'Xun su! Xiao Xi!' Lin coughed as he whispered. 'I knew you would find the phone! Sheng! Contact instantly! Sapphire is gone!' He replaced the microphone, but left his hand on the instrument, expecting to remove it with the agent's incoming call on his private line.
It did not come. He turned in his seat and looked back at the open, plastic shell of the pay phone across the road. The agent had dialled another number, but the defector was not speaking to him. There was no need to drive to Aberdeen.
The major silently got out of the car, walked across the street into the shadows of the far pavement and started towards the pay phone. He stayed in the relative darkness, moving slowly, calling as little attention to his bulk as he could, cursing, as he often did, the genes that had produced his outsized figure. Remaining well back in the shadows he approached the phone. The defector was eight feet away, his back to Lin, talking excitedly, exasperation in every sentence.
'Who is Sapphire! Why this telephone! Why would he reach me"!... No, I told you, he used the leader's name!... Yes, that's right, his name! No code, no symbol! It was insane?
Lin Wenzu heard all he had to hear. He pulled out his service automatic and walked rapidly out of the darkness.
'The film broke and they turned up the lights! My contact and I were-'
'Hang up the phone!' ordered the major.
The defector spun around. 'You!' he screamed.
Lin rushed the man, his immense body crushing the double agent into the plastic shell as he grabbed the phone, smashing it into the metal box. 'Enough? he roared.
Suddenly, he felt the blade slicing with ice-cold heat into his abdomen. The defector crouched, the knife in his left hand, and Lin squeezed the trigger. The explosion filled the quiet street as the traitor dropped to the pavement, his throat ripped open by the bullet, blood streaming down his clothes, staining the concrete below.
'M made!'' screamed a voice on the major's left, cursing him. It was the second man, the contact who had been inside the theatre talking with the defector. He raised a gun and fired as the major lunged, his huge bleeding torso falling into the man like a wall. Flesh blew apart in Lin's upper right chest, but the killer's balance was shaken. The major fired his automatic; the man fell clutching his right eye. He was dead.
Across the street, the pornographic film had ended and the crowd began to emerge on the street, sullen, angry, ungratified. And with what remained of his enormous strength, the badly wounded Lin picked up the bodies of the two dead conspirators and half dragged, half carried them back to his car. A number of people from the Pagoda's audience watched him with glazed or distinterested stares. What they saw was a reality they could not contend with or comprehend. It was, beyond the narrow confines of their fantasies.
Alex Conklin rose from the chair and limped awkwardly, noisily to the darkened bay window. 'What the hell do you want me to say?' he asked, turning and looking at the ambassador.
That given the circumstances, I took the only road open to me, the only one that would have recruited Jason Bourne. ' Havilland held up his hand. 'Before you answer, I should tell you in all fairness that Catherine Staples did not agree with me. She felt I should have appealed to David Webb directly. He was, after all, a Far East scholar, an expert who would understand the stakes, the tragedy that could follow. '
'She was nuts,' said Alex. 'He would have told you to shove it. '
Thank you for that. ' The diplomat nodded his head.
'Just hold it,' Conklin broke in. 'He would have said that to you not because he thought you were wrong, but because he didn't think he could do it. What you did– by taking Marie away from him – was to make him go back and be someone he wanted to forget. '
'Oh?'
'You really are one son of a bitch, you son of a bitch. '
Sirens suddenly erupted, ringing throughout the enormous house and the grounds as searchlights began spinning through the windows. Gunfire accompanied the sound of smashing metal as tyres screeched outside. The ambassador and the CIA man lurched to the floor; in seconds it was all over. Both men got to their feet as the door was crashed open. His chest and stomach drenched in blood, Lin Wenzu staggered in carrying two dead bodies under his arms.
'Here is your traitor, sir,' said the major, dropping both corpses. 'And a colleague. With these two, I believe we've cut off Dragonfly from Sheng-' Wenzu's eyes rolled upward until the sockets were white. He gasped and fell to the floor.
'Call an ambulance? shouted Havilland to the people who had gathered at the door.
'Get gauze, tape, towels, antiseptic – for Christ's sake, anything you can find? yelled Conklin, limping, racing over to the fallen Chinese. 'Stop the goddamned bleeding?
29
Bourne sat in the racing shadows of the back seat, the intermittent moonlight bright, creating brief explosions of light and dark inside the car. At sudden, irregular, unexpected moments he leaned forward and pressed the barrel of his gun into the back of his prisoner's neck. Try crashing off the road and there's a bullet in your head. Do you understand me?'
And always there was the same reply, or a variation of it, spoken in a clipped British accent . 'I'm not a fool. You're behind me and you've got a weapon and I can't see you. '
Jason had ripped the rearview mirror from its bracket, the bolt having cracked easily in his hand. Then I'm your eyes back here, remember that. I'm also the end of your life. '
'Understood,' the former commando officer repeated without expression.
The government road map spread out on his lap, the penlight cupped in his left hand, the automatic in his right, Bourne studied the roads heading south. As each half hour passed and landmarks were spotted, Jason understood that time was his enemy. Although the assassin's right arm was effectively immobilized, in sheer stamina Bourne knew he was no match for the younger, stronger man. The concentrated violence of the last three days had taken its toll physically, mentally and – whether he cared to acknowledge it or not – emotionally, and while Jason Bourne did not have to acknowledge it, David Webb proclaimed it with every fibre of his emotional being. The scholar had to be kept at bay, deep down inside, his voice stilled.
Leave me alone! You're worthless to me!
Every now and then Jason felt the dead weight of his lids closing over his eyes. He would snap them open and abuse some part of his body, pinching hard the soft sensitive flesh of his inner thigh or digging his nails into his lips, creating instant pain to dispel the exhaustion. He recognized his condition – only a suicidal fool would not – and there was no time or place to remedy it with– an axiom he had stolen from Medusa's Echo. Rest is a weapon, never forget it. Forget it, Echo... brave Echo... there's no time for rest, no place to find it.
And while he accepted his own assessment of himself, he also had to accept his evaluation of his prisoner. The killer was totally alert; his sharpness was in his skill at the wheel, for Jason demanded speed over the strange, unfamiliar roads. It was in his constantly moving head, and it was in his eyes whenever Bourne saw them, and he saw them frequently whenever he directed the assassin to slow down and watch for an off-shooting road on the right or the left. The impostor would turn in the seat – the sight of his so familiar features always a shock to Jason – and ask whether the road ahead was the one his 'eyes' watched. The questions were superfluous; the former commando was continuously making his own assessment of his captor's physical and mental condition. He was a trained killer, a lethal machine who knew that survival depended on gaining the advantage over his enemy. He was waiting, watching, anticipating the moment when his adversary's eyelids might close for that brief instant or when the weapon might suddenly drop to the floor, or his enemy's head might recline for a second into the comfort of the back seat. These were the signs he was waiting for, the lapses he could capitalize on to violently alter the circumstances. Bourne's defence, therefore, depended upon his mind, in doing the unexpected so that the psychological balance remained in his favour. How long could it last – could he last?