"But to ensure that we'd have the highest percentage for success," Anne Held said, "you needed Jason Bourne to be able to vouch for you when you became Martin Lindros. Of course, he'd never do that willingly, so we needed to find a way to manipulate and use him. Since I had access to Bourne's file, we were able to exploit his one weakness-his memory-as well as his many strengths, like loyalty, tenacity, and a highly intelligent, paranoid mind."

Anne was also bound into an ap.r.o.n. She gripped a hammer in one gloved hand, a wide-headed chisel in the other. As Karim al-Jamil went to work on Overton's feet and legs, she placed the chisel into the crease on the inner side of the left elbow, then brought the hammer down in a quick, accurate strike onto the chisel's head. The body shop was once again alive with industry, as it had been in its happy heyday.

"But what was the trigger mechanism that would allow you access to Bourne's weakness?" she asked.

He gave her a thin smile as he concentrated on his grisly work. "My research on the subject of amnesiacs provided the answer: Amnesiacs react most strongly to emotionally charged situations. We needed to give Bourne a nasty shock, one that would jar his memory."

"Is that what you did when I told you that Bourne's wife had died suddenly and unexpectedly?"

With his forearm, Karim al-Jamil wiped a thick squirt of blood off his face. "What do we Bedouins say. Life is but Allah's will." He nodded. "In his grief, Bourne's sickness of memory threatened to overwhelm him. So I instructed you to present him with a cure."

"Now I see." She turned away momentarily from an eruption of gas. "Naturally, it had to come from his friend Martin Lindros. I gave Lindros the name and address of Dr. Allen Sunderland.

"But in fact the phone call came to us," Karim said. "We set up Bourne's appointment for a Tuesday, the day of the week when Sunderland and his staff aren't there. We subst.i.tuted our own Dr. Costin Veintrop, who posed as Sunderland."

"Brilliant, my darling!" Anne's eyes were shining with her admiration.

There was a large oval tub made of galvanized steel into which the body parts were dropped, one by one, like the beginnings of an experiment in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. Karim al-Jamil kept one eye on Anne, but she neither flinched nor blanched at what she was doing. She was going about her business in a matter-of-fact manner that both pleased and surprised him. One thing she was right about: He had underestimated her right down the line. The fact was, he was unprepared for a woman who exhibited the attributes of a man. He had been used to his sister, meek and subservient. Sarah had been a good girl, a credit to the family; in her slim form, all their honor had resided. She had not deserved to die young. Now revenge was the only way to win back the family honor that had been buried with her.

In the culture of his father, women were excluded from anything a man had to do. Of course, Karim al-Jamil's mother was an exception. But she hadn't converted to Islam. Mysteriously to Karim al-Jamil, his father had neither cared nor forced her to convert. He seemed to take great pleasure in his secular wife, though she had made for him a great many enemies among the imams and the faithful. Even more mysteriously to Karim al-Jamil, he didn't care about that, either. His mother mourned for their lost daughter, and he, the crippled old man, engulfed every day by her grief, was forced to mourn, too.

"What exactly did Veintrop do to Bourne?" Anne asked.

Happily bisecting a knee joint, Karim replied, "Veintrop is an unheralded genius in memory loss. It was he whom I consulted regarded Bourne's amnesiac state. He used an injection of certain chemically engineered proteins he designed to stimulate synapses in parts of Bourne's brain, subtly altering their makeup and function. The stimulation acts as a trauma, which Veintrop's research revealed can alter memories. Veintrop's protein injection is able to affect specific synapses, thus creating new memories. Each individual memory is designed to be triggered in Bourne's head by certain outside stimuli."

"I'd call that brainwashing," Anne said.

Karim nodded. "In a sense, yes. But in a whole new sphere that doesn't involve physical coercion, weeks of sensory deprivation, and articulated torture."

The oval basin was almost full. Karim signaled to Anne. Together they laid their tools on Overton's chest-which, other than his head, was about all that was left whole.

"Give me an example," she said.

Together they hoisted the basin by its oversize handles and moved it over to a large dry well that in earlier times had been used to illegally dump used motor oil.

"The sight of Hiram Cevik triggered an 'added' memory in Bourne-the tactic of showing a prisoner the freedom he'd lost as a means of getting him to talk. Otherwise he would never have taken Fadi out of the cells for any reason whatsoever. His action accomplished two things at once: It allowed Fadi to escape, and it put Bourne under suspicion by his own organization."

