There came then a discreet knock on the door.
“Omar,” Muta said. “Let me.”
Fadi gave his silent assent before he slipped back into the bathroom.
Muta crossed the plush carpet and drew open the door for Omar to enter. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of no more than forty, with a shaven head, a quick smile, and a penchant for telling incomprehensible jokes. On his shoulder was a silver tray laden with a bottle in an enormous ice bucket, two flutes, and a plate of freshly sliced fruit. Omar filled the doorway, Muta thought, much as Fadi would, for the two men were of the same approximate height and weight.
“Your champagne,” Omar said superfluously. Crossing the room, he set his burden down on the glass top of the cocktail table. The ice made a shivery sound as he pulled the bottle free.
“I’ll open it,” Muta said, grasping the heavy champagne bottle from the waiter.
When Omar proffered the leather-bound folder with the chit to sign, Muta called, “Jakob, the champagne’s here. You must sign.”
“Tell Omar to come into the bathroom.”
Even so, Omar looked at the other questioningly.
“Go on.” Muta ibn Aziz smiled winningly. “I assure you, he won’t bite.”
With the small leather folder held before him like an offering, Omar plodded toward the sound of Fadi’s voice.
Muta dropped the bottle back into its bed of shaved ice. He had no idea what champagne tasted like and wasn’t in the least interested. When he heard the sudden loud noise from the bathroom, he used the remote to turn the TV back on, cranking up the volume. Switching channels because The Sopranos was over, he stopped when he recognized the face of Jack Nicholson. The actor’s voice filled the room.
“Here’s Johnny!” Nicholson crowed through the rent in the bathroom door he’d made with an ax.
Omar, his hands tied behind his back, was bound to the chair in the bathtub. His large brown liquid eyes were staring up at Fadi. There was an ugly bruise on his jaw just beginning to inflate.
“You’re not Jewish,” Omar said in Urdu. “You’re Muslim.”
Fadi ignored him and went about his business, which, at the moment, was death.
“You’re Muslim, just like me,” Omar repeated. To his utter surprise, he wasn’t frightened. He seemed to be in something of a dream state, as if from the moment he was born he was fated for this encounter. “How can you do this?”
“In a moment, you will be martyred to the cause,” Fadi said in Urdu, which his father had made certain he learned as a child. “What is your complaint?”
“The cause,” Omar said calmly, “is your cause. It isn’t mine. Islam is a religion of peace, and yet here you are waging a terrible, bloody war that devastates families, whole generations.”
“We are given no choice by the American terrorists. They suck at our oil tit, but that isn’t enough for them. They want to own the oil tit. So they make up lies and use them to invade our land. The American president claims, of course falsely, that his god has spoken to him. The Americans have revived the era of the Crusades. They are the world’s chief infidels—where they lead Europe follows, either willingly or grudgingly. America is like a colossal engine rolling across the world, its citizens grinding whatever they find into shit that all looks the same. If we don’t stop them, they will be the end of us. They want nothing less. Our backs are against the wall. We have been driven into this war of survival, unwilling. They have systematically stripped us of power, of dignity. Now they want to occupy all of the Middle East.”
“You speak with a terrible hatred.”
“A gift of the Americans. Cleanse yourself of all Western corruption.”
“And I say that as long as your focus is hatred, you’re doomed. Your hatred has blinded you to any possibility but the one you have created.”
A tremor of barely suppressed rage rippled through Fadi. “I have created nothing! I am defending what must be defended. Why can you not see that our very way of life hangs in the balance.”
“It is you who cannot see. There is another way.”
Fadi threw his head back, his voice corrosive. “Ah, yes, now you have opened my eyes, Omar. I shall renounce my people, my heritage. I will become like you, a servant waiting on the decadent whims of pampered Americans, dependent on the crumbs left on their table.”
“You see only what you want to see.” Omar’s expression was sad. “You’ve only to look at the Israeli model to know what can be done with hard work and—”
“The Israelis have the money and the military might of America behind them,” Fadi hissed into Omar’s face. “They also have the atomic bomb.”
