'Thank you,' said Alex, as the cab pulled up to the kerb. ''Thank you!' he added, opening the door and climbing inside. The woman nodded pleasantly and shrugged as she turned and started back up the steps. The glass doors above crashed open and Conklin watched through the rear window as the nurse nearly collided into two of Lin's men. One stopped her and spoke; the other reached the kerb and squinted, peering out of the light into the receding darkness beyond. 'Hurry!' said Alex to the driver as they passed through the gate. 'Kuai diar, if that's right.'
'It will do,' answered the driver wearily in fluent English.
'"Hurry" is better, however.'
The base of Nathan Road was the galactic entrance to the luminescent world of the Golden Mile. The blazing coloured lights, the dancing, flickering, shimmering lights, were the walls of this congested, urban valley of humanity where seekers sought and sellers shrieked for attention. It was the bazaar of bazaars, a dozen tongues and dialects vying for the ears and the eyes of the ever-shifting crowds. It was here, in this gauntlet of freewheeling commercial chaos, that Alex Conklin got out of the cab. Walking painfully, his limp pronounced, the veins of his footless leg swelling, he hurried up the east side of the street, his eyes roving like those of an angry wildcat seeking its young in the territory of hyenas.
He reached the end of the fourth block, the last block. Where were they? Where was the slender, compact Panov and the tall, striking, auburn-haired Marie? His instructions had been clear, absolute. The first four blocks north on the right side, the east side. Mo Panov had recited them back to him... Oh, Christ I He had been looking for two people, one whose physical appearance could belong to hundreds of men in those four crowded blocks. But his eyes had been searching for the tall, dark-red-headed woman - which she was no longer! Her hair had been dyed grey with streaks of white! Alex started back down towards Salisbury Road, his eyes now attuned to what he should look for, not what his painful memories told him he would find.
There they were! On the outskirts of a crowd surrounding a street vendor whose cart was piled high with silks of all descriptions and labels - the silks relatively genuine, the labels as ersatz as the distorted signatures.
'Come on with me!' said Conklin, his hands on both their elbows.
'Alex!' cried Marie.
'Are you all right? asked Panov.
'No,' said the CIA man. 'None of us is.'
'It's David, isn't it?' Marie grabbed Conklin's arm, gripping it.
'Not now. Hurry up. We have to get out of here.'
They're here?' Marie gasped, her grey-haired head turning right and left, fear in her eyes.
'Who?
'I don't know? she shouted over the din of the crowds.
'No, they're not here,' said Conklin. 'Come on. I've got a taxi holding down by the Pen.'
'What pen? asked Panov.
'I told you. The Peninsula Hotel.'
'Oh, yes, I forgot.' All three started walking down Nathan Road, Alex - as was obvious to Marie and Morris Panov -with difficulty. 'We can slow down, can't we?' asked the psychiatrist.
'No, we can't!'
'You're in pain,' said Marie.
'Knock it off! Both of you. I don't need your horseshit.'
'Then tell us what's happened?' yelled Marie, as they crossed a street filled with carts they had to dodge, and buyers and sellers and tourist-voyeurs who made for the exotic congestion of the Golden Mile.
'There's the taxi,' said Conklin, as they approached Salisbury Road. 'Hurry up. The driver knows where to go.'
'Inside the cab, Panov between Marie and Alex, she once again reached out, clutching Conklin's arm. 'It is David, isn't it?
'Yes. He's back. He's here in Hong Kong.'
'Thank God?
'You hope. We hope.'
'What does that mean? asked the psychiatrist sharply.
'Something's gone wrong. The scenario's off the wire.'
'For Christ's sake!' exploded Panov. 'Will you speak English?
'He means,' said Marie, staring at the CIA man, 'that David either did something he wasn't supposed to do, or didn't do something he was expected to do.'
