across to where the shattered plane was burning. Then it, too, burst asunder with a massive roar, incinerating everyone and everything in the immediate vicinity.
Colonel Ben David stared at Maceo Encarnación. “And the payment?”
Maceo Encarnación smiled. “And the formula?”
Ben David held up a 32-gigabyte SD card. “The real one, this time.”
Maceo Encarnación opened a second envelope, spilling its contents onto the bottom of the suitcase. The diamonds sparkled and glittered in the lamplight. “Thirty million worth of perfection.”
Ben David nodded. Handing over the SD card, he said, “When you insert that directly into your mobile, everything will be revealed.”
Maceo Encarnación clutched it tightly in his fist. “And Core Energy will corner the market on both nuclear fuel and weaponry.”
At that moment, they both heard the roar of the first explosion. They were halfway out of the tent when the shock waves from the second and third detonations threw them backward off their feet.
A flaming tire arced downward from the conflagration, heading directly for Bourne.
Scrambling away, he rolled onto a patch of snow to keep the flames from getting to his clothes. By the time he raised himself up onto one knee, three armed Mossad agents were sprinting toward him. As the first shots were fired, he leaped behind a storage shed just past the edge of the makeshift runway.
The intensity of the fire incinerating the plane and the Jeep kept the agents from coming any closer, and Bourne took the opportunity to run in a half-crouch to the next building, which housed the scientists working in the camouflaged laboratory several hundred yards to his left.
Though well armed, Bourne had no particular desire to shoot the agents except in self-defense. It was their commander and Maceo Encarnación he was after. He’d much prefer to keep hidden and out of their way while he searched for his quarry.
No sooner had he entered the building than the door slammed shut. One of the windows shattered and a thick tongue of flame set the bedding on fire. The sharp odor of chemical fire filled the interior: someone was using a flamethrower.
The blaze leaped up, engulfing the interior almost immediately. Bourne turned back, but the door through which he had slipped in was bolted shut from the outside. He tried to make his way to one of the windows, but the fire had spread so quickly and the flames were so hot that he could not get to even the nearest of them. Ripping off a pillowcase, he held it over his nose and mouth, dropping to the floor, where the air was several degrees cooler. Acrid smoke billowed like storm clouds, obscuring the low ceiling.
He heard a sound over the spark and crackle of the burning wood. A figure filled the shattered window, then stepped through. It was clad in a flame-retardant suit with its own breathing apparatus. The figure held the flamethrower as it looked to his right, then his left. From his position hidden away beneath one of the beds, Bourne could make out the features of Colonel Ben David through the glass face-plate.
Bourne had already witnessed the first tongue of flame and so knew that the flame flower was using liquid—likely napalm—ignited by propane. Now, as Ben David turned again, searching for him, Bourne saw the two tanks on his back: The napalm would be housed in the tank that lay against his back, the propane tank, hidden from anyone standing in front of the Colonel, just behind it. Bourne brought his rifle to bear: All it would take was a single bullet into the propane tank to roast Ben David alive. But in this enclosed space, already afire, Bourne himself would roast along with his enemy.
Trying not to cough, he watched as Ben David quartered the space, searching under one bed after another. The moment he left his post in front of the shattered window, Bourne snaked out from under the bed, sprinted diagonally across the smoke- and ash-filled interior. As he left his feet, diving through the window, Ben David turned, toggling on the flamethrower. Another tongue of flame licked out, across the wall, then shot out the window, where the very end of it licked at the back of Bourne’s jacket, igniting it.
Instantly feeling the heat, Bourne threw himself into a patch of deeper snow, rolling on his back to snuff out the flames. He saw Ben David step through the window, level the snout of the flamethrower on him, even as Bourne lifted the assault rifle to