Rousing himself, Muta saw the dark smudge of land coming into view. He glanced at his watch. Right on schedule. Rising, he stretched, hesitating. His thoughts went to the man piloting the jet. He knew this wasn’t the real pilot; he’d failed to give the recognition sign when he’d emerged from the woods. Who was he then? A CI agent, certainly; Jason Bourne, most probably. But then he had received a cell phone text message three hours ago that Jason Bourne was dead, according to an eyewitness and the electronic tracker, which now resided at the bottom of the Black Sea.
But what if the eyewitness lied? What if Bourne, discovering the tracker, had thrown it into the ocean? Who else could this pilot be but Jason Bourne, the Chameleon?
He went up the central aisle, into the cockpit. The pilot kept his attention focused on the neat rows of dials in front of him.
“We’re coming up on Iranian airspace,” Muta said. “Here’s the code you need to radio in.”
Bourne nodded.
Muta stood, his legs spread slightly apart, gazing at the back of the pilot’s head. He drew out his Korovin TK.
“Call in the code,” he said.
Ignoring him, Bourne continued to fly the plane into Iranian airspace.
Muta ibn Aziz took a step forward, put the muzzle of the Korovin at the base of Bourne’s skull. “Radio in the code immediately.”
“Or what?” Bourne said. “You’ll shoot me? Do you know how to fly a Sovereign?”
Of course Muta didn’t, which was why he’d gotten on board with the impostor. Just then the radio squawked.
An electronically thinned voice said in Farsi, “Salm aleikom. Esmetn ch st?”
Bourne picked up the mike. “Salm aleikom,” he responded.
“Esmetn ch st?” the voice said. What is your name?
Muta said, “Are you insane? Give him the code at once.”
“Esmetn ch st!” came the voice from the radio. It was no longer a question. “Esmetn ch st!” It was a command.
“Damn you, radio the code!” Muta was shaking with rage and terror. “Otherwise they’ll shoot us out of the sky!”
Thirty-one
BOURNE PUT the Sovereign into such a sudden, steep bank to the left that Muta ibn Aziz was thrown across the cockpit, fetching up hard against the starboard bulkhead. As Muta ibn Aziz struggled to regain his footing, Bourne sent the jet into a dive, simultaneously banking it to the right. Muta ibn Aziz slipped backward, banging his head on the edge of the doorway.
Bourne glanced back. Fadi’s messenger was unconscious.
The radar was showing two fighter planes coming up fast from beneath him. The hair-trigger Iranian government had wasted no time in scrambling its air defense. He brought the Sovereign around, caught a visual fix. What the Iranians had sent to intercept him were a pair of Chinese-built J-6s, reverse-engineered copies of the old MiG-19 used in the mid-1950s. These jets were so out of date, the Chengdu plant had stopped manufacturing them more than a decade ago. Even so, they were armed and the Sovereign wasn’t. He needed to do something to negate that enormous advantage.
They’d expect him to turn tail and run. Instead he lowered the Sovereign’s nose and put on a burst of speed as he headed directly toward them. Clearly startled, the Iranian pilots did nothing until the last moment, when they each peeled away from the Sovereign’s path.
As soon as they’d done so, Bourne pulled back on the yoke and brought the Sovereign’s nose to the vertical, performing a loop that set him behind both of them. They turned, describing paths like cloverleafs, homing in on him from either side.
They began to fire at him. He dipped below the crossfire, and it ceased immediately. Choosing the J-6 on the right because it was slightly closer, he banked sharply toward it. He allowed it to come under him, allowed the pilot to assume he’d made a tactical error. Taking evasive maneuvers as the chatter of the machine gun sprang up again, he waited until the J-6 had locked on to his tail, then he tipped the Sovereign’s nose up again. The Iranian pilot had seen the maneuver before and was ready, climbing steeply just behind the Sovereign. He knew what Bourne would do next: put the Sovereign into a steep dive. This Bourne did, but he also banked sharply to the right. The J-6 followed, even as Bourne punched in every ounce of the Sovereign’s speed. The plane began to chatter in the powerful shearing force. Bourne steepened both the bank and the dive.
