curious kindness. “Pity about your lip.” His laugh was short and savage. “It seems I required a violent wake-up call.”
Her eyes were the color and shape of ripe olives, vivid against her Mediterranean skin and black hair pulled back tight, tucked, except for a couple of wisps, inside her hood. “Why do you do what you do?”
“Why do you?”
She laughed softly. “That’s easy.” She had a Roman nose, delicate cheekbones, and a generous mouth. “I keep my country safe.”
“At the expense of all other countries.”
“Isn’t that the definition of a patriot?” She shook her head. “But then you wouldn’t know.”
“You’re very sure of yourself.”
She shrugged. “I was born that way.”
He stirred infinitesimally. “Tell me one thing. What did you think of when we were in bed together?”
Her smile changed character subtly, but that was the extent of her answer.
“You’ll give me what I want to know,” she said. “Tell me about Jihad bis saif.”
“Not even,” he said, “on the point of death.”
Her smile changed yet again, into the one he remembered from the hotel room in Dahr El Ahmar, a secret smile, he had thought, just between the two of them, and he hadn’t been wrong. It was only the context he’d missed.
“You have no country, no innate allegiance. Your masters have seen to that.”
“We all have masters,” he said. “It’s only that we tell ourselves we don’t.”
When she took a step toward him, he flicked the knife he had been holding close to his side.The short distance between them made it impossible for her to duck out of the way. She had just begun to react when the blade penetrated her Thinsulate parka and buried itself in the flesh of her right shoulder. The EAA swung away as she was spun 45 degrees. As her arm came down, he leaped at her, taking her down flat on her back. He bore down, using his superior weight to half-bury her in the snow,sinking her into the frozen,needle-packed earth beneath.
He struck a hard blow to her jaw. The EAA lay in the snow, some distance away. Shaking off the effects of the blow, she heaved him off her. He rolled back, and before she had a chance to move, grabbed the hilt of the knife, and ground the blade deeper into the muscle of her shoulder. She gritted her teeth, but she didn’t scream. Instead, she jabbed the tips of her fingers into the cricoid cartilage of his throat. He coughed, gagging, and his hand came off the knife. Grabbing hold of it, she drew it out. Her blood glimmered darkly as it ran down the narrow blade.
Rearing back away from her, he lunged for the EAA, snatched it up and aimed it at her. When she laughed at him, he pulled the trigger, pulled it again and again. It was empty. What had she meant to do? This thought was racing through his mind when she pulled a Glock 20 out of her parka. Throwing the useless EAA at her, he lurched up, turned, and ran a patternless path through the pines, toward the water. It was his only chance now to escape her.
As he ran, he unzipped his coat, shrugged it off. In the water, it would only help to carry him down. The water would be frigid—so cold that he would have only five or six minutes to swim away to safety before the temperature penetrated to his bones, anesthetizing him. Paralysis would not be far behind, followed by death.
A shot from behind him whistled past his right knee, and he stumbled, crashed into a tree, bounced off and kept running, deeper and deeper into the woods, closer and closer to the water, whose sound rushed at him like a conquering army. He pushed himself on, panted breath streaming from him.
When he saw the first glint of the water, his heart lifted and the breath came easier in his chest. Breaking free of the pines, he lurched along snowy scrub grass sprouting between bald rocks that sloped steeply down to the sea.
He was almost there when he skidded on a slick of muck, and the second shot, meant for his shoulder, grazed the side of his head. He spun around, arms flung wide, continued blindly, legs churning as he reached the lip of land, and, blinded by his own blood, plunged down into the icy depths.
Gazing at the spattering of tiny islets around him, rimed in ice, Jason Bourne sat in the center of the small fishing skiff,