The Bourne Sanction

Twenty-Eight

IT TOOK ten minutes for Bourne to get a decent connection to Professor Specter, then another five for his people to rouse him out of bed. It was 5 AM in Washington. Maslov had gone downstairs to see to business, leaving Bourne alone in the greenhouse to make his calls. Bourne used the time to consider what Maslov had told him. If it was true that Pyotr was a member of the Black Legion, two possibilities arose: One was that Pyotr was running his own operation under the professor’s nose. That was ominous enough. The second possibility was far worse, namely that the professor was, himself, a member. But then why had he been attacked by the Black Legion? Bourne himself had seen the tattoo on the arm of the gunman who had accosted Specter, beat him, and hustled him off the street.

At that moment Bourne heard Specter’s voice in his ear. “Jason,” he said, clearly out of breath, “what’s happened?”

Bourne brought him up to date, ending with the information that Pyotr was a member of the Black Legion.

For a long moment, there was silence on the line.

“Professor, are you all right?”

Specter cleared his throat. “I’m fine.”

But he didn’t sound fine, and as the silence stretched on Bourne strained to catch a hint of his mentor’s emotional state.

“Look, I’m sorry about your man Baronov. The killer wasn’t Black Legion; he was an NSA agent sent to murder me.”

“I appreciate your candor,” Specter said. “And while I grieve for Baronov, he knew the risks. Like you, he went into this war with his eyes open.”

There was another silence, more awkward than the last one.

Finally, Specter said, “Jason, I’m afraid I’ve withheld some rather vital information from you. Pyotr Zilber was my son.”

“Your son? By why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

“Fear,” the professor said. “I’ve kept his real identity a secret for so many years it’s become habit. I needed to protect Pyotr from his enemies-my enemies-the enemies who were responsible for murdering my wife. I felt the best way to do that was to change his name. So in the summer of his sixth year, Aleksei Specter drowned tragically and Pyotr Zilber came into being. I left him with friends, left everything and came to America, to Washington, to begin my life anew without him. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. But how can a father renounce his son when he can’t forget him?”

Bourne knew precisely what he meant. He’d been about to tell the professor what he’d learned about Pyotr and his cast of misfits and fuckups, but this didn’t seem the right time to bring up more bad news.

“So you helped him?” Bourne guessed. “Secretly.”

“Ever so secretly,” Specter said. “I couldn’t afford to have anyone link us together, I couldn’t allow anyone to know my son was still alive. It was the least I could do for him. Jason, I hadn’t seen him since he was six years old.”

Hearing the naked anguish in Specter’s voice, Bourne waited a moment. “What happened?”

“He did a very stupid thing. He decided to take on the Black Legion himself. He spent years infiltrating the organization. He discovered that the Black Legion was planning a major attack inside America, then he spent months worming his way closer to the project. And finally, he had the key to bringing them down: He stole the plans to their target. Since we had to be careful about direct communication, I suggested he use his network for the purpose of getting me information on the Black Legion’s movements. This is how he meant to send me the plans.”

“Why didn’t he simply photograph them and send them to you digitally?”

“He tried that, but it didn’t work. The paper the plans are printed on is coated with a substance that makes whatever’s printed on it impossible to copy by any means. He had to get me the plans themselves.”

“Surely he told you the nature of the plans,” Bourne said.

“He was going to,” the professor said. “But before he could he was caught, taken to Icoupov’s villa, where Arkadin tortured and killed him.”

Bourne considered the implications in light of the new information the professor had given him. “Do you think he told them he was your son?”

“I’ve been concerned about that ever since the kidnapping attempt. I’m afraid Icoupov might know our blood connection.”

“You’d better take precautions, Professor.”

“I plan to do just that, Jason. I’ll be leaving the DC area in just over an hour. Meanwhile, my people have been hard at work. I’ve gotten word that Icoupov sent Arkadin to fetch the plans from Pyotr’s network. He’s leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.”

“Where is he now?” Bourne said.

“Istanbul, but that won’t do you any good,” Specter said, “because by the time you get there he’ll surely have gone. It’s now more imperative than ever that you find him, though, because we have confirmed that he’s taken the plans from the courier he murdered in Istanbul, and time is running out before the attack.”

“This courier came from where?”

“Munich,” the professor said. “He was the last link in the chain before the plans were to be delivered to me.”

“From what you tell me, it’s clear that Arkadin’s mission is twofold,” Bourne said. “First, to get the plans; second, to permanently shut down Pyotr’s network by killing its members one by one. Dieter Heinrich, the courier in Munich, is the only one remaining alive.”

“Who was Heinrich supposed to deliver the plans to in Munich?”

“Egon Kirsch. Kirsch is my man,” Specter said. “I’ve already alerted him to the danger.”

Bourne thought a moment. “Does Arkadin know what Kirsch looks like?”

“No, and neither does the young woman with him. Her name is Devra. She was one of Pyotr’s people, but now she’s helping Arkadin kill her former colleagues.”

“Why would she do that?” Bourne asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the professor said. “She was something of a cipher in Sevastopol, where she fell in with Arkadin-no friends, no family, an orphan of the state. So far my people haven’t turned up anything useful. In any event, I’m going to pull Kirsch out of Munich.”

Bourne’s mind was working overtime. “Don’t do that. Get him out of his apartment to a safe place somewhere in the city. I’ll take the first flight out to Munich. Before I leave here I want all the information on Kirsch’s life you can get me-where he was born, raised, his friends, family, schooling, every detail he can give you. I’ll study it on the flight over, then meet with him.”

“Jason, I don’t like the way this conversation is headed,” Specter said. “I suspect I know what you’re planning. If I’m right, you’re going to take Kirsch’s place. I forbid it. I won’t let you set yourself up as a target for Arkadin. It’s far too dangerous.”

“It’s a little late for second thoughts, Professor,” Bourne said. “It’s vital I get these plans, you said so yourself. You do your part and I’ll do mine.”

“Fair enough,” Specter said after a moment’s hesitation. “But my part includes activating a friend of mine who operates out of Munich.”

Bourne didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve already made it clear that you work alone, Jason, but this man Jens is someone you want at your back. He’s intimately familiar with wet work.”

A professional killer for hire, Bourne thought. “Thank you, Professor, but no.”

“This isn’t a request, Jason.” Specter’s voice held a stern warning not to cross him. “Jens is my condition for you taking Kirsch’s place. I won’t allow you to walk into this bear trap on your own. My decision is final.”

Dimitri Maslov and Boris Karpov embraced like old friends while Bourne stood on, silent. When it came to Russian politics nothing should surprise him, but it was nevertheless astonishing to see a high-ranking colonel in the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency cordially greeting the kingpin of the Kazanskaya, one of the two most notorious narcotics grupperovka.

This bizarre reunion took place in Bar-Dak, near the Leninsky Prospekt. The club had opened for Maslov; hardly surprising, since he owned it. Bar-Dak meant both “brothel” and “chaos” in current Russian slang. Bar-Dak was neither, though it did sport a prominent strippers’ stage complete with poles and a rather unusual leather swing that looked like a horse’s harness.

An open audition for pole dancers was in full swing. The lineup of eye-poppingly-built young blond women snaked around the four walls of the club, which was painted in glossy black enamel. Massive sound speakers, lines of vodka bottles on mirrored shelves, and vintage mirror balls were the major accoutrements.

After the two men were finished slapping each other on the back, Maslov led them across the cavernous room, through a door, and down a wood-paneled hallway. Mixed in with the scent of the cedar was the unmistakable waft of chlorine. It smelled like a health club, and with good reason. They went through a translucent pebbled glass door into a locker room.

“The sauna’s just over there,” Maslov pointed. “We meet inside in five minutes.”

Before Maslov would continue the conversation with Bourne, he insisted on meeting with Boris Karpov. Bourne had thought such a conference unlikely, but when he called Boris, his friend readily agreed. Maslov had given Bourne the name of Bar-Dak, nothing more. Karpov had said only, “I know it. I’ll be there in ninety minutes.”

Now, stripped down to the buff, white Turkish towels around their loins, the three men reconvened in the steamy confines of the sauna. The small room was lined, like the hallway, in cedar paneling. Slatted wooden benches ran around three walls. In one corner was a heap of heated stones, above which hung a cord.

When Maslov entered, he pulled the cord, showering the rocks with water, which produced clouds of steam that swirled up to the ceiling and down again, engulfing the men as they sat on the benches.

“The colonel has assured me that he will take care of my situation if I take care of his,” Maslov said. “Perhaps I should say that I will take care of Cherkesov’s problem.”

There was a twinkle in his eye as he said this. Stripped of his outsize Hawaiian shirt, he was a small, wiry man with ropy muscles and not an ounce of fat on him. He wore no gold chains around his neck or diamond rings on his fingers. His tattoos were his jewelry; they covered his entire torso. But these were not the crude and often blurred prison tattoos found on so many of his kind. They were among the most elaborate designs Bourne had ever seen: Asian dragons breathing fire, coiling their tails, spreading their wings, grasping with claws outstretched.

“Four years ago I spent six months in Tokyo,” Maslov said. “It’s the only place to get tattoos. But that’s just my opinion.”

Boris rocked with laughter. “So that’s where you were, you bastard! I scoured all of Russia for your skinny butt.”

“In the Ginza,” Maslov said, “I hoisted quite a few saki martinis to you and your law enforcement minions. I knew you’d never find me.” He made a sweeping gesture. “But that bit of unpleasantness is behind us; the real perpetrator confessed to the murders I was suspected of committing. Now we find ourselves in our own private glasnost.”

“I want to know more about Leonid Danilovich Arkadin,” Bourne said.

Maslov spread his hands. “Once he was one of us. Then something happened to him, I don’t know what. He broke away from the grupperovka. People don’t do that and survive for long, but Arkadin is in a class by himself. No one dares to touch him. He wraps himself in his reputation for murder and ruthlessness. This is a man-let me tell you-who has no heart. Yes, Dimitri, you might say to me, but isn’t that true of most of your kind? To this I answer, Yes. But Arkadin is also without a soul. This is where he parts company with the others. There is no one else like him, the colonel can back me up on this.”

Boris nodded sagely. “Even Cherkesov fears him, our president as well. I personally don’t know anyone in either FSB-1 or FSB-2 who’d be willing to take him on, let alone survive. He’s like a great white shark, the murderer of killers.”

“Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”

Maslov sat forward, elbows in knees. “Listen, my friend, whatever the hell your real name is, this man Arkadin was born in Nizhny Tagil. Do you know it? No? Let me tell you. This fucking excuse of a city east of here in the southern Ural Mountains is hell on earth. It’s filled with smokestacks belching sulfurous fumes from its ironworks. Poor is not even a word you can apply to the residents, who swill homemade vodka that’s almost pure alcohol and pass out wherever they happen to land. The police, such as they are, are as brutal and sadistic as the citizens. As a gulag is ringed by guard towers, Nizhny Tagil is surrounded by high-security prisons. Since the prison inmates are released without even train fare they settle in the town. You, an American, cannot imagine the brutality, the callousness of the residents of this human sewer. No one but the worst of the crims-as the criminals are called-dares be on the streets after 10 PM.”

Maslov wiped the sweat off his cheeks with the back of his hand. “This is the place where Arkadin was born and raised. It was from this cesspit that he made a name for himself by kicking people out of their apartments in old Soviet-era projects and selling them to criminals with a bit of money stolen from regular citizens.

“But whatever happened to Arkadin in Nizhny Tagil in his youth-and I don’t profess to know what that might be-has followed him like a ghoul. Believe me when I tell you that you’ve never met a man like him. You’re better off not.”

“I know where he is,” Bourne said. “I’m going after him.”

“Christ.” Maslov shook his head. “You must have a mighty fucking large death wish.”

“You don’t know my friend here,” Boris said.

Maslov eyed Bourne. “I know him as much as I want to, I think.” He stood up. “The stench of death is already on him.”

Twenty-Nine

THE MAN who stepped off the plane in Munich airport, who dutifully went through Customs and Immigration with all the other passengers from the many flights arriving at more or less the same time, looked nothing like Semion Icoupov. His name was Franz Richter, his passport proclaimed him as a German national, but underneath all the makeup and prosthetics he was Semion Icoupov just the same.

Nevertheless, Icoupov felt naked, exposed to the prying eyes of his enemies, whom he knew were everywhere. They waited patiently for him, like his own death. Ever since boarding the plane he’d been haunted by a sense of impending doom. He hadn’t been able to shake it on the flight, he couldn’t shake it now. He felt as if he’d come to Munich to stare his own death in the face.

His driver was waiting for him at baggage claim. The man, heavily armed, took the one piece of luggage Icoupov pointed out to him off the chrome carousel, carried it as he led Icoupov through the crowded concourse and out into the dull Munich evening, gray as morning. It wasn’t as cold as it had been in Switzerland, but it was wetter, the chill as penetrating as Icoupov’s foreboding.

It wasn’t fear he felt so much as sorrow. Sorrow that he might not see this battle finished, that his hated nemesis would win, that old grudges would not be settled, that his father’s memory would remain sullied, that his murder would remain unavenged.

To be sure, there had been attrition on both sides, he thought as he settled into the backseat of the dove-gray Mercedes. The endgame had begun and already he sensed the checkmate waiting for him not far off. It was difficult but necessary for him to admit that he had been outmaneuvered at every turn. Perhaps he wasn’t up to carrying the vision his father had for the Eastern Brotherhood; perhaps the corruption and inversion of ideals had gone too far. Whatever the case, he had lost a great deal of ground to his enemy, and Icoupov had come to the bleak conclusion that he had only one chance to win. His chance rested with Arkadin, the plans for the Black Legion’s attack on New York City’s Empire State Building, and Jason Bourne. For he realized now that his nemesis was too strong. Without the American’s help, he feared his cause was lost.

He stared out the smoked-glass window at the looming skyline of Munich. It gave him a shiver to be back here, where it all began, where the Eastern Brotherhood was saved from Allied war trials following the collapse of the Third Reich.

At that time his father-Farid Icoupov-and Ibrahim Sever were jointly in charge of what was left of the Eastern Legions. Up until the Nazi surrender, Farid, the intellectual, ran the intelligence network that infiltrated the Soviet Union, while Ibrahim, the warrior, commanded the legions that fought on the Eastern Front.

Six months before the Reich’s capitulation, the two men met outside Berlin. They saw the end, even if the lunatic Nazi hierarchy was oblivious. So they laid plans for how to ensure their people would survive the war’s aftermath. The first thing Ibrahim did was to move his soldiers out of harm’s way. By that juncture the Nazi bureaucratic infrastructure had been decimated by Allied bombing, so it was not difficult to redeploy his people into Belgium, Denmark, Greece, and Italy, where they were safe from the reflexive violence of the first wave of invading Allies.

Because Farid and Ibrahim despised Stalin, because they were witness to the massive scale of the atrocities ordered by him, they were in a unique position to understand the Allied fear of communism. Farid argued persuasively that soldiers would be of no use to the Allies, but an intelligence network already inside the Soviet Union would be invaluable. He keenly understood how antithetical communism was to capitalism, that the Americans and the Soviets were allies out of necessity. He felt it inevitable that after the war was over these uncomfortable allies would become bitter enemies.

Ibrahim had no recourse but to agree with his friend’s thesis, and indeed this was how it turned out. At every step, Farid and Ibrahim brilliantly outmaneuvered the postwar German agencies in keeping control of their people. As a result, the Eastern Legions not only survived but in fact prospered in postwar Germany.

Farid, however, fairly quickly uncovered a pattern of violence that made him suspicious. German officials who disagreed with his eloquent arguments for continued control were replaced by ones who did. That was odd enough, but then he discovered that those original officials no longer existed. To a one, they had dropped out of sight, never to be seen or heard from again.

Farid bypassed the weakling German bureaucracy and went straight to the Americans with his concerns, but he was unprepared for their response, which was one big shrug. No one, it seemed, cared the least bit about disappeared Germans. They were all too busy defending their slice of Berlin to be bothered.

It was about this time that Ibrahim came to him with the idea of moving the Eastern Legions’ headquarters to Munich, out of the way of the increasing antagonism between the Americans and the Soviets. Fed up with the American’s disinterest, Farid readily agreed.

They found postwar Munich a bombed-out wreck, seething with immigrant Muslims. Ibrahim wasted no time in recruiting these people into the organization, which by this time had changed its name to the Eastern Brotherhood. For his part, Farid found the American intelligence community in Munich far more receptive to his arguments. Indeed, they were desperate for him and his network. Emboldened, he told them that if they wanted to make a formal arrangement with the Eastern Brotherhood for intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain, they had to look into the disappearances of the list of former German officials he handed them.

It took three months, but at the end of that time he was asked to appear before a man named Brian Folks, whose official title was American attachй of something-or-other. In fact, he was OSS chief of station in Munich, the man who received the intel Farid’s network provided him from inside the Soviet Union.

Folks told him that the unofficial investigation Farid asked him to undertake had now been completed. Without another word, he handed over a slim file, sat without comment as Farid read it. The folder contained the photos of each of the German officials on the list Farid had provided. Following each photo was a sheet detailing the findings. All the men were dead. All had been shot in the back of the head. Farid read through this meager material with an increasing sense of frustration. Then he looked up at Folks and said, “Is this it? Is this all there is?”

Folks watched Farid from behind steel-rimmed glasses. “It’s all that appears in the report,” he said. “But those aren’t all the findings.” He held out his hand, took the file back. Then he turned, put the sheets one by one through a shredder. When he was finished, he threw the empty folder into the wastebasket, the contents of which were burned every evening at precisely 5 PM.

Following this solemn ritual, he placed his hands on his desk, said to Farid, “The finding of most interest to you is this: Evidence collected indicates conclusively that the murders of these men were committed by Ibrahim Sever.”

Tyrone shifted on the bare concrete floor. It was so slippery with his own fluids that one knee went out from under him, splaying him so painfully that he cried out. Of course, no one came to help him; he was alone in the interrogation cell in the basement of the NSA safe house deep in the Virginia countryside. He had to quite literally locate himself in his mind, had to trace the route he and Soraya had taken when they’d driven to the safe house. When? Three days ago? Ten hours? What? The rendition he’d been subjected to had erased any sense of time. The hood over his head threatened to erase his sense of place, so that periodically he had to say to himself: “I’m in an interrogation cell in the basement of the NSA safe house in”-and here he would recite the name of the last town he and Soraya had passed… when?

That was the problem, really. His sense of disorientation was so complete, there were periods when he couldn’t distinguish up from down. Worse, those periods were becoming both longer and more frequent.

The pain was hardly an issue because he was used to pain, though never this intense or prolonged. It was the disorientation that was worming its way into his brain like a surgeon’s drill. It seemed that with each bout he was losing more of himself, as if he were made up of grains of salt or sand trickling away from him. And what would happen when they were all gone? What would he become?

He thought of DJ Tank and the rest of his former crew. He thought of Deron, of Kiki, but none of those tricks worked. They’d slip away like mist and he’d be left to the void into which, he was increasingly sure, he’d disappear. Then he thought of Soraya, conjured her piece by piece, as if he were a sculptor, molding her out of a lump of clay. And he found that as his mind lovingly re-created each minute bit of her, he miraculously stayed intact.

As he struggled back to a position that was tolerably painful, he heard a metallic scrape, and his head came up. Before anything else could transpire, the scents of freshly cooked eggs and bacon came to him, making his mouth water. He’d been fed nothing but plain oatmeal since he was brought here. And at inconsistent times-sometimes one meal right after the other-in order to keep his disorientation absolute.

He heard the scuff of leather soles-two men, his ears told him.

Then General Kendall’s voice, saying imperiously, “Set the food on the table, Willard. Right there, thank you. That will be all.”

One set of shoe soles clacked across the floor, the sound of the door closing. Silence. Then the screech of a chair being hitched across the concrete. Kendall was sitting down, Tyrone surmised.

“What have we here?” Kendall said, clearly to himself. “Ah, my favorite: eggs over easy, bacon, buttered grits, hot biscuits and gravy.” The sound of cutlery being taken up. “You like grits, Tyrone? You like biscuits and gravy?”

Tyrone wasn’t too far gone to be incensed. “On’y ting I like betta is watermelon, sah.”

“That’s a damn fine imitation of one of your brethren, Tyrone.” He was obviously talking while eating. “This is damn fine chow. Would you like some?”

Tyrone’s stomach growled so loudly he was sure Kendall heard it.

“All you gotta do is tell me everything you and the Moore woman were up to.”

“I don’t rat anyone out,” Tyrone said bitterly.

“Um.” The sounds of Kendall swallowing. “That’s what they all say in the beginning.” He chewed some more. “You do know this is just the beginning, don’t you, Tyrone? Sure you do. Just like you know the Moore woman isn’t going to save you. She’s going to hang you out to dry, sure as I’m sitting here eating the most mouthwatering biscuits I ever had. You know why? Because LaValle gave her a choice: you or Jason Bourne. You know her history with Bourne. She might claim she didn’t fuck him but you and I know better.”

“She never slept with him,” Tyrone said before he could stop himself.

“Sure. She told you that.” Munch, munch, munch went Kendall’s jaws, shredding the crisp bacon. “What’d you expect her to say?”

The sonovabitch was playing mind games with him, Tyrone knew that for a fact. Trouble was, he wasn’t lying. Tyrone knew how Soraya felt about Bourne-it was written all over her face every time she saw him or his name came up. Though she’d said otherwise, the question Kendall had just raised had gnawed at him like an addict at a candy bar.

It was difficult not to envy Bourne with his freedom, his encyclopedic knowledge, his friendship as equals with Deron. But all these things Tyrone dealt with in his own way. It was Soraya’s love for Bourne that was so hard to live with.

He heard the scrape of chair legs and then felt the presence of Kendall as he squatted down beside him. It was astonishing, Tyrone thought, how much heat another human being gave off.

“I have to say, Tyrone, you really have taken a beating,” Kendall said. “I think you deserve a reward for how well you’ve held up. Shit, we’ve had suspects in here who were crying for their mamas after twenty-four hours. Not you, though.” The quick click-clack of a metal utensil against a china plate. “How about some eggs and bacon? Man, this was some big plate of food, I surely can’t finish it myself. So come on. Join me.”

As the hood was raised high enough to expose his mouth Tyrone was conflicted. His mind told him to refuse the offer, but his severely shrunken stomach yearned for real food. He could smell the rich flavors of bacon and eggs, felt the food warm as a kiss against his lips.

“Hey, man, what’re you waiting for?”

Fuck it, Tyrone said to himself. The tastes of the food exploded inside his mouth. He wanted to moan in pleasure. He wolfed down the first few forkfuls fed to him, then forced himself to chew slowly and methodically, extracting every bit of flavor from the hickory-smoked meat and the rich yolk.

“Tastes good,” Kendall said. He must have regained his feet because his voice was above Tyrone when he said, “Tastes real good, doesn’t it?”

Tyrone was about to nod his assent when pain exploded in the pit of his stomach. He grunted when it came again. He’d been kicked before, so he knew what Kendall was doing. The third kick landed. He tried to hold on to his food, but the involuntary reaction had begun. A moment later he vomited up all the delicious food Kendall had fed him.

The Munich courier is the last one in the network,” Devra said. “His name is Egon Kirsch, but that’s all I know. I never met him; no one I know did. Pyotr made sure that link was completely compartmentalized. So far as I know Kirsch dealt directly with Pyotr and no one else.”

“Who does Kirsch deliver his intel to?” Arkadin said. “Who’s at the other end of the network?”

“I have no idea.”

He believed her. “Did Heinrich and Kirsch have a particular meeting place?”

She shook her head.

On the Lufthansa flight from Istanbul to Munich he sat shoulder-to-shoulder with her and wondered what the hell he was doing. She’d given him all the information he was going to get from her. He had the plans; he was on the last lap of his mission. All that remained was to deliver the plans to Icoupov, find Kirsch, and persuade him to lead Arkadin back to the end of the network. Child’s play.

Which begged the question of what to do with Devra. He’d already made up his mind to kill her, as he’d killed Marlene and so many others. It was a fait accompli, a fixed point detailed in his mind, a diamond that only needed polishing to sparkle into life. Sitting in the jetliner he heard the quick report from the gun, leaves falling over her dead body, covering her like a blanket.

Devra, who was seated on the aisle, got up, made her way back to the lavatories. Arkadin closed his eyes and was back in the sooty stench of Nizhny Tagil, men with filed teeth and blurry tattoos, women old before their time, bent, swigging homemade vodka from plastic soda bottles, girls with sunken eyes, bereft of a future. And then the mass grave…

His eyes popped open. He was having difficulty breathing. Heaving himself to his feet, he followed Devra. She was the last of the passengers waiting. The accordion door on the right opened, an older women bustled out, squeezed by Devra then Arkadin. Devra went into the lavatory, closed the door, and locked it. The OCCUPIED sign came on.

Arkadin walked to the door, stood in front of it for a moment. Then he knocked on it gently.

“Just a minute,” her voice came to him.

Leaning his head against the door, he said, “Devra, it’s me.” And after a short silence, “Open the door.”

A moment later, the door folded back. She stood in front of him.

“I want to come in,” he said.

Their eyes locked for the space of several heartbeats as each tried to gauge the intent of the other.

Then she backed up against the tiny sink, Arkadin stepped inside, with some difficulty shut the door behind him, and turned the lock.

Thirty

IT’S STATE-OF-THE-ART,” Gunter Mьller said. “Guaranteed.”

Both he and Moira were wearing hard hats as they walked through the series of semi-automated workshops of Kaller Steelworks Gesellschaft, where the coupling link that would receive the LNG tankers as they nosed into the NextGen Long Beach terminal had been manufactured.

Mьller, the team leader on the NextGen coupling link project, was a senior vice president of Kaller, a smallish man dressed impeccably in a conservatively cut three-piece chalk-striped suit, expensive shoes, and a tie in black and gold, Munich’s colors since the time of the Holy Roman Empire. His skin was bright pink, as if he’d just had his face steam-cleaned, and thick brown hair, graying at the sides. He talked slowly and distinctly in good English, though he was rather endearingly weak with modern American idioms.

At each step he explained the manufacturing process with excruciating detail, great pride. Spread out before them were the design drawings, along with the specs, to which Mьller referred time and again.

Moira was listening with only one ear. How her situation had changed now that the Firm was out of the picture, now that NextGen was on its own with the security of its terminal operations in Long Beach, now that she had been reassigned.

But the more things change, she thought, the more they stay the same. The moment Noah had handed her the packet for Damascus she knew she wouldn’t disengage herself from the Long Beach terminal project. No matter what Noah or his bosses had determined she couldn’t leave NextGen or this project in jeopardy. Mьller, like everyone else at Kaller and, for that matter, nearly everyone at NextGen, had no idea she worked for the Firm. Only she knew she should be on a flight to Damascus, not here with him. She had a grace period of mere hours before her contact at NextGen would begin to ask questions as to why she was still on the LNG terminal project. By then, she hoped to convince NextGen’s president of the wisdom of her disobeying the Firm’s orders.

Finally, they reached the loading bay where the sixteen parts of the coupling link were being packed for shipment by air to Long Beach on the NextGen 747 jet that had brought her and Bourne to Munich.

“As specified in the contract, our team of engineers will be accompanying you on the homeward journey.” Mьller rolled up the drawings, snapped a rubber band around them, and handed them to Moira. “They’ll be in charge of putting the coupling link together on site. I have every confidence that all will go smoothly.”

“It had better,” Moira said. “The LNG tanker is scheduled to dock at the terminal in thirty hours.” She shot Mьller an unpleasant look. “Not much leeway for your engineers.”

“Not to worry, Fraulein Trevor,” he said cheerfully. “They’re more than up to the task.”

“For your company’s sake, I sincerely hope so.” She stowed the roll under her left arm, preparatory to leaving. “Shall we speak frankly, Herr Mьller?”

He smiled. “Always.”

“I wouldn’t have had to come here at all had it not been for the string of delays that set your manufacturing process back.”

Mьller’s smile seemed immovable. “My dear Fraulein, as I explained to your superiors, the delays were unavoidable-please blame the Chinese for the temporary shortage of steel, and the South Africans for the energy shortages that is forcing the platinum mines to work at half speed.” He spread his hands. “We’ve done the best we could, I assure you.” His smile widened. “And now we are at the end of our journey together. The coupling link will be in Long Beach within eighteen hours, and eight hours later it will be in one piece and ready to receive your tanker of liquid natural gas.” He stuck out his hand. “All will have a happy ending, yes?”

