The Bourne Sanction

Fourteen

IT’S AMAZING,” Moira said.

Bourne looked up from the files he’d snatched from Veronica Hart. “What’s amazing?”

“You sitting here opposite me in this opulent corporate jet.” Moira was wearing a sleek black suit of nubbly wool, shoes with sensible heels. A thin gold chain was around her neck. “Weren’t you supposed to be on your way to Moscow tonight?”

Bourne drank water from the bottle on his side tray table, closed the file. He needed more time to ascertain whether Karim al-Jamil had doctored these conversations, but he had his suspicions. He knew Martin was far too canny to tell her anything that was classified-which covered just about everything that happened at CI.

“I couldn’t stay away from you.” He watched a small smile curl Moira’s wide lips. Then he dropped the bomb. “Also, the NSA is after me.”

It was as if a light went out in her face. “Say again?”

“The NSA. Luther LaValle has decided to make me a target.” He waved a hand to forestall her questions. “It’s political. If he can bag me when the CI hierarchy can’t, he’ll prove to the powers that be that his thesis that CI should come under his jurisdiction makes sense, especially after the turmoil CI has been in since Martin’s death.”

Moira pursed her lips. “So Martin was right. He was the only one left who believed in you.”

Bourne almost added Soraya’s name, then thought better of it. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“It matters to me,” she said fiercely.

“Because you loved him.”

“We both loved him.” Her head tilted to one side. “Wait a minute, are you saying there’s something wrong in that?”

“We live on the outskirts of society, in a world of secrets.” He deliberately included her. “For people like us there’s always a price to pay for loving someone.”

“Like what?”

“We’ve spoken about it,” Bourne said. “Love is a weakness your enemies can exploit.”

“And I’ve said that’s a horrid way to live one’s life.”

Bourne turned to stare out the Perspex window at the darkness rushing by. “It’s the only one I know.”

“I don’t believe that.” Moira leaned forward until their knees touched. “Surely you see you’re more than that, Jason. You loved your wife; you love your children.”

“What kind of a father can I be to them? I’m a memory. And I’m a danger to them. Soon enough I’ll be a ghost.”

“You can do something about that. And what kind of friend were you to Martin? The best kind. The only kind that matters.” She tried to get him to turn back to her. “Sometimes I’m convinced you’re looking for answers to questions that have none.”

“What does that mean?”

“That no matter what you’ve done in the past, no matter what you’ll do in the future, you’ll never lose your humanity.” She watched his eyes engage hers slowly, enigmatically. “That’s the one thing that frightens you, isn’t it?”

What’s the matter with you?” Devra asked.

Arkadin, behind the wheel of a rental car they had picked up in Istanbul, grunted irritably. “What’re you talking about?”

“How long is it going to take you to fuck me?”

There being no flights from Sevastopol to Turkey, they’d spent a long night in a cramped cabin of the Heroes of Sevastopol, being transported southwest across the Black Sea from Ukraine to Turkey.

“Why would I want to do that?” Arkadin said as he headed off a lumbering truck on the highway.

“Every man I meet wants to fuck me. Why should you be any different?” Devra ran her hands through her hair. Her raised arms lifted her small breasts invitingly. “Like I said. What’s the matter with you?” A smirk played at the corners of her mouth. “Maybe you’re not a real man. Is that it?”

Arkadin laughed. “You’re so transparent.” He glanced at her briefly. “What’s your game? Why are you trying to provoke me?”

“I like to extract reactions in my men. How else will I get to know them?”

“I’m not your man,” he growled.

Now Devra laughed. She wrapped slender fingers around his arm, rubbing back and forth. “If your shoulder’s bothering you I’ll drive.”

He saw the familiar symbol on the inside of her wrist, all the more fearsome for being tattooed on the porcelain skin. “When did you get that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really. What matters is why you got it.” Faced with open highway, he put on speed. “How else will I get to know you?”

She scratched the tattoo as if it had moved beneath her skin. “Pyotr made me get it. He said it was part of the initiation. He said he wouldn’t go to bed with me until I got it.”

“And you wanted to go to bed with him.”

“Not as much as I want to go to bed with you.”

She turned away then, stared out the side window, as if she was suddenly embarrassed by her confession. Perhaps she actually was, Arkadin thought as he signaled, moving right through two lanes as a sign for a rest stop appeared. He turned off the highway, parked at the far end of the rest stop, away from the two vehicles that occupied parking slots. He got out, walked to the edge, and, with his back to her, took a long satisfying pee.

The day was bright and warmer than it had been in Sevastopol. The breeze coming off the water was laden with moisture that lay on his skin like sweat. On the way back to the car he rolled up his sleeves. His coat was slung with hers across the car’s backseat.

“We’d better enjoy this warmth while we can,” Devra said. “Once we get onto the Anatolian Plateau, the mountains will block this temperate weather. It’ll be colder than a witch’s teat.”

It was as if she’d never made the intimate statement. But she’d caught his attention, all right. It seemed to him now that he understood something important about her-or, more accurately, about himself. It went through Gala, as well, now that he thought of it. He seemed to have a certain power over women. He knew Gala loved him with every fiber of her being, and she wasn’t the first one. Now this slim tomboyish dyevochka, hard-bitten, downright nasty when she needed to be, had fallen under his spell. Which meant he had the handle on her he was searching for.

“How many times have you been to Eskisёehir?” he asked.

“Enough to know what to expect.”

He sat back. “Where did you learn to answer questions without revealing a thing?”

“If I’m bad, I learned it at my mother’s breast.”

Arkadin looked away. He seemed to have trouble breathing. Without a word, he opened the door, bolted outside, stalking in small circles like a lion in the zoo.

I cannot be alone,” Arkadin had said to Semion Icoupov, and Icoupov had taken him at his word. At Icoupov’s villa where Arkadin was installed, his host provided a young man. But when, a week later, Arkadin had beaten his companion nearly into a coma, Icoupov switched tactics. He spent hours with Arkadin, trying to determine the root of his outbursts of fury. This failed utterly, as Arkadin seemed at a loss to remember, let alone explain these frightening episodes.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” Icoupov said. “I don’t want to incarcerate you, but I need to protect myself.”

“I would never harm you,” Arkadin said.

“Not knowingly, perhaps,” the older man said ruminatively.

The following week a stoop-shouldered man with a formal goatee and colorless lips spent every afternoon with Arkadin. He sat in a plush upholstered chair, one leg crossed over the other, writing in a neat, crabbed hand in a tablet notebook he protected as if it were his child. For his part, Arkadin lay on his host’s favorite chaise longue, a roll pillow behind his head. He answered questions. He spoke at length about many things, but the things that shadowed his mind he kept tucked away in a black corner of the deepest depths of his mind, never to be spoken of. That door was closed forever.

At the end of three weeks, the psychiatrist handed in his report to Icoupov and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. No matter. Arkadin’s nightmares continued to haunt him in the dead of night when, upon awakening with a gasp and a start, he was convinced he heard rats scuttling, red eyes burning in the darkness. At those moments, the fact that Icoupov’s villa was completely vermin-free was of no solace to him. The rats lived inside him squirming, shrieking, feeding.

The next person Icoupov employed to burrow into Arkadin’s past in an attempt to cure him of his fits of rage was a woman whose sensuality and lush figure he felt would keep her safe from Arkadin’s outbursts of fury. Marlene was adept at handling men of all kinds and kinks. She possessed an uncanny ability to sense the specific thing a man desired from her, and provide it.

At first Arkadin didn’t trust Marlene. Why should he? He couldn’t trust the psychiatrist. Wasn’t she just another form of analyst sent to coax out the secrets of his past? Marlene of course noted this aversion in him and set about countering it. The way she saw it, Arkadin was living under a spell, self-induced or otherwise. It was up to her to concoct an antidote.

“This won’t be a short process,” she told Icoupov at the end of her first week with Arkadin, and he believed her.

Arkadin observed Marlene walking on little cat feet. He suspected she was smart enough to know that even the slightest misstep on her part might strike him as a seismic shift, and then all the progress she’d made in gaining his trust would evaporate like alcohol over a flame. She seemed to him wary, acutely aware that at any moment he could turn on her. She acted as if she were in a cage with a bear. Day by day you could track the training of it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t unexpectedly rip your face off.

Arkadin had to laugh at that, the care with which she was treating every aspect of him. But gradually something else began to creep into his consciousness. He suspected that she was coming to feel something genuine for him.

Devra watched Arkadin through the windshield. Then she kicked open her door, went after him. She shaded her eyes against a white sun plastered to a high, pale sky.

“What is it?” she said when she’d caught up to him. “What did I say?”

Arkadin turned a murderous look her way. He appeared to be in a towering rage, just barely holding himself together. Devra found herself wondering what would happen if he let himself go, but she also didn’t want to be in his way when it happened.

She felt an urge to touch him, to speak soothingly until he returned to a calmer state of mind, but she sensed that would only inflame him further. So she went back to the car to wait patiently for him to return.

Eventually he did, sitting sideways on the seat, his shoes on the ground as if he might bolt again.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”

She felt he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t, that whatever it was was too bound up in what had happened to him a long time ago.

“It was a joke,” she said softly. “I was making a stupid joke.”

“There was a time when I would’ve thought nothing of it,” he said, as if talking to himself. “Sex is unimportant.”

She sensed that he was speaking about something else, something only he knew, and she glimpsed just how alone he was. She suspected that even in a crowd, even with friends-if he had any-he’d feel alone. It seemed to her that he’d walled himself off from sexual melding because it would underscore the depth of his apartness. He seemed to her to be a moonless planet with no sun to revolve around. Just emptiness everywhere as far as he could see. In that moment she realized that she loved him.

How long has he been in there?” Luther LaValle asked.

“Six days,” General Kendall replied. He was in his shirtsleeves, which were turned up. That precaution hadn’t been enough to protect them from spatters of blood. “But I guarantee that to him it feels like six months. He’s as disoriented as it’s possible for a human being to be.”

LaValle grunted, peering at the bearded Arab through the one-way mirror. The man looked like a raw piece of meat. LaValle didn’t know or care whether he was Sunni or Shi’a. They were the same to him-terrorists bent on destroying his way of life. He took these matters very personally.

“What’s he given up?”

“Enough that we know the copies of the Typhon intercepts Batt has given us are disinformation.”

“Still,” LaValle said, “it comes straight from Typhon.”

“This man’s very highly placed, there’s no question whatsoever of his identity, and he knows of no plans moving into their final stages to hit a major New York building.”

“That in itself could be disinformation,” LaValle said. “These bastards are masters of that kind of shit.”

“Right.” Kendall wiped his hands on a towel he’d thrown over his shoulder like a chef at the stove. “They love nothing better than to see us running around in circles, chasing our tails, which is what we’ll be doing if we put out an alert.”

LaValle nodded, as if to himself. “I want our best people to follow up on it. Confirm the Typhon intercepts.”

“We’ll do our best, but I feel it my duty to report that the prisoner laughed in my face when I asked him about this terrorist group.”

LaValle snapped his fingers several times. “What are they called again?”

“The Black Lesion, the Black Legion, something like that.”

“Nothing in our database about this group?”

“No, or at any of our sister agencies, either.” Kendall threw the soiled towel into a basket whose contents were incinerated every twelve hours. “It doesn’t exist.”

“I tend to agree,” LaValle said, “but I’d like to be certain.”

He turned from the window, and the two men went out of the viewing room. They walked down a rough concrete corridor painted an institutional green, the buzzing fluorescent tubes that hurled purple shadows on the linoleum floor as they passed. He waited patiently outside the locker room for Kendall to change his clothes; then they proceeded down the corridor. At the end of it they climbed a flight of stairs to a reinforced metal door.

LaValle pressed his forefinger onto a fingerprint reader. He was rewarded by the clicking of bolts being shot, not unlike a bank vault opening.

They found themselves in another corridor, the polar opposite of the one they were leaving. This one was paneled in polished mahogany; wall sconces produced a soft, buttery glow between paintings of historical naval engagements, phalanxes of Roman legions, Prussian Hussars, and English light cavalry.

The first door on the left brought them into a room straight out of a high-toned men’s club, replete with hunter-green walls, cream moldings, leather furniture, antique breakfronts, and a wooden bar from an old English pub. The sofas and chairs were well spaced, the better to allow occupants to speak of private matters. Flames cracked and sparked comfortingly in a large fireplace.

A liveried butler met them before they’d taken three steps on the thick, sound-deadening carpet. He guided them to their accustomed spot, in a discreet corner where two high-backed leather chairs were arranged on either side of a mahogany pedestal card table. They were near a tall, mullioned window flanked by thick drapes, which overlooked the Virginia countryside. This club-like room, known as the Library, was in an enormous stone house that the NSA had taken over decades ago. It was used as a retreat as well as for formal dinners for the generals and directors of the organization. Its lower depths, however, were used for other purposes.

When they had ordered drinks and light refreshments, and were alone again, LaValle said, “Do we have a line on Bourne yet?”

“Yes and no.” Kendall crossed one leg over the other, arranging the crease in his trousers. “As per our previous briefing, he came onto the grid at six thirty-seven last night, passing through Immigration at Dulles. He was booked on a Lufthansa flight to Moscow. Had he showed we could’ve put McNally onto the flight.”

“Bourne’s far too clever for that,” LaValle grumbled. “He knows we’re after him now. The element of surprise has been neutralized, dammit.”

“We managed to discover that he boarded a NextGen Energy Solutions corporate jet.”

Like a hunting dog on alert, Lavalle’s head came up. “Really? Explain.”

“An executive by the name of Moira Trevor was on it.”

“What is she to Bourne?”

“A question we’re trying to answer,” Kendall said unhappily. He hated disappointing his boss. “In the meantime, we obtained a copy of the flight plan. The destination was Munich. Shall I activate a point man there?”

“Don’t waste your time.” LaValle waved a hand. “My money’s on Moscow. That’s where he meant to go, that’s where he’s going.”

“I’ll get right on it.” Kendall opened his cell phone.

“I want Anthony Prowess.”

“He’s in Afghanistan.”

“Then pull him the fuck out,” LaValle said shortly. “Get him on a military chopper. I want him on the ground in Moscow by the time Bourne gets there.”

Kendall nodded, punched in a special encrypted number, and typed the coded text message to Prowess.

LaValle smiled at the approaching waiter. “Thank you, Willard,” he said as the man snapped out a starched white tablecloth, arranged the glasses of whiskey, small plates of nibbles, and cutlery on the table, then departed as silently as he’d come.

LaValle stared at the food. “It seems we’ve backed the wrong horse.”

General Kendall knew he meant Rob Batt. “Soraya Moore witnessed the debacle. She’s put two and two together in short order. Batt told us he knew about Hart’s meet with Bourne because he was in her office when Bourne’s call came in. Other than the Moore woman, who else is she likely to have told? No one. That’ll lead Hart right back to the deputy director.”

“Hang him out to dry.”

Picking up his glass, Kendall said. “Time for Plan B.”

LaValle stared into the chestnut liquid. “I always thank God for Plan B, Richard. Always.”

Their glasses clinked together. They drank in studied silence while LaValle ruminated. When, half an hour later, they’d drained their whiskeys and new ones were in their hands, LaValle said, “On the subject of Soraya Moore, I do believe it’s time to bring her in for a chat.”

“Private?”

“Oh, yes.” LaValle added a dollop of water his whiskey, releasing its complex scent. “Bring her here.”

Fifteen

TELL ME about Jason Bourne.”

Harun Iliev, in an American Nike jogging suit identical to the one worn by his commander, Semion Icoupov, rounded the turn of the natural ice-skating rink in the heart of Grindelwald village. Harun had spent more than a decade as Icoupov’s second in command. As a boy he’d been adopted by Icoupov’s father, Farid, after his parents had drowned when a ferry taking them from Istanbul to Odessa had capsized. Harun, at the age of four, was visiting his grandmother there. The news of the deaths of her daughter and son-in-law sent her into cardiac arrest. She died almost instantly-which everyone involved felt was a blessing, for she lacked both the strength and the stamina to care for a four-year-old. Farid Icoupov stepped in, because Harun’s father had worked for him; the two were close.

“There’s no easy answer,” Harun said now, “principally because there’s no one answer. Some swear he’s an agent of the American CI, others claim he’s an international assassin for hire. Clearly he can’t be both. What is indisputable is that he was responsible for foiling the plot to gas the attendees of the International Anti-Terrorist Conference in Reykjavik three years ago and, last year, the very real nuclear threat to Washington, DC, posed by Dujja, the terrorist group that was run by the two Wahhib brothers, Fadi and Karim al-Jamil. Rumor has it Bourne killed them both.”

“Impressive, if true. But just the fact that no one can get a handle on him is of extreme interest.” Icoupov’s arms chugged up and down in perfect rhythm to his gliding back and forth. His cheeks were apple red and he smiled warmly at the children skating on either side of them, laughing when they laughed, giving encouragement when one of them fell. “And how did such a man get involved with Our Friend?”

“Through the university in Georgetown,” Harun said. He was a slender man with the look of an accountant, which wasn’t helped by his sallow skin and the way his olive-pit eyes were sunk deep in his skull. Ice-skating did not come naturally to him as it did to Icoupov. “Besides killing people, it seems Bourne is something of a genius at linguistics.”

“Is he now?”

Even though they’d skated for more than forty minutes, Icoupov wasn’t breathing hard. Harun knew he was just getting warmed up. They were in spectacular country. The resort of Grindelwald was just under a hundred miles southeast of Bern. Above them towered three of Switzerland’s most famous mountains-Jungfrau, Mцnch, and Eiger-glittering white with snow and ice.

“It seems that Bourne’s weak spot is for a mentor. The first was a man named Alexander Conklin, who-”

“I knew Alex,” Icoupov said curtly. “It was before your time. Another lifetime, it often seems.” He nodded. “Please continue.”

“It seems Our Friend has made a play to become his new mentor.”

“I must interject here. That seems improbable.”

“Then why did Bourne kill Mikhail Tarkanian?”

“Mischa.” Icoupov’s pace faltered for a moment. “Allah preserve us! Does Leonid Danilovich know?”

“Arkadin is currently out of contact.”

“What’s his progress?”

“He’s come and gone from Sevastopol.”

“That’s something, anyway.” Icoupov shook his head. “We’re running out of time.”

“Arkadin knows this.”

“I want Tarkanian’s death kept from him, Harun. Mischa was his best friend; they were closer than brothers. Under no circumstances can he be allowed to be distracted from his present assignment.”

A lovely young woman held out her hand as she skated abreast of them. Icoupov took it and for a time was swept away in an ice dance that made him feel as if he were twenty again. When he returned, he resumed their skate around the rink. Something about the easy gliding motion of skating, he’d once told Harun, helped him to think.

“Given what you’ve told me,” Icoupov said at length, “this Jason Bourne may very well cause an unforeseen complication.”

“You can be sure Our Friend has recruited Bourne to his cause by telling him that you caused the death of-”

Icoupov shot him a warning look. “I agree. But the question we must answer is how much of the truth he’s risked telling Bourne.”

“Knowing Our Friend,” Harun said, “I would say very little, if at all.”

“Yes.” Icoupov tapped a gloved forefinger against his lips. “And if this is the case we can use the truth against him, don’t you think?”

“If we can get to Bourne,” Harun said. “And if we can get him to believe us.”

“Oh, he’ll believe us. I’ll make sure of that.” Icoupov executed a perfect spin. “Your new assignment, Harun, is to ensure we get to him before he can do any more damage. We could ill afford to lose our eye in Our Friend’s camp. Further deaths are unacceptable.”

Munich was full of cold rain. It was a gray city on the best of days, but in this windswept downpour it seemed to hunker down. Like a turtle, it pulled in its head into its concrete shell, turning its back on all visitors.

Bourne and Moira sat inside the cavernous NextGen 747. Bourne was on his cell, making a reservation on the next flight to Moscow.

“I wish I could authorize the plane to take you,” Moira said after he’d folded away the phone.

“No, you don’t,” Bourne said. “You’d like me to stay here by your side.”

“I already told you why I think that would be a bad idea.” She looked out at the wet tarmac, rainbow-streaked with droplets of fuel and oil. Raindrops trickled down the Perspex window like racing cars in their lanes. “And I find myself not wanting to be here at all.”

Bourne opened the file he’d taken from Veronica Hart, turned it around, held it out. “I’d like you to take a look at this.”

Moira turned back, put the file on her lap, paged through it. All at once she looked up. “Was it CI that had me under surveillance?” When Bourne nodded, she said, “Well, that’s a relief.”

“How is it a relief?”

She lifted the file. “This is all disinformation, a setup. Two years ago, when bidding for the Long Beach LNG terminal was at its height, my bosses suspected that AllEn, our chief rival, was monitoring our communications in order to get a handle on the proprietary systems that make our terminal unique. As a favor to me, Martin went to the Old Man for permission to set up a sting. The Old Man agreed, but it was imperative that no one else know about it, so he never told anyone else at CI. It worked. By tracking our cell conversations we discovered that AllEn was, indeed, monitoring the calls.”

“I recall the settlement,” Bourne said.

“Because of the evidence Martin and I provided, AllEn had no incentive to go to trial.”

“NextGen got a mid-eight-figure settlement, right?”

Moira nodded. “And won the rights to build the LNG terminal in Long Beach. That’s how I got my promotion to executive vice president.”

Bourne took back the file. He, too, was relieved. For him, trust was like an ill-made boat, springing leaks at every turn, threatening at any moment to sink him. He’d ceded part of himself to Moira, but the loss of control was like a knife in his heart.

Moira looked at him rather sadly. “Did you suspect me of being a Mata Hari?”

“It was important to make sure,” he said.

Her face closed up. “Sure. I understand.” She began to stuff papers into a slim leather briefcase more roughly than was needed. “You thought I’d betrayed Martin and was going to betray you.”

“I’m relieved it’s not true.”

“I’m so very happy to hear that.” She shot him an acid stare.

“Moira…”

“What?” She pulled hair off her face. “What is it you want to say to me, Jason?”

“I… This is hard for me.”

She leaned forward, peering at him. “Just tell me.”

“I trusted Marie,” Bourne said. “I leaned on her, she helped me with my amnesia. She was always there. And then, suddenly, she wasn’t.”

Moira’s voice softened. “I know.”

He looked at her at last. “There is no good thing about being alone. But for me it’s all a matter of trust.”

“I know you think I haven’t told you the truth about Martin and me.” She took his hands in hers. “We were never lovers, Jason. We were more like brother and sister. We supported each other. Trust didn’t come easily to either of us. I think it’s important for both of us that I tell you that now.”

Bourne understood that she was also talking about the two of them, not her and Martin. He’d trusted so few people in his life: Marie, Alex Conklin, Mo Panov, Martin, Soraya. He saw all the things that had been keeping him from moving on with his life. With so little past, it was difficult letting go of the people he’d known and cared about.

A pang of sorrow shot through him. “Marie is dead. She’s in the past now. And my children are far better off with their grandparents. Their life is stable and happy. That’s best for them.”

He rose, needing to get moving.

Moira, aware he was ill at ease, changed the subject. “Do you know how long you’ll be in Moscow?”

“The same amount of time you’ll be in Munich, I imagine.”

That got a smile out of her. She stood, leaned toward him. “Be well, Jason. Stay safe.” She gave him a lingering, loving kiss. “Remember me.”

Sixteen

SORAYA MOORE was ushered cordially into the hushed sanctuary of the Library where less than twenty-four hours before, Luther LaValle and General Kendall had had their post-rendition fireside chat. It was Kendall himself who had picked her up, chauffeured her to the NSA safe house deep in the Virginia countryside. Soraya had, of course, never been here.

LaValle, in a midnight-blue chalk-striped suit, blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, a striped tie in the Yale colors, looked like a merchant banker. He rose as Kendall brought her over to the area by the window. There were three chairs grouped around the antique card table.

“Director Moore, having heard so much about you, it’s a genuine pleasure to meet you.” Smiling broadly, LaValle indicated a chair. “Please.”

Soraya saw no point in refusing the invitation. She didn’t know whether she was more curious or alarmed by the abrupt summons. She did, however, glance around the room. “Where is Secretary Halliday? General Kendall informed me that the invitation came from him.”

“Oh, it did,” LaValle said. “Unfortunately, the secretary of defense was called into a meeting in the Oval Office. He phoned me to convey to you his apologies and to insist that we carry on without him.”

All of which meant, Soraya knew, that Halliday had never had any intention of attending this little tкte-а-tкte. She doubted he even knew about it.

“Anyway,” LaValle said as Kendall sat in the third chair, “now that you’re here you might as well enjoy yourself.” He raised his hand, and Willard appeared as if by prestidigitation. “Something to drink, Director? I know as Muslim you’re forbidden alcohol, but we have a full range of potions for you to choose from.”

“Tea, please,” she said directly to Willard. “Ceylon, if you have it.”

“Of course, ma’am. Milk? Sugar?”

“Neither, thank you.” She’d never formed the British habit.

Willard seemed to bow before he vanished without a sound.

Soraya redirected her attention to the two men. “Now, gentlemen, in what way can I help you?”

“I rather think it’s the other way around,” General Kendall said.

Soraya cocked her head. “How d’you figure that?”

“Frankly, because of the turmoil at CI,” LaValle said, “we think Typhon is working with one hand tied behind its back.”

Willard arrived with Soraya’s tea, the men’s whiskeys. He set the japanned tray down with the cup, glasses, and tea service, then left.

LaValle waited until Soraya had poured her tea before he continued. “It seems to me that Typhon would benefit immensely from taking advantage of all the resources at NSA’s disposal. We could even help you expand beyond the scope of CI’s reach.”

Soraya lifted her cup to her lips, found the fragrant Ceylon tea exquisitely delicious. “It seems that you know more about Typhon than any of us at CI were aware.”

LaValle let go with a soft laugh. “Okay, let’s stop beating around the bush. We had a mole inside CI. You know who it is now. He made a fatal mistake in going after Jason Bourne and failing.”

Veronica Hart had relieved Rob Batt of his position that morning, a fact that must have come to LaValle’s attention, especially since his replacement, Peter Marks, had been one of Hart’s most vocal supporters from day one. Soraya knew Peter well, had suggested to Hart that he deserved the promotion.

