Khan snapped on the flashlight he carried with him, sat immobile, staring at Bourne. Unfolding his legs, he kicked out violently, the sole of his shoe catching Bourne on the shoulder so that he rolled over on his side facing Khan. Bourne groaned, and his eyes fluttered open. He gasped, took another shuddering breath, inhaling the fumes from the aviation fuel, and convulsed, vomiting in the space between where he lay in burning pain and misery and where Khan sat serene as Buddha himself.
"I've been down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever; yet have I brought up my life from the darkness," Khan said, paraphrasing Jonah. He continued to stare fixedly into Bourne's reddened swollen face. "You look like shit." Bourne struggled to rise onto one elbow. Khan calmly kicked it out from under him. Again Bourne tried to sit up and again Khan thwarted him. The third time, however, Khan did not make a move and Bourne sat up, facing him.
The faint and maddeningly enigmatic smile played across Khan's lips, but there was a sudden spark of flames in his eyes.
"Hello, Father," he said. "It's been such a long time I was beginning to think we'd never have this moment."
Bourne shook his head slightly. "What the hell are you talking about?" "I'm your son."
"My son is ten years old."
Khan's eyes were glittery. "Not that one. I'm the one you left behind in Phnom Penh." All at once, Bourne felt violated. A red rage rose up inside him. "How dare you? I don't know who you are, but my son Joshua is dead." The effort cost him, for he had inhaled more of the fumes, and he bent over suddenly, retching again, but there was nothing left inside him to vomit up.
"I'm not dead." Khan's voice was almost tender as he leaned forward, pulled Bourne back up to face him. In so doing, the small carved stone Buddha fell away from his hairless chest, swinging a little with his efforts to keep Bourne upright. "As you can see."
"No, Joshua is dead! I put the coffin in the ground myself, along with Dao and Alyssa!
They were wrapped in American flags."
"Lies, lies and more lies!" Khan held the carved stone Buddha in the palm of his hand, held it toward Bourne. "Look at this, and remember, Bourne." Reality seemed to slip away from Bourne. He heard his rapid pulse thundering in his inner ears, a tidal wave that threatened to pick him up and carry him off. It couldn't be! It couldn't! "Where—where did you get that?"
"You know what this is, don't you?" The Buddha disappeared behind the curl of his fingers. "Have you finally recognized your long-lost son Joshua?"
"You're not Joshua!" Bourne was enraged now, his face dark, his lips pulled back from his teeth in an animal snarl. "Which Southeast Asia diplomat did you kill to get it?" He laughed grimly. "Yes, I know more about you than you think."
"Then you're sadly mistaken. This is mine, Bourne. Do you understand?" He opened his hand, revealed the Buddha again, the stone dark with the imprint of his sweat. "The Buddha is mine!"
"Liar!" Bourne leaped at him, his arms coming around from behind his back. He had flexed his muscles—the cords expanding as Khan had wound the wire around him—then using the slack had worked his way out of the bonds while Khan had been gloating. Khan was caught out, unprepared for his headlong bull-rush. He tumbled backward, Bourne on top of him. The flashlight struck the deck, rolling back and forth, its potent beam flashing on them, then off, illuminating an expression here, a bulging muscle there. In this eerily striped and stippled darkness and light, so like the dense jungle they had left behind, they fought like beasts, breathing in each other's enmity, struggling for supremacy.
Bourne, his teeth gritted, struck Khan again and again in a maddened attack. Khan managed to gain a grip on Bourne's thigh, pressed in on the nerve bundle there. Bourne lurched, his temporarily paralyzed leg buckling beneath him. Khan struck him hard on the point of the chin, and Bourne staggered further, shaking his head. He grabbed hold of his switchblade just as Khan delivered another massive blow. Bourne dropped the knife and Khan picked it up, flipped open the blade.
He stood over Bourne now, pulled him up by the front of his shirt. A brief tremor passed through him, as a current sizzles through a wire when the switch is thrown. "I'm your son. Khan is a name I took, just as David Webb took the name Jason Bourne."
