"It"s so hard to make ends meet these days," Bourne said.
Soraya looked like she wanted to laugh, but didn"t.
"I rarely do things by the book," he said. "But whatever I do, whatever I say, goes. Is that clear?"
For a moment she stared deep into his eyes. What was she looking for? he wondered. What was the matter with her?
"I"m familiar with your methods," she said in an icy tone.
Cevik was leaning against one wall of his cage, smoking a cigarette. When he saw Bourne approaching with Soraya, he blew out a cloud of smoke and said, "You the cavalry or the inquisitor?"
Bourne watched him as Soraya unlocked the cage door.
"Inquisitor, then." Cevik dropped the cigarette b.u.t.t and ground it beneath his heel. "I should tell you that my wife knows all about my gambling-and about my mistress."
"I"m not here to blackmail you." Bourne stepped into the cage. He could feel Soraya behind him as if she were a part of him. His scalp began to tingle. She had a weapon and was prepared to use it on the prisoner before the situation got out of hand. She was a perfectionist, Bourne sensed that about her.
Cevik came off the wall and stood with his hands at his side, fingers slightly curled. He was tall, with the wide shoulders of a former rugby player and gold cat"s eyes. "Judging by your extreme fitness, it"s to be physical coercion, then."
Bourne looked around the cage, getting a feel for what it was like to be pent up in it. A flare of something half remembered, a feeling of sickness in the pit of his stomach. "That would get me nowhere." He used the words to bring himself out of it.
"Too true."
It wasn"t a boast. The simple statement of fact told him more about Cevik than an hour of vigorous interrogation. Bourne"s gaze resettled on the South African.
"How to resolve this dilemma?" Bourne spread his hands. "You need to get out of here. I need information. It"s as simple as that."
Cevik let a thin laugh escape his lips. "If it were that simple, my friend, I"d be long gone."
"My name is Jason Bourne. You"re talking to me now. I"m neither your jailor nor your adversary." Bourne paused. "Unless you wish it."
"I doubt I"d care for that," Cevik said. "I"ve heard of you."
Bourne gestured with his head. "Walk with me."
"That"s not a good idea." Soraya planted herself between them and the outside world.
Bourne gave her a curt hand signal.
She pointedly ignored him. "This is a gross breach of security."
"I went out of my way to warn you," he said. "Step aside."
She had her cell phone to her ear as he and Cevik went past. But it was Tim Hytner she was calling, not the Old Man.
Though it was night, the floodlights turned the lawn and its paths into silver oases amid the many-armed shadows of the leafless trees. Bourne walked beside Cevik. Soraya Moore followed five paces behind them, like a dutiful duenna, a look of disapproval on her face, a hand on her holstered gun.
Down in the depths, Bourne had been gripped by a sudden compulsion, fired by the lick of a memory-an interrogation technique used on subjects who were particularly resistant to the standard techniques of torture and sensory deprivation. Bourne was suddenly quite certain that if Cevik tasted the open air, experienced the s.p.a.ce after being holed up in the cage for days, it would bring home to him all he had to gain from answering Bourne"s questions truthfully. And all he had to lose.
"Who did you sell the TSGs to?" Bourne asked.
"I"ve already told this one behind us. I don"t know. It was just a voice on the telephone."
Bourne was skeptical. "Do you normally sell TSGs over the phone?"
"For five mil, I do."
Believable, but was it the truth?
"Man or woman?" Bourne said.
"Man."
"Accent?"
"British, like I told them."
"Do better."
"What, you don"t believe me?"
"I"m asking you to think again, I"m asking you to think harder. Take a moment, then tell me what you remember."
"Nothing, I..." Cevik paused in the crisscross shadows of an Adams flowering crab apple.
"Hang on. Maybe, just maybe, there was a hint of something else, something more exotic, maybe Eastern European."
"You lived for a number of years in Ukraine, didn"t you?"
"You have me." Cevik screwed up his face. "I want to say possibly he was Slavic. There was a touch... maybe southern Ukraine. In Odessa, on the northern Black Sea coast, where I"ve spent time, the dialect is somewhat different, you know."
Bourne, of course, did know, but he said nothing. In his mind, he was on a countdown to the moment when Tim Hytner would arrive with the "decoded" cipher.
"You"re still lying to me," Bourne said.
"You must"ve seen your buyer when he picked up the TSGs."
"And yet I didn"t. The deal was done through a dead drop."
"From a voice on the phone? Come on, Cevik."
"It"s the truth. He gave me a specific time and a specific place. I left half the shipment and I returned an hour later for half the five mil. The next day, we completed the deal. I saw no one, and believe me when I tell you I didn"t want to."