“Is Batt now working for NSA?”

“Mr. Batt has outlived his usefulness,” Kendall said rather stiffly.

Soraya turned her attention to the military man. “A glimpse of your own fate, don’t you think, General?”

Kendall’s face closed up like a fist, but following an almost imperceptible shake of LaValle’s head he bit back a rejoinder.

“While it’s certainly true that life in the intelligence services can be harsh, even brutal,” LaValle interjected, “certain individuals within it are-shall we say-inoculated against such unfortunate eventualities.”

Soraya kept her gaze on Kendall. “I suppose I could be one of those certain individuals.”

“Yes, absolutely.” LaValle put one hand over the other on his knee. “Your knowledge of Muslim thought and custom, your expertise as Martin Lindros’s right hand as he put Typhon together are invaluable.”

“You see how it is, General,” Soraya said. “One day an invaluable asset like me is bound to take over your position.”

LaValle cleared his throat. “Does that mean you’re on board?”

Smiling sweetly, Soraya put her teacup down. “I’ll say this for you, Mr. LaValle, you certainly know how to make lemonade from lemons.”

LaValle returned her smile as if it were a tennis serve. “My dear Director, I do believe you’ve hit upon one of my specialities.”

“What makes you think I’d abandon CI?”

LaValle put a forefinger beside his nose. “My reading of you is that you’re a pragmatic woman. You know better than we do what kind of a mess CI is in. How long do you think it’s going to take the new DCI to right the ship? What makes you think she even can?” He raised his finger. “I’m exceedingly interested in your opinion, but before you answer think about how little time we might have before this unknown terrorist group is going to strike.”

Soraya felt as if she’d been rabbit-punched. How in the hell had NSA gotten wind of the Typhon terrorist intercepts? At the moment, however, that was a moot point. The important thing was how to respond to this breach of security.

Before she could formulate a counter, LaValle said, “I’m curious about one thing, though. Why is it that Director Hart saw fit to keep this intel to herself, rather than bringing in Homeland Security, FBI, and NSA?”

“That was my doing.” I’m in it now, Soraya thought. I might as well go all the way. “Until the incident at the Freer, the intel was sketchy enough that I felt the involvement of other intelligence agencies would only muddy the waters.”

“Meaning,” Kendall said, glad of the opportunity to get in a dig, “you didn’t want us rooting around in your carrot patch.”

“This is a serious situation, Director,” LaValle said. “In matters of national security-”

“If this Muslim terrorist group-which we now know calls itself the Black Legion-gets wind that we’ve intercepted their communications we’ll be sunk before we even start trying to counter their attack.”

“I could have you shit-canned.”

“And lose my invaluable expertise?” Soraya shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“So what do we have?” Kendall snapped.

“Stalemate.” LaValle passed a hand across his brow. “Do you think it would be possible for me to see the Typhon intercepts?” His tone had changed completely. He was now in conciliatory mode. “Believe it or not, we’re not the Evil Empire. We actually might be able to be of some assistance.”

Soraya considered. “I think that be can arranged.”

“Excellent.”

“It would have to be Eyes Only.”

LaValle agreed at once.

“And in a controlled, highly restricted environment,” Soraya added, following up her advantage. “The Typhon offices at CI would be perfect.”

LaValle spread his hands. “Why not here?”

Soraya smiled. “I think not.”

“Under the current climate I think you can understand why I’d be reluctant to meet you there.”

“I take your point.” Soraya thought for a moment. “If I did bring the intercepts here I’d have to have someone with me.”

LaValle nodded vigorously. “Of course. Whatever makes you feel comfortable.” He seemed far more pleased than Kendall, who looked at her as if he had caught sight of her from a battlefield trench.

“Frankly,” Soraya said, “none of this makes me feel comfortable.” She glanced around the room again.

“The building is swept three times a day for electronic bugs,” LaValle pointed out. “Plus, we have all the most sophisticated surveillance systems, basically a computerized monitoring system that keeps track of the two thousand closed-circuit video cameras installed throughout the facility and grounds, compares them from second to second for any anomalies whatsoever. The DARPA software compares any anomalies against a database of more than a million images, makes real-time decisions in nanoseconds. For instance, a bird in flight would be ignored, a running figure wouldn’t. Believe me, you have nothing to worry about.”

“Right now, the only thing I worry about,” Soraya said, “is you, Mr. LaValle.”

“I understand completely.” LaValle finished off his whiskey. “That’s what this exercise is all about, Director. To engender trust between us. How else could we be expected to work together?”

General Kendall sent Soraya back to the district with one of his drivers. She had him drop her where she’d arranged to meet Kendall, outside what had once been the National Historical Wax Museum on E Street, SW. She waited until the black Ford had been swallowed up in traffic, then she turned away, walked all the way around the block at a normal pace. By the end of her circuit she was certain she was free of tags, NSA or otherwise. At that point, she sent a three-letter text message via her cell. Two minutes later, a young man on a motorcycle appeared. He wore jeans, a black leather jacket, a gleaming black helmet with the smoked faceplate lowered. He slowed, stopped just long enough for her to climb on behind him. Handing her a helmet, he waited for her to don it, then he zoomed off down the street.

I have several contacts within DARPA,” Deron said. DARPA was an acronym for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Department of Defense. “I have a working knowledge of the software architecture at the heart of the NSA’s surveillance system.” He shrugged. “This is one way I keep my edge.”

“We gotta find a way around it or through it,” Tyrone said.

He was still wearing his black leather jacket. His black helmet was on a table alongside the one he’d given Soraya for the high-speed trip here to Deron’s house-lab. Soraya had met both Deron and Tyrone when Bourne had brought her to this nondescript olive-colored house just off 7th Street, NE.

“You must be joking, right?” Deron, a tall, slim, handsome man with skin the color of light cocoa, looked from one to the other. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“If we were joking we wouldn’t be here.” Soraya rubbed the heel of her hand against her temple as she sought to ignore the fierce headache that had began after her terrifying interview with LaValle and Kendall.

“It’s just not possible.” Deron put his hands on his hips. “That software is state-of-the-art. And two thousand CCTV cameras! Fuck me.”

They sat on canvas chairs in his lab, a double-height room filled with all manner of monitors, keyboards, electronic systems whose functions were known only to Deron. Ranged around the wall were a number of paintings-all masterpieces by Titian, Seurat, Rembrandt, van Gogh. Water Lilies, Green Reflection, Left Part was Soraya’s favorite. That all of them were painted by Deron in the atelier in the next room had stunned her the first time she was here. Now they simply filled her with wonder. How he had reproduced Monet’s exact shade of cobalt blue was beyond her. It was hardly surprising that Bourne used Deron to forge all his ID documents, when in this day and age it was becoming increasingly difficult to do. Many forgers had quit, claiming governments had made their job impossible, but not Deron. It was his stock in trade. Little wonder that he and Bourne were so close. Birds of a feather, Soraya thought.

“What about mirrors?” Tyrone said.

“That would be simplest,” Deron said. “But one of the reasons they’ve installed so many cameras is to give the system multiple views of the same area. That negates mirrors right there.”

“Too bad Bourne killed dat fucker Karim al-Jamil. He could probably write a worm t’screw with the DARPA software like he did with the CI database.”

Soraya turned to Deron. “Can it be done?” she said. “Could you do it?”

“Hacking’s not my thing. I leave that to my old lady.”

Soraya didn’t know Deron had a girlfriend. “How good is she?”

“Please,” Deron snorted.

“Can we talk to her?”

Deron looked dubious. “This is the NSA we’re talking about. Those fuckers don’t fool around. To be frank, I don’t think you ought to be messing with them in the first place.”

“Unfortunately, I have no choice,” Soraya said.

“They fuckin’ wid us,” Tyrone said, “and unless we get all medieval on they ass, they gonna walk all over us an’ own us forever.”

Deron shook his head. “You sure put some interesting notions in this man’s head, Soraya. Before you came along he was the best street protection I ever had. Now look at him. Messing with the big boys in the bad world outside the ghetto.” He didn’t hide the pride he felt for Tyrone, but his voice held a warning, too. “I hope to hell you know what you’re getting yourself into, Tyrone. If this thing comes apart in any way you’re in the federal slammer till Gabriel comes calling.”

Tyrone crossed his arms over his chest, stood his ground.

Deron sighed. “All right, then. We’re all adults here.” He reached for his cell. “Kiki’s upstairs in her lair. She doesn’t like to be interrupted, but in this case I think she’ll be intrigued.” He spoke briefly into the cell, then put it down. Moments later a slim woman with a beautiful African face and deep chocolate skin appeared. She was as tall as Deron, with the upright carriage of proud and ancient royalty.

Her face split into a ferocious grin when she saw Tyrone. “Hey,” they said to each other. That one word seemed all that was needed.

“Kiki, this is Soraya,” Deron said.

Kiki’s smile was wide and dazzling. “My name’s actually Esiankiki. I’m Masai. But in America I’m not so formal; everyone calls me Kiki.”

The two women touched hands. Kiki’s grip was cool and dry. She regarded Soraya out of large coffee-colored eyes. She had the smoothest skin Soraya had ever seen, which she instantly envied. Her hair was very short, marvelously cut like a cap to fit her elongated skull. She wore a brown ankle-length dress that clung provocatively to her slim hips and small breasts.

Deron briefly outlined the problem while he brought up the DARPA software architecture on one of his computer terminals. While Kiki checked it out, he filled her in on the basics. “We need something that can bypass the firewall, and is undetectable.”

“The first isn’t all that difficult.” Kiki’s long, delicate fingers were flying over the keyboard as she experimented with the computer code. “The second, I don’t know.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it.” Deron positioned himself so he could peer over her shoulder at the terminal. “This particular software controls two thousand CCTV cameras. Our friends here need to get in and out of the facility without being detected.”

Kiki stood up, turned around to face them. “In other words all two thousand cameras have to be covered.”

“That’s right,” Soraya said.

“You don’t need a hacker, dear. You need the invisible man.”

“But you can make them invisible, Kiki.” Deron slid his arm around her slender waist “Can’t you?”

“Hmm.” Kiki peered again at the code on the terminal. “You know, there looks like there may be a recurring variance I might be able to exploit.” She hunkered down on a stool. “I’m going to transfer this upstairs.”

Deron winked at Soraya, as if to say, I told you so.

Kiki routed a number of files to her computer, which was separate from Deron’s. She spun around, slapped her hands on her thighs, and got up. “Okay, then, I’ll see you all later.”

“How much later?” Soraya said, but Kiki was already taking the stairs three at a time.

Moscow was wreathed in snow when Bourne stepped off the Aeroflot plane at Sheremetyevo. His flight had been delayed forty minutes, the jet circling while the runways were de-iced. He cleared Customs and Immigration and was met by a small, cat-like individual wrapped in a white down coat. Lev Baronov, Professor Specter’s contact.

“No luggage, I see,” Baronov said in heavily accented English. He was as wiry and hyperactive as a Jack Russell terrier as he elbowed and barked at the small army of gypsy cab drivers vying for a fare. They were a sad-faced lot, plucked from the minorities in the Caucasus, Asians and the like whose ethnicity prevented them from getting a decent job with decent pay in Moscow. “We’ll take care of that on the way in to town. You’ll need proper clothes for Moscow’s winter. It’s a balmy minus two Celsius today.”

“That would be most helpful,” Bourne replied in perfect Russian.

Baronov’s bushy eyebrows rose in surprise. “You speak like a native, gospadin Bourne.”

“I had excellent instructors,” Bourne said laconically.

Amid the bustle of the flight terminal, he was studying the flow of passengers, noting those who lingered at a newsagent or outside the duty-free shop, those who didn’t move at all. Ever since he emerged into the terminal he’d had the unshakable feeling that he was being watched. Of course there were CCTV cameras all over, but the particular prickling of his scalp that had developed over the years of fieldwork was unerring. Someone had him under surveillance. This fact was both alarming and reassuring-that he’d already picked up a tag meant someone knew he was scheduled to arrive in Moscow. NSA could have scanned the departing flight manifests back at New York and picked up his name from Lufthansa; there’d been no time to take himself off the list. He looked only in short touristic glances because he had no desire to alert his shadow that he was on to him.

“I’m being followed,” Bourne said as he sat in Baronov’s wheezing Zil. They were on the M10 motorway.

“No problem,” Baronov said, as if he was used to being tailed all the time. He didn’t even ask who was following Bourne. Bourne thought of the professor’s pledge that Baronov wouldn’t get in his way.

Bourne paged through the packet Baronov had given him, which included new ID, a key, and the box number to get money out of the safe-deposit vault in the Moskva Bank.

“I need a plan of the bank building,” Bourne said.

“No problem.” Baronov exited the M10. Bourne was now Fyodor Ilianovich Popov, a midlevel functionary of GazProm, the gargantuan state-run energy conglomerate.

“How well will this ID hold up?” Bourne asked.

“Not to worry.” Baronov grinned. “The professor has friends in GazProm who know how to protect you, Fyodor Ilianovich Popov.”

Anthony Prowess had come a long way to keep the ancient Zil in sight and he wasn’t about to lose it, no matter what evasive maneuvers the driver took. He’d been waiting at Sheremetyevo for Bourne to come through Immigration. General Kendall had sent a recent surveillance photo of Bourne to his cell. The photo was grainy and two-dimensional because of the long telephoto lens used, but it was a close-up; there was no mistaking Bourne when he arrived.

For Prowess, the next few minutes were crucial. He had no illusions that he could remain unnoticed by Bourne for any length of time; therefore, in the short moments while his subject was still unself-conscious, he needed to drink in every tic and habit, no matter how minuscule or seemingly irrelevant. He knew from bitter experience that these small insights would prove invaluable as the surveillance ground on, especially when it came time to engage the subject and terminate him.

Prowess was no stranger to Moscow. He’d been born here to a British diplomat and his cultural attachй wife. Not until Prowess was fifteen did he understand that his mother’s job was a cover. She was, in fact, a spy for MI6, Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Four years later Prowess’s mother was compromised, and MI6 spirited them out of the country. Because his mother was now a wanted woman, the Prowesses were sent to America, to begin a new life with a new family name. The danger had been ground so deeply into Prowess that he’d actually forgotten what they were once called. He was now simply Anthony Prowess.

As soon as he’d built up qualified academic credits, he applied to the NSA. From the moment he’d discovered that his mother was a spy, that was all he’d wanted to do. No amount of pleading from his parents could dissuade him. Because of his ease with foreign languages and his knowledge of other cultures, the NSA sent him abroad, first to the Horn of Africa to train, then to Afghanistan, where he liaised with the local tribes fighting the Taliban in rough mountain terrain. He was a hard man, no stranger to hardship, or to death. He knew more ways to kill a human being than there were days in the year. Compared with what he’d been through in the past nineteen months, this assignment was going to be a piece of cake.

Seventeen

BOURNE AND BARONOV sped down Volokolamskoye Highway. Crocus City was an enormous high-end mall. Built in 2002, it was a seemingly endless array of glittering boutiques, restaurants, car showrooms, and marble fountains. It was also an excellent place to lose a tail.

While Bourne shopped for suitable clothes, Baronov was busy on his cell phone. There was no point in going to the trouble of losing the tail inside the maze of the mall only to have him pick them up again when they returned to the Zil. Baronov was calling a colleague to come to Crocus City. They’d take his car, and he’d drive the Zil into Moscow.

Bourne paid for his purchases and changed into them. Baronov took him to the Franck Muller Cafй inside the mall, where they had coffee and sandwiches.

“Tell me about Pyotr’s last girlfriend,” Bourne said.

“Gala Nematova?” Baronov shrugged. “Not much to tell, really. She’s just another one of those pretty girls one sees around all the latest Moscow nightclubs. These women are a ruble a dozen.”

“Where would I find her?”

Baronov shrugged. “She’ll go where the oligarchs cluster. Really, your guess is as good as mine.” He laughed good-naturedly. “For myself, I’m too old for places like that, but I’ll be glad to take you on a round-robin tonight.”

“All I need is for you to lend me a car.”

“Suit yourself, miya droog.”

A few moments later, Baronov went to the men’s room, where he’d agreed to make the switch of car keys with his friend. When he returned he handed Bourne a folded piece of paper on which was the plan for the Moskva Bank building.

They went out a different direction from the way they’d come in, which led them to a parking lot on the other side of the mall. They got into a vintage black Volga four-door sedan that, to Bourne’s relief, started up immediately.

“You see? No problem.” Baronov laughed jovially. “What would you do without me, gospadin Bourne?”

The Frunzenskaya embankment was located southwest of Moscow’s inner Garden Ring. Mikhail Tarkanian had said that he could see the pedestrian bridge to Gorky Park from his living room window. He hadn’t lied. His apartment was in a building not far from Khlastekov, a restaurant serving excellent Russian food, according to Baronov. With its two-story, square-columned portico and decorative concrete balconies, the building itself was a prime example of the Stalinist Empire style that raped and beat into submission a more pastoral and romantic architectural past.

Bourne instructed Baronov to stay in the Volga until he returned. He went up the stone steps, under the colonnade, and through the glass door. He was in a small vestibule that ended in an inner door, which was locked. On the right wall was a brass panel with rows of bell pushes corresponding to the apartments. Bourne ran his finger down the rows until he found the push with Tarkanian’s name. Noting the apartment number, he crossed to the inner door and used a small flexible blade to fool the lock’s tumblers into thinking he had a key. The door clicked open, and he went inside.

There was a small arthritic elevator on the left wall. To the right, a rather grand staircase swept up to the first floor. The first three treads were in marble, but these gave way to simple concrete steps that released a kind of talcum-like powder as the porous treads wore away.

Tarkanian’s apartment was on the third floor, down a dark corridor, dank with the odors of boiled cabbage and stewed meat. The floor was composed of tiny hexagonal tiles, chipped and worn as the steps leading up.

Bourne found the door without trouble. He put his ear against it, listening for sounds within the apartment. When he heard none, he picked the lock. Turning the glass knob slowly, he pushed open the door a crack. Weak light filtered in past half-drawn curtains framing windows on the right. Behind the smell of disuse was a whiff of a masculine scent-cologne or hair cream. Tarkanian had made it clear he hadn’t been back here in years, so who was using his apartment?

Bourne moved silently, cautiously through the rooms. Where he’d expected to find dust, there was none; where he expected the furniture to be covered in sheets, it wasn’t. There was food in the refrigerator, though the bread on the counter was growing mold. Still, within the week, someone had been living here. The knobs to all the doors were glass, just like the one on the front door, and some looked wobbly on their brass shafts. There were photos on the wall: high-toned black-and-whites of Gorky Park in different seasons.

Tarkanian’s bed was unmade. The covers lay pulled back in unruly waves, as if someone had been startled out of sleep or had made a hasty exit. On the other side of the bed, the door to the bathroom was half closed.

As Bourne stepped around the end of the bed, he noticed a five-by-seven framed photo of a young woman, blond, with a veneer of beauty cultivated by models the world over. He was wondering whether this was Gala Nematova when he caught a blurred movement out of the corner of his eye.

A man hidden behind the bathroom door made a run at Bourne. He was armed with a thick-bladed fisherman’s knife, which he jabbed at Bourne point-first. Bourne rolled away, the man followed. He was blue-eyed, blond, and big. There were tattoos on the sides of his neck and the palms of his hands. Mementos of a Russian prison.

The best way to neutralize a knife was to close with your opponent. As the man lunged after him, Bourne turned, grabbed the man by his shirt, slammed his forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. Blood spurted, the man grunted, cursed in guttural Russian, “Blyad!”

He drove a fist into Bourne’s side, tried to free his hand with the knife. Bourne applied a nerve block at the base of the thumb. The Russian butted Bourne in the sternum, drove him back off the bed, into the half-open bathroom door. The glass knob drilled into Bourne’s spine, causing him to arch back. The door swung fully open and he sprawled on the cold tiles. The Russian, regaining use of his hand, pulled out a Stechkin APS 9mm. Bourne kicked him in the shin, so he went down on one knee, then struck him on the side of the face, and the Stechkin went flying across the tiles. The Russian launched a flurry of punches and hand strikes that battered Bourne back against the door before grabbing the Stechkin. Bourne reached up, felt the cool octagon of the glass doorknob. Grinning, the Russian aimed the pistol at Bourne’s heart. Wrenching off the knob, Bourne threw it at the center of the Russian’s forehead, where it struck full-on. His eyes rolled up and he slumped to the floor.

Bourne gathered up the Stechkin and took a moment to catch his breath. Then he crawled over to the Russian. Of course, he had no conventional ID on him, but that didn’t mean Bourne couldn’t find out where he’d come from.

Stripping off the big man’s jacket and shirt, Bourne took a long look at a constellation of tattoos. On his chest was a tiger, a sign of an enforcer. On his left shoulder was a dagger dripping blood, a sign that he was a killer. But it was the third symbol, a genie emerging from a Middle Eastern lamp, that interested Bourne the most. This was a sign that the Russian had been put in prison for drug-related crimes.

The professor had told Bourne that two of the Russian Mafia families, the Kazanskaya and the Azeri, were vying for sole control of the drug market. Don’t get in their way, Specter had warned. If they have any contact with you, I beg you not to engage them. Instead, turn the other cheek. It’s the only way to survive there.

Bourne was about to get up when he saw something on the inside of the Russian’s left elbow: a small tattoo of a figure with a man’s body and a jackal’s head. Anubis, Egyptian god of the underworld. This symbol was supposed to protect the wearer from death, but it had also latterly been appropriated by the Kazanskaya. What was a member of such a powerful Russian grupperovka family doing in Tarkanian’s apartment? He’d been sent to find him and kill him. Why? That was something Bourne needed to find out.

He looked around the bathroom at the sink with its dripping faucet, pots of eye cream and powder, makeup pencils, the stained mirror. He pulled back the shower curtain, plucked several blond hairs from the drain. They were long; from a woman’s head. Gala Nematova’s head?

He made his way to the kitchen, opened drawers, pawed through them until he found a blue ballpoint pen. Back in the bathroom, he took one of the eyeliner pencils. Crouching down beside the Russian, he drew a facsimile of the Anubis tattoo on the inside of his left elbow; when he got a line wrong, he rubbed it off. When he was satisfied, he used the blue ballpoint pen to make the final “tattoo.” He knew it wouldn’t withstand a close inspection, but for a flash of identification he thought it would suffice. At the sink, he delicately rinsed off the makeup pencil, then shot some hair spray over the ink outline to further fix it on his skin.

He checked behind the toilet tank and in it, favorite hiding places for money, documents, or important materials, but found nothing. He was about to leave when his eyes fell again on the mirror. Peering more closely, he could see a trace of red here and there. Lipstick, which had been carefully wiped off, as if someone-possibly the Kazanskaya Russian-had sought to erase it. Why would he do that?

It seemed to Bourne the smears formed a kind of pattern. Taking up a pot of face powder, he blew across the top of it. The petroleum-based powder sought its twin, clung to the ghost image of the petroleum-based lipstick.

When he was done, he put the pot down, took a step backward. He was looking at a scrawled note:

Off to the Kitaysky Lyotchik. Where R U? Gala.

So Gala Nematova, Pyotr’s last girlfriend, did live here. Had Pyotr used this apartment while Tarkanian was away?

On his way out, he checked the Russian’s pulse. It was slow but steady. The question of why the Kazanskaya sent this prison-hardened assassin to an apartment where Gala Nematova had once lived with Pyotr loomed large in his mind. Was there a connection between Semion Icoupov and the grupperovka family?

Taking another long look at Gala Nematova’s photo, Bourne slipped out of the apartment as silently as he’d entered it. Out in the hallway he listened for human sounds, but apart from the muted wailing of a baby in an apartment on the second floor, all was still. He descended the stairs and went through the vestibule, where a little girl holding her mother’s hand was trying to drag her upstairs. Bourne and the mother exchanged the meaningless smiles of strangers passing each other. Then Bourne was outside, emerging from under the colonnade. Save for an old woman gingerly picking her way through the treacherous snow, no one was about. He slipped into the passenger’s seat of the Volga and shut the door behind him.

That was when he saw the blood leaking from Baronov’s throat. At the same instant a wire whipped around his neck, digging into his windpipe.

Four times a week after work, Rodney Feir, chief of field support for CI, worked out at a health club a short walk from his house in Fairfax, Virginia. He spent an hour on the treadmill, another hour weight training, then took a cold shower and headed for the steam room.

This evening General Kendall was waiting for him. Kendall dimly saw the glass door open, cold air briefly sucked in as tendrils of steam escaped into the men’s locker room. Then Feir’s trim, athletic body appeared through the mist.

“Good to see you, Rodney,” General Kendall said.

Feir nodded silently, sat down beside Kendall.

Rodney Feir was Plan B, the backup the general had put in place in the event the plan involving Rob Batt blew up. In fact, Feir had been easier to land than Batt. Feir was someone who’d drifted into security work not for any patriotic reason, not because he liked the clandestine life. He was simply lazy. Not that he didn’t do his job, not that he didn’t do it damn well. It was just that government life suited him down to his black wing-tip shoes. The key fact to remember about him was that whatever Feir did, he did because it would benefit him. He was, in fact, an opportunist. He, more than any of the others at CI, could see the writing on the wall, which is why his conversion to the NSA cause had been so easy and seamless. With the death of the Old Man, the end of days had arrived. He had none of Batt’s loyalty to contend with.

Still, it didn’t do to take anyone for granted, which is why Kendall met him here occasionally. They would take a steam, then shower, climb into their civvies, and go to dinner at one of several grungy barbecue joints Kendall knew in the southeast section of the district.

These places were no more than shacks. They were mainly the pit out back, where the pitmaster lovingly smoked his cuts of meat-ribs, brisket, burnt ends, sweet and hot sausages, sometimes a whole hog-for hours on end. The old, scarred wooden picnic tables, topped with four or five sauces of varying ingredients and heat, were a kind of afterthought. Most folk had their meat wrapped up to take out. Not Kendall and Feir. They sat at a table, eating and drinking beer, while the bones piled up along with the wadded-up napkins and the slices of white bread so soft, they disintegrated under a few drops of sauce.