Behind him, the old J-6 was shuddering and jerking. All at once a handful of rivets were sucked off the left wing. The wing crumpled as if punched by an invisible fist. The wing ripped from its socket in the fuselage. The two sections of the J-6 blew apart in a welter of stripped and shredded metal, plummeting end-over-end downward to the earth.
Bullets ripped through the Sovereign’s skin as the second J-6 came after them. Now Bourne lit out for the border to Afghanistan, crossing it within seconds. The second Iranian J-6, undeterred, came on, its engines screaming, its guns chattering.
Just south of the position where he had crossed into Afghani airspace was a chain of mountains that began in northern Iran. The mountains didn’t rise to significant height, however, until they reached Bourne’s current position, just northwest of Koh-i-Markhura. With a compass heading of east by southeast, he dipped the Sovereign toward the highest peaks.
The J-6 was shuddering and shrieking as it flattened out the curve of its descent. Having seen what had happened to his companion, the Iranian pilot had no intention of getting that close to the Sovereign. But it shadowed Bourne’s plane, dogging it from behind and just above, now and again firing short bursts at his engines.
Bourne could see that the pilot was trying to herd him into a narrow valley between two sharp-edged mountains that loomed ahead. In the confined space, the pilot sought to keep the Sovereign’s superior maneuverability to a minimum, catch it in the chute, and shoot it down.
The mountains rose up, blocking out light on either side. The massive rock faces blurred by. Both planes were in the chute now. The Iranian pilot had the Sovereign just where he wanted it. He began to fire in earnest, knowing that his prey was limited in the evasive maneuvers it could take.
Bourne felt several more hits judder through the Sovereign. If the J-6 hit an engine, he was finished. The end would come before he had a chance to react. Turning the plane on its right wingtip, he waggled out of the line of fire. But the maneuver would help him only temporarily. Unless he could find a more permanent solution, the J-6 would shoot him out of the sky.
Off to his left he saw a jagged rift in the sheer mountain wall, and immediately headed for it. Almost at once he saw the danger: a spire of rock splitting the aperture in two.
The defile they were in was now so narrow that behind him, the J-6 had assumed the same sideways position. Bourne maneuvered the Sovereign ever so slightly, keeping the profile of his plane between the J-6 and the rock spire.
As far as the Iranian pilot knew, they were both going to fly through the aperture. He was so hell-bent on blowing the Sovereign away that when, at the last moment, his prey moved slightly to the right in order to pass through the rift, he had no chance to react. The spire came up on him, froze him with its frightful proximity, and then his plane smashed into the rock spire, sending up a fireball out of which a column of black smoke shot upward into the arid sky. The J-6 and its pilot, now no more than a hail of white-hot debris, vanished as if by a conjuror’s hand.
Soraya awoke to the sound of a baby crying. She tried to move, groaned as her traumatized nerves rebelled in pain. As if her sound antagonized it, the baby started to scream. Soraya looked around. She was in a grimy room, filled with grimy light. The smells of cooking and closely packed human beings clogged the air. A cheap print of Christ on the cross hung at a slant on the grimy wall across from her. Where was she?
“Hey!” she called.
A moment later, Tyrone appeared. He was holding an infant in the crook of his left arm. The baby’s face was so scrunched up in rage, all its features were sucked into its wrinkled center. It looked like a fi
st.
“Yo, how yo feelin’ yo?”
“Like I just went fifteen rounds with Lennox Lewis.” Soraya made another, more concerted effort to sit up. As she struggled, she said, “Man, do I owe you.”
“Take yo up on dat sumtime.” He grinned as he came into the room.
“What happened to the guys from the black Ford? They didn’t follow you—?”
“They fuckin’ dead, girl. Sure as shit, they won’t bother yo no mo.”
The squalling baby turned her head, staring right into Soraya’s eyes with that pure vulnerability only very young children had. Her screams subsided to gulping sobs.
