The prisoner did as he was told. The leap from Delta’s leg was minimal; the assassin’s left arm expertly slithered between the coils, his hand gripping the opposite side of the top of the wall. He severed the coiled wire noiselessly, holding the cutters against the metal on one side to reduce the sound of snapping tension. The open space above was now five feet wide. ‘Climb up there,’ said Delta.
The killer did so, and as his left leg swung over the wall, Delta leaped up to grab the assassin’s trousers and pulled himself up against the stone, swinging his own left leg over the top. He straddled the wall simultaneously with the commando.
‘Nicely done, Major Allcott-Price,’ he said, a small circular microphone in his hand, his weapon again aimed at the assassin’s head. ‘Not much longer now. If I were you, I’d study the grounds.’
Under Conklin’s urgent pleas to the driver, the taxi sped up the road in Victoria Peak. They passed a broken down car off the side of the road; it seemed out of place in the elegant surroundings, and Alex swallowed as he saw it, wondering in dread if it was really disabled. There’s the house!’ cried the CIA man. ‘For God’s sake, hurry] Go up to the-‘
He did not – could not – finish. Up ahead a shattering explosion filled the road and the night. Fire and stone flew in all directions as first a large part of the wall collapsed and then the huge iron gates fell forward in eerie slow motion beyond the flames.
‘Oh, my God, I was right,’ said Alexander Conklin softly to himself. ‘Delta’s come back. He wants to die. He will die.’
32
‘Not yet!’ roared Jason Bourne as the wall blew apart beyond the stately gardens filled with rows of lilacs and roses. ‘I’ll tell you when,’ he added quietly, holding the small circular microphone in his free hand.
The assassin grunted, his instincts roused to their primeval limits, his desire to kill equal to his desire to survive, the one dependent upon the other. He was on the edge of madness; only the barrel of Delta’s gun stopped him from an insane assault. He was still human, and it was better to try to live than to accept death through default. But when, when! The nervous tic returned to Allcott-Price’s face; his lower lip twitched as screams and shouts and the sound of men running in panic filled the gardens. The killer’s hands trembled as he stared at Delta in the dim, pulsating light of the distant flames.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said the man from Medusa. ‘You’re dead if you make a move. You’ve studied me so you know there’s no reprieve. You make it, you make it on your own. Swing your leg over the wall and be ready to jump when I tell you. Not before.’ Without warning, Bourne suddenly brought the microphone to his lips and snapped a switch. When he spoke his amplified words echoed eerily throughout the grounds, a haunting, reverberating sound that matched the thunder of the explosion, made more ominous by its calm simplicity, its frigidity.
‘You marines. Take cover and stay out of this. It’s not your fight. Don’t die for the men who brought you here. To them expendable – as I was expendable. There’s no legitimacy here, no territory to be defended, no honour of your country in question. You’re here for the sole purpose of protecting killers. The only difference between you and me is the fact that they used me, too, but now they want to kill me because I know what they’ve done. Don’t die for these men, they’re not worth it. I give you my word I won’t fire on you unless you shoot at me, and then I’ll have no choice. But there’s another man here who isn’t going to make any deals-‘
A fusillade of gunfire erupted, shattering the source of the sound, blasting the unseen speaker randomly off the wall. Delta was ready; it was bound to happen. One of the faceless, nameless manipulators had given an order and it was carried out. He reached into the knapsack, removing a 15-inch preset tear gas launcher, the canister in place. It could smash heavy glass at fifty yards; he aimed and pulled the trigger. A hundred feet away a bay window was shattered, the fog of gas billowing throughout the room inside. He could see figures running beyond the fragmented glass. Lamps and chandeliers were extinguished, supplanted by a startling array of floodlights positioned in the eaves of the great house and the trunks of the surrounding trees. Suddenly the grounds were awash with blinding white light. The branches of the overhanging tree would be a magnet for pivoting eyes and levelled weapons and he understood that no appeal of his would countermand the orders. He had delivered that appeal both as an honest warning and a salve for what conscience remained to a barely-thinking, barely-feeling robot avenger. In the shadows of the mind he had left he did not want to take the lives of youngsters called to serve the paranoid egos of manipulators – he had seen too much of that in Saigon years ago. He wanted only the lives of those inside the sterile house, and he intended to have them. Jason Bourne would not be denied. They had taken everything from him, and his personal account was now going to be settled. For the man from Medusa the decision was made – he was a puppet on the strings of his own rage, and apart from that rage his life was over.