Now and again Feir stopped eating to impart to Kendall some bit of fact or scuttlebutt currently going around the CI offices. Kendall noted these with his steel-trap military mind, occasionally asking questions to help Feir clarify or amplify a point, especially when it came to the movements of Veronica Hart and Soraya Moore.

Afterward, they drove to an old abandoned library for the main event. The Renaissance-style building had been bought at fire sale prices by Drew Davis, a local businessman familiar in SE but otherwise unknown within the district, which was precisely how he liked it. He was one of those people savvy enough to fly under the Metro police radar. Not so simple a matter in SE, because like almost everyone else who lived there he was black. Unlike most of those around him, he had friends in high places. This was mainly due to the place he ran, The Glass Slipper.

To all intents and purposes it was a legit music club, and an extremely successful one to boot, attracting many big-name R amp;B acts. But in the back was the real business: a high-end cathouse that specialized in women of color. To those in the know, any flavor of color, which in this case meant ethnicity, could be procured at The Glass Slipper. Rates were steep but nobody seemed to mind, partly because Drew Davis paid his girls well.

Kendall had frequented this cathouse since his senior year in college. He’d come with a bunch of well-connected buddies one night as a hoot. Didn’t want to but they’d dared him, and he knew how much he’d be ridiculed if he failed to take them up on it. Ironically he stayed, over the years having developed a taste for, as he put it, walking on the wild side. At first he told himself that the attraction was purely physical. Then he realized he liked being there; no one bothered him, no one made fun of him. Later, his continued interest was a reaction to his role as outsider when it came to working with the power junkies like Luther LaValle. Christ, even the fallen Ron Batt had been a member of Skull amp; Bones at Yale. Well, The Glass Slipper is my Skull amp; Bones, Kendall thought as he was ushered into the back room. This was as clandestine, as outrй as things got inside the Beltway. It was Kendall’s own little hideaway, a life that was his alone. Not even Luther knew about The Glass Slipper. It felt good to have a secret from LaValle.

Kendall and Feir sat in purple velvet chairs-the color of royalty, as Kendall pointed out-and were treated to a soft parade of women of all sizes and colors. Kendall chose Imani, one of his favorites, Feir a dusky-skinned Eurasian woman who was part Indian.

They retired to spacious rooms, furnished like bedrooms in European villas, with four-poster beds, tons of chintz, velvet, swags, drapes. There Kendall watched as, in one astonishing shimmy, Imani slid out of her chocolate silk spaghetti-strap dress. She wore nothing underneath. The lamplight burnished her dark skin.

Then she opened her arms and, with a deep-felt groan, General Richard P. Kendall melted into the sinuous river of her flawless body.

The moment Bourne felt his air supply cut off, he levered himself up off the front bench seat, arching his back so that he could put first one foot, then the other on the dashboard. Using his legs, he launched himself diagonally into the backseat, so that he landed right behind the ill-fated Baronov. The strangler was forced to turn to his right in order to keep the wire around Bourne’s throat. This was an awkward position for him; he now lacked the leverage he had when Bourne was directly in front of him.

Bourne planted the heel of his shoe in the strangler’s groin and ground down as hard as he could, but his strength was depleted from the lack of oxygen.

“Die, fucker,” the strangler said in a hard-edged Midwestern accent.

White lights danced in his vision, and a blackness was seeping up all around him. It was as if he were looking down a tunnel through the wrong end of a telescope. Nothing looked real; his sense of perspective was skewed. He could see the man, his dark hair, his cruel face, the unmistakable hundred-mile stare of the American soldier in combat. In the back of his mind, he knew the NSA had found him.

Bourne’s lapse of concentration allowed the strangler to free himself, jerk the ends of the wire so that it dug deeper into Bourne’s throat. Bourne’s windpipe was totally cut off. Blood was running down into his collar as the wire bit through his skin. Strange animal noises bubbled up from deep inside him. He blinked away tears and sweat, used his last ounce of strength to jam his thumb into the agent’s eye. Keeping up the pressure despite blows to his midsection gained him a temporary respite: The wire slackened. He gasped in a railing breath, and dug deeper with his thumb.

The wire slackened further. He heard the car door open. The strangler’s face wrenched away from him, and the car door slammed shut. He heard running feet, dying away. By the time he managed to unwind the wire, to cough and gasp air into his burning lungs, the street was empty. The NSA agent was gone.

Bourne was alone in the Volga with the corpse of Lev Baronov, dizzy, weak, and sick at heart.

Eighteen

I CAN’T SIMPLY contact Haydar,” Devra said. “After what happened in Sevastopol they’ll know you’ll be going after him.”

“That being the case,” Arkadin said, “the document is long gone.”

“Not necessarily.” Devra stirred her Turkish coffee, thick as tar. “They chose this backwater because it’s so inaccessible. But that works both ways. Chances are Haydar hasn’t yet been able to pass the document along.”

They were sitting in a tiny dust-blown cafй in Eskisёehir. Even for Turkey this was a backward place, filled with sheep, the smells of pine, dung, and urine, and not much else. A chill wind blew across the mountain pass. There was snow on the north side of the buildings that made up the village, and judging by the lowering clouds more was on its way.

“Godforsaken is too good a word for this hellhole,” Arkadin said. “For shit’s sake, there isn’t even a cell phone signal.”

“That’s funny coming from you.” Devra downed her coffee. “You were born in a shithole, weren’t you.”

Arkadin felt an almost uncontrollable urge to drag her around the back of the rickety structure and beat her. But he held his hand and his rage, husbanding them both for another day when he would gaze down at her as if from a hundred miles away, whisper into her ear, I have no regard for you. To me, your life is without meaning. If you have any hope of staying alive even a little longer, you’ll never again ask where I was born, who my parents were, anything of a personal nature whatsoever.

As it turned out, among her other talents Marlene was an accomplished hypnotist. She told him she wanted to hypnotize him in order to get at the root of his rage.

“I’ve heard there are people who can’t be hypnotized,” Arkadin said. “Is that right?”

“Yes,” Marlene said.

It turned out he was one of them.

“You simply will not take suggestion,” she said. “Your mind has put up a wall it’s impossible to penetrate.”

They were sitting in the garden behind Semion Icoupov’s villa. Owing to the steep lay of the land it was the size of a postage stamp. They sat on a stone bench beneath the shade afforded by a fig tree, whose dark, soon-to-be-luscious fruit was just beginning to curl the branches downward to the stony earth.

“Well,” Arkadin said, “what are we to do?”

“The question is what are you going to do, Leonid.” She brushed a fragment of leaf off her thigh. She was wearing American designer jeans, an open-necked shirt, sandals on her feet. “The process of examining your past is designed to help you regain control over yourself.”

“You mean my homicidal tendencies,” he said.

“Why would you choose to say it that way, Leonid?”

He looked deeply into her eyes. “Because it’s the truth.”

Marlene’s eyes grew dark. “Then why are you so reluctant to talk to me about the things I feel will help you?”

“You just want to worm your way inside my head. You think if you know everything about me you can control me.”

“You’re wrong. This isn’t about control, Leonid.”

Arkadin laughed. “What is it about then?”

“What it’s always been-it’s about helping you control yourself.”

A light wind tugged at her hair, and she smoothed it back into place. He noticed such things and attached to them psychological meaning. Marlene liked everything just so.

“I was a sad little boy. Then I was an angry little boy. Then I ran away from home. There, does that satisfy you?”

Marlene tilted her head to catch a bit of sunlight that appeared through the tossed leaves of the fig tree. “How is it you went from being sad to being angry?”

“I grew up,” Arkadin said.

“You were still a child.”

“Only in a manner of speaking.”

He studied her for a moment. Her hands were crossed on her lap. She lifted one of them, touched his cheek with her fingertips, traced the line of his jaw until she reached his chin. She turned his face a bit farther toward her. Then she leaned forward. Her lips, when they touched his, were soft. They opened like a flower. The touch of her tongue was like an explosion in his mouth.

Arkadin, damping down the dark eddy of his emotion, smiled winningly. “Doesn’t matter. I’m never going back.”

“I second that emotion.” Devra nodded, then rose. “Let’s see if we can get proper lodgings. I don’t know about you but I need a shower. Then we’ll see about contacting Haydar without anyone knowing.”

As she began to turn away, he caught her by the elbow.

“Just a minute.”

Her expression was quizzical as she waited for him to continue.

“If you’re not my enemy, if you haven’t been lying to me, if you want to stay with me, then you’ll demonstrate your fidelity.”

“I said, yes, I would do what you asked of me.”

“That might entail killing the people who are surely guarding Haydar.”

She didn’t even blink. “Give me the fucking gun.”

Veronica Hart lived in an apartment complex in Langley, Virginia. Like so many other complexes in this part of the world, it served as temporary housing for the thousands of federal government workers, including spooks of all stripes, who were often on assignment overseas or in other parts of the country.

Hart had lived in this particular apartment for just over two years. Not that it mattered; since coming to the district seven years ago she’d had nothing but temporary lodgings. By this point she doubted she’d be comfortable settling down and nesting. At least, those were her thoughts as she buzzed Soraya Moore into the lobby. A moment later a discreet knock sounded, and she let the other woman in.

“I’m clean,” Soraya said as she shrugged off her coat. “I made sure of that.”

Hart hung her coat in the foyer closet, led her into the kitchen. “For breakfast I have cold cereal or”-she opened the refrigerator-“cold Chinese food. Last night’s leftovers.”

“I’m not one for conventional breakfasts,” Soraya said.

“Good. Neither am I.”

Hart grabbed an array of cardboard cartons, told Soraya where to find plates, serving spoons, and chopsticks. They moved into the living room, set everything on a glass coffee table between facing sofas.

Hart began opening the cartons. “No pork, right?”

Soraya smiled, pleased that her boss remembered her Muslim strictures. “Thank you.”

Hart returned to the kitchen, put up water for tea. “I have Earl Grey or oolong.”

“Oolong for me, please.”

Hart finished brewing the tea, brought the pot and two small handleless cups back to the living room. The two women settled themselves on opposite sides of the table, sitting cross-legged on the abstract patterned rug. Soraya looked around. There were some basic prints on the wall, the kind you’d expect to find at any midlevel hotel chain. The furniture looked rented, as anonymous as anything else. There were no photos, no sense of Hart’s background or family. The only unusual feature was an upright piano.

“My only real possession,” Hart said, following Soraya’s gaze. “It’s a Steinway K-52, better known as a Chippendale hamburg. It’s got a sounding board larger than many grand pianos, so it lets out with a helluva sound.”

“You play?”

Hart went over, sat down on the stool, began to play Frйdйric Chopin’s Nocturne in B-Flat Minor. Without missing a beat she segued into Isaac Albйniz’s sensuous “Malagueсa,” and, finally, into a raucous transposition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

Soraya laughed and applauded as Hart rose, came back to sit opposite her.

“My absolute only talent besides intelligence work.” Hart opened one of the cartons, spooned out General Tso’s chicken. “Careful,” she said as she handed it over, “I order it extra hot.”

“That’s okay by me,” Soraya said, digging deep into the carton. “I always wanted to play the piano.”

“Actually, I wanted to play electric guitar.” Hart licked oyster sauce off her finger as she passed over another carton. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. According to him, electric guitar wasn’t a ‘lady’s’ instrument.”

“Strict, was he?” Soraya said sympathetically.

“You bet. He was a full-bird colonel in the air force. He’d been a fighter pilot back in his salad days. He resented being too old to fly, missed that damn oily-smelling cockpit something fierce. Who could he complain to in the force? So he took his frustration out on me and my mother.”

Soraya nodded. “My father is old-school Muslim. Very strict, very rigid. Like many of his generation he’s bewildered by the modern world, and that makes him angry. I felt trapped at home. When I left, he said he’d never forgive me.”

“Did he?”

Soraya had a faraway look in her eyes. “I see my mom once a month. We go shopping together. I speak to my father once in a while. He’s never invited me back home; I’ve never gone.”

Hart put down her chopsticks. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It is what it is. Do you still see your father?”

“I do, but he doesn’t know who I am. My mother’s gone now, which is a blessing. I don’t think she could’ve tolerated seeing him like that.”

“It must be hard for you,” Soraya said. “The indomitable fighter pilot reduced like that.”

“There’s a point in life where you have to let go of your parents.” Hart resumed eating, though more slowly. “Whoever’s lying in that bed isn’t my father. He died a long time ago.”

Soraya looked down at her food for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me how you knew about the NSA safe house.”

“Ah, that.” Hart’s face brightened. Clearly, she was happy to be on a work topic. “During my time at Black River we were often hired by NSA. This was before they trained and deployed their own home-grown black-ops details. We were good for them because they never had to specify to anyone what we’d been hired to do. It was all ‘fieldwork,’ priming the battlefield for our troops. No one on Capitol Hill was going to look farther than that.”

She dabbed her mouth, sat back. “Anyway, after one particular mission, I caught the short straw. I was the one from my squad who brought the findings back to the NSA. Because it was a black-ops mission, the debriefing took place at the safe house in Virginia. Not in the fine library you were taken to, but in one of the basement-level cubicles-windowless, featureless, just gritty reinforced concrete. It’s like a war bunker down there.”

“And what did you see?”

“It wasn’t what I saw.” Hart said. “It was what I heard. The cubicles are soundproof, except for the doors, I assume so the guards in the corridors know what’s going on. What I heard was ghastly. The sounds were barely human.”

“Did you tell your bosses at Black River?”

“What was the point? They didn’t care, and even if they did, what were they going to do? Start a congressional investigation on the basis of sounds I heard? The NSA would have cut them off at the knees, put them out of business in a heartbeat.” She shook her head. “No, these boys are businessmen, pure and simple. Their ideology revolves around milking as much money from the government as possible.”

“So now we have a chance to do what you couldn’t before, what Black River wouldn’t do.”

“That’s right,” Hart said. “I want to get photos, videos, absolute proof of what NSA is doing down there so I can present the evidence myself to the president. That’s where you and Tyrone come in.” She shoved her plate away. “I want Luther LaValle’s head on a platter, and by God I’m going to get it.”

Nineteen

BECAUSE OF the corpse and all the blood on the seats Bourne was forced to abandon the Volga. Before he did, though, he took Baronov’s cell phone, as well as his money. It was freezing. Within the preternatural afternoon winter darkness came the snow, swirling down in ever-heavier curtains. Bourne knew he had to get out of the area as quickly as possible. He took the SIM card out of his phone, put it in Baronov’s, then threw his own cell phone down a storm drain. In his new identity as Fyodor Ilianovich Popov he couldn’t afford to be in possession of a cell with an American carrier.

He walked, leaning into the wind and snow. After six blocks, huddled in a doorway, he used Baronov’s cell phone to call his friend Boris Karpov. The voice at the end of the line grew cold.

“Colonel Karpov is no longer with FSB.”

Bourne felt a chill go through him. Russia had not changed so much that lightning-swift dismissals on trumped-up charges were a thing of the past.

“I need to contact him,” Bourne said.

“He’s now at the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency.” The voice recited a local number before abruptly hanging up.

That explained the attitude, Bourne thought. The Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency was headed up by Viktor Cherkesov. But many believed he was much more than that, a silovik running an organization so powerful that some had taken to calling it FSB-2. Recently an internal war between Cherkesov and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, the modern-day successor to the notorious KGB, had sprung up within the government. The silovik who won that war would probably be the next president of Russia. If Karpov had gone from the FSB to FSB-2, it must be because Cherkesov had gotten the upper hand.

Bourne called the office of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, but he was told that Karpov was away and could not be reached.

For a moment he contemplated calling the man who had picked up Baronov’s Zil in the Crocus City parking lot, but he almost immediately thought better of it. He’d already gotten Baronov killed; he didn’t want any more deaths on his conscience.

He walked on until he came to a tram stop. He took the first one that appeared out of the gloom. He’d used the scarf he’d bought at the boutique in Crocus City to cover up the mark the wire had made across his throat. The small seepage of blood had dried up as soon as he’d hit the frigid air.

The tram jounced and rattled along its rails. Crammed inside with a stinking, noisy crowd, he felt thoroughly shaken. Not only had he discovered a Kazanskaya assassin waiting in Tarkanian’s apartment, but his contact had been murdered by an NSA assassin sent to kill him. His sense of apartness had never been more extreme. Babies cried, men rustled newspapers, women chatted side by side, an old man, big-knuckled hands curled over the head of his walking stick, clandestinely ogled a young girl engrossed in a manga comic. Here was life, bustling all around him, a burbling stream that parted when it came to him, an immovable rock, only to come together when it passed him, flowing on while he remained behind, still and alone.

He thought of Marie, as he always did at times like this. But Marie was gone, and her memory was of little solace to him. He missed his children, and wondered whether this was the David Webb personality bubbling up. An old, familiar despair swept through him, as it hadn’t since Alex Conklin had taken him out of the gutter, formed the Bourne identity for him to slip on like a suit of armor. He felt the crushing weight of life on him, a life lived alone, a sad and lonely life that could only end one way.

And then his thoughts turned to Moira, of how impossibly difficult that last meeting with her had been. If she had been a spy, if she had betrayed Martin and meant to do the same with him, what would he have done? Would he have turned her over to Soraya or Veronica Hart?

But she wasn’t a spy. He would never have to face that conundrum.

When it came to Moira, his personal feelings were now bound up in his professional duty, inextricably combined. He knew that she loved him and, now, in the face of his despair, he understood that he loved her, as well. When he was with her he felt whole, but in an entirely new way. She wasn’t Marie, and he didn’t want her to be Marie. She was Moira, and it was Moira he wanted.

By the time he swung off the tram in Moscow Center, the snow had abated to veils of drifting flakes whirled about by stray gusts of wind across the huge open plazas. The city’s lights were on against the long winter evening, but the clearing sky turned the temperature bitter. The streets were clogged with gypsy cabbies in their cheap cars manufactured during the Brezhnev years, trundling slowly in bumper-to-bumper lines so as to not miss a fare. They were known in local slang as bombily-those who bomb-because of the bowel-loosening speed with which they bombed around the city’s streets as soon as they had a passenger.

He went into a cybercafй, paid for fifteen minutes at a computer terminal, typed in Kitaysky Lyotchik. Kitaysky Lyotchik Zhao-Da, the full name-or The Chinese Pilot in its English translation-turned out to be a throbbing elitny club at proyezd Lubyansky 25. The Kitai-Gorod metro stop let Bourne out at the end of the block. On one side was a canal, frozen solid; on the other, a row of mixed-use buildings. The Chinese Pilot was easy enough to spot, what with the BMWs, Mercedeses, and Porsche SUVs, as well as the ubiquitous gaggle of bombily Zhigs clustered on the street. The crowd behind a velvet rope was being held in check by fierce-looking face-control bullies, so that waiting partygoers spilled drunkenly off the pavement. Bourne went up to the red Cayenne, rapped on the window. When the driver scrolled the window down, Bourne held out three hundred dollars.

“When I come out that door, this is my car, right?”

The driver eyed the money hungrily. “Right you are, sir.”

In Moscow, especially, American dollars talked louder than words.

“And if your client comes out in the meantime?”

“He won’t,” the driver assured Bourne. “He’s in the champagne room till four at the earliest.”

Another hundred dollars got Bourne past the shouting, unruly mob. Inside, he ate an indifferent meal of an Oriental salad and almond-crusted chicken breast. From his perch along the glowing bar, he watched the Russian siloviki come and go with their diamond-studded, mini-skirted, fur-wrapped dyevochkas-strictly speaking, young women who had not yet borne a child. This was the new order in Russia. Except Bourne knew that many of the same people were still in power-either ex-KGB siloviki or their progeny lined up against the boys from Sokolniki, who came from nothing into sudden wealth. The siloviki, derived from the Russian word for “power,” were men from the so-called power ministries, including the security services and the military, who had risen during the Putin era. They were the new guard, having overthrown the Yeltsin-period oligarchs. No matter. Siloviki or mobster, they were criminals, they’d killed, extorted, maimed, blackmailed; they all had blood on their hands, they were all strangers to remorse.

Bourne scanned the tables for Gala Nematova, was surprised to find half a dozen dyevs who might have fit the bill, especially in this low light. It was astonishing to observe firsthand this wheat field of tall, willowy young women, one more striking than the next. There was a prevalent theory, a kind of skewed Darwinism-survival of the prettiest-that explained why there were so many startlingly handsome dyevochkas in Russia and Ukraine. If you were a man in his twenties in these countries in 1947 it meant that you’d survived one of the greatest male bloodbaths in human history. These men, being in the vast minority, had their pick of women. Who had they chosen to marry and impregnate? The answer was obvious, hence the acres of dyevs partying here and in every other nightclub in Russia.

Out on the dance floor, a crush of gyrating bodies made identification of individuals impossible. Spotting a redheaded dyev on her own, Bourne walked over to her, gestured if she wanted to dance. The earsplitting house music pumped out of a dozen massive speakers made small talk impossible. She nodded, took his hand, and they shoved, elbowed, and squeezed their way into a cramped space on the dance floor. The next twenty minutes could have substituted for a vigorous workout. The dancing was nonstop, as were the colored flashing lights and the chest-vibrating drumming of the high-octane music spewed out by a local band called Tequilajazz.

Over the top of the redhead Bourne caught a glimpse of yet another blond dyev. Only this one was different. Grabbing the redhead’s hand, Bourne eeled deeper into the gyrating pack of dancers. Perfume, cologne, and sour sweat mixed with the raw tang of hot metal and blazing monster amplifiers.

Still dancing, Bourne maneuvered around until he was certain. The blonde dyev dancing with the broad-shouldered mobster was, indeed, Gala Nematova.

It’ll never be the same,” Dr. Mitten said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Anthony Prowess, sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the NSA safe house just outside Moscow, barked at the ophthalmologist bent over him.

“Mr. Prowess, I don’t think you’re in the best shape to hear a full diagnosis. Why not wait until the shock-”

“A, I’m not in shock,” Prowess lied. “And B, I don’t have time to wait.” That was true enough: Having lost Bourne’s trail, he needed to get back on it ASAP.

Dr. Mitten sighed. He’d been expecting just such a response; in fact, he would’ve been surprised at anything else. Still, he had a professional responsibility to his patient even if he was on retainer to the NSA.

“What it means,” he said, “is that you’ll never see out of that eye again. At least, not in any way that’ll be useful to you.”

Prowess sat with his head back, his damaged eye numbed with drops so the damn ophthalmologist could poke around. “Details, please.”

Dr. Mitten was a tall, thin man with narrow shoulders, a wisp of a comb-over, and a neck with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed comically when he spoke or swallowed. “I believe you’ll be able to discern movement, differentiate light from dark.”

“That’s it?”

“On the other hand,” Dr. Mitten said, “when the swelling goes down you may be completely blind in that eye.”

“Fine, now I know the worst. Just fix me the hell up so I can get out of here.”

“I don’t recommend-”

“I don’t give a shit what you recommend,” Prowess snapped. “Do as I tell you or I’ll wring your scrawny little chicken neck.”

Dr. Mitten puffed out his checks in indignation, but he knew better than to talk back to an agent. They seemed born with hair-trigger responses to everything, which their training further honed.

As the ophthalmologist worked on his eye, Prowess seethed inside. Not only had he failed to terminate Bourne, he’d allowed Bourne to permanently maim him. He was furious at himself for turning tail and running, even though he knew that when a victim gains the upper hand you have to exit the field as quickly as possible.

Still, Prowess would never forgive himself. It wasn’t that the pain had been excruciating-he had an extremely high pain threshold. It wasn’t even that Bourne had turned the tables on him-he’d redress that situation shortly. It was his eye. Ever since he was a child, he had a morbid fear of being blind. His father had been blinded in an accidental fall getting off a transit bus, when the impact had detached both his retinas. This was in the days before ophthalmologists could staple retinas back in place. At six years old the horror of watching his father deteriorate from an optimistic, robust man into a bitter, withdrawn nub had imprinted itself forever in his mind. That horror had kicked in the moment Jason Bourne had dug his thumb deep into his eye.

As he sat in the chair, brooding amid the chemical smells emitted by Dr. Mitten’s ministrations, Prowess was filled with determination. He promised himself he’d find Jason Bourne, and when he did Bourne would pay for the damage he’d inflicted, he’d pay dearly before Prowess killed him.

Professor Specter was chairing a chancellors’ meeting at the university when his private cell phone vibrated. He immediately called a fifteen-minute break, left the room, strode down the hall and outside onto the campus.

When he was clear, he opened his cell, and heard Nemetsov’s voice buzzing in his ear. Nemetsov was the man Baronov had called to switch cars with at Crocus City.

“Baronov’s dead?” Specter said. “How?”

He listened while Nemetsov described the attack in the car outside Tarkanian’s apartment building. “An NSA assassin,” Nemetsov concluded. “He was waiting for Bourne, to garrote him as he did Baronov.”

“And Jason?”

“Survived. But the assassin escaped as well.”

Specter felt a wave of relief wash over him. “Find that NSA man before he finds Jason, and kill him. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly. But shouldn’t we also try to make contact with Bourne?”

Specter considered a moment. “No. He’s at his best when working alone. He knows Moscow, speaks Russian fluently, and he has our fake IDs. He’ll do what must be done.”

“You’ve put your faith in this one man?”

“You don’t know him, Nemetsov, otherwise you wouldn’t make such a stupid statement. I only wish Jason could be with us permanently.”

When, sweaty and entangled, Gala Nematova and her boy toy left the dance floor, so did Bourne. He watched as the couple made their way to a table where they were greeted by two other men. They all began to guzzle champagne as if it were water. Bourne waited until they’d refilled their flutes, then swaggered over in the style of these new-style gangsters.

Leaning over Gala’s companion, he shouted in her ear, “I have an urgent message for you.”

“Hey,” her companion shouted back with no little belligerence, “who the fuck’re you?”

“Wrong question.” Glaring at him, Bourne pushed up the sleeve of his jacket just long enough to give him a glimpse of his fake Anubis tattoo.

The man bit his lip and sat back down as Bourne reached over, pulled Gala Nematova away from the table.

“We’re going outside to talk.”

“Are you crazy?” She tried to squirm away from his grip. “It’s freezing out there.”

