Bourne stood by the door, watching the motorcycle coming closer. It was almost upon him when he swung the door out. The Indian’s front wheel struck the metal with a dull clang, and the motorcycle bucked like a stallion. Its back reared up, flinging the driver out of his seat. He somersaulted up and over the car’s crumpled door, and landed on the roof.
As he slid down, Bourne grabbed him, slammed him back against the car’s side. He ripped off the helmet and saw up close the damage the flames had done to Halevy’s neck.
As the Babylonian leaped at him, Bourne drove a knee into Halevy’s crotch, then smashed a fist into the side of his head. Bourne grabbed him as he fell sideways. Halevy kicked him in the side of the knee, then, twisting free, drove his fist into the pit of Bourne’s stomach. As Bourne’s body turned, he struck the Babylonian in the kidney.
Bourne went down, Halevy on top of him. Halevy flicked out a knife, slicing a shallow arc toward Bourne’s throat. Bourne reached up, scraped his nails down the Babylonian’s fire-wounded throat. Halevy reared back, his eyes tearing with the fiery pain, and Bourne smashed his wrist against the bottom of the car. The knife clattered to the tarmac, and Bourne pressed his forearm against Halevy’s throat.
“Tell me about Ouyang.” Ouyang was the name Rebeka had spoken just before she died.
Halevy stared up at him balefully. “Who or what is an Ouyang?”
Bourne dug into the nerve bundle at the side of his neck. Halevy bared his teeth and his eyes popped. Sweat broke out on his face. The left side was scorched red, rippled and rent by the inroads the flames had made as they ate away and blackened the layers of his skin. He began to breathe hard.
“Ouyang,” Bourne prompted.
“How d’you know about Ouyang?”
Bourne did that thing again, and this time Halevy’s body arched up, his straining muscles trembling involuntarily. Little grunting noises emanated from his open mouth, like an animal caught in a trap, about to gnaw his leg off.
“Ben David deals with Ouyang.”
“Not the Director or Dani Amit?”
Halevy, blowing air through his mouth as if to cool himself off, shook his head. “This is private. It isn’t Mossad.”
“Then how do you know about it?”
“I won’t—” The Babylonian gave a silent howl as Bourne worked on him for a third time. His face was blue-white. Even his fire wound was now a pale pink, livid against the starkness of his stubble. Sweat flew off him like rain. “Okay, all right. Ouyang’s a high minister in the CSP. Ben David has something going with him, but I swear I don’t know what. Ben David recruited me to run interference with Tel Aviv, to make sure neither the Director nor Amit find out what he’s up to.” His gaze turned briefly canny. “But Rebeka found out, didn’t she? She’s the one who told you about Ouyang.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bourne said.
“Oh, but it does.” The Babylonian gave Bourne a smile tainted with pain. “Ben David has a thing for her. He always did.”
“And yet he sent you to kill her.”
“That’s the kind of man he is.” Halevy took several shuddering breaths. “Divided, always divided, just like our country, just like every country in the Middle East. He loves Rebeka. I don’t know what it took out of him to order her termination.” Those oddly porcine breaths again. “There’s no reason for you to believe this, but I’m glad she’s still alive.”
At that, Bourne rose, and, hauling the Babylonian up by his shirtfront, walked him back to the taxi. He shoved his face against the window.
“See her there? She’s dead, Halevy,” Bourne said. “I hold you and Ben David to account.”
“I didn’t do it. You know I didn’t.” Even as he was saying this, he whirled, a needle-like weapon in the palm of his hand. Its point glinted wetly with what must be some kind of fast-acting poison. Bourne, lifting an arm, felt the needle snag in the fabric of his jacket. The needle point scraped against his skin but did not break it. Bourne smashed the heel of his hand into Halevy’s nose. He delivered a second strike to the Babylonian’s throat, fracturing the cricoid cartilage.
Jerking his arm away from the needle, he struck Halevy flush on his ear. The Babylonian, gasping for air that would not come, staggered to his knees, still trying desperately to swipe at Bourne with the needle. Bourne grabbed him, and drove his knee into his groin, then struck him over and over again until he felt the bones in Halevy’s chest give way.
With the Babylonian dead, Bourne slipped into the old car he had chosen, hot-wired it, and drove out of the lot. At Benito Juárez International Airport, he bought a first-class ticket, then went in search of something to eat.
While he waited for his food, he took out the tiny skull studded with crystals that el Enterrador had given him as protection against Maceo Encarnación. “He is protected by an almost mystical power,” Constanza Camargo had told him, “as if by gods.”
His food came, but he found that he was no longer hungry. As he turned the skull around and around between his fingers, he thought about everything that had happened to him and Rebeka since coming to Mexico City, all of which had been dictated, in one way or another, by Constanza Camargo. And then he began to wonder about something else. Why would Henry Rowland secrete himself in the closet of his bedroom unless he had known they were coming? But how had he known with such precision where they were?
Bourne stared at the crystal-studded skull and into his mind came thoughts of other gods—the gods of technology. Placing the skull on the table, he smashed the bottom of his fist down onto it. Carefully, he picked through the shattered bits and pieces, extracting the minuscule tracking device that had been embedded in its center. He left it amid the debris without destroying it. He wanted the signal to continue broadcasting, just as if he had never discovered the device.
He rose, paying for the meal he hadn’t touched, then exited the departure lounge, heading for the long-term parking lot, to find a suitable vehicle to drive back into the city.
There are any number of ways to remain alive after you’re dead.” Don Fernando Hererra laughed, seeing the expression on Martha Christiana’s face. “This is only one of them.”
The pilot had landed the private jet in a vast field south of Paris.
There was no runway, no windsock, no customs shed. The plane had deviated from its flight plan and, after a frantic Mayday call, was now off the grid as far as the towers at Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports were concerned.
“There are no magicians in the world, Martha. Only illusionists,” Hererra said. “The idea is to create the illusion of death. For this, we require an authentic disaster, which is why the plane has landed here, where no one will be hurt.”
“Those bodies I saw on the plane,” Martha said, “are real.” Hererra nodded as he handed her a folder.
“What’s this?”
“Look inside.”
Opening the file, she saw forensic reports on three bodies retrieved from the wreckage of the plane that had not yet crashed. The three bodies were burned beyond recognition, of course, but were identified by dental records. Hererra was named, as well as the pilot and the navigator.
Martha picked her head up. “What about their families? What will you tell them?”
Hererra nodded to the two men who were exiting the jet, whose engines were still running. “These men have no families, one of the reasons they were hired in the first place.”
“But how—?”
“I have friends inside the Élysée Palace who will control the accident scene.”
The pilot approached Hererra. “The three corpses have been placed correctly,” he said. “We can proceed anytime.”
Hererra checked his wristwatch. “We’ve been off the radar for seven minutes. Do it now.”
The pilot nodded, then turned to his navigator, who was standing apart from them. The navigator held a small black box in his hand. When he pressed a button on the box, the jet’s engines rose in pitch until they became a scream. Another button remotely released the brakes, and the jet bucked forward, quickly gaining speed until it slammed into the line of trees at the far end of the field. A ferocious noise flared, momentarily deafening them. The ground shook, and an oily black-and-red fireball puffed out in the sky.