“Of course it will. Thank you, Herr Mьller.”

Mьller nearly clicked his heels. “The pleasure is all mine, Fraulein.”

Moira walked back through the factory with Mьller at her side. She said good-bye to him once more at the gates to the factory, walked across the gravel drive to where her chauffeured car sat waiting for her, its precisely engineered German engine purring quietly.

They pulled out of the Kaller Steelworks property, turned left toward the autobahn back to Munich. Five minutes later, her driver said, “There’s a car following us, Fraulein.”

Turning around, Moira peered out the back window. A small Volks-wagen, no more than fifty yards behind them, flashed its headlights.

“Pull over.” She pushed aside the hem of her long skirt, took a SIG Sauer out of the holster strapped to her left ankle.

The driver did as he was told, and the car came to a stop on the shoulder of the road. The Volkswagen pulled in behind. Moira sat waiting for something to happen; she was too well trained to get out of the car.

At length, the Volkswagen drove off the shoulder, into the underbrush, where it disappeared from sight. A moment later a man became visible tramping out onto the side of the road. He was tall and narrow, with a pencil mustache and suspenders holding up his trousers. He was in his shirtsleeves, oblivious to the German winter chill. She could see that he had no weapons on him, which, she reasoned, was the point. When he came abreast of her car, she leaned across the backseat, opened the door for him, and he slipped inside.

“My name is Hauser, Fraulein Trevor. Arthur Hauser.” His expression was morose, bitter. “I apologize for the incivility of this impromptu meeting, but I assure you the melodrama is necessary.” As if to underscore his words, he glanced back down the road toward the factory, his expression fearful. “I do not have much time so I shall come straight to the point. There is a flaw in the coupling link-not, I hasten to add, in the hardware. That, I assure you, is absolutely sound. But there is a problem with the software. Nothing that will interfere with the operation of the link, no, not at all. It is, rather, a security flaw-a window, if you will. The chances are it might never be discovered, but all the same it’s there.”

When Hauser glanced again out the back window a car was coming toward them. He clamped his jaws shut, watched as the vehicle passed by, then visibly relaxed as it drove on down the road.

“Herr Mьller was not altogether truthful. The delays were caused by this software flaw, nothing else. I should know, since I was part of the software design team. We tried for a patch, but it’s been devilishly difficult, and we ran out of time.”

“Just how serious is this flaw?” Moira said.

“It depends on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.” Hauser ducked his head, embarrassed. “As I said, it might never be discovered.”

Moira glanced out the window for a time, thinking that she shouldn’t ask the next question because, as Noah told her in no uncertain terms, the Firm was now out of ensuring the security of NextGen’s LNG terminal.

And then she heard herself say, “What if I’m a pessimist?”

Peter Marks found Rodney Feir, chief of field support, in the CI caff, eating a bowl of New England clam chowder. Feir looked up, gestured to Marks to sit. Peter Marks had been elevated to chief of operations after the ill-starred Rob Batt was outed as an NSA rat.

“How’s it going?” Feir said.

“How d’you think it’s going?” Marks parked himself on the chair opposite Feir. “I’ve been vetting every one of Batt’s contacts for any sign of NSA taint. It’s daunting and frustrating work. You?”

“As exhausted as you, I expect.” Feir sprinkled oyster crackers into the chowder. “I’ve been briefing the new DCI on everything from agents in the field to the cleaning firm we’ve used for the past twenty years.”

“D’you think she’ll work out?”

Feir knew he had to be careful here. “I’ll say this for her: She’s a stickler for detail. No stone unturned. She’s not leaving anything to chance.”

“That’s a relief.” Marks twiddled a fork between his thumb and fingers. “What we don’t need is another crisis. I’d be happy with someone who can right this listing ship.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“The reason I’m here,” Marks said, “is I’m having a staffing problem. I’ve lost some people to attrition. Of course, that’s inevitable. I thought I’d get some good recruits graduating from the program, but they went to Typhon. I’m in need of a short-term fix.”

Feir chewed on a mouthful of gritty clam bits and soft potato cubes. He’d diverted those graduates to Typhon and had been waiting for Marks to come to him ever since. “How can I help?”

“I’d like some of Dick Symes’s people to be assigned to my directorate.” Dick Symes was the chief of intelligence. “Just temporarily, you understand, until I can get some raw recruits through training and orientation.”

“Have you talked to Dick?”

“Why bother? He’ll just tell me to go to hell. But you can plead my case to Hart. She’s so snowed under that you’re the one best suited to get her to listen to me. If she makes the call Dick can yell all he wants, it won’t matter.”

Feir wiped his lips. “What number of personnel are we talking here, Peter?”

“Eighteen, two dozen tops.”

“Not inconsiderable. The DCI is going to want to know what you have in mind.”

“I’ve got a brief detailing it all ready to go,” Marks said. “I shoot it to you electronically, you walk it in to her personally.”

Feir nodded. “I think that can be arranged.”

Relief flooded Marks’s face. “Thanks, Rodney.”

“Don’t mention it.” He began to dig into what was left of the chowder. As Marks was about to rise, he said, “Do you by any chance know where Soraya is? She’s not in her office and she’s not answering her cell.”

“Unh-unh.” Marks resettled himself. “Why?”

“No reason.”

Something in Feir’s voice gave him pause. “No reason? Really?”

“Just, you know how office scuttlebutt can be.”

“Meaning?”

“You two are tight, aren’t you.”

“Is that what you heard?”

“Well, yeah.” Feir placed his spoon into the empty bowl. “But if it isn’t true-”

“I don’t know where she is, Rodney.” Marks’s gaze drifted off. “We never had that kind of thing going.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

Marks waved away his apology. “Forget it. I have. So what do you want to talk with her about?”

This was what Feir was hoping he’d say. According to the general, he and LaValle required intel on the nuts and bolts of how Typhon worked. “Budgets. She’s got so many agents in the field, the DCI wants an accounting of their expenses-which, frankly, hasn’t been done since Martin died.”

“That’s understandable, given what’s been going on in here lately.”

Feir shrugged deferentially. “I’d do it myself; Soraya’s got more on her plate than she can handle, I imagine. Trouble is, I don’t even know where the files are.” He was going to add: Do you? but decided that would be overselling it.

Marks thought a minute. “I might be able to help you there.”

How badly does your shoulder hurt?” Devra said.

Arkadin, pressed against her body, his powerful arms around her, said, “I don’t know how to answer that. I have an extremely high tolerance for pain.”

The airplane’s cramped bathroom allowed him to concentrate exclusively on her. It was like being in a coffin together, like being dead, but in a strange afterlife where only they existed.

She smiled up at him as one of his hands traced its way from the small of her back to her neck. His thumb pressed against her jaw, gently tilted her head up while his fingers tightened on the nape of her neck.

He leaned in, his weight arching her torso backward above the sink. He could see the back of her head in the mirror, his face about to eclipse hers. A flame of emotion flickered to life, illuminating the soulless void inside him.

He kissed her.

“Gently,” she whispered. “Relax your lips.”

Her moist lips opened beneath his, her tongue searched for his, tentatively at first, then with an unmistakable hunger. His lips trembled. He had never felt anything when kissing a woman. In fact, he’d always done his best to avoid it, not knowing what it was for, or why women sought it so relentlessly. An exchange of fluids, that’s all it was to him, like a procedure performed in a doctor’s office. The best he could say was that it was painless, that it was over quickly.

The electricity that shot through him when his lips met hers stunned him. The sheer pleasure of it astonished him. It hadn’t been like this with Marlene; it hadn’t been like this with anyone. He did not know what to make of the tremor in his knees. Her sweet, moaning exhalations entered him like silent cries of ecstasy. He swallowed them whole, and wanted more.

Wanting was something Arkadin was unused to. Need was the word that had driven his life up to this moment: He needed to revenge himself on his mother, he needed to escape home, he needed strike out on his own, no matter the course, he needed to bury rivals and enemies, he needed to destroy anyone who got close to his secrets. But want? That was another matter entirely. Devra defined want for him. And it was only when he was certain he no longer needed her that his desire revealed itself. He wanted her.

When he lifted her skirt, probing underneath, her leg drew up. Her fingers nimbly freed him from his clothing. Then he stopped thinking altogether.

Afterward, when they’d returned to their seats, making their way through the line of glaring passengers queued up to use the lavatory, Devra burst into laughter. Arkadin sat watching her. This was another thing unique about her. Anyone else would have asked, Was that your first time? Not her. She wasn’t interested in prying his lid open, peering inside to see what made him tick. She had no need to know. Because he was someone who had always needed something, he couldn’t tolerate that trait in anyone else.

He was aware of her next to him in a way he was unable to understand. It was as if he could feel her heartbeat, the rush of blood through her body, a body that seemed frail to him, even though he knew how tough she could be, after all she’d suffered. How easily her bones could be broken, how easily a knife slipped through her ribs might pierce her heart, how easily a bullet could shatter her skull. These thoughts sent him into a rage, and he shifted closer to her, as if she were in need of protection-which, when it came to her former allies, she most certainly was. He knew then that he’d do everything in his power to kill anyone who sought to do her harm.

Feeling him edge closer, she turned and smiled. “You know something, Leonid, for the first time in my life I feel safe. All that prickly shit I give off is something I learned early on to keep people away.”

“You learned to be tough like your mother.”

She shook her head. “That’s the really shitty part. My mother had this tough shell, yeah, but it was skin-deep. Beneath it, she was a mass of fears.”

Devra put her head against the headrest as she continued, “In fact, the most vivid thing I remember about my mother was her fear. It came off her like a stink. Even after she’d bathed, I smelled it. Of course, for a long time I didn’t know what it was, and maybe I was the only one who smelled it, I don’t know.

“Anyway, she used to tell me an old Ukrainian folktale. It was about the Nine Levels of Hell. What was she thinking? Was she trying to frighten me or lessen her own fear by sharing it with me? I don’t know. In any case, this is what she told me. There is one heaven, but there are nine levels of hell where, depending on the severity of your sins, you’re sent when you die.

“The first, the least bad, is the one familiar to everyone, where you roast in flames. The second is where you’re alone on the summit of a mountain. Every night you freeze solid, slowly and horribly, only to thaw out in the morning, when the process begins all over again. The third is a place of blinding light; the fourth of pitch blackness. The fifth is a place of icy winds that cut you, quite literally, like a knife. In the sixth, you’re pierced by arrows. In the seventh, you’re slowly buried by an army of ants. In the eighth, you’re crucified.

“But it was the ninth level that terrified my mother the most. There, you lived among wild beasts that gorged themselves on human hearts.”

The cruelty of telling this to a child wasn’t lost on Arkadin. He was absolutely certain that if his mother had been Ukrainian she’d have told him the same folktale.

“I used to laugh at her story-or at least I tried to,” Devra said. “I struggled against believing such nonsense. But that was before a number of those levels of hell were visited on us.”

Arkadin felt her presence inside him all the more deeply. The sense of wanting to protect her seemed to bounce around inside him, increasing exponentially as his brain tried to come to terms with what the feeling meant. Had he at last stumbled across something big enough, bright enough, strong enough to put his demons to rest?

After Marlene’s death, Icoupov had seen the writing on the wall. He’d stopped trying to peer into Arkadin’s past. Instead he’d shipped him off to America to be rehabilitated. “Reprogrammed,” Icoupov had called it. Arkadin had spent eighteen months in the Washington, DC, area going through a unique experimental program devised and run by a friend of Icoupov’s. Arkadin had emerged changed in many ways, though his past-his shadows, his demons-remained intact. How he wished the program had erased all memory of it! But that wasn’t the nature of the program. Icoupov no longer cared about Arkadin’s past, what concerned him was his future, and for that the program was ideal.

He fell asleep thinking about the program, but he dreamed he was back in Nizhny Tagil. He never dreamed about the program; in the program he felt safe. His dreams weren’t about safety; they were about being pushed from great heights.

Late at night, a subterranean bar called Crespi was the only option when he wanted to get a drink in Nizhny Tagil. It was a reeking place, filled with tattooed men in tracksuits, gold chains around their necks, short-skirted women so heavily made up they looked like store mannequins. Behind their raccoon eyes were vacant pits where their souls had been.

It was in Crespi where Arkadin at age thirteen was first beaten to a pulp by four burly men with pig eyes and Neanderthal brows. And it was to Crespi that Arkadin, after nursing his wounds, returned three months later and blew the men’s brains all over the walls. When another crim tried to snatch his gun away, Arkadin shot him point-blank in the face. That sight stopped anyone else in the bar from approaching him. It also gained him a reputation, which helped him to amass a mini real estate empire.

But in that city of smelted iron and hissing slag success had its own particular consequences. For Arkadin, it was coming to the attention of Stas Kuzin, one of the local crime bosses. Kuzin found Arkadin one night, four years later, having a bare-knuckle brawl with a giant lout whom Arkadin called out on a bet, for the prize of one beer.

Having demolished the giant, Arkadin grabbed his free beer, swigged half of it down, and, turning, confronted Stas Kuzin. Arkadin knew him immediately; everyone in Nizhny Tagil did. He had a thick black pelt of hair that came down in a horizontal slash to within an inch of his eyebrows. His head sat on his shoulders like a marble on a stone wall. His jaw had been broken and reconstructed so badly-probably in prison-that he spoke with a peculiar hissing sound, like a serpent. Sometimes what he said was all but unintelligible.

On either side of Kuzin were two ghoulish-looking men with sunken eyes and crude tattoos of dogs on the backs of their hands, which marked them as forever bound to their master.

“Let’s talk,” this monstrosity said to Arkadin, jerking his tiny head toward a table.

The men who’d been occupying the table rose as one when Kuzin approached, fleeing to the other side of the bar. Kuzin hooked his shoe around a chair leg, dragged it around, and sat down. Disconcertingly, he kept his hands in his lap, as if at any moment he’d draw down on Arkadin and shoot him dead.

He began talking, but it took the seventeen-year-old Arkadin some minutes before he could make heads or tails of what Kuzin was saying. It was like listening to a drowning man going under for the third time. At length, he realized that Kuzin was proposing a merger of sorts: half Arkadin’s stake in real estate for 10 percent of Kuzin’s operation.

And just what was Stas Kuzin’s operation? No one would speak about it openly, but there was no lack of rumors on the subject. Everything from running spent nuclear fuel rods for the big boys over in Moscow to white slave trading, drug trafficking, and prostitution was laid at Kuzin’s doorstep. For his own part, Arkadin tended to dismiss the more outlandish speculation in favor of what he very well knew would make Kuzin money in Nizhny Tagil, namely, prostitution and drugs. Every man in the city had to get laid, and if they had any money at all, drugs were far preferable to beer and bathtub vodka.

Once again, want never appeared on Arkadin’s horizon, only need. He needed to do more than survive in this city of permasoot, violence, and black lung disease. He had come as far as he could on his own. He made enough to sustain himself here, but not enough to break away to Moscow where he needed to go to grab life’s richest opportunities. Outside, the rings of hell rose up: brick smokestacks, vigorously belching particle-laden smoke, iron guard towers of the brutal prison zonas, bristling with assault rifles, powerful spotlights, and bellowing sirens.

In here he was locked inside his own brutal zona with Stas Kuzin. Arkadin gave the only sensible answer. He said yes, and so entered the ninth level of hell.

Thirty-One

WHILE ON LINE for passport control in Munich, Bourne phoned Specter, who assured him everything was in readiness. Moments later he came in range of the first set of the airport’s CCTV cameras. Instantly his image was picked up by the software employed at Semion Icoupov’s headquarters, and before he’d finished his call to the professor he’d been identified.

At once Icoupov was called, who ordered his people stationed in Munich to move from standby to action, thus alerting both the airport personnel and the Immigration people under Icoupov’s control. The man directing the incoming passengers to the different cordoned-off lanes leading to the Immigration booths received a photo of Bourne on his computer screen just in time to indicate Bourne should go to booth 3.

The Immigration officer manning booth 3 listened to the voice coming through the electronic device in his ear. When the man identified to him as Jason Bourne handed over his passport the officer asked him the usual questions-“How long do you intend to remain in Germany? Is your visit business or pleasure?”-while paging through the passport. He moved it away from the window, passed the photo under a humming purple light. As he did so, he pressed a small metallic disk the thickness of a human nail into the inside back cover of the passport. Then he closed the booklet, smoothed its front and back covers, and handed it back to Bourne.

“Have a pleasant stay in Munich,” he said without a trace of emotion or interest. He was already looking beyond Bourne to the next passenger in line.

As in Sheremetyevo, Bourne had the sense that he was under physical surveillance. He changed taxis twice when he arrived at the seething center of the city. In Marienplatz, a large open square from which the historic Marian column ascended, he walked past medieval cathedrals, through flocks of pigeons, lost himself within the crowds of guided tours, gawping at the sugar-icing architecture and the looming twin domes of the Frauenkirche, cathedral of the archbishop of Munich-Freising, the symbol of the city.

He inserted himself in a tour group gathered around a government building in which was inset the city’s official shield, depicting a monk with hands spread wide. The tour leader was telling her charges that the German name, Mьnchen, stemmed from an Old High German word meaning “monks.” In 1158 or thereabouts, the current duke of Saxony and Bavaria built a bridge over the Isar River, connecting the saltworks, for which the growing city would soon become famous, with a settlement of Benedictine monks. He installed a tollbooth on the bridge, which became a vital link in the Salt Route in and out of the high Bavarian plains on which Munich was built, and a mint in which to house his profits. The modern-day mercantile city was not so far removed from its medieval beginnings.

When Bourne was certain he wasn’t being shadowed, he slipped away from the group and boarded a taxi, which dropped him off six blocks from the Wittelsbach Palace.

According to the professor, Kirsch said he’d rather meet Bourne in a public setting. He chose the State Museum for Egyptian Art on Hofgartenstrasse, which was housed within the massive rococo facade of the Wittelsbach Palace. Bourne took a full circuit of the streets around the palace, checking once more for tags, but he couldn’t recall being in Munich before. He didn’t have that eerie sense of dйjа vu that meant he had returned to a place he couldn’t remember. Therefore, he knew local tags would have the advantage of terrain. There might be a dozen places to hide around the palace that he didn’t know about.

Shrugging, he entered the museum. The metal detector was staffed by a pair of armed security guards, who were also setting aside backpacks and picking through handbags. On either side of the vestibule was a pair of basalt statues of the Egyptian god Horus-a falcon with a disk of the sun on his forehead-and his mother, Isis. Instead of walking directly to the exhibits, Bourne turned, stood behind the statue of Horus, watching for ten minutes as people came and went. He noted everyone between twenty-five and fifty, memorizing their faces. There were seventeen in all.

He then made his way past a female armed guard, into the exhibition halls, where he found Kirsch precisely where he told Specter he’d be, scrutinizing an ancient carving of a lion’s head. He recognized Kirsch from the photo Specter had sent him, a snapshot of the two men standing together on the university campus. The professor’s courier was a wiry little man with a shiny bald skull and black eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. He had pale blue eyes that darted this way and that as if on gimbals.

Bourne went past him, ostensibly looking at several sarcophagi while using his peripheral vision to check for any of the seventeen people who’d entered the museum after him. When no one presented themselves, he retraced his steps.

Kirsch did not turn as Bourne came up beside him, but said, “I know it sounds ridiculous, but doesn’t this sculpture remind you of something?”

“The Pink Panther,” Bourne said, both because it was the proper code response, and because the sculpture did look astonishingly like the modern-day cartoon icon.

Kirsch nodded. “Glad you made it without incident.” He handed over the keys to his apartment, the code for the front door, and detailed directions to it from the museum. He looked relieved, as if he were handing over his burdensome life rather than his home.

“There are some features of my apartment I want to talk to you about.”

As Kirsch spoke they moved on to a granite sculpture of the kneeling Senenmut, from the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

“The ancient Egyptians knew how to live,” Kirsch observed. “They weren’t afraid of death. To them, it was just another journey, not to be undertaken lightly, but still they knew there was something waiting for them after life.” He put his hand out, as if to touch the statue or perhaps to absorb some of its potency. “Look at this statue. Life still glows within it, thousands of years later. For centuries the Egyptians had no equal.”

“Until they were conquered by the Romans.”

“And yet,” Kirsch said, “it was the Romans who were changed by the Egyptians. A century after the Ptolemys and Julius Caesar ruled from Alexandria, it was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of revenge and rebellion, who was worshipped throughout the Roman Empire. In fact, it’s all too likely that the early Christian Church founders, unable to do away with her or her followers, transmogrified her, stripped her of her war-like nature, and made from her the perfectly peaceful Virgin Mary.”

“Leonid Arkadin could use a little less Isis and a lot more Virgin Mary,” Bourne mused.

Kirsch raised his eyebrows. “What do you know of this man?”

“I know a lot of dangerous people are terrified of him.”

“With good reason,” Kirsch said. “The man’s a homicidal maniac. He was born and raised in Nizhny Tagil, a hotbed of homicidal maniacs.”

“So I’ve heard,” Bourne nodded.

“And there he would have stayed had it not been for Tarkanian.”

Bourne’s ears pricked up. He’d assumed that Maslov had put his man in Tarkanian’s apartment because that’s where Gala was living. “Wait a minute, what does Tarkanian have to do with Arkadin?”

“Everything. Without Mischa Tarkanian, Arkadin would never have escaped Nizhny Tagil. It was Tarkanian who brought him to Moscow.”

“Are they both members of the Black Legion?”

“So I’ve been given to understand,” Kirsch said. “But I’m only an artist; the clandestine life has given me an ulcer. If I didn’t need the money-I’m a singularly unsuccessful artist, I’m afraid-I never would have stayed in this long. This was to be my last favor for Specter.” His eyes continued to dart to the left and right. “Now that Arkadin has murdered Dieter Heinrich, last favor has taken on a new and terrifying meaning.”

Bourne was now on full alert. Specter had assumed that Tarkanian was Black Legion, and Kirsch just confirmed it. But Maslov had denied Tarkanian’s affiliation with the terrorist group. Someone was lying.

Bourne was about to ask Kirsch about the discrepancy when out of the corner of his eye he spotted one of the men who’d come into the museum just after he had. The man had paused for a moment in the vestibule, as if orienting himself, then strode purposefully off into the exhibition hall.

Because the man was close enough to overhear them in the museum’s hushed atmosphere, Bourne took Kirsch’s arm. “Come this way,” he said, leading the German contact into another room, which was dominated by a calcite statue of twins from the Eighth Dynasty. It was chipped, time-worn, dating from 2390 BC.

Pushing Kirsch behind the statue, Bourne stood like a sentinel, watching the other man’s movements. The man glanced up, saw that Bourne and Kirsch were no longer at the statue of Senenmut, and looked casually around.

“Stay here,” Bourne whispered to Kirsch.

“What is it?” There was a slight quaver in Kirsch’s voice, but he looked stalwart enough. “Is Arkadin here?”

“Whatever happens,” Bourne warned him, “stay put. You’ll be safe until I come get you.”

As Bourne moved around the far side of the Egyptian twins, the man entered the gallery. Bourne walked to the side opening and into the room beyond. The man, sauntering nonchalantly, took a quick look around and, as if seeing nothing of interest, followed Bourne.

This gallery held a number of high display cases but was dominated by a five-thousand-year-old stone statue of a woman with half her head sheared off. The antiquity was staggering, but Bourne had no time to appreciate it. Perhaps because it was toward the rear of the museum, the room was deserted, save for Bourne and the man, who was standing between Bourne and the one way in or out of the gallery.

Bourne placed himself behind a two-sided display case with a board in the center on which were hung small artifacts-sacred blue scarabs and gold jewelry. Because of a center gap in the board, Bourne could see the man, but the man remained unaware of his position.

Standing completely still, Bourne waited until the man began to come around the right side of the display case. Bourne moved quickly to his right, around the opposite side of the case, and rushed the man.

He shoved him against the wall, but the man maintained his balance. As he took up a defensive posture he pulled a ceramic knife from a sheath under his armpit, swung it back and forth to keep Bourne at bay.

Bourne feinted right, moved left in a semi-crouch. As he did so, he swung his right arm against the hand wielding the knife. His left hand grabbed the man by his throat. As the man tried to drive his knee into Bourne’s belly, Bourne twisted to partially deflect the blow. In so doing, he lost his block on the knife hand and now the blade swept in toward the side of his neck. Bourne stopped it just before it struck, and there they stood, locked together in a kind of stalemate.

“Bourne,” the man finally got out. “My name is Jens. I work for Dominic Specter.”

“Prove it,” Bourne said.

“You’re here meeting with Egon Kirsch, so you can take his place when Leonid Arkadin comes looking for him.”

Bourne let up on his grip of Jens’s neck. “Put away your knife.”

Jens did as Bourne asked, and Bourne let go of him completely.

“Now where’s Kirsch? I need to get him out of here and safely on a plane back to Washington.”

Bourne led him back into the adjoining gallery, to the statue of the twins.

“Kirsch, the gallery’s clear. You can come out now.”

When the contact didn’t appear, Bourne stepped behind the statue. Kirsch was there all right, crumpled on the floor, a bullet hole in the back of his head.

Semion Icoupov watched the receiver attuned to the electronic bug in Bourne’s passport. As they approached the area of the Egyptian museum, he told the driver of his car to slow down. A keen sense of anticipation coursed through him: He’d decided to take Bourne by gunpoint into his car. It seemed the best way now to get him to listen to what Icoupov had to tell him.

At that moment his cell phone sounded with the ringtone he’d assigned to Arkadin’s number, and while on the lookout for Bourne he put the phone to his ear.

“I’m in Munich,” Arkadin said in his ear. “I rented a car, and I’m driving in from the airport.”

“Good. I’ve got an electronic tag on Jason Bourne, the man Our Friend has sent to retrieve the plans.”

“Where is he? I’ll take care of him,” Arkadin said in his typical blunt way.

“No, no, I don’t want him killed. I’ll take care of Bourne. In the meantime, stay mobile. I’ll be in touch shortly.”

Bourne, kneeling down beside Kirsch, examined the dead body.

“There’s a metal detector out front,” Jens said. “How the hell could someone bring a gun in here? Plus, there was no noise.”

Bourne turned Kirsch’s head so the back of it caught the light. “See here.” He pointed to the entry wound. “And here. There’s no exit wound, which there would have been with a shot fired at close range.” He stood up. “Whoever killed him used a suppressor.” He went out of the gallery with a purposeful stride. “And whoever killed him works here as a guard; the museum’s security personnel are armed.”

“There are three of them,” Jens said, keeping pace behind Bourne.

“Right. Two on the metal detector, one roaming the galleries.”

In the vestibule, the two guards were at their station beside the metal detector. Bourne went up to one of them, said, “I lost my cell phone somewhere in the museum and the guard in the second gallery said she’d help me locate it, but now I can’t find her.”

“Petra,” the guard said. “Yeah, she just took off for her lunch break.”

Bourne and Jens went through the front door, down the steps onto the sidewalk, where they looked left and right. Bourne saw a uniformed female figure walking fast down the block to their right, and he and Jens took off after her.

She disappeared around a corner, and the two men sprinted after her. As they neared the corner Bourne became aware of a sleek Mercedes sedan as it came abreast of them.

Icoupov was appalled to discover Bourne exiting the museum in the company of Franz Jens. Jens’s appearance told him that his enemy wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Jens’s job was to keep Icoupov’s people away from Bourne, so that Bourne had a clear shot at retrieving the attack plans. A certain dread gripped Icoupov. If Bourne was successful all was lost; his enemy would have won. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

Leaning forward in the backseat, he drew a Luger.

“Pick up speed,” he told the driver.

Bracing himself against the door frame, he waited until the last instant before depressing the button that slid the window down. He took aim at the running figure of Jens, but Jens sensed him, slowed as he turned. With Bourne now safely three paces ahead, Icoupov squeezed off two shots in succession.

Jens slipped to one knee, skidded off the sidewalk as he went down. Icoupov fired a third shot, just to be sure Jens didn’t survive the attack, then he slid the window up.

“Go!” he said to the driver.

