes in his mouth.
Now, as he pounded down the cold corridor toward the thermal heating station, he saw one of his own people raise her machine pistol as if she was going to shoot him. Perhaps in the HAZMAT suit she couldn’t tell who was coming toward her.
“Wait! Don’t shoot!” he cried. “It’s Hasan Arsenov!”
A bullet from her opening volley struck him in the left arm, and half in shock, he spun around, diving around a corner, away from the deadly spray of ricocheting bullets.
In the abrupt frenzy of the present, there was no more time for questions or speculation. He heard renewed gunfire but not in his direction. Peering around the corner, he saw that the two females had turned their backs to him and, crouched, were firing at two figures as they advanced down the passageway.
Arsenov rose and, taking advantage of the diversion, headed for the doorway to the thermal heating station.
Spalko heard the gunfire and said, “Zina, that can’t be just Arsenov.”
Zina swung her machine pistol around, nodded to the guard, who threw her a second one.
Behind them, Spalko went over to the wall of thermal heating pipes. Each one had a valve and, beside it, a gauge that showed the pressure. He found the pipe that corresponded to the dignitaries’ wing, began to unscrew the valve.
Hasan Arsenov knew that he’d been meant to die with the others in the HVAC substation. “It’s a trap! Someone crossed the wires!” Karim had wailed just before he’d died. Spalko had crossed the wires; he’d needed not simply a diversion, as he’d told them, but scapegoats—targets of enough importance that their deaths would occupy the security for a sufficient amount of time for Spalko to reach the real objective and release the virus. Spalko had tricked him and, Arsenov was quite certain now, Zina had conspired with him.
How quickly love turned rancid, its transformation into hate occurring in no more time than it takes a heart to beat. Now they had turned against him, all his compatriots, the men and women he’d fought alongside, whom he’d laughed and cried with, prayed to Allah with, who had the same goals as he did. Chechens! All corrupted now by Stepan Spalko’s power and poisonous charm.
In the end Khalid Murat had been right about everything. He hadn’t trusted Spalko; he wouldn’t have followed him into this folly. Once, Arsenov had accused him of being an old man, of being too cautious, of not understanding the new world that lay before them. But now he knew what Khalid Murat had surely known: that that new world was nothing more than a self-serving illusion created by the man who called himself the Shaykh. Arsenov had believed this pipe dream because he’d wanted to believe it. Spalko had preyed upon that weakness. But no more! Arsenov vowed. No more! If he was to die today, it would be on his own terms, not as a sheep to the slaughter o
f Spalko’s making.
He pressed himself against the edge of the doorway, took a deep breath and when he let it out, he somersaulted past the open doorway. The resulting hail of automatic fire told him all he needed to know. Rolling, he kept to the concrete floor, wriggling on his stomach into the opening. He saw the guard, his machine pistol aimed at waist height, and shot him four times in the chest.
When Bourne saw the two terrorists in HAZMAT suits behind a concrete column, firing their machine pistols in alternate bursts, his blood ran cold. He and Khan took cover around the corner of a T-junction and he fired back.
“Spalko’s in that room with the bio-weapon,” Bourne said. “We’ve got to get in there now.”
“Not unless those two run out of ammo.” Khan was looking around behind them. “Do you remember the schematics? Remember what’s in the ceiling?”
Bourne, continuing to fire, nodded.
“There’s an access panel back about twenty feet. I need a boost.”
Bourne got off one more burst before retreating with Khan.
“Will you be able to see anything up there?” he asked.
Khan nodded, indicating his miraculous jacket. “I’ve got a pen light, among other things, up my sleeve.”
Tucking the machine pistol under his arm, Bourne laced his fingers together for Khan to put his foot in. His bones seemed to crack with the weight and the strained muscles in his shoulder seemed to catch fire.
Then Khan slid the panel off and had hoisted himself the rest of the way into the access hatch.
“Time,” Bourne said.
“Fifteen seconds,” Khan replied, disappearing.
Bourne turned. He counted to ten, then turned the corner, his machine pistol blazing. But almost immediately he stopped. He could feel his heart pounding painfully against his ribs. The two Chechens had taken off their HAZMAT suits. They had emerged from behind the column and now stood facing him. He saw that they were female and that around their waists were a series of linked packets filled with C4 explosive.
“Good Christ,” Bourne said. “Khan! They’re wearing suicide belts!”
At that moment they were plunged into darkness. Khan, in the electrical conduit above his head, had cut the wires.
Arsenov was up and sprinting forward the moment after he fired. He ran into the station, grabbed the guard before he fell. Two other figures were in the room: Spalko and Zina. Using the dead guard as a shield, he fired at the target with a machine pistol in each hand. Zina! But she had squeezed the triggers and even as she staggered back, hit, the massed fury of the automatic fire blew right through the guard’s body.
Arsenov’s eyes opened wide as he felt the searing pain in his chest, and then an odd kind of numbness. The lights winked out and he lay on the floor, the breath rattling in his blood-filled lungs. As if in a dream, he heard Zina screaming, and he wept for all the dreams he’d had, for a future that would now never come. With a sigh, life left him as it had come upon him, in hardship and brutality and pain.
A terrible, deathly silence had descended on the passage. Time seemed to have stopped. Bourne, his gun aimed into the darkness, heard the soft, shallow breathing of the human bombs. He could feel their fear as well as their determination. If they sensed him take a step toward them, if they became aware of Khan moving in the electrical conduit, they would surely detonate the explosives strapped around their waists.
