Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (52 page)

Bourne had already witnessed the first tongue of flame and so knew that the flame flower was using liquid—likely napalm—ignited by propane. Now, as Ben David turned again, searching for him, Bourne saw the two tanks on his back: The napalm would be housed in the tank that lay against his back, the propane tank, hidden from anyone standing in front of the Colonel, just behind it. Bourne brought his rifle to bear: All it would take was a single bullet into the propane tank to roast Ben David alive. But in this enclosed space, already afire, Bourne himself would roast along with his enemy.

Trying not to cough, he watched as Ben David quartered the space, searching under one bed after another. The moment he left his post in front of the shattered window, Bourne snaked out from under the bed, sprinted diagonally across the smoke- and ash-filled interior. As he left his feet, diving through the window, Ben David turned, toggling on the flamethrower. Another tongue of flame licked out, across the wall, then shot out the window, where the very end of it licked at the back of Bourne’s jacket, igniting it.

Instantly feeling the heat, Bourne threw himself into a patch of deeper snow, rolling on his back to snuff out the flames. He saw Ben David step through the window, level the snout of the flamethrower on him, even as Bourne lifted the assault rifle to shoot him.

“Stalemate,” Ben David said as he pulled off the suit’s hood. He appeared oblivious to the building burning behind him. “It seems you’re always in my way, one way or another, Bourne. What have you done with Rebeka?”

“Rebeka and I made a good team. I tried to save her.” 

Ben David frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“She was killed—stabbed to death inside Maceo Encarnación’s villa in Mexico City.”

Ben David took a threatening step toward Bourne. “Goddamn you. You never should have taken her there.”

“You think her death was my fault? She was on her own mission; it coincided with mine. Besides, you sent the Babylonian to terminate her because she was getting too close to your little operation.” 

“What d’you know about it?”

“Now you want me to believe you still have feelings for her?” 

“I asked you—”

“I know everything, down to the counterfeit money the Chinese manufactured.”

Ben David leaned forward. “You don’t know his name.” 

“You mean Minister Ouyang?”

Ben David stared at him. “Why does he hate your guts?” 

Bourne stared back.

“You’re not going to screw this deal for me, Bourne.”

When Ben David tightened his finger on the trigger, Bourne said, “Don’t you want to know who killed Rebeka?”

“I don’t care. She’s dead.”

“It was Nicodemo, Ben David, Maceo Encarnación’s son.” The Colonel stood stock still. “What?”

“You didn’t know Nicodemo was your partner’s son, did you?” 

Ben David said nothing, but his tongue emerged briefly to moisten his lips.

“Which means Maceo Encarnación gave the order to have her killed. I could use a partner like that.” Bourne laughed grimly. “But he’s all yours.”

“He’s playing you, Ben David.”

Both men turned at Maceo Encarnación’s growl.

“Why haven’t you killed him?” Encarnación was carrying a pistol in one hand and in the other a massive machete with an evil-looking blade. Ben David looked from Bourne to Encarnación. “Why did you have Rebeka killed?”

“What? I don’t explain my actions to anyone.”

Ben David shook his head. “You had a choice. You could have captured her—”

“Are you crazy? She was far too dangerous to try to capture. Besides, there was Bourne to deal with.”

“—but you had your son kill her anyway.”

Maceo Encarnación looked suddenly stricken. “I have no son.” 

“Nicodemo. He
is
your son.”

“Who told you that?” Encarnación flared.

Ben David gestured at Bourne with his head.

“And you believe him?”

“It makes too much sense to be a lie.”

Maceo Encarnación spat. “Did you even hear what I said? You’ve inhaled too much smoke. Rebeka is dead, so is Nicodemo. The past is buried. It’s our future we have to concentrate on now. Bourne is the only one standing in—”

Ben David turned the ugly snout of the flamethrower on Encarnación and pulled the trigger. A burst of napalm spat out, just missing the Mexican. Bourne was on his feet in an instant. He kicked out, sending Ben David reeling back into the flames licking out of the shattered window.