'That's about it.' Conklin's eyes drifted to the right, towards the lights of Victoria Harbour and the island of Hong Kong beyond. 'I used to be able to read Delta's moves, usually before he made them. Then later, when he was Bourne, I was able to track him when others couldn't because I understood his options and knew which ones he would take.
That is until things happened to him, and no one could predict anything because he'd lost touch with the Delta inside him. But Delta's back now and, as happened so often so long ago, his enemies have underestimated him. I hope I'm wrong - Jesus, I hope I'm wrong?
His gun against the back of the assassin's neck, Delta moved silently through the underbrush in front of the high wall of the sterile house. The killer balked; they were within 10 feet of the darkened entrance. Delta jammed the weapon into the commando's flesh and whispered. There aren't any trip lights in the wall or on the ground. They'd be set off by tree rats every thirty seconds. Keep going! I'll tell you when to stop.'
The order came four feet from the gate. Delta grabbed his prisoner by the collar and swung him around, the barrel of the gun still touching the assassin's neck. The man from Medusa then reached into his pocket, pulled out a globule of plastique and stretched his arm out as far as he could towards the gate. He pressed the adhesive side of the packet against the wall; he had pre-set the small digital timer in the soft centre of the explosive for seven minutes, the number chosen both for luck and to give him time to get the killer and himself in place several hundred feet away. 'Move!' he whispered.
They rounded the corner of the wall and proceeded along the side to the mid-point, from where the end of the stone was visible in the moonlight. 'Wait here,' said Delta, reaching into his knapsack which was strapped across his chest like a bandolier, the bag on his right side. He pulled out a square black box, 5 inches wide, 3 high, and 2 deep. At its side was a coiled 40-foot line of thin, black plastic tubing. It was a battery-amplified speaker; he placed it on top of the wall and snapped a switch in the back; a red light glowed. He uncoiled the thin tubing as he shoved the killer forward. 'Another twenty or thirty feet,' he said.
Above them the branches of a cascading willow tree were spread out above the wall, arcing downward. Concealment. 'Here!' Bourne whispered harshly, and stopped the commando by gripping his shoulder. He removed the wirecutters from the knapsack and pushed the assassin against the wall; they faced each other. 'I'm cutting you loose now, but not free. Do you understand that?' The commando nodded, and Delta snipped the ropes between his prisoner's wrists and elbows while levelling his gun at the assassin's head. He stepped back and bent his right leg forward in front of the killer as he handed him the cutters. 'Stand on my leg and cut the coils. You can reach them if you jump a bit and slide your hand under for a grip. Don't try anything. You haven't got a gun yet, but I have, and as I'm sure you've gathered, I don't care any more.'
The prisoner did as he was told. The leap from Delta's leg was minimal; the assassin's left arm expertly slithered between the coils, his hand gripping the opposite side of the top of the wall. He severed the coiled wire noiselessly, holding the cutters against the metal on one side to reduce the sound of snapping tension. The open space above was now five feet wide. 'Climb up there,' said Delta.
The killer did so, and as his left leg swung over the wall, Delta leaped up to grab the assassin's trousers and pulled himself up against the stone, swinging his own left leg over the top. He straddled the wall simultaneously with the commando.
'Nicely done, Major Allcott-Price,' he said, a small circular microphone in his hand, his weapon again aimed at the assassin's head. 'Not much longer now. If I were you, I'd study the grounds.'
Under Conklin's urgent pleas to the driver, the taxi sped up the road in Victoria Peak. They passed a broken down car off the side of the road; it seemed out of place in the elegant surroundings,
and Alex swallowed as he saw it, wondering in dread if it was really disabled. There's the house!' cried the CIA man. 'For God's sake, hurry] Go up to the-'
He did not - could not - finish. Up ahead a shattering explosion filled the road and the night. Fire and stone flew in all directions as first a large part of the wall collapsed and then the huge iron gates fell forward in eerie slow motion beyond the flames.
'Oh, my God, I was right,' said Alexander Conklin softly to himself. 'Delta's come back. He wants to die. He will die.'
