blow up headquarters." She knew she sounded breathless, even a little bit mad. "Please, I'm begging you. Go to the Old Man, tell him it's going to happen in the next twenty-four hours."
"The Old Man and Anne are at the White House, meeting with the president. They'll be there for some time, Deputy Director Lindros said."
"Then contact one of the directorate chiefs-better yet, all of them. Anyone but Lindros."
"Listen, come in. Give yourself up. We can help you."
"I'm not crazy," Soraya said, though increasingly she felt as if she was.
"Then this conversation is over."
As Katya turned toward the two guards outside the infirmary, her delicate fingers undid the top two buttons of her blouse. She had never worn a bra. She had beautiful breasts, and she knew it.
The guards were playing the same game they always did, the rules of which she could never fathom. Of course, no money changed hands; that would make it gambling, which was forbidden by Islamic law. The object seemed to be to sharpen their reaction time.
To turn her mind away from her present situation, she conjured up the rush of her old life, the one Costin had insisted she give up. As the guards became aware of her, she stood in profile, as she would on a Perfect Ten shoot, her back slightly arched, her breasts thrust out.
Then slowly, disarmingly, she turned toward them. Their eyes were nailed to her body.
She felt the ache in her breastbone, where she had instructed Lindros to hit her. She opened her blouse wide enough so that they could see the bruise, so new that the skin was bright red, just starting to puff up.
"Look," she said, quite unnecessarily. "Look what that bastard has done to me."
With these words, the guards roused themselves sufficiently to rush past her into the infirmary. They saw Lindros flat on his back, his eyes closed. There was blood on his face. He seemed to be scarcely breathing.
The taller of the two guards turned to Katya, who was standing directly behind him. "What have you done to him?"
At that precise moment, Lindros drew back his right leg, opened his eyes, and slammed the heel of his right foot as hard as he could into the shorter guard's crotch. The guard gave a little grunt of surprise as he collapsed in on himself.
The taller guard, slow in turning back, received the tightly curled edge of Lindros's knuckles in his throat. He coughed, his eyes going wide, his fingers scrabbling for his sidearm. Katya, as Lindros had instructed her, kicked the back of his left knee. As he pitched over, the side of his head made violent contact with Lindros's fist.
The two of them spent the next five minutes stripping the guards, then tying and gagging them. Lindros dragged first one, then the other to the utility closet, stowing them away like so much rubbish. He and Katya climbed into their clothes, she in the smaller guard's outfit, Lindros in the taller one's.
As they dressed, he smiled at her. She reached out and wiped the blood from his pricked finger off his cheek.
"How was that?" he said.
"We're a long way from being free."
"How right you are." Lindros gathered up the guards' weapons-sidearms and semiautomatic machine guns. "Do you know how to use these?"
"I know how to pull a trigger," she said.
"That'll have to do."
He took her hand, and together they fled the infirmary.
Bourne was not treated as roughly by the terrorists as he had expected. In fact, once they'd dragged him out of the wrecked Sovereign, he wasn't treated harshly at all. They were all Saudis, this cadre. He could tell not only by the way they looked, but by the Arabic dialect they spoke as well.
As soon as his shoe soles hit the scorched earth of the runway, they stood him up straight and frog-marched him onto the shale, where two armored military all-terrain vehicles, veiled in heavy camouflaging, stood waiting. No wonder he'd missed seeing them from the air.
They took him around to the larger of the two vehicles, which on close inspection looked like a mobile command center. The rear doors banged open, two burly arms extended, and he was hauled bodily up and in. Immediately the metal doors slammed shut.
From out of the inky darkness, a familiar voice in a beautiful clipped British accent said, "Hello, Jason."
Red lights flickered on, making Bourne blink as his eyes adjusted. By the odd illumination he could see banks of electronic equipment, silently emitting mysterious