Robert Ludlum’s™ The Bourne Dominion

by Robert Ludlum

  Blood bubbled out of Semid’s mouth as he sighed a fetid breath. She stared hard into his eyes while she held him up with her knife blade and her tensed arm.

  “Rebeka,” Bourne said.

  She studied Semid as if he were a specimen pinned to a lab table.

  “Rebeka,” Bourne repeated, more gently this time.

  She expelled a breath and, at the same time, withdrew the knife blade, and the body fell to the floor. Bourne expected an expression of triumph on her face, but when she turned to him, there was only disgust.

  She stared at him for a long moment, and Bourne had the impression that he was facing a singular creature, precisely controlled and calibrated on the outside, but possessing an untamed spirit and a wild heart.

  “You ran out on me,” she said as she wiped her blade free of blood and gore, “and now I find you here.”

  “Lucky you.” He smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised.”

  Her eyes burned with a cold fury. “This is my territory.”

  “That’s irrelevant now,” he said evenly, trying to defuse her anger. “Semid Abdul-Qahhar is dead.”

  She kicked the corpse so it flopped over on its back. “Whoever the hell this is,” she said, “he’s not Semid Abdul-Qahhar.”

  32

  THERE WERE TIMES—and this was one of them—when Hendricks resented the security detail that followed him around as closely as his own shadow. He resented the fact that they were surely speculating on what had caused him to drive hell-for-leather back to his house in the middle of a workday. Worse, they watched him from behind smoked-glass windows as he crossed to his rose garden, got down on his knees, and began rooting around.

  One of them, Richards, he thought, exited his car and strode to where he knelt.

  “Sir, are you feeling well?”

  “Perfectly,” Hendricks said with a distracted air.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “You can return to your car.”

  “Yes, sir,” Richards said, after a short pause.

  Hendricks, glancing over his shoulder, saw Richards shrug, signing to his compatriots that he had no idea what the boss was up to. Returning to his work, Hendricks tried to calm himself, but he found to his horror that his hands were trembling uncontrollably. The moment he’d picked up Skara’s business card and seen the rose imprinted on it, he’d become certain that she had left the card for him to find. Only he would understand the rose’s significance.

  “I’m on my final journey.”

  He was terribly afraid that Skara was going to do something irrevocable. He could not imagine her killing herself, but then he knew so little about her. And yet, strangely, he felt that he had known her all his life. It was a complete mystery to him how someone could become a part of his life so quickly. She had crawled under his skin and, lodged there, refused to budge. Her sudden disappearance only made him more acutely aware of how she affected him.

  “I’m on my final journey.”

  Was she going to do something terrible, some final act that one way or another would snuff out her life? This was the scenario that terrified him.

  “I’m on my final journey.”

  He had convinced himself that she’d left him a clue to what she was about to do, that she wanted him to stop her, that he was the only one with the ability to do so. He desperately wanted to believe that she felt about him the way he felt about her. Hadn’t she said as much on the DVD? But he harbored a suspicion that it had been a performance, that she had not really revealed what was in her hidden heart, and that now he would never know, because within days, or even hours, her life would be extinguished like a candle flame.

  His shaking hands were covered with soil, his nails dark with grit. Starting at the left side of the rose garden, he was making his methodical way toward the right. At the base of each plant, his fingers dug into the soil, hoping to find something she had buried there for him to find after she had gone. But he came to the last rose and, digging in, found nothing.

  He sat back on his haunches, resting his wrists on his knees while he stared at the flowers. He loved his roses, their colors and scents, but now all he saw were the thorns. Perhaps this time a rose was just a rose. He didn’t want to believe it, but now he had to, because there was nothing else for him to believe.

  Bitter tears rose into his eyes, and, ashamed and despairing, he covered his face with his filthy hands.

  Boris was nowhere to be found. Bourne, making a quick inventory of the dead and dying, found no trace of either Boris, for which he was profoundly grateful, or the SVR chief, Konstantin Beria. Briefly, he wondered whether they had gone, but he had his own agenda to consider.