32
'Not yet!' roared Jason Bourne as the wall blew apart beyond the stately gardens filled with rows of lilacs and roses. 'I'll tell you when,' he added quietly, holding the small circular microphone in his free hand.
The assassin grunted, his instincts roused to their primeval limits, his desire to kill equal to his desire to survive, the one dependent upon the other. He was on the edge of madness; only the barrel of Delta's gun stopped him from an insane assault. He was still human, and it was better to try to live than to accept death through default. But when, when! The nervous tic returned to Allcott-Price's face; his lower lip twitched as screams and shouts and the sound of men running in panic filled the gardens. The killer's hands trembled as he stared at Delta in the dim, pulsating light of the distant flames.
'Don't even think about it,' said the man from Medusa. 'You're dead if you make a move. You've studied me so you know there's no reprieve. You make it, you make it on your own. Swing your leg over the wall and be ready to jump when I tell you. Not before.' Without warning, Bourne suddenly brought the microphone to his lips and snapped a switch. When he spoke his amplified words echoed eerily throughout the grounds, a haunting, reverberating sound that matched the thunder of the explosion, made more ominous by its calm simplicity, its frigidity.
'You marines. Take cover and stay out of this. It's not your fight. Don't die for the men who brought you here. To them expendable - as I was expendable. There's no legitimacy here, no territory to be defended, no honour of your country in question. You're here for the sole purpose of protecting killers. The only difference between you and me is the fact that they used me, too, but now they want to kill me because I know what they've done. Don't die for these men, they're not worth it. I give you my word I won't fire on you unless you shoot at me, and then I'll have no choice. But there's another man here who isn't going to make any deals-'
A fusillade of gunfire erupted, shattering the source of the sound, blasting the unseen speaker randomly off the wall. Delta was ready; it was bound to happen. One of the faceless, nameless manipulators had given an order and it was carried out. He reached into the knapsack, removing a 15-inch preset tear gas launcher, the canister in place. It could smash heavy glass at fifty yards; he aimed and pulled the trigger. A hundred feet away a bay window was shattered, the fog of gas billowing throughout the room inside. He could see figures running beyond the fragmented glass. Lamps and chandeliers were extinguished, supplanted by a startling array of floodlights positioned in the eaves of the great house and the trunks of the surrounding trees. Suddenly the grounds were awash with blinding white light. The branches of the overhanging tree would be a magnet for pivoting eyes and levelled weapons and he understood that no appeal of his would countermand the orders. He had delivered that appeal both as an honest warning and a salve for what conscience remained to a barely-thinking, barely-feeling robot avenger. In the shadows of the mind he had left he did not want to take the lives of youngsters called to serve the paranoid egos of manipulators - he had seen too much of that in Saigon years ago. He wanted only the lives of those inside the sterile house, and he intended to have them. Jason Bourne would not be denied. They had taken everything from him, and his personal account was now going to be settled. For the man from Medusa the decision was made - he was a puppet on the strings of his own rage, and apart from that rage his life was over.
'Jump!' whispered Delta, swinging his right leg over the wall, pummelling the assassin down to the ground. He followed while the commando was in mid-air and grabbed the impostor's shoulder as the startled killer - arms extended on his knees - righted himself on the grass. Bourne dragged him out of sight into a latticed arbour with a profusion of bougainvillaea that reached nearly 6 feet high. 'Here's your gun, Major,' said the original Jason Bourne. 'Mine's on you, and don't you forget it!'
The assassin simultaneously grabbed the weapon and tore the cloth from his mouth, coughing and spitting out saliva as a savage burst of gunfire tore leaves and branches all along the wall. 'Your little lecture didn't do much fucking good, did it?