Bourne continued to steer her by her elbow. “We’ll talk in my limo.”

“Well, that’s something.” Gala Nematova bared her teeth, clearly unhappy. Her teeth were very white, as if scrubbed to within an inch of their lives. Her eyes were a remote chestnut, large with uptilted corners that revealed the Asian blood in her ancestry.

A frigid wind swept off the canal, blocked only partially by the gridlock of expensive cars and bombily. Bourne rapped on the Porsche’s door and the driver, recognizing him, unlocked the doors. Bourne and the dyev piled in.

Gala, shivering, hugged her inadequately short fur coat around her. Bourne asked the driver to turn up the heat. He complied, sank down in his fur-collared greatcoat.

“I don’t care what message you have for me,” Gala said sullenly. “Whatever it is, the answer’s no.”

“Are you sure?” Bourne wondered where she was going with this.

“Sure I’m sure. I’ve had it with you guys trying to find out where Leonid Danilovich is.”

Leonid Danilovich, Bourne said to himself. There’s a name the professor never mentioned.

“The reason we keep hounding you is he’s sure you know.” Bourne had no idea what he was saying, but he felt if he kept running with her he’d be able to open her up.

“I don’t.” Now Gala sounded like a little girl in a snit. “But even if I did I wouldn’t rat him out. You can tell Maslov that.” She fairly spat out the name of the Kazanskaya’s leader, Dimitri Maslov.

Now we’re getting somewhere, Bourne thought. But why was Maslov after Leonid Danilovich, and what did any of this have to do with Pyotr’s death? He decided to explore this link.

“Why were you and Leonid Danilovich using Tarkanian’s apartment?”

Instantly he knew he’d made a mistake. Gala’s expression changed dramatically. Her eyes narrowed and she made a sound deep in her throat. “What the hell is this? You already know why we were camped out there.”

“Tell me again,” Bourne said, improvising desperately. “I’ve only heard it thirdhand. Maybe something was left out.”

“What could be left out? Leonid Danilovich and Tarkanian are the best of friends.”

“Is that where you took Pyotr for your late-night trysts?”

“Ah, so that’s what this is all about. The Kazanskaya want to know all about Pyotr Zilber, and I know why. Pyotr ordered the murder of Borya Maks, in prison, of all places-High Security Prison Colony 13. Who could do that? Get in there, kill Maks, a Kazanskaya contract killer of great strength and skill, and get out without being seen.”

“That’s precisely what Maslov wants to know,” Bourne said, because it was the safe comment to make.

Gala picked at her nail extensions, realized what she was doing, stopped. “He suspects Leonid Danilovich did it because Leonid is known for such feats. No one else could do that, he’s sure.”

Time to press her, Bourne decided. “He’s right on the money.”

Gala shrugged.

“Why are you protecting Leonid?”

“I love him.”

“The way you loved Pyotr?”

“Don’t be absurd.” Gala laughed. “I never loved Pyotr. He was a job Semion Icoupov paid me handsomely for.”

“And Pyotr paid for your treachery with his life.”

Gala seemed to peer at him in a different light. “Who are you?”

Bourne ignored her question. “During that time where did you meet Icoupov?”

“I never met him. Leonid served as intermediary.”

Now Bourne’s mind raced to put the building blocks Gala had provided into their proper order. “You know, don’t you, that Leonid murdered Pyotr.” He didn’t of course know that, but given the circumstances it seemed all too likely.

“No.” Gala blanched. “That can’t be.”

“You can see how it must be what happened. Icoupov didn’t kill Pyotr himself, surely that much must be clear to you.” He observed the fear mounting behind her eyes. “Who else would Icoupov have trusted to do it? Leonid was the only other person to know you were spying on Pyotr for Icoupov.”

The truth of what he said was written on Gala’s face like a road sign appearing out of the fog. While she was still in shock, Bourne said, “Please tell me Leonid’s full name.”

“What?”

“Just do as I tell you,” Bourne said. “It may be the only way to save him from being killed by the Kazanskaya.”

“But you’re Kazanskaya.”

Pushing up his sleeve, Bourne gave her a close-up look at the false tattoo. “A Kazanskaya was waiting for Leonid in Tarkanian’s apartment this evening.”

“I don’t believe you.” Her eyes widened. “What were you doing there?”

“Tarkanian’s dead,” Bourne said. “Now do you want to help the man you say you love?”

“I do love Leonid! I don’t care what he did.”

At that moment, the driver cursed mightily, turned in his seat. “My client’s coming.”

“Go on,” Bourne urged Gala. “Write his name down.”

“Something must’ve happened in the VIP,” the driver said. “Shit, he looks pissed. You gotta get outta here now.”

Bourne grabbed Gala, opened the street-side door, nearly burying it in the fender of a hurtling bombily. He flagged it down with a fistful of rubles, made the transfer from Western luxury to Eastern poverty in one stride. Gala Nematova broke away from him as he was entering the Zhig. He clutched her by the back of her fur coat, but she shrugged it off, began to run. The cabbie stepped on the gas, the stench of diesel fumes foaming up into the interior, choking them so badly Bourne had to crank open a window. As he did so, he saw two men who’d been at her table come out of the club. They looked right and left. One of them spotted Gala’s running figure, gestured to the other one, and they took off after her.

“Follow those men!” Bourne shouted to the cabbie.

The cabbie had a flat face with a distinctly Asian caste. He was fat, greasy, and spoke Russian with an abominable accent. Clearly, Russian wasn’t his first language. “You’re joking, yes?”

Bourne thrust more rubles at him. “I’m joking, no.”

The cabbie shrugged, crashed the Zhig into first gear, depressed the gas pedal.

At that moment the two men caught up with Gala.

Twenty

AT PRECISELY that moment, Leonid Danilovich Arkadin and Devra were deciding how to get to Haydar without Devra’s people knowing about it.

“Best would be to extract him from his environment,” Arkadin said. “But for that we need to know his habitual movements. I don’t have time-”

“I know a way,” Devra said.

The two of them were sitting side by side on a bed on the ground floor of a small inn. The room wasn’t much to look at-just a bed, a chair, a broken-down dresser-but it had its own bathroom, a shower with plenty of hot water, which they’d used one after the other. Best of all, it was warm.

“Haydar’s a gambler,” she continued. “Almost every evening he’s hunkered down in the back room of a local cafй. He knows the owner, who lets them play without imposing a fee. In fact, once a week he joins them.” She glanced at her watch. “He’s sure to be there now.”

“What good is that? Your people are sure to protect him there.”

“Right, that’s why we aren’t going to go near the place.”

An hour later, they were sitting in their rented car on the side of a two-lane road. All their lights were off. They were freezing. Whatever snow had seemed imminent had passed them by. A half-moon rode in the sky, an Old World lantern revealing wisps of clouds and bluish crusty snowbanks.

“This is the route Haydar takes to and from the game.” Devra tilted her watch face so it was illuminated by the moonglow coming off the banked snow. “He should show any minute now.”

Arkadin was behind the wheel. “Just point out the car, leave the rest to me.” One hand was on the ignition key, the other on the gearshift. “We have to be prepared. He might have an escort.”

“If he’s got guards they’ll be in the same car with him,” Devra said. “The roads are so bad it will be extremely difficult to keep him in sight from a trailing vehicle.”

“One car,” Arkadin said. “All the better.”

A moment later the night was momentarily lit by a moving glow below the rise in the road.

“Headlights.” Devra tensed. “That’s the right direction.”

“You’ll know his car?”

“I’ll know it,” she said. “There aren’t many cars in the area. Mostly old trucks for carting.”

The glow brightened. Then they saw the headlights themselves as the vehicle crested the rise. From the position of the headlights, Arkadin could tell this was a car, not a truck.

“It’s him,” she said.

“Get out,” Arkadin ordered. “Run! Run now!”

Keep moving,” Bourne told the cabbie, “in first gear only till I tell you different.”

“I don’t think-”

But Bourne had already swung open the curbside door, was sprinting toward the two men. One had Gala, the other was turning, raising his hand, perhaps a signal for one of the waiting cars. Bourne chopped his midsection with his two hands, brought his head down to his raised knee. The man’s teeth clacked together and he toppled over.

The second man swung Gala around so that she was between him and Bourne. He scrabbled for his gun, but Bourne was too quick. Reaching around Gala, Bourne went for him. He moved to block Bourne and Gala stamped her heel on his instep. That was all the distraction Bourne needed. With a hand around her waist, he pulled her away, delivered a vicious uppercut to the man’s throat. Reflexively, he put two hands up, choking and gagging. Bourne delivered two quick blows to his stomach and he, too, hit the pavement.

“Come on!”

Bourne grabbed Gala by the hand, made for the bombila, moving slowly along the street with its door open. Bourne swung her inside, climbed in after her, slammed the door shut.

“Take off!” he shouted at the cabbie. “Take off now!”

Shivering with the cold, Gala rolled up the window.

“My name is Yakov,” the cabbie said, craning his neck to look at them in the rearview mirror. “You make much excitement for me tonight. Is there more? Where can I take you?”

“Just drive around,” Bourne said.

Several blocks on he discovered Gala staring at him.

“You weren’t lying to me,” she said.

“Neither were you. Clearly, the Kazanskaya think you know where Leonid is.”

“Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.” She was still trying to catch her breath. “That’s his name. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“What I want,” Bourne said, “is a meeting with Dimitri Maslov.”

“The head of the Kazanskaya? You’re insane.”

“Leonid has been playing with a very bad crowd,” Bourne said. “He’s put you in harm’s way. Unless I can persuade Maslov that you don’t know where Arkadin is you’ll never be safe.”

Shivering, Gala struggled back into her fur jacket. “Why did you save me?” She pulled the jacket tight around her slender frame. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I can’t let Arkadin throw you to the wolves.”

“That’s not what he’s done,” she protested.

“What would you call it?”

She opened her mouth, closed it again, bit her lip as if she could find an answer in her pain.

They had reached the inner Garden Road. Traffic whizzed by at dizzying speeds. The cabbie was about to earn his bombily name.

“Where to?” he said over his shoulder.

There was silence for a moment. Then Gala leaned forward, gave him an address.

“And where the fuck might that be?” the cabbie asked.

That was another oddity about bombily. Since almost none of them were Muscovites, they had no idea where anything was. Unfazed, Gala gave him directions and, with a horrific belching of diesel fumes, they lurched into the madly spinning traffic.

“Since we can’t go back to the apartment,” Gala said, “we’ll crash at my girlfriend’s place. I’ve done it before. She’s cool with it.”

“Do the Kazanskaya know about her?”

Gala frowned. “I don’t think so, no.”

“We can’t take the chance.” Bourne gave the cabbie the address of one of the new American-run hotels near Red Square. “That’s the last place they’ll think to look for you,” he said as the cabbie changed gears and they hurtled through the spangled Moscow night.

Alone in the car, Arkadin fired the ignition and pulled out. He stamped on the gas pedal, accelerating so quickly his head jerked back. Just before he slammed into the right corner of Haydar’s car, he switched on his headlights. He could see Haydar’s bodyguards in the rear seat. They were in the process of turning around when Arkadin’s car made jarring contact. The rear end of Haydar’s car slewed to the left, beginning its spin; Arkadin braked sharply, rammed the right back door, staving it in. Haydar, who had been struggling with the wheel, completely lost control of the car. It spun off the road, its front now facing the way it had come. Its rear struck a tree, the bumper broke in two, the trunk collapsed, and there it sat, a crippled animal. Arkadin drove off the road, put his car in park, got out, stalking toward Haydar. His headlights were shining directly into the wrecked car. He could see Haydar behind the wheel, conscious, clearly in shock. Only one of the men in the backseat was visible. His head was thrown back and to one side. There was blood on his face, black and glistening in the harsh light.

Haydar cringed fearfully as Arkadin made for the bodyguards. Both rear doors were so buckled they could not be opened. Using his elbow, Arkadin smashed the near-side rear window and peered in. One man had been caught in Arkadin’s broadside hit. He’d been thrown clear across the car, lay half on the lap of the bodyguard still sitting up. Neither one moved.

As Arkadin moved to haul Haydar out from behind the wheel, Devra came hurtling out of the darkness. Haydar’s eyes opened wide as he recognized her. She tackled Arkadin, her momentum knocking him off his feet.

Haydar watched in amazement as they rolled over through the snow, now visible, now not in the headlight beams. Haydar could see her striking him, the much larger man fighting back, gradually gaining the upper hand by dint of his superior bulk and strength. Then Devra reared back. Haydar could see a knife in her hand. She drove it down into darkness, stabbing again and again.

When she rose again into the headlight beams he could see her breathing heavily. Her hand was empty. Haydar figured she must have left the knife buried in her adversary. She staggered for a moment with the aftereffects of her struggle. Then she made her way over to him.

Yanking open the car door, she said, “Are you okay?”

He nodded, shrinking away from her. “I was told you’d turned on us, joined the other side.”

She laughed. “That’s just what I wanted that sonovabitch to think. He managed to get to Shumenko and Filya. After that I figured the only way to survive was to play along with him until I got a chance to take him down.”

Haydar nodded. “This is the final battle. The thought that you’d turned traitor was dispiriting. I know some of us thought your status was earned on your back, in Pyotr’s bed. But not me.” The shock was coming out of his eyes. The old canny light was returning.

“Where is the package?” she said. “Is it safe?”

“I handed it off to Heinrich this evening -at the card game.”

“Has he left for Munich?”

“Why the hell would he stay a minute more than he had to? He hates it here. I assume he was driving to Istanbul for his usual early-evening flight.” His eyes narrowed. “Why d’you want to know?”

He gave a little yelp as Arkadin loomed out of the night. Looking from Devra to Arkadin and back again, he said, “What is this? I saw you stab him to death.”

“You saw what we wanted you to see.” Arkadin handed Devra his gun, and she shot Haydar between the eyes.

She turned back to him, handed him the gun butt-first. There was clear defiance in her voice when she said, “Have I proved myself to you now?”

Bourne checked into the Metropolya Hotel as Fyodor Ilianovich Popov. The night clerk didn’t bat an eye at Gala’s presence, nor did he ask for her ID. Having Popov’s was enough to satisfy hotel policy. The lobby, with its gilt sconces and accents, and glittering crystal chandeliers, looked like something out of the czarist era, the designers thumbing their nose at the architecture of Soviet Brutalism.

They took one of the silk-lined elevators to the seventeenth floor. Bourne opened the door to their room with an electronically coded plastic card. After a thorough visual check, he allowed her to enter. She took off her fur jacket. The act of sitting on the bed rode her mini-skirt farther up her thighs, but she appeared unconcerned.

Leaning forward, elbows on knees, she said, “Thank you for saving me. But to be honest, I don’t know what I’ll do now.”

Bourne pulled out the chair that went with the desk, sat facing her. “The first thing you have to do is tell me whether you know where Arkadin is.”

Gala looked down at the carpet between her feet. She rubbed her arms as if she was still cold, though the temperature in the room was warm enough.

“All right,” Bourne said, “let’s talk about something else. Do you know anything about the Black Legion?”

Her head came up, her brows furrowed. “Now, that’s odd you should mention them.”

“Why is that?”

“Leonid would speak about them.”

“Is Arkadin one of them?”

Gala snorted. “You must be joking! No, he never actually spoke about them to me. I mean, he mentioned them now and again when he was going to see Ivan.”

“And who is Ivan?”

“Ivan Volkin. He’s an old friend of Leonid’s. He used to be in the grupperovka. Leonid told me that from time to time the leaders ask him for advice, so he knows all the players. He’s a kind of de facto underworld historian now. Anyway, he’s the one Leonid would go to.”

This interested Bourne. “Can you take me to him?”

“Why not? He’s a night owl. Leonid used to visit him very late.” Gala searched in her handbag for her cell phone. She scrolled through her phone book, dialed Volkin’s number.

After speaking to someone for several minutes, she terminated the connection and nodded. “He’ll see us in an hour.”

“Good.”

She frowned, put away her phone. “If you’re thinking that Ivan knows where Leonid is, you’re mistaken. Leonid told no one where he was going, not even me.”

“You must love this man a great deal.”

“I do.”

“Does he love you?”

When she turned back to him, her eyes were full of tears. “Yes, he loves me.”

“Is that why you took money to spy on Pyotr? Is that why you were partying with that man tonight at The Chinese Pilot?”

“Christ, none of that matters.”

Bourne sat forward. “I don’t understand. Why doesn’t it matter?”

Gala regarded him for a long time. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know anything about love?” A tear overflowed, ran down her cheek. “Whatever I do for money allows me to live. Whatever I do with my body has nothing to do with love. Love is strictly a matter of the heart. My heart belongs to Leonid Danilovich. That’s sacred, pure. No one can touch it or defile it.”

“Maybe we have different definitions of love,” Bourne said.

She shook her head. “You’ve no right to judge me.”

“Of course you’re right,” Bourne said. “But that wasn’t meant as a judgment. I have difficulty understanding love, that’s all.”

She cocked her head. “Why is that?”

Bourne hesitated before continuing. “I’ve lost two wives, a daughter, and many friends.”

“Have you lost love, too?”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“My brother died protecting me.” Gala began to shake. “He was all I had. No one would ever love me the way he did. After our parents were killed we were inseparable. He swore he’d make sure nothing bad happened to me. He went to his grave keeping that promise.” She sat up straight. Her face was defiant. “Now do you understand?”

Bourne realized that he’d seriously underestimated this dyev. Had he done the same with Moira? Despite admitting his feelings for Moira, he’d unconsciously made the decision that no other woman could be as strong, as imperturbable as Marie. In this, he was clearly mistaken. He had this Russian dyevochka to thank for the insight.

Gala peered at him now. Her sudden anger seemed to have burned itself out. “You’re like Leonid Danilovich in many ways. You no longer will walk off the cliff, you no longer trust in love. Like him, you were damaged in terrible ways. But now, you see, you’ve made your present as bleak as your past. Your only salvation is to find someone to love.”

“I did find someone,” Bourne said. “She’s dead now.”

“Is there no one else?”

Bourne nodded. “Maybe.”

“Then you must embrace her, instead of running away.” She clasped her hands together. “Embrace love. That’s what I would tell Leonid Danilovich if he were here instead of you.”

Three blocks away, parked at the curb, Yakov, the cabbie who had dropped Gala and Bourne off, opened his cell phone, pressed a speed-dial digit on the keypad. When he heard the familiar voice, he said, “I dropped them off at the Metropolya not ten minutes ago.”

“Keep an eye out for them,” the voice said. “If they leave the hotel, tell me. Then follow them.”

Yakov gave his assent, drove back around, installed himself opposite the hotel entrance. Then he dialed another number, delivered precisely the same information to another of his clients.

We just missed the package,” Devra said as they walked away from the wreck. “We’d better get on the road to Istanbul right away. The next contact, Heinrich, has a good couple of hours’ head start.”

They drove through the night, negotiating the twists, turns, and switchbacks. The black mountains with their shimmering stoles of snow were their silent, implacable companions. The road was as pockmarked as if they were in a war zone. Once, hitting a patch of black ice, they spun out, but Arkadin didn’t lose his head. He turned into the skid, tamped gently on the brakes several times while he threw the car into neutral, then turned the engine off. They came to a stop in the side of a snowdrift.

“I hope Heinrich had the same difficulty,” Devra said.

Arkadin restarted the car but couldn’t build up enough traction to get them moving. He walked around to the rear while Devra took the wheel. He found nothing useful inside the trunk, so he trudged several paces into the trees, snapped off a handful of substantial branches, which he wedged in front of the right rear tire. He slapped the fender twice and Devra stepped on the gas. The car wheezed and groaned. The tires spun, sending up showers of granular snow. Then the treads found the wood, rolled up onto it and over. The car was free.

Devra moved over as Arkadin took the wheel. Clouds had slid across the moon, steeping the road in dense shadow as they made their way through the mountain pass. There was no traffic; the only illumination for many miles was the car’s own headlights. Finally, the moon rose from its cloud bed and the hemmed-in world around them was bathed in an eerie bluish light.

“Times like this when I miss my American,” Devra mused, her head against the seat back. “He came from California. I loved especially his stories about surfing. My God, what a weird sport. Only in America, huh? But I used to think how great it would be to live in a land of sunshine, ride endless highways in convertibles, and swim whenever you wanted to.”

“The American dream,” Arkadin said sourly.

She sighed. “I so wanted him to take me with him when he left.”

“My friend Mischa wanted me to take him with me,” Arkadin said, “but that was a long time ago.”

Devra turned her head toward him. “Where did you go?”

“To America.” He laughed shortly. “But not to California. It didn’t matter to Mischa; he was crazy about America. That’s why I didn’t take him. You go to a place to work, you fall in love with it, and now you don’t want to work anymore.” He paused for a moment, concentrated on navigating through a hairpin switchback. “I didn’t tell him that, of course,” he continued. “I could never hurt Mischa like that. We both grew up in slums, you know. Fucking hard life, that is. I was beaten up so many times I stopped counting. Then Mischa stepped in. He was bigger than I was, but that wasn’t it. He taught me how to use a knife-not just stab, but how to throw it, as well. Then he took me to a guy he knew, skinny little man, but he had no fat on him at all. In the blink of an eye he had me down on my back in so much pain my eyes watered. Christ, I couldn’t even breathe. Mischa asked me if I’d like to be able to do that and I said, ‘Shit, where do I sign up?’”

The headlights of a truck appeared, coming toward them, a horrific dazzle that momentarily blinded both of them. Arkadin slowed down until the truck lumbered past.

“Mischa’s my best friend, my only friend, really,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

“Will I meet him when you take me back to Moscow?”

“He’s in America now,” Arkadin said. “But I’ll take you to his apartment, where I’ve been staying. It’s along the Frunzenskaya embankment. His living room overlooks Gorky Park. The view is very beautiful.” He thought fleetingly of Gala, who was still in the apartment. He knew how to get her out; it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

“I know I’ll love it,” Devra said. It was a relief to hear him talk about himself. Encouraged by his talkative mood, she continued, “What work did you do in America?”

And just like that his mood flipped. He braked the car to a halt. “You drive,” he said.

Devra had grown used to his mercurial mood swings, but watched him come around the front of the car. She slid over. He slammed the passenger’s-side door shut and she put the car in gear, wondering what tender nerve she’d touched.

They continued along the road, heading down the mountainside.

“We’ll hit the highway soon enough,” she said to break the thickening silence. “I can’t wait to crawl into a warm bed.”

Inevitably there came a time when Arkadin took the initiative with Marlene. It happened while she was sleeping. He crept down the hall to her door. It was child’s play for him to pick the lock with nothing more than the wire that wrapped the cork in the bottle of champagne Icoupov served at dinner. Of course, being a Muslim, Icoupov himself had not partaken of the alcohol, but Arkadin and Marlene had no such restrictions. Arkadin had volunteered to open the champagne and when he did he palmed the wire.

The room smelled of her-of lemons and musk, a combination that set off a stirring below his belly. The moon was full, low on the horizon. It looked as if God were squeezing it between his palms.

Arkadin stood still, listening to her deep even breaths, every once in a while catching the hint of a snore. The bedcovers rustled as she turned onto her right side, away from him. He waited until her breathing settled again before moving to the bed. He climbed, knelt over her. Her face and shoulder were in moonlight, her neck in shadow, so that it appeared to him as if he’d already decapitated her. For some reason, this vision disturbed him. He tried to breathe deeply and easily, but the disturbing vision tightened his chest, made him so dizzy that he almost lost his balance.

And then he felt something hard and cold that in a drawn breath brought him back to himself. Marlene was awake, her head turned, staring at him. In her right hand was a Glock 20 10mm.

“I’ve got a full magazine,” she said.

Which meant she had fourteen more rounds if she missed the kill with her first shot. Not that that was likely. The Glock was one of the most powerful handguns on the market. She wasn’t fooling around.

“Back off.”

He rolled off the bed and she sat up. Her bare breasts shone whitely in the moonlight. She appeared totally unconcerned with her semi-nudity.

“You weren’t asleep.”

“I haven’t slept since I came here,” Marlene said. “I’ve been anticipating this moment. I’ve been waiting for you to steal into my room.”

She set aside the Glock. “Come to bed. You’re safe with me, Leonid Danilovich.”

As if mesmerized, he climbed back onto the bed and, like a little child, rested his head against the warm cushion of her breasts while she rocked him tenderly. She lay curled around him, willing her warmth to seep into his cool, marble flesh. Gradually, she felt his heartbeat cease its manic racing. To the steady sound of her heartbeat, he fell into slumber.

Some time later, she woke him with a whisper in his ear. It wasn’t difficult; he wanted to be released from his nightmare. He started, staring at her for a long moment, his body rigid. His mouth felt raw from yelling in his sleep. Returning to the present, he recognized her. He felt her arms around him, the protective curl of her body, and to her astonishment and elation he relaxed.

“Nothing can harm you here, Leonid Danilovich,” she breathed. “Not even your nightmares.”

He stared at her in an odd, unblinking fashion. Anyone else would have been frightened, but not Marlene.

“What made you cry out?” she said.

“There was blood everywhere… on the bed.”

“Your bed? Were you beaten, Leonid?”

He blinked, and the spell was broken. He turned over, faced away from her, waiting for the ashen light of dawn.

Twenty-One

ON A FINE clear afternoon, with the sun already low in the sky, Tyrone drove Soraya Moore to the NSA safe house nestled within the rolling hills of Virginia. Somewhere, in some anonymous cybercafй in northeast Washington, Kiki was sitting at a public computer terminal, waiting to sow the software virus she’d devised to disable the property’s two thousand CCTV surveillance cameras.

“It’ll loop the video images back on themselves endlessly,” she’d told them. “That was the easy part. In order to make the code a hundred percent invisible it’ll work for ten minutes, no more. At that point, it will, in essence, self-destruct, deforming into tiny packets of harmless code the system won’t pick up as anomalous.”

Everything now depended on timing. Since it was impossible to send an electronic signal from the NSA safe house without it being picked up and tagged as suspicious, they had worked out an external timing scheme, which meant that if anything went wrong-if Tyrone was delayed for any reason-the ten minutes would tick by and the plan would fail. This was the plan’s Achilles’ heel. Still, it was their only option and they decided to take it.

