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.