The Mercedes shot forward, down the street, screeching away from the bloody body tangled in the gutter.

Thirty-Two

ROB BATT sat in his car, a pair of night-vision binoculars to his eyes, chewing over the recent past as if it were a piece of gum that had lost its flavor.

From the time that Batt had been called into Veronica Hart’s office and confronted with his treacherous actions against CI, he’d gone numb. At the moment, he’d felt nothing for himself. Rather, his enmity toward Hart had morphed into pity. Or maybe, he had thought, he pitied himself. Like a novice, he’d stepped into a bear trap; he’d trusted people who never should have been trusted. LaValle and Halliday were going to have their way, he had absolutely no doubt of it. Filled with self-disgust, he’d begun his long night of drinking.

It wasn’t until the morning after that Batt, waking up with the father of all hangovers, realized that there was something he could do about it. He thought about that for some time, while he swallowed aspirins for his pounding head, chasing them down with a glass of water and angostura bitters to calm his rebellious stomach.

It was then that the plan formed in his mind, unfolding like a flower to the rays of the sun. He was going to get his revenge for the humiliation LaValle and Kendall had caused him, and the real beauty part was this: If his scheme worked, if he brought them down, he’d resuscitate his own career, which was on life support.

Now, sitting behind the wheel of a rented car, he swept the street across from the Pentagon, on the lookout for General Kendall. Batt was canny enough to know better than to go after LaValle, because LaValle was too smart to make a mistake. The same, however, couldn’t be said for the general. If Batt had learned one thing from his abortive association with the two it was that Kendall was a weak link. He was too tied to LaValle, too slavish in his attitude. He needed someone to tell him what to do. The desire to please was what made followers vulnerable; they made mistakes their leaders didn’t.

He suddenly saw life the way it must appear to Jason Bourne. He knew the work that Bourne had done for Martin Lindros in Reykjavik and knew that Bourne had put himself on the line to find Lindros and bring him home. But like most of his former co-workers, Batt had conveniently dismissed Bourne’s actions as collateral happenstance, choosing to stick to the common wisdom that Bourne was an out-of-control paranoid who needed to be stopped before he committed some heinous act that would disgrace CI. And yet, people in CI had had no compunction about using him when all else failed, coercing him into playing as their pawn. But at last he, Batt, was no one’s pawn.

He saw General Kendall exit a side door of the building and, huddled in his trench-coat, hurry across the lot to his car. He kept the general in his sights as he put one hand on the keys he’d already inserted in the ignition. At the precise moment Kendall leaned his right shoulder forward to start his engine, Batt flipped his own ignition, so Kendall didn’t hear another car start when his did.

As the general pulled out of the lot, Batt set aside the night glasses and put his car in gear. The night seemed quiet and still, but maybe that was simply a reflection of Batt’s mood. He was a sentinel of the night, after all. He’d been trained by the Old Man himself; he’d always been proud of that fact. After his downfall, though, he realized that it was this pride that had distorted his thinking and his decision making. It was his pride that made him rebel against Veronica Hart, not because of anything she said or did-he hadn’t even given her the chance-but because he’d been passed over. Pride was his weakness, one that LaValle had recognized and exploited. Twenty-twenty hindsight was a bitch, he thought as he followed Kendall toward the Fairfax area, but at least it provided the humility he needed to see how far he’d strayed from his sworn duties at CI.

He kept well back of the general’s car, varying his distance and his lane the better to avoid detection. He doubted that Kendall would consider that he might be followed, but it paid to be cautious. Batt was determined to atone for the sin he’d committed against his own organization, against the memory of the Old Man.

Kendall turned in at an anonymous modern-looking building whose entire ground floor was taken up by the In-Tune health club. Batt observed the general park, take out a small gym bag, and enter the club. Nothing useful so far, but Batt had long ago learned to be patient. On stakeouts it seemed nothing came quickly or easily.

And then, because he had nothing better to do until Kendall reappeared, Batt stared at the IN-TUNE sign while he bit hunks off a Snickers bar. Why did that sign seem familiar? He knew he had never been inside, had never, in fact, been in this part of Fairfax. Maybe it was the name: In-Tune. Yes, he thought, it sounded maddeningly familiar, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of why.

Fifty minutes had passed since Kendall had gone in; time to train his night glasses on the entrance. He watched people of all description and build come in and out. Most were solitary figures; occasionally two women came out talking, once a couple emerged, headed in tandem for their car.

Another fifteen minutes passed and still no Kendall. Batt had taken the glasses away from his eyes to give them a rest when he saw the gym door swung open. Fitting the binoculars back to his eyes he saw Rodney Feir step out into the night. Are you kidding me? Batt thought.

Feir ran his hand through his damp hair. And that’s when Batt remembered why the name In-Tune was so familiar. All CI directors were required to post their whereabouts after hours so if they were needed the duty officer could calculate how long it would take them to get back to headquarters.

Watching Feir walk over and get into his car, Batt bit his lip. Of course it might be sheer coincidence that General Kendall used the same health club as Feir, but Batt knew that in his trade there was no such thing as coincidence.

His suspicion was borne out when Feir did not fire up his car, but sat silent and still behind the wheel. He was waiting for something, but what? Maybe, Batt thought, it was someone.

Ten minutes later, General Kendall emerged from the club. He looked neither to the right nor the left, but went immediately to his car, started it up, and began to back out of his space. Before he’d exited the lot, Feir started his car. Kendall turned right out of the lot and Feir followed.

Excitement flared in Batt’s chest. Game on! he thought.

After the first two shots struck Jens, Bourne turned back toward him, but the third shot fired into Jens’s head made him change his mind. He ran down the street, knowing the other man was dead, there was nothing he could do for him. He had to assume that Arkadin had followed Jens to the museum and had been lying in wait.

Turning the same corner as the museum guard, Bourne saw that she had hesitated, half turned to the sound of the shots. Then, seeing Bourne coming after her, she took off. She darted into an alley. Bourne, following, saw her vault up a corrugated steel fence, beyond which was a cleared building site bristling with heavy machinery. She grabbed hold of the top of the fence, levered herself up and over.

Bourne scaled the fence after her, jumping down onto the packed earth and concrete rubble on the other side. He saw her duck behind the mud-spattered flank of a bulldozer, and ran toward her. She swung up into the cab, slid behind the wheel, and fumbled with the ignition.

Bourne was quite close when the engine rumbled to life. Throwing the bulldozer into reverse, she backed up directly at him. She’d chosen a clumsy vehicle, and he leapt to one side, reached for a handhold, and swung up. The bulldozer lurched, the gears grinding as she struggled to shove it into first, but Bourne was already inside the cab.

She tried to draw her gun, but she was also trying to guide the bulldozer, and Bourne easily slapped the weapon away. It fell to the foot well, where he kicked it away from her. Then he reached over, turned off the engine. The moment he did that, the woman covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

This is your mess,” Deron said.

Soraya nodded. “I know it is.”

“You came to us-Kiki and me.”

“I take full responsibility.”

“I think in this case,” Deron said, “we have to share the responsibility. We could’ve said no, but we didn’t. Now all of us-not just Tyrone and Jason-are in serious jeopardy.”

They were sitting in the den of Deron’s house, a cozy room with a wraparound sofa that faced a stone fireplace and, above it, a large plasma TV. Drinks were set out on a low wooden table, but nobody had touched them. Deron and Soraya sat facing each other. Kiki was curled up in the corner like a cat.

“Tyrone’s already totally fucked,” Soraya said. “I saw what they’re doing to him.”

“Hold on.” Deron sat forward. “There’s a difference between perception and reality. Don’t let them skullfuck you. They’re not going to risk damaging Tyrone; he’s their only leverage to coerce you to bring Jason to them.”

Soraya, once again finding fear scattering her thoughts, reached over and poured herself a scotch. Rolling it around in the glass, she inhaled its complex aroma, which called to mind heather and butterscotch. She recalled Jason telling her how sights, scents, idioms, or tones of voice could trigger his hidden memories.

She took a sip of the scotch, felt it ignite a stream of fire down to her stomach. She wanted to be anywhere but here now; she wanted another life; but this was the life she’d chosen, these were the decisions she’d made. There was no help for it-she could not abandon her friends; she had to keep them safe. How to do that was the vexing question.

Deron was right about LaValle and Kendall. Taking her back down to the interrogation room was a psychological ploy. What they’d showed her was minimal, now that she thought about it. They were counting on her to imagine the worst, to let those thoughts prey on her until she gave in, called Jason so they could take him into custody and, like a show dog, present him to the president as proof that, having accomplished what numerous CI initiatives could not, LaValle deserved to take over and run CI.

She took another sip of scotch, aware that Deron and Kiki were silent, patiently waiting for her to work through the mistake she’d made and, coming through the other side, put it behind her. But she had to take the initiative, to formulate a plan of counterattack. That was what Deron meant when he said, This is your mess.

“The thing to do,” she said, slowly and carefully, “is to beat LaValle at his own game.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” Deron said.

Soraya stared down at the dregs of her scotch. That was just it, she had no idea.

The silence stretched out, growing thicker and more deadly by the second. At last, Kiki uncurled herself, stood up, and said, “I for one have had enough of this gloom and doom. Sitting around feeling angry and frustrated isn’t helping Tyrone and it isn’t helping us find a solution. I’m going out to have a good time at my friend’s club.” She looked from Soraya to Deron and back again. “So who’s going to join me?”

The high-low wail of the police sirens came to Bourne as he sat beside the museum guard in the bulldozer. Up close, she looked younger than he had imagined. Her blond hair, which had been pulled back in a severe bun, had come loose. It flowed down around her pale face. Her eyes were large and liquid-red around the rims now from crying. There was something about them that made him think she’d been born sad.

“Take off your jacket,” he said.

“What?” The guard appeared totally confused.

Without saying anything, Bourne helped her off with her jacket. Pushing up the sleeves of her shirt, he checked the insides of her elbows, but found no Black Legion tattoo. Naked fear had joined the sadness in her eyes.

“What’s your name?” he said softly.

“Petra-Alexandra Eichen,” she said in a quavery voice. “But everyone calls me Petra.” She wiped at her eyes, and gave him a sideways look. “Are you going to kill me now?”

The police sirens were very loud, and Bourne had a desire to get as far away from them as possible.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I…” Her voice faltered and she choked, it seemed, on her own words, or on an emotion welling up. “I shot your friend.”

“Why did you do that?”

“For money,” she said. “I need money.”

Bourne believed her. She didn’t act like a professional; she didn’t talk like one, either. “Who paid you?”

Fear distorted her expression, magnified her eyes until they seemed to goggle at him. “I… I can’t tell you. He made me promise, he said he’d kill me if I opened my mouth.”

Bourne heard raised voices, using the clipped jargon endemic to police the world over. They’d started their dragnet. He retrieved her gun, a Walther P22, the small caliber being the only option for a silent kill in an enclosed space, even with a suppressor.

“Where’s the suppressor?”

“I threw it down a storm drain,” she said, “as I was instructed to do.”

“Continuing to follow orders isn’t going to help. The people who hired you are going to kill you anyway,” he said as he dragged her down from the bulldozer. “You’re in way over your head.”

She gave a little moan and tried to break away from him.

He grabbed her. “If you want, I’ll let you go straight to the cops. They’ll be here any minute.”

Her mouth worked, but nothing intelligible came out.

Voices came to him, more distinct now. The police were on the other side of the corrugated wall. He pulled her in the opposite direction. “Do you know another way out of here?”

Petra nodded, pointing. She and Bourne ran diagonally across the yard, dodging heavy equipment as they picked their way through the rubble and around deep holes in the earth. Without turning around, Bourne could tell that the cops had entered the far side of the yard. He pushed Petra’s head down as he himself bent over to keep them both from being spotted. Beyond a crane, a crew chief’s trailer was set up on concrete blocks. Temporary electric lines were strung into it from just above the tin roof.

Petra threw herself headlong under the trailer, and Bourne followed. The blocks set the trailer just high enough for them to worm their way on their bellies to the far side, where Bourne saw that a gap had been cut in the chain-link fence.

Crawling through the gap, they found themselves in a quiet alley filled with industrial-size garbage bins and a Dumpster filled with broken tiles, jagged blocks of terrazzo, and pieces of twisted metal, no doubt from whatever buildings had once stood in the now empty space behind them.

“This way,” Petra whispered as she took them out of the alley and down a residential street. Around the corner, she went to a car and opened it with a set of keys.

“Give me the keys,” Bourne said. “They’ll be looking for you.”

He caught them in midair, and they both got in. A block away they passed a cruising police car. The sudden tension caused Petra’s hands to tremble in her lap.

“We’re going right past them,” Bourne said. “Don’t look at them.”

Nothing further passed between them until Bourne said, “They’ve turned around. They’re coming after us.”

Thirty-Three

I’M GOING to drop you off somewhere,” Arkadin said. “I don’t want you in the middle of whatever’s going to come.”

Devra, in the passenger’s seat of the rented BMW, shot him a skeptical look. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”

“No? Who does it sound like?”

“We still have to get Egon Kirsch.”

Arkadin turned a corner. They were in the center of the city, a place filled with old cathedrals and palaces. The place looked like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

“There’s been a complication,” he said. “The opposition’s king has entered the chess match. His name is Jason Bourne and he’s here in Munich.”

“All the more reason why I should stay with you.” Devra checked the action on one of the two Lugers that Arkadin had picked up from one of Icoupov’s local agents. “A crossfire has many benefits.”

Arkadin laughed. “There’s no lack of fire to you.”

That was another thing that drew him to her-she wasn’t afraid of the male fire burning in her belly. But he had promised her-and himself-that he would protect her. It had been a very long time since he’d said that to anyone, and even though he’d sworn never to make that promise again, he’d done just that. And strange to say, he felt good about it; in fact, there was a sense now when he was around her that he’d stepped out of the shadows he’d been born into, that had been tattooed into his flesh by so many violent incidents. For the first time in his life he felt as if he could take pleasure in the sun on his face, in the wind lifting Devra’s hair behind her like a mane, that he could walk down the street with her and not feel as if he was living in another dimension, that he hadn’t just arrived here from another planet.

As they stopped at a red light, he glanced at her. Sunlight was streaming into the interior, turning her face the palest shade of pink. At that precise moment he felt something rush out of him and into her, and she turned as if she felt it, too, and she smiled at him.

The light turned green and he accelerated through the cross street. His cell phone buzzed. A glance down at the number of the incoming call told him that Gala was calling. He didn’t answer; he had no wish to talk to her now, or ever, for that matter.

Three minutes later, he received a text message. It read: MISCHA DEAD. KILLED BY JASON BOURNE.

Having followed Rodney Feir and General Kendall over the Key Bridge into Washington proper, Rob Batt made sure his long-lens SLR Nikon was fully loaded with fast film. He shot a series of digital photos with a compact camera, but these were only for reference, because they could be Photoshopped in a heartbeat. To forestall any suspicion that the images might be manipulated, he’d present the undeveloped roll of film to… well, this was his real problem. For a legitimate reason he was persona non grata at CI. It was astonishing how quickly years-long associations vanished. But now he realized he’d mistaken the camaraderie he’d developed with what had been his fellow directors for friendship. As far as they were concerned he no longer existed, so going to them with any alleged evidence that the NSA had turned yet another CI officer would be either ignored or laughed at. Trying to approach Veronica Hart was similarly out of the question. Assuming he could ever get to her-which he doubted-speaking to her now would be like groveling. Batt had never groveled in his life, and he wasn’t going to now.

Then he laughed out loud at how easy it was to become self-deluded. Why should any of his former colleagues want anything to do with him? He’d betrayed them, abandoned them for the enemy. If he were in their shoes-and how he wished he were!-he’d feel the same venomous animosity toward someone who’d sold him out, which was why he’d embarked on this mission to destroy LaValle and Kendall. They’d sold him out-hung him out to dry as soon as it suited their purposes. The moment he came on board, they’d taken control of Typhon away from him.

Venomous animosity. That was an excellent phrase, he thought, one that precisely defined his feelings toward LaValle and Kendall. He knew, deep down, that hating them was the same as hating himself. But he couldn’t hate himself; that was self-defeating. At this very moment he couldn’t believe he’d sunk so low as to defect to the NSA. He’d gone through his line of thinking over and over, and now it seemed to him as if someone else, some stranger, had made that decision. It hadn’t been him, it couldn’t have been him, ergo, LaValle and Kendall had made him do it. For that they had to pay the ultimate price.

The two men were on the move again, and Batt headed out after them. After a ten-minute drive, the two cars ahead of him pulled into the crowded parking lot of The Glass Slipper. As Batt passed by, Feir and Kendall got out of their respective cars and went inside. Batt drove around the block, parked on a side street. Reaching into the glove compartment, he took out a tiny Leica camera, the kind used by the Old Man in his youthful days of surveillance. It was the old spy standby, as dependable as it was easy to conceal. Batt loaded it with fast film, put it in the breast pocket of his shirt along with the digital camera, and got out of the car.

The night was filled with a gritty wind. Refuse spiraled up from the gutter, only to come to rest in a different place. Jamming his hands in his coat pockets, Batt hurried down the block and into The Glass Slipper. A slide guitarist was up on stage, wailing the blues, warming up for the feature act, a high-powered band with several hit CDs under its belt.

He’d heard about the club by reputation only. He knew, for instance, that it was owned by Drew Davis, primarily because Davis was a larger-than-life character who continually inserted himself into the political and economic affairs of African Americans in the district. Thanks to his influence, homeless shelters had become safer places for their residents, halfway houses had been built; he made it a point to hire ex-cons. He was so cannily public about these hirings that the ex-cons had no choice but to make the most of their second chances.

What Batt didn’t know about was the Slipper’s back room, so he was puzzled when, after a full circuit of the space, plus an expedition to the men’s room, he could find no trace of either Feir or the general.

Fearing that they’d slipped out the back, he returned to the parking lot, only to find their cars where they’d left them. Back in the Slipper, he took another trip through the crowd, figuring he must have missed them somehow. Still, there was no sign, but as he neared the rear of the space he spotted someone talking to a muscled black man the approximate size of a refrigerator. After a small bout of jawing, Mr. Muscle opened a door Batt hadn’t noticed before, and the man slipped through. Guessing this was where Feir and Kendall must have gone, Batt edged his way toward Mr. Muscle and the door.

It was then that he saw Soraya walk through the front door.

Bourne almost stripped the car’s gears trying to outrun the police car on their tail.

“Take it easy,” Petra said, “or you’ll tear my poor car apart.”

He wished he’d taken a longer look at the map of the city. A street blocked off with wooden sawhorses flashed by on their left. The paving had been torn up, leaving the heavily pitted and cracked underlayer, the worst parts of which were in the process of being excavated.

“Hold on tight,” Bourne said as he reversed, then turned into the street and drove the car through the sawhorses, cracking one and scattering the others. The car hit the underlayer, jounced down the street at what seemed a reckless speed. It felt as if the vehicle were being machine-gunned by a pile driver. Bourne’s teeth rattled in his head, and Petra struggled to keep from crying out.

Behind them, the police car was having even more difficulty keeping to a straight path. It jerked back and forth to avoid the deepest of the holes gouged in the roadbed. Putting on another burst of speed, Bourne was able to lengthen the distance between them. But then he glanced ahead. A cement truck was parked crosswise at the other end of the street. If they kept going there was no way to avoid crashing into it.

Bourne kept the speed on as the cement truck loomed larger and larger. The police car was coming up fast behind them.

“What are you doing?” Petra screamed. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

At that moment, Bourne threw the car into neutral, stepped on the brake. He immediately changed into reverse, took his foot off the brake, and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The car shuddered, its engine screaming. Then the transmission locked into place, and the car flew backward. The police car came on, its driver frozen in shock. Bourne swerved around it as the vehicle raced forward into the side of the cement truck.

Bourne wasn’t even looking. He was busy steering the car back down the street in reverse. Blasting past the shattered sawhorses, he turned, braked, put the car into first, and drove off.

What the hell are you doing here?” Noah said. “You should be on your way to Damascus.”

“I’m due to take off in four hours.” Moira put her hands in her pockets so he wouldn’t see that they were curled into fists. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Noah sighed. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

Her laugh had a bitter taste to it. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Because,” Noah said, “you’ve been with Black River long enough to know how we operate.”

They were walking down Kaufingerstrasse in the center of Munich, a heavily trafficked area just off the Marienplatz. Turning in at the sign for the Augustiner Bierkeller, they entered a long, dim cathedral-like space that smelled powerfully of beer and boiled wurst. The hubbub of noise was just right for masking a private conversation. Crossing the red flagstone floor, they chose a table in one of the rooms, sat on wooden benches. The person closest to them was an old man sucking on a pipe while he leisurely read the paper.

Moira and Noah both ordered a Hefeweizen, a wheat beer still clouded with unfiltered yeast, from a waitress dressed in the regional Dirndlkleid, a long, wide skirt and low-cut blouse. She had an apron around her waist, along with a decorative purse.

“Noah,” Moira said when the beers had been served, “I don’t hold any illusions about why we do what we do, but how do you expect me to ignore this intel I got right from the source?”

Noah took a long draw of his Hefeweizen, fastidiously wiped his lips before answering. Then he began to tick off points on his fingers. “First, this man Hauser told you that the flaw in the software is virtually undetectable. Second, what he told you isn’t verifiable. He might simply be a disgruntled employee trying to get revenge on Kaller Steelworks. Have you considered that possibility?”

“We could run our own tests on the software.”

“No time. There’s less than two days before the LNG tanker is scheduled to dock at the terminal.” He continued ticking off points. “Third, we couldn’t do anything without alerting NextGen, who would then turn around and confront Kaller Steelworks, which would put us in the middle of a nasty situation. And, fourth and finally, what part of the sentence We’ve officially notified NextGen that we’ve withdrawn from the project do you not understand?”

Moira sat back for a moment and took a deep breath. “This is solid intel, Noah. It could lead to the situation we were most worried about: a terrorist attack. How can you-”

“You’ve already taken several steps over the line, Moira,” Noah said sharply. “Get your tail on that plane and your head into your new assignment, or you’re through at Black River.”

It’s better for the moment that we don’t meet,” Icoupov said.

Arkadin was seething, barely holding down his rage, and only then because Devra, canny witch that she was, dug her fingernails into the palm of his hand. She understood him; no questions, no probing, no trying to pick over his past like a vulture.

“What about the plans?” He and Devra were sitting in a miserable, smoke-filled bar, in a run-down part of the city.

“I’ll pick them up from you now.” Icoupov’s voice sounded thin and far away over the cell phone, even though there could be only a mile or two separating them. “I’m following Bourne. I’m going after him myself.”

Arkadin didn’t want to hear it. “I thought that was my job.”

“Your job is essentially over. You have the plans and you’ve terminated Pyotr’s network.”

“All except Egon Kirsch.”

“Kirsch has already been disposed of,” Icoupov said.

“I’m the one who terminates the targets. I’ll give you the plans and then take care of Bourne.”

“I told you, Leonid Danilovich, I don’t want Bourne terminated.”

Arkadin made an anguished animal sound under his breath. But Bourne has to be terminated, he thought. Devra dug her claws deeper into his flesh, so that he could smell the sweet, coppery scent of his own blood. And I have to do it. He murdered Mischa.

“Are you listening to me?” Icoupov said sharply.

Arkadin stirred within his web of rage. “Yes, sir, always. However, I must insist that you tell me where you’ll be when you accost Bourne. This is security, for your own safety. I won’t stand helplessly by while something unforseen happens to you.”

“Agreed,” Icoupov said after a moment’s hesitation. “At the moment, he’s on the move, so I have time to get the plans from you.” He gave Arkadin an address. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“It’ll take me a bit longer,” Arkadin said.

“Within the half hour then. The moment I know where I’ll be intercepting Bourne, you’ll know. Does that satisfy you, Leonid Danilovich?”

“Completely.”

Arkadin folded away his phone, disentangled himself from Devra, and went up to the bar. “A double Oban on rocks.”

The bartender, a huge man with tattooed arms, squinted at him. “What’s an Oban?”

“It’s a single-malt scotch, you moron.”

The bartender, polishing an old-fashioned glass, grunted. “What does this look like, the prince’s palace? We don’t have single-malt anything.”

Arkadin reached over, snatched the glass out of the bartender’s hands, and smashed it bottom-first into his nose. Then, as blood started to gush, he hauled the dazed man over the bar top and proceeded to beat him to a pulp.

I can’t go back to Munich,” Petra said. “Not for a while, anyway. That’s what he told me.”

“Why would you jeopardize your job to kill someone?” Bourne said.

“Please!” She glanced at him. “A hamster couldn’t live on what they paid me in that shithole.”

She was behind the wheel, driving on the autobahn. They had already passed the outskirts of the city. Bourne didn’t mind; he needed to stay out of Munich himself until the furor over Egon Kirsch’s death died down. The authorities would find someone else’s ID on Kirsch, and though Bourne had no doubt they’d eventually find out his real identity, he hoped by that time to have retrieved the plans from Arkadin and be flying back to Washington. In the meantime the police would be searching for him as a witness to the murders of both Kirsch and Jens.

“Sooner or later,” Bourne said, “you’re going to have to tell me who hired you.”

Petra said nothing, but her hands trembled on the wheel, an aftermath of their harrowing chase.

“Where are we going?” Bourne said. He wanted to keep her engaged in conversation. He felt that she needed to connect with him on some personal level in order to open up. He had to get her to tell him who had ordered her to kill Egon Kirsch. That might answer the question of whether he was connected to the man who’d gunned down Jens.

“Home,” she said. “A place I never wanted to go back to.”

“Why is that?”

“I was born in Munich because my mother traveled there to give birth to me, but I’m from Dachau.” She meant the town, of course, after which the adjacent Nazi concentration camp had been named. “No parent wants Dachau to appear on their child’s birth certificate, so when their time comes the women check into a Munich hospital.” Hardly surprising: Almost two hundred thousand people were exterminated during the camp’s life, the longest of the war, since it was the first built, becoming the prototype for all the other KZ camps.

The town itself, situated along the Amper River, lay some twelve miles northwest of Munich. It was unexpectedly bucolic, with its narrow cobbled streets, old-fashioned street lamps, and quiet tree-lined lanes.

When Bourne observed that most of the people they passed looked contented enough, Petra laughed unpleasantly. “They go around in a permanent fog, hating that their little town has such a murderous burden to carry.”

She drove through the center of Dachau, then turned north until they reached what once had been the village of Etzenhausen. There, on a desolate hill known at the Leitenberg, was a graveyard, lonely and utterly deserted. They got out of the car, walked past the stone stela with the sculpted Star of David. The stone was scarred, furry with blue lichen; the overhanging firs and hemlocks blocked out the sky even on such a bright midwinter afternoon.

As they walked slowly among the gravestones, she said, “This is the KZ-Friedhof, the concentration camp cemetery. Through most of Dachau’s life, the corpses of the Jews were piled up and burned in ovens, but toward the end when the camp ran out of coal, the Nazis had to do something with the corpses, so they brought them up here.” She spread her arms wide. “This is all the memorial the Jewish victims got.”

Bourne had been in many cemeteries before, and had found them peculiarly peaceful. Not KZ-Friedhof, where a sensation of constant movement, ceaseless murmuring made his skin crawl. The place was alive, howling in its restless silence. He paused, squatted down, and ran his fingertips over the words engraved on a headstone. They were so eroded it was impossible to read them.

“Did you ever think that the man you shot today might have been a Jew?” he said.

She turned on him sharply. “I told you I needed the money. I did it out of necessity.”

Bourne looked around them. “That’s what the Nazis said when they buried their last victims here.”

A flash of anger momentarily burned away the sadness in her eyes. “I hate you.”

“Not nearly as much as you hate yourself.” He rose, handed her back her gun. “Here, why don’t you shoot yourself and end it all?”

She took the gun, aimed it at him. “Why don’t I just shoot you?”

“Killing me will only make matters worse for you. Besides…” Bourne opened up one palm to show her the bullets he’d taken out of her weapon.

With a disgusted sound, Petra holstered her gun. Her face and hands looked greenish in what light filtered through the evergreens.

“You can make amends for what you did today,” Bourne said. “Tell me who hired you.”