“Of course, that is what you see. But Israelis themselves are Nobel laureates in physics, economics, chemistry, literature; prizewinners in quantum computing, black-hole thermodynamics, string theory. Israelis were founders of Packard Bell, Oracle, SanDisk, Akamai, Mercury Interactive, Check Point, Amdocs, ICQ.”
“You’re talking gibberish,” Fadi said, dismissively.
“To you, yes. Because all you know how to do is destroy. These people created a life for themselves, for their children, for their children’s children. This is the model you need to follow. Turn inward, help your people, educate them, allow them to make something of themselves.”
“You’re insane,” Fadi said in fury. “Never. Finished. The end.” The flat of his hand cut through the air and broke Omar’s neck.
With a last look at Nicholson’s manically grinning face, Muta ibn Aziz followed Omar into the grotesque pink-marble bathroom, which looked to him like flesh after the skin had been stripped off. There was Omar, sitting on the chair he had placed in the bathtub. There was Fadi bent over, studying Omar’s face as if to memorize it. Fadi’s makeup case had been overturned when Omar had kicked it during his death throes. Small jars, broken bottles, prosthetics were all over the place. Not that it mattered.
“He looks so sad, slumped there on the chair,” Muta said.
“He’s beyond sadness,” Fadi said. “He’s beyond all pain and pleasure.”
Muta stared into Omar’s glassy eyes, the pupils fixed and dilated in death. “You broke his neck. So neat, so precise.”
Fadi sat down on the lip of the tub. After a moment’s hesitation, Muta retrieved an electric hair shearer from the tile floor. Fadi had affixed a mirror to the wall at the back of the tub by means of suction cups. He stared into this, scrutinizing every motion, as Muta began to take off his hair.
When the task was done, Fadi rose. He stared at himself in the mirror over the sink, then back at Omar. He turned to one side, and Muta moved Omar’s head so the same side was visible. Then the other side.
“A little more here—” Fadi pointed at a spot on the top of his own scalp. “—where Omar is already bald.”
When he was satisfied, he began to give himself Omar’s nose, Omar’s slight overbite, Omar’s elongated earlobes.
Together they stripped Omar of his uniform, socks, and shoes. Fadi did not forget the man’s underwear, putting those on first. The idea was to be absolutely authentic.
“La ilaha ill allah.” Muta grinned. “You look every inch the Pakistani servant.”
Fadi nodded. “Then it’s time.”
As he went through the suite, he picked up the tray Omar had brought. Out in the corridor, he took the service elevator to the basement. He drew out a handheld video device, brought up the schematics for the hotel. Locating the room housing the electronic panels for the HVAC, electrical power, and sprinkler systems took less than three minutes. Inside, he removed the cover to the sprinkler panel and replaced the wires for the fifth floor. The color coding would look correct to anyone who checked, but the wires were now shorted out, rendering the fifth-floor sprinklers inoperable.
He returned to the fifth floor the way he had come. Encountering a maid who entered the service lift on the second floor, he tried out his imitation of Omar’s voice. She got out on the fourth floor without suspecting a thin
g.
Returning to the Silvers’ suite, he went into the bathroom. From the bottom drawer of his case, he pulled out a small spray can and two metal containers of carbon disulfide. He emptied one container into Omar’s accommodating lap, the odor of rotten eggs pervading the air. Back in the living room, he poured out the second just below the window, where the hem of the thick curtains fell. Then he sprayed the curtains with a substance that would turn the fabric from fire-retardant to flammable.
In the sitting room, he said, “Do you have everything you need?”
“I have forgotten nothing, Fadi.”
Fadi ducked back into the bathroom and lit the accelerant in Omar’s lap. Virtually no trace of him, not a recognizable bone nor a bit of flesh, would survive the intense heat of the inferno the accelerants would generate. With Muta watching, Fadi lit the bottom of the curtains in the living room, and they left the suite together. They parted almost immediately, Muta ibn Aziz to the stairwell, Fadi once again to the service elevator. Two minutes later, he exited the side entrance: Omar on a cigarette break. Forty-three seconds later, Muta joined him.
