The other two bodyguards in the jumpseat just behind the driver fired wildly at the assassin, who pushed the bodyguard with the broken neck so that his body absorbed the bullets. From behind this makeshift protection, he used the bodyguard's gun, fired precisely, one shot through the forehead of each man.
That left only Khalid Murat. The Chechen leader, his face a mask of hatred, had kicked open the door and was shouting for his men. The assassin lunged at Murat, shaking the huge man as if he were a water rat; Murat's jaws snapped at him, almost taking off an ear. Calmly, methodically, almost joyously he seized Murat around the throat and, staring into his eyes, jabbed his thumb into the cricoid cartilage of the Chechen leader's lower larynx. Blood immediately filled Murat's throat, choking him, draining him of strength. His arms flailed, his hands beating against the assassin's face and head. To no avail. Murat was drowning in his own blood. His lungs filled and his breathing became ragged, thick. He vomited blood and his eyes rolled up in their sockets.
Dropping the now-limp body, the assassin climbed back into the front seat, hurling the driver's corpse out of the door. He slammed the vehicle into gear and stepped on the gas before what remained of the rebels could react. The vehicle leaped forward like a racehorse from the gate, hurtled over rubble and tarmac, then vanished into thin air as it plummeted into the hole the explosives had made in the street.
Underground, the assassin upshifted, racing through the tight space of a storm drain that had been widened by the Russians, who had intended to use them for clandestine assaults on rebel strongholds. Sparks flew as the metal fenders now and again scraped against the curving concrete walls. But for all that, he was safe. His plan had concluded as it had begun: with perfect clockwork precision.
After midnight the noxious clouds rolled away, at last revealing the moon. The detritus-laden atmosphere gave it a reddish glow, its lambent light intermittently disturbed by the still burning fires.
Two men stood in the center of a steel bridge. Below them, the charred remains of an unending war were reflected in the surface of the sluggish water.
"It's done," the first one said. "Khalid Murat has been killed in a manner that will cause maximum impact."
"I would expect nothing less, Khan," the second man said. "You owe your impeccable reputation in no small part to the commissions I've given you." He was taller than the assassin by a good four inches, square-shouldered, long-legged. The only thing that marred his appearance was the strange glassy utterly hairless skin on the left side of his face and neck. He possessed the charisma of a born leader, a man not to be trifled with. Clearly, he was at home in the great halls of power, in public forums or in thuggish back alleys.
Khan was still basking in the look in Murat's eyes as he died. The look was different in every man. Khan had learned there was no common thread, for each man's life was unique, and though all sinned, the corrosion those sins caused differed from one to the next, like the structure of a snowflake, never to be repeated. In Murat, what had it been?
Not fear. Astonishment, yes, rage, surely, but something more, deeper—sorrow at leaving a life's work undone. The dissection of the last look was always incomplete, Khan thought. He longed to know whether there was betrayal there, as well. Had Murat known who had ordered his assassination?
He looked at Stepan Spalko, who was holding out an envelope, heavy with money.
"Your fee," Spalko said. "Plus a bonus."
"Bonus?" The topic of money refocused Khan's attention fully on the immediate.
"There was no mention of a bonus."
Spalko shrugged. The ruddy moonlight made his cheek and neck shine like a bloody mass. "Khalid Murat was your twenty-fifth commission with me. Call it an anniversary present, if you wish."
"You're most generous, Mr. Spalko." Khan stowed the envelope away without looking inside. To have done otherwise would have been very bad manners.
"I've asked you to call me Stepan. I refer to you as Khan."
"That's different."
"How so?"
Khan stood very still, and the silence flowed toward him. It gathered in him, making him seem taller, broader.
"I'm not required to explain myself to you, Mr. Spalko."
"Come, come," Spalko said with a conciliatory gesture. "We're far from strangers. We share secrets of the most intimate nature."
The silence built. Somewhere on the outskirts of Grozny an explosion lit up the night, and the sound of small-arms fire came to them like strings of children's firecrackers. At length, Khan spoke. "In the jungle I learned two mortal lessons. The first was to trust absolutely only myself. The second was to observe the most minute proprietaries of civilization, because knowing your place in the world is the only thing standing between you and the anarchy of the jungle."