Without a backward glance, Maceo Encarnación ran around to the rear of the building. Bourne followed him at a strong lope. At the corner, a shot caused him to quickly duck back. He heard the crunch of running feet and darted around the corner, firing as he went. Maceo Encarnación had vanished. Bourne stalked after him, checking the snowy ground for his footprints. The three Mossad agents who had fired at him previously were frantically combating the fire, which had crept close to the netting that camouflaged the laboratory from both the ground and the sky. 

At the end of the building Bourne saw prints leading off toward the laboratory. Having to cross unprotected ground, he moved cautiously. He was halfway across when he noticed one of the agents answer his satphone, and he hunkered down, making himself as inconspicuous as possible. The agent, covered in soot, his clothes seared and singed in places, nodded, then abandoned his comrades, racing off toward the far side of the compound. Bourne tracked him until he passed behind the burning building, then he rose, tracing Maceo Encarnación’s footprints, which led directly to the front door of the camouflaged lab. He was about to follow them when he turned, sensing movement out of the corner of his eye.

The Mossad agent had appeared from around the far side of the furiously burning building, and he wasn’t alone. Colonel Ben David was with him.

Maceo Encarnación cursed the day he had agreed to Tom Brick’s plan to buy the SILEX process from the avaricious Ben David. He’d bought into Brick’s argument that the process would mean that Core Energy would eventually corner the market on nuclear fuel, which, despite certain setbacks, was surely the main energy source of an emissionless future without fossil fuel.

Perhaps Brick had been right. Maceo Encarnación didn’t know, and he no longer cared. It had been his idea to rope in Minister Ouyang, knowing through Maricruz’s weekly reports how desperate the Chinese were for more energy, especially now with their great engine of progress slowing because of massive pollution all over the country. The Chinese were building nuclear reactors at an astonishing rate. Their appetite for enriched uranium to fuel these plants was increasing exponentially. Maceo Encarnación hated the Chinese with an unrivaled passion. They stood for everything he despised, everything he had spent his entire adult life fighting against: repression, regulation, dampening the free spirit of the country’s population. Seeing the opportunity to fuck them over was too great a temptation. But now, as he made himself invisible in the shadows near the front door of the laboratory, he understood how his desire had conflicted with destiny.

He was not meant to be here, on the run from Jason Bourne. He should have been back in Mexico City with Anunciata. Now he was faced with the moment when dominion slips through one’s grip, when expectations of wealth, influence, and power are overwhelmed by self-preservation and survival.

He stiffened as the door to the laboratory opened inch by inch. The interior of the building, designed by the five scientists at work here, was broken up into rooms where the separate processes of the formula could be produced and refined before being chained together with the others in the largest area at the far end of the structure. This last space was lead-lined, and all precautions had been taken owing to the radioactive material being created there. As far as he could tell, all the scientists were clustered in the far lab, finishing the last of the SILEX testing.

The door opened farther. Maceo Encarnación, checking his firearm, discovered that it was empty. Tossing it aside, he raised his machete over his head, ready to strike off Bourne’s head the moment he entered the building.

A shadow fell across the widening wedge of doorway, and Maceo Encarnación felt the tremor of intent run up his arm and into the fists that grasped the machete with a professional executioner’s grip.

He watched the silhouette form: the nose, lips, forehead, chin, until the entire head was in front of him like that of a condemned criminal on the block. The machete whistled down, the long, wicked blade glimmering briefly before it fell into shadow as it cleaved through the neck, severing the head from its trunk.

The head bounced along the floor while the trunk danced and spun, blood spurting with each frantic pump of the heart. For an instant, Maceo Encarnación was transported back to the shoreline of Mexico, the soft Gulf waves rolling onto the shore, both seawater and sand soaking up the blood, as the head rolled back and forth in the pink foam of the surf.

Then the present returned with the speed of a rocket, and he saw the severed head facing away from him. He turned it toward him by hooking his foot against the side of the nose. It stared up at him with the unthinking eyes of a landed shark. It was a face he knew well, but it wasn’t Bourne’s.

He expelled a startled yelp as Bourne grabbed hold of him and slammed him back against the wall so hard he dropped the bloody machete. He stared from Bourne to the severed head.

“I thought Ben David had been burned to death.”

“One of his agents saved him, and I liberated him from his agent,” Bourne said. “I wanted his death to have meaning.”