Besides, Deron had a number of goodies he’d concocted for them after consulting the architectural plans of the building he’d mysteriously conjured up. She had tried to get them herself and struck out; NSA had what she thought was a total lock on the property records.

Just before they stopped at the front gates, Soraya said, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

Tyrone nodded, stony-faced. “Let’s get on wid it.” He was pissed that she’d even thought to ask that question. When he was on the street, if one of his crew dared to question his courage or resolve that would’ve been the end of him. Tyrone had to keep reminding himself that this wasn’t the street. He knew all too well that she’d accepted a huge risk in taking him in off the street-civilizing him, as he sometimes thought of the process when he felt particularly hemmed in by the rules and regulations of white men he knew nothing about.

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, wondering if he’d ever have stepped into the white man’s world were it not for his love of her. Here was a woman of color-a Muslim, no less-who was working for the Man. Not just the Man, but the Man squared, cubed into infinity, whatever. If she didn’t mind doing it, why should he? But his upbringing was about as different from hers as it could get. From what she’d told him her parents had given her everything she needed; he barely had parents, and they either didn’t want to give him anything or were incapable of giving it. She had the advantage of a first-class education; he had Deron who, though he’d taught Tyrone many things, was no substitute for white man’s education.

What was ironic was that only months ago, he would have sneered at the kind of education she had. But once he’d met her he began to understand how ignorant he really was. He was street-smart, sure-more than she was. But he was intimidated around people who’d graduated high school and college. The more he observed them maneuvering through their world-how they talked, negotiated, interacted with one another-the more he understood just how stunted his life had been. Street smarts and nothing else was just what the doctor ordered for picking your way through the hood, but there was a whole fucking world beyond the hood. Once he realized that, like Deron, he wanted to explore the world beyond the borders of his neighborhood, he knew he’d have to remake himself from the toes up.

All this was on his mind when he saw the imposing stone-and-slate building within the high iron fence. As he knew from the plans he’d memorized at Deron’s it was perfectly symmetrical, with four high chimneys, eight gabled rooms. A spiky fistful of antennas, aerials, and satellite dishes was the only anomalous feature.

“You look very handsome in that suit,” Soraya said.

“It’s fuckin’ uncomfortable,” he said. “I feel stiff.”

“Just like every NSA agent.”

He laughed the way a Roman gladiator might as he entered the Colosseum.

“Which is the point,” she added. “You’ve got the tag Deron gave you?”

He patted a place over his heart. “Safe and sound.”

Soraya nodded. “Okay, here we go.”

He knew there was a chance he’d never come out of that house alive, but he didn’t care. Why should he? What had his life amounted to up until now? Shit-all. He’d stood up-just as Deron had-made his choice. That’s all a man asks for in this life.

Soraya presented the credentials LaValle had sent her by messenger this morning. Nevertheless, both she and Tyrone were scrutinized by a bookend pair of suits with square jaws and standing orders not to smile. Finally, they passed muster, and were waved through.

As Tyrone drove down the snaking gravel drive Soraya pointed out the terrible gauntlet of surveillance systems an intruder would have to pass in order to infiltrate from beyond the property’s borders. This monologue reassured him that they’d already bypassed these risks by being LaValle’s guests. Now all they had to do was negotiate the interior of the house. Getting out again was another matter entirely.

He drove up to the portico. Before he could turn off the engine, a valet came to relieve him of the car, yet another square-jawed military type who’d never look right in his civilian suit.

General Kendall, punctual as usual, was at the door to meet them. He gave Soraya’s hand a perfunctory shake, then eyeballed Tyrone as she introduced him.

“Your bodyguard, I presume,” Kendall said in a tone someone would use for a rebuke. “But he doesn’t look like standard-issue CI material.”

“This isn’t a standard CI rendezvous,” Soraya returned tartly.

Kendall shrugged. Another perfunctory handshake and he turned on his heel, leading them inside the hulking structure. Through the public rooms, gilt-edged, refined, expensive beyond modern-day imagining, along hushed corridors lined with martial paintings, past mullioned windows through which the January sunlight sparked in beams that stretched across the plush blue carpet. Without seeming to, Tyrone took note of every detail, as if he were casing the joint for a high-end robbery, which in fact he was. They passed the door down to the basement levels. It looked precisely as Soraya had drawn it from memory for him and Deron.

They went on another ten yards to the walnut doors leading to the Library. The fireplace contained a roaring blaze, a grouping had been set with four chairs in the same spot where Soraya said she had sat with Kendall and LaValle on her first visit. Willard met them just inside the door.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Moore,” he said with his customary half bow. “How very nice to see you again so soon. Would you care for your Ceylon tea?”

“That would be wonderful, thank you.”

Tyrone was about to ask for a Coke, but thought better of it. Instead he ordered another Ceylon tea, having not the faintest idea what it tasted like.

“Very good,” Willard said, and left them.

“This way,” Kendall said unnecessarily, leading them to the grouping of chairs where Luther LaValle was already seated, staring out the mullioned windows at the light gathered to an oval over the western hills.

He must have heard the whisper of their approach, because he rose and turned just as they came up. The maneuver seemed to Soraya artfully rehearsed, and therefore as artificial as LaValle’s smile. Dutifully, she introduced Tyrone, and they all sat down together.

LaValle steepled his fingers. “Before we begin, Director, I feel compelled to point out that our own archives department has unearthed some fragmentary history on the Black Legion. Apparently, they did exist during the time of the Third Reich. They were composed of Muslim prisoners of war who were brought back to Germany from the first putsches into the Soviet Union. These Muslims, mainly of Turkish descent from the Caucasus, detested Stalin so much they’d do anything to topple his regime, even becoming Nazis.”

LaValle shook his head like a history professor recounting evil days to a class of wide-eyed students. “It’s a particularly unpleasant footnote in a thoroughly repugnant decade. But as for the Black Legion itself, there’s no evidence whatsoever that it survived the regime that spawned it. Besides which, its benefactor Himmler was a master of propaganda, especially when it came to advancing himself in the eyes of Hitler. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the role of the Black Legion on the Eastern Front was minimal, that it was in fact Himmler’s fantastic propaganda machine that gave it the feared reputation it enjoyed, not anything its members themselves did.”

He smiled, the sun emerging from behind storm clouds. “Now, in that light, let me take a look at the Typhon intercepts.”

Soraya tolerated this rather condescending introduction, meant to discredit the origin of the intercepts before she even handed them over. She allowed indignation and humiliation to pass through her so she could remain calm and focused on her mission. Pulling the slim briefcase onto her lap, she unlocked the coded lock, extracted a red file with a thick black stripe across its upper right-hand corner, marking it as DIRECTOR EYES ONLY-material of the highest security clearance.

Staring LaValle in the face, she handed it over.

“Excuse me, Director.” Tyrone held out his hand. “The electronic tape.”

“Oh, yes, I forgot,” Soraya said. “Mr. LaValle, would you please hand the file to Mr. Elkins.”

LaValle checked the file more closely, saw a ribbon of shiny metal sealing the file. “Don’t bother. I can peel this back myself.”

“Not if you want to read the intercepts,” Tyrone said. “Unless the tape is opened with this”-he held up a small plastic implement-“the file will incinerate within seconds.”

LaValle nodded his approval of the security measures Soraya had taken.

As he gave the file to Tyrone, Soraya said, “Since our last meeting my people have intercepted more communication from the same entity, which increasingly seems to be the command center.”

LaValle frowned. “A command center? That’s highly unusual for a terrorist network, which is, by definition, made up of independent cadres.”

“That’s what makes the intercepts so compelling.”

“It also makes them suspect, in my opinion,” LaValle said. “Which is why I’m anxious to read them myself.”

By this time, Tyrone had slit the metallic security tape, handed the file back. LaValle’s gaze dropped as he opened the file and began to read.

At this point Tyrone said, “I need to use the bathroom.”

LaValle waved a hand. “Go ahead,” he said without looking up.

Kendall watched him as he went up to Willard, who was on his way over with the drinks, to ask for directions. Soraya saw this out of the corner of her eye. If all went well, in the next couple of minutes Tyrone would be standing in front of the door down to the basement at the precise moment Kiki sent the virus to the NSA security system.

Ivan Volkin was a hairy bear of a man, salt-and-pepper hair standing straight up like a madman, a full beard white as snow, small but cheerful eyes the color of a rainstorm. He was slightly bandy-legged, as if he’d been riding a horse all his life. His lined and leathery face lent him a certain dignified aspect, as if in his life he’d earned the respect of many.

He greeted them warmly, welcoming them into an apartment that appeared small because of the stacks of books and periodicals that covered every conceivable horizontal surface, including the kitchen stovetop and his bed.

He led them down a narrow, winding aisle from the vestibule to the living room, made room for them on the sofa by moving three teetering stacks of books.

“Now,” he said, standing in front of them, “how can I be of help?”

“I need to know everything you can tell me about the Black Legion.”

“And why are you interested in such a tiny footnote to history?” Volkin looked at Bourne with a jaundiced eye. “You don’t have the look of a scholar.”

“Neither do you,” Bourne said.

This produced a spraying laugh from the older man. “No, I suppose not.” Volkin wiped his eyes. “Spoken like one soldier to another, eh? Yes.” Reaching around behind him, he swung over a ladder-backed chair, straddled it with his arms crossed over the top. “So. What specifically do you want to know?”

“How did they manage to survive into the twenty-first century?”

Volkin’s face immediately shut down. “Who told you the Black Legion survives?”

Bourne did not want to use Professor Specter’s name. “An unimpeachable source.”

“Is that so? Well, that source is wrong.”

“Why bother to deny it?” Bourne said.

Volkin rose, went into the kitchen. Bourne could hear the refrigerator door open and close, the light clink of glassware. When Volkin returned, he had an iced bottle of vodka in one hand, three water glasses in the other.

Handing them the glasses, he unscrewed the cap, filled their glasses halfway. When he’d poured for himself, he sat down again, the bottle standing between them on the threadbare carpet.

Volkin raised his glass. “To our health.” He emptied his glass in two great gulps. Smacking his lips, he reached down, refilled it. “Listen to me closely. If I were to admit that the Black Legion exists today there would be nothing left of my health to toast.”

“How would anyone know?” Bourne said.

“How? I’ll tell you how. I tell you what I know, then you go out and act on that information. Where d’you think the shitstorm that ensues is going to land, hmm?” He tapped his barrel chest with his glass, slopping vodka onto his already stained shirt. “Every action has a reaction, my friend, and let me tell you that when it comes to the Black Legion every reaction is fatal for someone.”

Since he’d already as much as admitted that the Black Legion had, in fact, survived the defeat of Nazi Germany, Bourne brought the subject around to what really concerned him. “Why would the Kazanskaya be involved?”

“Pardon?”

“In some way I can’t yet understand the Kazanskaya are interested in Mikhail Tarkanian. I stumbled across one of their contract killers in his apartment.”

Volkin’s expression turned sour. “What were you doing in his apartment?”

“Tarkanian’s dead,” Bourne said.

“What?” Volkin exploded. “I don’t believe you.”

“I was there when it happened.”

“And I tell you it’s impossible.”

“On the contrary, it’s a fact,” Bourne said. “His death was a direct result of him being a member of the Black Legion.”

Volkin crossed his arms over his chest. He looked like the silverback in the National Zoo. “I see what’s happening here. How many ways will you try to get me to talk about the Black Legion?”

“Every way I can,” Bourne said. “The Kazanskaya are in some way in league with the Black Legion, which is an alarming prospect.”

“I may look as if I have all the answers, but I don’t.” Volkin stared at him, as if daring Bourne to call him a liar.

Though Bourne was certain that Volkin knew more than he would admit, he also knew it would be a mistake to call him on it. Clearly, this was a man who couldn’t be intimidated, so there was no point in trying. Professor Specter had warned him not to get caught up in the grupperovka war, but the professor was a long way away from Moscow; his intelligence was only as accurate as his men on the ground here. Instinct told Bourne there was a serious disconnect. So far as he could see there was only one way to get to the truth.

“Tell me how to get a meet with Maslov,” he said.

Volkin shook his head. “That would be most unwise. With the Kazanskaya in the middle of a power struggle with the Azeri-”

“Popov is only my cover name,” Bourne said. “Actually, I’m a consultant to Viktor Cherkesov”-the head of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, one of the two or three most powerful siloviks in Russia.

Volkin pulled back as if stung by Bourne’s words. He shot Gala an accusatory glance, as if Bourne were a scorpion she’d brought into his den. Turning back to Bourne he said, “Have you any proof of this?”

“Don’t be absurd. However, I can tell you the name of the man I report to: Boris Illyich Karpov.”

“Is that so?” Volkin produced a Makarov handgun, placed it on his right knee. “If you’re lying…” He picked up a cell phone he scavenged miraculously from out of the clutter, and quickly punched in a number. “We have no amateurs here.”

After a moment he said into the phone, “Boris Illyich, I have here with me a man who claims to be working for you. I would like to put him on the line, yes?”

With a deadpan face, Volkin handed over the cell.

“Boris,” Bourne said, “it’s Jason Bourne.”

“Jason, my good friend!” Karpov’s voice reverberated down the line. “I haven’t seen you since Reykjavik.”

“It seems like a long time.”

“Too long, I tell you!”

“Where have you been?”

“In Timbuktu.”

“What were you doing in Mali?” Bourne asked.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Karpov laughed. “I understand you’re now working for me.”

“That’s right.”

“My boy, I’ve longed for this day!” Karpov let go with another booming laugh. “We must toast this moment with vodka, but not tonight, eh? Put that old goat Volkin back on the line. I assume there’s something you want from him.”

“Correct.”

“He hasn’t believed a word you’ve told him. But I’ll change that. Please memorize my cell number, then call me when you’re alone. Until we speak again, my good friend.”

“He wants to talk to you,” Bourne said.

“That’s understandable.” Volkin took the cell from Bourne, put it to his ear. Almost immediately his expression changed. He stared at Bourne, his mouth slightly open. “Yes, Boris Illyich. Yes, of course. I understand.”

Volkin broke the connection, stared at Bourne for what seemed a long time. At length, he said, “I’m going to call Dimitri Maslov now. I hope to hell you know what you’re doing. Otherwise, this is the last time anyone will see you, either alive or dead.”

Twenty-Two

TYRONE WENT immediately into one of the cubicles in the men’s room. Fishing out the plastic tag Deron had made for him, he clipped it on the outside of his suit jacket, a suit that looked like the regulation government suits all the other spooks wore here. The tag identified him as Special Agent Damon Riggs, out of the NSA field office in LA. Damon Riggs was real enough. The tag came straight from the NSA HR database.

Tyrone flushed the toilet, emerged from the cubicle, smiled frostily at an NSA agent bent over one of the sinks washing his hands. The agent glanced at Tyrone’s tag, said, “You’re a long way from home.”

“And in the middle of winter, too.” Tyrone’s voice was strong and firm. “Damn, I miss goin’ top-down in Santa Monica.”

“I hear you.” The agent dried his hands. “Good luck,” he said as he left.

Tyrone stared at the closed door for a moment, took a deep breath, let it out slowly. So far, so good. He went out into the hallway, his eyes straight ahead, his stride purposeful. He passed four or five agents. A couple gave his tag a cursory glance, nodded. The others ignored him altogether.

“The trick,” Deron had said, “is to look like you belong. Don’t hesitate, be purposeful. If you look like you know where you’re going, you become part of the scene, no one notices you.”

Tyrone reached the door without incident. He went past it as two agents, deep in conversation, passed him. Then, checking both ways, he doubled back. Quickly he took out what seemed to be an ordinary piece of clear tape, laid it on top of the fingerprint reader. Checking his watch, he waited until the second hand touched the 12. Then, holding his breath, he pressed his forefinger onto the tape so that it was flush against the reader. The door opened. He stripped off the tape, slipped inside. The tape contained LaValle’s fingerprint, which Tyrone had lifted off the back cover of the file while working the device that slit the security tape. Soraya had engaged LaValle in conversation as a diversion.

At the bottom of the flight of steps, he paused for a moment. No alarm bells were going off, no sound of armed security guards coming his way. Kiki’s software program had done its work. Now the rest was up to him.

He moved swiftly and silently down the rough concrete corridor. Buzzing fluorescent strips were the only decoration here, casting a sickly glow. He saw no one, heard nothing beyond the susurrus of machinery.

Snapping on latex gloves he tried each door he came to. Most were locked. The first one that wasn’t opened into a small cubicle with a viewing window in one wall. Tyrone had been in enough police precincts to know this was one-way glass. He peered into a room not much larger than the one he was in. He could make out a metal chair bolted to the center of the floor, beneath which was a large drain. Affixed to the right-hand wall was a three-foot-deep trough as long as a man with manacles bolted to each end, above which was coiled a fire hose. Its nozzle looked enormous in the confines of the small room. This, Tyrone knew from photos he’d seen, was a waterboarding tank. He snapped as many photos of it as possible, because there was the proof Soraya needed that the NSA was enacting illegal and inhuman torture.

Tyrone took photos of everything with the ten-megapixel digital mini camera Soraya had given him. Given the huge memory of its smart card, it could record six videos of up to three minutes in duration.

He moved on, knowing he had an extremely limited amount of time. Opening the door an inch at a time, he determined that the corridor was still deserted. He hurried down it, checking all the doors he came to. At length, he found himself in another viewing room. This time, however, he saw a man kneeling beside a table. His arms were drawn back, his bound hands on the table. A black hood had been pulled down over his head. His attitude was of a defeated soldier about to be forced to kiss the feet of his conqueror. Tyrone felt a surge of rage run through him such as he’d never felt before. He couldn’t help thinking of the history of his own people, hunted by rival tribes on the east coast of Africa, sold to the white man, brought as slaves back to America. All of this terrible history Deron had made him study, to learn where he came from, to understand what drove the prejudices, the innate hatreds, all the powerful forces inside him.

With an effort he pulled himself together. This is what they’d been hoping for: proof that the NSA was subjecting prisoners to illegal forms of torture. Tyrone took a slew of photos, even a short video before exiting the viewing room.

Once again, he was the only one in the corridor. This concerned him. Surely he would have heard or seen NSA personnel down here. But there was no sign of anyone.

All at once, he felt a prickling at the back of his neck. He turned, retracing his steps at a half run. His heart pounded, his blood rushed in his ears. With every step he took his sense of foreboding increased. Then he broke into a full-out sprint.

Luther LaValle looked up from his reading, said ominously, “What kind of game are you playing, Director?”

Soraya kept herself from starting. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve been through these transmission intercepts you claim come from the Black Legion twice now. Nowhere do I find any reference to that name or, for that matter, any name at all.”

Willard appeared, handed General Kendall a folded slip of paper. Kendall read it without any expression. Then he excused himself. Soraya watched him leave the Library with no little trepidation.

To regain her attention, LaValle waved the sheets briefly in the air like a red flag in front of a bull. “Tell me the truth. For all you know, these conversations could be between two sets of eleven-year-olds playing terrorist games.”

Soraya could feel herself bristling. “My people assure me they’re genuine, Mr. LaValle, and they’re the best in the business. If you don’t believe that, I can’t imagine why you want a piece of Typhon.”

LaValle conceded her point, but he wasn’t finished with her. “Then how do you know they’re from the Black Legion.”

“Collateral intelligence.”

LaValle sat back in his chair. His drink was left untouched on the table. “Just what the holy hell does collateral intelligence mean?”

“Another source, unrelated to the intercepts, has knowledge of an imminent attack on American soil that originates with the Black Legion.”

“Who we have no tangible evidence actually exist.”

Soraya was growing increasingly uncomfortable. The conversation was veering perilously close to an interrogation. “I brought these intercepts at your behest with the intention of engendering trust between us.”

“That’s as may be,” LaValle said. “But quite frankly these anonymous intercepts, alarming as they seem on the surface, don’t do it for me. You’re holding something back, Director. I want to know the source of your so-called collateral intel.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. The source is absolutely sacrosanct.” Soraya could not tell him that her source was Jason Bourne. “However-” She reached down to her slim attachй case, pulled out several photos, handed them over.

“It’s a corpse,” LaValle said. “I fail to see the significance-”

“Look at the second photo,” Soraya said. “It’s a close-up of the inside of the victim’s elbow. What do you see?”

“A tattoo of three horses’ heads attached to-what is this? It looks like the Nazi SS death’s head.”

“And so it is.” Soraya handed him another photo. “This is the uniform patch of the Black Legion under their leader Heinrich Himmler.”

LaValle pursed his lips. Then he put sheets back in the file, returned it to Soraya. He held up the photos. “If you could find this insignia, anyone could. This could be a group that’s simply appropriated the Black Legion’s sign, like the skinheads in Germany appropriated the swastika. Besides, this isn’t proof that the intercepts came from the Black Legion. And even if they did I have a problem, Director. It’s the same as yours, I would think. You’ve told me-also according to your sacrosanct source-that the Black Legion is being fronted by the Eastern Brotherhood. If the NSA acts on this intel, we’ll have every flavor of PR nightmare visited on us. The Eastern Brotherhood, as I’m sure you’re aware, is exceedingly powerful, especially with the overseas press. We run with this and we’re wrong, it’s going to cause the president and this country an enormous amount of humiliation, which we can’t afford now. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly, Mr. LaValle. But if we ignore it and America is successfully attacked again, then how do we look?”

LaValle scrubbed his face with one hand. “So we’re between a rock and hard place.”

“Sir, you know as well as I do that action is better than inaction, especially in a volatile situation like this.”

LaValle was about to capitulate, Soraya knew it, but here came Willard again, gliding up, silent as a ghost. He bent, whispered something in LaValle’s ear.

“Thank you, Willard,” Lavalle said, “that will be all.” Then he returned his attention to Soraya. “Well, Director, it seems I’m urgently wanted elsewhere.” He stood up and smiled down at her, but spoke with a steely tone. “Please join me.”

Soraya’s heart plummeted. This invitation wasn’t a request.

Yakov, the bombila driver, who’d been ordered to park across the avenue from the front entrance of the Metropolya Hotel, had been joined forty minutes ago by a man who looked as if he’d been in a fistfight with a meat grinder. Despite efforts to cover it up, his face was swollen, dark as pounded flesh. He wore a silver patch over one eye. He was a surly bastard, Yakov decided, even before the man handed him a fistful of money. He uttered not a word of greeting, but slammed into the backseat, slithered down so even the crown of his head was invisible to anyone glancing casually in.

The atmosphere inside the bombila quickly grew so toxic that Yakov was forced to vacate the semi-warmth for the freezing Moscow night. He bought himself some food from a passing Turkish vendor, spent the next half hour eating it, talking to his friend Max, who’d pulled up behind him because Max was a lazy sonovabitch who grasped at any excuse not to work.

Yakov and Max were in the middle of heated speculation that concerned last week’s death of a high-level RAB Bank officer, who was discovered tied up, tortured, and asphyxiated in the garage of his own elitny dacha. The two of them were wondering why the General Prosecutor’s Office and the president’s newly formed Investigative Committee were fighting over jurisdiction of the death.

“It’s politics, pure and simple,” Yakov said.

“Dirty politics,” Max retorted. “There’s nothing pure and simple about that.”

It was then that Yakov spotted Jason Bourne and the sexy dyev getting out of a bombila in front of the hotel. When he struck the side of his cab three times with the flat of his hand, he sensed a stirring in the backseat.

“He’s here,” he said as the rear window rolled down.

Bourne was about to drop Gala off at the Metropolya Hotel when he looked out the bombila window, saw the taxi that had earlier taken him from The Chinese Pilot to the hotel. Yakov, the driver, was leaning against the fender of his dilapidated junkmobile, eating something greasy while talking to the cabbie parked right behind him.

Bourne saw Yakov glance over as he and Gala exited the bombila. When they’d gone through the revolving door, Bourne told her to stay put. To his left was the service door used by porters to take guests’s luggage in and out of the hotel. Bourne looked out across the street. Yakov stuck his head in the rear window, huddled with a man who’d been hidden in the backseat.

In the elevator, on the way up to their room, he said, “Are you hungry? I’m starved.” Harun Iliev, the man Semion Icoupov sent to find Jason Bourne, had expended hours in contentious negotiations and frustrating dead ends, and finally spent a great deal of money in his pursuit. It wasn’t coincidence that had led him at last to the bombila named Yakov, for Yakov was an ambitious man who knew he’d never get rich driving around Moscow, fending off other bombily, pissing them off by cutting in, snatching their fares from under their noses. What could be more lucrative than spying on other people? Especially when your chief client was the American. Yakov had many clients, but none of them knew how to throw around dollars like the Americans. It was their sincere belief that enough money bought you anything. Mostly, they were right. When they weren’t, though, it was still costly for them.

Most of Yakov’s other clients laughed at the kind of money the Americans threw around. Chiefly, though, he suspected it was because they were jealous. Laughing at what you didn’t have and never would was, he supposed, better than letting it depress you.

Icoupov’s people were the only ones who paid as well. But they used him far less than the Americans. On the other hand, they had him on retainer. Yakov knew Harun Iliev well, had dealt with him a number of times before, and both liked and trusted him. Besides, they were both Muslim. Yakov kept his religion a secret in Moscow, especially from the Americans, who, stupidly, would have dropped him like a fake ruble.

Directly after the American attachй contacted him for the job, Yakov had called Harun Iliev. As a consequence, Harun had already inserted himself in the staff of the Metropolya Hotel through a cousin of his, who worked in the kitchen as one of the expediters. He coordinated food orders for the line chefs. The moment he saw the room-service order come down from 1728, Bourne’s room, he called Harun.

“We’re short-staffed tonight,” he said. “Get down here in the next five minutes and I’ll make sure you’re the one to take the order up to him.”

Harun Iliev quickly presented himself to his cousin and was shown to a trolley, neatly covered in starched white linen, laden with covered bowls, platters, plates, silverware, and napkins. Thanking his cousin for this opportunity to get to Jason Bourne, he rolled his trolley to the service elevator. Someone was already there. Harun took him to be one of the hotel managers until, as they entered the elevator, he turned so Harun caught a fleeting glimpse of his pulped face and the silver patch over one eye.