Petra eyed him skeptically. “I won’t give you the money, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

“I have no interest in your money,” Bourne said. “But I think the man you shot was going to tell me something I needed to know. I suspect that’s why you were hired to kill him.”

Some of the skepticism leached out of her face. “Really?”

Bourne nodded.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said. “You understand that.”

“You walked up to him, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.”

Petra looked away, at nothing in particular. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“Then you’re no better than anyone else in Dachau.”

Tears spilled over, she covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. The sounds she made were like those Bourne had heard on Leitenberg.

At length, Petra’s crying jag was spent. Wiping her reddened eyes with the backs of her hands, she said, “I wanted to be a poet, you know? I always equated being a poet with being a revolutionary. I, a German, wanted to change the world or, at least, do something to change the way the world saw us, to do something to scoop that core of guilt out of us.”

“You should have become an exorcist.”

It was a joke, but such was her mood that she found nothing funny in it. “That would be perfect, wouldn’t it?” She looked at him with eyes still filled with tears. “Is it so naive to want to change the world?”

“Impractical might be a better word.”

She cocked her head. “You’re a cynic, aren’t you?” When he didn’t answer, she went on. “I don’t think it’s naive to believe that words-that what you write-can change things.”

“Why aren’t you writing then,” he said, “instead of shooting people for money? That’s no way to earn a living.”

She was silent for so long, he wondered whether she’d heard him.

At last, she said, “Fuck it, I was hired by a man named Spangler Wald-he’s just past being a boy, really, no more than twenty-one or two. I’d seen him around the pubs; we had coffee together once or twice. He said he was attending the university, majoring in entropic economics, whatever that is.”

“I don’t think anyone can major in entropic economics,” Bourne said.

“Figures.” Petra was still sniffling. “I have to get my bullshit meter recalibrated.” She shrugged. “I never was good with people; I’m better off communing with the dead.”

Bourne said, “You can’t take on the grief and rage of so many people without being buried alive.”

She looked off at the rows of crumbling headstones. “What else can I do? They’re forgotten now. Here’s where the truth lies. If you omit the truth, isn’t that worse than a lie?”

When he didn’t answer, she gave a quick twitch of her shoulders and turned around. “Now that you’ve been here, I want to show you what the tourists see.”

She led him back to her car, drove down the deserted hill to the official Dachau memorial.

There was a pall over what was left of the camp buildings, as if the noxious emissions of the coal-fired incinerators still rose and fell on the thermals, like carrion birds still searching for the dead. An ironwork sculpture, a harrowing interpretation of skeletal prisoners made to resemble the barbed wire that had imprisoned them, greeted them as they drove in. Inside what had once been the main administrative building was a mock-up of the cells, display cases of shoes and other inexpressibly sad items, all that was left of the inmates.

“These signs,” Petra said. “Do you see any mention of how many Jews were tortured and lost their lives there? ‘One hundred and ninety-three thousand people lost their lives here,’ the signs say. There’s no expiation in this. We’re still hiding from ourselves; we’re still a land of Jew-haters, no matter how often we try to stifle the impulse with righteous anger, as if we have a right to be the aggrieved ones.”

Bourne might have told her that nothing in life is as simple as that, except he deemed it better to let her fury burn itself out. Clearly, she couldn’t vent these views to anyone else.

She took him on a tour of the ovens, which seemed sinister even so many years after their use. They seemed alive, appeared to shimmer, to be part of an alternate universe overflowing with unspeakable horror. At length, they passed out of the crematorium and arrived at a long room, the walls of which were covered with letters, some written by prisoners, others by families desperate for news of their loved ones, as well as other notes, drawings, and more formal letters of inquiry. All were in German; none had been translated into other languages.

Bourne read them all. The aftermath of despair, atrocities, and death hung in these rooms, unable to escape. There was a different kind of silence here than the one on the Leitenberg. He was aware of the soft scuff of shoe soles, the whisper of sneakers as tourists dragged themselves from one exhibit to another. It was as if the accumulated inhumanity stifled the ability to speak, or perhaps it was that words-any words-were both inadequate and superfluous.

They moved slowly down the room. He could see Petra’s lips move as she read letter after letter. Near the end of the wall, one caught his eye, quickened his pulse. A sheet of paper, obviously stationery, contained a handwritten text complaining that the author had developed what he claimed was a gas far more effective than Zyklon-B, but that no one at Dachau administration had seen fit to answer him. Possibly that was because the gas was never used at Dachau. However, what interested Bourne far more was that the stationery was imprinted with the wheel of three horses’ heads joined in the center by the SS death’s head.

Petra came up beside him, now her brows knitted together in a frown. “That’s damn familiar.”

He turned to her. “What do you mean?”

“There was someone I used to know-Old Pelz. He said he lived in town, but I think he was homeless. He’d come down to the Dachau air raid shelter to sleep, especially in winter.” She pushed a stray lock of hair behind one ear. “He used to babble all the time, you know how crazy people do, as if he was talking to someone else. I remember him showing me a patch with that same insignia. He was talking about something called the Black Legion.”

Bourne’s pulse began to pound. “What did he say?”

She shrugged.

“You hate the Nazis so much,” he said, “I wonder if you know that some things they gave birth to still exist.”

“Yeah, sure, like the skinheads.”

He pointed at the insignia. “The Black Legion still exists, it’s still a danger, even more so than when Old Pelz knew it.”

Petra shook her head. “He talked on and on. I never knew whether he was speaking to me or to himself.”

“Can you take me to him?”

“Sure, but who knows whether he’s still alive. He drank like a fish.”

Ten minutes later Petra drove down Augsburgerstrasse, heading for the foot of a hill known as Karlsburg. “Fucking ironic,” she said bitterly, “that the one place I despise the most is now the safest place for me.”

She pulled into the lot outside the St. Jakob parish church. Its octagonal baroque tower could be seen throughout the town. Next door was Hцrhammer’s department store. “You see there at the side of Hцrhammer’s,” she said as they clambered out of the car, “those steps lead down to the huge air raid bunker built into the hill, but you can’t get in that way.”

Leading him up the steps into St. Jakob, she led him across the Renaissance interior, past the choir. Adjacent to the sacristy was an unobtrusive dark wooden door, behind which lay a flight of stone stairs curving down to the crypt, which was surprisingly small, considering the size of the church above it.

But as Petra quickly showed him, there was a reason for the size: Beyond it lay a labyrinth of rooms and corridors.

“The bunker,” she said, flicking on a string of bare lightbulbs affixed to the stone wall on their right. “Here is where my grandparents fled when your country bombed the shit out of the unofficial capital of the Third Reich.” She was speaking of Munich, but Dachau was close enough to feel the brunt of the American air force raids.

“If you hate your country so much,” Bourne said, “why don’t you leave?”

“Because,” Petra said, “I also love it. It’s the mystery of being German-proud but self-hating.” She shrugged. “What can you do? You play the hand fate deals you.”

Bourne knew how that felt. He looked around. “You’re familiar with this place?”

She sighed heavily, as if her fury had left her spent. “When I was a child my parents took me to Sunday Mass every week. They’re God-fearing people. What a joke! Didn’t God turn his face away from this place years ago?

“Anyway, one Sunday I was so bored I snuck away. In those days, I was obsessed with death. Can you blame me? I grew up with the stench of it in my nostrils.” She looked up at him. “Can you believe that I’m the only one I know who ever visited the memorial? Do you think my parents ever did? My brothers, my aunts and uncles, my classmates? Please! They don’t even want to admit it exists.”

Seemingly weary again. “So I came down here to commune with the dead, but I didn’t see enough of them, so I pushed on and what did I find? Dachau’s bunker.”

She put her hand on the wall, moved it along the rough-cut stone as caressingly as if it were a lover’s flank. “This became my place, my own private world. I was only happy underground, in the company of the one hundred and ninety-three thousand dead. I felt them. I believed that the soul of each and every one of them was trapped here. It was so unfair, I thought. I spent my time trying to figure out how to free them.”

“I think the only way to do that,” Bourne said, “is to free yourself.”

She gestured. “Old Pelz’s crash pad is this way.”

As they picked their way along a tunnel, she said, “It’s not too far. He liked to be near the crypt. He thought a couple of those old folks were his friends. He’d sit and talk to them for hours, drinking away, just as if they were alive and he could see them. Who knows? Maybe he could. Stranger things have happened.”

After a short time, the tunnel opened out into a series of rooms. The odors of whiskey and stale sweat came to them.

“It’s the third room on the left,” Petra said.

But before they reached it, the doorway was filled with a hulking body topped by a head like a bowling ball with hair standing up like the quills of a porcupine. Old Pelz’s mad eyes looked them over.

“Who goes there?” His voice was as thick a fog.

“It’s me, Herr Pelz. Petra Eichen.”

But Old Pelz was looking in horror at the gun on her hip. “The fuck it is!” Hefting a shotgun, he yelled, “Nazi sympathizers!” and fired.

Thirty-Four

SORAYA ENTERED The Glass Slipper behind Kiki and ahead of Deron. Kiki had called ahead, and no sooner were they all inside than the owner, Drew Davis, came waddling over like Scrooge McDuck. He was a grizzled old man with white hair that stood on end as if it were shocked to see he was still alive. He had an animated face with mischievous eyes, a nose like a wad of chewed-up gum, and a broad smile honed to perfection on TV ops and stumping for local politicos, as well as his good works throughout the poorer neighborhoods of the district. But he possessed a warmth that was genuine. He had a way of looking at you when you spoke with him that made you feel he was listening to you alone.

He embraced Kiki while she kissed him on both cheeks and called him “Papa.” Later, after the introductions, when they were seated at a prime table that Drew Davis had reserved for them, after the champagne and goodies had been served, Kiki explained her relationship with him.

“When I was a little girl, our tribe was swept by a drought so severe that many of the elderly and newborn grew sick and died. After a time, a small group of white people arrived to help us. They told us they were from an organization that would send us money each month, after they’d set up their program in our village. They had brought water, but of course there wasn’t enough.

“After they left, thinking of broken promises, we fell into despair, but true to their word water came, then the rains came until we didn’t need their water anymore, but they never left. Their money went for medicines and schooling. Every month I, along with all the other children, got letters from our sponsor-the person sending the money.

“When I was old enough, I started writing back to Drew and we struck up a correspondence. Years later, when I wanted to go on to higher learning, he arranged for me to travel to Cape Town to go to school, then he sponsored me for real, bringing me to the States for college and university. He never asked for anything in return, except that I do well in school. He’s like my second father.”

They drank champagne and watched the pole dancing-which, much to Soraya’s surprise, seemed more artful, less crass than she had imagined. But there were more surgically enhanced body parts in that one room than she’d ever seen. For the life of her she couldn’t figure out why a woman would want breasts that looked and acted like balloons.

She continued to drink her champagne, all too aware that she was taking tiny, overly dainty sips. She’d like nothing better than to take Kiki’s advice, forget about her problems for a couple of hours, kick back, get drunk, let herself go. The only trouble was, she knew it would never happen. She was too controlled, too closed in. What I ought to do, she thought morosely as she watched a redhead with gravity-defying breasts and hips that seemed unattached to the rest of her, is get smashed, pull off my top, and do some pole dancing myself. Then she laughed at the absurdity of the notion. She’d never been that kind of person, even when it might have been age-appropriate. She had always been the good girl-cool, calculating to the point of overanalysis. She glanced over at Kiki, whose magnificent face was lit up not only by the colored strobe lights but also by a fiercely experienced joy. Wasn’t the good girl’s life drained of color, of flavor? Soraya asked herself.

This thought depressed her even more, but it was just the prelude, because a moment later she looked up to see Rob Batt. What the what? she thought. He’d seen her, all right, and was making a beeline right at her.

Soraya excused herself, rose, and walked in the other direction, toward the ladies’ room. Somehow Batt managed to snake his way to a position in front of her. She turned on her heel, threaded her way around the tables. Batt, running up the waiters’ aisle from the kitchen, caught up with her.

“Soraya, I need to talk to you.”

She shook him off, kept going, out the front door. In the parking lot she heard him running after her. A light sleet was falling, but the wind had failed entirely, the precipitation coming straight down, melting on her shoulders and bare head.

She didn’t know why she’d come out here; Kiki had driven them from Deron’s house, so she had no car to get into. Maybe she’d been disgusted by the sight of a man she’d liked and trusted, a man who’d betrayed that trust, who’d defected to the dark side, as she privately called LaValle’s NSA because she could no longer bear to utter the words National Security Agency without feeling sick to her stomach. The NSA had come to stand for everything that had gone wrong in America over the last number of years-the power grabs, the sense felt by some inside the Beltway that they were entitled to do anything and everything, laws of democracy be damned. It all boiled down to contempt, she thought. These people were so sure they were right, they felt nothing but contempt and perhaps even pity for those who tried to oppose them.

“Soraya, wait! Hold on!”

Batt had caught up with her.

“Get out of here,” she said, continuing to walk away.

“But I’ve got to talk to you.”

“The hell you do. We have nothing to talk about.”

“It’s a matter of national security.”

Soraya, shaking her head in disbelief, laughed bitterly and kept on walking.

“Listen, you’re my only hope. You’re the only one open enough to listen to me.”

Rolling her eyes, she turned to face him. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, Rob. Go back and lick your new master’s boots.”

“LaValle sold me out, Soraya, you know that.” His eyes were pleading. “Listen, I made a terrible mistake. I thought what I was doing would save CI.”

Soraya was so incredulous she almost laughed in his face. “What? You don’t expect me to believe that.”

“I’m a product of the Old Man. I had no faith in Hart. I-”

“Don’t use the Old Man routine with me. If you really were his product you’d never have sold us out. You’d have hung in there, become part of the solution, rather than making the problem worse.”

“You didn’t hear Secretary Halliday, the guy’s like a goddamn force of nature. I got sucked into his orbit. I made a mistake, okay? I admit it.”

“There’s no excuse for your loss of faith.”

Batt held up his hands, palms-outward. “You’re absolutely right, but, for God’s sake, look at me now. I’m being thoroughly punished, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know, Rob, you tell me.”

“I have no job, no prospect of getting one, either. My friends won’t answer my calls, and when I run into them on the street or a restaurant, they act like you did, they turn away. My wife’s moved out and taken the kids with her.” He ran his hand through his wet hair. “Hell, I’ve been living out of my car since it happened. I’m a mess, Soraya. What could be a worse punishment?”

Was it a flaw in her character that her heart went out to him? Soraya wondered. But she showed no trace of sympathy, simply stood, silent, waiting for him to continue.

“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Listen-”

“I don’t want to listen.”

As she began to turn away again, he shoved a digital camera into her hand. “At least take a look at these photos.”

Soraya was about to hand it back, then she figured she had nothing to lose. Batt’s camera was on, and she pressed the REVIEW button. What she saw was a series of surveillance photos of General Kendall.

“What the hell?” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been doing since I got canned,” Batt said. “I’ve been trying to find a way to bring down LaValle. I figured right away that he might be too tough a nut to crack quickly, but Kendall, well, he’s another story.”

She looked up into his face, which shone with an inner fervor she’d never seen before. “How d’you figure that?”

“Kendall’s restless and bitter, chafing under LaValle’s yoke. He wants a bigger piece of the action than either Halliday or LaValle is willing to give him. That desire makes him stupid and vulnerable.”

Despite herself, she was intrigued. “What have you found out?”

“More than I could’ve hoped for.” Batt nodded at her. “Keep going.”

As Soraya continued to scroll through the photos her heart started to hammer in her chest. She peered closer. “Is that… Good God, it’s Rodney Feir!”

Batt nodded. “He and Kendall met up at Feir’s health club, then they went to dinner, and now they’re here.”

She looked up at him. “The two of them are here at The Glass Slipper?”

“Those are their cars.” Batt pointed. “There’s a back room. I don’t know what goes on in there, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. General Kendall is a God-fearing family man, goes to church with his family and LaValle’s every Sunday like clockwork. He’s very active in the church, very visible there.”

Soraya saw the light at the end of her own personal tunnel. Here was a way to get both her and Tyrone off the hook. “Two birds with one photo shoot,” she said.

“Yeah, only trouble is how to get back there to snap ’em. It’s invitation only, I checked.”

A slow smile spread across Soraya’s face. “Leave that to me.”

For what seemed a long time after Kendall had kicked him until he vomited, nothing happened. But then, Tyrone had already taken note that time seemed to have slowed down to an agonizing crawl. A minute was made up of a thousand seconds, an hour consisted of ten thousand minutes, and a day-well, there were simply too many hours in a day to count.

During one of the periods when his hood was taken off, he walked back and forth the narrow width of the room, not wanting to go near the far end with its ominous waterboarding tub.

Somewhere inside him he knew he’d lost track of time, that this slippage was part of the process to wear him down, open him up, and turn him inside out. Moment by moment he felt himself sliding down a slope so slick, so steep that whatever he did to try to hold on to it failed. He was falling into darkness, into a void filled only with himself.

This, too, was calculated. He could imagine one of Kendall’s underlings coming up with a mathematical formula for how far a subject should break down each hour of each day he was subject to incarceration.

Ever since he had suggested to Soraya that he might be useful to her he’d been reading up on how to handle himself in the worst situations. There was a trick he’d come across that was useful to him now-he needed to find a place in his mind where he could withdraw when the going got really rough, a place that was inviolable, where he knew he’d be safe no matter what was done to him.

He had that place now, he’d been there several times when the pain of kneeling with his arms locked high behind him became too much even for him. But there was one thing that frightened him: that damn trough on the other side of the room. If they decided to waterboard him he was done. For as far back as he could remember he’d been terrified of drowning. He couldn’t swim, couldn’t even float. Every time he’d tried to do either he’d choked, had to be hauled from the water like a three-year-old. He’d soon given up, figuring it didn’t matter. When was he going to go sailing or even lie on a beach? Never.

But now the water had come to him. That damn trough was waiting, grinning like a whale about to swallow him whole. He was no Jonah, he knew that. That fucking thing wasn’t going to spit him out alive.

He looked down, saw that the hand he held out in front of him was trembling. Turning away, he pressed it against the wall, as if the cinder block could absorb his unreasoning terror.

He started as the sound of the door being unlocked ricocheted around the small space. In came one of the NSA zombies, with dead eyes and dead breath. He put down the tray of food and left without even glancing at Tyrone, all part of the second phase of the plan to break him down: make him think he didn’t exist.

He went over to the tray. As usual, his food consisted of cold oatmeal. It didn’t matter; he was hungry. Taking up the plastic spoon, he took a bite of the cereal. It was gummy, had no taste whatsoever. He almost gagged on the second bite because he was chewing on something other than oatmeal. Aware that his every move was monitored, he bent over, spit out the mouthful. Then he used the fork to paw open a folded piece of paper. There was something written on it. He bent over further to make out the letters.

DON’T GIVE UP, it read.

At first, Tyrone couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he read it again. After reading it a third time, he scooped the message up with another bite of oatmeal, chewed it all slowly and methodically, and swallowed.

Then he went over to the stainless-steel toilet, sat down on the edge, and wondered who had written that note and how he could communicate with him. It wasn’t until some time later that he realized this one brief message from outside his tiny cell had managed to restore the balance he’d lost. Inside his head, time resolved itself into normal seconds and minutes, and the blood began once again to circulate through his veins.

Arkadin allowed Devra to drag him out of the bar before he could demolish it completely. Not that he cared about the thuggish patrons who sat in stupefied silence, watching the mayhem he wreaked as if it were a TV show, but he was mindful of the cops who had a significant presence in this trashy neighborhood. During the time they’d been in the bar he’d noticed three police cruisers pass slowly by on the street.

They drove through the sunshine down littered streets. He heard dogs barking, voices shouting. He was grateful for the heat of her hip and shoulder against him. Her presence grounded him, wrestled his rage back down to a manageable level. He hugged her more tightly to him, his mind returning with feverish intensity to his past.

For Arkadin, the ninth level of hell began innocently enough with Stas Kuzin’s confirmation that his business came from prostitution and drugs. Easy money, Arkadin thought, immediately lulled into a false sense of security.

At first, his role was as simple as it was clearly defined: He’d provide the space in his buildings to expand Kuzin’s brothel empire. This Arkadin did with his usual efficiency. Nothing could have been simpler, and for several months as the rubles rolled in he congratulated himself on making a lucrative business deal. Plus, his association with Kuzin brought him a boatload of perks, from free drinks at the local pubs to free sessions with Kuzin’s ever-expanding ring of teenage girls.

But it was this very thing-the young prostitutes-that became Arkadin’s slippery slope into hell’s lowest level. When he stayed away from the brothels, or made his cursory weekly checkups to ensure the apartments weren’t being trashed, it was easy to turn a blind eye on what was really going on. He was mostly too busy counting his money. However, on those occasions when he availed himself of a freebie or two, it was impossible not to notice how young the girls were, how afraid they were, how bruised their thin arms were, how hollow their eyes, and, all too often, how drugged up most of them were. It was like Zombie Nation in there.

All of this might have passed Arkadin by with a minimum of speculation had he not developed a liking for one of them. Yelena was a girl with wide lips, skin as pale as snow, and eyes that burned like a coal fire. She had a quick smile and, unlike some of the other girls, she wasn’t prone to bursting into tears for no apparent reason. She laughed at his jokes, she lay with him afterward, her face buried in his chest. He liked the feel of her in his arms. Her warmth seeped into him like fine vodka, and he grew used to how she found just the right position so that the curves of her body meshed perfectly with his. He could fall asleep in her arms, which for him was something of a miracle. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept through the night.

About this time, Kuzin called him into a meeting, told him he was doing so well he wanted to increase his partnership stake with Arkadin.

“Of course, I’ll need you to play a more active role,” Kuzin said in his semi-intelligible voice. “Business is so good that what I need most now is more girls. That’s where you come in.”

Kuzin made Arkadin the head of a crew whose sole purpose was to solicit teenage girls from the populace of Nizhny Tagil. This Arkadin did with his usual frightening efficiency. His visits to Yelena’s bed were as plentiful but not as idyllic. She had grown afraid, she told him, of the disappearances of some of the girls. One day she saw them; the next they had vanished as if they’d never existed. No one spoke of them, no one answered her questions when she asked where they’d gone. In the main, Arkadin dismissed her fears-after all, the girls were young, weren’t they leaving all the time? But Yelena was certain the girls’ disappearances had nothing to do with them and everything to do with Stas Kuzin. No matter what he said, her fears did not subside until he promised to protect her, to make sure nothing happened to her.

After six months Kuzin took him aside.

“You’re doing a great job.” A mixture of vodka and cocaine slurred Kuzin’s voice even further. “But I need more.”

They were in one of the brothels, which to Arkadin’s practiced eye looked oddly underpopulated. “Where are all the girls?” he asked.

Kuzin waved an arm. “Gone, run away, who the fuck knows where? These bitches get a bit of money in their pocket, they’re off like rabbits.”

Ever the pragmatist, Arkadin said, “I’ll take my crew and go find them.”

“A waste of time.” Kuzin’s little head bobbled on his shoulders. “Just find me more.”

“It’s getting difficult,” Arkadin pointed out. “Some of the girls are scared; they don’t want to come with us.”

“Take them anyway.”

Arkadin frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

“Okay, moron, I’ll lay it out for you. Take your fucking crew in the fucking van and snatch the bitches off the street.”

“You’re talking about kidnapping.”

Kuzin laughed. “Fuck me, he gets it!”

“What about the cops.”

Kuzin laughed even harder. “The cops are in my pocket. And even if they weren’t, d’you think they get paid to work? They don’t give a rat’s ass.”

For the next three weeks Arkadin and his crew worked the night shift, delivering girls to the brothel, whether or not they wanted to come. These girls were sullen, often belligerent, until Kuzin took them into a back room, where none of them ever wanted to go a second time. Kuzin didn’t mess with their faces, as that would be bad for business; only their arms and legs were bruised.

Arkadin watched this controlled violence as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He knew it was happening, but he pretended it had nothing to do with him. He continued to count his money, which was now piling up at a more rapid clip. It was his money and Yelena that kept him warm at night. Each time he was with her, he checked her arms and legs for bruises. When he made her promise not to take drugs, she laughed, “Leonid Danilovich, who has money for drugs?”

He smiled at this, knowing what she meant. In fact, she had more money than all the other girls in the brothel combined. He knew this because he was the one who gave it to her.

“Get yourself a new dress, a new pair of shoes,” he’d tell her, but frugal girl that she was, she’d merely smile and kiss him on the cheek with great affection. She was right, he realized, not to do anything to call attention to herself.

One night, not long after, Kuzin accosted him as he was leaving Yelena’s room.

“I have an urgent problem and I need your help,” the freak said.

Arkadin went with him out of the apartment building. A large van was waiting on the street, its engine running. Kuzin climbed into the back, and Arkadin followed. Two of the brothel girls were being guarded by Kuzin’s pair of personal ghouls.

“They tried to escape,” Kuzin said. “We just caught them.”

“They need to be taught a lesson,” Arkadin said, because he assumed that was what his partner wanted him to say.

“Too fucking late for that.” Kuzin signaled to the driver, and the van took off.

Arkadin settled back on the seat, wondering where they were going. He kept his mouth shut, knowing that if he asked questions now he’d look like a fool. Thirty minutes later the van slowed, turned off onto an unpaved road. For the next several minutes they jounced along a rutted track that must have been very narrow because branches kept scraping against the sides of the van.

At length, they stopped, the doors opened, and everyone clambered out. The night was very dark, illuminated only by the headlights of the van, but in the distance the fire of the smelters was like blood in the sky or, rather, on the undersides of the belching miasma churned out by hundreds of smokestacks. No one saw the sky in Nizhny Tagil, and when it snowed the flakes turned gray or even sometimes black as they passed through the industrial murk.

Arkadin followed along with Kuzin as the two ghouls pushed the girls through the thick, weedy underbrush. The resiny scent of pine perfumed the air so strongly, it almost masked the appalling stench of decomposition.

A hundred yards in the ghouls pulled back on the collars of the girls’s coats, reining them in. Kuzin took out his gun and shot one of the girls in the back of the head. She pitched forward into a bed of dead leaves. The other girl screamed, squirming within the ghoul’s grasp, desperate to run.

Then Kuzin turned to Arkadin, placed the gun in his hand. “When you pull the trigger,” he said, “we become equal partners.”

There was something in Kuzin’s eyes that at this close range gave Arkadin the shivers. It seemed to him that Kuzin’s eyes were smiling in the way the devil smiled, without warmth, without humanity, because the pleasure that animated the smile was of an evil and perverted nature. It was at this precise moment that Arkadin thought of the prisons ringing Nizhny Tagil, because he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was locked within his own private prison, with no idea if there was a key, let alone how to use it.

The gun-an old Luger with the Nazi swastika imprinted on it-was greasy with Kuzin’s excitement. Arkadin raised it to the height of the girl’s head. She was whimpering and crying. Arkadin had done many things in his young life, some of them unforgivable, but he’d never shot a girl in cold blood. And yet now, in order to prosper, in order to survive the prison of Nizhny Tagil, this was what he had to do.

He was aware of Kuzin’s avid eyes boring into him, red as the fire of Nizhny Tagil’s foundries themselves, and then he felt the muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and knew that the driver was standing behind him, no doubt on Kuzin’s orders.

“Do it,” Kuzin said softly, “because one way or another in the next ten seconds someone’s going to fire his gun.”

Arkadin aimed the Luger. The shout of the report echoed on and on through the deep and forbidding forest, and the girl slid along the leaves, into the pit with her friend.

Thirty-Five

THE SOUND of the bolt being thrown on the 8mm Mauser K98 rifle echoed through the Dachau air raid bunker. That was the end of it, however.

“Damn!” Old Pelz groaned. “I forgot to load the thing!”

Petra took out her handgun, pointed it in the air, and squeezed the trigger. Because the result was the same as what had happened to him, Old Pelz threw down the K98.

“Scheisse!” he said, clearly disgusted.

She approached him then. “Herr Pelz,” she said gently, “as I said, my name is Petra. Do you remember me?”

The old man stopped muttering, peered at her carefully. “You do look an awful lot like a Petra-Alexandra I once knew.”

“Petra-Alexandra.” She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Yes, yes, that’s me!”