They had just turned off 20th Street onto H Street, protected by the bulk of one of the buildings at George Washington University, when, with a thunderous roar, the fire blew out the fifth-floor window, on its way to completely incinerating all three rooms of the Silvers’ suite.
They strolled down the street to the sounds of shouts, cries, the mounting wail of sirens. A flickering red heat rose into the night, the heartbreaking light of disaster and death.
Both Fadi and Muta ibn Aziz knew it well.
A world away from both luxury and international terrorism, Northeast quadrant was rife with its own homegrown disasters arising from poverty, inner-city rage, and disenfranchisement—toxic ingredients of existence so familiar to Fadi and Muta ibn Aziz.
Gangs owned much of the territory; drug- and numbers-running were the commerce that fed the strong, the amoral. Vicious turf wars, drive-by shootings, raging fires were nightly occurrences. There wasn’t a foot patrolman on the Metro D.C. Police who would venture onto the streets without armed backup. This held true for the squad cars as well, which were without exception manned by two cops; sometimes, on particularly bloody-minded nights or when the moon was full, by three or four.
Bourne and Soraya were racing through the night along these mean streets when he noted for the second time a black Camaro behind them.
“We picked up a tail,” he said over his shoulder.
Soraya didn’t bother looking back. “It’s Typhon.”
“How d’you know?”
Over the sighing wind he heard the distinct metallic snik! of a switchblade. Then the edge of the blade was at his throat.
“Pull over,” she said in his ear.
“You’re crazy. Put the knife away.”
She pressed the blade into his skin. “Do as I tell you.”
“Don’t do this, Soraya.”
“You’re the one who needs to think about what he’s done.”
“I don’t know what you—”
She gave him a shove in the back with the heel of her hand. “Dammit! Pull over now!”
Obediently, he slowed down. The black Camaro came roaring up on his left to trap him between it and the curb. Soraya noted this with satisfaction and, as she did so, Bourne jammed his thumb into the nerve on the inside of her wrist. Her hand opened involuntarily and he caught the falling switchblade by the handle, closed it, and stuck it into his jacket.
The Camaro, following procedure to the letter, had now angled in to the curb just in front of him. The passenger door swung open even as it rocked on its shocks, and an armed agent leapt out. Bourne twisted the handlebars and the motorcycle’s engine screamed as he turned to his right, cutting across a burned-out lawn, slipping into a narrow alley between two houses.
He could hear shouts behind him, the slamming of a door, the angry roar of the Camaro, but it was no use. The alley was too narrow for the car to be able to follow the motorcycle. It might try to find him on the other side, but Bourne had an answer for that as well. He was intimate with this part of Washington, and he was willing to bet everything that they weren’t.
On the other hand, he had Soraya to contend with. He might have stripped her of her knife, but she could still use every part of her body as a weapon. This she did with an economy of movement and an efficiency of application. She dug knuckles into his kidneys, repeatedly slammed her elbow into his ribs, even tried to gouge out an eye with her thumb, in obvious retaliation for what had happened to poor Tim Hytner.
All these assaults Bourne suffered with a grim stoicism, fending her off as best he could while the motorcycle rocketed through the narrow lane between the stained building walls on either side. Garbage cans and passed-out drunks were only the most frequent obstacles he had to negotiate at speed.
Then three teens appeared at the end of the alley. Two had baseball bats, which they brandished with chop-licking menace. The third, just behind the others, leveled a Saturday-night special at him as the motorcycle neared.
“Hang on!” he shouted at Soraya. Feeling her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, he leaned back, shifting their center of gravity sharply, at the same time gunning the engine. The front end of the motorcycle lifted off the ground. They rushed at the thugs reared up like a lion on the attack. He heard a shot fired, but the underside of the motorcycle protected them. Then they were in the midst of it. He snatched a bat from the grip of the thug on the left, slammed it down onto the wrist of the third teen, and the gun went flying.
