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“It’s a sad day for you, Viktor. I agree, but I can’t sympathize.” Boris shook his former boss until his teeth chattered. “Now, fucker, tell me the details, and you can cry yourself to sleep.”
Soraya stood perfectly still. El-Arian’s touch was toxic, as if he had somehow exposed her to polonium-210 and now she was rotting from the inside out, weak and defenseless.
“Who are you, mademoiselle?”
Soraya said nothing and stared straight ahead. The pounding in her head made it difficult to gather her defenses.
“It seems that we’re a mystery to each other, M. El-Arian.”
He wrenched at her wrists and she gasped. “Enemies by whatever names we call ourselves.”
“Did Marchand order Laurent’s death, or did you?”
“Marchand was a bureaucrat.” El-Arian’s voice was like the scrape of sandpaper. “His mind was fixed on petty things. He lacked the vision to conceive of the traitor’s death.”
She looked at him, then, a terrible mistake. She was riveted, paralyzed. Never before had she believed in the concepts of Good and Evil, but his mesmeric eyes struck her as windows into an unbearable evil.
She grabbed the paperweight and smashed it into El-Arian’s temple. He relinquished his hold on her as he staggered back into the chair. It spun away from him on its casters and he pitched down onto the floor. Soraya turned and ran out of the office, down the hall. She heard a discreet alarm sound—El-Arian must have pressed a panic button. A security guard appeared, pulling a sidearm from a black leather holster. Rushing him, she smashed her elbow into his throat, and he went down. She bent to take his weapon, but he grabbed her and she had to kick him in the face to free herself. She passed up the elevator; it would be a death trap. Racing down the hallway, past open doors and startled faces, she reached the top of one of the staircases leading down to the ground floor. Behind her, she heard El-Arian cursing her.
She took the stairs two at a time, stumbling a bit because of the incessant pounding in her head, but managed to hold herself upright with one hand clutching the polished wooden banister. But she was less than halfway down when a pair of security guards converged from either side of the ground floor and rushed the stairs. Both men had their service revolvers out.
Soraya turned back, but El-Arian fairly flew down the stairs. He had a gun in his hand. He reached out and, as she tried to dive away from him, snatched her into his grasp.
29
BOURNE RETURNED REBEKA’S smile as he exited the plane. He could smell the light rose of her perfume all the way down the jetway. He saw the security officer standing by just as she described.
“Pardon me,” Bourne said in Arabic. “This is my first visit to Damascus. Could you recommend a good hotel to stay at?”
The officer stared at Bourne as if he were an insect, then grunted. Bourne bumped against him as he was getting out of the way of a woman being escorted off the plane in a wheelchair. Bourne apologized, the security officer shrugged while he was writing down his recommendations. Thanking him, Bourne walked off with his clearance card.
He was already behind the rest of the debarking passengers and now he fell farther back. Then he saw what he was looking for: a door marked NO ADMITTANCE. OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY. Beside the door was an electronic reader. He swiped the stolen card and pushed the door open. He had no idea who would be monitoring passengers going through Immigration, he only knew he didn’t want to be identified entering Damascus by anyone, especially Severus Domna.
He took the back halls of the airport, unsure of where he was going until he found a fire-drill map of the area screwed to a wall. In fifteen seconds he had memorized the map and had worked out the route he wanted to take.
Soraya felt herself being dragged backward, the cold metal of the gun’s muzzle hard against the side of her head. Seeing the security guards hesitate, she felt disoriented. Didn’t these men work for El-Arian? Then they parted and she saw Aaron, Jacques Robbinet, and a young man she didn’t recognize, who was scrutinizing her with a cold physician’s eye. The entire ground floor had been evacuated.
“Put the weapon down,” Aaron said. He was armed, as well, with a SIG. Aaron advanced between the two guards. “Put it down, let the woman go, and we’ll all walk out of here peacefully.”
“There is no chance of peace,” El-Arian said, “here or anywhere.”
“There’s nowhere to run,” Aaron said as he took a step forward. “This can end well, or end badly.”
“It will surely end badly for her,” El-Arian said, jamming the muzzle of the pistol into Soraya’s head so hard that she made a low sound in her throat. “Unless you move aside and allow us safe passage.”
“Let the woman go and we’ll discuss it,” Robbinet said.
El-Arian’s lip curled upward. “I won’t even dignify that suggestion with a response,” he said. “I am not afraid to die.” He rubbed his cheek against Soraya’s hair. “The same ca
“She’s not our agent,” Aaron said.
“I’m done listening to your lies.” El-Arian dragged Soraya down the stairs. “She and I are going to walk across the floor and out the door. We’ll disappear and that will be the end of it.”
As he took the last several steps down to the marble floor, Robbinet ordered the guards to move back. El-Arian smiled. Aaron looked into Soraya’s eyes. What is he trying to tell me? she asked herself.
El-Arian apparently saw the look, too, because he said to Aaron, “If you kill me, you’ll kill her as well. Her death will be your responsibility. Are you a gambling man? Are you willing to take on that weight?”
As he spoke, El-Arian moved across the floor. The space echoed with their footfalls, the vast empty space an arena where, Soraya supposed, the end of her life might play out. She knew that Aaron had given her a signal. If her head had been clear, if the pounding weren’t making her wince with every agonizing throb, she would know what part he wanted her to play in the endgame, because she had no doubt Aaron had an endgame in mind. She would have, if she were in his position.
They were almost to the front door now, Aaron and Robbinet shadowing their every step. She felt helpless, like every damsel in distress in every action movie ever made, and this angered her to such a degree that she shoved the pain into a dark corner, holding it at bay while she tried to figure out…
Position! That was it! Aaron was moving into position to make a kill shot. He would do it just as El-Arian reached the door—that’s when she would do it. She could see Aaron moving into position, approximately forty-five degrees to the rear of El-Arian’s right shoulder. That was the vulnerable spot—the head shot.
But she had looked into her captor’s eyes and she knew his heart, she knew that he would not go down easily, that his first instinct would be to shoot Aaron, not her. It would be the soldier’s reflex action—to fire back at his attacker—one El-Arian couldn’t control. He might shoot Aaron and then her before he went down, but for certain Aaron was in mortal danger. One man she cared about was already dead because of her. She would not allow another to die.
This decision was what drove the pain racking her skull down farther, the adrenaline pumping through her, the certain desire to do this one last thing that would give her a sense of rightness, of completion, of her life—and death—having meaning. Like El-Arian, she was not afraid to die. In fact, she had considered it an inevitability when she had chosen fieldwork. But she was not a martyr; she loved life, and there was a sadness in her even as she and El-Arian reached the door, as she saw Aaron’s SIG come up, as she slammed the back of her head against El-Arian, as she drove an elbow into his kidney, as she became his assailant, not Aaron.