He recoiled a little, put a hand on his cheek where she’d planted her lips. Then, skeptical to the end, he looked past her at Bourne. “Who’s this Nazi bastard? Did he force you to come here?” His hands curled into fists. “I’ll box his ears for him!”

“No, Herr Pelz, this is a friend of mine. He’s Russian.” She used the name Bourne had given her, which was on the passport Boris Karpov had provided.

“Russians’re no better than Nazis in my book,” the old man said sourly.

“Actually, I’m an American traveling under a Russian passport.” Bourne said this first in English and then in German.

“You speak English very well, for a Russian,” Old Pelz said in excellent English. Then he laughed, showing teeth yellowed by time and tobacco. At the sight of an American, he seemed to perk up, as if coming out of a decades-long drowse. This was the way he was, a rabbit being drawn out of a hat, only to withdraw again into the shadows. He wasn’t mad, just living both in the drab present and in the vivid past. “I embraced the Americans when they liberated us from tyranny,” he continued proudly. “In my time I helped them root out the Nazis and the Nazi sympathizers pretending to be good Germans.” He spat out the last words, as if he couldn’t stand to have them in his mouth.

“Then what are you doing here?” Bourne said. “Don’t you have a home to go to?”

“Sure I do.” Old Pelz smacked his lips, as if he could taste the life of his younger self. “In fact, I have a very nice house in Dachau. It’s blue and white, with flowers all around a picket fence. A cherry tree stands in back, spreading its wings in summer. The house is rented out to a fine young couple with two strapping children, who send their rent check like clockwork to my nephew in Leipzig. He’s a big-shot lawyer, you know.”

“Herr Pelz, I don’t understand,” Petra said. “Why not stay in your own home? This is no place to live.”

“The bunker is my health insurance.” The old man cocked a canny eye her way. “Do you have any idea what would happen to me if I went back to my house? They’d spirit me away in the night, and that’s the last anyone would ever see of me.”

“Who would do that to you?” Bourne said.

Pelz seemed to consider his answer, as if he needed to remember the text of a book he’d read in high school. “I told you I was a Nazi hunter, a damn fine one, too. In those days I lived like a king-or, if I’m honest, a duke. Anyway, that’s before I got cocky and made my mistake. I decided to go after the Black Legion, and that one intemperate decision was my downfall. Because of them I lost everything, even the trust of the Americans, who at that time needed those damn people more than they needed me.

“The Black Legion kicked me into the gutter like a piece of garbage or a mangy dog. From there it was only a short crawl down here into the bowels of the earth.”

“It’s the Black Legion I came here to talk to you about,” Bourne said. “I’m a hunter, too. The Black Legion isn’t a Nazi organization anymore. They’ve turned into a Muslim terrorist network.”

Old Pelz rubbed his grizzled jaw. “I’d say I’m surprised, but I’m not. Those bastards knew how to play all the cards in all the hands-the Germans, the Brits, and, most importantly, the Americans. They toyed with all of ’em after the war. Every Western intelligence service was throwing money at them. The thought of having built-in spies behind the Iron Curtain had them all salivating.

“It didn’t take the bastards long to figure out it was the Americans who had the upper hand. Why? ’Cause they had all the money and, unlike the Brits, weren’t being tight-fisted with it.” He cackled. “But that’s the American way, isn’t it?”

Not waiting for an answer to a question that was self-evident, he plowed on. “So the Black Legion took up with the American intelligence machine. First off, it wasn’t difficult to convince the Yanks that they’d never been Nazis, that their only goal was to fight Stalin. And that was true, as far as it went, but after the war they had other goals in mind. They’re Muslims, after all; they never felt comfortable in Western society. They wanted to build for the future, and like a lot of other insurgents they created their power base with American dollars.”

He squinted up at Bourne. “You’re American, poor bastard. None of these modern-day terrorist networks would’ve existed without your country’s backing. Fucking ironic, that is.”

For a time he lapsed into muttering, broke into a song whose lyrics were so melancholy tears welled up in his rheumy eyes.

“Herr Pelz,” Bourne said, trying to get the old man to focus. “You were talking about the Black Legion.”

“Call me Virgil,” Pelz said, nodding as he came out of his fugue state. “That’s right, my Christian name is Virgil, and for you, American, I will hold my lamp high enough to throw light on those bastards who ruined my life. Why not? I’m at a stage in my life when I should tell someone, and it might as well be you.”

They’re in the back,” Bev said to Drew Davis. “Both of them.” A woman in her midfifties with a thick frame and a quick wit, she was The Glass Slipper’s girl wrangler, as she wryly called herself-part disciplinarian, part den mother.

“The main interest is in the general,” Davis said, “isn’t that right, Kiki?”

Kiki nodded. She was closely flanked by Soraya and Deron, and all of them were clustered in Davis’s cramped office up a short flight of stairs from the main room. The pounding of the bass and drums thumped against the walls like the fists of angry giants. The room had the appearance of an attic or a garret, windowless, its walls like a time machine, plastered with photos of Drew Davis with Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, four different American presidents, a host of Hollywood stars, and various UN dignitaries and ambassadors from virtually every country in Africa. There was also a series of informal snapshots of him with his arm around a younger Kiki in the Masai Mara, totally unself-conscious, looking like a queen-in-training.

After her talk with Rob Batt in the parking lot, Soraya had returned to her table inside and filled in Kiki and Deron on her plan. The noise from the band on stage made eavesdropping impossible, even by anyone at the next table. Because of her longtime friendship with Drew Davis, it had been up to Kiki to create the spark that would light the fuse. This she did, resulting in this impromptu meeting in Davis’s office.

“For me to even contemplate what you’re asking, you have to guarantee blanket immunity,” Drew Davis said to Soraya. “Plus, leave our names out of it, unless you want to piss me off-which you don’t-as well as pissing off half the elected officials in the district.”

“You have my word,” Soraya said. “We want these two people, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

Drew Davis glanced at Kiki, who responded with an almost imperceptible nod.

Now Davis turned to Bev.

“Here’s what you can do and what you can’t do,” Bev said, reacting to her boss’s cue. “I won’t allow anyone on my ranch who’s not there for legitimate purposes-that is, either a patron or a working girl. So forget just barging in there. I do that and tomorrow we have no business left.”

She wasn’t even looking at Drew Davis, but Soraya saw him nod in assent, and her heart fell. Everything depended on their gaining access to the general while he was in the midst of his frolics. Then she had a thought.

“I’ll go in as a working girl,” she said.

“No, you won’t,” Deron said. “You’re known to both the general and Feir. One look at you and they’ll be spooked.”

“They don’t know me.”

Everyone turned their heads to stare at Kiki.

“Absolutely not,” Deron said.

“Ease up there,” Kiki said with a laugh. “I’m not going through with anything. I just need access.” She mimed taking photos. Then she turned to Bev. “How do I get into the general’s private room?”

“You can’t. For obvious reasons the private rooms are sacrosanct. Another rule of the house. And both the general and Feir have chosen their partners for the evening.” She drummed her fingers against Davis’s desktop. “But in the case of the general there is one way.”

Virgil Pelz took Bourne and Petra farther into the bunker’s main tunnel, to a rough-hewn space that opened out into a circle. There were benches here, a small gas stove, a refrigerator.

“Lucky someone forgot to turn off the electricity,” Petra said.

“Lucky my ass.” Pelz settled himself on a bench. “My nephew pays a town official under the table to keep the lights on.” He offered them whiskey or wine, which they refused. He poured himself a shot of liquor, downed it perhaps to fortify himself or to keep himself from sinking back into the shadows. It was obvious he liked having company, that the stimulation of other humans was bringing him out of himself.

“Most of what I’ve already told you about the Black Legion is basic history, if you know where to look, but the key to understanding their success in negotiating the dangerous postwar landscape lies in two men: Farid Icoupov and Ibrahim Sever.”

“I assume this Icoupov you speak of is Semion Icoupov’s father,” Bourne said.

Pelz nodded. “Just so.”

“And did Ibrahim Sever have a son?”

“He had two,” Pelz replied, “but I’m getting ahead of myself.” He smacked his lips, glanced at the bottle of whiskey, then decided against another shot.

“Farid and Ibrahim were the best of friends. They grew up together, each the only sons in large families. Possibly, this is what bonded them as children. The bond was strong; it lasted for most of their lives, but Ibrahim Sever was a warrior at heart, Farid Icoupov an intellectual, and the seeds of discontent and mistrust must have been sown early. During the war their shared leadership worked out just fine. Ibrahim was in charge of the Black Legion soldiers on the Eastern Front; Farid put in place and directed the intelligence-gathering network in the Soviet Union.

“It was after the war when the problems began. Stripped of his duties as commandant of the military end, Ibrahim began to fret that his power was eroding.” Pelz clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Listen, American, if you’re a student of history you know how the two longtime allies and friends Gaius Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus became enemies infected by the ambitions, fears, deceptions, and power struggles of those under their respective commands. So it was with these two. In time, Ibrahim convinced himself-no doubt abetted by some of his more militant advisers-that his longtime friend was planning a power grab. Unlike Caesar, who was off in Gaul when Pompey declared war on him, Farid lived in the next house. Ibrahim Sever and his men came in the night and assassinated Farid Icoupov. Three days later Farid’s son, Semion, shot Ibrahim to death as he was driving to work. In retaliation, Ibrahim’s son, Asher, went after Semion in a Munich nightclub. Asher managed to escape, but in the ensuing hail of gunfire Asher’s younger brother was killed.”

Pelz scrubbed his face with his hand. “You see how it goes, American? Like an ancient Roman vendetta, an orgy of blood of biblical proportions.”

“I know about Semion Icoupov, but not about Sever,” Bourne said. “Where’s Asher Sever now?”

The old man shrugged his thin shoulders. “Who knows? If Icoupov did, Sever would surely be dead by now.”

For a time, Bourne sat silent, thinking about the Black Legion’s attack on the professor, thinking about all the little anomalies that had been piling up in his mind: the oddity of Pyotr’s network of decadents and incompetents, the professor saying it was his idea to have the stolen plans delivered to him via the network, and the question of whether Mischa Tarkanian-and Arkadin himself-was Black Legion. At last, he said, “Virgil, I need to ask you several questions.”

“Yes, American.” Pelz’s eyes looked as bright and eager as a robin’s.

Still, Bourne hesitated. Revealing anything of his mission or its background to a stranger violated every instinct, every lesson he’d been taught, and yet he could see no other alternative. “I came to Munich because a friend of mine-a mentor, really-asked me to go after the Black Legion, first because they’re planning an attack against my country, and second because their leader, Semion Icoupov, ordered his son, Pyotr, killed.”

Pelz looked up, a curious expression on his face. “Asher Sever gathered his power base, which he’d inherited from his father-a powerful intelligence-gathering network strewn across Asia and Europe-and ousted Semion. Icoupov hasn’t been running the Black Legion for decades. If he had, I doubt whether I’d still be down here. Unlike Asher Sever, Icoupov was a man you could reason with.”

“Are you saying that you’ve met both Semion Icoupov and Asher Sever?” Bourne said.

“That’s right,” Pelz said, nodding. “Why?”

Bourne had gone cold as he contemplated the unthinkable. Could the professor have been lying to him all the time? But if so-if he was in fact a member of the Black Legion-why in the world would he entrust the delivery of the attack plans to Pyotr’s shaky network? Surely he would have known how unreliable its members were. Nothing seemed to make sense.

Knowing he had to solve this problem one step at a time, he took out his cell phone, scrolled through the photos, brought up the one the professor had sent of Egon Kirsch. He looked at the two men in the photo, then handed the phone to Pelz.

“Virgil, do you recognize either of these men?”

Pelz squinted, then stood and walked nearer to one of the bare lightbulbs. “No.” He shook his head, then, after a moment’s further scrutiny, his forefinger jabbed at the photo. “I don’t know, because he looks so different…” He returned to where Bourne sat, turned the phone so they could both see the photo, and tapped the figure of Professor Specter. “… but, damn, I’d swear this one is Asher Sever.”

Thirty-Six

PETER MARKS, chief of operations, was with Veronica Hart in her office, poring over reams of personnel data sheets, when they came for her. Luther LaValle, accompanied by a pair of federal marshals, had swept through CI security, armed with their warrant. Hart had only the briefest of warnings-a phone call from the first set of security guards downstairs-that her professional world was imploding. No time to get out of the way of the falling debris.

She barely had time to tell Marks, then stand up to face her accusers before the three men entered her office and presented her with the federal warrant.

“Veronica Rose Hart,” the senior of the stone-faced federal marshals intoned, “you are hereby placed under arrest for conspiring with one Jason Bourne, a rogue agent, for purposes that violate the regulations of Central Intelligence.”

“On what evidence?” Hart said.

“NSA surveillance photos of you in the courtyard of the Freer handing a packet to Jason Bourne,” the marshal said in the same zombie voice.

Marks, who was also on his feet, said, “This is insane. You can’t really believe-”

“Shut it, Mr. Marks,” Luther LaValle said with no fear of contradiction. “One more word out of you and I’ll have you put under formal investigation.”

Marks was about to reply when a sharp look from the DCI forced him to bite back his words. His jaws clamped shut, but the fury in his eyes was unmistakable.

Hart came around the desk, and the junior marshal cuffed her hands behind her back.

“Is that really necessary?” Marks said.

LaValle pointed at him wordlessly. As they marched Hart from her office, she said, “Take over, Peter. You’re acting DCI now.”

LaValle grinned. “Not for long, if I have anything to say about it.”

After they’d gone, Marks collapsed into his chair. Finding that his hands were trembling, he clasped them together, as if in prayer. His heart was pounding so hard he found it difficult to think. He jumped up, walked over to the window behind the DCI’s desk, stood staring out at the Washington night. All the monuments were lit up, all the streets and avenues were filled with traffic. Everything was as it should be, and yet nothing looked familiar. He felt as if he’d entered an alternate universe. He couldn’t have been witness to what just happened, NSA couldn’t be about to absorb CI into its gigantic corpus. But then he turned around to find the office empty and the full horror of seeing the DCI frog-marched out in handcuffs swept over him, made his legs weak, so that he sought out the big chair behind the desk and sat in it.

Then the implications of where he sat, and why, sank in. He picked up the phone and dialed Stu Gold, CI’s lead counsel.

“Sit tight. I’ll be right over,” Gold told him in his usual no-nonsense voice. Did nothing faze him?

Then Marks began to make a series of calls. It was going to be a long and harrowing night.

Rodney Feir was having the time of his life. As he accompanied Afrique into one of the rooms in the back of The Glass Slipper, he felt as if he were on top of the world. In fact, popping a Viagra, he decided to ask her to do a number of things he’d never tried before. Why the hell not? he asked himself.

While he was undressing he thought of the information on Typhon’s field agents Peter Marks had sent him via interoffice mail. Feir had deliberately told Marks he didn’t want it sent electronically because it was too insecure. The info was folded into the inside pocket of his coat, ready to give to General Kendall before they left The Glass Slipper tonight. He could have handed it over while they were at dinner, but he’d felt, all things considered, that a champagne toast after all their treats had been consumed was the proper way to cap off the night.

Afrique was already on the bed, spread languidly, her large eyes half closed, but she got right down to business as soon as Feir joined her. He tried to keep his mind on the proceedings, but seeing as how his body was totally in it, there wasn’t much point. He preferred dwelling on the things that made him truly happy, like getting the better of Peter Marks. When he was growing up it was people like Marks-and, for that matter, Batt-who’d had it all over him, brainiacs with brawn, in other words, who’d made his life miserable. They were the ones who had the cool circle of friends, who got all the great-looking girls, who rode in cars while he was still tooling around on a scooter. He was the nerd, the chubby-fat, really-kid who was made the butt of all their jokes, who was pushed around and ostracized, who, despite his high IQ, was so tongue-tied he could never stick up for himself.

He’d joined CI as a glorified pencil pusher, and, yes, he’d worked his way up the professional ladder, but not into fieldwork or counterintelligence. No, he was chief of field support, which meant that he was in charge of gathering and distributing the paperwork generated by the very CI personnel he longed to be like. His office was the central hub of supply and demand, and there were days when he could convince himself that it was the nerve center of CI. But most of the time he saw himself for what he really was-someone who kept pushing electronic lists, data entry forms, directorate requests, allocation tables, budget spreadsheets, personnel assignment profiles, matйriel lading bills, a veritable landslide of paperwork whizzing through the CI intranet. A monitor of information, in other words, a master of nothing.

He was enveloped in pleasure, a warm, viscous friction spreading outward from his groin into his torso and limbs. He closed his eyes and sighed.

At first, being an anonymous cog in the CI machine suited him, but as the years passed, as he rose in the hierarchy, only the Old Man understood his worth, for it was the Old Man who promoted him, time after time. But no one else-certainly none of the other directors-said a word to him until they needed something. Then a request came flying through CI cyberspace as quick as you could say, I need it yesterday. If he got them what they wanted yesterday, he heard nothing, not even a nod of thanks in the hallway, but should there be any delay at all, no matter the reason, they’d land on him like woodpeckers on a tree full of insects. He’d never hear the end of their pestering until they got what they wanted, and then silence again. It seemed sadly ironic to him that even in an insider’s paradise like CI he was on the outside.

It was humiliating to be one of those stereotypical Americans who time and again got sand kicked in his face. How he hated himself for being a living, breathing clichй. It was these evenings spent with General Kendall that gave his life color and meaning, the clandestine meetings in the health club sauna, the dinners at local barbecue joints in SE, and then the delicious chocolate nightcaps at The Glass Slipper, where he was for once the insider instead of having his nose pressed to someone else’s window. Knowing that he couldn’t be transformed he had to settle for losing himself in Afrique’s bed at The Glass Slipper.

General Kendall, smoking a cigar in the corral, the colloquial name for the parlor room where the girls were paraded for the benefit of the patrons, was enjoying himself immensely. If he was thinking of his boss at all, it was of the heart attack this scene he was enacting would cause LaValle. As for his family, they were the farthest thing from his mind. Unlike Feir, who always went for the same girl, Kendall was a man of diverse tastes when it came to the women of The Glass Slipper, and why not? He had virtually no choice in any other areas of his life. If not here, where?

He sat on the purple velvet sofa, one arm thrown along the back, watching through slitted eyes the slow parade of flesh. He had already made his choice; the girl was in her room, undressing, but when Bev had come to him, suggesting that he might want something a bit more special-another girl to create a threesome-he hadn’t hesitated. He’d been just about to make his choice when he saw someone. She was impossibly tall, with skin like the darkest cocoa, and was so regal in her beauty that he broke out into a sweat.

He caught Bev’s eye and she came over. Bev was attuned to his desires. “I want her,” he said to Bev, pointing at the regal beauty.

“I’m afraid Kiki’s not available,” she said.

This answer made Kendall want her all the more. Venal witch; she knew him too well. He produced five hundred-dollar bills. “How about now?” he said.

Bev, true to form, pocketed the money. “Leave it to me,” she said.

The general watched her pick her way through the girls to where Kiki was standing, somewhat apart from the others. While he observed the conversation his heart began to beat in his chest like a war drum. He was sweating so much he was obliged to wipe his palms on the purple velvet of the sofa arm. If she said no, what would he do? But she wasn’t saying no, she was looking across the corral at him, with a smile that raised his temperature a couple of degrees. Jesus, he wanted her!

As if in a trance, he saw her coming across the room toward him, her hips swaying, that maddening half smile on her face. He stood up, with some difficulty, he noted. He felt like a seventeen-year-old virgin. Kiki held out her hand and he took it, terrified that she’d be repulsed if it was damp, but nothing interfered with that half smile.

There was something intensely pleasurable about allowing her to lead him past all the other girls, enjoying the looks of envy on their faces.

“Which room are you in?” Kiki murmured in a voice like honey.

Kendall, inhaling her spicy, musky scent, could not find his voice. He pointed, and again she led him as if he were on a leash until they were standing in front of the door.

“Are you sure you want two girls tonight?” She brushed her hip against his. “I’m more than enough for any man I’ve been with.”

The general felt a delicious shiver travel down the length of his spine, lodge itself like a heated arrow between his thighs. Reaching out, he opened the door. Lena writhed on the bed, naked. He heard the door close behind him. Without thinking, he undressed himself, then he stepped out of the puddle of his clothes, took Kiki’s hand, padded over to the bed. He knelt on it, she let go of his hand, and he fell on Lena.

He felt Kiki’s hands on his shoulders, and, groaning, he lost himself within Lena’s lush body. The pleasure built along with the anticipation of Kiki’s long, lithe body pressed against his glistening back.

It took him some time to become aware that the quick flashes of light weren’t a result of the quickened firing of nerve endings behind his eyes. Drugged with sex and desire, he was slow to turn his head directly into another battery of flashes. Even then, negative images dancing behind his retinas, his fogged brain couldn’t quite piece together what was happening, and his body continued to move rhythmically against Lena’s pliant flesh.

Then the camera flashed again, he belatedly raised his hand to shield his eyes, and there was stark reality staring him in the face. Kiki, still dressed, continued to take shots of him and Lena.

“Smile, General,” she said in that sensual, honeyed voice. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

I’ve got too much anger inside me,” Petra said. “It’s like one of those flesh-eating diseases you read about.”

“Dachau is toxic for you, so is Munich now,” Bourne said. “You’ve got to go away.”

She moved to the left-hand lane of the autobahn, put on some real speed. They were on their way back to Munich in the car Pelz’s nephew had bought for him under the nephew’s name. The police might still be looking for both of them, but their only lead was Petra’s Munich apartment, and neither of them had any intention of going anywhere near it. As long as she didn’t get out of the car, Bourne felt it was relatively safe for her to drive him back into the city.

“Where would I go?” she said.

“Leave Germany altogether.”

She laughed, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Turn tail and run, you mean.”

“Why would you see it that way?”

“Because I’m German; because I belong here.”

“The Munich police are looking for you,” he said.

“And if they find me, then I’ll do my time for killing your friend.” She flashed her headlights so a slower car could get out of her way. “Meanwhile I have money. I can live.”

“But what will you do?”

She gave him a lopsided smile. “I’m going to take care of Virgil. He needs drying out; he needs a friend.” Nearing the city, she changed lanes so she could exit when she needed to. “The cops won’t find me,” she said with an odd kind of certainty, “because I’m taking him far away from here. Virgil and me, we’ll be two outlaws learning a whole new way of life.”

Egon Kirsch lived in the northern district of Schwabing, known as the young intellectual quarter because of the mass of university students that flooded its streets, cafйs, and bars.

As they came abreast of Schwabing’s main plaza, Petra pulled over. “When I was younger I used to hang out here with my friends. We were all militants, then, agitating for change, and we felt connected to this place because it was from here that the Freiheitsaktion Bayer, one of the most famed resistance groups, commandeered Radio Munich near the end of the war. They broadcast messages to the populace to seize and arrest all local Nazi leaders, and to signal their rejection of the regime by waving white sheets out of their windows-an action that was punishable by death, by the way. And they managed to save a large number of civilian lives as the American army swept in.”

“At last we find something in Munich that even you can be proud of,” Bourne said.

“I suppose so.” Petra laughed, almost sadly. “But I among all of my friends was the only one who stayed a revolutionary. The others are corporate functionaries or Hausfraus now. They lead sad, gray lives. I see them sometimes, trudging to and from work. I walk by them; they don’t even look up. In the end, they all disappointed me.”

Kirsch’s apartment was on the top floor of a beautiful house of stone-colored stucco, arched windows, and a terra-cotta tile roof. Between two of his windows was a niche holding a stone statue of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus.

Petra pulled into the curb in front of the building. “I wish you well, American,” she said, deliberately using Virgil Pelz’s phrasing. “Thank you… for everything.”

“You may not believe it, but we helped each other,” Bourne said as he got out of the car. “Good luck, Petra.”

When she’d driven off, he turned, went up the steps to the building, and used the code Kirsch had given him to open the front door. The interior was neat and spotlessly clean. The wood-paneled hallway gleamed with a recent waxing. Bourne climbed the carved wooden staircase to the top floor. Using Kirsch’s key, he let himself in. Though the apartment itself was light and airy, with many windows overlooking the street, it was steeped in a deep silence, as if it existed on the bottom of the sea. There was no TV, no computer. Bookcases lined one entire wall of the living room, holding volumes by Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, Heidegger, Leibniz, and Machiavelli. There were also books by many of the great mathematicians, biographers, fiction writers, and economists. The other walls were covered with Kirsch’s framed and matted line drawings, so detailed and intricate that at first glance they seemed to be architectural plans, but then suddenly they came into focus and Bourne realized the drawings were abstracts. Like all good art, they seemed to move back and forth from reality to an imagined dream world where anything was possible.

After taking a brief tour of all the rooms, he settled down in a chair behind Kirsch’s desk. He thought long and hard about the professor. Was he Dominic Specter, the nemesis of the Black Legion, as he claimed to be, or was he, in fact, Asher Sever, the leader of the Black Legion? If he was Sever, he’d staged the attack on himself-an elaborate scheme that had cost a number of lives. Could the professor be guilty of such an irrational act? If he was the leader of the Black Legion, certainly. The second question Bourne had been asking himself was why the professor would entrust the stolen plans to Pyotr’s thoroughly undependable network. But there was another enigma: If the professor was Sever, why was he so anxious to get those plans? Wouldn’t he already have them? These two questions went around and around in Bourne’s head without producing a satisfactory solution. Nothing about the situation he found himself in appeared to make sense, which meant that a vital part of the picture was missing. And yet he had the nagging suspicion that, like Egon Kirsch’s drawings, he was being shown two separate realities-if only he could decipher which was real and which one was false.

At length, he turned his mind to something that had been bothering him ever since the incident at the Egyptian Museum. He knew that Franz Jens had been the only one to follow him into the museum, so how on earth did Arkadin know where he was? Arkadin had to have been the one to kill Jens. He also must have given the order to kill Egon Kirsch, but, again, how did he know where Kirsch was?

The answers to both questions were firmly rooted in time and place. He hadn’t been tailed to the museum, then… As a chill spread through him, Bourne went very still. With no physical tail, there had to be an electronic tail somewhere on his person. But how had it been put there? Someone could have brushed up against him in the airport. He rose, slowly undressed. As he did so, he went through every item of clothing, looking for an electronic tag. Finding nothing, he dressed, sat again in the chair, deep in thought.

With his eidetic memory, he went through every step of his journey from Moscow to Munich. When he recalled the German Immigration officer, he realized that his passport had been out of his possession for close to half a minute. Taking it out of his breast pocket, he began to leaf through it, checking each page both by sight and by touch. On the inside of the back cover, stuck in the fold of the binding, he found the tiny transmitter.

Thirty-Seven

HOW WONDERFUL it is to breathe the good night air,” Veronica Hart said as she stood on the pavement just outside the Pentagon.

“Diesel fumes and all,” Stu Gold said.

“I knew LaValle’s charges wouldn’t stick,” she said as they crossed to his car. “They’re patently trumped up.”

“I wouldn’t begin celebrating just yet,” the attorney said. “LaValle’s put me on notice that he’s going to take those surveillance photos of you and Bourne to the president tomorrow for an executive order to have you removed.”

“Come on, Stu, those were private conversations between Martin Lindros and a civilian, Moira Trevor. There’s nothing in them. LaValle’s banking on hot air.”

“He’s got the secretary of defense,” Gold said. “Under the circumstances that alone is enough to make trouble for you.”

The wind was whipping up and Hart caught her hair, pushed it off her face. “Coming into CI and marching me out in cuffs… LaValle made a big mistake grandstanding like that.” She turned, looked back at the headquarters of the NSA in which she’d been incarcerated for three hours until the moment Gold showed up with his order from a federal judge for her temporary release. “He’ll pay for humiliating me.”

“Veronica, don’t do anything rash.” Gold opened the car door, ushered her inside. “Knowing LaValle as I do it’s more than likely that he wants you to go off half-cocked. That’s how fatal mistakes are made.”

He went around the front of the car, got behind the wheel, and they drove off.

“We can’t let him get away with this, Stu. Unless we stop him he’s going to hijack CI right out from under us.” She watched the Virginia night turn into the district night as they crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The Lincoln Memorial rose up before them. “I made a pledge when I signed on.”

“Like all DCIs.”