Spalko regarded him for a long time. The fitful glow from the firefight was in Khan's eyes, lending him a savage aspect. Spalko imagined him alone in the jungle, prey to privations, the quarry of greed and wanton bloodlust. The jungle of Southeast Asia was a world unto itself. A barbarous, pestilential area with its own peculiar laws. That Khan had not only survived there, but flourished, was, in Spalko's mind at least, the essential mystery surrounding him.
"I'd like to think we're more than businessman and client." Khan shook his head. "Death has a particular odor. I smell it on you." "And I on you." A slow smile crept across Spalko's face. "So you agree, there is something special between us."
"We're men of secrets," Khan said, "aren't we?"
"A worship of death; a shared understanding of its power." Spalko nodded his assent.
"I have what you requested." He held out a black file folder. Khan looked into Spalko's eyes for a moment. His discerning nature had caught a certain air of condescension that he found inexcusable. As he had long ago learned to do, he smiled at the offense, hiding his outrage behind the impenetrable mask of his face. Another lesson he had learned in the jungle: Acting in the moment, in hot blood, often led to an irreversible mistake; waiting in patience for the hot blood to cool was where all successful vengeance was bred. Taking the folder, he busied himself with opening the dossier. Inside, he found a single sheet of onionskin with three brief close-typed paragraphs and a photo of a handsome male face. Beneath the picture was a name: David Webb. "This is all of it?"
"Culled from many sources. All the information on him anyone has." Spalko spoke so smoothly Khan was certain he had rehearsed the reply.
"But this is the man."
Spalko nodded.
"There can be no doubt."
"None whatsoever."
Judging by the widening glow, the firefight had intensified. Mortars could be heard, bringing their rain of fire. Overhead, the moon seemed to glow a deeper red. Khan's eyes narrowed and his right hand curled slowly into a tight fist of hate. "I could never find a trace of him. I'd suspected he was dead."
"In a way," Spalko said, "he is."
He watched Khan walk across the bridge. He took out a cigarette and lit up, drawing the smoke into his lungs, letting it go reluctantly. When Khan had disappeared into the shadows, Spalko pulled out a cell phone, dialed an overseas number. A voice answered, and Spalko said, "He has the dossier. Is everything in place?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. At midnight your local time you'll begin the operation."
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
David Webb, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, was buried beneath a stack of ungraded term papers. He was striding down the musty back corridors of gargantuan Healy Hall, heading for the office of Theodore Barton, his department head, and he was late, hence this shortcut he had long ago discovered using narrow, ill-lighted passageways few students knew about or cared to use.
There was a benign ebb and flow to his life bound by the strictures of the university. His year was denned by the terms of the Georgetown semesters. The deep winter that began them gave grudging way to a tentative spring and ended in the heat and humidity of the second
semester's finals week. There was a part of him that fought against serenity, the part that thought of his former life in the clandestine service of the U.S. government, the part that kept him friends with his former handler, Alexander Conklin. He was about to round a corner when he heard harsh voices raised and mocking laughter and saw ominous-seeming shadows playing along the wall.
"Muthfucka, we gonna make your gook tongue come out the back of your head!" Bourne dropped the stack of papers he had been carrying and sprinted around the corner. As he did so, he saw three young black men in coats down to their ankles arrayed in a menacing semicircle around an Asian, trapping him against a corridor wall. They had a way of standing, their knees slightly bent, their upper limbs loose and swinging slightly that made their entire bodies seem like blunt and ugly aspects of weapons, cocked and ready. With a start, he recognized their prey was Rongsey Siv, a favorite student of his.
"Mutha fucka," snarled one, wiry, with a strung-out, reckless look on his defiant face,
"we come in here, gather up the goods to trade for the bling-bling."
"Can't ever have enough bling-bling," said another with an eagle tattoo on his cheek. He rolled a huge gold square-cut ring, one of many on the fingers of his right hand, back and forth. "Or don't you know the bling-bling, gook?"