“Here.” Soraya held out her arms. Tyrone transferred the baby to her. At once she laid her head against Soraya’s breast, gave a tiny squawk. “She’s hungry, Tyrone.”
He left the room, returning several moments later with a bottle full of milk. He turned it over, tested the temperature on the inside of his wrist.
“S’okay,” he said, handing it to her.
Soraya looked at him for a moment.
“What?”
She put the bottle’s nipple to the infant’s lips. “I never thought of you as being domesticated.”
“Yo evah thought a me havin’ a kid?”
“This baby’s yours?”
“Nah. Belongs t’my sis.” He half turned and called: “Aisha!”
The doorway remained empty for a time, but Tyrone must have detected movement, because he said, “C’mon, yo.”
Soraya saw a shadow of movement, then a thin little girl with big coffee-colored eyes stood framed in the doorway.
“Doan yo go bein’ shy, girl.” Tyrone’s voice had softened. “This here’s Miss Spook.”
Aisha crunched up her face. “Miss Spook! Are you scary?”
Her father laughed good-naturedly. “Nah. Looka how she holdin’ Darlonna. Yo woan bite, will ya, Miss Spook?”
“Not if you call me Soraya, Aisha.” She smiled at the little girl, who was quite beautiful. “Think you can do that?”
Aisha stared at her, winding a braid around her tiny forefinger. Tyrone was about to admonish her again, but Soraya headed him off by saying, “You have such a pretty name. How old are you, Aisha?”
“Six,” the girl said very softly. “What do your name mean? Mine means ‘alive and well.’”
Soraya laughed. “I know, that’s Arabic. Soraya is a Farsi word. It means ‘princess.’”
Aisha’s eyes opened wider, and she took several steps into the room. “Are you a real princess?”
Soraya, trying to keep the laughter down, said to her with exaggerated solemnity, “Not a real princess, no.”
“She a kind a princess.” Tyrone contrived to ignore Soraya’s curious glance. “Only she not allowed to say so.”
“Why?” The child, fully engaged now, tripped over to them.
“Because bad people are after her,” Tyrone said.
The girl looked up at him. “Like the ones you shot, Daddy?”
In the ensuing silence, Soraya could hear raucous sounds from the street: the sudden throaty roar of motorcycles, the teeth-rattling blare of hip-hop, the clangor of heated conversations.
“Go play wid yo aunt Libby,” he said, not unkindly.
Aisha gave one last glance toward Soraya, then whirled, skipped out of the room.
Tyrone turned to Soraya, but before he could say anything he took off one shoe, threw it hard and expertly into a corner. Soraya turned and saw the large rat lying on its side. The heel of Tyrone’s shoe had nearly decapitated it. Wrapping the rat in some old newspaper, he wiped off his shoe, then took the rat out of the room.
When he returned, Tyrone said, “About Aisha’s mother, it’s a old story hereabouts. She got hit in a drive-by. She was wid two a her cousins who pissed off some gangstas inna hood, skimmin’ an shit off a drug run.” His face clouded. “I couldn’t let that go, yo.”
“No,” Soraya said. “I don’t imagine you could.”
The baby had drifted off, draining the bottle. She lay in Soraya’s arms breathing deeply and evenly.
Tyrone fell silent, abruptly shy. Soraya cocked her head.
“What is it?”
“Yo, I got sumpin important to tell yo, leastways I think it’s important.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Ain’t a short story, but I’ll try’tell it dat way.”
He told her about M&N Bodywork, how he and DJ Tank had been staking it out to use as the crew’s new crib. He told her about seeing the armed men there one night and how he and DJ Tank had sneaked in after the men had left, what they’d found, “the plastic explosive an shit.” He told her about coming upon the couple—the man and the woman—sawing up a man’s body.
“My God.” Soraya stopped him there. “Can you describe the man and woman?”
He began, painting frighteningly accurate word pictures of the false Lindros and Anne Held. How little we know people, Soraya thought bitterly. How easily they fool us.
“Okay,” she said at length, “what happened then?”
“They set fire to the building. Burn it to the fuckin’ ground.”