  “I’ve been after Semid Abdul-Qahhar for three years,” Rebeka said as they exited the synagogue the way they both had entered it. “He employs half a dozen doubles who look like him and talk like him. More often than not, they’re the ones who appear in public. Semid Abdul-Qahhar himself can be seen in the periodic taped messages his people send to Al Jazeera. I’ve studied those tapes in detail. I know what the real Semid Abdul-Qahhar looks like. Virtually no one else outside his circle of lieutenants does.”

  That there might be body doubles changed Bourne’s plan radically. Boris had told him Semid Abdul-Qahhar was in Damascus. Now he sensed that the synagogue was a ruse. If so, then he knew that the leader of the Mosque must be at El-Gabal. This had many implications, not the least of which was that the planning phase of the terrorist attack was at an end, the operations phase had begun, and Bourne had little time to infiltrate El-Gabal, plant the cloned SIM cards, and set off the charges inside the twelve crates of FN SCAR-M, Mark 20 assault rifles Don Fernando had spiked.

  He wanted to go into El-Gabal alone, but he realized now that having Rebeka with him was vital. Only she could recognize Semid Abdul-Qahhar. If he really was in the building, Bourne was not going to let this opportunity to kill him pass. Semid was the real danger. With El-Arian dead, he was now the heart and soul of Severus Domna; without his support the organization would be so severely weakened that it could be dealt with by Soraya, Peter, and their team. But if Semid somehow survived, his grip on the Domna would become a stranglehold, and with its members in legitimate positions in business and politics, Semid’s potential for launching terrorist attacks expanded exponentially. Bourne could not allow that to happen.

  As they reached the street, he told Rebeka about El-Gabal and what he needed to do. “I think that’s where Semid Abdul-Qahhar is. I know how to get in, just as you knew how to get into the synagogue without being observed,” he concluded. “Either you’re with me or we part ways here.”

  To her credit, she didn’t hesitate an instant. They took a taxi to the train station, where he opened the locker and took out the duffel filled with the implements he had purchased earlier. Rebeka watched him with the ghost of a smile on her lips.

  “What’s so amusing?” Bourne said as they exited the terminal.

  “Nothing really.” She shrugged. “It’s only that I was right and my superiors were wrong.” Her smile widened. “It was no coincidence that I was working your flight from Madrid.”

  “Mossad was tracking me.”

  “You think I’m Mossad?”

  He did not reply as he guided her along the wide streets that led to Avenue Choukry Kouatly. They both wore Syrian clothes, so no one gave them a second look. Rebeka’s head was completely covered by her hijab.

  “I’ve been tracking you,” she said. “Once I had identified the connection between Semid Abdul-Qahhar and Severus Domna, I knew our paths were going to cross. Your false name didn’t fool me; I’d seen your photo and matched it to ones we have in our files.”

  “So you didn’t care that I ran out on you.”

  “Frankly, I expected it.”

  “I owe you for the check.”

  She grinned. “My treat.”

  “Now that I’m taking you in with me.”

  She laughed softly. “Everything my
superiors think they know about you is wrong.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” he said.

  Within twenty minutes, they had reached the area around the El-Gabal complex. Lights were blazing inside, though it was after 2 AM. Bourne, crouched in shadow, observed the uptick in both activity and guards. The loading dock and surrounding area were crawling with armed men. Trucks had not yet pulled up, but the first of them was rumbling down the street. He had less time than he had thought, an hour at the outside, probably less.

  Rebeka, crouched in the shadows beside him, said, “You’re sure you can get us inside? The building is crawling with armed guards.”

  Bourne unzipped the duffel. “Watch me,” he said.

  Boris sat at an all-night café with his left leg up on a chair. The doctor he had gotten out of bed to clean and dress his wound insisted on an outrageous sum of money, even though he knew Boris from previous visits. Boris was beyond caring.

  When he had left the synagogue, he had spent a dizzying and unsuccessful half hour scouring the maze of surrounding streets in Bab Touma for Beria. His heart was a black pit in which he wanted to bury the SVR director. Then, like a switch being thrown, something changed. Most likely it was the pain, which had become so severe he could hardly stand on his left leg, and, with the adrenaline draining out of him, he felt overcome by exhaustion. Beria could wait; he needed to take care of himself.