They tipped the basin. Out tumbled the contents, vanishing down the dry well.

"But I didn't feel that a single added memory was enough to slow Bourne down," Karim said, "so I had Veintrop add an element of physical discomfort-a debilitating headache whenever an added memory is triggered."

As they were carrying the receptacle back to the table, Anne said, "This much is clear. But wasn't it unconscionably dangerous for Fadi to allow himself to be captured in Cape Town?"

"Everything I design and do is by default dangerous," said Karim al-Jamil. "We're in a war for the hearts, minds, and future of our people. There's no action too perilous for us. As for Fadi, first of all he was posing as the arms dealer Hiram Cevik. Second of all, he knew that we had arranged for Bourne to unwittingly rescue him."

"And what if Dr. Veintrop's procedure hadn't worked, or hadn't worked properly?"

"Well, then, we always had you, my darling. I would have provided you with instructions that would have extracted my brother."

He switched on the chain saw, made short shrift of the remains. Into the dry well they went.

"Fortunately, we never had to implement that part of the plan."

"We a.s.sumed Soraya Moore would call the DCI to clear Bourne's request to release Fadi," Anne said. "Instead she called Tim Hytner to inform him that he should meet her outside on the grounds. She told him exactly where Fadi would be. Since I was monitoring all her calls, you were able to set the rest of the escape plan in motion."

Karim picked up a can of gasoline, unscrewed the cap, poured a third of the contents into the dry well. "Allah even provided us with the perfect scapegoat: Hytner."

Pulling off the car's gas cap, he splashed most of what was left in the can into the car's interior. No forensics team was going to get anything out of what would be left. Pointing to the rear entrance, he backed away from the car, pouring a trail from the can as he went.

They both bellied up to the oversize soapstone sink, stripped off their gloves, and washed the blood off their arms and cheeks. Then they untied their ap.r.o.ns and dropped them onto the floor.

When they were at the door, Anne said, "There's still Lerner to consider."

Karim al-Jamil nodded. "You'll have to watch your back until I decide how to handle him. We can't deal with him the way we did Overton."

He lit a match and dropped it at his feet. With a whoosh, blue flame sprang up, rushed headlong toward the car.

Anne opened the door, and they walked out into ghetto darkness.

Way before M&N Bodywork burst into flames, Tyrone had the man and woman in his sights. He'd been crouched on a stone wall, deep in the shadows of an old oak that spread its gnarled branches in a domed Medusa's nest. He had on black sweats, and his hoodie was up over the back of his head. He'd been hanging, waiting for DJ Tank to bring a pair of gloves because, d.a.m.n, it was cold.

He'd been blowing on his hands when the car had drawn up in front of the ruins of M&N Bodywork. For months, he'd had his eye on the place: He was hoping it had been abandoned, and he coveted it as a base for his crew. But six weeks ago, he'd been told of some activity there, late at night when any legitimate business was shut down, and he'd taken DJ Tank over for a look-see.

Sure enough, people were inside. Two bearded men. Even more interestingly, there was another bearded man posted outside. When he'd turned, Tyrone had clearly seen the glint of a gun at the man's waist. He knew who wore beards like that: either Orthodox Jews or Arab extremists.

When he and DJ Tank had sneaked around to the side and peered in through a grimy window, the men were outfitting the place with canisters, tools, and some kind of machinery. Though the electricity had been restored, clearly no renovations were being contemplated, and when the men left, they'd locked the front door with an immense padlock that Tyrone's expert eye knew was unbreakable.

On the other hand, there was the back door, hidden in a narrow back alley, which hardly anyone knew about. Tyrone did, though. There wasn't hardly anything in his turf he didn't know about or could get info on at a moment's notice.

After the men had left, Tyrone had picked the lock on the back door, and they went in. What did he find? A mess of power tools, which told him nothing about the men and their intentions. But the canisters, now they were another story entirely. He inspected them one by one: trinitrotoluene, penthrite, carbon disulfide, octogen. He knew what TNT was, of course, but he'd never heard of the others. He'd called Deron, who'd told him. Except for carbon disulfide, they were all high-level explosives. Penthrite, also known as PETN, was used as the core in detonator fuses. Octogen, also known as HMX, was a polymer-bonded explosive, a solid like C-4. Unlike TNT, it wasn't sensitive to motion or vibration.