Again, plausible-and a clever arrangement, Bourne thought. If it was true.
"Human beings are born curious."
"That may be so," Cevik said with a nod. "But I have no desire to die. This man... his people were watching the dead drop. They would have shot me on sight. You know that, Bourne. This situation is familiar to you."
Cevik shook out a cigarette, offered Bourne one, then took one himself. He lit it with a book of matches that was almost empty. Seeing the direction of Bourne"s gaze, he said, "Nothing to burn in the hole so they let me keep it."
Bourne heard an echo in his mind, as if a voice were speaking to him from a great distance.
"That was then, this is now," he said, taking the matchbook from Cevik.
Cevik, having made no move to resist, pulled the smoke into his lungs, let it out with a soft hiss, the sound of the cars rolling by beyond the moat of gra.s.s.
Nothing to burn in the hole. The words bounced around in Bourne"s head as if his brain were a pinball machine.
"Tell me, Mr. Bourne, have you ever been incarcerated?"
Nothing to burn in the hole. The sentence, once evoked, kept repeating, blocking out thought and reason.
With a grunt almost of pain, Bourne pushed Cevik on and they resumed walking; Bourne wanted him in the light. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tim Hytner hurrying their way.
"Do you know what it means to have your freedom taken from you?" Cevik flicked a bit of tobacco off his underlip. "All your life to live in poverty. Being poor is like watching p.o.r.nography: Once you start, there"s no way out. It"s addictive, d"you see, this life without hope. Don"t you agree?"
Bourne"s head was hurting now, each repet.i.tion of each word falling like a hammer blow on the inside of his skull. It was with extreme difficulty that he realized Cevik was merely trying to regain a measure of control. It was a basic rule of the interrogator never to answer a question. Once he did, he lost his absolute power.
Bourne frowned. He wanted to say something; what was it? "Make no mistake. We have you where we want you."
"I?" Cevik"s eyebrows lifted. "I"m nothing, a conduit, that"s all. It"s my buyer you need to find. What do you want with me?"
"We know you can lead us to the buyer."
"No I can"t. I already told you-"
Hytner was approaching through inky shadow and glazed light. Why was Hytner here? Through the pounding in his head, Bourne could scarcely remember. He had it; it slipped away like a fish, then reappeared. "The cipher, Cevik. We"ve broken it."
Right on cue, Hytner came up and handed the paper to Bourne, who almost dropped it, such was his preoccupation with the ringing in his brain.
"It was a b.i.t.c.h all right," Hytner said a bit breathlessly. "But I finally got it licked. The fifteenth algorithm I used proved to be-"
The last part of what he was going to say turned into a ragged shout of shock and pain as Cevik jammed the glowing end of his cigarette into Hytner"s left eye. At the same time he spun the agent around in front of him, locking his left forearm across his throat.
"Take one step toward me," he said low in his throat, "and I"ll break his neck."
"We"ll take you down, right enough." Soraya, with a quick glance at Bourne, was advancing, her gun arm straight out, her other hand cupped beneath the gun b.u.t.t, its barrel aimed, questing. Waiting for an opening. "You don"t want to die, Cevik. Think of your wife and three children."
Bourne stood as if poleaxed. Cevik, seeing this, showed his teeth.
"Think of the five mil."
His golden eyes flicked toward her for an instant. But he was already backing away from her and from Bourne, his bleeding human shield held tight to his chest.
"There"s nowhere to go," Soraya said in a most reasonable tone. "Not with all the agents we have around. Not with him slowing you down."
"I"m thinking of the five mil." He kept edging away from them, away from the glare of the sodium lights. He was heading toward 23rd Street, beyond which rose the National Academy of Sciences.
More people there-tourists especially-to hamper the agents" pursuit.
"No more prisons for me. Not one more day."
Nothing to burn in the hole. Bourne wanted to scream. And then a sudden explosion of memory obliterated even those words: He was running across ancient cobblestones, a sharp mineral wind in his nostrils. The weight in his arms seemed suddenly too heavy to bear. He looked down to see Marie-no, it was the unknown woman"s b.l.o.o.d.y face! Blood everywhere, streaming from her though he frantically tried to stanch the flow...
"Don"t be an idiot," Soraya was saying to Cevik. "Cape Town? You"ll never be able to hide from us. There or anywhere else."
Cevik c.o.c.ked his head. "But look what I"ve done to him."
"He"s maimed, not dead," she said through gritted teeth. "Let him go."