"No!" Bourne fairly shouted this over the rising noise and vibration of the engines.
"My son died with the rest of my family in Phnom Penh!"
"I am Joshua Webb," Khan said. "You abandoned me. You left me to the jungle, to my death."
The point of the knife hovered over Bourne's throat. "How many times I almost died. I would have, I'm sure of it, if I didn't have your memory to hold on to."
"How dare you use his name! Joshua is dead!" Bourne's face was livid, his teeth bared in animal rage. His vision was clouded with blood-lust.
"Maybe he is." The knife-blade lay against Bourne's skin. A millimeter more and it would draw blood. "I'm Khan now. Joshua—the Joshua you knew—is dead. I've come back for revenge, to deliver your punishment for abandoning me. I could've killed you so many times in the last few days, but I stayed my hand because before I killed you I wanted you to know what you had done to me." Khan's lips opened and a bubble of spittle grew at the corner of his mouth. "Why did you abandon me? How could you have run away!"
The plane gave a terrific lurch as it began to taxi out onto the runway. The blade sprayed blood as it sliced into Bourne's skin, then it was lifted away as Khan lost his balance. Bourne took the advantage, drove his balled fist into Khan's side. Khan swept his foot back, hooking it behind Bourne's ankle, and Bourne went down. The plane slowed, turning onto the head of the runway.
"I didn't run away!" Bourne shouted. "Joshua was taken from me!" Khan pounced on him, the knife flashing down. Bourne twisted and the blade drove past his right ear. He was aware of the ceramic gun secreted at his right hip, but try as he might he wouldn't be able to get to it without leaving himself open to a fatal attack. They struggled, their muscles bulging, their faces engorged with effort and rage. Their breath sawed from between half-open mouths, their eyes and minds searching for the most minute opening as they attacked and defended, counterattacked only to be rebuffed. They were well matched, if not in age, then in speed, strength, skill and cunning. It was as if they knew each other's minds, as if they could anticipate each other's moves a split second beforehand, thus neutralizing whatever advantage had been sought. They did not fight with dispassion and, therefore, they did not fight at peak level. All their emotion had been flushed out of the depths, lay stranded and squirming in the conscious mind, like an oil slick clouding water.
The plane lurched, the fuselage trembling as the plane began its race down the runway. Bourne slipped and Khan used his free hand as a cudgel to draw Bourne's attention away from the knife. Bourne countered, striking the inside of Khan's left wrist. But now the blade-point flashed in on him. He stepped back and to the side, inadvertently unlatching the bay door. The rising motion of the plane caused the unlocked door to swing open. As the runway blurred by below, Bourne splayed himself out like a starfish to keep himself inside the plane, gripping the doorframe tightly with both hands. Grinning maniacally, Khan leaned in toward Bourne, the knife-blade describing a wicked shallow arc that would cut across the entire width of Bourne's abdomen.
Khan lunged just as the plane was about to lift off the runway. At the last possible instant, Bourne let go with his right hand. His body, driven out and back by gravity, swung so violently away that his shoulder was nearly dislocated. Where his body had been was now a gaping space through which Khan fell, tumbling to the tarmac below. Bourne had one final glimpse of him, nothing more than a gray ball against the black of the runway.
Then the plane was airborne and Bourne was swinging up, farther from the open doorway. He struggled; rain whipped against him like chain-mail. The wind threatened to take his breath away, but it scrubbed the last of the jet fuel from his face, the rain rinsing his stinging red-rimmed eyes, flushing the poison from his skin and tissue.
The plane banked to the right and Khan's flashlight rolled across the cargo bay deck, tumbled out after him. Bourne knew that if he did not get himself inside within seconds, he would be lost. The terrible strain on his arm was far too intense for him to hold on much beyond that.
