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She heard Aaron shout, felt the air go out of El-Arian. Then she was in the eye of a monstrous thunderstorm that blew her sideways. She tasted her own blood, she was falling, the pain in her head vanished.
Then everything was obliterated by absolute stillness.
Damascus spread out before Bourne as he took a taxi in from the airport. The sun-washed morning bounced off the windshield and set fire to the hood as they rumbled through the streets. He had the taxi let him off several blocks from the section of Avenue Choukry Kouatly that was his destination, then walked the rest of the way, losing himself within the drifts of pedestrians. Taking a quick, covert circuit of El-Gabal’s geometric Syrian modernist building, he scoped out the three entrances and the security at each. The front entrance, all glass and hammered steel, had no overt security presence, but taking his time paid off, as at intervals of precisely three minutes, he observed a pair of uniformed guards passing in front of the glass doors. On the west side of the building was a single-door emergency exit. The metal door looked solid, made to seem impregnable, but Bourne knew that no door was impregnable. In the rear was a wide loading dock, which was currently empty. Beyond the dock were four wide doors, at the moment all closed. A uniformed security guard sat smoking and talking on his cell phone. Occasionally, he turned his narrowed eyes on the street, peering back and forth, checking for anything suspicious or out of place. Unlike the guards in the lobby, who carried sidearms only, this man had an AK-47 strapped across his back. At each angle, Bourne looked upward, studying the roofline and the possible means of gaining its height. There were no trees or telephone poles, but the building itself looked scalable.
He was about to depart when he heard a truck coming down the alley. The guard heard it, too, because he broke off his conversation and pressed a buzzer just to the left of the left-most door. Almost at once, the four doors lifted up. A wizened man peered out, the guard said something to him, he nodded and disappeared into the dimness of the interior.
By the time the truck rumbled, turned, and backed up to the loading dock, two men appeared. They wore sidearms. The driver got out and, leaping up onto the dock, opened the rear door with a key. He rolled the door up and stood back as the two men entered the truck’s rear. The guard had unstrapped his AK-47 and was now holding it at the ready. He was young and looked slightly nervous as he peered down the street.
Bourne shifted his position in time to see the two men unloading the first of the dozen long wooden crates containing the poisoned weapons he had seen in the warehouse in Cadiz. He recognized them by both their shape and the distinctive greenish color of the wood.
He needed to get inside to set the SIM cards, but that would have to wait until the darkness of night. He withdrew and went in search of the items he thought he’d need. He bought himself Syrian clothes that would allow him to better blend in, a glass cutter, a sturdy, wide-bladed knife, a length of electrical wire, two coils of rope of different lengths, and a pickax. Lastly, he purchased a duffel in which to carry everything, then took a taxi to the train station, where he stashed the duffel in a paid locker.
Then he went in search of a hotel, which proved problematic. The first three he entered had security perso
Bourne took a protesting elevator up to the sixth floor, went down a bare, odorous concrete hallway, and entered his room, a Spartan cubicle with bed, dresser, badly streaked mirror, tiny closet inhabited by a couple of roaches, and threadbare carpet. One window faced west. Beyond the grid of the fire escape lay the teeming street, the city’s unceasing daytime tumult boring its way through the glass. The bathroom, if you wanted to call it that, was down the hall.
Despite the mea
Where are you, Boris? he wondered. When are you coming for me?
He must have dozed off because the next thing he knew, the sun was thicker, deeper, slanting through the window, low in the sky. Late afternoon, shading into twilight. He lay still on the bed as if stu
Silently, he rose and went to the wall just behind where the door hinged open. Reaching out, he watched as the lock was slowly opened from the hallway. The doorknob began to turn and he steeled himself for whoever was coming in.
That’s when a shadow crossed his peripheral vision an instant before two men shattered the window as they leapt through.
Christopher Hendricks sat at his desk for fully an hour without moving or speaking to anyone. Once, his secretary came in, worried that he wasn’t answering his intercom, but one look at his ashen face and she departed.
Alone at his desk, the image of Skara frozen on the screen in front of him, he felt an existential coldness creep over him. Maggie: Her face was now a matter of colored pixels, informed by a series of 0s and 1s. This was Maggie, a mirage, a dream, an electronic fantasy. Who, then, was Skara? How had she so successfully penetrated the government’s vetting process, how had she pierced his own armor, how had she grabbed hold of his heart? Even now, with the shock of her revelations still ru
“I have never loved anyone before you.”
He did not know whether to believe what she said in the video.
“Something happened when we met, a mysterious current went through me and changed me.”
At last, at the end, had she told him the truth, or was that wishful thinking? Was her last message another lie, one to keep him from sending his people after her?
“I’m on my final journey.” What the hell did she mean by that? The words tolled in his head like funeral bells, sending a shiver down his spine.
His head hurt, his thoughts frantically pinwheeling, getting nowhere. He no longer knew truth from fiction because he wanted what she said to be the truth, wanted it so badly it left a metallic taste like blood in his mouth.
She was an agent, that was clear enough, and a demonically clever one. But who was she working for, and how did she know about Indigo Ridge? His mind raced backward, reliving in reverse their short but intense time together. He thought of their picnic, of what he had revealed to her—a helluva lot less than she already knew, as it turned out. It had been her idea for him to dump security for Indigo Ridge into Danziger’s lap, though he had, of course, not revealed names or places.
Why had she made that suggestion? He ran a hand across his eyes, but at once he snatched it away. He felt magnetized to her eyes, pulled toward the image on the screen. He wanted so badly to reach out and touch her—no, not merely touch her, he ached to hold her.
She had protected him, she said. What did that mean? “Remember me when you are protecting Indigo Ridge.”