The Jackal roared; it was a defiant shriek at having been hit. Bourne lunged back across the opening, pivoting once again into the wall, momentarily distracted by the sounds of a now functioning ice machine. Again he crouched, inching his face toward the corner of the archway when the murderous insanity in the hallway erupted into the fever pitch of close combat. Like an enraged caged animal, the wounded Carlos kept spinning around in place, continuous bursts from his weapon exploding as if he were firing through unseen walls that were closing in on him. Two piercing, hysterical screams came from the far end of the hallway, one male, one female; a couple had been wounded or killed in the panicked fusillade of stray bullets.
“Get down!” Conklin’s scream from across the corridor was an instant command for what Jason could not know. “Take cover! Grab the fucking walls!” Bourne did as he was told, under standing only that the order meant he was to shove himself into as small a place as possible, protecting his head as much as possible. The corner. He lunged as the first explosion rocked the walls—somewhere—and then a second, this much nearer, far more thunderous, in the hallway itself. Grenades!
Smoke mingled with falling plaster and shattered glass. Gunshots. Nine, one after another—a Graz Burya automatic … Alex! Jason spun up and away from the corner of the recess and lurched for the opening. Conklin stood outside the door of their suite in front of the upturned room-service table; he snapped out his empty clip and furiously searched his trousers pockets. “I haven’t got one!” he shouted angrily, referring to the extra clips of ammunition supplied by Krupkin. “He ran around the corner into the other corridor, and I don’t have any goddamned shells!”
“I do and I’m a lot faster than you,” said Jason, removing his spent magazine and inserting a fresh clip from his pocket. “Get back in there and call the lobby. Tell them to clear it.”
“Krupkin said—”
“I don’t give a damn what he said! Tell them to shut down the elevators, barricade all staircase exits, and stay the hell away from this floor!”
“I see what you mean—”
“Do it!” Bourne raced down the hallway, wincing as he approached the couple who lay on the carpet; each moved, groaning. Their clothes were spotted with blood, but they moved! He turned and yelled to Alex, who was limping around the room-service table. “Get help up here!” he ordered, pointing at an exit door directly down the corridor. “They’re alive! Use that exit and only that one!”
The hunt began, compounded and impeded by the fact that the word had been spread throughout these adjacent wings of the Metropole’s tenth floor. It took no imagination to realize that behind the closed doors, along both sides of the hallways, panicked calls were being made to the front desk as the sound of nearby gunfire echoed throughout the corridors. Krupkin’s strategy for a KGB assault team in civilian clothes had been nullified by the first burst from the Jackal’s weapon.
Where was he? There was another exit door at the far end of the long hallway Jason had entered, but there were perhaps fifteen to eighteen guest-room doors lining that hallway. Carlos was no fool, and a wounded Carlos would call upon every tactic he could summon from a long life of violence and survival to survive, if only long enough to achieve the kill he wanted more than life itself. … Bourne suddenly realized how accurate his analysis was, for he was describing himself. What had old Fontaine said on Tranquility Isle, in that faraway storeroom from which they had stared down at the procession of priests knowing that one had been bought by the Jackal? “… Two aging lions stalking each other, not caring who’s killed in the cross fire”—those had been Fontaine’s words, a man who had sacrificed his life for another he barely knew because his own life was over, for the woman he loved was gone. As Jason started cautiously, silently down the hall toward the first door on the left, he wondered if he could do the same. He wanted desperately to live—with Marie and their children—but if she was gone … if they were gone … would life really matter? Could he throw it away if he recognized something in another man that reflected something in himself?
No time. Meditate on your own time, David Webb! I have no use for you, you weak, soft son of a bitch. Get away from me! I have to flush out a bird of prey I’ve wanted for thirteen years. His claws are razor-sharp and he’s killed too often, too many, and now he wants to kill my own—your own. Get away from me!
Bloodstains. On the dull, dark brown carpet, wet driblets glistening in the dim overhead light. Bourne crouched and felt them; they were wet; they were red—bloodred. Unbroken, they passed the first door, then the second, remaining on the left—then they crossed the hall, the pattern now altered, no longer steady, instead zigzagging, as if the wound had been located, the bleeding partially stemmed. The trail passed the sixth door on the right, and the seventh … then abruptly the shining red drops stopped—no, not entirely. There was a trickle heading left, barely visible, and again, across the hallway—there it was! A faint smudge of red just above the knob on the eighth door on the left, no more than twenty feet from the corridor’s exit staircase. Carlos was behind that door holding hostage whoever was inside.
Precision was everything now, every movement, every sound concentrated on the capture or the kill. Breathing steadily while imposing a suspension of the muscular spasms he felt everywhere throughout his body, Bourne once more walked silently, now retracing his steps up the hallway. He reached a point roughly thirty paces away from the eighth door on the left and turned around, suddenly aware of a muted chorus of sporadic sobs and cries that came from closed doorways along the hotel corridor. Orders had been given couched in language far removed from Krupkin’s instructions: Stay inside your rooms, please. Admit no one. Our people are investigating. It was always “our people,” never “the police,” never “the authorities”; with those names came panic. And panic was precisely what Medusa’s Delta One had in mind. Panic and diversion, eternal components for the human snare, lifelong allies in the springing trap.
He raised the Graz Burya automatic, aiming at one of the ornate hallway chandeliers, and fired twice, simultaneously shouting furiously as the earsplitting explosions accompanied the shattered glass that plummeted from the ceiling. “There he goes! A black suit!” His feet pounding, Bourne ran with loud emphatic strides down the corridor to the eighth door on the left, then past the door, shouting once again. “The exit … the exit!” He abruptly stopped, firing a third shot into another chandelier, the jarring cacophony covering the absent noise of his pounding feet as he spun around, throwing his back against the opposing wall of the eighth door, then pushing himself away, hurling his body at the door and crashing into it, smashing it off its hinges as he. lurched inside, plunging to the floor, his weapon raised, prepared for rapid fire.
He was wrong! He knew it instantly—a final reverse trap was in the making! He heard another door opening somewhere outside—he either heard it or he instinctively knew it! He rolled furiously to his right, over and over again, his legs crashing into a floor lamp, sending it toward the door, his panicked darting eyes catching a glimpse of an elderly couple clutching each other, crouching in a far corner.
The white-gowned figure burst into the room, his automatic pistol spitting indiscriminately, the staccato reports deafening. Bourne fired repeatedly into the mass of white as he sprang into the left wall, knowing that if for only a split second he was positioned on the killer’s blind right flank. It was enough!
The Jackal was caught in his shoulder—his right shoulder! The weapon literally snapped out of his grip as he jerked up his forearm, his fingers spastically uncurled under the impact of the Graz Burya’s penetration. With no cessation of movement, the Jackal swung around, the bloody long white robe separating, billowing like a sail as he grabbed the massive flesh wound with his left hand and violently kicked the floor lamp into Jason’s face.
Bourne fired again, half blinded by the flying shade of the heavy lamp, his weapon deflected by the thick stem. The shot went wild; steadying his hand, he squeezed the trigger again, only to hear the sickening finality of a sharp metallic click—the gun’s magazine was empty! Struggling to a crouch, he lunged for the blunt, ugly automatic weapon as the white-robed Carlos raced through the shattered doorway into the corridor. Jason got to his feet, but his knee collapsed! It had buckled under his own weight. Oh, Christ! He crawled to the edge of the bed and dived over the pulled-down sheets toward the bedside telephone—it had been demolished, the Jackal had shot it apart! Carlos’s demented mind was summoning up every tactic, every counteraction he had ever used.