Then, because he was listening for it, he heard the very faint double tap above his head, the sound, swiftly diminishing, of Khan moving in the electrical conduit. He knew there was an access panel more or less where the doorway to the thermal heating station was, and he had an idea what Khan was going to try. It would require nerves of steel and a very steady hand from both of them. The AR-15 he carried was short-barreled, but it made up for any slight inaccuracy with its awesome firepower. It used .223-caliber ammo which it spit out with a muzzle velocity in excess of 2,400 feet per second. He wriggled silently closer, then, aware of a slight shifting ahead of him in the darkness, he froze. His heart was in his throat. Had he heard something, a sibilance, a whisper, footsteps? Utter silence now. He held his breath and concentrated on sighting down the barrel of the AR-15.
Where was Spalko? Had he loaded the bio-weapon yet? Would he stay to finish the mission or would he cut and run? Knowing he had no answers, he put these terrifying questions aside. Concentrate, he berated himself. Relax now, breathe deeply and evenly as you move into alpha rhythm, as you become one with the weapon.
He saw it then. Khan’s penlight flash, the beam illuminating a woman’s face, blinding her. There was no time to consider or to think. His finger had been curled on the trigger and now instinct flowed naturally and instantaneously into action. The muzzle flash lit up the corridor, and he watched the woman’s head disintegrate in a welter of blood, bone and brains.
He was up then, running forward, looking for the other woman. Then the lights blinked on and he saw the second human bomb, lying beside the other one, her throat slit. An instant later, Khan dropped down from the open access hatch and together they entered the thermal heating station.
Moments before, in the darkness that smelled of cordite and blood and death, Spalko had dropped to his knees, searching blindly for Zina. The darkness had defeated him. Without light, he was unable to make the delicate connection between the muzzle of the NX 20 and the valve into the thermal heating system.
His arm extended, he felt along the floor. He hadn’t been paying attention to her, wasn’t certain of her position, and in any case, she had moved the moment Arsenov had burst through the doorway. It had been clever of him to use the human shield, but Zina was cleverer still and she had killed him. But she was still alive. He had heard her scream.
Now he waited, knowing that the human bombs he had primed would protect him from whoever was out there. Bourne? Khan? He was ashamed to realize that he was afraid of the unknown presence in the passage. Whoever it was had seen through his diversion, had followed his own reasoning regarding the vulnerability of the thermal heating system. There was a rising panic in him, alleviated for the moment when he heard Zina suck in a ragged breath. Quickly he crawled through a pool of sticky blood to where she lay.
Her hair was wet and stringy as he kissed her cheek. “Beautiful Zina,” he whispered in her ear. “Powerful Zina.”
He felt a kind of spasm pass through her and his heart constricted in fear. “Zina, don’t die. You can’t die.” Then he tasted the salty wetness running down her cheek and knew that she was weeping. Her breast rose and fell irregularly with her silent sobs.
“Zina”—he kissed away her tears—“you must be strong, now more than ever before.” He embraced her tenderly and felt her arms slowly come around him.
“This is the moment of our greatest triumph.” He drew away and pressed the NX 20 into her embrace. “Yes, yes, I choose you to fire the weapon, to bring the future to fruition.”
She couldn’t speak. It was all she could do to keep the breath sawing in and out of her lungs. Once again he cursed the darkness, for he couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t be certain that he had her. He had to take the chance, however. He took her hands and placed the left one on the barrel of the bio-diffuser, the right one at the guard on the stock. He placed her forefinger on the main trigger.
“All you need do is squeeze,” he whispered in her ear. “But not yet, not yet. I need time.”
Yes, time was what he needed in order to escape. He was trapped in the darkness, the one contingency for which he hadn’t been prepared. And now he couldn’t even take the NX 20 with him. He’d have to run and run hard, a condition that Schiffer had made clear, the weapon once loaded was not designed to handle. The payload and its container were far too fragile.
“Zina, you’ll do this, won’t you?” He kissed her cheek. “You have enough strength inside you, I know you do.” She was trying to say something, but he put a hand over her mouth, afraid that his unknown pursuers outside would hear her strangled
cry. “I’ll be close by, Zina. Remember that.”
Then so slowly and gently that it was imperceptible to her impaired senses, he slithered away. Turning, at last, from her, he stumbled over Arsenov’s corpse and his HAZMAT suit ripped. For a moment his new-found terror returned as he imagined himself being trapped in here when Zina pulled the trigger, the virus seeping into the rent, infecting him. In his mind’s eye, the city of the dead he had created in Nairobi bloomed in all its vivid, gruesome detail.
Then he’d regained his composure and he stripped off the encumbering suit altogether. Silent as a cat, he made his way to the doorway, swung out into the passage. At once the human bombs became aware of him and shifted slightly, tensing.
“La illaha ill Allah,” he whispered.
“La illaha ill Allah,” they whispered in return.
Then, in the darkness, he stole away.
They both saw it at once, the blunt, ugly snout of Dr. Felix Schiffer’s bio-diffuser pointed at them. Bourne and Khan froze.
“Spalko’s gone. There’s his HAZMAT suit,” Bourne said. “This station has only one entrance.” He thought of the movement he’d detected, the whisper, the sound of furtive footfalls he thought he’d heard. “He must’ve slipped out in the darkness.”
“I know this one,” Khan said. “It’s Hasan Arsenov, but this other, the female holding the weapon, I don’t know.”
The female terrorist lay half-propped up on the corpse of another terrorist. How she had managed to drag herself into this position neither of them could say. She was very badly wounded, possibly fatally, though from this distance it was impossible to say for sure. She looked at them from a world filled with pain and, Bourne was quite certain, something else that went beyond mere physical hurt.
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