Harun reached out, pressed the button for the seventeenth floor. The man pressed the button for the eighteenth. The elevator stopped at the fourth floor, where a maid got on with her turn-down cart. She exited a floor later.

The elevator had just passed the fifteenth floor when the man reached over, pulled out the large red EMERGENCY STOP button. Harun turned to question the man’s action, but the man fired one bullet from a exceptionally quiet 9mm Welrod equipped with a suppressor. The bullet pierced Harun’s forehead, tore through his brain. He was dead before he collapsed to the elevator floor.

Anthony Prowess mopped up what little blood there was with a napkin from the room-service cart. Then he quickly stripped the clothes off his victim, donned the uniform of the Metropolya Hotel. He pushed in the EMERGENCY STOP button again and the elevator continued its ascent to the seventeenth floor. After determining that the hallway was clear, Prowess consulted a map of the floor, dragged the corpse into a utility room, then wheeled the cart around the corner to room 1728.

Why don’t you take shower? A long hot,” Bourne said.

Gala’s expression was mischievous. “If I stink at least it’s not as bad as you.” She began to slip out of her mini skirt. “Why don’t we take one together?”

“Some other time. I have business to attend to.”

Her lower lip comically pouted. “God, what could be more boring?”

Bourne laughed as she crossed into the bathroom, closed the door behind her. Soon after, the sound of running water came to him, along with tiny curls of steam. He turned on the TV, watched a dreadful show in Russian with the sound turned up.

There was a knock on the door. Bourne rose from his position on the bed, opened the door. A uniformed waiter in a short jacket and a hat with a bill pulled down over his face pushed a trolley full of food into the room. Bourne signed the bill, the waiter turned to leave. Instantly he whirled, a knife in his hand. In one blurred movement, he drew his arm back. But Bourne was ready. As the waiter threw the knife Bourne raised a domed metal top off a chafing dish, used it as a shield to deflect the knife. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning at the waiter, who ducked out of the way. The edge of the domed top caught his hat, spun it off his head, revealing the puffy face of the man who’d strangled Baronov and tried to kill Bourne, as well.

The attacker drew a Welrod and squeezed off two shots before Bourne shoved the cart into his midsection. He staggered back. Bourne threw himself across the cart, grabbed Prowess by the front of the uniform, then wrestled him to the floor.

Bourne managed to kick away the Welrod. The man attacked with hands and feet, moving Bourne so that he could regain possession of the gun. Bourne could see the patch over the NSA agent’s eye, could only surmise the damage he’d inflicted.

The agent feinted one way, then caught Bourne flush on the jaw. Bourne staggered and his attacker was on him with another wire, which he whipped around Bourne’s neck. Pulling hard on it, he drew Bourne back to his feet. Bourne staggered against the cart. As it skittered away from him, he grabbed the chafing dish, hurled its contents in the agent’s face. The scalding soup struck the attacker like a torch, and he shouted but failed to drop the wire, instead pulling it tighter, jerking Bourne against his chest.

Bourne was on his knees, his back arched. His lungs were screaming for oxygen, his muscles were rapidly losing their strength, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate. Soon, he knew, he’d pass out.

With his remaining strength, he jabbed his elbow into the agent’s crotch. The wire slacked off enough for him to get to his feet. He slammed the back of his head into the agent’s face, heard the satisfying thunk as the man’s head struck the wall. The wire slackened a bit more, enough for Bourne to pull it from his throat, gasping in air, and reverse their positions, wrapping the wire around Prowess’s neck. He fought and kicked like a madman, but Bourne held on, working the wire tighter and tighter, until the agent’s body went slack. His head toppled to one side. Bourne didn’t slacken the wire until he’d assured himself there was no longer a pulse. Then he let the man slide to the floor.

He was bent over, hands on thighs, taking deep, slow breaths when Gala walked out of the bathroom amid a halo of lavender-scented mist.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. Then she turned and vomited all over her bare pink feet.

Twenty-Three

ANY WAY you slice it or dice it,” Luther LaValle said, “he’s a dead man.”

Soraya stared bleakly through the one-way glass at Tyrone, who was standing in a cubicle ominously outfitted with a shallow coffin-like tub that had restraints for wrists and ankles, a fire hose above it. In the center of the room a steel table was bolted down to the bare concrete floor, beneath which was a drain to sluice both water and blood away.

LaValle held up the digital camera. “General Kendall found this on your compatriot.” He touched a button, and the photos Tyrone had taken scrolled across the camera’s screen. “This smoking gun is enough to convict him of treason.”

Soraya couldn’t help wondering how many shots of the torture chambers Tyrone had managed to take before he was caught.

“Off with his head,” Kendall said, baring his teeth.

Soraya could not rid herself of the sick feeling in her stomach. Of course, Tyrone had been in dangerous situations before, but she was directly responsible for putting him in harm’s way. If anything happened to him she knew she’d never be able to forgive herself. What was she thinking involving him in such perilous work? The enormity of her miscalculation was all too clear to her now, when it was too late to do anything about it.

“The real pity,” LaValle went on, “is that with very little difficulty we can make a case against you, as well.”

Soraya was solely focused on Tyrone, whom she had wronged so terribly.

“This was my idea,” she said dully. “Let Tyrone go.”

“You mean he was only following orders,” General Kendall said. “This isn’t Nuremberg. Frankly, there’s no viable defense the two of you can put up. His conviction and execution-as well as yours-are a fait accompli.”

They took her back to the Library, where Willard, seeing her ashen face, fetched her a fresh pot of Ceylon tea. The three of them sat by the window. The fourth chair, conspicuously empty, was an accusation to Soraya. Her grievous mismanagement of this mission was compounded by the knowledge that she had seriously underestimated LaValle. She’d been lulled by his smug, overaggressive nature into thinking he was the sort of man who’d automatically underestimate her. She was dead wrong.

She fought the constriction in her chest, the panic welling up, the sense that she and Tyrone were trapped in an impossible situation. She used the tea ritual to refocus herself. For the first time in her life she added cream and sugar, and drank the tea as if it were medication or a form of penance.

She was trying to get her brain unfrozen from shock, to get it working normally again. In order to help Tyrone, she knew she needed to get herself out of here. If LaValle meant to charge her as he threatened to do with Tyrone, she’d already be in an adjacent cell. The fact that they’d brought her back to the Library allowed a sliver of light into the darkness that had settled around her. She decided for now to allow this scenario to play out on LaValle’s and Kendall’s terms.

The moment she set her teacup down, LaValle took up his ax. “As I said before, Director, the real pity is your involvement. I’d hate to lose you as an ally-though, I see now, I never really had you as an ally.”

This little speech sounded canned, as if each word had been chewed over by LaValle.

“Frankly,” he continued, “in retrospect, I can see that you’ve lied to me from the first. You never had any intention of switching your allegiance to NSA, did you?” He sighed, as if he were a disciplinary dean addressing a bright but chronically wayward student. “That’s why I can’t believe that you concocted this scheme on your own.”

“If I were a betting man,” Kendall said, “I’d wager your orders came from the top.”

“Veronica Hart is the real problem here.” LaValle spread his hands. “Perhaps through the lens of what’s happened here today you can begin to see things as we do.”

Soraya didn’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing. Keeping her voice deliberately neutral, she said, “How can I be of service?”

LaValle smiled genially, turned to Kendall, said, “You see, Richard, the director can be of help to us, despite your reservations.” He quickly turned back to Soraya, his expression sobering. “The general wants to prosecute you both to the full extent of the law, which I needn’t reiterate is very full indeed.”

Their good-cop, bad-cop routine would seem clichйd, Soraya thought bitterly, except this was for real. She knew Kendall hated her guts; he’d made no effort to hide his contempt. He was a military man, after all. The possibility of having to report to a female superior was unthinkable, downright risible. He hadn’t thought much of Tyrone, either, which made his capture of the younger man that much harder to stomach.

“I understand my position is untenable,” she said, despising having to kowtow to this despicable human being.

“Excellent, then we’ll start from that point.”

LaValle stared up at the ceiling, giving an impersonation of someone trying to decide how to proceed. But she suspected he knew very well what he was doing, every step of the way.

His eyes engaged hers. “The way I see it we have a two-part problem. One concerns your friend down in the hold. The second involves you.”

“I’m more concerned with him,” Soraya said. “How do I get him out?”

LaValle shifted in his chair. “Let’s take your situation first. We can build a circumstantial case against you, but without direct testimony from your friend-”

“Tyrone,” Soraya said. “His name is Tyrone Elkins.”

To hammer home just whose conversation this was, LaValle quite deliberately ignored her. “Without direct testimony from your friend we won’t get far.”

“Direct testimony we will get,” Kendall said, “as soon as we waterboard him.”

“No,” Soraya said. “You can’t.”

“Why, because it’s illegal?” Kendall chuckled.

Soraya turned to LaValle. “There’s another way. You and I both know there is.”

LaValle said nothing for a moment, drawing out the tension. “You told me that your source for the attribution of the Typhon intercepts was sacrosanct. Does that decision still stand?”

“If I tell you will you let Tyrone go?”

“No,” LaValle said, “but you’ll be free to leave.”

“What about Tyrone?”

LaValle crossed one leg over another. “Let’s take one thing at a time, shall we?”

Soraya nodded. She knew that as long as she was sitting here she had no wiggle room. “My source was Bourne.”

LaValle looked startled. “Jason Bourne? Are you kidding me?”

“No, Mr. LaValle. He has knowledge of the Black Legion and that they were being fronted by the Eastern Brotherhood.”

“Where the hell did this knowledge come from?”

“He had no time to tell me, even if he had a mind to,” she said. “There were too many NSA agents in the vicinity.”

“The incident at the Freer,” Kendall said.

LaValle held up a hand. “You helped him to escape.”

Soraya shook her head. “Actually, he thought I’d turned on him.”

“Interesting.” LaValle tapped his lip. “Does he still think that?”

Soraya determined it was time for a little defiance, a little lie. “I don’t know. Jason has a tendency toward paranoia, so it’s possible.”

LaValle looked thoughtful. “Maybe we can use that to our ad-vantage.”

General Kendall looked disgusted. “So, in other words, this whole story about the Black Legion could be nothing more than a lunatic fantasy.”

“Or, more likely, deliberate disinformation,” LaValle said.

Soraya shook her head. “Why would he do that?”

“Who knows why he does anything?” LaValle took a slow sip of his whiskey, diluted now by the melted ice cubes. “Let’s not forget that Bourne was in a rage when he told you about the Black Legion. By your own admission, he thought you’d betrayed him.”

“You have a point.” Soraya knew better than to defend Bourne to these people. The more you argued against them, the more entrenched they became in their position. They’d built a case against Jason out of fear and loathing. Not because, as they claimed, he was unstable, but because he simply didn’t care about their rules and regulations. Instead of flouting them, something the directors had knowledge of and knew how to handle, he annihilated them.

“Of course I do.” LaValle set down his glass. “Let’s move on to your friend. The case against him is airtight, open-and-shut, no hope whatsoever of appeal or commutation.”

“Let him eat cake,” Kendall said.

“Marie Antoinette never said that, by the way,” Soraya said.

Kendall glared at her, while LaValle continued, “Let the punishment fit the crime would be more apropos. Or, in your case, Let the expiation fit the crime.” He waved the approaching Willard away. “What we’re going to need from you, Director, is proof-incontrovertible proof-that your illegal foray into NSA territory was instigated by Veronica Hart.”

She knew what he was asking of her. “So, basically, we’re talking an exchange of prisoners-Hart for Tyrone.”

“You’ve grasped it entirely,” LaValle said, clearly pleased.

“I’ll have to think about it.”

LaValle nodded. “A reasonable request. I’ll have Willard prepare you a meal.” He glanced at his watch. “Richard and I have a meeting in fifteen minutes. We’ll be back in approximately two hours. You can think over your answer until then.”

“No, I need to think this over in another environment,” Soraya said.

“Director Moore, given your history of deception that would be a mistake on our part.”

“You promised I could leave if I told you my source.”

“And so you shall, when you’ve agreed to my terms.” He rose, and with him Kendall. “You and your friend came in here together. Now you’re joined at the hip.”

Bourne waited until Gala was sufficiently recovered. She dressed, shivering, not once looking at the body of the dead agent.

“I’m sorry you got dragged into this,” Bourne said.

“No you’re not. Without me you never would’ve gotten to Ivan.” Gala angrily jammed her feet into her shoes. “This is a nightmare,” she said, as if to herself. “Any minute I’ll wake up in my own bed and none of this will have happened.”

Bourne led her toward the door.

Gala shuddered anew as she carefully skirted the body.

“You’re hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

“Ha, ha, good one,” she said, as they made their way down the hall. “That includes you.”

A moment later, he signaled her to stop. Kneeling down, he touched his fingertip to a wet spot on the carpet.

“What is it?”

Bourne examined his fingertip. “Blood.”

Gala gave a little whimper. “What’s it doing out here?”

“Good question,” Bourne said as he crept along the hallway. He noted a tiny smear in front of a narrow door. Wrenching it open, he switched on the utility room’s light.

“Christ,” Gala said.

Inside was a crumpled body with a bullet in its forehead. It was nude, but there was a pile of clothes tossed in a corner, obviously those of the NSA agent. Bourne knelt down, rifled through them, hoping to find some form of ID, to no avail.

“What are you doing?” Gala cried.

Bourne spotted a tiny triangle of dark brown leather sticking out from under the corpse, which was only visible from this low angle. Rolling the corpse on its side, he discovered a wallet. The dead man’s ID would prove useful, since Bourne now had none of his own. His assumed identity, which he’d used to check in, was unusable, because the moment the corpse was found in Fyodor Ilianovich Popov’s room, there’d be a massive manhunt for him. Bourne reached out, took the wallet.

Then he rose, grabbed Gala’s hand, and got them out of there. He insisted they take the service elevator down to the kitchen. From there it was a simple matter to find the rear entrance.

Outside, it had begun to snow again. The wind, slicing in from the square, was icy and bitter. Flagging down a bombila, Bourne was about to give the cabbie the address of Gala’s friend, then realized that Yakov, the cabbie working for the NSA, knew that address.

“Get in the taxi,” Bourne said quietly to Gala, “but be prepared to get out quickly and do exactly as I say.”

Soraya didn’t need a couple of hours to make up her mind; she didn’t even need a couple of minutes.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get Tyrone out of here.”

LaValle turned back to regard her. “Well, now, that kind of capitulation would do my heart good if I didn’t know you to be such a duplicitous little bitch.

“Unfortunately,” he went on, “in your case, verbal capitulation isn’t quite as convincing as it would be in others. That being the case, the general here will make crystal clear to you the consequences of further treachery on your part.”

Soraya rose, along with Kendall.

LaValle stopped her with his voice, “Oh, and, Director, when you leave here you’ll have until ten tomorrow morning to make your decision. I’ll expect you back here then. I hope I’ve made myself clear.”

The general led her out of the Library, down the corridor to the door to the basement. The moment she saw where he was taking her, she said, “No! Don’t do this. Please. There’s no need.”

But Kendall, his back ramrod-straight, ignored her. When she hesitated at the security door, he grasped her firmly by the elbow and, as if she were a child, steered her down the stairs.

In due course, she found herself in the same viewing room. Tyrone was on his knees, his arm behind him, bound hands on the tabletop, which was higher than shoulder level. This position was both extremely painful and humiliating. His torso was forced forward, his shoulder blades back.

Soraya’s heart was filled with dread. “Enough,” she said. “I get it. You’ve made your point.”

“By no means,” General Kendall said.

Soraya could see two shadowy figures moving about the cell. Tyrone had become aware of them, too. He tried to twist around to see what they were up to. One of the men shoved a black hood over his head.

My God, Soraya said to herself. What did the other man have in his hands?

Kendall shoved her hard against the one-way glass. “Where your friend is concerned we’re just warming up.”

Two minutes later, they began to fill the waterboarding tank. Soraya began to scream.

Bourne asked the bombila driver to pass by the front of the hotel. Everything seemed calm and normal, which meant that the bodies on the seventeenth floor hadn’t been discovered yet. But it wouldn’t be long before someone went to look for the missing room-service waiter.

He turned his attention across the street, searching for Yakov. He was still outside his car, talking to a fellow driver. Both of them were swinging their arms to keep their circulation going. He pointed out Yakov to Gala, who recognized him. When they’d passed the square, Bourne had the bombila pull over.

He turned to Gala. “I want you to go back to Yakov and have him take you to Universitetskaya Ploshchad at Vorobyovy Gory.” Bourne was speaking of the top of the only hill in the otherwise flat city, where lovers and university students went to get drunk, make love, and smoke dope while looking out over the city. “Wait there for me and whatever you do, don’t get out of the car. Tell the cabbie you’re meeting someone there.”

“But he’s the one who’s been spying on us,” Gala said.

“Don’t worry,” Bourne reassured her. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The view out over Vorobyovy Gory was not so very grand. First, there was the ugly bulk of Luzhniki Stadium in the mid-foreground. Second, there were the spires of the Kremlin, which would hardly inspire even the most ardent lovers. But for all that, at night it was as romantic as Moscow could get.

Bourne, who’d had his bombila track the one Gala was in all the way there, was relieved that Yakov had orders only to observe and report back. Anyway, the NSA was interested in Bourne, not a young blond dyev.

Arriving at the overlook, Bourne paid the fare he’d agreed to at the beginning of the ride, strode down the sidewalk, and got into the front seat of Yakov’s taxi.

“Hey, what’s this?” Yakov said. Then he recognized Bourne and made a scramble for the Makarov he kept in a homemade sling under the ratty dash.

Bourne pulled his hand away and held him back against the seat while taking possession of the handgun. He pointed it at Yakov. “Who do you report to?”

Yakov said in a whiny voice, “I challenge you to sit in my seat night after night, driving around the Garden Ring, crawling endlessly down Tverskaya, being cut out of fares by kamikaze bombily and make enough to live on.”

“I don’t care why you pimp yourself out to the NSA,” Bourne told him. “I want to know who you report to.”

Yakov held up his hand. “Listen, listen, I’m from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. It’s not so nice there, who can make a living? So I pack my family and we travel to Russia, the beating heart of the new federation, where the streets are paved with rubles. But when I arrive here I am treated like dirt. People in the street spit on my wife. My children are beaten and called terrible names. And I can’t get a job anywhere in this city. ‘Moscow for Muscovites,’ that is the refrain I hear over and over. So I take to the bombily because I have no other choice. But this life, sir, you have no idea how difficult it is. Sometimes after twelve hours I come home with a hundred rubles, sometimes with nothing. I cannot be faulted for taking money the Americans offer.

“Russia is corrupt, but Moscow, it’s more than corrupt. There isn’t a word for how bad things are here. The government is made up of thugs and criminals. The criminals plunder the natural resources of Russia-oil, natural gas, uranium. Everyone takes, takes, takes so they can have big foreign cars, a different dyev for every day of the week, a dacha in Miami Beach. And what’s left for us? Potatoes and beets, if we work eighteen hours a day and if we’re lucky.”

“I have no animosity toward you,” Bourne said. “You have a right to earn a living.” He handed Yakov a fistful of dollars.

“I see no one, sir. I swear. Just voices on my cell phone. All moneys come to a post office box in-”

Bourne carefully placed the muzzle of the Makarov in Yakov’s ear. The cabbie cringed, turned mournful eyes on Bourne.

“Please, please, sir, what have I done?”

“I saw you outside the Metropolya with the man who tried to kill me.”

Yakov squealed like a skewered rat. “Kill you? I’m employed merely to watch and report. I have no knowledge about-”

Bourne hit the cabbie. “Stop lying and tell me what I want to know.”

“All right, all right.” Yakov was shaking with fear. “The American who pays me, his name is Low. Harris Low.”

Bourne made him give a detailed description of Low, then he took Yakov’s cell phone.

“Get out of the car,” he said.

“But sir, I answered all your questions,” Yakov protested. “You’ve taken everything of mine. What more do you want?”

Bourne leaned across him, opened the door, then shoved him out. “This is a popular place. Plenty of bombily come and go. You’re a rich man now. Use some of the money I gave you to get a ride home.”

Sliding behind the wheel he put the Zhig in gear, drove back into the heart of the city.

Harris Low was a dapper man with a pencil mustache. He had the prematurely white hair and ruddy complexion of many blue-blooded families in the American Northeast. That he had spent the last eleven years in Moscow, working for NSA, was a testament to his father, who had trod the same perilous path. Low had idolized his father, had wanted to be like him for as long as he could remember. Like his father, he had the Stars and Stripes tattooed on his soul. He’d been a running back in college, gone through the rigorous physical training to be an NSA field agent, had tracked down terrorists in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. He wasn’t afraid to engage in hand-to-hand combat or to kill a target. He did it for God and country.

During his eleven years in the capital of Russia, Low had made many friends, some of whom were the sons of his father’s friends. Suffice to say he had developed a network of apparatchiks and siloviks for whom a quid pro quo was the order of the day. Harris held no illusions. To further his country’s cause he would scratch anyone’s back-if they, in turn, scratched his.

He heard about the murders at the Metropolya Hotel from a friend of his in the General Prosecutor’s Office, who’d caught the police squeal. Harris met this individual at the hotel and was consequently one of the first people on the scene.

He had no interest in the corpse in the utility closet, but he immediately recognized Anthony Prowess. Excusing himself from the crime scene, he went into the stairwell off the seventeenth-floor hallway, punched in an overseas number on his cell. A moment later Luther LaValle answered.

“We have a problem,” Low said. “Prowess has been rendered inoperative with extreme prejudice.”

“That’s very disturbing,” LaValle said. “We have a rogue operative loose in Moscow who has now murdered one of our own. I think you know what to do.”

Low understood. There was no time to bring in another of NSA’s wet-work specialists, which meant terminating Bourne was up to him.

“Now that he’s killed an American citizen,” LaValle said, “I’ll bring the Moscow police and the General Prosecutor’s Office into the picture. They’ll have the same photo of him I’m sending to your cell within the hour.”

Low thought a moment. “The question is tracking him. Moscow is way behind the curve in closed-circuit TVs.”

“Bourne is going to need money,” LaValle said. “He couldn’t take enough through Customs when he landed, which means he wouldn’t try. He’ll have set up a local account at a Moscow bank. Get the locals to help with surveillance pronto.”

“Consider it done,” Low said.

“And Harris. Don’t make the same mistake with Bourne that Prowess did.”

Bourne took Gala to her friend’s apartment, which was lavish even by American standards. Her friend, Lorraine, was an American of Armenian extraction. Her dark eyes and hair, her olive complexion, all served to increase her exoticism. She hugged and kissed Gala, greeted Bourne warmly, and invited him to stay for a drink or tea.

As he took a tour through the rooms, Gala said, “He’s worried about my safety.”

“What’s happened?” Lorraine asked. “Are you all right?”

“She’ll be fine,” Bourne said, coming back into the living room. “This’ll all blow over in a couple of days.” Having satisfied himself of the security of the apartment, he left them with the warning not to open the door for anyone they didn’t know.

Ivan Volkin had directed Bourne to go to Novoslobodskaya 20, where the meet with Dimitri Maslov would take place. At first Bourne thought it lucky that the bombila he flagged down knew how to find the address, but when he was dropped off he understood. Novoslobodskaya 20 was the address of Motorhome, a new club jammed with young partying Muscovites. Gigantic flat-panel screens above the center island bar showed telecasts of American baseball, basketball, football, English rugby, and World Cup soccer. The floor of the main room was dominated by tables for Russian billiards and American pool. Following Volkin’s direction, Bourne headed for the back room, which was fitted out as an Arabian Nights hookah room complete with overlapping carpets, jewel-toned cushions, and, of course, gaily colored brass hookahs being smoked by lounging men and women.

Bourne, stopped at the doorway by two overdeveloped members of club security, told them he was here to see Dimitri Maslov. One of them pointed to a man lounging and smoking a hookah in the far left corner.

“Maslov,” Bourne said when he reached the pile of cushions surrounding a low brass table.

“My name is Yevgeny. Maslov isn’t here.” The man gestured. “Sit down, please.”

Bourne hesitated a moment, then sat on a cushion opposite Yev-geny. “Where is he?”

“Did you think it would be so simple? One call and poof! he pops into existence like a genie from a lamp?” Yevgeny shook his head, offered Bourne the pipe. “Good shit. Try some.”

When Bourne declined, Yevgeny shrugged, took a toke deep into his lungs, held it, then let it out with an audible hiss. “Why do you want to see Maslov?”

“That’s between me and him,” Bourne said.

Yevgeny shrugged again. “As you like. Maslov is out of the city.”

“Then why was I told to come here?”

“To be judged, to see whether you are a serious individual. To see whether Maslov will make the decision to see you.”

“Maslov trusts people to make decisions for him?”

“He is a busy man. He has other things on his mind.”

“Like how to win the war with the Azeri.”

Yevgeny’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you can see Maslov next week.”

“I need to see him now,” Bourne said.

Yevgeny shrugged. “As I said, he’s out of Moscow. But he may be back tomorrow morning.”

“Why don’t you ensure it.”

“I could,” Yevgeny said. “But it will cost you.”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand.”

“Ten thousand dollars to talk to Dimitri Maslov?”

Yevgeny shook his head. “The American dollar has become too debased. Ten thousand Swiss francs.”

Bourne thought a moment. He didn’t have that kind of money on him, and certainly not in Swiss francs. However, he had the information Baronov had given him on the safe-deposit box at the Moskva Bank. The problem was that it was in the name of Fyodor Ilianovich Popov, who was no doubt now wanted for questioning regarding the body of the man in his room at the Metropolya Hotel. There was no help for it, Bourne thought. He’d have to take the chance.

“I’ll have the money tomorrow morning,” Bourne said.

“That will be satisfactory.”

“But I’ll give it to Maslov and no one else.”

Yevgeny nodded. “Done.” He wrote something on a slip of paper, showed it to Bourne. “Please be at this address at noon tomorrow.” Then he struck a match, held it to the corner of the paper, which burned steadily until it crumbled into ash.

