in my office until called," he said as he confronted Lerner. "I must ask you to return to-"
The heavy blow from the end of the silencer struck him square on the left temple, sending him to the floor in a heap, insensate. Lerner took him by the back of his collar, dragged him back to one of the empty examination rooms, and stowed him behind the door.
Without another thought, he returned to the corridor and walked the rest of the way to his destination without further interference. Standing outside the closed door, he settled his mind into the clear quiet of the kill. Grasping the doorknob with his free hand, he slowly turned it as far as he could, held it in place. The kill-state surrounded him, entered him.
Simultaneously, he let go of the knob, kicked the door open and, taking a long stride across the threshold, squeezed off three shots into the figure on the examination table.
Chapter Twenty-Two
LERNER'S BRAIN took a moment to make sense of what his eyes saw. It recognized the rolls of material on the examination table; as a result, he began to turn.
But that lag between action and reaction was just enough to allow Bourne, standing to one side, to drive the syringe loaded with a general anesthetic into Lerner's neck. Still, Lerner was far from finished. He had the constitution of a bull, the determination of the damned. Breaking the syringe before Bourne had a chance to deliver the full dose, he drove his body against Bourne's.
As Bourne delivered two blows, Lerner squeezed off a shot that ripped open the security guard's chest.
"What are you doing?" Dr. Pavlyna screamed. "You told me-"
Lerner, driving an elbow into Bourne's bloody wound, shot her in the head. Her body flew backward into Soraya's arms.
Bourne dropped to his knees, pain weakening every muscle, firing every nerve ending. As Lerner grabbed him by the neck, Soraya threw the chair she'd been sitting on into his face. His death grip on Bourne broken, he staggered back, firing still, though wildly. She saw the guard's gun across the room, thought momentarily of making a run for it, but Lerner, recovering with frightening speed, made that impossible.
Instead she lunged for Bourne, dragged him to his feet, and got both of them out of there. She heard the phut! phut! of silenced bullets splinter the wall at her elbow, and then they were racing around a corner, down the corridor, retracing their route to the side door.
Outside, she half threw, half stuffed Bourne into the passenger seat of the battered Skoda, slid behind the wheel, fired the ignition, and in a squeal of tires and spray of gravel reversed them out of there.
Lerner, half leaning against the examination table, staggered to his feet. He shook his head, trying to clear it, failed. Reaching up, he pulled the needle from the broken syringe out of his neck. What the hell had Bourne injected him with?
He stood for a moment, weaving like a landlubber on a boat in heavy weather. He gripped the countertop to steady himself. Groggily, he went over to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. The only thing that did was blur his vision even further. He found he had trouble breathing.
Moving his hand along the counter, he discovered a small glass container with one of the rubber tops that allows needles through. He picked it up, put it in front of his face. It took him a moment for his eyes to focus on the small print. Midazolam. That's what this was. A short-term anesthetic meant to induce twilight sleep. Knowing that, he knew what he needed to counteract its effects. He went through the cabinets until he found a vial of epinephrine, the main chemical in adrenaline. Locating the syringes, he loaded one up, zipped a little of the liquid out the end of the needle to get rid of any air bubbles that might have formed, then injected himself.
That was the end of the midazolam. The cotton-wool haziness went up in a blaze of mental fire. He could breathe again. He knelt over the corpse of the late unlamented Dr. Pavlyna and fished out her ring of keys.
Minutes later, finding his way to the side door, he was out of the Polyclinic. As he approached Dr. Pavlyna's car, he saw fresh skid marks in the gravel by a vehicle that had been parked beside it. The driver had been in a hurry. He piled into