“Break his fingers,” he said.
The armlock briefly choked off Jason’s air as the barrel of the gun crashed down repeatedly on his hand—hands. Instinctively, Bourne had swung his left hand over his right, protecting it. As the blood burst from the back of his left, he twisted his fingers, letting it flow between them until both hands were covered. He choked his screams; the grip lessened; he shouted.
“My hands! They’re broken!”
“Gut.”
But they were not broken; the left was damaged to the point where it was useless; not the right. He moved his fingers in the shadows; his hand was intact.
The car sped down the Steppdeckstrasse and swung into a sidestreet, heading south. Jason collapsed back in the seat, gasping. The gunman tore at his clothes, ripping his shirt, yanking at his belt. In seconds his upper body would be naked; passport, papers, cards, money no longer his, all the items intrinsic to his escape from Zurich taken from him. It was now or it was not to be. He screamed.
“My leg! My goddamned leg!” He lurched forward, his right hand working furiously in the dark, fumbling under the cloth of his trouser leg. He felt it. The handle of the automatic.
“Nein!” roared the professional in the front. “Watch him!” He knew; it was instinctive knowledge.
It was also too late. Bourne held the gun in the darkness of the floor; the powerful soldier pushed him back. He fell with the blow, the revolver, now at his waist, pointed directly at his attacker’s chest.
He fired twice; the man arched backward. Jason fired again, his aim sure, the heart punctured; the man fell over into the recessed jump seat.
“Put it down!” yelled Bourne, swinging the revolver over the rounded edge of the front seat, pressing the barrel into the base of the driver’s skull. “Drop it!”
His breathing erratic, the killer let the gun fall. “We will talk,” he said, gripping the wheel. “We are professionals. We will talk.” The large automobile lurched forward, gathering speed, the driver increasing pressure on the accelerator.
“Slow down!”
“What is your answer?” The car went faster. Ahead were the headlights of traffic; they were leaving the Steppdeckstrasse district, entering the busier city streets. “You want to get out of Zurich, I can get you out. Without me, you can’t. All I have to do is spin the wheel, crash into the pavement. I have nothing whatsoever to lose, Herr Bourne. There are police everywhere up ahead. I don’t think you want the police.”
“We’ll talk,” lied Jason. Everything was timing, split-second timing. There were now two killers in a speeding enclosure that was in itself a trap. Neither killer was to be trusted; both knew it. One had to make use of that extra half-second the other would not take.’ Professionals. “Put on the brakes,” said Bourne.
“Drop your gun on the seat next to mine.”
Jason released the weapon. It fell on top of the killer’s, the ring of heavy metal proof of contact. “Done.”
The killer took his foot off the accelerator, transferring it to the brake. He applied the pressure slowly, then in short stabs so that the large automobile pitched back and forth. The jabs on the pedal would become more pronounced; Bourne understood this. It was part of the driver’s strategy, balance a factor of life and death.
The arrow on the speedometer swung left: 30 kilometers, 18 kilometers, 9 kilometers. They had nearly stopped; it was the moment for the extra half-second of effort—balance a factor, life in balance.
Jason grabbed the man by the neck, clawing at his throat, yanking him up off the seat. Then he raised his bloody left hand and thrust it forward, smearing the area of the killer’s eyes. He released the throat. surging his right hand down toward the guns on the seat. Bourne gripped a handle, shoving the killer’s hand away; the man screamed, his vision blurred, the gun out of reach. Jason lunged across the man’s chest, pushing him down against the door, elbowing the killer’s throat with his left arm, grabbing the wheel with his bloody palm. He looked up through the windshield and turned the wheel to the right, heading the car toward a pyramid of trash on the pavement.
The automobile plowed into the mound of debris—a huge, somnambulant insect crawling into garbage, its appearance belying the violence taking place inside its shell.
The man beneath him lunged up, rolling on the seat. Bourne held the automatic in his hand, his fingers jabbing for the open space of the trigger. He found it. He bent his wrist and fired.
His would-be executioner went limp, a dark red hole in his forehead.
In the street, men came running toward what must have looked like a dangerously careless accident.. Jason shoved the dead body across the seat and climbed over behind the wheel. He pushed the gearshift into reverse; the sedan backed awkwardly out of the debris, over the curb and into the street. He rolled down his window, calling out to the would-be rescuers as they approached.
“Sorry! Everything’s fine! Just a little too much to drink!”
The small band of concerned citizens broke up quickly, a few making gestures of admonition, others running back to their escorts and companions. Bourne breathed deeply, trying to control the involuntary trembling that seized his entire body. He pulled the gear into drive; the car started forward. He tried to picture the streets of Zurich from a memory that would not serve him.
He knew vaguely where he was-where he had been-and more important, he knew more clearly where the Guisan Quai was in relationship to the Limmat.
Geh! Schnell. Guisan Quai!
Marie St. Jacques was to be killed on the Guisan Quai, her body thrown into the river. There was only one stretch where the Guisan and the Limmat met: it was at the mouth of Lake Zurich, at the base of the western shore. Somewhere in an empty parking lot or a deserted garden overlooking the water, a short, stocky man was about to carry out an execution ordered by a dead man. Perhaps by now the gun had been fired, or a knife plunged into its mark; there was no way to know, but Jason knew he had to find out. Whoever and whatever he was, he could not walk away blindly.
The professional in him, however, demanded that he swerve into the dark wide alley ahead. There were two dead men in the car; they were a risk and a burden he could not tolerate. The precious seconds it would take to remove them could avoid the danger of a traffic policeman looking through the windows and seeing death.
Thirty-two seconds was his guess; it had taken less than a minute to pull his would-be executioners from the car. He looked at them as he limped around the hood to the door. They were curled up obscenely next to one another against a filthy brick wall. In darkness.
He climbed behind the wheel and backed out of the alley.
Geh! Schnell. Guisan Quai!
9
He reached an intersection, the traffic light red. Lights. On the left, several blocks east, he could see lights arching gently into the night sky. A bridge! The Limmat! The signal turned green; he swung the sedan to the left.
He was back on the Bahnhofstrasse; the start of the Guisan Quai was only minutes away. The wide avenue curved around the water’s edge, riverbank and lakefront merging. Moments later, on his left was the silhouetted outline of a park, in summer a stroller’s haven, now dark, devoid of tourists and Zurichers. He passed an entrance for vehicles; there was a heavy chain across the white pavement, suspended between two stone posts. He came to a second, another chain prohibiting access. But it was not the same; something was different, something odd. He stopped the car and looked closer, reaching across the seat for the flashlight he had taken from his would-be executioner. He snapped it on and shot the beam over the heavy chain. What was it? What was different?
It was not the chain. It was beneath the chain. On the white pavement kept spotless by maintenance crews. There were tire marks, at odds with the surrounding cleanliness. They would not be noticed during the summer months; they were now. It was as if the filth of the Steppdeckstrasse had traveled too well.
Bourne switched off the flashlight and dropped it on the seat. The pain in his battered left hand suddenly fused with the agony in his shoulder and his arm; he had to push all pain out of his mind; he had to curtail the bleeding as best he could. His shirt had been ripped; he reached inside and ripped it further, pulling out a strip of cloth which he proceeded to wrap around his left hand, knotting it with teeth and fingers. He was as ready as he would ever be.