field of vision, her eyes tracked him and a small smile lit her face.
?There you are.?
He reached down, putting one arm beneath her shoulders, but when he moved to pick her up, her face contorted and she cried out.
?Oh, God?God help me!?
?What is it? What?s the matter??
She stared at him mutely, a web of pain clouding her eyes.
He lifted her torso as gently as he could, and that was when he saw the two large shards of glass sticking out of her back like dagger blades. Wiping the sweat off her brow, he said, ?Tracy, I want you to move your feet. Can you do that for me??
He looked at her feet, but nothing happened.
?What about your legs??
Nothing. He pinched the flesh of her thigh. ?Do you feel that??
?What what did you do??
She was paralyzed. At least one of the glass spears had severed key nerves. And the other one? He moved, trying to get a better look at how deeply the glass was embedded. These were good-size pieces, six to eight inches long, he judged, and they were buried deep. He recalled Tracy turning away, then the bullet from Yevsen?s gun slamming into the heavy glass bowl. The impact had acted like the detonation of a nail bomb, impaling her on two of the larger projectiles.
The thunder of the semi-automatic fire was very close now, though more intermittent.
?I?ve got to get you to a hospital,? Bourne said, but as he tried to lever her from her half-sitting position she vomited a gout of blood, and he eased back, cradling her in his arms.
?I?m not going anywhere.?
?I?m not going to let you??
?You know it and I know it.? Tracy?s eyes were bloodshot, cratered with dark circles like deep bruises. ?I don?t want to be alone, Jason.?
He held her as she relaxed back against him. ?Why did you call me that??
?Yes, I know your real name, I have from the moment I met you, which wasn?t a coincidence. Keep still,? she said, cutting him off, ?I have things to tell you and there isn?t much time.? She licked her bloody lips. ?Arkadin hired me to make sure you got here. Nikolai Yevsen, the man you just killed, told me that Arkadin is in Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, why I don?t know, but he isn?t here.?
So she?d been working for Arkadin all along. Bourne shook his head grimly at how well he?d been played. He?d been made to suspect her and then been given a perfectly plausible explanation as to why she?d lied about knowing the Goya was real. At that, he?d stupidly let down his guard. He saw Arkadin?s hand in these delicate threads and admiration mingled with his anger at himself.
Tracy?s eyes suddenly opened so wide he could see the bloodshot whites all the way around. ?Jason!?
Her breathing had become shallow and erratic. She tried to smile. ?It?s in our darkest hour that our secrets eat us alive.?
He put two fingers against her carotid. Her pulse was weak and irregular. She was slipping away. All at once their conversation of last night came back to him??Why is it, I wonder, that people feel the need to lie altogether?? she had said?and he knew absolutely that she had wanted to tell him then. ?Would it be so terrible if everyone just told each other the truth?? Their entire conversation had been about her double life, and her inability to confess it to him. ?What about you?? she had said. ?Do you mind being alone??
He struggled to understand the situation?to understand her?but all human beings were too complicated to be summed up by one thought, or even one string of thoughts. Once again, he was struck by all the myriad strands that went into the weave of a human life?Tracy?s no less than anyone else?s?perhaps more so in her case because, like him, she lived a double life. Like Don Hererra and the Torturer, she had been part of Arkadin?s spider?s web, an attempt to manipulate him into doing?what? He still didn?t know. But here was one of his enemy?s pawns, lying still and dying in his arms. It was obvious now?and, in retrospect, last night?that she felt conflicted about the role Arkadin had hired her to play. Her ambivalence struck him like a blow to his stomach. She had fooled him but, as she had wondered last night, had she in the process been fooling herself? These were questions that went to the heart of his own dilemma: the not-knowing, the always being