Soraya considered. “So by that time the explosives had been moved.”
“True dat.” Tyrone nodded. “There’s sumpin else, too. Those two shitbirds I pulled offa you over Ninth and Florida? I recognized one a them. He were a guard that night outside that body shop.”
Thirty-two
MUTA IBN AZIZ had begun to stir during the latter part of the aerial dogfight. Now Bourne became aware that he had regained his feet. He couldn’t relinquish the controls in order to engage the terrorist, so he had to find another way to deal with Muta.
The Sovereign was nearing the end of the mountain chasm. As Muta ibn Aziz put the muzzle of the gun against his right ear, Bourne directed the Sovereign toward the mountain peak at the end of the chasm.
“What are you doing?” Muta said.
“Put the gun away,” Bourne said while focusing on the peak rising up in front of them.
Muta stared out the windshield, mesmerized. “Get us out of here.”
Bourne kept the nose of the Sovereign headed directly for the peak.
“You’re going to kill us both.” Muta licked his lips nervously. All at once he lifted the gun away from Bourne’s head. “All right, all right! Just—”
They were terrifyingly close to the mountain.
“Throw the gun across the cockpit,” Bourne ordered.
“You’ve left it too late,” Muta ibn Aziz cried. “We’ll never make it!”
Bourne kept his hands steady on the yoke. With a shout of disgust, Muta tossed his gun across the floor.
Bourne pulled back on the yoke. The Sovereign whooshed upward. The mountain rushed at them with appalling speed. It was going to be close, very close. At the last instant Bourne saw the gap in the right side, as if the hand of God had reached down and cracked off half the mountaintop. He banked a precise amount; any farther and the passing crag would snap off the right wingtip. They passed just above the mountaintop, then, still climbing, pulled free of the chasm, blasting into blue sky.
Muta, on hands and knees, went scrabbling after the gun. Bourne was ready for this. He’d already engaged the autopilot. Unstrapping himself, he leapt onto the terrorist’s back, delivered a savage kidney punch. With a muted scream, Muta collapsed onto the cockpit floor.
Quickly, Bourne took possession of the gun, then bound the terrorist in a coil of wire he found in the engineer’s locker. Dragging him back across the cockpit, he returned to the pilot’s chair, disengaged the autopilot, adjusted the heading a bit more south. They were halfway across Afghanistan now, heading for Miran Shah, just across the eastern border in Pakistan, the place circled on the pilot’s map Bourne had studied.
Muta ibn Aziz expelled a long string of Bedouin curses.
“Bourne,” he added, “I was right. You manufactured the story of your own death.”
Bourne grinned at him. “Shall we call everyone by the
ir real name? Let’s start with Abu Ghazi Nadir al-Jamuh ibn Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib. But Fadi is so much shorter and to the point.”
“How could you possibly know—?”
“I also know that his brother, Karim, has taken Martin Lindros’s place.”
The shock showed in Muta’s dark eyes.
“And then there’s the sister, Sarah ibn Ashef.” With grim satisfaction, Bourne watched the messenger’s expression. “Yes, I know about that, too.”
Muta’s face was ashen. “She told you her name?”
At once Bourne understood. “You were there that night in Odessa when we had the rendezvous set up with our contact. I shot Sarah ibn Ashef as she ran into the square. We barely managed to escape the trap with our lives.”
“You took her,” Muta ibn Aziz said. “You took Sarah ibn Ashef with you.”
“She was still alive,” Bourne said.
“Did she say anything?”
Muta said this so quickly, Bourne knew that he was desperate for the answer. Why? There was more here than Bourne knew. What was he missing?
He was at the very end of what was known to him. But it was vital that he keep his opponent believing that he knew more than he did. He decided the best course was to say nothing.
The silence worked on Muta, who became extremely agitated. “She said my name, didn’t she?”
Bourne kept his voice neutral. “Why would she do that?”
“She did, didn’t she?” Muta was frantic now, twisting this way and that in a vain attempt to free himself. “What else did she say?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You must remember.”