Semion Icoupov, in his temporary headquarters in Grindelwald, took the news of Harun Iliev’s death very hard. He’d been a witness to death many times, but Harun had been like a brother to him. Closer, even, because the two had no sibling baggage to clutter and distort their relationship. Icoupov had relied on Harun for his wise counsel. His was a sad loss indeed.

His thoughts were interrupted by the orchestrated chaos around him. A score of people were staffing computer consoles hooked up to satellite feeds, surveillance networks, public transportation CCTV from major hubs all over the world. They were coming to the final buildup to the Black Legion’s attack; every screen had to be scrutinized and analyzed, the faces of suspicious people picked out and run through a nebula of software that could identify individuals. From this, Icoupov’s operatives were building a mosaic of the real-time backdrop against which the attack was scheduled to take place.

Icoupov became aware that three of his aides were clustered around his desk. Apparently, they’d been trying to talk to him.

“What is it?” His voice was testy, the better to cover up his grief and inattention.

Ismail, the most senior of his aides, cleared his throat. “We wanted to know who you intend to send after Jason Bourne now that Harun…” His voice trailed off.

Icoupov had been contemplating the same question. He’d made a mental list that included any number of people he could send, but he kept eliminating most of them, for one reason or another. But on the second and third run through he began to realize that these reasons were in one way or another trivial. Now, as Ismail asked the question again, he knew.

He looked up into his aides’ anxious faces and said. “It’s me. I’m going after Bourne myself.”

Twenty-Four

IT WAS disturbingly hot in the Alter Botanischer Garten, and as humid as a rain forest. The enormous glass panels were opaque with beads of mist sliding down their faces. Moira, who had already taken off her gloves and long winter coat, now shrugged out of the thick cable-knit sweater that helped protect her from Munich’s chill, damp morning, which could penetrate to the bone.

When it came to German cities, she much preferred Berlin to Munich. For one thing, Berlin had for many years been on the cutting edge of popular music. Berlin was where such notable pop icons as David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Lou Reed, among many others, had come to recharge their creative batteries by listening to what musicians far younger than they were creating. For another, it hadn’t lost its legacy of the war and its aftermath. Berlin was like a living museum that was reinventing itself with every breath it took.

There was, however, a strictly personal reason why she preferred Berlin. She came for much the same reason Bowie did, to get away from stale habits, to breathe the fresh air of a city unlike those she knew. At an early age Moira became bored with the familiar. Every time she felt compelled to join a group because that was what her friends were doing she sensed she was losing a piece of herself. Gradually, she realized that her friends had ceased to become individuals, devolving into a cliquey “they” she found repellent. The only way to escape was to flee beyond the borders of the United States.

She could have chosen London or Barcelona, as some other college sophomores did, but she was a freak for Bowie and the Velvet Underground, so Berlin it was.

The botanical garden was built in the mid-1800s as an exhibition hall, but eighty years later, after its garden was destroyed by a fire, it gained new life as a public park. Outside, the awful bulk of the prewar Fountain of Neptune cast a shadow across the space through which she strolled.

The array of gorgeous specimens on display inside this glassed-in space only underscored the fact that Munich itself was without verve or spark. It was a plodding city of untermenchen, businessmen as gray as the city, and factories belching smoke into the low, angry sky. It was also a focal point of European Muslim activity, which, in one of those classic action-reaction scenarios, made it a hotbed of skinhead neo-Nazis.

Moira glanced at her watch. It was precisely 9:30 AM, and here came Noah, striding toward her. He was cool and efficient, personally opaque, even withholding, but he wasn’t a bad sort. She’d have refused him as a handler if he was; she was senior enough to command that respect. And Noah did respect her, she was certain of that.

In many ways Noah reminded her of Johann, the man who’d recruited her while she was at the university. Actually, Johann hadn’t contacted her at college; he was far too canny for that. He asked his girlfriend to make the approach, rightly figuring Moira would be more responsive to a fellow female student. Ultimately, Moira had met with Johann, was intrigued by what he had to offer her, and the rest was history. Well, not exactly. She’d never told anyone, including Martin or Bourne, who she really worked for. To do so would have violated her contract with the firm.

She stopped in front of the pinkly intimate blooms of an orchid, speckled like the bridge of a virgin’s nose. Berlin had also been the site of her first passionate love affair, the kind that curled your toes, obliterated your focus on responsibility and the future. The affair almost ruined her, principally because it possessed her like a whirlwind and, in the process, she’d lost any sense of herself. She became a sexual instrument on which her lover played. What he wanted, she wanted, and so dissolution.

In the end, it was Johann who had saved her, but the process of separating pleasure from self was immensely painful. Especially because two months afterward her lover died. For a time, her rage at Johann was boundless; curdling their friendship, jeopardizing the trust they’d placed in each other. It was a lesson she never forgot. It was one reason she hadn’t allowed herself to fall for Martin, though part of her yearned for his touch. Jason Bourne was another story entirely, for she had once again been overtaken by the whirlwind. But this time, she wasn’t diminished. Partly, that was because she was mature now and knew better. Mainly, though, it was because Bourne asked nothing of her. He sought neither to lead nor to dominate her. Everything with him was clean and open. She moved on to another orchid, this one dark as night, with a tiny lantern of yellow hidden in its center. It was ironic, she thought, that despite his own issues, she had never before met a man so in control of himself. She found his self-assurance a compelling aphrodisiac, as well as a powerful antidote to her own innate melancholy.

That was another irony, she thought. If asked, Bourne would surely say that he was a pessimist, but being one herself, she knew an optimist when she met one. Bourne would take on the most impossible situations and somehow find a solution. Only the greatest of optimists could accomplish that.

Hearing soft footfalls, she turned to see Noah, shoulders hunched within a tweed overcoat. Though born in Israel, he could pass for a German now, perhaps because he’d lived in Berlin for so long. He’d been Johann’s protйgй; the two had been very close. When Johann was killed, it was Noah who took his place.

“Hello, Moira.” He had a narrow face below dark hair flecked with premature gray. His long nose and serious mouth belied a keen sense of the absurd. “No Bourne, I see.”

“I did my best to get him on board at NextGen.”

Noah smiled. “I’m sure you did.”

He gestured and they began to walk together. Few people were around this gloomy morning so there was no chance of being overheard.

“But to be honest, from what you told me, it was a long shot.”

“I’m not disappointed,” Moira said. “I detested the entire experience.”

“That’s because you have feelings for him.”

“What if I do?” Moira said rather more defensively than she expected.

“You tell me.” Noah watched her carefully. “There is a consensus among the partners that your emotions are interfering with your work.”

“Where the hell is that coming from?” she said.

“I want you to know that I’m on your side.” His voice was that of a psychoanalyst calming an increasingly agitated patient. “The problem is you should have come here days ago.” They passed a worker tending a swath of African violets. When they were out of her earshot, he continued. “Then you go and bring Bourne with you.”

“I told you. I was still trying to recruit him.”

“Don’t lie to a liar, Moira.” He crossed his arms over his chest. When he spoke again, every word had weight. “There is a grave concern that your priorities aren’t straight. You have a job to do, and a vitally important one. The firm can’t afford to have your attention wandering.”

“Are you saying you want to replace me?”

“It’s an option that was discussed,” he acknowledged.

“Bullshit. At this late stage there’s no one who knows the project as well as I do.”

“But then another option was requested: withdrawal from the project.”

Moira was truly shocked. “You wouldn’t.”

Noah kept his gaze on her. “The partners have determined that in this instance it would be preferable to withdraw than to fail.”

Moira felt her blood rising. “You can’t withdraw, Noah. I’m not going to fail.”

“I’m afraid that’s no longer an option,” he said, “because the decision’s been made. As of oh seven hundred this morning we’ve officially notified NextGen that we’ve withdrawn from the project.”

He handed her a packet. “Here is your new assignment. You’re required to leave for Damascus this afternoon.”

Arkadin and Devra reached the Bosporus Bridge and crossed over into Istanbul just as the sun was rising. Since coming down from the cruel, snow-swept mountains along Turkey’s spine they had shed layers of clothes, and now the morning was exceptionally clear and mild. Pleasure yachts and huge tankers alike plowed the Bosporus on their way to various destinations. It felt good to roll down the windows. The air, fresh, moist, tangy with salt and minerals, was a distinct relief after the dry hard winter of the hinterlands.

During the night they’d stopped at every gas station, beaten-down motel, or store that was open-though most were not-in an attempt to find Heinrich, the next courier in Pyotr’s network.

When it came time for him to spell her, she moved to the passenger’s side, put her head against the door, and fell into a deep sleep, from which emerged a dream. She was a whale, swimming in icy black water. No sun pierced the depths where she swam. Below her was an unfathomable abyss. Ahead of her was a shadowy shape. She didn’t know why, but it seemed imperative that she follow that shape, catch up with it, identify it. Was it friend or foe? Every so often she filled her head and throat with sound, which she sent out through the darkness. But she received no reply. There were no other whales around, so what was she chasing, what was she so desperate to find? There was no one to help her. She became frightened. The fright grew and grew…

It clung to her as she awoke with a start in the car beside Arkadin. The grayish predawn light creeping through the landscape rendered every shape unfamiliar and vaguely threatening.

Twenty-five minutes later they were in the seething, clamorous heart of Istanbul.

“Heinrich likes to spend the time before his flight in Kilyos, the beach community in the northern suburbs,” Devra said. “Do you know how to get there?”

Arkadin nodded. “I’m familiar with the area.”

They wove their way through Sultanahmet, the core of Old Istanbul, then took the Galata Bridge, which spanned the Golden Horn, to Karakцy in the north. In the old days, when Istanbul was known as Constantinople, seat of the Byzantine Empire, Karakцy was the powerful Genoese trading colony known as Galata. As they reached the center of the bridge Devra looked west toward Europe, then east across the Bosporus to Ьskьdar and Asia.

They passed into Karakцy, with its fortified Genoese walls and, rising from it, the stone Galata tower with its conical top, one of the monuments that, along with the Topkapi Palace and Blue Mosque, dominated the modern-day city’s skyline.

Kilyos lay along the Black Sea coast twenty-two miles north of Istanbul proper. In the summer it was a popular beach resort, packed with people swimming, snacking in the restaurants that lined the beach, shopping for sunglasses and straw hats, sunbathing, or just dreaming. In winter it possessed a sad, vaguely disreputable air, like a dowager sinking into senility. Still, on this sun-splashed morning, under a cloudless cerulean sky, there were figures walking up and down the beach: young couples hand in hand; mothers with young children who ran laughing to the waterline, only to run back, screaming with terror and delight when the surf piled roughly in. An old man sat on a fold-up stool, smoking a crooked hand-rolled cigar that gave off a stench like the smokestack of a tannery.

Arkadin parked the car and got out, stretching his body after the long drive.

“He’ll recognize me the moment he sees me,” Devra said, staying put. She described Heinrich in detail. Just before Arkadin headed down to the beach, she added, “He likes putting his feet in the water, he says it grounds him.”

Down on the beach it was warm enough that some people had taken off their jackets. One middle-aged man had stripped to the waist and sat with knees drawn up, arms locked around them, facing up to the sun like a heliotrope. Kids dug in the sand with yellow plastic Tweety Bird shovels, poured sand into pink plastic Petunia Pig buckets. One pair of lovers had stopped at the shoreline, embracing. They kissed passionately.

Arkadin walked on. Just behind them a man stood in the surf. His trousers were rolled up; his shoes, with socks stuffed into them, had been placed on a high point in the sand not far away. He was staring out at the water, dotted here and there with tankers, tiny as LEGOs, inching along the blue horizon.

Devra’s description was not only detailed, it was accurate. The man in the surf was Heinrich.

The Moskva Bank was housed in an enormous, ornate building that would pass for a palace in any other city but was run-of-the-mill by Moscow standards. It occupied a corner of a busy thoroughfare a stone’s throw from Red Square. The streets and sidewalks were packed with both Muscovites and tourists.

It was just before 9 AM. Bourne had been walking around the area for the last twenty minutes, checking for surveillance. That he hadn’t spotted any didn’t mean the bank wasn’t being watched. He’d glimpsed a number of police cars cruising the snow-covered streets, more than usual, perhaps.

As he walked along a street close to the bank, he saw another police cruiser, this one with its light flashing. Stepping back into a shop doorway, he watched as it sped by. Halfway down the block it stopped behind a double-parked car. It sat there for a moment, then the two policemen got out of their cruiser, swaggered over to the vehicle.

Bourne took the opportunity to walk down the crowded sidewalk. People were wrapped and bundled, swaddled like children. Breath came out of their mouths and noses in cloud-like bursts as they hurried along with hunched shoulders and bent backs. As Bourne came abreast of the cruiser, he dipped down and glanced in the window. There he saw his face staring up at him from a tear sheet that had obviously been distributed to every cop in Moscow. According to the accompanying text he was wanted for the murder of an American government official.

Bourne walked quickly in the opposite direction, disappearing around a corner before the cops had a chance to return to their car.

He phoned Gala, who was parked in Yakov’s battered Zhig three blocks away awaiting his signal. After his call, she pulled out into traffic, made a right, then another. As they had surmised, it was slow going, the morning traffic sluggish.

She checked her watch, saw she needed to give Bourne another ninety seconds. As she approached the intersection near the bank, she used the time to pick a likely target. A shiny Zil limousine, not a speck of snow on its hood or roof, was heading slowly toward the intersection at right angles to her.

At the appointed time she accelerated forward. The bombila’s tires, which she and Bourne had checked when they’d returned to Lorraine’s, were nearly bald, their treads worn down to a nub. Gala braked much too hard and the Zhig shrieked as the brakes locked, the old tires skidding along the icy street until its grille struck the front fender of the Zil limo.

All traffic came to a screeching halt, horns blared, pedestrians detoured from their appointed rounds, drawn by the spectacle. Within thirty seconds three police cruisers had converged on the site of the accident.

As the chaos mounted, Bourne slipped through the revolving door into the ornate lobby of the Moskva Bank. He immediately crossed the marble floor, passing under one of the three huge gilt chandeliers that hung from the vaulted ceiling high above. The effect of the room was to diminish human size, and the experience was not unlike visiting a dead relative in his marble niche.

There was a low banquette two-thirds of the way across the vast room, behind which sat a row of drones, their heads bent over their work. Before approaching, Bourne checked everyone inside the bank for suspicious behavior. He produced Popov’s passport, then wrote down the number of the safe-deposit box on a small pad kept for that specific purpose.

The woman glanced at him, took his passport and the slip of paper, which she ripped off the pad. Locking her drawer, she told Bourne to wait. He watched her walk over to the rank of supervisors and managers, who sat in rows behind identical wooden desks, and present Bourne’s documentation. The manager checked the number against his master list of safe-deposit boxes, then he checked the passport. He hesitated, then reached for the phone, but when he noticed Bourne staring at him, he returned to receiver to its cradle. He said something to the woman clerk, then rose and came over to where Bourne stood.

“Mr. Popov.” He handed back the passport. “Vasily Legev, at your service.” He was an oily Muscovite who continually scrubbed his palms together as if his hands had been somewhere he’d rather not reveal. His smile seemed as genuine as a three-dollar bill.

Opening a door in the banquette, he ushered Bourne through. “It will be my pleasure to escort you to our vault.”

He led Bourne to the rear of the room. A discreet door opened onto a hushed carpeted corridor with a row of square columns on either side. Bad reproductions of famous landscape paintings hung on the walls. Bourne could hear the muted sounds of phones ringing, computer operators inputting information or writing letters. The vault was directly ahead, its massive door open; to the left a set of marble stairs swept upward.

Vasily Legev showed Bourne through the circular opening and into the vault. The hinges of the door looked to be two feet long and as thick around as Bourne’s biceps. Inside was a rectangular room filled floor-to-ceiling with metal boxes, only the fronts of which could be seen.

They went over to Bourne’s box number. There were two locks, two keyholes. Vasily Legev inserted his key in the left-hand lock, Bourne inserted his into the right-hand lock. The two men turned their keys at the same time, and the box was free to be pulled out of its niche. Vasily Legev brought the box to one of a number of small viewing rooms. He set it down on a ledge, nodded to Bourne, then left, pulling the privacy curtain behind him.

Bourne didn’t bother sitting. Opening the box, he discovered a great deal of money in American dollars, euros, Swiss francs, and a number of other currencies. He pocketed ten thousand Swiss francs, along with some dollars and euros, before he closed the box, pulled aside the curtain, and emerged into the vault proper.

Vasily Legev was nowhere to be seen, but two plainclothes cops had placed themselves between Bourne and the doorway to the vault. One of them aimed a Makarov handgun at him.

The other, smirking, said, “You will come with us now, gospadin Popov.”

Arkadin, hands in his pockets, strolled down the crescent beach, past a happily barking dog whose owner had let it off the leash. A young woman pulled her auburn hair off her face and smiled at him as they passed each other.

When he was fairly near Heinrich, Arkadin kicked off his shoes, peeled off his socks, and, rolling up his trousers, picked his way down to the surf line, where the sand turned dark and crusty. He moved at an angle, so that as he ventured into the surf he was within earshot of the courier.

Sensing someone near him, Heinrich turned and, shading his eyes from the sun, nodded at Arkadin before turning away.

Under the pretext of stumbling as the surf rolled in, Arkadin edged closer. “I’m surprised that someone besides me likes the winter surf.”

Heinrich seemed not to hear him, continued his contemplation of the horizon.

“I keep wondering what it is that feels so good about the water rushing over my feet and pulling back out.”

After a moment, Heinrich glanced at him. “If you don’t mind, I’m trying to meditate.”

“Meditate on this,” Arkadin said, sticking a knife very carefully in his side.

Heinrich’s eyes opened wide. He staggered, but Arkadin was there to catch him. They sat down together in the surf, like old friends communing with nature.

Heinrich’s mouth made gasping sounds. They reminded Arkadin of a fish hauled out of the water.

“What… what?”

Arkadin cradled him with one hand as he searched beneath his poplin jacket with the other. Just as he thought, Heinrich had the package on him, not trusting it to be out of his sight for an instant. He held it in his palm for a moment. It was in a rolled cardboard cylinder. So small for something with that much power.

“A lot of people have died for this,” Arkadin said.

“Many more will die before it’s over,” Heinrich managed to get out. “Who are you?”

“I’m your death,” Arkadin said. Plunging the knife in again, he turned it between Heinrich’s ribs.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Heinrich whispered as his lungs filled with his own blood. His breathing turned shallow, then erratic. Then it ceased altogether.

Arkadin continued to shelter him with a comradely arm. When Heinrich, nothing more than deadweight now, slumped against him, Arkadin held him up as the surf crashed and ebbed around them.

Arkadin stared out at the horizon, as Heinrich had done, certain that beyond the demarcation was nothing save a black abyss, endless and unknowable.

Bourne went willingly with the two plainclothes policemen out of the vault. As they stepped into the corridor, Bourne slammed the edge of his hand down on the cop’s wrist, causing the Makarov to drop and slide along the floor. Whirling, Bourne kicked the other cop, who was flung back against the edge of a square column. Bourne grabbed hold of the arm of the first cop. Lifting it, he slammed his elbow into the cop’s rib cage, then smashed his hand into the back of his neck. With both cops down, Bourne hurried along the corridor, but another man came sprinting toward him, blocking the way to the front of the bank, a man who fit Yakov’s description of Harris Low.

Reversing course, Bourne leapt up the marble staircase, taking the steps three at a time. Racing around the turn, he gained the landing of the second floor. He’d memorized the plans Baronov’s friend had procured for him and had planned for an emergency, not trusting to chance that he’d get in and out of the bank without being identified. It was clear Vasily Legev, having recognized gospadin Popov, would blow the whistle on him while he was inside the safe-deposit viewing cubicle. As Bourne broke out into the corridor he encountered one of the bank’s security men. Grabbing him by the front of his uniform, Bourne jerked him off his feet, swung him around, and hurled him down the stairs at the ascending NSA agent.

Racing down the corridor, reached the door to the fire stairs, opened it, and went through. Like many buildings of its vintage this one had a staircase that rose around an open central core.

Bourne took off up the stairs. He passed the third floor, then the fourth. Behind him, he could hear the fire door bang open, the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs behind him. His maneuver with the guard had slowed down the agent, but hadn’t stopped him.

He was midway to the fifth and top floor when the agent fired on him. Bourne ducked, hearing the spang! of the ricochet. He sprinted upward as another shot went past him. Reaching the door to the roof at last, he opened it, and slammed it shut behind him.

Harris Low was furious. With all the personnel at his disposal Bourne was still at large. That’s what you get, he thought as he raced up the stairwell, when you leave the details to the Russians. They were great at brute force, but when it came to the subtleties of undercover work they were all but useless. Those two plainclothes officers, for instance. Over Low’s objections they hadn’t waited for him, had gone into the vault after Bourne themselves. Now he was left with mopping up the mess they’d made.

He came to the door to the roof, turned the handle, and banged it open with the flat of his shoe. The tarred rooftop, the low winter sky glowered at him. Walther PPK/S at the ready, he stepped out onto the roof in a semi-crouch. Without warning, the door slammed shut on him, driving him back onto the small landing.

Up on the roof, Bourne pulled open the door and dived through. He struck Low three blows, directed first at the agent’s stomach and then at his right wrist, forcing Low to let go of the gun. The Walther flew down the stairwell, landing on a step just above the fourth floor.

Low, enraged, drove his fists into Bourne’s kidney twice in succession. Bourne collapsed to his knees, and Low kicked him onto his back then straddled his chest, pinning Bourne’s arms. Low gripped Bourne’s throat, squeezing as hard as he could.

Bourne struggled to get his arms free, but he had insufficient leverage. He tried to get a breath, but Low’s grip on him was so complete that he was unable to get any oxygen into his system. He stopped trying to free his arms and pressed down with the small of his back, providing a fulcrum for his legs, which he drew up, then extended toward his head. He brought his calves together, sandwiching Low’s head between them. Low tried to shake them off, violently twisting his shoulders back and forth, but Bourne held on, increasing his grip. Then, with an enormous effort, Bourne spun them both to the left. Low’s head hit against the wall, and Bourne’s arms were free. Unwinding his legs, he slammed the palms of his hands against Low’s ears.

Low shouted in pain, kicked away, and scrambled back down the stairs. Bourne, on his knees, could see that Low was heading for the Walther. Bourne rose. Just as Low reached it, Bourne launched himself down and across the air shaft. He landed on Low, who whipped the Walther’s short but thick barrel into Bourne’s face. Bourne reared back, and Low bent him over the railing. Four floors of air shaft loomed below, ending in an unforgiving concrete base. As they locked in their struggle, Low slowly, inexorably, brought the muzzle of the Walther to bear on Bourne’s face. At the same time, the heel of Bourne’s hand was pushing Low’s head up.

Low shook loose from Bourne’s grip, lunged at him in an effort to pistol-whip him into unconsciousness. Bourne bent his knees. Using Low’s own momentum, he slid one arm under the agent’s crotch, and lifted him up. Low tried to get a fix on Bourne with the Walther, failed, swung his arm back to deliver another blow with the barrel.

Using all his remaining strength, Bourne hefted him up and over the banister, dumping him down the air shaft. Low plummeted, a tangle of arms and legs, until he hit the bottom.

Bourne turned, went back out onto the roof. As he loped across it, he could hear the familiar rise and fall of police sirens. He wiped blood off his cheek with the back of his hand. Reaching the other side of the roof, he climbed atop the parapet, leapt across the intervening space onto the roof of the adjoining building. He did this twice more until he felt that it was safe for him to return to the street.

Twenty-Five

SORAYA HAD NEVER understood the nature of panic, despite the fact that she grew up with an aunt who was prone to panic attacks. When the attacks came on her aunt said she felt as if someone had put a plastic dry-cleaning bag over her head; she felt as if she were being smothered to death. Soraya would watch her huddled in a chair or curled up on her bed and wonder how on earth she could feel such a thing. There weren’t even any plastic dry-cleaning bags allowed in the house. How could a person feel as if she were suffocating when there wasn’t anything on her face?

Now she knew.

As she drove out of the NSA safe house without Tyrone, as the high reinforced metal gates swung closed behind her, her hands trembled on the wheel, her heart felt as if it was jumping painfully inside her breast. There was a film of sweat on her upper lip, under her arms, and at the nape of her neck. Worst of all, she couldn’t catch her breath. Her mind raced like a rat in a cage. She gasped, sucking ragged gulps of air in to her lungs. She felt, in short, as if she were being smothered to death. Then her stomach rebelled.

As quickly as she was able she pulled to the side of the road, got out, and stumbled into the trees. Falling to her hands and knees, she vomited up the sweet, milky Ceylon tea.

Jason, Tyrone, and Veronica Hart were now all in terrible jeopardy because of rash decisions she’d made. She quailed at the thought. It was one thing to be chief of station in Odessa, quite another to be director. Maybe she’d taken on more than she could handle, maybe she didn’t have the steel nerve that was required to make tough choices. Where was her vaunted confidence? It was back there in the NSA interrogation cell with Tyrone.

Somehow she made it to Alexandria, where she parked. She sat in the car bent over, her clammy forehead pressed to the steering wheel. She tried to think coherently, but her brain seemed encased in a block of concrete. At last, she wept bitterly.

She had to call Deron, but she was petrified of his reaction when she told him that she had allowed his protйgй to be captured and tortured by the NSA. She had fucked up big time. And she had no idea how to rectify the situation. The choice LaValle had given her-Veronica Hart for Tyrone-was unacceptable.

After a time, she calmed down enough to get out of the car. She moved like a sleepwalker through crowds of people oblivious to her agony. It seemed somehow wrong that the world should spin on as it always had, utterly indifferent and uncaring.

She ducked into a little tea shop, and as she rummaged in her handbag for her cell phone she saw the pack of cigarettes. A cigarette would calm her nerves, but standing out in the chilly street while she smoked would make her feel more of a lost soul. She decided to have a smoke on the way back to her car. Placing her cell phone on the table, she stared down at it as if it were alive. She ordered chamomile tea, which calmed her enough for her to pick up her phone. She punched in Deron’s number, but when she heard his voice her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth.

