Bourne saw before she did that Semid gripped a Mauser in his other hand. He leapt at Semid, knocking him back, wrestling the Mauser out of his hand. As Semid turned toward Bourne’s attack, Rebeka contemptuously slapped aside the dirk and stabbed inward with her own knife. The blade penetrated Semid’s chest just below the sternum, and, with a surgeon’s deft hand, she twisted it upward and to the left, puncturing a lung, and then the heart.
Blood bubbled out of Semid’s mouth as he sighed a fetid breath. She stared hard into his eyes while she held him up with her knife blade and her tensed arm.
“Rebeka,” Bourne said.
She studied Semid as if he were a specimen pinned to a lab table.
“Rebeka,” Bourne repeated, more gently this time.
She expelled a breath and, at the same time, withdrew the knife blade, and the body fell to the floor. Bourne expected an expression of triumph on her face, but when she turned to him, there was only disgust.
She stared at him for a long moment, and Bourne had the impression that he was facing a singular creature, precisely controlled and calibrated on the outside, but possessing an untamed spirit and a wild heart.
“You ran out on me,” she said as she wiped her blade free of blood and gore, “and now I find you here.”
“Lucky you.” He smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised.”
Her eyes burned with a cold fury. “This is my territory.”
“That’s irrelevant now,” he said evenly, trying to defuse her anger. “Semid Abdul-Qahhar is dead.”
She kicked the corpse so it flopped over on its back. “Whoever the hell this is,” she said, “he’s not Semid Abdul-Qahhar.”
32
THERE WERE TIMES—and this was one of them—when Hendricks resented the security detail that followed him around as closely as his own shadow. He resented the fact that they were surely speculating on what had caused him to drive hell-for-leather back to his house in the middle of a workday. Worse, they watched him from behind smoked-glass windows as he crossed to his rose garden, got down on his knees, and began rooting around.
One of them, Richards, he thought, exited his car and strode to where he knelt.
“Sir, are you feeling well?”
“Perfectly,” Hendricks said with a distracted air.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You can return to your car.”
“Yes, sir,” Richards said, after a short pause.
Hendricks, glancing over his shoulder, saw Richards shrug, signing to his compatriots that he had no idea what the boss was up to. Returning to his work, Hendricks tried to calm himself, but he found to his horror that his hands were trembling uncontrollably. The moment he’d picked up Skara’s business card and seen the rose imprinted on it, he’d become certain that she had left the card for him to find. Only he would understand the rose’s significance.
“ I’m on my final journey.”
He was terribly afraid that Skara was going to do something irrevocable. He could not imagine her killing herself, but then he knew so little about her. And yet, strangely, he felt that he had known her all his life. It was a complete mystery to him how someone could become a part of his life so quickly. She had crawled under his skin and, lodged there, refused to budge. Her sudden disappearance only made him more acutely aware of how she affected him.
“ I’m on my final journey.”
Was she going to do something terrible, some final act that one way or another would snuff out her life? This was the scenario that terrified him.
“ I’m on my final journey.”
He had convinced himself that she’d left him a clue to what she was about to do, that she wanted him to stop her, that he was the only one with the ability to do so. He desperately wanted to believe that she felt about him the way he felt about her. Hadn’t she said as much on the DVD? But he harbored a suspicion that it had been a performance, that she had not really revealed what was in her hidden heart, and that now he would never know, because within days, or even hours, her life would be extinguished like a candle flame.
His shaking hands were covered with soil, his nails dark with grit. Starting at the left side of the rose garden, he was making his methodical way toward the right. At the base of each plant, his fingers dug into the soil, hoping to find something she had buried there for him to find after she had gone. But he came to the last rose and, digging in, found nothing.
He sat back on his haunches, resting his wrists on his knees while he stared at the flowers. He loved his roses, their colors and scents, but now all he saw were the thorns. Perhaps this time a rose was just a rose. He didn’t want to believe it, but now he had to, because there was nothing else for him to believe.
Bitter tears rose into his eyes, and, ashamed and despairing, he covered his face with his filthy hands.
Boris was nowhere to be found. Bourne, making a quick inventory of the dead and dying, found no trace of either Boris, for which he was profoundly grateful, or the SVR chief, Konstantin Beria. Briefly, he wondered whether they had gone, but he had his own agenda to consider.
“I’ve been after Semid Abdul-Qahhar for three years,” Rebeka said as they exited the synagogue the way they both had entered it. “He employs half a dozen doubles who look like him and talk like him. More often than not, they’re the ones who appear in public. Semid Abdul-Qahhar himself can be seen in the periodic taped messages his people send to Al Jazeera. I’ve studied those tapes in detail. I know what the real Semid Abdul-Qahhar looks like. Virtually no one else outside his circle of lieutenants does.”
That there might be body doubles changed Bourne’s plan radically. Boris had told him Semid Abdul-Qahhar was in Damascus. Now he sensed that the synagogue was a ruse. If so, then he knew that the leader of the Mosque must be at El-Gabal. This had many implications, not the least of which was that the planning phase of the terrorist attack was at an end, the operations phase had begun, and Bourne had little time to infiltrate El-Gabal, plant the cloned SIM cards, and set off the charges inside the twelve crates of FN SCAR-M, Mark 20 assault rifles Don Fernando had spiked.
He wanted to go into El-Gabal alone, but he realized now that having Rebeka with him was vital. Only she could recognize Semid Abdul-Qahhar. If he really was in the building, Bourne was not going to let this opportunity to kill him pass. Semid was the real danger. With El-Arian dead, he was now the heart and soul of Severus Domna; without his support the organization would be so severely weakened that it could be dealt with by Soraya, Peter, and their team. But if Semid somehow survived, his grip on the Domna would become a stranglehold, and with its members in legitimate positions in business and politics, Semid’s potential for launching terrorist attacks expanded exponentially. Bourne could not allow that to happen.
As they reached the street, he told Rebeka about El-Gabal and what he needed to do. “I think that’s where Semid Abdul-Qahhar is. I know how to get in, just as you knew how to get into the synagogue without being observed,” he concluded. “Either you’re with me or we part ways here.”
To her credit, she didn’t hesitate an instant. They took a taxi to the train station, where he opened the locker and took out the duffel filled with the implements he had purchased earlier. Rebeka watched him with the ghost of a smile on her lips.
“What’s so amusing?” Bourne said as they exited the terminal.
“Nothing really.” She shrugged. “It’s only that I was right and my superiors were wrong.” Her smile widened. “It was no coincidence that I was working your flight from Madrid.”
“Mossad was tracking me.”
“You think I’m Mossad?”
He did not reply as he guided her along the wide streets that led to Avenue Choukry Kouatly. They both wore Syrian clothes, so no one gave them a second look. Rebeka’s head was completely covered by her hijab.