From that night on the incident had sat in his mind like a squalling baby. Tyrone wanted to understand what that baby was saying, so he'd staked out M&N Bodyworks, and tonight his vigilance was rewarded.

Lookee here: a body on the zinc-topped table in the center of the floor. And a man and a woman in ap.r.o.ns and work gloves were cutting the d.a.m.n thing up as if it were the carca.s.s of a steer. What some people got up to! Tyrone shook his head as he and DJ Tank peered through the smeared gla.s.s of the side window. And then he felt a small shock ping the back of his neck. He recognized the face of the corpse on the table! It was the man who had followed Miss S a couple of days ago, the one she said she'd take care of.

He watched the man and the woman at their work, but after the shock of recognition he paid no attention to what they were doing. Instead he spent his time more advantageously memorizing their faces. He had a feeling Miss S would be very interested in what these two were up to.

Then the night lit up, he felt an intense heat on his cheek, and flames gushed out of the building.

Fire-or more accurately arson-was no stranger to Tyrone, so he couldn't say he was shocked, merely saddened. He'd lost the use of M&N Bodywork for sure. But then a thought occurred to him, and he whispered something to DJ Tank.

When they'd snuck into the place the first time, the interior had been stocked with all manner of explosives and accelerants. If the chemicals had still been inside, the explosion would have taken out the entire block, him and DJ Tank with it.

Now he asked himself: If the explosives weren't inside, where the f.u.c.k were they?

Secretary of Defense E. R. "Bud" Halliday took his meals at no fixed time of the day or night. But unless summoned by the president for a policy skull session or to take the current temperature of the Senate, unless jawboning with the vice president or the Joint Chiefs, he took his meals in his limousine. Save for certain necessary pit stops of various sorts, the limousine, like a shark, was never at rest, but continued to roll through the streets and avenues of D.C. undisturbed.

Matthew Lerner enjoyed certain privileges in the secretary's company, not the least of which was to break bread with Bud, as he was about to do this evening. In the world outside the tinted-gla.s.s windows, the hour was early for dinner. But this was the secretary's world; dinner was bang on time.

After a short prayer, they dug into their plates of Texas barbeque-ma.s.sive beef ribs, a deep, glossy red; baked beans with bits of fiery chile peppers in them; and, in the lone concession to the vegetable kingdom, steak fries. All of this was washed down with bottles of Shiner Blonde, proudly brewed, as Bud would say, in Fort Worth.

Finished in jig time, the secretary wiped his hands and mouth, then grabbed another bottle of Blonde and sat back. "So the DCI hired you to be his personal a.s.sa.s.sin."

"Looks that way," Lerner said.

The secretary's cheeks were flushed, gleaming with a lovely sheen of beef fat. "Any thoughts about that?"

"I've never backed down from either a job or a dare," Lerner said.

Bud glanced down at the sheet of paper Lerner had handed him as he'd climbed into the limo. He'd already read it, of course; he did it for effect, something at which the secretary was very good.

"It took some doing, but I found out where Bourne is. His face came up on the closed-circuit security cameras at Kennedy International." Bud looked up, sucked a shred of charred beef from between his molars. "This a.s.signment's going to take you to Odessa. That's quite a far piece from CI headquarters."

Lerner knew the secretary meant it was going to take him away from the mission Bud had sent him on in the first place. "Not necessarily," he said. "I do this for the Old Man and he owes me big time. He'll know it and I'll know it. I can leverage that."

"What about Held?"

"I've put someone I can trust on Anne Held." Lerner mopped the last of the thick, spicy sauce with a slice of Wonder Bread. "He's a dogged sonovab.i.t.c.h. You'd have to kill him to get him to let go."

Bourne dreamed again. Only this time, he knew it was no dream. He was reliving a shard of memory, another piece of the puzzle clicking into place: In a filthy Odessa alleyway, Soraya is kneeling over him. He hears the bitter regret in her voice. "That b.a.s.t.a.r.d Tariq ibn Said had me fooled from the outset," she says. "He was Hamid ibn Ashef's son, Nadir al-Jamuh. He gave me the information that led us into this trap. Jason, I f.u.c.ked up."