They burst out of the end of the alley. Bourne leaned forward, guiding the motorcycle back onto two wheels just in time for the sharp turn to the right, down a street seething with garbage and stray dogs, yelping at the Harley’s thunderous passage.
Bourne said, “Now we can straighten—”
He never finished. Soraya had locked the crook of her arm across his windpipe and was bringing to bear a lethal pressure.
Five
DAMN YOU, damn you, damn you!” Soraya chanted like an exorcist.
Bourne scarcely heard her. He was far too busy trying to stay alive. The motorcycle was hurtling at a hundred kilometers an hour down the street, the wrong way, as it happened. He managed to swerve out of the way of an old Ford, horn blaring, a deep voice shouting obscenities. But in the process he sideswiped a Lincoln idling at the opposite curb. The motorcycle hit, bouncing off the long dented slash in the Continental’s front fender. Bourne’s windpipe, almost entirely blocked by the choke hold Soraya had on him, was allowing next to no air into his lungs. Stars twinkled at the periphery of his vision, and he was blacking out for microseconds at a time.
Even so, he was aware that the Lincoln had awakened and, making a sharp U-turn, was now in fast pursuit of the motorcycle that had done it damage. Up ahead, a truck lumbered toward him, taking up most of the street.
Putting on a shocking burst of speed, the Continental came abreast of him, its blackened window rolled down and a moon-faced black man scowling and howling a string of curses. Then the voracious snout of a sawed-off shotgun showed itself.
“This’ll teach yo, muthafucka!”
Before Moon-face had a chance to pull the trigger, Soraya kicked upward with her left leg. The edge of her boot struck the shotgun barrel; it swung wildly upward, the blast exploding into the treetops lining the street. Taking advantage, Bourne twisted the handlebars to full speed and took off down the street directly toward the huge truck. The driver saw their suicide maneuver and panicked, turning the wheel hard over as he simultaneously downshifted and stood on the air brakes. The truck, howling in protest, slewed broadside across the road.
Soraya, seeing death approaching with appalling speed, cried out in Arabic. She relinquished her choke hold to once again swing her arms tight around Bourne’s waist.
Bourne coughed, sucked sweet air into his burning lungs, leaned all the way over to his right, cut the engine an instant befor
e they were sure to slam into the truck.
Soraya’s scream was cut short. The motorcycle went down on its side in a welter of sparks and blood from skin flayed off Bourne’s right leg as they slid between the truck’s madly spinning axles.
On the other side Bourne brought the engine to life, using the momentum and the weight of their combined bodies to return the motorcycle to its normal upright position.
Soraya, too dazed to immediately resume her attack, said, “Stop, please stop now.”
Bourne ignored her. He knew where he was going.
The DCI was in conference with Matthew Lerner, being debriefed on the particulars of Hiram Cevik’s escape and its fiery aftermath.
“Hytner aside,” Lerner said, “the damage was light. Two agents with cuts and abrasions—one of those also with a concussion from the blast. A third agent missing. Minor damage to the bird on the ground”—he meant the helicopter—“none to the one that had been hovering.”
“That was a public arena,” the Old Man said. “It was fucking amateur hour out there.”
“What the hell was Bourne thinking, bringing Cevik out into the open?”
The director’s gaze rose to the portrait of the president that hung on one wall of the conference room. On the other wall was a portrait of his predecessor. You only get your portrait painted after they’ve hung you out to dry, he thought sourly. The years had piled up on him, and some days—like today—he could feel every grain of sand in the hourglass burying him slowly, surely. Atlas with bowed shoulders.
The DCI shuffled through some papers, held one to the light. “The chief of D.C. Metro’s called, ditto the FB fucking I.” His eyes bored into Lerner’s. “You know what they wanted, Matthew? They wanted to know if they could help. Can you beat that? Well, I can.
“The president phoned to ask what the hell was going on, if we were under attack by terrorists, if he should head for Oz.” Another name for the Hidden Seat of Power, the secret place from which the president and his staff could run the country during a full-fledged emergency. “I told him everything was under control. Now I’m asking you the same question, and by God I’d better get the answer I want.”