Eventually, she was able to get out her name. Before he could ask her how the mission went she asked to speak with Kiki, Deron’s girlfriend. Where that came from, she had no idea. She’d met Kiki only twice. But Kiki was a woman and, instinctively, with an atavistic clannishness, Soraya knew it would be easier to confess to her than to Deron.

When Kiki came on the line, Soraya asked if she could come to the little tea shop in Alexandria. When Kiki asked when, Soraya said, “Now. Please.”

The first thing you have to do is stop blaming yourself,” Kiki said after Soraya had finished recounting in painful detail what had happened at the NSA safe house. “It’s your guilt that’s paralyzing you, and believe me you’re going to need every last brain cell if we’re going to get Tyrone out of that hole.”

Soraya looked up from her pallid tea.

Kiki smiled, nodding. In her dark red dress, her hair up in a swirl, hammered-gold earrings depending from her earlobes, she looked more regal, more exotic than ever. She towered over everyone in the tea shop by at least six inches.

“I know I have to tell Deron,” Soraya said. “I just don’t know what his reaction is going to be.”

“His reaction won’t be as bad as what you fear,” Kiki said. “And after all, Tyrone is a grown man. He knew the risks as well as anyone. It was his choice, Soraya. He could’ve said no.”

Soraya shook her head. “That’s just it, I don’t think he could, at least not from the way he sees things.” She stirred her tea, more to forestall what she knew she had to say. Then she looked up, licked her lips. “See, Tyrone’s got a thing for me.”

“Doesn’t he ever!”

Soraya was taken aback. “You know?”

“Everyone who knows him knows, honey. You just have to look at him when the two of you are together.”

Soraya felt her cheeks flush. “I think he would’ve done anything I asked of him no matter how dangerous, even if he didn’t want to.”

“But you know he wanted to.”

It was true, Soraya thought. He’d been excited. Nervous, but definitely excited. She knew that ever since Deron had taken him under his wing he’d chafed at being cooped up in the hood. He was smarter than that, and Deron knew it. But he had neither the interest nor the aptitude for what Deron did. Then she came along. He’d told her he saw her as his ticket out of the ghetto.

Yet she still had a knot in her chest, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could not get out of her head the image of Tyrone on his knees, hooded, arms held behind him on the tabletop.

“You just turned pale,” Kiki said. “Are you all right?”

Soraya nodded. She wanted to tell Kiki what she had seen, but she couldn’t. She sensed that to talk about it would give it a reality so frightening, so powerful it would throw her back into panic.

“Then we ought to go.”

Soraya’s heart tripped over itself. “No time like the present,” she said.

As they went out the door, she pulled out the pack of cigarettes and threw it in a nearby trash can. She didn’t need it anymore.

As planned, Gala picked up Bourne in Yakov’s bombila and together they returned to Lorraine’s apartment. It was just past 10 AM; his meet with Maslov wasn’t until noon. He needed a shower, a shave, and some rest.

Lorraine was kind enough to provide the necessities for all three. She gave Bourne a set of towels, a disposable razor, and said if he gave her his clothes she’d wash and dry them for him. In the bathroom Bourne stripped, then opened the door enough to hand the dirty clothes to Lorraine.

“After I put these in the wash, Gala and I are going out to get food. Can we bring you anything?”

Bourne thanked her. “Whatever you’re having will be fine.”

He closed the door, crossed to the shower, turned it on full force. Opening the medicine cabinet, he took out rubbing alcohol, a gauze pad, surgical tape, and antibiotic cream. Then he went back to the toilet, put the seat cover down, and cleaned his abraded heel. It had taken a lot of abuse and was red and raw looking. Squeezing the cream onto the gauze, he placed it over the wound and taped it up.

Then he took his cell phone off the edge of the sink where he’d placed it when undressing, and dialed the number Boris Karpov had given him.

Would you mind going without me?” Gala said, as Lorraine reached into the hall closet for her fur coat. “All of a sudden I’m not feeling well.”

Lorraine walked back to her. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Gala sank onto the white leather sofa. “I’m kind of dizzy.”

Lorraine took hold of the back of her head. “Bend over. Put your head between your knees.”

Gala did as she was told. Lorraine crossed to the sideboard, took out a bottle of vodka, and poured some into a glass. “Here, take a drink. It’ll settle you.”

Gala came up as gingerly as a drunk walks. She took the vodka, threw it down her throat so fast she almost choked. But then the fire hit her stomach and the warmth began to spread through her.

“Okay?” Lorraine asked.

“Better.”

“All right. I’m going to buy you some hot borscht. You need to get some nourishment into you.” She drew on her coat. “Why don’t you lie down?”

Once again Gala did as she was told, but after her friend left, she rose. She’d never found the sofa comfortable. Making sure of her balance, she went down the hall. She needed to crash on a proper bed.

As she was passing the bathroom, she heard a sound like talking, but Bourne was in there by himself. Curious, she moved closer, then put her ear to the door. She could hear the rushing of the shower more clearly, but also Bourne’s voice. He must be on his cell phone.

She heard him say “Medvedev did what?” He was talking politics to whoever was on the other end of the line. She was about to take her ear away from the door when she heard Bourne say, “It was bad luck with Tarkanian… No, no, I killed him… I had to, I had no other choice.”

Gala pulled away as if she’d touched her ear to a hot iron. For some time, she stood staring at the closed door, then she backed away. Bourne had killed Mischa! My God, she said to herself. How could he? And then, thinking of Arkadin, Mischa’s best friend, My God.

Twenty-Six

DIMITRI MASLOV had the eyes of a rattlesnake, the shoulders of a wrestler, and the hands of a bricklayer. He was, however, dressed like a banker when Bourne met him inside a warehouse that could have doubled as an aircraft hanger. He was wearing a chalk-striped three-piece Savile Row suit, an Egyptian cotton shirt, and a conservative tie. His powerful legs ended in curiously dainty feet, as if they’d been grafted on from another, far smaller body.

“Don’t bother telling me your name,” he said as he accepted the ten thousand Swiss francs, “as I always assume they’re fake.”

The warehouse was one among many in this soot-laden industrial area on the outskirts of Moscow, and therefore anonymous. Like its neighbors, it had a front area filled with boxes and crates on neat stacks of wooden pallets piled almost to the ceiling. Parked in one corner was a forklift. Next to it was a bulletin board on which had been tacked overlapping layers of flyers, notices, invoices, advertisements, and announcements. Bare lightbulbs at the ends of metal flex burned like miniature suns.

After Bourne had been expertly patted down for weapons and wires, he’d been escorted through a door to a tiled bathroom that stank of urine and stale sweat. It contained a trough with water running sluggishly along its bottom and a line of stalls. He was taken to the last stall. Inside, instead of a toilet, was a door. His escort of two burly Russians took him through to what appeared to be a warren of offices, one of which was raised on a steel platform bolted onto the far wall. They climbed the staircase to the door, at which point his escort had left him, presumably to go stand guard.

Maslov was seated behind an ornate desk. He was flanked on either side by two more men, interchangeable with the pair outside. In one corner sat a man with a scar beneath one eye, who would have been unprepossessing save for the flamboyant Hawaiian print shirt he wore. Bourne was aware of another presence behind him, his back against the open door.

“I understand you wanted to see me.” Maslov’s rattlesnake eyes shone yellow in the harsh light. Then he gestured, holding out his left arm, his hand extended, palm-up, as if he were shoveling dirt away from him. “However, there’s someone who insists on seeing you.”

In a blur, the figure behind Bourne hurled himself forward. Bourne turned in a half crouch to see the man who’d attacked him at Tarkanian’s apartment. He came at Bourne with a knife extended. Too late to deflect it, Bourne sidestepped the thrust, grabbed the man’s right wrist with his left hand, using his own momentum to pull him forward so that his face met Bourne’s raised elbow flush-on.

He went down. Bourne stepped on the wrist with his shoe until the man let go of the knife, which Bourne took up in his hand. At once the two burly bodyguards drew down on him, pointing their Glocks. Ignoring them, Bourne held the knife in his right palm so the hilt pointed away from him. He extended his arm across the desk to Maslov.

Maslov stared instead at the man in the Hawaiian print shirt, who rose, took the knife from Bourne’s palm.

“I am Dimitri Maslov,” he said to Bourne.

The big man in the banker’s suit rose, nodded deferentially to Maslov, who handed him the knife as he sat down behind the desk.

“Take Evsei out and get him a new nose,” Maslov said to no one in particular.

The big man in the banker’s suit pulled the dazed Evsei up, dragged him out of the office.

“Close the door,” Maslov said, again to no one in particular.

Nevertheless, one of the burly Russian bodyguards crossed to the door, closed it, turned and put his back against it. He shook out a cigarette, lit it.

“Take a seat,” Maslov said. Sliding open a drawer, he took out a Mauser, laid it on the desk within easy reach. Only then did his eyes slide up to engage Bourne’s again. “My dear friend Vanya tells me that you work for Boris Karpov. He says you claim to have information I can use against certain parties who are trying to muscle in on my territory.” His fingers tapped the grips of the Mauser. “However, I would be inexcusably naive to believe that you were willing to part with this information without a price, so let’s have it. What do you want?”

“I want to know what your connection is with the Black Legion?”

“Mine? I have none.”

“But you’ve heard of them.”

“Of course I’ve heard of them.” Maslov frowned. “Where is this going?”

“You posted your man Evsei in Mikhail Tarkanian’s apartment. Tarkanian was a member of the Black Legion.”

Maslov held up a hand. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

“He was working against people-friends of mine.”

Maslov shrugged. “That might be so-I have no knowledge of it one way or another. But one thing I can tell you is that Tarkanian wasn’t Black Legion.”

“Then why was Evsei there?”

“Ah, now we get to the root of the matter.” Maslov’s thumb rubbed against his forefinger and middle finger in the universal gesture. “Show me the quid pro quo, to co-opt what Jerry Maguire says.” His mouth grinned, but his yellow eyes remained as remote and malevolent as ever. “Though to tell you the truth I’m doubting very much there’s any money at all. I mean to say, why would the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency want to help me? It’s anti-fucking-intuitive.”

Bourne finally pulled over a chair, sat down. His mind was rerunning the long conversation he’d had with Boris at Lorraine’s apartment, during which Karpov had briefed him on the current political climate in Moscow.

“This has nothing to do with narcotics and everything to do with politics. The Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency is controlled by Cherkesov, who’s in the midst of a parallel war to yours-the silovik wars,” Bourne said. “It seems as if the president has already picked his successor.”

“That pisspot Mogilovich.” Maslov nodded. “Yeah, so what?”

“Cherkesov doesn’t like him, and here’s why. Mogilovich used to work for the president in the St. Petersburg city administration way back when. The president put him in charge of the legal department of VM Pulp and Paper. Mogilovich promptly engineered VM’s dominance to become Russia’s largest and most lucrative pulp and timber company. Now one of America’s largest paper companies is buying fifty percent of VM for hundreds of millions of dollars.”

During Bourne’s discourse Maslov had taken out a penknife, was busy paring grime from under his manicured nails. He did everything but yawn. “All this is part of the public record. What’s it to me?”

“What isn’t known is that Mogilovich cut himself a deal giving him a sizable portion of VM’s shares when the company was privatized through RAB Bank. At the time, questions were raised about Mogilovich’s involvement with RAB Bank, but they magically went away. Last year VM bought back the twenty-five percent stake that RAB had taken to ensure the privatization would go through without a hitch. The deal was blessed by the Kremlin.”

“Meaning the president.” Maslov sat up straight, put away the penknife.

“Right,” Bourne said. “Which means that Mogilovich stands to make a king’s ransom through the American buy-in, by means the president wouldn’t want made public.”

“Who knows what the president’s own involvement is in the deal?”

Bourne nodded.

“Wait a minute,” Maslov said. “Last week a RAB Bank officer was found tied up, tortured, and asphyxiated in his dacha garage. I remember because the General Prosecutor’s Office claimed he’d committed suicide. We all got a good laugh out of that one.”

“He just happened to be the head of RAB’s loan division to the timber industry.”

“The man with the smoking gun that could ruin Mogilovich and, by extension, the president,” Maslov said.

“My boss tells me this man had access to the smoking gun, but he never actually had it in his possession. His assistant absconded with it days before his assassination, and now can’t be found.” Bourne hitched his chair forward. “When you find him for us and hand over the papers incriminating Mogilovich, my boss is prepared to end the war between you and the Azeri once and for all in your favor.”

“And how the fuck is he going to do that?”

Bourne opened his cell phone, played back the MP3 file Boris had sent to him. It was a conversation between the kingpin of the Azeri and one of his lieutenants ordering the hit on the RAB Bank executive. It was just like the Russian in Boris to hold on to the evidence for leverage, rather than go after the Azeri kingpin right away.

A broad grin broke out across Maslov’s face. “Fuck,” he said, “now we’re talking!”

After a time, Arkadin became aware that Devra was standing over him. Without looking at her, he held up the cylinder he’d taken from Heinrich.

“Come out of the surf,” she said, but when Arkadin didn’t make a move, she sat down on a crest of sand behind him.

Heinrich was stretched out on his back as if he were a sunbather who’d fallen asleep. The water had washed away all the blood.

After a time, Arkadin moved back, first onto the dark sand, then up behind the waterline to where Devra sat, her legs drawn up, chin on her knees. That was when she noticed that his left foot was missing three toes.

“My God,” she said, “what happened to your foot?”

It was the foot that had undone Marlene. The three missing toes on Arkadin’s left foot. Marlene made the mistake of asking what had happened.

“An accident,” Arkadin said with a practiced smoothness. “During my first term in prison. A stamping machine came apart, and the main cylinder fell on my foot. The toes were crushed, nothing more than pulp. They had to be amputated.”

It was a lie, this story, a fanciful tale Arkadin appropriated from a real incident that took place during his first stint in prison. That much, at least, was the truth. A man stole a pack of cigarettes from under Arkadin’s bunk. This man worked the stamping machine. Arkadin tampered with the machine so that when the man started it up the next morning the main cylinder dropped on him. The result wasn’t pretty; you could hear his screams clear across the compound. In the end, they’d had to take his right leg off at the knee.

From that day forward he was on his guard with Marlene. She was attracted to him, of this he was quite certain. She’d slipped from her objective pedestal, from the job Icoupov had given her. He didn’t blame Icoupov. He wanted to tell Icoupov again that he wouldn’t harm him, but he knew Icoupov wouldn’t believe him. Why should he? He had enough evidence to the contrary to make him suitably nervous. And yet, Arkadin sensed that Icoupov would never turn his back on him. Icoupov would never renege on his pledge to take Arkadin in.

Nevertheless, something had to be done about Marlene. It wasn’t simply that she’d seen his left foot; Icoupov had seen it as well. Arkadin knew she suspected the maimed foot was connected with his horrendous nightmares, that it was part of something he couldn’t tell her. Even the story Arkadin told her did not fully satisfy her. It might have with someone else, but not Marlene. She hadn’t exaggerated when she’d told him that she possessed an uncanny ability to sense what her clients were feeling, and to find a way to help them.

The problem was that she couldn’t help Arkadin. No one could. No one was allowed to know what he’d experienced. It was unthinkable.

“Tell me about your mother and father,” Marlene said. “And don’t repeat the pabulum you fed the shrink who was here before me.”

They were out on Lake Lugano. It was a mild summer’s day, Marlene was in a two-piece bathing suit, red with large pink polka dots. She wore pink rubber slippers; a visor shaded her face from the sun. Their small motorboat lay to, its anchor dropped. Small swells rocked them now and again as pleasure boats went to and fro across the crystal blue water. The small village of Campione d’Italia rose up the hillside like the frosted tiers of a wedding cake.

Arkadin looked hard at her. It annoyed him that he didn’t intimidate her. He intimidated most people; it was how he got along after his parents were gone.

“What, you don’t think my mother died badly?”

“I’m interested in your mother before she died,” Marlene said airily. “What was she like?”

“Actually, she was just like you.”

Marlene gave him a basilisk stare.

“Seriously,” he said. “My mother was tough as a fistful of nails. She knew how to stand up to my father.”

Marlene seized on this opening. “Why did she have to do that? Was your father abusive?”

Arkadin shrugged. “No more than any other father, I suppose. When he was frustrated at work he took it out on her.”

“And you find that normal.”

“I don’t know what the word normal means.”

“But you’re used to abuse, aren’t you?”

“Isn’t that called leading the witness, Counselor?”

“What did your father do?”

“He was consiglieri-the counselor-to the Kazanskaya, the family of the Moscow grupperovka that controls drug trafficking and the sale of foreign cars in the city and surrounding areas.” He’d been nothing of the sort. Arkadin’s father had been an ironworker, dirt-poor, desperate, and drunk as shit twenty hours a day, just like everyone else in Nizhny Tagil.

“So abuse and violence came naturally to him.”

“He wasn’t on the streets,” Arkadin said, continuing his lie.

She gave him a thin smile. “All right, where do you think your bouts of violence come from?”

“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

Marlene laughed. “Come on, Leonid Danilovich. Don’t you want to be of use to Mr. Icoupov?”

“Of course I do. I want him to trust me.”

“Then tell me.”

Arkadin sat for a time. The sun felt good on his forearms. The heat seemed to draw his skin tight over his muscles, making them bulge. He felt the beating of his heart as if it were music. For just a moment, he felt free of his burden, as if it belonged to someone else, a tormented character in a Russian novel, perhaps. Then his past came rushing back like a fist in his gut and he almost vomited.

Very slowly, very deliberately he unlaced his sneakers, took them off. He peeled off his white athletic socks, and there was his left foot with its two toes and three miniature stumps, knotty, as pink as the polka dots on Marlene’s bathing suit.

“Here’s what happened,” he said. “When I was fourteen years old, my mother took a frying pan to the back of my father’s head. He’d just come home stone drunk, reeking of another woman. He was sprawled facedown on their bed, snoring peacefully, when whack!, she took a heavy cast-iron skillet from its peg on the kitchen wall and, without a word, hit him ten times in the same spot. You can imagine what his skull looked like when she was done.”

Marlene sat back. She seemed to have trouble breathing. At length, she said, “This isn’t another one of your bullshit stories, is it?”

“No,” Arkadin said, “it’s not.”

“And where were you?”

“Where d’you think I was? Home. I saw the whole thing.”

Marlene put a hand to her mouth. “My God.”

Having expelled this ball of poison, Arkadin felt an exhilarating sense of freedom, but he knew what had to come next.

“Then what happened?” she said when she had recovered her equilibrium.

Arkadin let out a long breath. “I gagged her, tied her hands behind her, and threw her into the closet in my room.”

“And?”

“I walked out of the apartment and never went back.”

“How?” There was a look of genuine horror on her face. “How could you do such a thing?”

“I disgust you now, don’t I?” He said this not with anger, but with a certain resignation. Why wouldn’t she be disgusted by him? If only she knew the whole truth.

“Tell me in more detail about the accident in prison.”

Arkadin knew at once that she was trying to find inconsistencies in his story. This was a classic interrogator’s technique. She would never know the truth.

“Let’s go swimming,” he said abruptly. He shed his shorts and T-shirt.

Marlene shook her head. “I’m not in the mood. You go if-”

“Oh, come on.”

He pushed her overboard, stood up, dived in after her. He found her under the water, kicking her legs to bring herself to the surface. He wrapped his thighs around her neck, locked his ankles, tightening his grip on her. He rose to the surface, held on to the boat, swung water out of his eyes as she struggled below him. Boats thrummed past. He waved to two young girls, their long hair flying behind them like horses’ manes. He wanted to hum a love song, but all he could think of was the theme to Bridge on the River Kwai.

After a time, Marlene stopped struggling. He felt her weight below him, swaying gently in the swells. He didn’t want to, really he didn’t, but unbidden the image of his old apartment resurrected itself in his mind’s eye. It was a slum, the filthy crumbling Soviet-era piece of shit building teeming with vermin.

Their poverty didn’t stop the older man from banging other women. When one of them became pregnant, she decided to have the baby. He was all for it, he told her. He’d help her in any way he could. But what he really wanted was the child his barren wife could never give him. When Leonid was born, he ripped the baby from the girl’s arms, brought Leonid to his wife to raise.

“This is the child I always wanted, but you couldn’t give me,” he told her.

She raised Arkadin dutifully, without complaint, because where could a barren woman go in Nizhny Tagil? But when her husband wasn’t home, she locked the boy in the closet of his room for hours at a time. A blind rage gripped her and wouldn’t let her go. She despised this result of her husband’s seed, and she felt compelled to punish Leonid because she couldn’t punish his father.

It was during one of these long punishments that Arkadin woke to awful pain in his left foot. He wasn’t alone in the closet. Half a dozen rats, large as his father’s shoe, scuttled back and forth, squealing, teeth gnashing. He managed to kill them, but not before they finished what they’d started. They ate three of his toes.

Twenty-Seven

IT ALL STARTED with Pyotr Zilber,” Maslov said. “Or rather his younger brother, Aleksei. Aleksei was a wise guy. He tried to muscle in on one of my sources for foreign cars. A lot of people were killed, including some of my men and my source. For that, I had him killed.”

Dimitri Maslov and Bourne were sitting in a glassed-in greenhouse built on the roof of the warehouse where Maslov had his office. They were surrounded by a lush profusion of tropical flowers: speckled orchids, brilliant carmine anthurium, birds-of-paradise, white ginger, heliconia. The air was perfumed with the scents of the pink plumeria and white jasmine. It was so warm and humid, Maslov looked right at home in his bright-hued short-sleeved shirt. Bourne had rolled up his sleeves. There was a table with a bottle of vodka and two glasses. They’d already had their first drink.

“Zilber pulled strings, had my man Borya Maks sent to High Security Prison Colony 13 in Nizhny Tagil. You’ve heard of it?”

Bourne nodded. Conklin had mentioned the prison several times.

“Then you know it’s no picnic in there.” Maslov leaned forward, refilled their glasses, handed one to Bourne, took the other himself. “Despite that, Zilber wasn’t satisfied. He hired someone very, very good to infiltrate the prison and kill Maks.” Drinking vodka, surrounded by a riot of color, he appeared totally at his ease. “Only one person could accomplish that and get out alive: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”

The vodka had done Bourne a world of good, returning both warmth and strength to his overtaxed body. There was still a smear of blood on the point of one cheek, dried now, but Maslov had neither looked at it nor commented on it. “Tell me about Arkadin.”

Maslov made an animal sound in the back of his throat. “All you need to know is that the sonovabitch killed Pyotr Zilber. God knows why. Then he disappeared off the face of the earth. I had Evsei stake out Mischa Tarkanian’s apartment. I was hoping Arkadin would come back there. Instead, you showed up.”

“What’s Zilber’s death to you?” Bourne said. “From what you’ve told me, there was no love lost between the two of you.”

“Hey, I don’t have to like a person to do business with him.”

“If you wanted to do business with Zilber you shouldn’t have had his brother murdered.”

“I have my reputation to uphold.” Maslov sipped his vodka. “Pyotr knew what kinds of shit his brother was into, but did he stop him? Anyway, the hit was strictly business. Pyotr took it far too personally. Turns out he was almost as reckless as his brother.”

There it was again, Bourne thought, the slurs against Pyotr Zilber. What, then, was he doing running a secret network? “What was your business with him?”

“I coveted Pyotr’s network. Because of the war with the Azeri, I’ve been looking for a new, more secure method to move our drugs. Zilber’s network was the perfect solution.”

Bourne put aside his vodka. “Why would Zilber want anything to do with the Kazanskaya?”

“There you’ve given away the extent of your ignorance.” Maslov eyed him curiously. “Zilber would have wanted money to fund his organization.”

“You mean his network.”

“I mean precisely what I say.” Maslov looked hard and long at Bourne. “Pyotr Zilber was a member of the Black Legion.”

Like a sailor who senses an onrushing storm, Devra stopped herself from asking Arkadin again about his maimed foot. There was about him at this moment the same slight tremor of intent of a bowstring pulled back to its maximum. She transferred her gaze from his left foot to the corpse of Heinrich, taking in sunlight that would no longer do him any good. She felt the danger beside her, and she thought of her dream: her pursuit of the unknown creature, her sense of utter desolation, the building of her fear to an unbearable level.

“You’ve got the package now,” she said. “Is it over?”

For a moment, Arkadin said nothing, and she wondered whether she’d left her deflecting question too late, whether he would now turn on her because she had asked about what had happened to that damn foot.

The red rage had gripped Arkadin, shaking him until his teeth rattled in his skull. It would have been so easy to turn to her, smile, and break her neck. So little effort; nothing to it. But something stopped him, something cooled him. It was his own will. He-did-not-want-to-kill-her. Not yet, at least. He liked sitting here on the beach with her, and there were so few things he liked.

“I still have to shut down the rest of the network,” he said, at length. “Not that I think it actually matters at this point. Christ, it was put together by an out-of-control commander too young to have learned caution, peopled by drug addicts, inveterate gamblers, weaklings, and those of no faith. It’s a wonder the network functioned at all. Surely it would have imploded on its own sooner or later.” But what did he know? He was simply a soldier engaged in an invisible war. His was not to reason why.

Pulling out his cell phone, he dialed Icoupov’s number.

“Where are you?” his boss said. “There’s a lot of background noise.”

“I’m at the beach,” Arkadin said.

“What? The beach?”

“Kilyos. It’s a suburb of Istanbul,” Arkadin said.

“I hope you’re having a good time while we’re in a semi-panic.”

Arkadin’s demeanor changed instantly. “What happened?”

“The bastard had Harun killed, that’s what happened.”

He knew how much Harun Iliev meant to Icoupov. Like Mischa meant to him. A rock, someone to keep him from drifting into the abyss of his imagination. “On a happier note,” he said, “I have the package.”

Icoupov gave a short intake of breath. “Finally! Open it,” he commanded. “Tell me if the document is inside.”

Arkadin did as he was told, breaking the wax seal, prying open the plastic disk that capped off the cylinder. Inside, tightly rolled sheets of pale blue architectural paper unfurled like sails. There were four in all. Quickly, he scanned them.

Sweat broke out at his hairline. “I’m looking at a set of architectural plans.”

“It’s the target of the attack.”

“The plans,” Arkadin said, “are for the Empire State Building in New York City.”