"When you hand me your gun." Cevik"s smile was ironic. "No? See? I"m already a dead man in your eyes, isn"t that true, Bourne?"
Bourne seemed to be coming very slowly out of his nightmare. He saw Cevik step into 23rd Street now with Hytner skidding off the curb like a recalcitrant child.
Just as Bourne lunged at him, Cevik pitched Hytner at them.
Then everything happened at once. Hytner staggered pitifully. Brakes screeched from a black Hummer close by. Just behind it a trailer-truck filled with new Harley-Davidson motorcycles swerved to avoid a collision. Air horns blaring, it almost struck a red Lexus, whose driver spun in terror into two other cars. In the first fraction of a second it appeared as if Hytner had stumbled over the curb, but then a plume of blood spat out of his chest and he twisted with the impact of the bullet.
"Oh, G.o.d!" Soraya moaned.
The black Hummer, rocking on its shocks, had pulled up. Its front window was partly open, the ugly gleam of a silencer briefly glimpsed. Soraya squeezed off two shots before answering fire sent her and Bourne diving for cover. The Hummer"s rear door flew open and Cevik ducked inside. It sped off even before he"d pulled the door closed behind him.
Putting up her gun, Soraya ran to her partner, cradling his head in her lap.
Bourne, hearing the echo of the gunshot in his memory, felt himself released from a velvet prison where everything around him was m.u.f.fled, dim. He leapt past Soraya and the crumpled form of Hytner, ran out onto 23rd Street, one eye on the Hummer, the other on the trailer-truck. The truck"s driver had recovered and sent his gears clashing as he resumed speed. Bourne sprinted toward the back of the trailer, grabbed the chain across the lifted ramp, and hauled himself aboard.
His mind was racing as he clambered up onto the platform on which the motorcycles were chained in neat, soldierly rows. The guttering flame in the darkness, the flare of the match: Cevik lighting his cigarette had two purposes. The first, of course, was to provide him with a weapon. The second was as a signal. The black Hummer had been waiting, prepared. Cevik"s escape had been meticulously planned.
By whom? And how could they have known where he"d be, and when?
No time for answers now. Bourne saw the Hummer just ahead. It was neither speeding nor weaving in and out of the traffic; its driver secure in the a.s.sumption that he and his pa.s.sengers had made a clean escape.
Bourne unchained the motorcycle closest to the rear of the trailer and swung into the saddle. Where were the keys? Bending over and shielding it from the wind, he lit a match from the matchbook Cevik had tossed to him. Even so, the flame lasted only a moment, but in that time it revealed the keys taped to the underside of the gleaming black tank console.
Jamming the key into the ignition, Bourne fired up the Twin Cam 88B engine. He gunned the engine, shifted his weight to the rear. The front end of the motorcycle rose up as it shot forward off the rear edge of the trailer.
While he was still in free fall the cars behind the trailer jammed on their brakes, their front ends slewing dangerously. Bourne hit the pavement, leaned forward as the Harley bounced once, gaining traction as both wheels bit into the road. In a welter of squealing tires and stripped rubber, he made an acute U-turn and sped off after the black Hummer.
After a long, anxiety-filled moment, he spotted it going through the traffic-clogged square where 23rd Street intersected with Const.i.tution Avenue, heading south toward the Lincoln Memorial. The Hummer"s profile was unmistakable. Bourne kicked the motorcycle into high gear, blasting into the intersection on the amber, zigzagging through it to more squeals and angry horn blasts.
He shadowed the Hummer as it followed the road to the right, describing a quarter of a circle around the arc-lit memorial slowly enough that he made up most of the distance between them. As the Hummer continued on around toward the on-ramp to the Arlington Memorial Bridge, he gunned up, nudged its pa.s.senger-side rear b.u.mper. The vehicle shrugged off the motorcycle"s maneuver like an elephant swatting a fly. Before Bourne could drop back, the driver stamped on his brakes. The Hummer"s ma.s.sive rear end collided with the motorcycle, sending Bourne toward the guardrail and the black Potomac below. A VW came up on him, horn blaring, and almost finished the job the Hummer had started-but at the last instant Bourne was able to regain control. He swerved away from the VW, snaking back through traffic after the accelerating Hummer.
Above his head he heard the telltale thwup-thwup-thwup and, glancing up, saw a dark insect with bright eyes: a CI helicopter. Soraya had been busy on her cell phone again.
As if she were in his mind, his cell phone rang. Answering it, he heard her deep-toned voice in his ear.
"I"m right above you. There"s a rotary on the center of Columbia Island just ahead. You"d better make sure the Hummer gets there."