  Now, sitting with a cup of thick Turkish coffee laced with cardamom and a small plate of sticky sweets, he popped pills in his mouth—a painkiller and an antibiotic—and, with a grimace, swallowed them dry. He sipped his coffee, which warmed him heart and soul, and watched the intermittent comings and goings on the street.

  After some consideration he thought that breaking off his pursuit had little to do with pain; he had endured much worse and kept going. He sensed that his change of heart stemmed, instead, from his reunion with Jason Bourne. That brief encounter had brought home that his life—his and Jason’s—did not have to be predicated solely on a chain of affronts and retributions. There could, in fact, be a human element, and, after all, it was friends like Jason, even if Jason was the only one, who made this life bearable. Briefly, he thought about Jason, wondering where he was. It didn’t matter; Boris was in no shape to be of help to him. Besides, Jason worked best when he was on his own.

  Boris sighed and took a bite of a sweet, holding it in his mouth while the paper-thin layers of pastry dissolved and the honey melted on his tongue. He did not want to turn into a modern-day Ahab. He had made promises to himself, true enough, but their fulfillment could wait for another time, another place.

  Wasn’t revenge a dish best served cold?

  Removing the length of electrical wire and the pickax from the duffel, Bourne attached the haft to one end of the longer coil of rope. He stood up, moving several paces away from Rebeka. They were both well in the penumbra of shadow cast by a stand of royal palm trees. The west side of the El-Gabal building was in front of them, the palms behind them and, beyond, a bank building, dark and brooding. Security lights blazed on either corner of El-Gabal, but there was a narrow stripe of shadow down the center of the building’s side.

  As Bourne began to swing the rope with the pickax at its end, Rebeka saw what he was about to do. “There may be guards on the roof,” she said.

  When Bourne said, “I’m counting on it,” she shot him a quizzical look.

  Bourne waited until the throaty roar of the trucks’ exhaust rose through the night, then whirled the pickax over his head and let it go, watched it as it rose up into the night and landed on the roof. Whatever sound it made was masked by the burble of the trucks. Tugging on the rope, he pulled the pickax toward him until its curved head caught in the crack between the roof and the low parapet wall. He strapped the duffel across his back, and, without another word to Rebeka, began his ascent of the strip of shadowed wall.

  When he was halfway up, she took hold of the rope and hauled herself up after him. The noise from the trucks had ceased, making them hypervigilant about any noise whatsoever. Bourne reached the parapet, grabbed hold of it with one hand, and rose up high enough to peek over the top. Two guards were visible. One was standing in the center of what looked like an enormous target painted onto the flat roof. Outlining its circumference were a series of small blue LED lights, which burned very brightly. The second guard was at the rear of the roof, his hands on the parapet as he leaned over, staring down at the increased activity on the loading dock.

  Bourne launched himself over the parapet and crouched down onto the roof. A moment later, Rebeka joined him.

  “They’ve got a helipad up here,” she whispered in his ear. “The lights are on so they must be expecting a helicopter.”

  He nodded. “It looks like this is the way the real Semid Abdul-Qahhar is going to make his exit.”

  To one side of the helipad was a glass-covered hatch, large enough so that both men and matériel could be taken from inside the building to the helicopter, or vice versa. It was a neat solution to arriving and leaving quickly. Bourne signaled Rebeka to take the guard at the rear while he handled the one at the helipad.

  The roof, made of a gravelly substance, was dotted with risers, water tanks, vents, and elevator and HVAC housings. He crabbed his way from one of these to the next. This was the easy part because he could keep to the shadows cast by the structures. The circle of light cast by the LEDs was another story entirely. As he came to rest behind the elevator housing, he picked up a loose piece of gravel and threw it so that it hit the side of a water tank twenty feet to his right.

  The guard turned his head instantly and, unstrapping his AK-74, came cautiously toward the spot where the gravel had struck the tank. He walked around the tank. As he turned his back on Bourne’s position, Bourne sprinted across the intervening space, leapt onto the guard’s back, and, wrapping his arm around the guard’s neck, snapped it. He lay the limp body down and took the automatic weapon from nerveless hands.

