being dead. He wouldn't believe it even if Fadi himself told him so. He knew Bourne too well. He always had a way of turning over the newly shoveled earth to climb out of his grave. Jason was alive, Lindros knew it.
But he wondered whether it even mattered. Did Jason suspect that Karim al-Jamil had taken Lindros's place? If he'd been fooled, then even if he'd survived the rescue attempt on Ras Dejen he'd have abandoned the rescue. An even worse scenario made him break out into a cold sweat. What if Jason had found Karim al-Jamil, brought him back to CI headquarters. God in heaven, was that what Fadi had planned all along?
His body swayed and juddered as the plane hit a pocket of turbulence. To steady himself, he leaned against the plane's chill concave bulkhead. After a moment, he put his hand over the bandage that covered half his face. Underneath was the excavation where his right eye had been. This had become a habit of his. His head throbbed with an unspeakable pain. It was as if his eye were on fire-only his eye was no longer his. It belonged to Fadi's brother, Karim al-Jamil ibn Hamid ibn Ashef al-Wahhib. At first, this thought had made him sick to his stomach; he would vomit often and rackingly, like a junkie going cold turkey. Now it simply made him sick at heart.
The violation of his body, the harvesting of his organ while he was still alive, was a horror from which he would never recover. At several points, while he was out on the silver lake fishing for rainbow trout, the thought of killing himself crossed his mind, but he had never actually considered it. Suicide was the coward's way out.
Besides, he very much wanted to live, if only to exact his revenge on Fadi and Karim al-Jamil.
Bourne awoke with a violent twitch. He looked around him, momentarily disoriented. Where was he? He saw a bureau, a night table, curtains drawn against the light. Anonymous furniture, heavy, threadbare. A hotel room. Where?
Sliding out of bed, he padded across the mottled carpet, pulled back the thick curtains. A sudden glare struck him a clean blow across his face and chest. He squinted at the tiny scimitars of sunlight, gold against the deep gray of the water. The Black Sea. He was in Odessa.
Had he been dreaming of Odessa, or remembering Odessa?
He turned, his mind still filled with the dream-memory, stretched like taffy into the blue morning. Marie in Odessa? Never! Then what was she doing in his memory shard of...
Odessa!
It was in this city that his memory shard had been born. He'd been here before. He'd been sent to kill... someone. Who? He had no idea.
He sat back down on the bed, rubbing the heels of his hands against his eyes. He still heard Marie's voice.
"I would be alive now if you hadn't been halfway across the globe, if you hadn't been with her." Not accusatory. Sad.
What did it matter where he was, what he was doing? He hadn't been with her. Marie had phoned him. She thought she had a cold, that's all. Then the second call, which had sent him half out of his mind with grief. And guilt.
He should have been there to protect his family, just as he should have been there to protect his first family. History had repeated itself, if not exactly, then tragically close enough. Ironically, this far away in kilometers from the scene of the disaster had brought him closer, to the very brink of the black void inside him. Staring into it, he felt that old, overwhelming despair well up inside him-a need to punish himself, or to punish someone else.
He felt totally, absolutely alone. For him, this was a deeply disturbing state, as if he had stepped outside himself, as one does in a dream. Only this was no dream; this was waking life. Not for the first time he wondered whether his judgment was being impaired by his current emotional turmoil. He could find no other logical explanation for certain anomalies: his bringing Hiram Cevik out of the CI cell; his waking up here and not knowing where he was. For a brief, despairing moment, he wondered if Marie's death had ripped him completely asunder, if the delicate threads that held his multiple identities together had snapped. Am I losing my mind?