Swinging his leg around, he managed to hook the back of his left ankle into the doorway. Then, with a mighty effort, he heaved himself forward, the back of his knee clamped against the raised frame, giving himself both purchase and leverage enough to turn so that he was facing the fuselage. He got his right hand on the lip of the seal and in this fashion was able to work his way into the interior. His last act was to slam the door shut.
Bourne, bruised, bleeding and in a great deal of pain, collapsed into an exhausted heap. In the frightful, turbulent darkness of the shuddering interior, he saw again the small carved stone Buddha that he and his first wife had given Joshua for his fourth birthday. Dao had wanted the spirit of Buddha to be with their son from the earliest age. Joshua, who had died along with Dao and his little sister when the enemy plane had strafed the river they had been playing in.
Joshua was dead. Dao, Alyssa, Joshua—they were all dead, their bodies ripped asunder by the hail of bullets from the dive-bombing plane. His son could not be alive, he could not. To think otherwise would be to invite insanity. Then who was Khan really, and why was he playing this hideously cruel game?
Bourne had no answers. The plane dipped and rose, the pitch of the engines changing as it reached cruising altitude. It grew frigid, his breath clouding as it left his nose and mouth. He wrapped his arms around himself, rocking. It was not possible. It was not!
He gave an inarticulate animal cry, and all at once he was undone by pain and utter despair. His head sank, and he wept bitter tears of rage, disbelief and grief.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the full belly of Flight 113, Jason Bourne was asleep, but in his unconscious mind his life—a far-off life he had buried long ago—was once again unspooling. His dreams were filled to overflowing with images, feelings, sights and sounds he had spent the intervening years pushing down as far from his conscious thoughts as they would go. What had happened that hot summer's day in Phnom Penh? No one knew. At least, no one who was still alive. This much was fact: While he sat bored and restless in his aircooled office at the American Foreign Services complex, attending a meeting, his wife Dao had taken their two children swimming in the wide, muddy river just outside their house. From out of nowhere, an enemy plane had banked, dropping from the sky. It strafed the river where David Webb's family swam and splashed and played. How many times had he envisioned the terrible sight? Had Dao seen the plane first?
But it had come upon them so swiftly, swooping down in a silent glide. If so, she must have gathered their children to her, pushing them beneath the water, covering them with her own body in a vain attempt to save them even while their screams echoed in her ears, their blood flecked her face, even while she felt the pain of her own impending death. This, in any event, was what he believed, what he dreamed, what had driven him to the edge of madness. For the screams he imagined Dao had heard just before the end were the same screams he heard night after night, starting awake, his heart racing, his blood pounding. Those dreams had forced him to abandon his house, all that he had held dear, for the sight of each familiar object had been like a stab in his guts. He had fled Phnom Penh for Saigon, where Alexander Conklin had taken charge of him. If only he could have left his nightmares behind in Phnom Penh. In the dripping jungles of Vietnam, they came back to him again and again, as if they were wounds he needed to inflict on himself. Because this truth, above all others, remained: He could not forgive himself for not being there, for not protecting his wife and children. He cried out now in his tortured dreams thirty thousand feet over the stormy Atlantic. Of what use is a husband and a father, he asked himself as he had a thousand times before, if he failed to protect his family?
The DCI was woken out of a sound sleep at five in the morning by a priority call from the National Security Advisor, summoning him to her office in one hour. Just when did this bitch-woman sleep? he wondered as he put down the phone. He sat on the edge of his bed, facing away from Madeleine. Nothing disturbed her sleep, he thought sourly. Long ago she had taught herself to sleep through the phone ringing at all hours of the night and morning.
"Wake up!" he said, shaking Madeleine awake. "There's a flap on and I need coffee." Without a note of complaint, she rose, slipped on her robe and slippers and went down the hall to the kitchen.
Rubbing his face, the DCI padded into the bathroom, closed the door. Sitting on the toilet, he called the DDCI. Why the hell should Lindros be sleeping when his superior was not? To his consternation, however, Martin Lindros was wide awake.