“No, I’m talking about a personal pledge.” She very much wanted to see Lincoln sitting on his chair, contemplating all the unknowns that lay before every human being. She asked Gold to make a stop there. “I never told anyone this, Stu, but the day I officially became DCI I went to the Old Man’s grave. Have you ever been to the Arlington National Cemetery? It’s a sobering place, but in its own way a joyous place as well. So many heroes, so much courage, the bedrock of our freedom, Stu, every one of us.”

They’d come to the memorial. They both got out, walked up to the majestic floodlit granite statue, stood gazing up into Lincoln’s stern, wise face. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers at his feet, withered heads nodding in the wind.

“I stayed at the Old Man’s grave for a long time,” Hart continued in a faraway voice. “I swear I could feel him, I swear I felt something stir against me, then inside me.” Her gaze swung around to fix on the attorney. “There’s a long, exemplary legacy at CI, Stu. I swore then, and I’m swearing now, that I won’t let anything or anyone damage that legacy.” She took a breath. “So whatever it takes.”

Gold returned her stare without flinching. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

“Yes, I believe I do.”

At last, he said, “All right, Veronica, it’s your call. Whatever it takes.”

Feeling invigorated and invulnerable after his workout, Rodney Feir met General Kendall in the champagne room, reserved for those VIPs who had consummated the evening’s pleasures and wanted to linger, with or without their girls. Of course time spent in there was far more expensive with the girls than without.

The champagne room was decorated like a Middle Eastern pasha’s den. The two men lazed on voluminous pillows while being served the bubbly of their choice. This was where Feir planned to hand over the intel on Typhon’s field agents. But first he wanted to luxuriate in the pure pleasure provided in the back rooms of The Glass Slipper. After all, the moment he set foot outside, the real world would come crashing in on him with all its annoyances, petty humiliations, drudgery, and the piquancy of fear that preceded every move he made to advance LaValle’s position vis-а-vis CI.

Kendall, his cell phone at his right hand, sat rather stiffly, as befitted a military man. Feir thought he must be slightly uncomfortable in such lush surroundings. The men chatted for a time, sipping their champagne, exchanging theories about steroids and baseball, about the chances of the Redskins making the play-offs next year, the gyrations of the stock market, anything but politics.

After a time, when the bottle of champagne was nearly exhausted, Kendall looked at his watch. “What d’you have for me?”

This was the moment Feir had been keenly anticipating. He couldn’t wait to see the look on the general’s face when he caught a glimpse of the intel. Reaching into the pocket in the lining of his coat, he brought out the packet. A low-tech hard copy was the safest way to smuggle data out of the CI building, since security systems were in place to monitor the comings and goings of any device with a hard drive large enough to hold substantial data files.

A smile broke out across Feir’s face. “The whole enchilada. Every last detail on the Typhon agents across the globe.” He held up the packet. “Now let’s talk about what I get in return.”

“What do you want?” Kendall said without much enthusiasm. “A higher grade? More control?”

“I want respect,” Feir said. “I want LaValle to respect me the way you do.”

A curious smile curled the general’s lips. “I can’t speak for Luther, but I’ll see what I can do.”

As he leaned forward to take the intel, Feir was wondering why he was so solemn-no, worse than solemn, he was downright glum. Feir was on the point of asking him about it when a tall, elegant black woman began snapping a series of photos.

“What the hell?” he said, through the blinding string of flashes.

When his vision cleared, he saw Soraya Moore standing beside them. She had the packet of intel in her hand.

“This isn’t a good night for you, Rodney.” She picked up the general’s cell phone, thumbed it on, and there was the conversation between the general and Feir recorded and regurgitated so everyone could hear his treachery for themselves. “No, I would have to say that all things considered it’s the end of the line.”

I’m not afraid to die,” Devra said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not worried,” Arkadin said. “What makes you think I’m worried?”

She bit into the chocolate ice cream he’d bought her. “You’ve got that deep vertical indentation between your eyes.”

She wanted ice cream even though it was the middle of winter. Maybe it was the chocolate she wanted, he thought. Not that it mattered; pleasing her in little ways was strangely satisfying-as if in pleasing her he was also pleasing himself, although that seemed like an impossibility to him.

“I’m not worried,” he said. “I’m thoroughly pissed off.”

“Because your boss told you to stay away from Bourne.”

“I’m not going to stay away from Bourne.”

“You’ll piss off your boss.”

“There comes a time,” Arkadin said, walking faster.

They were in the center of Munich; he wanted to be in a central location when Icoupov told him where he was meeting Bourne in order to get there as quickly as possible.

“I’m not afraid to die,” Devra repeated, “the only thing is, though, what do you do when you no longer have memories?”

Arkadin shot her a look. “What?”

“When you look at a dead person what do you see?” She took another bite of ice cream between her teeth, leaving little indentations in what was left of the scoop. “Nothing, right? Not a damn thing. Life has flown the coop, and with it all the memories that have been built up over the years.” She looked at him. “At that moment, you cease to be human, so what are you?”

“Who gives a shit?” Arkadin said. “It’ll be a fucking relief to be without memories.”

Soraya presented herself at the NSA safe house just before 10 AM, so that by the time she cleared the various levels of security, she was being ushered into the Library precisely on time.

“Breakfast, madam?” Willard asked as he escorted her across the plush carpet.

“I believe I will, today,” she said. “A fines herbes omelet would be nice. Do you have a baguette?”

“We do, indeed, madam.”

“Fine.” She shifted the evidence damning General Kendall from one hand to the other. “And a pot of Ceylon tea, Willard. Thank you.”

She walked the rest of the way to where Luther LaValle sat, drinking his morning cup of coffee. He stared out the window, casting a jaundiced eye on the early spring. It was so warm the fireplace held only cold, white ash.

He did not turn when she sat down. She placed the evidence file on her lap, then said without preamble, “I’ve come to take Tyrone home.”

LaValle ignored her. “There’s nothing on your Black Legion; there’s no unusual terrorist activities inside the US. We’ve come up blank.”

“Did you hear what I said? I’ve come for Tyrone.”

“That’s not going to happen,” LaValle said.

Soraya brought out Kendall’s cell phone, played back the conversation he’d had with Rodney Feir in the champagne room of The Glass Slipper.

“Every last detail on the Typhon agents across the globe,” came Feir’s voice. “Now let’s talk about what I get in return.”

General Kendall: “What do you want? A higher grade? More control?”

Feir: “I want respect. I want LaValle to respect me the way you do.”

“Who cares?” LaValle’s head swung around. His eyes were dark and glassy. “That’s Feir’s problem, not mine.”

“Maybe so.” Soraya slid the file across the table toward him. “However, this is very much your problem.”

LaValle stared at her for a moment. His eyes were now full of venom. Without lowering his gaze, he reached out, flipped open the file. There he saw photo after photo of General Kendall, naked as sin, caught in the midst of having intercourse with a young black woman.

“How is that going to look for the career officer and devout Christian family man when the story comes out?”

Willard arrived with her breakfast, snapping down a starched white tablecloth, setting the china and silverware in a precise pattern in front of her. When he was finished, he turned to LaValle. “Anything for you, sir?”

LaValle shooed him away with a curt flick of his hand. For a time, he did nothing more than leaf through the photos again. Then he took out a cell phone, placed it on the table, and pushed it toward her.

“Call Bourne,” he said.

Soraya froze with a forkful of omelet halfway to her mouth. “I beg your pardon?”

“I know he’s in Munich, our substation there picked him up on their CCTV monitoring of the airport. I have men in place to take him into custody. All that’s needed now is for you to set the trap.”

She laughed as she set down her fork. “You’re dreaming, LaValle. I have you, not the other way around. If these photos become public, your right-hand man will be ruined both professionally and personally. You and I both know you’re not going to allow that to happen.”

LaValle gathered up the photos, slid them back into the envelope. Then he took out a pen, wrote a name and address on the front of the envelope. When Willard glided over at his beckoning, LaValle said, “Please have these scanned and sent electronically to The Drudge Report. Then have a courier deliver them to The Washington Post as soon as possible.”

“Very good, sir.” Willard tucked the envelope under his arm, vanished into another part of the Library.

Then LaValle took out his cell phone, dialed a local number. “Gus, this is Luther LaValle. Fine, fine. How’s Ginnie? Good, give her my love. The kids, as well… Listen, Gus, I have a situation here. Evidence has come to light regarding General Kendall, that’s right, he’s been the target of an internal investigation for some months now. Effective immediately, he’s been terminated from my command, from the NSA in toto. Well, you’ll see, I’m having the photos messengered over to you even as we speak. Of course it’s an exclusive, Gus. Frankly, I’m shocked, truly shocked. You will be, too, when you see these photos… I’ll have an official statement over to you within forty minutes. Yes, of course. No need to thank me, Gus, I always think of you first.”

Soraya watched this performance with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that grew from an icy ball into an iceberg of disbelief.

“How could you?” she said when LaValle finished his call. “Kendall’s your second in command, your friend. You and he go to church together with your families every Sunday.”

“I have no permanent friends or allies; I only have permanent interests,” LaValle said flatly. “You’ll be a damn sight better director when you learn that.”

She then drew out another set of photos, this one showing Feir handing a packet to General Kendall. “That packet,” she said, “details the number and locations of Typhon field personnel.”

LaValle’s disdainful expression didn’t change. “What’s that to me?”

For the second time, Soraya struggled to hide her astonishment. “That’s your second in command taking possession of classified CI intel.”

“On that score you should see to your own people.”

“Are you denying that you gave General Kendall orders to cultivate Rodney Feir as a mole?”

“Yes, I am.”

Soraya was almost breathless. “I don’t believe you.”

LaValle produced an icy smile. “I doesn’t matter what you believe, Director. Only the facts matter.” He flicked the photo away with his fingernail. “Whatever General Kendall did, he did on his own. I have no knowledge of it.”

Soraya was wondering how everything could have gone so wrong, when, once again, LaValle pushed the phone across the table.

“Now call Bourne.”

She felt as if there were a steel band around her chest; the blood was singing in her ears. Now what? she said to herself. Dear God, what can I do?

She heard someone with her voice say, “What should I tell him?”

LaValle produced a slip of paper with a time and an address on it. “He needs to go here, at this time. Tell him that you’re in Munich, that you have information vital to the Black Legion’s attack, that he has to see it for himself.”

Soraya’s hand was so slick with sweat, she wiped it on her napkin. “He’ll be suspicious if I don’t call him on my own phone. In fact, he might not answer if I don’t, because he won’t know it’s me.”

LaValle nodded, but when she produced her phone, he said, “I’m going to listen to every word you say. If you try to warn him I promise your friend Tyrone will never leave this building alive. Clear?”

She nodded, but did nothing.

Observing her like a frog split open on a dissecting table, LaValle said, “I know you don’t want to do this, Director. I know how badly you don’t want to do this. But you will call Bourne and you will set the trap for me, because I’m stronger than you are. By that I mean my will. I get what I want, Director, at any cost, but not you-you care too much to have a long career in intelligence work. You’re doomed and you know it.”

Soraya had stopped listening to him after the first few words. Acutely aware that she had vowed to take control of the situation, to somehow turn disaster into victory, she was furiously marshaling her forces. One step at a time, she told herself now. I have to clear my mind of Tyrone, of the failed ploy with Kendall, of my own guilt. I have to think of this call now; how am I going to make the call and keep Jason from being captured?

It seemed an impossible task, but that kind of thinking was defeatist, totally unhelpful. Still-what was she to do?

“After your call,” LaValle said, “you’ll stay here, under constant surveillance, until after Bourne is taken into custody.”

Uncomfortably aware of his avid eyes on her, she flipped open her phone, and called Jason.

When she heard his voice, she said, “Hi, it’s me, Soraya.”

Bourne was standing in Egon Kirsch’s apartment, staring down at the street when his cell phone rang. He saw Soraya’s number come up on the screen, answered the call, and heard her say, “Hi, it’s me, Soraya.”

“Where are you?”

“Actually, I’m in Munich.”

He perched on the arm of an upholstered chair. “Actually? In Munich?”

“That’s what I said.”

He frowned, hearing echoes in his head from far away. “I’m surprised.”

“Not as much as I am. You came up on the CI surveillance grid at the airport.”

“There was no help for it.”

“I’m sure not. Anyway, I’m not over here on official CI business. We’ve been continuing to monitor the Black Legion communications, and at last we got a breakthrough.”

He stood up. “What is it?”

“The phone’s too insecure,” she said. “We should meet.” She told him the place and the time.

Glancing at his watch, he said, “That’s a little over an hour from now.”

“Right as rain. I can make it. Can you?”

“I think I can manage,” he said. “See you.”

He disconnected, went over to the window, leaned on the sash, replaying the conversation word by word in his mind.

He felt the jolt of a dislocation, as if he had moved outside his body, experiencing something that had happened to someone else. His mind, recording a seismic shift in its neurons, was struggling with a memory. Bourne knew he’d had this conversation before, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember where or when, or what significance it might have for him now.

He would have continued on with his fruitless search had not the downstairs bell rang. Turning from the window, he went across the living room, pressed the button that released the outer door’s lock. The time had finally come when he and Arkadin would meet face-to-face-the assassin of legend, who specialized in killing killers, who had slipped in and out of a Russian high-security prison without anyone being the wiser, who had managed to eliminate Pyotr and his entire network.

There was a knock on the door. He kept away from the spy hole, kept away from the door itself, unlatching it from the side. There was no gunshot, no splintering of the wood and metal. Instead the door opened inward and a dapper man with dark skin and a spade-shaped beard stepped into the apartment.

Bourne said, “Turn around slowly.”

The man, hands where Bourne could see them, turned to face him. It was Semion Icoupov.

“Bourne,” he said.

Bourne produced his passport, opened it to the inside cover.

Icoupov nodded. “I see. Is this where you kill me at the behest of Dominic Specter?”

“You mean Asher Sever.”

“Oh, dear,” Icoupov said, “there goes my surprise.” He smiled. “I confess I’m shocked. Nevertheless, I congratulate you, Mr. Bourne. You’ve come by knowledge no one else has. By what means is a complete mystery.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Bourne said.

“No matter. What’s important is that I don’t have to waste time trying to convince you that Sever has played you. Since you’ve already uncovered his lies, we can move on to the next stage.”

“What makes you think I’m going to listen to anything you have to say?”

“If you’ve discovered Sever’s lies, then you know the recent history of the Black Legion, you know we were once like brothers, you know how deep the enmity between us runs. We are enemies, Sever and I. There can be only one outcome to our war, you understand me?”

Bourne said nothing.

“I want to help you stop his people from attacking your country, is that clear enough?” He shrugged. “Yes, of course you’re right to be skeptical, I would be if I was in your place.” He moved his left hand very slowly to the edge of his overcoat, pulled it back to reveal the lining. There was something sticking out of the slit pocket. “Perhaps before anything untoward happens, you should take a look at what I have here.”

Bourne leaned in, took the SIG Sauer Icoupov had holstered at his belt. Then he pulled the packet free.

As he was opening it up, Icoupov said, “I went to a great deal of trouble to steal those from my nemesis.”

Bourne found himself looking over the architectural plans for the Empire State Building. When he glanced up, he found Icoupov watching him intently. “This is what the Black Legion means to attack. Do you know when?”

“Indeed, I do.” Icoupov glanced at his watch. “Precisely thirty-three hours, twenty-six minutes from now.”

Thirty-Eight

VERONICA HART was looking at The Drudge Report when Stu Gold escorted General Kendall into her office. She was sitting in front of her desk, the monitor turned toward the door so Kendall could get a clear view of the photos of him and the woman from The Glass Slipper.

“That’s just one site,” she said, waving them to three chairs that had been arranged opposite her. “There are so many others.” When her guests were seated, she addressed Kendall. “Whatever is your family going to say, General? Your minister, and the congregation?” Her expression remained neutral; she was careful to keep the gloat out of her voice. “I understand that a goodly number of them aren’t fond of African Americans, even as maids and nannies. They prefer the Eastern Europeans-young blond Polish and Russian women. Isn’t that right?”

Kendall said nothing, sat with his back ramrod-straight, his hands clasped primly between his knees, as if he were at a court-martial.

Hart wished Soraya were here, but she hadn’t returned from the NSA safe house, which was worrying enough; she wasn’t answering her cell, either.

“I’ve suggested that the best thing he can do now is to help us tie LaValle in to the plot to steal CI secrets,” Gold said.

Now Hart smiled rather sweetly at Kendall. “And what do you think of that suggestion, General?”

“Recruiting Rodney Feir was entirely my idea,” Kendall said woodenly.

Hart sat forward. “You want us to believe you’d embark on such a risky course without informing your superior?”

“After the fiasco with Batt, I had to do something to prove my worth. I felt I had the best chance romancing Feir.”

“This is getting us nowhere,” Hart said.

Gold stood up. “I agree. The general has made up his mind to fall on his sword for the man who sold him down the river.” He moved to the door. “I’m not sure how that computes, but it takes all kinds.”

“Is that it?” Kendall looked straight ahead. “Are you done with me?”

“We are,” Hart said, “but Rob Batt isn’t.”

Batt’s name got a reaction out of the general. “Batt? What does he have to do with anything? He’s out of the picture.”

“I don’t think so.” Hart got up, stood behind his chair. “Batt’s had you under surveillance from the moment you ruined his life. Those photos of you and Feir going in and out of the health club, the barbecue joint, and The Glass Slipper were taken by him.”

“But that’s not all he has.” Gold lifted his briefcase meaningfully.

“So,” Hart said, “I’m afraid your stay at CI will continue awhile longer.”

“How much longer?”

“What do you care?” Hart said. “You no longer have a life to go back to.”

While Kendall remained with two armed agents, Hart and Gold went next door, where Rodney Feir was sitting, guarded by another pair of agents.

“Is the general having fun yet?” Feir said as they took seats facing him. “This is a black day for him.” He chuckled at his own joke, but no one else did.

“Do you have any idea how serious your situation is?” Gold said.

Feir smiled. “I do believe I have a handle on the situation.”

Gold and Hart exchanged a glance; neither could understand Feir’s lighthearted attitude.

Gold said, “You’re going to jail for a very long time, Mr. Feir.”

Feir crossed one leg over the other. “I think not.”

“You think wrong,” Gold said.

“Rodney, we have you stealing Typhon secrets and handing them over to a ranking member of a rival intelligence organization.”

“Please!” Feir said. “I’m fully aware of what I did and that you caught me at it. What I’m saying is none of that matters.” He continued to look like the Cheshire Cat, as if he held a royal flush to their four aces.

“Explain yourself,” Gold said curtly.

“I fucked up,” Feir said. “But I’m not sorry for what I did, only that I got caught.”

“That attitude will certainly help your case,” Hart said caustically. She was done being manhandled by Luther LaValle and his cohorts.

“I’m not, by nature, prone to being contrite, Director. But like your evidence, my attitude is of no import. I mean to say, if I were contrite like Rob Batt, would it make any difference to you?” He shook his head. “So let’s not bullshit each other. What I did, how I feel about it is in the past. Let’s talk about the future.”

“You have no future,” Hart said tartly.

“That remains to be seen.” Feir kept his maddening smile trained on her. “What I’m proposing is a barter.”

Gold was incredulous. “You want to make a deal?”

“Let’s call it a fair exchange,” Feir said. “You drop all charges against me, give me a generous severance package and a letter of recommendation I can take into the private sector.”

“Anything else?” Hart said. “How about a summer house on the Chesapeake and a yacht to go with it?”

“A generous offer,” Feir said with a perfectly straight face, “but I’m not a pig, Director.”

Gold rose. “This is intolerable behavior.”

Feir eyed him. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist, counselor. You haven’t heard my side of the exchange.”

“Not interested.” Gold signaled the two agents. “Take him back down to the holding cell.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Feir didn’t struggle as the agents grabbed hold of either arm and hauled him to his feet. He turned to Hart. “Director, did you ever wonder why Luther LaValle didn’t try a run at CI while the Old Man was alive?”

“I didn’t have to; I know. The Old Man was too powerful, too well connected.”

“True enough, but there’s another, more specific reason.” Feir looked from one agent to the other.

Hart wanted to wring his neck. “Let him go,” she said.

Gold stepped forward. “Director, I strongly recommend-”

“No harm in hearing the man out, Stu.” Hart nodded. “Go ahead, Rodney. You have one minute.”

“The fact is LaValle tried several times to make a run at CI while the Old Man was in charge. He failed every time, and do you know why?” Feir looked from one to the other, the Cheshire Cat grin back on his face. “Because for years the Old Man has had a deep-cover mole inside the NSA.”

Hart goggled at him. “What?”

“This is bullshit,” Gold said. “He’s blowing smoke up our ass.”

“Good guess, counselor, but wrong. I know the identity of the mole.”

“How on earth would you know that, Rodney?”

Feir laughed. “Sometimes-not very often, I admit-it pays to be CI’s chief file clerk.”

“That’s hardly what you-”

“That’s precisely what I am, Director.” A storm cloud of deep-seated anger momentarily shook him. “No fancy title can obscure the fact.” He waved a hand, his flash of rage quickly banked to embers. “But no matter, the point is I see things in CI no one else does. The Old Man had contingencies in place should he be killed, but you know this better than I do, counselor, don’t you?”

Gold turned to Hart. “The Old Man left a number of sealed envelopes addressed to different directors in the event of his sudden demise.”

“One of those envelopes,” Feir said, “the one with the identity of the mole inside NSA, was sent to Rob Batt, which made sense at the time, since Batt was chief of operations. But it never got to Batt, I saw to that.”

“You-” Hart was so enraged that she could barely speak.

“I could say that I’d already begun to suspect that Batt was working for the NSA,” Feir said, “but that would be a lie.”

“So you held on to it, even after I was appointed.”

“Leverage, Director. I figured that sooner or later I’d need my Get Out of Jail Free card.”

There was the smile that made Hart want to bury her fist in his face. With an effort, she restrained herself. “And meanwhile, you let LaValle trample all over us. Because of you I was led out of my office in handcuffs, because of you the Old Man’s legacy is a hair’s breadth from being buried.”

“Yeah, well, these things happen. What can you do?”

“I’ll tell you what I can do,” Hart said, signaling the agents, who grabbed Feir again. “I can tell you to go to hell. I can tell you that you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail.”

Even then, Feir appeared unfazed. “I said I knew who the mole is, Director. Furthermore-and I believe this will be of especial interest you-I know where he’s stationed.”

Hart was too enraged to care. “Get him out of my sight.”

As he was being led to the door, Feir said, “He’s inside the NSA safe house.”

The DCI felt her heart thumping hard in her chest. Feir’s goddamn smile was not only understandable now, it was warranted.

Thirty-three hours, twenty-six minutes from now. Icoupov’s ominous words were still ringing in Bourne’s ears when he saw a flicker of movement. He and Icoupov were standing in the foyer, the front door was still open, and a shadow had for a moment stained the opposite wall of the hallway. Someone was out there, shielded by the half-open door.

Bourne, continuing to talk to Icoupov, took the other man by his elbow and moved him back into the living room, across the rug, toward the hallway to the bedrooms and bath. As they passed one of the windows, it exploded inward with the force of a man swinging through. Bourne whirled, the SIG Sauer he’d taken from Icoupov coming to bear on the intruder.

“Put the SIG down,” a female voice said from behind him. He turned his head to see that the figure in the hallway-a young pale woman-was aiming a Luger at his head.

“Leonid, what are you doing here?” Icoupov seemed apoplectic. “I gave you express orders-”

“It’s Bourne.” Arkadin advanced through the welter of glass littering the floor. “It was Bourne who killed Mischa.”

“Is this true?” Icoupov turned on Bourne. “You killed Mikhail Tarkanian?”

“He left me no choice,” Bourne said.

Devra, her Luger aimed squarely at Bourne’s head, said, “Drop the SIG. I won’t say it again.”

Icoupov reached out toward Bourne. “I’ll take it.”

“Stay where you are,” Arkadin ordered. His own Luger was aimed at Icoupov.

“Leonid, what are you doing?”

Arkadin ignored him. “Do as the lady says, Bourne. Drop the SIG.”

Bourne did as he was told. The moment he let go of the gun, Arkadin tossed his Luger aside and leapt at Bourne. Bourne raised a forearm in time to block Arkadin’s knee, but he felt the jolt all the way up into his shoulder. They traded punishing blows, clever feints, and defensive blocks. For each move he employed, Arkadin had the perfect counter, and vice versa. When he stared into the Russian’s eyes he saw his darkest deeds reflected back at him, all the death and destruction that lay in his wake. In those implacable eyes there was a void blacker than a starless night.

They moved across the living room as Bourne gave way, until they passed under the archway separating the living room from the rest of the apartment. In the kitchen Arkadin grabbed a cleaver, swung it at Bourne. Dodging away from the executioner’s lethal arc, Bourne reached for a wooden block that held several carving knives. Arkadin brought the cleaver down on the countertop, missing Bourne’s fingers by less than an inch. Now he blocked the way to the knives, swinging the cleaver back and forth like a scythe reaping wheat.

Bourne was near the sink. Snatching a plate out of the dish rack, he hurled it like a Frisbee, forcing Arkadin to duck out of the way. As the plate shattered against the wall behind Arkadin, Bourne withdrew a carving knife like a sword out of its scabbard. Steel clashed against steel, until Bourne used the knife to stab directly at Arkadin’s stomach. Arkadin brought the cleaver down precisely at the place where Bourne was gripping the knife, and he had to let go. The knife rang as it hit the floor, then Arkadin rushed Bourne, and the two closed together.

Bourne managed to keep the cleaver away, and at such close quarters it was impossible to swing it back and forth. Realizing it had become a liability, Arkadin dropped it.

For three long minutes they were locked together in a kind of double death grip. Bloody and bruised, neither managed to gain the upper hand. Bourne had never encountered someone of Arkadin’s physical and mental skill, someone who was so much like him. Fighting Arkadin was like fighting a mirror image of himself, one he didn’t care for. He felt as if he stood on the precipice of something terrible, a chasm filled with endless dread, where no life could survive. He felt Arkadin had reached out to pull him into this abyss, as if to show him the desolation that lurked behind his own eyes, the grisly image of his forgotten past reflected back at him.

With a supreme effort Bourne broke Arkadin’s hold, slammed his fist against the Russian’s ear. Arkadin recoiled back against a column, and Bourne sprinted out of the kitchen, down the hall. As he did so, he heard the unmistakable sound of someone racking the slide, and he flung himself headlong into the main bedroom. A shot splintered the wooden door frame just over his head.

Scrambling up, he headed straight for Kirsch’s closet, even as he heard Arkadin shout to the pale woman to hold her fire. Pushing aside a rack of clothes on hangers, Bourne scrabbled at the plywood panel in the rear wall of the closet, searching for the clips Kirsch had described to him at the museum. Just as he heard Arkadin rush into the bedroom, he turned the clips, removed the panel, and, crouching almost double, stepped through into a world filled to overflowing with shadow.

When Devra turned around after her attempt to wound Bourne, she found herself looking at the muzzle of the SIG Sauer that Icoupov had retrieved from the floor.

“You fool,” Icoupov said, “you and your boyfriend are going to fuck everything up.”

“What Leonid is doing is his own business,” she said.

“That’s the nature of the mistake,” Icoupov said. “Leonid has no business of his own. Everything he is he owes to me.”

She stepped out of the shadows of the hallway into the living room. The Luger at her hip was pointed at Icoupov. “He’s quits with you,” she said. “His servitude is done.”

Icoupov laughed. “Is that what he told you?”

“It’s what I told him.”

“Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought.”

They circled each other, wary of the slightest move. Even so, Devra managed an icy smile. “He’s changed since he left Moscow. He’s a different person.”

Icoupov made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. “The first thing you need to get through your head is that Leonid is incapable of change. I know this better than anyone because I spent so many years trying to make him a better person. I failed. Everyone who tried failed, and do you know why? Because Leonid isn’t whole. Somewhere in the days and nights of Nizhny Tagil he was fractured. All the czar’s horses and all the czar’s men can’t put him back together again; the pieces no longer fit.” He gestured with the SIG Sauer’s barrel. “Get out now, get out while you can, otherwise, I promise you he’ll kill you like he killed all the others who tried to get close to him.”