'I didn't expect it to. The truth of the matter is that they want you, not me. You see, I'm really expendable now. That was their plan from the beginning. I bring you out and I'm dead. My wife's dead. We know too much. She because she learned who they were - she had to, she was the bait - me because they knew I'd put some figures together in Peking. You're messed up with a bloodbath, Major. A megabomb that can blow the whole Far East apart, and will if saner heads in Taiwan don't isolate and rip out those lunatic clients of yours. Only I don't give a shit any more. Play your goddamned games and blow yourselves up. I just want to get inside that house.'
A squad of marines assaulted the wall, running alongside the stone, rifles poised, ready to fire. Delta pulled a second plastique from his knapsack, set the miniaturized digital timer for ten seconds, and threw the packet as far as he could towards the rear garden wall, away from the guards. 'Come on!' he ordered the commando, ramming his weapon into the killer's spine. 'You in front! Down this path. Nearer the house.'
'Give me one of those! Give me a plastic!'
'I don't think so.'
'Christ, you gave me your word!'
'Then either I lied or I changed my mind.'
'Why! What do you care?
'I care. I didn't know there were so many kids. Too many kids. You could take out ten of them with one of these, maim a lot more.'
'It's a little late for you to become such a fucking Christian!'
'The club's not that exclusive; it never was. I know who I want and who I don't want and I don't want kids in pressed GI pajamas. I want the men inside that-'
The explosion came some forty yards away at the rear of the grounds. Trees and dirt, bushes and whole beds of flowers flamed into the air - a panorama of greens and browns and speckled dots of colour within the billowing grey smoke illuminated by the hot white floodlights. 'Move!' whispered Delta. 'To the end of the row. It's about sixty feet from the house and there's a pair of doors-' Bourne closed his eyes in angry futility as a series of seemingly unending spurts of rifle fire filled the rear gardens. They were children. They fired blindly out of fear, killing imaginary demons but no targets. And they would not listen.
Another group of marines, these obviously led by an experienced officer, took up equidistant positions in front of the great house, circling it, legs bent, feet dug in for recoils, weapons angled forward. The manipulators had called for their Praetorian guard. So be it. Delta again reached into his knapsack, felt around his arsenal and removed one of the two manual firebombs he had purchased in the Mongkok. It was similar to a grenade at the top - circular but covered with a shield of heavy plastic. The base, however, was a handle, five inches long so that the thrower could hurl the explosive farther and with greater accuracy. The trick was in the throwing, the accuracy and the timing. For once the plastic was removed, the shell of the bomb itself would adhere to any surface by an instant steel-like adhesive activated by air, and with the explosion a chemical shot out in all directions, prolonging the flames, embedding itself into all porous surfaces, seeping and burning. From the removal of the plastic covering to the explosion took fifteen seconds. The
sides of the great house, the sterile house, were weatherboard above an imposing lower border of stone. Delta shoved the assassin into a cluster of roses, stripped off the plastic and heaved the firebomb into the boarding far above and to the left of the french doors thirty-odd fee
t away. It stuck to the wood, the rest was waiting for the seconds to pass while the rifle fire - hesitant now, diminishing - ceased altogether.
The wall of the house blew apart. A gaping hole revealed a formal Victorian bedroom, complete with a brass bedstead and ornate English furniture. The flames spread instantly, shooting spokes of fire from a central hub, spewing along the weatherboard and spitting inside the house.
An order was given, and again there was an eruption of rifle fire, bullets spraying the flowerbeds away from the rear garden wall and the contingent of marines who had raced in the direction of the previous explosion. Commands and counter commands were shouted in anger and frustration as two officers appeared, sidearms in their hands. One rounded the circle of protecting guards, checking their positions and their weapons, peering in front of each. The other headed for the sidewall and began retracing the route of the first squad, his eyes constantly shifting to his inner flanks, to the succeeding rows of flowers. He stopped beneath the willow tree and studied the wall, then the grass. He raised his head and looked over at the arbour of bougainvillaea. His weapon now steadied by both hands, he started towards the arbour.
Robert Ludlum - Bourne 2 - Bourne Supremecy Page 64