"I've been spending all night in the Four-Zero archives." Lindros was referring to the maximum-security files on CIA personnel. "I think I know all there is to know about both Alex Conklin and Jason Bourne."
"Great. Find me Bourne then."
"Sir, knowing what I know about the two of them, how closely they worked together, how many times they went out on a limb for each other, saved each other's lives, I find it highly improbable that Bourne would murder Alex Conklin."
"Alonzo-Ortiz wants to see me," the DCI said irritably. "After that fiasco at Washington Circle, d'you think I should tell her what you've just told me?"
"Well, no, but—"
"You're goddamned right, sonny boy. I've got to give her facts, facts that add up to good news."
Lindros cleared his throat. "At the moment, I don't have any. Bourne has vanished."
"Vanished? Jesus Christ, Martin, what the hell kind of intelligence operation are you running?"
"The man's a magician."
"He's flesh and blood, just like the rest of us," the DCI thundered. "How the hell did he slip through your fingers yet again? I thought you had all the bases covered!"
"We did. He simply—"
"Vanished, I know. This is what you have for me? Alonzo-Ortiz will have my fucking head on a platter, but not before I have yours!"
The DCI cut the connection, flung the phone through the open doorway onto the bed. By the time he had showered, dressed and taken a sip of coffee from the mug Madeleine obediently held out, his car was waiting for him.
Through the pane of bullet-proof glass, he drank in the facade of his house, dark-red brick with pale stone quoins at the corners, working shutters at every window. It had once belonged to a Russian tenor, Maxim something-or-other, but the DCI liked it because it had about it a certain mathematical elegance, an aristocratic air that could no longer be found in buildings of a younger vintage. Best of all was its sense of Old World privacy, owing to a cobbled courtyard screened by leafy poplars and a hand-worked iron fence. He sat back in the plush seat of the Lincoln Town Car, watching morosely as Washington slept on around him. Christ, at this hour only the fucking robins are up, he thought. Aren't I due the privilege of seniority? After all these years of service, don't I deserve to sleep past five o'clock?
They sped across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the Potomac gun-metal gray, looking flat and hard as an airport runway. On the other side, looming over the more or less Doric temple of the Lincoln Memorial, was the Washington Monument, dark and forbidding as the spears the Spartans once used to drive through the hearts of their enemies.
Each time the water closes over him, he hears a musical sound, as of the bells the monks are sounding, echoing from ridge to ridge in the forested mountains; the monks he hunted when he was with the Khmer Rouge. And the smell of, what is it? cinnamon. The water, swirling with a malevolent current, is alive with sounds and scents from he knows not where. It seeks to drag him down, and once again he's sinking. No matter how hard he struggles, how desperately he strikes out for the surface, he feels himself spiraling down, as if weighted with lead. His hands are scrabbling at the thick rope tied around his left ankle, but it's so slick it keeps sliding through
his fingers. What is at the end of the rope? He peers down into the shadowy depths through which he's sinking. It seems imperative to him that he know what is dragging him to his death, as if that knowledge might save him from a horror for which he has no name. He's falling, falling, tumbling into darkness, unable to understand the nature of his desperate predicament. Below him, at the end of the taut rope, he sees a shape— the thing that will cause his death. Emotion sticks in his throat like a mouthful of nettles, and as he tries to define the shape, the musical sound comes to him again, clearer this time, not bells, something else, something at once intimate and barely remembered. At last, he identifies the thing that's causing him to drown: It's a human body. All at once, he begins to weep.... Khan awoke with a start, a whimper caught in his throat. He bit down hard on his lip, looked around the darkened cabin of the plane. Outside, all was black as pitch. He had fallen asleep even though he'd promised himself he wouldn't, knowing that if he did he would be trapped in his recurring nightmare. He rose, went to the lavatory, where he used the paper towels to wipe the sweat off his face and arms. He felt more tired than when the flight had taken off. While he was staring at himself in the mirror, the pilot announced their airtime to Orly Airport: four hours, fifty minutes. An eternity for Khan.
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