"Yah, gook," the strung-out one said, goggle-eyed. "You don't look like you know shit."
"He wants to stop us," the one with the tattooed cheek said, leaning in toward Rongsey.
"Yah, gook, whatcha gonna do, kung-fuckin-fu us to death?" They laughed raucously, making stylized kicking gestures toward Rongsey, who shrank back even farther against the wall as they closed in.
The third black man, thick-muscled, heavyset, drew a baseball bat from underneath the voluminous folds of his long coat. "That right. Put your hands up, gook. We gonna break your knuckles good." He slapped the bat against his cupped palm. "You want it all at once or one at a time?"
"Yo," the strung-out one cried, "he don't get to choose." He pulled out his own baseball bat and advanced menacingly on Rongsey.
As the strung-out kid brandished his bat, Webb came at them. So silent was his approach, so intent were they on the damage they were about to inflict that they did not become aware of him until he was upon them.
He grabbed the strung-out kid's bat in his left hand as it was coming down toward Rongsey's head. Tattoo-cheek, on Webb's right, cursed mightily, swung his balled fist, knuckles bristling with sharp-edged rings, aiming for Webb's ribs. In that instant, from the veiled and shadowed place inside Webb's head, the Bourne persona took firm control. Webb deflected the blow from tattoo-cheek with his biceps, stepped forward and slammed his elbow into tattoo-cheek's sternum. He went down, clawing at his chest.
The third thug, bigger than the other two, cursed and, dropping his bat, pulled a switchblade. He lunged at Webb, who stepped into the attack, delivering a short, sharp blow to the inside of the assailant's wrist. The switchblade fell to the corridor floor, skittering away. Webb hooked his left foot behind the other's ankle and lifted up. The big thug fell on his back, turned over and scrambled away.
Bourne yanked the baseball bat out of the strung-out thug's grip. "Muthafuckin' FiveO," the thug muttered. His pupils were dilated, unfocused by the effects of whatever drugs he'd taken. He pulled a gun—a cheap Saturday-night special—and aimed it at Webb.
With deadly accuracy, Webb flung the bat, striking the strung-out thug between the eyes. He staggered back, crying out, and his gun went flying.
Alerted by the noise of the struggle, a pair of campus security guards appeared, rounding the corner at a run. They brushed past Webb, pounding after the thugs, who fled without a backward glance, the two helping the strung-out one. They burst through the rear door to the building, out into the bright sunshine of the afternoon, with the guards hot on their heels.
Despite the guards' intervention, Webb felt Bourne's desire to pursue the thugs run hot in his body. How quickly it had risen from its psychic sleep, how easily it had gained control of him. Was it because he wanted it to? Webb took a deep breath, gained a semblance of control and turned to face Rongsey Siv.
"Professor Webb!" Rongsey tried to clear his throat. "I don't know—" He seemed abruptly overcome. His large black eyes were wide behind the lenses of his glasses. His expression was, as usual, impassive, but in those eyes Webb could see all the fear in the world.
"It's okay now." Webb put his arm across Rongsey's shoulders. As always, his fondness for the Cambodian refugee was showing through his professorial reserve. He couldn't help it. Rongsey had overcome great adversity— losing almost all his family in the war. Rongsey and Webb had been in the same Southeast Asian jungles, and try as he might, Webb could not fully remove himself from the tangle of that hot, humid world. Like a recurring fever, it never really left you. He felt a shiver of recognition, like a dream one has while awake.
" Loak soksapbaee chea tay?" How are you? he asked in Khmer.
"I'm fine, Professor," Rongsey replied in the same language. "But I don't... I mean, how did you ... ?"
"Why don't we go outside?" Webb suggested. He was now quite late for Barton's meeting, but he couldn't care less. He picked up the switchblade and the gun. As he checked the gun's mechanism, the firing pin broke. He threw the useless gun in a trash bin but pocketed the switchblade.