“How deluded you are!” Devra spat. “You’re like all your kind, corrupted by power. You’ve spent so many years removed from life on the streets you’ve created your own reality, one that moves only to the wave of your own hand.” She took a step toward him, which prompted a tense response from him. “Think you can kill me before I kill you? I wouldn’t count on it.” She tossed her head. “Anyway, you have more to lose than I do. I was already half dead when Leonid found me.”

“Ah, I see it now,” Icoupov nodded, “he’s saved you from yourself, he’s saved you from the streets, is that it?”

“Leonid is my protector.”

“God in heaven, talk about deluded!”

Devra’s icy smile widened. “One of us is fatally mistaken. It remains to be seen which one.”

The room is filled with mannequins,” Egon Kirsch had said when he’d described his studio to Bourne. “I keep the light out with blackout shades because these mannequins are my creation. I built them from the ground up, so to speak. They’re my companions, you might say, as well as my creations. In that sense, they can see or, if you like, I believe that they have the gift of sight, and what creature can look upon his creator without going mad or blind, or both?”

With the map of the room in his mind, Bourne crept through the studio, avoiding the mannequins so as not to make noise or, as Kirsch might have said, so as not to disturb the process of their birth.

“You think I’m insane,” he’d said to Bourne in the museum. “Not that it matters. To all artists-successful or not!-their creations are alive. I’m no different. It’s simply that after struggling for years to bring abstractions to life, I’ve given my work human form.”

Hearing a sound, Bourne froze for a moment, then peered around a mannequin’s thigh. His eyes had adjusted to the extreme gloom, and he could see movement: Arkadin had found the panel and had come through into the studio after him.

Bourne liked his chances here far better than in Kirsch’s apartment. He knew the layout, the darkness would help him, and if he struck quickly, he’d have the advantage of being able to see where Arkadin couldn’t.

With that strategy in mind, he moved out from behind the mannequin, picked his way toward the Russian. The studio was like a minefield. There were three mannequins between him and Arkadin, all set at different angles and poses: One was sitting, holding a small painting as if reading a book; another was standing spread-legged, in a classic shooter’s pose; the third was running, leaning forward, as if stretching to cross the finish line.

Bourne moved around the runner. Arkadin was crouched down on his hams, wisely staying in one place until his eyes adjusted. It was precisely what Bourne had done when he’d entered the studio moments before.

Once again Bourne was struck by the eerie mirror image that Arkadin represented. There was no pleasure and a great deal of anxiety at the most primitive level in watching yourself do his best to find you and kill you.

Picking up his pace, Bourne negotiated the space to where the mannequin sat, reading his painting. Keenly aware that he was running out of time, Bourne moved stealthily abreast of the shooter. Just as he was about to lunge at Arkadin, his cell phone buzzed, the screen lighting up with Moira’s number.

With a silent curse, Bourne sprang. Arkadin, alert for even the tiniest anomaly, turned defensively toward the sound, and Bourne was met with a solid wall of muscle, behind which was a murderous will of fiery intensity. Arkadin swung; Bourne slid backward, between the legs of the shooter mannequin. As Arkadin came after him he ran right into the mannequin’s hips. Recoiling with a curse, he swung at the mannequin. The blade struck the acrylic skin and lodged in the sheet metal underneath. Bourne kicked out while Arkadin was trying to pull the blade free, and made contact with the left side of his chest. Arkadin tried to roll away. Bourne jammed his shoulder against the back of the shooter. It was extremely heavy, he put all of his strength into it, and the mannequin tipped over, trapping Arkadin underneath.

“Your friend gave me no choice,” Bourne said. “He would’ve killed me if I hadn’t stopped him. He was too far away; I had to throw the knife.”

A sound like the crackle of a fire came from Arkadin. It took a moment for Bourne to realize it was laughter. “I’ll make you a bet, Bourne. Before he died, I bet Mischa said you were a dead man.”

Bourne was about to answer him when he saw the dim glint of a SIG Sauer Mosquito in Arkadin’s hand. He ducked just before the.22 bullet whizzed over his head.

“He was right.”

Bourne twisted away, dodging around the other mannequins, using them as cover even as Arkadin squeezed off three more rounds. Plaster, wood, and acrylic shattered near Bourne’s left shoulder and ear before he dived behind Kirsch’s worktable. Behind him, he could hear Arkadin’s grunts combined with the screech of metal as he worked to free himself from the fallen shooter.

Bourne knew from Kirsch’s description that the front door was to the left. Scrambling up, he dashed around the corner as Arkadin fired another shot. A chunk of plaster and lath disintegrated where the.22 impacted the corner. Reaching the door, Bourne unlocked it, pulled it open, and sprinted out into the hallway. The open door to Kirsch’s apartment loomed to his left.

No good can come of us training guns on each other,” Icoupov said. “Let’s try to reason through this situation rationally.”

“That’s your problem,” Devra said. “Life isn’t rational; it’s fucked-up chaos. It’s part of the delusion; power makes you think you can control everything. But you can’t, no one can.”

“You and Leonid think you know what you’re doing, but you’re wrong. No one operates in a vacuum. If you kill Bourne it will have terrible repercussions.”

“Repercussions for you, not for us. This is what power does: You think in shortcuts. Expediency, political opportunities, corruption without end.”

It was at that moment they both heard the gunshots, but only Devra knew they came from Arkadin’s Mosquito. She could sense Icoupov’s finger tighten around the SIG’s trigger, and she went into a semi-crouch because she knew if Bourne appeared rather than Arkadin she would shoot him dead.

The situation had reached a boiling point, and Icoupov was clearly worried. “Devra, I beg you to reconsider. Leonid doesn’t know the whole picture. I need Bourne alive. What he did to Mischa was despicable, but personal feelings have no place in this equation. So much planning, so much spilled blood will come to nothing if Leonid kills Bourne. You must let me stop it; I’ll give you anything-anything you want.”

“Do you think you can buy me? Money means nothing to me. What I want is Leonid,” Devra said just as Bourne appeared through the front doorway.

Devra and Icoupov both turned. Devra screamed because she knew, or she thought she knew, that Arkadin was dead, and so she redirected the Luger from Icoupov to Bourne.

Bourne ducked back into the hallway and she fired shot after shot at him as she walked toward the door. Because her focus was entirely concentrated on Bourne, she took her eyes off Icoupov and so missed the crucial movement as he swung the SIG in her direction.

“I warned you,” he said as he shot her in the chest.

She fell onto her back.

“Why didn’t you listen?” Icoupov said as he shot her again.

Devra made a little sound as her body arched up. Icoupov stood over her.

“How could you let yourself be seduced by such a monster?” he said.

Devra stared up at him with red-rimmed eyes. Blood pumped out of her with every labored beat of her heart. “That’s exactly what I asked him about you.” Each ragged breath filled her with indescribable pain. “He’s not a monster, but if he were you’d be so much worse.”

Her hand twitched. Icoupov, caught up in her words, paid no attention until the bullet she fired from her Luger struck his right shoulder. He spun back against the wall. The pain caused him to drop the SIG. Seeing her struggling to fire again, he turned and ran out of the apartment, fleeing down the stairwell and out onto the street.

Thirty-Nine

WILLARD, relaxing in the steward’s lounge adjacent to the Library of the NSA safe house, was enjoying his sweet and milky midmorning cup of coffee while reading The Washington Post when his cell phone buzzed. He checked it, saw that it was from his son, Oren. Of course it wasn’t actually from Oren, but Willard was the only one who knew that.

He put down the paper, watched as the photo appeared on the phone’s screen. It was of two people standing in front of a rural church, its steeple rising up into the top margin of the photo. He had no idea who the people were or where they were, but these things were irrelevant. There were six ciphers in his head; this photo told him which one to use. The two figures plus the steeple meant he was to use cipher three. If, for instance, the two people were in front of an arch, he’d subtract one from two, instead of adding to it. There were other visual cues. A brick building meant divide the number of figures by two; a bridge, multiply by two; and so on.

Willard deleted the photo from his phone, then picked up the third section of the Post and began to read the first story on page three. Starting with the third word, he began to decipher the message that was his call to action. As he moved through the article, substituting certain letters for others as the protocol dictated, he felt a profound stirring inside him. He had been the Old Man’s eyes and ears inside the NSA for three decades, and the Old Man’s sudden death last year had saddened him deeply. Then he had witnessed Luther LaValle’s latest run at CI and had waited for his phone to ring, but for months his desire to see another photo fill his screen had been inexplicably unfulfilled. He simply couldn’t understand why the new DCI wasn’t making use of him. Had he fallen between the cracks; did Veronica Hart not know he existed? It certainly seemed that way, especially after LaValle had trapped Soraya Moore and her compatriot, who was still incarcerated belowdecks, as Willard privately called the rendition cells in the basement. He’d done what he could for the young man named Tyrone, though God knows it was little enough. Yet he knew that even the smallest sign of hope-the knowledge that you weren’t alone-was enough to reinvigorate a stalwart heart, and if he was any judge of character, Tyrone had a stalwart heart.

Willard had always wanted to be an actor-for many years Olivier had been his god-but in his wildest dreams he’d never imagined his acting career would be in the political arena. He’d gotten into it by accident, playing a role in his college company, Henry V, to be exact, one of Shakespeare’s great tragic politicians. As the Old Man said to him when he’d come backstage to congratulate Willard, Henry’s betrayal of Falstaff is political, rather than personal, and ends in success. “How would you like to do that in real life?” the Old Man had asked him. He’d come to Willard’s college to recruit for CI; he said he often found his people in the most unlikely places.

Finished with the deciphering, Willard had his immediate instructions, and he thanked the powers that be that he hadn’t been tossed aside with the Old Man’s trash. He felt like his old friend Henry V, though more than thirty years had passed since he’d trod a theater stage. Once again he was being called on to play his greatest role, one that he wore as effortlessly as a second skin.

He folded the paper away under one arm, took up his cell phone, and went out of the lounge. He still had twenty minutes left on his break, more than enough time to do what was required of him. What he had been ordered to do was find the digital camera Tyrone had on him when he’d been captured. Poking his head into the Library, he satisfied himself that LaValle was still sitting in his accustomed spot, opposite Soraya Moore, then he went down the hall.

Though the Old Man had recruited him, it was Alex Conklin who had trained him. Conklin, the Old Man had told him, was the best at what he did, namely preparing agents to be put into the field. It didn’t take him long to learn that though Conklin was renowned inside CI for training wet-work agents, he was also adept at coaching sleeper agents. Willard spent almost a year with Conklin, though never at CI headquarters; he was part of Treadstone, Conklin’s project that was so secret even most CI personnel was unaware of its existence. It was of paramount importance that he have no overt association with CI. Because the role the Old Man had planned for him was inside the NSA, his background check had to be able to withstand the most vigorous scrutiny.

All this flashed through Willard’s mind as he walked the sacrosanct hallways and corridors of the NSA’s safe house. He passed agent after agent and knew that he’d done his job to perfection. He was the indispensable nobody, the person who was always present, whom no one noticed.

He knew where Tyrone’s camera was because he’d been there when Kendall and LaValle had spoken about its disposition, but even if he hadn’t, he’d have suspected where LaValle had hidden it. He knew, for instance, that it wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the safe house, even on LaValle’s person, unless the damaging images Tyrone had taken of the rendition cells and the waterboarding tanks had been transferred to the in-house computer server or deleted off the camera’s drive. In fact, there was a chance that the images had been deleted, but he doubted it. In the short amount of time the camera had been in the NSA’s possession, Kendall was no longer in residence and LaValle had become obsessed with coercing Soraya Moore into giving him Jason Bourne.

He knew all about Bourne; he’d read the Treadstone files, even the ones that no longer existed, having been shredded and then burned when the information they held became too dangerous for Conklin, as well as for CI. He knew there had been far more to Treadstone than even the Old Man knew. That was Conklin’s doing; he’d been a man for whom the word secrecy was the holy grail. What his ultimate plan for Treadstone had been was anyone’s guess.

Inserting his passkey into the lock on LaValle’s office door, he punched in the proper electronic code. Willard knew everyone’s code-what use would he be as a sleeper agent otherwise? The door opened inward, and he slipped inside, shutting and locking it behind him.

Crossing to LaValle’s desk, he opened the drawers one by one, checking for false backs or bottoms. Finding none, he moved on to the bookcase, the sideboard with its hanging files and liquor bottles side by side. He lifted the prints off the walls, searching behind them for a hidden cache, but there was nothing.

He sat on a corner of the desk, contemplated the room, unconsciously swinging his leg back and forth while he tried to work out where LaValle had hidden the camera. All at once he heard the sound the heel of his shoe made against the skirt of the desk. Hopping off, he went around, crawled into the kneehole, and rapped on the skirt until he replicated the sound his heel had made. Yes, he was certain now: This part of the skirt was hollow.

Feeling around with his fingertips, he discovered the tiny latch, pushed it aside, and swung open the door. There was Tyrone’s camera. He was reaching for it when he heard the scratch of metal on metal.

LaValle was at the door.

Tell me you love me, Leonid Danilovich.” Devra smiled up at him as he knelt over her.

“What happened, Devra? What happened?” was all he could say.

He’d extricated himself at last from the sculpture, and would have gone after Bourne-but he’d heard the shots coming from Kirsch’s apartment, then the sound of running feet. The living room was spattered with blood. He saw her lying on the floor, the Luger still in her hand. Her shirt was dyed red.

“Leonid Danilovich.” She’d called his name when he appeared in her limited field of vision. “I waited for you.”

She started to tell him what had happened, but blood bubbles formed at the corners of her mouth and she started to gurgle horribly. Arkadin lifted her head off the floor, cradled it on his thighs. He pushed matted hair off her forehead and cheeks, leaving red streaks like war paint.

She tried to continue, stopped. Her eyes went out of focus and he thought he’d lost her. Then they cleared, her smile returned, and she said, “Do you love me, Leonid?”

He bent down and whispered her in ear. Was it I love you? There was so much static in his head, he couldn’t hear himself. Did he love her, and, if he did, what would it mean? Did it even matter? He’d promised to protect her and failed. He stared down into her eyes, into her smile, but all he saw was his own past rising up to engulf him once again.

I need more money,” Yelena said one night as she lay entangled with him.

“What for? I give you enough as it is.”

“I hate it here, it’s like a prison, girls are crying all the time, they’re beaten, and then they disappear. I used to make friends just to pass the time, to have something to do during the day, but now I don’t bother. What’s the point? They’re gone within a week.”

Arkadin had become aware of Kuzin’s seemingly insatiable need for more girls. “I don’t see how any of this has to do with you needing more money.”

“If I can’t have friends,” Yelena said, “I want drugs.”

“I told you, no drugs,” Arkadin said as he rolled away from her and sat up.

“If you love me, you’ll get me out of here.”

“Love?” He turned to stare at her. “Who said anything about love?”

She started to cry. “I want to live with you, Leonid. I want to be with you always.”

Feeling something unknown close around his throat, Arkadin stood up, backed away. “Jesus,” he said, gathering up his clothes, “where do you get such ideas?”

Leaving her to her pitiful weeping, he went out to procure more girls. Before he reached the front door of the brothel Stas Kuzin intercepted him.

“Yelena’s wailing is disturbing the other girls,” he said in his hissing way. “It’s bad for business.”

“She wants to live with me,” Arkadin said. “Can you imagine?”

Kuzin laughed, the sound like nails screeching against a blackboard. “I’m wondering what would be worse, the nagging wife wanting to know where you were all night or the caterwauling brats making it impossible to sleep.”

They both laughed at the comment, and Arkadin thought nothing more about it. For the next three days he worked steadily, methodically combing Nizhny Tagil for more girls to restock the brothel. At the end of that time he slept for twenty hours, then went straight to Yelena’s room. He found another girl, one he’d recently hijacked off the streets, sleeping in Yelena’s bed.

“Where’s Yelena?” he said, throwing off the covers.

She looked up at him, blinking like a bat in sunlight. “Who’s Yelena?” she said in a voice husky with sleep.

Arkadin strode out of the room and into Stas Kuzin’s office. The big man sat behind a gray metal desk, talking on the phone, but he beckoned Arkadin to take a seat while he finished his call. Arkadin, preferring to stand, gripped the back of a wooden chair, leaning forward over its ladder back.

At length, Kuzin put down the receiver, said, “What can I do for you, my friend?”

“Where’s Yelena?”

“Who?” Kuzin’s frown knit his brows together, making him look something like a cyclops. “Oh, yes, the wailer.” He smiled. “There’s no chance of her bothering you again.”

“What does that mean?”

“Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?” Kuzin’s phone rang and he answered it. “Hold the fuck on,” he said into it. Then he looked up at his partner. “Tonight we’ll go to dinner to celebrate your freedom, Leonid Danilovich. We’ll make a real night of it, eh?”

Then he returned to his call.

Arkadin felt frozen in time, as if he was now doomed to relive this moment for the rest of his life. Mute, he walked like an automaton out of the office, out of the brothel, out of the building he owned with Kuzin. Without even thinking, he got into his car, drove north into the forest of dripping firs and weeping hemlocks. There was no sun in the sky, the horizon was rimmed with smokestacks. The air was hazed with carbon and sulfur particles, tinged a lurid orange-red, as if everything were on fire.

Arkadin pulled off the road and walked down the rutted track, following the route the van had taken previously. Somewhere along the line he found that he was running as fast as he could through the evergreens, the stench of decay and decomposition billowing up, as if eager to meet him.

He brought himself up abruptly at the edge of the pit. In places, sacks of quicklime had been shaken out in order to aid the decomposition; nevertheless it was impossible to mistake the content. His eyes roved over the bodies until he found her. Yelena was lying in a tangle where she’d landed after being kicked over the side. Several very large rats were picking their way toward her.

Arkadin, staring into the mouth of hell, gave a little cry, the sound a puppy might make if you mistakenly stepped on its paw. Scrambling down the side, he ignored the appalling stench and, through watering eyes, dragged her up the slope, laid her out on the forest floor, the bed of brown needles, soft as her own. Then he trudged back to the car, opened the trunk, and took out a shovel.

He buried her half a mile away from the pit, in a small clearing that was private and peaceful. He carried her over his shoulder the whole way, and by the time he was finished he smelled like death. At that moment, crouched on his hamstrings, his face streaked with sweat and dirt, he doubted whether he’d ever be able to scrub off the stench. If he knew a prayer, he would have said it then, but he knew only obscenities, which he uttered with the fervor of the righteous. But he wasn’t righteous; he was damned.

For a businessman there was a decision to be made. Arkadin was no businessman, though, so from that day forward his fate was sealed. He returned to Nizhny Tagil with his two Stechkin handguns fully loaded and extra rounds of ammunition in his breast pockets. Entering the brothel, he shot the two ghouls dead as they stood at guard. Neither had a chance to draw his weapon.

Stas Kuzin appeared in the doorway, gripping a Korovin TK pistol. “Leonid, what the fuck?”

Arkadin shot him once in each knee. Kuzin went down, screaming. As he tried to raise the Korovin, Arkadin trod heavily on his wrist. Kuzin grunted heavily. When he wouldn’t let go of the pistol, Arkadin kicked him in the knee. The resulting bellow brought the last of the girls from their respective rooms.

“Get out of here.” Arkadin addressed the girls, though his gaze was fixed on Kuzin’s monstrous face. “Take whatever money you can find and go back to your families. Tell them about the lime pit north of town.”

He heard them scrambling, babbling to one another, then it was quiet.

“Fucking sonovabitch,” Kuzin said, staring up at Arkadin.

Arkadin laughed and shot him in the right shoulder. Then, jamming the Stechkins in their holsters, he dragged Kuzin across the floor. He had to push one of the dead ghouls out of the way, but at last he made it down the stairs and out the front door with the moaning Kuzin in tow. In the street one of Kuzin’s vans screeched to a halt. Arkadin drew his guns, emptied them into the interior. The car rocked on its shocks, glass shattered, its horn blared as the dead driver fell over onto it. No one got out.

Arkadin dragged Kuzin to his car and dumped him in the backseat. Then he drove out of town to the forest, turning off at the rutted dirt track. At the end of it, he stopped, hauled Kuzin to the edge of the pit.

“Fuck you, Arkadin!” Kuzin shouted. “Fuck-”

Arkadin shot him point-blank in the left shoulder, shattering it and sending Kuzin down into the quicklime pit. He peered over. There was the monster, lying on the corpses.

Kuzin’s mouth drooled blood. “Kill me!” he shouted. “D’you think I’m afraid of death? Go on, do it now!”

“It’s not for me to kill you, Stas.”

“Kill me, I said. For fuck’s sake, finish it now!”

Arkadin gestured at the corpses. “You’ll die in your victims’s arms, hearing their curses echoing in your ears.”

“What about all your victims?” Kuzin shouted when Arkadin disappeared from view. “You’ll die choking on your own blood!”

Arkadin paid him no mind. He was already behind the wheel of his car, backing out of the forest. It had begun to rain, gunmetal-colored drops that fell like bullets out of a colorless sky. A slow booming coming from the smelters starting up sounded like the thunder of cannons signaling the beginning of a war that would surely destroy him unless he found a way out of Nizhny Tagil that wasn’t in a body bag.

Forty

WHERE ARE YOU, Jason?” Moira said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I’m in Munich,” he said.

“How wonderful! Thank God you’re close by. I need to see you.” She seemed slightly out of breath. “Tell me where you are and I’ll meet you there.”

Bourne switched his cell phone from one ear to the other, the better to check his immediate surroundings. “I’m on my way to the Englischer Garten.”

“What are you doing in Schwabing?”

“It’s a long story; I’ll tell you about it when I see you.” Bourne checked his watch. “But I’m due to meet up with Soraya at the Chinese pagoda in ten minutes. She says she has new intel on the Black Legion attack.”

“That’s odd,” Moira said. “So do I.”

Bourne crossed the street, hurrying, but still alert for tags.

“I’ll meet you,” Moira said. “I’m in a car; I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Not a good idea.” He didn’t want her involved in a professional rendezvous. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m through and we can-” All of a sudden, he realized he was talking to dead air. He dialed Moira’s number, but got her voice mail. Damn her, he thought.

He reached the outskirts of the garden, which was twice the size of New York’s Central Park. Divided by the Isar River, it was filled with jogging and bicycle paths, meadows, forests, and even hills. Near the crown of one of these was the Chinese pagoda, which was actually a beer garden.

He was naturally thinking of Soraya as he approached the area. It was odd that both she and Moira had intel on the Black Legion. Now he thought back over his phone conversation with her. Something about it had been bothering him, something just out of reach. Every time he strained for it, it seemed to move farther away from him.

His pace was slowed by the hordes of tourists, American diplomats, children with balloons or kites riding the wind. In addition, a rally of teenagers protesting new rulings on curriculum at the university had begun to gather at the pagoda.

He pushed his way forward, past a mother and child, then a large family in Nikes and hideous tracksuits. The child glanced at him and, instinctively, Bourne smiled. Then he turned away, wiped the blood off his face, though it continued to seep through the cuts opened during his fight with Arkadin.

“No, you can’t have sausages,” the mother said to her son in a strong British accent. “You were sick all night.”

“But Mummy,” he replied, “I feel right as rain.”

Right as rain. Bourne stopped in his tracks, rubbed the heel of his hand against his temple. Right as rain; the phrase rattled around in his head like a steel ball in a pachinko machine.

Soraya.

Hi, it’s me, Soraya. That’s how she’d started off the call

Then she’d said: Actually, I’m in Munich.

And just before she’d hung up: Right as rain. I can make it. Can you?

Bourne, buffeted by the quickening throngs, felt as if his head were on fire. Something about those phrases. He knew them, and he didn’t, how could that be? He shook his head as if to clear it; memories were appearing like knife slashes through a piece of fabric. Light was glimmering…

And then he saw Moira. She was hurrying toward the Chinese pagoda from the opposite direction, her expression intent, grim, even. What had happened? What information did she have for him?

He craned his neck, trying to find Soraya in the swirl of the demonstration. That was when he remembered.

Right as rain.

He and Soraya had had this conversation before-where? In Odessa? Hi, it’s me coming before her name meant that she was under duress. Actually coming before a place where she was supposed to be meant that she wasn’t there.

Right as rain meant it’s a trap.

He looked up and his heart sank. Moira was heading right into it.

When the door opened, Willard froze. He was on his hands and knees hidden from the doorway by the desk’s skirt. He heard voices, one of them LaValle’s, and held his breath.

“There’s nothing to it,” LaValle said. “E-mail me the figures and after I’m done with the Moore woman I’ll check them.”

“Good deal,” Patrick, one of LaValle’s aides said, “but you’d better get back to the Library, the Moore woman is kicking up a fuss.”

LaValle cursed. Willard heard him cross to the desk, shuffle some papers. Perhaps he was looking for a file. LaValle grunted in satisfaction, walked back across the office, and closed the door after him. It was only when Willard heard the grate of the key in the lock that he exhaled.

He fired up the camera, praying that the images hadn’t been deleted, and there they were, one after another, evidence that would damn Luther LaValle and his entire NSA administration. Using both the camera and his cell phone, he linked them through the wireless Bluetooth protocol, then transferred the images to his cell. Once that was completed, he navigated to his son’s phone number-which wasn’t his son’s number, though if anyone called it a young man who had standing instructions to pass as his son would answer-and sent the photos in one long burst. Sending them one by one via separate calls would surely cause a red flag on the security server.

At last, Willard sat back and took a deep breath. It was done; the photos were now in the hands of CI, where they’d do the most good, or-if you were Luther LaValle-the most damage. Checking his watch, he pocketed the camera, relatched the door to the hidden compartment, and scrambled out from under the desk.

Four minutes later, his hair freshly combed, his uniform brushed down, and looking very smart, indeed, he placed a Ceylon tea in front of Soraya Moore and a single-malt scotch in front of Luther LaValle. Ms. Moore thanked him; LaValle, staring at her, ignored him as usual.

Moira hadn’t seen him, and Bourne couldn’t call out to her because in this maelstrom of people his voice wouldn’t carry. Blocked in his forward motion, he edged his way back to the periphery, moving to his left in order to circle around to her. He tried her cell again, but she either couldn’t hear it or wasn’t answering.

It was as he was disengaging the line that he saw the NSA agents. They were moving in concert toward the center of the crowd, and he could only assume that there were others in a tightening circle within which they meant to trap him. They hadn’t spotted him yet, but Moira was close to one of the pair in Bourne’s view. There was no way to get to her without them spotting him. Nevertheless, he continued to circle through the fringes of the crowd, which had grown so large that many of the young people were shoving one another as they shouted their slogans.

Bourne pushed on, although it seemed to him at a slower and slower pace, as if he were in a dream where the laws of physics were nonexistent. He needed to get to Moira without the agents seeing him; it was dangerous for her to be looking for him with NSA infiltrating the crowd. Far better for him to get to her first so he could control both their movements.

Finally, as he neared the NSA agents, he could see the reason for the sudden rancor of the crowd. The shoving was being precipitated by a large group of skinheads, some wielding brass knuckles or baseball bats. They had swastikas tattooed on their bulging arms, and when they began to swing at the chanting university students, Bourne made a run for Moira. But as he lunged for her, one of the agents elbowed a skinhead aside and, as he did so, caught a glimpse of Bourne. He whirled, his lips moving as he spoke urgently into the earpiece with which he was wirelessly connected with the other members of what Bourne assumed was an execution team.

He grabbed Moira, but the agent had hold of him, and he began to jerk Bourne back toward him, as if to detain him long enough for the other members of the team to reach them. Bourne struck him flush on the chin with the heel of his hand. The agent’s head snapped back, and he collapsed into a group of skinheads, who thought he was attacking them and started beating him.

“Jason, what the hell happened to you?” Moira said as she and Bourne turned, making their way through the throng. “Where’s Soraya?”

“She was never here,” Bourne said. “This is another NSA trap.”

It would have been best to keep to where the garden was most crowded, but that would put them in the center of the trap. Bourne led them around the crowd, hoping to emerge in a place where the agents wouldn’t spot them, but now he saw three more outside the mass of the demonstration and knew retreat was impossible. Instead he reversed course, drawing Moira farther into the surging mass of demonstrators.

“What are you doing?” Moira said. “Aren’t we headed straight into the trap?”

“Trust me.” Instinctively he headed toward one of the flashpoints where the skinheads were clashing with the university students.

