Страница 81 из 94
And then he understood. She had tried to protect him by taking him off Indigo Ridge. But how had she known he was on it? The depth and accuracy of her intel boggled his mind. No wonder she had been able to fool the vetting process. He made a mental note to overhaul the entire process.
A setup. He was meant to take a fall via a video taken in Room 916 that she would disseminate. Disgraced, he would be summarily removed from Indigo Ridge and, momentarily, at least, the security would be in turmoil.
That’s when the people she was working for were going to strike!
He lunged for the phone and jabbed the red button.
“Remember me when you are protecting Indigo Ridge.”
I will, he thought as he waited for the president to come on the line. I swear I will.
The two men were on Bourne even as he was turning to face them. The third man came through the door unimpeded. The three men converged on Bourne. They were big, grizzly men who stank of beer and fried corn.
They might be big, but they were undisciplined—street fighters, rough and tumble. They were partial to roundhouse punches with brass knuckles and swipes with switchblades. Ripping the mirror off the wall, Bourne slammed its edge into a brass knuckle. The mirror cracked into a dozen shards, and Bourne grabbed one of the larger ones, unmindful of how it sliced into his palm, and jabbed the pointed end into one of the men’s arms. The man reeled backward into one of his compatriots.
The third man rushed at Bourne, knife held in front of him, expecting Bourne to retreat. Instead Bourne moved into the attack, grabbed the man’s knife arm, pulling him into him, and embedded the mirror shard in the man’s throat. Blood gouted as the man reeled backward. Bourne grabbed his shirtfront and shoved him into the two oncoming attackers. One man used his brass knuckles to sweep aside his dead compatriot while the other drew an ice pick and hacked down with it. Bourne, dodging, slipped past the attack. Three straight punches brought Ice Pick to his knees. Bourne kicked him in the face, and he toppled onto his side.
The third man, the largest of the three, leapt on Bourne, bouncing Bourne’s head off the wall. Bourne went down and Knuckles dropped onto him. He swung, the brass knuckles co
As Knuckles collapsed, Bourne took a moment to check out a hunch. Going through the men’s pockets revealed Colombian passports. This was a death squad sent by Roberto Corellos, who hadn’t forgotten his vow of revenge against Bourne. How they had picked up his trail here in Damascus was anyone’s guess. In any event, he had no time to try to find an answer—that would come later.
He was about to exit the room via the shattered window when he turned back, scooped the ice pick off the floor, and, stepping over bodies and through shattered glass, made his way out of the room, down the fire escape, and into the teeming twilight.
Damascus’s Jewish Quarter, a warren of narrow ancient streets, scarred and twisted by time and cruelty, was filled with abandoned houses cordoned off by thick chains and brass padlocks. The place had an unmistakable air of sorrow and suffering, two things with which Boris was well acquainted.
The rendezvous with Semid Abdul-Qahhar wasn’t until 10 PM, but Boris thought he’d better get the lay of the land before he tried what the late, unlamented Viktor Cherkesov had described as impossible. As he wandered the streets surrounding the old synagogue, he thought back to the vacant lot that had been his home last night. He could have left Cherkesov alive after his former boss had coughed up all his secrets, but that would have been foolish—worse, it would have been the height of sentimentality. When a man in his profession became sentimental, it was time to quit. And yet, not too many actually did quit or retire. Ivan was the latest example. Really, Boris thought now as he turned a corner, it was astonishing that he had fooled everyone into believing that he had retired, including Boris himself. But then Ivan’s sincerity was always one of his most admired traits. It was, after all, what had led him to be trusted by all the grupperovka families. And he had never betrayed confidences to any of them. But now, it seemed brutally clear that he had betrayed every family’s confidences to Severus Domna.
Boris shook his head. If he lived to the age of Methuselah he would never understand what could possibly motivate Ivan and then Cherkesov to turn against the motherland.
He had now made three complete circuits of the streets surrounding the old synagogue occupied by Semid Abdul-Qahhar and had set the map of the Jewish Quarter firmly in his head. Though his stomach was grumbling fiercely, he felt so encrusted with grime that he headed for Hammam Nureddin, at Souk el-Bzouriyeh, in another section of the Medina.
He paid his fee, hung his clothes in a wooden locker, and took a moment to study the key Cherkesov had picked up at the Mosque in Munich, which he was due in three hours to put into Semid Abdul-Qahhar’s grubby little hand. It was gold, small, and oddly shaped. It looked ancient, but when he scratched at it with his thumbnail a thin line of patina came off. He examined his nail. It wasn’t only the patina that had come off, but the gold color itself.
He looked at the key in a whole new way. Gold was soft, so it wasn’t surprising that the key was made of a harder metal. Boris had speculated that the key was made of iron with an outer layer of gold. He turned the key over and over between his fingers. There was something vaguely familiar about its shape. It seemed unlikely that he had seen it before, nevertheless he could have sworn he had.
Standing in front of his locker, naked save for the towel wrapped around his waist, he set his mind to thinking about where he might have seen the key—perhaps in a book, a magazine article, or even an intel report at FSB-2. Nothing surfaced.
He secured the locker with an old-fashioned key on a red cotton wrist bracelet. The color indicated that he had paid for the full menu. He padded to the first of the many showers, steam rooms, and skylit massage facilities. What did the mysterious key open, and what made it so valuable that Cherkesov had to deliver it in person? And why Cherkesov? Surely the Domna and Semid Abdul-Qahhar had any number of trustworthy agents to handle the task.
These questions swirled through his mind like a school of fish as he showered, was scrubbed by an attendant, then padded into one of the great tiled steam rooms. He sat, a towel draped across his loins, bent forward, forearms on thighs, and tried to free his mind of questions, doubts, and the myriad responsibilities he faced. His head hung, his vision going out of focus as his muscles slowly relaxed. He could feel the exhaustion oozing out of him with his sweat. His overactive mind eventually calmed.
Suddenly his head snapped up. He opened his left hand and stared at the key lying in the center of his palm. A laugh bubbled up. He laughed so hard his eyes began to tear. Now he understood why Cherkesov had been chosen to go to the Mosque in Munich, even though he despised Muslims.
Twenty minutes later he was lying facedown on a massage table, having his muscles reduced to quivering jelly. He closed his eyes, listening to the slap of the masseur’s hands on his back, humming to himself as his right hand played with the thick wooden peg under the tabletop that kept the parts together.