Around the corner, Rongsey helped him with the spill of term papers. They then walked in silence through the corridors, which became increasingly crowded as they neared the front of the building. Webb recognized the special nature of this silence, the dense weight of time returning to normal after an incident of shared violence. It was a wartime thing, a consequence of the jungle; odd and unsettling that it should happen on this teeming metropolitan campus.
Emerging from the corridor, they joined the swarm of students crowding through the front doors to Healy Hall. Just inside, in the center of the floor, gleamed the hallowed Georgetown University seal. A great majority of the students were walking around it because a school legend held that if you walked on the seal you'd never graduate. Rongsey was one of those who gave the seal a wide berth, but Webb strode right across it with no qualms whatsoever.
Outside, they stood in the buttery spring sunlight, facing the trees and the Old Quadrangle, breathing the air with its hint of budding flowers. At their backs rose the looming presence of Healy Hall with its imposing Georgian red-brick facade, nineteenthcentury dormer windows, slate roof and central two-hundred-foot clock spire. The Cambodian turned to Webb. "Professor, thank you. If you hadn't come..."
"Rongsey," Webb said gently, "do you want to talk about it?" The student's eyes were dark, unreadable. "What's there to say?"
"I suppose that would depend on you."
Rongsey shrugged. "I'll be fine, Professor Webb. Really. This isn't the first time I've been called names."
Webb stood looking at Rongsey for a moment, and he was swept by sudden emotion that caused his eyes to sting. He wanted to take the boy in his arms, hold him close, promise him that nothing else bad would ever happen to him. But he knew that Rongsey's Buddhist training would not allow him to accept the gesture. Who could say what was going on beneath that fortresslike exterior. Webb had seen many others like Rongsey, forced by the exigencies of war and cultural hatred to bear witness to death, the collapse of a civilization, the kinds of tragedies most Americans could not understand. He felt a powerful kinship with Rongsey, an emotional bond that was tinged with a terrible sadness, recognition of the wound inside him that could never truly be healed. All this emotion stood between them, silently acknowledged perhaps but never articulated. With a small, almost sad smile, Rongsey formally thanked Webb again and they said their good-byes.
Webb stood alone amid the students and faculty hurrying by, and yet he knew that he wasn't truly alone. Despite his best efforts, the aggressive personality of Jason Bourne had once again asserted itself. He breathed slowly and deeply, concentrating hard, using the mental techniques
his psychiatrist friend, Mo Panov, had taught him for pushing the Bourne identity down. He concentrated first on his surrounding, on the blue and gold colors of the spring afternoon, on the gray stone and red brick of the buildings around the quad, of the movement of the students, the smiling faces of the girls, the laughter of the boys, the earnest talk of the professors. He absorbed each element in its entirety, grounding himself in time and place. Then, and only then, did he turn his thoughts inward. Years ago he had been working for the foreign service in Phnom Penh. He'd been married then, not to Marie, his current wife, but to a Thai woman named Dao. They had two children, Joshua and Alyssa, and lived in a house on the bank of the river. America was at war with North Vietnam, but the war had spilled over into Cambodia. One afternoon, while he was at work and his family had been swimming in the river, a plane had strafed them, killing them.
Webb had almost gone mad with grief. Finally, fleeing his house and Phnom Penh, he'd arrived in Saigon, a man with no past and no future. It had been Alex Conklin who had taken a heartsick, half-mad David Webb off the streets of Saigon and forged him into a first-rate clandestine operative. In Saigon, Webb had learned to kill, had turned his own self-hatred outward, inflicting his rage on others. When a member of Conklin's group—
an evil-tempered drifter named Jason Bourne—had been discovered to be a spy, it was Webb who had executed him. Webb had come to loathe the Bourne identity, but the truth was that it had often been his lifeline. Jason Bourne had saved Webb's life more times than he could remember. An amusing thought if it hadn't been so literal. Years later, when they had both returned to Washington, Conklin had given him a long-term assignment. He had become what amounted to a sleeper agent, taking the name of Jason Bourne, a man long dead, forgotten by everyone. For three years Webb was Bourne, turned himself into an international assassin of great repute in order to hunt down an elusive terrorist.
Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy Page 2
