“You bitch!” he cried and leaped at her.
Ann took her hand out of the dresser drawer. She gripped a small Walther PPK/S. Thorne either didn’t see it or didn’t care. Enraged, he came on, his hands raised, seeking to strangle her.
Ann pulled the trigger once, twice, holding her hand rock-steady, squeezing the trigger. The powerful .32 ACP bullets tore through him, knocking Thorne against the wall with such force he ricocheted off.
His eyes opened in shock and disbelief. Then came the blinding pain, and he pitched into her. For a moment he gripped her as he once had when they were lovers, desperate in their feverish lust.
His mouth opened and closed, a speared fish gasping for air. “Why...? You...”
Ann watched him dying with a cold, almost clinical eye. “You’re a traitor, Charles. To me, to our marriage, but most of all to our country.” He slipped to his knees. “Do you know what you were up to with the estimable Mr. Li? Estimable as a spy, that is.”
Thorne felt as if there were no more shocks left for him to endure. The landslide had come and it was covering him completely.
“Good-bye, Charles.” Ann pushed him away, found his blood on her. Stepping over him, she returned to the bathroom, where she stepped into the shower and began to scrub her body clean.
Bourne kept moving forward, judging the distance from the last after-image of the shaft’s rim still shining in his mind’s eye. The pipe was now so narrow that he could feel the top by lifting his arm in his prone position. This is how he traversed the last few feet to the rim. Feeling it with his fingertips, his heart lifted.
Setting Rebeka down, he stood up into the shaft. Reaching above his head, he felt the bottom of the hatch. There was a metal ring distended from the bottom. He turned this to the left, then pushed, and was rewarded by a rush of light and fresh air.
Freedom!
Ducking back down, he once more gathered Rebeka up and, lifting her into the shaft, pushed her up to the surface. A moment later, he followed her up. Daylight glowed around them. They were in the center of a copse of trees, planted in a perfectly symmetrical square, four trees deep on each side.
Keeping Rebeka down and out of sight, he lifted his head, listening for sounds of pursuit. He heard the distant rumble of traffic from the perimeters. It was too early for any strollers to be visiting the park. They were alone.
Checking Rebeka again, he saw that the wound was already suppurating. He tried using one of the bits of cloth he’d taken from the toolbox to stanch the flow, but almost immediately the cloth was saturated. The difficult travel through the drainpipe had exacerbated the wound.He listened to her heart, then her lungs, and didn’t like what he heard. He tried to calculate how much blood she had lost—more than she had on their flight from Damascus to Dahr El Ahmar. Her face was ashen, all color drained from her eyes. She tried to speak but couldn’t manage it. If he didn’t get her to a hospital soon, she’d surely bleed out.
She opened her mouth, said something unintelligible.
“Save your strength,” he whispered. “Only a little way to go now until the hospital.”
He picked his head up again. What they needed now was transportation.
“Rebeka,” he said, “I’m going to get a car for us.” Rising, he wove his way out of the square of trees, went across the park, and down a bit, where he saw a car park. Traffic drove by. A taxi passed. He thought about hailing it, but cruising cabs were all too often driven by gang members out to mug and rob unsuspecting tourists. Instead, he stood by the side of the parked car. He was about to break in when a police cruiser drifted past. The cops marked him and the cruiser slowed. Bourne turned away. The cruiser stayed put, and he cursed under his breath.
Another taxi turned the corner and came his way. It was free, and he flagged it down. From the corner of his eye, he saw the cruiser pull away and drive on. When the cab pulled to a halt, Bourne told the driver to wait. Retracing his steps, he returned to the grove. As he brought Rebeka across the park to the waiting vehicle, she murmured something again. This time, he put his ear close to her mouth. Her eyes opened, focusing on him with an obvious effort, and forced herself to repeat it. A name.
They reached the waiting taxi. The driver turned, watching Bourne deposit Rebeka in the backseat and climb in after her.
“¿Qué pasa con ella?” the driver said.
“Ponernos al Hospital General de Mexico,” Bourne ordered.
“Hey, she’s bleeding all over my seat!”
“She’s been stabbed,” Bourne said, leaning forward. “¡Vamos!”
The driver grimaced, put the taxi in gear, and pulled out into traffic. Within three blocks, Bourne knew they were going the wrong way. Hospital General de Mexico was south of here; they were heading north. He was about to say something when the driver began to pull over to where two squat Mayan-looking men were loitering on a corner, smoking furiously.
Lunging forward, Bourne wrapped one arm around the driver’s throat and pulled hard. At the same time, his free hand groped beneath his jacket, found the pistol, and jerked it out of its shoulder holster.
“The hospital,” Bourne said, pressing the muzzle against the side of his head, “or I pull the trigger.”
“And risk the car going out of control?” The driver, still heading for his partners in crime, shook his head. “You won’t.”
Bourne pulled the trigger and the driver’s head exploded in a welter of blood, brains, and bone. The taxi lurched forward, heading directly toward the two men. They recognized the oncoming vehicle, threw down their butts, and got ready to go to work. Then the taxi jumped the curb and, yelling, they scattered.
By this time, Bourne had clambered over the front seat. Shoving the driver out the door, he slid behind the wheel, veered away to just miss a streetlight and several pedestrians before he was able to muscle the car’s trajectory back out onto the street.
He made a spectacular U-turn, running up and over the divider. Brakes screeched, horns blared, and angry shouts were raised. But, moments later, they were all behind him as he raced in and out of lanes, heading pell-mell south toward the hospital.
He glanced at Rebeka in the rearview mirror, saw her extreme pallor, could not detect even a shallow breath coming from her. She was bathed in blood.
“Rebeka,” he said. And then, more forcefully, “Rebeka!” She did not respond. Her eyes stared upward blankly. He sped on through the increasingly chaotic streets, past modern buildings and squares embedded in the ruins of the ancient past, into the smoky, raw-flesh–colored Mexico City dawn.
Book Three
21
TREADSTONE’S INTERNAL ALARM sounded at precisely 7:43 am.
Anderson, the ranking Treadstone officer, called Dick Richards at 8:13 am, after his staff had been unable to identify the Trojan that had jumped the firewall to attack the on-site servers, much less quarantine and exterminate it.
“Get down to HQ,” Anderson said, “ASAP.”
Richards, who had been sitting on the edge of his bed, literally biting his nails to the quick while he waited for the call, jumped up, splashed water on his face, and, grabbing his raincoat, headed out the door. On the way to work, he allowed himself a self-satisfied smile.
When he arrived fourteen minutes later, the office was in something of a quiet uproar. No one had yet figured out how a Trojan could have invaded the on-site servers, and it was this question, just as much as how much damage it had done, that occupied the discussion around the IT department.
After checking in with the hastily convened team, Richards set himself up at the server terminal and began his “tracking” of the Trojan he had created and set like a time bomb inside the Treadstone intranet. Creating the Trojan had been the fun part, but inserting it had proved far more difficult than even he had imagined, and he cursed himself for not paying more attention to the intricacies of the firewall during the short time he had been at Treadstone.