‘Jump!’ whispered Delta, swinging his right leg over the wall, pummelling the assassin down to the ground. He followed while the commando was in mid-air and grabbed the impostor’s shoulder as the startled killer – arms extended on his knees – righted himself on the grass. Bourne dragged him out of sight into a latticed arbour with a profusion of bougainvillaea that reached nearly 6 feet high. ‘Here’s your gun, Major,’ said the original Jason Bourne. ‘Mine’s on you, and don’t you forget it!’
The assassin simultaneously grabbed the weapon and tore the cloth from his mouth, coughing and spitting out saliva as a savage burst of gunfire tore leaves and branches all along the wall. ‘Your little lecture didn’t do much fucking good, did it?
‘I didn’t expect it to. The truth of the matter is that they want you, not me. You see, I’m really expendable now. That was their plan from the beginning. I bring you out and I’m dead. My wife’s dead. We know too much. She because she learned who they were – she had to, she was the bait – me because they knew I’d put some figures together in Peking. You’re messed up with a bloodbath, Major. A megabomb that can blow the whole Far East apart, and will if saner heads in Taiwan don’t isolate and rip out those lunatic clients of yours. Only I don’t give a shit any more. Play your goddamned games and blow yourselves up. I just want to get inside that house.’
A squad of marines assaulted the wall, running alongside the stone, rifles poised, ready to fire. Delta pulled a second plastique from his knapsack, set the miniaturized digital timer for ten seconds, and threw the packet as far as he could towards the rear garden wall, away from the guards. ‘Come on!’ he ordered the commando, ramming his weapon into the killer’s spine. ‘You in front! Down this path. Nearer the house.’
‘Give me one of those! Give me a plastic!’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Christ, you gave me your word!’
‘Then either I lied or I changed my mind.’
‘Why! What do you care?
‘I care. I didn’t know there were so many kids. Too many kids. You could take out ten of them with one of these, maim a lot more.’
‘It’s a little late for you to become such a fucking Christian!’
‘The club’s not that exclusive; it never was. I know who I want and who I don’t want and I don’t want kids in pressed GI pajamas. I want the men inside that-‘
The explosion came some forty yards away at the rear of the grounds. Trees and dirt, bushes and whole beds of flowers flamed into the air – a panorama of greens and browns and speckled dots of colour within the billowing grey smoke illuminated by the hot white floodlights. ‘Move!’ whispered Delta. ‘To the end of the row. It’s about sixty feet from the house and there’s a pair of doors-‘ Bourne closed his eyes in angry futility as a series of seemingly unending spurts of rifle fire filled the rear gardens. They were children. They fired blindly out of fear, killing imaginary demons but no targets. And they would not listen.
Another group of marines, these obviously led by an experienced officer, took up equidistant positions in front of the great house, circling it, legs bent, feet dug in for recoils, weapons angled forward. The manipulators had called for their Praetorian guard. So be it. Delta again reached into his knapsack, felt around his arsenal and removed one of the two manual firebombs he had purchased in the Mongkok. It was similar to a grenade at the top – circular but covered with a shield of heavy plastic. The base, however, was a handle, five inches long so that the thrower could hurl the explosive farther and with greater accuracy. The trick was in the throwing, the accuracy and the timing. For once the plastic was removed, the shell of the bomb itself would adhere to any surface by an instant steel-like adhesive activated by air, and with the explosion a chemical shot out in all directions, prolonging the flames, embedding itself into all porous surfaces, seeping and burning. From the removal of the plastic covering to the explosion took fifteen seconds. The