  Scuttling back around the water tank, he made for the rear of the roof. He saw the second guard sprawled on the gravel. Above him was Rebeka, but she wasn’t alone. A third guard, one hidden from both of them until now, was creeping up on her. Not wanting to fire his weapon, he ran toward her, but the instant the third guard was within arm’s length, she whirled, struck away the muzzle of his AK-74, drove her fist into his gut, and grabbed him by the throat. The guard arched back, straining to fire his weapon so as to alert the guards on the loading dock. Rebeka was forced to relinquish her grip on his throat in order to pry open his hold on the assault rifle. As it clattered to the rooftop, something flashed in his hand and drove inward. Rebeka slipped her arm through his, twisted sharply, fracturing his elbow. The guard groaned, his knees giving way, and she slammed the heel of her hand into the base of his nose, jamming the cartilage back into his brain. He keeled over, dead before his body hit the gravel.

  Bourne was at Rebeka’s side. She grinned up into his face, then her eyes went out of focus and she slid into his arms, her head flung back, her face to the starry night. He saw the slick blackness, felt the warm flow of blood coming from the knife wound in her side. She was panting, her lips parted.

  He lay her down and began to part her clothes in order to see the extent of her wound.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “You have a deadline to make. I won’t be the reason you don’t make it.”

  “Shut up.” Bourne’s fingers moved quickly and expertly over the wound. It was deep, but he couldn’t find any evidence of organ damage. This was good, of course, but she was still losing blood at a rapid rate. If he didn’t take immediate action, she would bleed to death. Ripping her cloak into strips, he wound them around her, binding the wound as tightly as he dared. The blood stopped flowing for a moment, but then it began to soak through the material.

  “Listen to me,” she said in an urgent voice, “the real Semid Abdul-Qahhar has a tic at the outer corner of his right eye. You’ll see a tiny muscle
pulsing. That’s something that can’t be replicated by his doubles.”

  Bourne nodded as he bound her with another layer. This was as much as he could do.

  “Leave me now,” she said.

  Still, he hesitated.

  “Go on.” She gave up a tight smile. “I can take care of myself. I’m Mossad.”

  “I’ll come back for you.”

  Her smile turned sardonic. “No you won’t. But thanks, anyway.”

  He rose and peered over the rear parapet. The doors of the loading bay had been thrown open. He had to get to the stash of spiked weapons before they were loaded onto the trucks. He had no time to argue with her.

  Without a backward glance, he ran to the hatch that led down into the building. Stripping off his clothes, he clad himself in the uniform of the guard he had killed. Then he surveyed the top of the hatch. Through it, he could see a storeroom, for the moment at least dark and deserted. A ladder led up from the floor to one side of the hatch. He wasn’t surprised to see an alarm wire running around the edge of it. Instantly, he knew that without suction cups to hold the glass in place after he had cut it, the glass cutter was of no use. Setting down the duffel, he brought out the wide-bladed knife. He drove the tip of the blade into the base of the hatch, where it met the gravel. The tip broke off, leaving the end looking more like a screwdriver than a knife blade.

  The hinges of the hatch were on the side opposite the ladder. Using the broken tip of the blade, Bourne loosened the screws enough to lift the hatch. He found the alarm trip wire, used the knife to cut through the insulation in two places, then wrapped the bare ends of the electrical wire to the bare spots to keep the circuit intact while extending the length of the trip wire. Then he raised the hatch far enough for him to slither through. He dropped to the floor of the storeroom, found the door, and stepped out into a long corridor that stretched to his left and right. Directly ahead of him was a half wall. Peering down, he could see the whole of the warehouse structure laid out below him. He looked for the twelve long crates and spotted them almost immediately. They were off to the right side. To the left were the open doors that led out to the loading bay. The first crates were being taken out to be loaded onto the trucks. He spent ten seconds memorizing the warehouse layout, then found the nearest staircase and began his rapid descent.