Maceo Encarnación’s gaze returned to Colonel Ben David’s face, which stared up at him from its position on the floor. There was no seawater to wash away the blood and gore, to make the death clean and neat, to dream the dream of a perfect death.

“I thought he was you,” Maceo Encarnación said.

“Of course you did.”

Maceo Encarnación shuddered. “Let me go. I have the secret to SILEX. Imagine the wealth you and I will share.”

Bourne stared into his eyes.

“You killed Nicodemo in Paris.” It was only a semi-question. 

“He knifed Rebeka,” Bourne said by way of answer. “She died a slow, painful death.”

“For that I’m sorry.”

“I looked into her eyes. I saw the pain. I saw the end coming, and there was nothing I could do.”

“For a man like you, that must be terrible indeed.”

Bourne drove a fist deep into Encarnación’s stomach. He doubled over, and Bourne pulled him erect by his hair.

The Mexican’s red-rimmed eyes opened wide. “You killed my son.”

 “He killed himself.”

Maceo Encarnación spat into his face. “How dare you!” 

“I tried to subdue him underwater, but you trained him too well. He would have killed me and Don Fernando if I hadn’t killed him.” “
¡Asesino!
” Encarnación slipped a push-dagger from a sheath hidden beneath his clothes. His fist shot out, the blade aimed at Bourne’s heart.

Bourne grasped the wrist, and turned it, snapping it in two. Maceo Encarnación grimaced, slammed Bourne’s throat with the heel of his other hand. Bourne, a low animal growl erupting from deep inside him, spun him around, grasped his head in both hands, and cracked the neck completely in two. As he let Maceo Encarnación go, the Mexican’s head lolled at an unnatural angle, as if begging to be separated from the rest of him.

Tel Aviv, Israel

THE DIRECTOR WOULD like to talk with you,” Dani Amit, head of Mossad Collections, said.

“Talk with me,” Bourne said. “Not kill me.”

Amit laughed, but his pale blue eyes remained steady and grave. The two men were sitting at a small table at Entr’acte, a seaside restaurant along Tel Aviv’s sweeping scimitar beach.

“The termination order was a mistake. Obviously.”

“In our business,” Bourne said, matching Amit’s tone, “almost everything is a mistake in hindsight.”

Amit’s eyes drifted to the water, the lines of empty chairs set up on the beach. “That which doesn’t kill us turns us gray.”

“Or insane.”

Amit’s gaze snapped back.

“It was insane to send someone after Rebeka,” Bourne said.

“She went off the grid. She broke protocol.”

“Because she couldn’t trust anyone.”

Amit sighed and folded his hands together, as if in prayer. “Concerning Dahr El Ahmar, we owe you a great debt of gratitude.”

“Rebeka suspected Ben David was rotten.” Bourne would not let the subject go. “She was right.”

Amit licked his lips. “Concerning Rebeka, we have received her body from the authorities in Mexico City.”

“I know. You will bury her with honors. I want to be there.”

“Outsiders are not permitted—” Amit bit off the automatic response, and nodded. “Of course.”

A soft breeze ruffled Bourne’s hair. His body ached. He could feel every place the flames had touched him, every place Maceo Encarnación had struck him.

“Did she have family?”

“Her parents are dead,” Amit said. “You’ll meet her brother at the funeral.”

“He’s Mossad also.”

“Finish your espresso,” Amit said, “then we must go.”

Aboard the Director’s boat, Bourne was provided with a panoramic view of the city. The sun beat down from a sky studded with small clouds, scudding before a following wind. He seemed far removed from the snowy highlands of Lebanon.

“You’re a fine sailor,” the Director said. “What other talents have you hidden from us?”

“I don’t forgive.”

The Director looked at him. “That’s a very Mossad trait.” His Brillo hair seemed impervious to the wind. “That said, we’re all human, Bourne.”

“No,” Bourne said. “You’re Mossad.”

The Director pursed his livery lips. “Well, there’s truth to that, no doubt, but as you’ve already discovered, we’re not infallible.”

Bourne looked back at the glaringly white city and was suddenly aware of the ages of history buried there. He took out the thin gold chain with the star of David.