Bourne sits up. Hamid ibn Ashef. He had to find his target, shoot him dead. Orders from Conklin. "Do you know where Hamid ibn Ashef is now?"

"Yes, and this time the intel's straight," Soraya says. "He's at Otrada Beach."

Oleksandr stirred, nudging Bourne's thigh with his blunt black muzzle. Bourne, blinking the memory from in front of his eyes, struggled to concentrate on the present. He must have fallen asleep, even though he'd meant to stay vigilant. Oleksandr had been vigilant for him.

Propped up on the planks in the tiny underground cell, he saw the ominous pearling of the darkness. The boxer's neck fur bristled. Someone was coming!

Ignoring the flood of pain, Bourne swung his legs over the side. It was too soon for Soraya to be coming back. Leaning against the wall, he levered himself to his feet, stood for a moment, feeling Oleksandr's warm, muscular form against him. He was still weak, but he'd spent his time productively, going into energizing meditation and deep breathing. His forces might be weakened by blood loss, but he was still able to marshal them.

The change in the light was still faint, but now he could confirm that it wasn't coming from a fixed source. It was bobbing up and down, which meant that it was being held by someone coming toward him down the tunnel.

Beside him, Oleksandr, the fur at the ruff of his neck standing straight up, licked his lips in antic.i.p.ation. Bourne rubbed the place between his ears, as he'd seen Soraya do. Who was she, really? he asked himself. What had she meant to him? The little reactions to him she'd had when he'd first come into the Typhon offices, seeming odd then, now made sense. She'd expected him to remember her, to remember their time here. What had they done? Why had it taken her out of the field?

The light was no longer formless. He had no more time to ponder his fractured memory. It was time to act. But as he began to move, a wave of vertigo caused him to stagger. He grasped the stone wall as his knees buckled. The light brightened and there was nothing he could do.

Fadi, moving along the left-hand branch, kept his ears open for even the smallest sound. Each time he heard something, he swung the light in its direction. All he saw were rats, red-eyed, skittering away with a flick of their tails. There was an acute sense in him of unfinished business. The thought of his father-his brilliant, robust, powerful father-reduced to a drooling sh.e.l.l, bound into a wheelchair, staring at a gray infinity, was like a fire in his gut. Bourne had done that, Bourne and the woman. Not so far from here, and so close to being shot to death by him. He had no illusions when it came to Jason Bourne. The man was a magician-changing his appearance, materializing as if out of nowhere, vanishing just as mysteriously. In fact, it was Bourne who had inspired his own chameleon-like changes of ident.i.ty.

His life's work had changed the moment the shot Bourne had fired lodged in his father's spine. The bullet had caused instant paralysis. Worse, the trauma had brought on a stroke, robbing his father of the ability to speak, or to think coherently.

Fadi had internalized his radical philosophy. As far as his followers were concerned, nothing had changed. But inside, he knew it had. Since his father's maiming at the hands of Jason Bourne, he had his own personal agenda, which was to inflict the worst possible damage on Bourne and Soraya Moore before he killed them. A quick death for them was intolerable. He knew that, and so did his brother, Karim al-Jamil. The living death of their father had bonded them in a way nothing else could. They became one mind in two bodies, dedicated to the revenge they would wreak. And so they had applied their prodigious minds to the task.

Fadi-born Abu Ghazi Nadir al-Jamuh ibn Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib-pa.s.sed a hole in the pa.s.sageway on his left. Up ahead, his light picked out pa.s.sageways left and right. He went several meters down each of them without finding a sign of anyone.

Deciding he'd been wrong after all, he turned back, heading toward the fork. He was hurrying now to catch up with Lieutenant Kove and his men. He desperately needed to be in on the kill. There was always the chance that in the heat of battle, his express orders to keep Bourne alive would be forgotten.

He'd just pa.s.sed the hole in the pa.s.sageway when he paused. Turning, he probed the darkness with his light. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but he ventured in anyway. Quite soon, he came to the debris fall. He saw the bulging walls, the substantial cracks in the stone, the groaning wooden beams. The place was a mess, undoubtedly unsafe.

Playing the beam of light over the debris, he saw that there was a small gap between the top of it and the ceiling of the chamber. He was just contemplating whether it was wide enough for a man to slither through when he heard the gunfire echoing through the catacombs.

They've found him! he thought. Turning on his heel, he emerged into the main pa.s.sageway, heading for the fork at a dead run.

Eighteen

SORAYA, flying down the pa.s.sageway, felt stone fragments from the ricochets whiz by her. One struck her shoulder, almost made her cry out. She pulled it out of her on the run, dropped it for her pursuers to find. She was determined to protect Bourne, to atone for the dreadful mistake in judgment she'd made the last time they'd been in Odessa.

She had switched off her light and was traveling by memory alone, which was far from the ideal way to make her way through these catacombs. Still, she knew she had no choice. She had been counting her strides. By her calculations, rough though they might be, she was five kilometers from the fork. Another two klicks to the access nearest Dr. Pavlyna's house.

But first she'd have to negotiate three turns, another branching. She heard something. An instant later the catacombs behind her were briefly, though dimly, lit. Someone had picked up her trail! Taking advantage of the light to orient herself, she dashed into a tunnel on her right. Blackness, the sounds of pursuit for the moment muted.

Then the toe of her right shoe struck something. She stumbled, pitched forward onto hands and knees. She could feel the ground rise irregularly just in front of her, and her heart clenched. It could only mean a new debris fall. But how extensive was it? She'd have to risk turning on her light, if only for a second or two.

This she did, clambering up and over the new fall, continuing on. She heard no more sounds of pursuit. It was entirely possible that she'd eluded the police, but she couldn't count on it.

She kept going, pushing herself. Around the second turn to the left she went, then the third. Approximately a kilometer ahead, she knew, was the second branching. After that, she was home free.

Fadi discovered that the police had not only caught sight of Bourne but fired at him. Without asking Kove's permission, he struck the offending officer a terrible blow that nearly cracked his skull. Kove stood red-faced, biting his lip. He said nothing, even when Fadi ordered them on. Several hundred meters farther, Fadi spotted a stone shard, shiny with blood in the floodlights. He picked it up, closed his fist around it, and was heartened.

But now, this far into the catacombs, he knew that following in a pack made no sense. He turned to Kove and said, "The longer he stays in the catacombs, the greater his chance of eluding us. Split up the men, let them fan out singly as they would in a forest in enemy territory."

He could see that Kove's men were rapidly losing their nerve-and that their anxiety was spreading to their commander. He had to get them moving now or it would happen not at all.

He drew close to Kove, whispering in the lieutenant's ear: "We're losing the race against time. Give the order now, or I will."

Kove jerked as if coming in contact with a live wire. He retreated a pace, licked his lips. For a moment, he seemed mesmerized by Fadi. Then, with a minute shiver, he turned to his men and delivered the order for them to fan out, one man to a pa.s.sageway or arm.

Soraya sensed the branching up ahead. A wisp of fresh air brushed her cheek like a lover's caress: the access point. Darkness behind her. It was very damp. She could smell the rot as the underground water worked on the earth and wood, decomposing it bit by bit. She risked another flicker of light. She ignored the weeping walls, because she saw the Y juncture less than twenty meters directly ahead. Here she needed to take the left branch.

At that moment a splinter of light probed the pa.s.sage behind her. At once she extinguished her light. Her pulse throbbed in her temples; her heart raced. Had her pursuer seen the light up ahead and realized she was here? Though she needed to continue, she nevertheless could not allow Dr. Pavlyna to be compromised. The doctor was CI, under deep cover.

She stood still, turned so that she could see the way she had come. The light was gone. No, there it was again, a tiny beacon in the pitch blackness, less diffuse now. Someone was, indeed, coming down this part of the catacombs.

Slowly, she began to back up, edging away from her pursuer, moving cautiously toward the Y juncture, never taking her eyes from the bobbing stab of light. She kept moving, trying to decide what to do. Then it was too late.

Her back foot broke the soft surface of the catacomb floor. She tried to shift her weight forward, but the suck of the disintegrated floor pulled her backward, and down. She flung out her arms for balance, but it wasn't enough. She had already sunk into the ooze to the level of her thighs. She began to struggle.

A sharp brightening brought the pa.s.sageway into sudden focus. A black blob resolved itself into a familiar shape: a Ukrainian policeman, ma.s.sive looking in the confided s.p.a.ce.

He saw her, his eyes widened, and he drew his gun.