They reached the edge of the escalating fight between the two groups of teens. Out of the corner of his eye Bourne saw an NSA agent struggling through the same mass of people. Bourne tried to alter their course, but their way was blocked, and a resurgent wave of students pushed them like flotsam at the tide line. Feeling the new influx of people, the agent turned to fight against it and ran right into Moira.

He barked Bourne’s name into the microphone in his earpiece, and Bourne slammed a shoe into the side of his knee. The agent faltered, but managed to counter the chop Bourne directed at his shoulder blade. The agent drew a handgun, and Bourne snatched a baseball bat from a skinhead’s grip, struck the agent so hard on the back of his hands that he dropped the handgun.

Then, from behind him, Bourne heard Moira say. “Jason, they’re coming!”

The trap was about to snap shut on both of them.

Forty-One

LUTHER LAVALLE waited on tenterhooks for the call from his extraction team leader in Munich. He sat in his customary chair facing the window that looked out over the rolling lawns to the left of the wide gravel drive, which wound through the elms and oaks lining it like sentinels. Having verbally put her in her place after returning from his office, he contrived to ignore Soraya Moore and Willard who, after the second time, had given up asking him if he wanted his single-malt scotch refreshed. He didn’t want his single-malt scotch refreshed and he didn’t want to hear another word from the Moore woman. What he wanted was his cell phone to ring, for his team leader to tell him that Jason Bourne was in custody. That’s all he required of this day; he didn’t think it was too much to ask.

Nevertheless, it was true that his nerves were pulled tighter than a drawn bowstring. He found himself wanting to scream, to punch someone; he’d almost launched himself like a missile at Willard when the steward had approached him the last time-he was so damn servile. Beside him, the Moore woman sat, one leg crossed over her knee, sipping her damnable Ceylon tea. How could she be so calm!

He reached over, slapped the cup and saucer out of her hands. They bounced on the thick carpet, along with what was left of the espresso, but they didn’t break. He jumped up, stomped the china beneath his heel until it cracked and cracked again. Aware of Soraya staring up at him, he snapped, “What? What are you looking at?”

His cell phone buzzed and he snatched it off the table. His heart lifted, a smile of triumph wreathed his face. But it was a guard at the front gate, not the leader of his extraction team.

“Sir, I’m sorry to bother you,” the guard said, “but the director of Central Intelligence is here.”

“What?” LaValle fairly shouted his response. He was flooded with bitter disappointment. “Keep her the fuck out!”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, sir.”

“Of course it’s possible.” He moved to the window. “I’m giving you a direct order!”

“She’s with a contingent of federal marshals,” the guard said. “They’re already on their way to the main house.”

It was true, LaValle could see the convoy making its way up the drive. He stood, speechless with confusion and fury. How dare the DCI invade his private sanctuary! He’d have her in prison for this outrage!

He started, feeling someone standing next to him. It was Soraya Moore. Her wide lips were curled in an enigmatic smile.

Then she turned to him and said, “I do believe it’s the end of days.”

The maelstrom closed around Bourne and Moira. What had once been a simple demonstration was now a full-blown melee. He heard screams and shouts, hurled invective, and then, under it all, the familiar high-low wail of police sirens approaching from several different directions. Bourne was quite certain the NSA hit squad had no desire to run afoul of the Munich police; it was therefore running out of time. The agent near Bourne heard the sirens, too, and with his hands clearly still half numb from the bat grabbed Moira around the throat.

“Drop the bat and come with me, Bourne,” he said against the rising tide of screams and shouts, “or so help me I’ll break her neck like a twig.”

Bourne dropped the bat but, as he did so, Moira bit into the agent’s hand. Bourne drove his fist into the soft spot just below his sternum then, taking hold of his wrist, he turned over the arm at an awkward angle, and with a sharp blow broke the agent’s elbow. The agent groaned, went to his knees.

Bourne dug out his passport and earbud, threw the passport to Moira as he fitted the electronic bud into his ear canal.

“Name,” he said.

Moira already had the wallet open. “William K. Saunders.”

“This is Saunders,” Bourne said, addressing the wireless network. “Bourne and the girl are getting away. They’re heading north by northwest past the pagoda.”

Then he took her hand. “Biting his hand,” he said as they stepped over the fallen agent. “That was quite a professional move.”

She laughed. “It did the trick, didn’t it?”

They made their way through the mob, heading southeast. Behind them, the NSA agents were shoving their way toward the opposite side of the mass of people. Ahead, a corps of uniformed policemen outfitted in riot gear were trotting along the path, semi-automatics at the ready. They passed Bourne and Moira without a second look.

Moira glanced at her watch. “Let’s get to my car as quickly as possible. We have a plane to catch.”

Don’t give up. Those three words Tyrone had found in his oatmeal were enough to sustain him. Kendall never came back, nor did any other interrogator. In fact, his meals came at regular intervals, the trays filled with real food, which was a blessing because he didn’t think he could ever get oatmeal down again.

The periods when the black hood was taken off seemed to him longer and longer in duration, but his sense of time had been shot, so he didn’t really know whether or not that was true. In any case, he’d used those periods to walk, do sit-ups, push-ups, and squats, anything to relieve the terrible, bone-deep aching of his arms, shoulders, and neck.

Don’t give up. That message might just as well have read You’re not alone or Have faith, so rich were those words, like a millionaire’s cache. When he read them he knew both that Soraya hadn’t abandoned him and that something inside the building, someone who had access to the basement, was on his side. And that was the moment when the revelation struck him, as if, if he remembered his Bible correctly, he were Paul on the road to Damascus, converted by God’s light.

Someone is on my side -not the side of the old Tyrone, who roamed his hood with perfect wrath and retribution, not the Tyrone who’d been saved from life in the gutter by Deron, not even the Tyrone who’d been awed by Soraya. No, once he spontaneously thought Someone is on my side, he realized that my side meant CI. He had not only moved out of the hood forever, but also stepped out from under Soraya’s beautiful shadow. He was his own man now; he’d found his own calling, not as Deron’s protector, or his disciple, not as Soraya’s adoring assistant. CI was where he wanted to be, in the service of making a difference. His world was no longer defined by himself on one side and the Man on the other. He was no longer fighting what he was becoming.

He looked up. Now to get out of here. But how? His best choice was to try to find a way to communicate with whoever had sent the note. He considered a moment. The note had been hidden in his food, so the logical answer would be to write a note of his own and somehow hide it in his leftovers. Of course, there was no way to be sure that person would find the note, or even know it was there, but it was his only shot and he was determined to take it.

He was looking around for something to use to write when the clanging of the door brought him up short. He turned to face it as it opened. Had Kendall returned for more sadistic playtime? Had the real torturer arrived? He took a fearful glance over his shoulder at the waterboarding tank and his blood turned cold. Then he turned back and saw Soraya standing in the doorway. She was grinning from ear to ear.

“God,” she said, “it’s good to see you!”

How nice to see you again,” Veronica Hart said, “especially under these circumstances.”

Luther LaValle had come away from the window; he was standing when the DCI, flanked by federal marshals and a contingent of CI agents, entered the Library. Everyone else in the Library at the time goggled, then at the behest of the marshals beat a hasty retreat. Now he sat ramrod-straight in his chair, facing Hart.

“How dare you,” LaValle said now. “This intolerable behavior won’t go unpunished. As soon as I inform Secretary of Defense Halliday of your criminal breach of protocol-”

Hart fanned out the photos of the rendition cells in the basement. “You’re right, Mr. LaValle, this intolerable behavior won’t go unpunished, but I believe it will be Secretary of Defense Halliday who’ll be leading the charge to punish you for your criminal protocols.”

“I do what I do in the defense of my country,” LaValle said stiffly. “When a country is at war extraordinary actions must be undertaken in order to safeguard its borders. It’s you and people like you, with your weak-willed leftist leanings, that are to blame, not me.” He was livid, his cheeks aflame. “I’m the patriot here. You-you’re just an obstructionist. This country will crack and fall if people like you are left to run it. I’m America’s only salvation.”

“Sit down,” Hart said quietly but firmly, “before one of my ‘leftist’ people knocks you down.”

LaValle glared at her for a moment, then slowly sank into the chair.

“Nice to be living in your own private world where you make the rules and you don’t give a shit about reality.”

“I’m not sorry for what I did. If you’re expecting remorse, you’re sorely mistaken.”

“Frankly,” Hart said, “I’m not expecting anything out of you until after you’re waterboarded.” She waited until all the blood had drained from his face, before she added, “That would be one solution-your solution-but it isn’t mine.” She shuffled the photos back into their envelope.

“Who’s seen those?” LaValle asked.

The DCI saw him wince when she said, “Everyone who needs to see them.”

“Well, then.” He was unbowed, unrepentant. “It’s over.”

Hart looked past him to the front of the Library. “Not quite yet.” She nodded. “Here come Soraya and Tyrone.”

Semion Icoupov sat on the stoop of a building not far from where the shooting had taken place. His greatcoat hid the blood that had pooled inside it, so it he didn’t draw a crowd, just a curious glance or two from pedestrians hurrying by. He felt dizzy and nauseated, no doubt from shock and loss of blood, which meant he wasn’t thinking clearly. He looked around with bloodshot eyes. Where was the car that had brought him here? He needed to get out of here before Arkadin emerged from the building and spotted him. He’d taken a tiger from the wild and had tried to domesticate him, a historic mistake by any measure. How many times had it been attempted before with always the same result? Tigers weren’t meant to be domesticated; neither was Arkadin. He was what he was, and would never be anything else: a killing machine of almost preternatural abilities. Icoupov had recognized the talent and, greedily, had tried to harness it to his own needs. Now the tiger had turned on him; he’d had a premonition that he would die in Munich, now he knew why, now he knew how.

Looking back toward Egon Kirsch’s apartment building, he felt a sudden rush of fear, as if at any moment death would emerge from it, stalking him down the street. He tried to pull himself together, tried to rise to his feet, but a horrific pain shot through him, his knees buckled, and he collapsed back onto the cold stone.

More people passed, now ignoring him altogether. Cars rolled by. The sky came down, the day darkened as if covered with a shroud. A sudden gust of wind brought the onset of rain, hard as sleet. He ducked his head between his shoulders, shivered mightily.

And then he heard his name shouted and, turning his head, saw the nightmare figure of Leonid Danilovich Arkadin coming down the steps of Kirsch’s building. Now more highly motivated, Icoupov once again tried to get up. He groaned as he gained his feet, but tottered there uncertainly as Arkadin began to run toward him.

At that moment, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up to the sidewalk. The driver hurried out and, taking hold of Icoupov, half carried him across the pavement. Icoupov struggled, but to no avail; he was weak with lost blood, and growing weaker by the moment. The driver opened the rear door, bundled him into the backseat. He pulled an HK 1911.45 and with it warned Arkadin away, then he hustled back around the front of the Mercedes, slid behind the wheel, and took off.

Icoupov, slumped in the near corner of the backseat, made rhythmic grunts of pain like puffs of smoke from a steam locomotive. He was aware of the soft rocking of the shocks as the car sped through the Munich streets. More slowly came the realization that he wasn’t alone in the backseat. He blinked heavily, trying to clear his vision.

“Hello, Semion,” a familiar voice said.

And then Icoupov’s vision cleared. “You!”

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, hasn’t it?” Dominic Specter said.

The Empire State Building,” Moira said as she studied the plans Bourne had managed to scoop up in Kirsch’s apartment. “I can’t believe I was wrong.”

They were parked in a rest stop by the side of the autobahn on the way to the airport.

“What do you mean, wrong?” Bourne said.

She told him what Arthur Hauser, the engineer hired by Kaller Steelworks, had confessed about the flaw in LNG terminal’s software.

Bourne thought a moment. “If a terrorist used that flaw to gain control of the software, what could he do?”

“The tanker is so huge and the terminal is so complex that the docking is handled electronically.”

“Through the software program.”

Moira nodded.

“So he could cause the tanker to crash into the terminal.” He turned to her. “Would that set off the tanks of liquid gas?”

“Quite possibly, yes.”

Bourne was thinking furiously. “Still, the terrorist would have to know about the flaw, how to exploit it, and how to reconfigure the software.”

“It sounds simpler than trying to blow up a major building in Manhattan.”

She was right, of course; and because of the questions he’d been pondering he grasped implications of that immediately.

Moira glanced at her watch. “Jason, the NextGen plane with the coupling link is scheduled to take off in thirty minutes.” She put the car in gear, nosed out onto the autobahn. “We have to make up our minds before we get to the airport. Do we go to New York or to Long Beach?”

Bourne said, “I’ve been trying to figure out why both Specter and Icoupov were so hell-bent on retrieving these plans.” He stared down at the blueprints as if willing them to speak to him. “The problem,” he said slowly and thoughtfully, “is that they were entrusted to Specter’s son, Pyotr, who was more interested in girls, drugs, and the Moscow nightlife than he was in his work. As a consequence, his network was peopled by misfits, junkies, and weaklings.”

“Why in the world would Specter entrust so important a document to a network like that?”

“That’s just the point,” Bourne said. “He wouldn’t.”

Moira glanced at him. “What does that mean? Is the network bogus?”

“Not as far as Pyotr was concerned,” Bourne said, “but so far as Specter saw it, yes, everyone who was a part of it was expendable.”

“Then the plans are bogus, too.”

“No, I think they’re real, and that’s what Specter was counting on,” Bourne said. “But when you consider the situation logically and coolly, which no one does when it comes to the threat of an imminent terrorist attack, the probability of a cell managing to get what it needs into the Empire State Building is very low.” He rolled up the plans. “No, I think this was all an elaborate disinformation scheme-leaking communications to Typhon, recruiting me because of my loyalty to Specter. It was all meant to mobilize American security forces on the wrong coast.”

“So you think the Black Legion’s real target is the LNG terminal in Long Beach.”

“Yes,” Bourne said, “I do.”

Tyrone stood looking down at LaValle. A terrible silence had descended over the Library when he and Soraya had entered. He watched Soraya scoop up LaValle’s cell phone from the table.

“Good,” she said with an audible sigh of relief. “No one’s called. Jason must be safe.” She tried him on her cell, but he wasn’t answering.

Hart, who had stood up when they’d come over, said, “You look a little the worse for wear, Tyrone.”

“Nothing a stint at the CI training school wouldn’t cure,” he said.

Hart glanced at Soraya before saying, “I think you’ve earned that right.” She smiled. “In your case, I’ll forgo the usual warning about how rigorous the training program is, how many recruits drop out in the first two weeks. I know we won’t have to be concerned about you dropping out.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Just call me Director, Tyrone. You’ve earned that as well.”

He nodded, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off LaValle.

His interest did not go unnoticed. The DCI said, “Mr. LaValle, I think it only just that Tyrone decide your fate.”

“You’re out of your mind.” LaValle looked apoplectic. “You can’t-”

“On the contrary,” Hart said, “I can.” She turned to Tyrone. “It’s entirely up to you, Tyrone. Let the punishment fit the crime.”

Tyrone, impaling LaValle in his glare, saw there what he always saw in the eyes of white people who confronted him: a toxic mixture of contempt, aversion, and fear. Once, that would have sent him into a frenzy of rage, but that was because of his own ignorance. Perhaps what he had seen in them was a reflection of what had been on his own face. Not today, not ever again, because during his incarceration he’d finally come to understand what Deron had tried to teach him: that his own ignorance was his worst enemy. Knowledge allowed him to work at changing other people’s expectations of him, rather than confronting them with a switchblade or a handgun.

He looked around, saw the look of expectation on Soraya’s face. Turning back to LaValle, he said: “I think something public would be in order, something embarrassing enough to work its way up to Secretary of Defense Halliday.”

Veronica Hart couldn’t help laughing, she laughed until tears came to her eyes, and she heard the Gilbert and Sullivan lines run through her head: His object all sublime, he will achieve in time-let the punishment fit the crime!

Forty-Two

I SEEM TO HAVE you at quite a disadvantage, dear Semion.” Dominic Specter watched Icoupov as he dealt with the pain of sitting up straight.

“I need to see a doctor.” Icoupov was panting like an underpowered engine struggling up a steep grade.

“What you need, dear Semion, is a surgeon,” Specter said. “Unfortunately, there’s no time for one. I need to get to Long Beach and I can’t afford to leave you behind.”

“This was my idea, Asher.” Having braced his back against the seat, some small amount of color was returning to Icoupov’s cheeks.

“So was using Pyotr. What did you call my son? Oh, yes, a useless wart on fate’s ass, that was it, wasn’t it?”

“He was useless, Asher. All he cared about was getting laid and getting high. Did he have a commitment to the cause, did he even know what the word meant? I doubt it, and so do you.”

“You killed him, Semion.”

“And you had Iliev murdered.”

“I thought you’d changed your mind,” Sever said. “I assumed you’d sent him after Bourne to expose me, to gain the upper hand by telling him about the Long Beach target. Don’t look at me like that. Is it so strange? After all, we’ve been enemies longer than we’ve been allies.”

“You’ve become paranoid,” Icoupov said, though at the time he had sent his second in command to expose Sever. He’d temporarily lost faith in Sever’s plan, had finally felt the risks to all of them were too great. From the beginning, he’d argued with Sever against bringing Bourne into the picture, but had acquiesced to Sever’s argument that CI would bring Bourne into play sooner later. “Far better for us to preempt them, to put Bourne in play ourselves,” Sever had said, capping his argument, and that had been the end of it, until now.

“We’ve both become paranoid.”

“A sad fact,” Icoupov said with a gasp of pain. It was true: Their great strength in working together without anyone in either camp knowing about it was also a weakness. Because their regimes ostensibly opposed each other, because the Black Legion’s nemesis was in reality its closest ally, all other potential rivals shied away, leaving the Black Legion to operate without interference. However, the actions both men were sometimes obliged to take for the sake of appearance caused a subconscious erosion of trust between them.

Icoupov could feel that their level of distrust had achieved its highest point yet, and he sought to defuse it. “Pyotr killed himself-and, in fact, I was only defending myself. Did you know he hired Arkadin to kill me? What would you have had me do?”

“There were other options,” Sever said, “but your sense of justice is an eye for an eye. For a Muslim you have a great deal of the Jewish Old Testament in you. And now it appears that that very justice is about to be turned on you. Arkadin will kill you, if he can get his hands on you.” Sever laughed. “I’m the only one who can save you now. Ironic, isn’t it? You kill my son and now I have the power of life and death over you.”

“We always had the power of life and death over each other.” Icoupov still struggled to gain equality in the conversation. “There were casualties on both sides-regrettable but necessary. The more things change the more they stay the same. Except for Long Beach.”

“There’s the problem precisely,” Sever said. “I’ve just come from interrogating Arthur Hauser, our man on the inside. As such, he was monitored by my people. Earlier today, he got cold feet; he met with a member of Black River. It took me some time to convince him to talk, but eventually he did. He told this woman-Moira Trevor-about the software flaw.”

“So Black River knows.”

“If they do,” Sever said, “they aren’t doing anything about it. Hauser also told me that they withdrew from NextGen; Black River isn’t handling their security anymore.”

“Who is?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sever said. “The point is the tanker is less than a day away from the California coastline. My software engineer is aboard and in place. The question now is whether this Black River operative is going to act on her own.”

Icoupov frowned. “Why should she? You know Black River as well as I do, they act as a team.”

“True enough, but the Trevor woman should have been on to her next assignment by now; my people tell me that she’s still in Munich.”

“Maybe she’s taking some downtime.”

“And maybe,” Sever said, “she’s going to act on the information Hauser gave her.”

They were nearing the airport, and with some difficulty Icoupov pointed. “The only way to find out is to check to see whether she’s on the NextGen plane that’s transshipping the coupling link to the terminal.” He smiled thinly. “You seem surprised that I know so much. I have my spies as well, many of whom you know nothing about.” He gasped in pain as he searched beneath his greatcoat. “It was texted to me, but I can’t seem to find my cell.” He looked around. “It must have fallen out of my pocket when your driver manhandled me into the car.”

Sever waved a hand, ignoring the implied rebuke. “Never mind. Hauser gave me all the details, if we can get through security.”

“I have people in Immigration you don’t know about.”

Sever’s smile held a measure of the cruelty that was common to both of them. “My dear Semion, you have a use after all.”

Arkadin found Icoupov’s cell phone in the gutter where it had fallen as Icoupov had been bundled into the Mercedes. Controlling the urge to stomp it into splinters, he opened it to see whom Icoupov had called last, and noticed that the last incoming message was a text. Accessing it, he read the information on a NextGen jet due to take off in twenty minutes. He wondered why that would be important to Icoupov. Part of him wanted to go back to Devra, the same part that had balked at leaving her to go after Icoupov. But Kirsch’s building was swarming with cops; the entire block was in the process of being cordoned off, so he didn’t look back, tried not to think of her lying twisted on the floor, her blank eyes staring up at him even after she stopped breathing.

Do you love me, Leonid?

How had he answered her? Even now he couldn’t remember. Her death was like a dream, something vivid that made no sense. Maybe it was a symbol, but of what he couldn’t say.

Do you love me, Leonid?

It didn’t matter, but he knew to her it did. He had lied then, surely he’d lied to ease the moments before her death, but the thought that he’d lied to her sent a knife through whatever passed for his heart.

He looked down at the text message and knew this was where he’d find Icoupov. Turning around, he walked back toward the cordoned-off area. Posing as a crime reporter from the Abendzeitung newspaper, he boldly accosted one of the junior uniformed police, asking him pointed questions about the shooting, stories of gunfire he’d gleaned from residents of the neighboring buildings. As he suspected, the cop was on guard duty and knew next to nothing. But that wasn’t the point; he’d now gotten inside the cordon, leaning against one of the police cars as he conducted his phony and fruitless interview.

At length, the cop was called away, and he dismissed Arkadin, saying the commissioner would be holding a press conference at 16:00, at which time he would be free to ask all the questions he wanted. This left Arkadin alone, leaning against the fender. It didn’t take him long to walk around the front of the vehicle, and when the medical examiner’s van arrived-creating a perfect diversion-he opened the driver’s-side door, ducked in behind the wheel. The keys were already in the ignition. He started the car and drove off. When he reached the autobahn, he put on the siren and drove at top speed toward the airport.

I won’t have a problem getting you on board,” Moira said as she turned off onto the four-lane approach to the freight terminal. She showed her NextGen ID at the guard booth, then drove on toward the parking lot outside the terminal. During the drive to the airport she’d thought long and hard about whether to tell Jason about whom she really worked for. Revealing that she was with Black River was a direct violation of her contract, and right now she prayed there’d be no reason to tell him.

After passing through security, Customs, and Immigration, they arrived on the tarmac and approached the 747. A set of mobile stairs rose up to the high passenger door, which stood open. On the far side of the plane, the truck from Kaller Steelworks Gesellschaft was parked, along with an airport hoist, which was lifting crated parts of the LNG coupling link into the jet’s cargo area. The truck was obviously late, and the loading process was necessarily slow and tedious. Neither Kaller nor NextGen could afford an accident at this late stage.

Moira showed her NextGen ID to one of the crew members standing at the bottom of the stairs. He smiled and nodded, welcoming them aboard. Moira breathed a sigh of relief. Now all that stood between them and the Black Legion attack was the ten-hour flight to Long Beach.

But as they neared the top of the stairs, a figure appeared from the plane’s interior. He stood in the doorway, staring down at her.

“Moira,” Noah said, “what are you doing here? Why aren’t you on your way to Damascus?”

Manfred Holger, Icoupov’s man in Immigration, met them at the checkpoint to the freight terminals, got in the car with them, and they lurched forward. Icoupov had called him using Sever’s cell phone. He’d been about to go off duty, but luckily for them had not yet changed out of his uniform.

“There’s no problem.” Holger spoke in the officious manner that had been drummed into him by his superiors. “All I have to do is check the recent immigration records to see if she’s come through the system.”

“Not good enough,” Icoupov said. “She may be traveling under a pseudonym.”

“All right then, I’ll go on board and check everyone’s passports.” Holger was sitting in the front seat. Now he swiveled around to look at Icoupov. “If I find that this woman, Moira Trevor, is on board, what would you have me do?”

“Take her off the plane,” Sever said at once.

Holger looked inquiringly at Icoupov, who nodded. Icoupov’s face was gray again, and he was having more difficulty keeping the pain at bay.

“Bring her here to us,” Sever said.

Holger had taken their diplomatic passports, passed them quickly through security. Now the Mercedes was sitting just off the tarmac. The 747 with the NextGen logo emblazoned on its sides and tail was at rest, still being loaded from the Kaller Steelworks truck. The driver had pulled up so that the truck shielded them from being seen by anyone boarding the plane or already inside it.

Holger nodded, got out of the Mercedes, and walked across the tarmac to the rolling stairs.

Kriminalpolizei,” Arkadin said as he stopped the police car at the freight terminal checkpoint. “We have reason to believe a man who killed two people this afternoon has fled here.”

The guards waved him past Customs and Immigration without asking for ID; the car itself was proof enough for them. As Arkadin rolled past the parking lot and onto the tarmac, he saw the jet, crates from the NextGen truck being hoisted into the cargo bay, and the black Mercedes idling some distance away from both. Recognizing the car at once, he nosed the police cruiser to a spot directly behind the Mercedes. For a moment, he sat behind the wheel, staring at the Mercedes as if the car itself were his enemy.

He could see the silhouettes of two male figures in the backseat; it wasn’t a stretch for him to figure that one of them was Semion Icoupov. He wondered which of the handguns he had with him he should use to kill his former mentor: the SIG Sauer 9mm, the Luger, or the.22 SIG Mosquito. It all depended on what kind of damage he wanted to inflict and to what part of the body. He’d shot Stas Kuzin in the knees, the better to watch him suffer, but this was another time and, especially, another place. The airport was public space; the adjacent passenger terminal was crawling with security personnel. Just because he had been able to get this far as a member of the kriminalpolizei, he knew better than to overstep his luck. No, this kill needed to be quick and clean. All he desired was to look into Icoupov’s eyes when he died, for him to know who’d ended his life and why.

Unlike the moment of Kuzin’s demise, Arkadin was fully aware of this moment, keyed in to the importance of the son overtaking the father, of revenging himself for the psychological and physical advantages an adult takes with a child. That he hadn’t, in fact, been a child when Mischa had sent Semion Icoupov to resurrect him never occurred to him. From the moment the two had met, he had always seen Icoupov as a father figure. He’d obeyed him as he would a father, had accepted his judgments, had swallowed whole his worldview, had been faithful to him. And now, for the sins Icoupov had visited on him, he was going to kill him.

When you didn’t show for your scheduled flight, I had a hunch you’d show up here.” Noah stared at her, completely ignoring Bourne. “I won’t allow you on the plane, Moira. You’re no longer a part of this.”

“She still works for NextGen, doesn’t she?” Bourne said.

“Who is this?” Noah said, keeping his eyes on her.

“My name is Jason Bourne.”

A slow smile crept over Noah’s face. “Moira, you didn’t introduce us.” He turned to Bourne, stuck out his hand. “Noah Petersen.”

Bourne shook his hand. “Jason Bourne.”

Keeping the same sly smile on his face, Noah said, “Do you know she lied to you, that she tried to recruit you to NextGen under false pretenses?”

His eyes flicked toward Moira, but he was disappointed to see neither shock nor outrage on her face.

“Why would she do that?” Bourne said.

“Because,” Moira said, “like Noah here, I work for Black River, the private security firm. We were hired by NextGen to oversee security on the LNG terminal.”

It was Noah who registered shock. “Moira, that’s enough. You’re in violation of your contract.”

“It doesn’t matter, Noah. I quit Black River half an hour ago. I’ve been made chief of security at NextGen, so in point of fact it’s you who isn’t welcome aboard this flight.”

Noah stood rigid as stone, until Bourne took a step toward him. Then he backed away, descending the flight of rolling stairs. Halfway down, he turned to her. “Pity, Moira. I once had faith in you.”

She shook her head. “The pity is that Black River has no conscience.”

Noah looked at her for a moment then turned, clattered down the rest of the stairs, and stalked off across the tarmac without seeing the Mercedes or the police car behind it.

Because it would make the least noise, Arkadin decided on the Mosquito. Hand curled around the grips, he got out of the police car, stalked to the driver’s side of the Mercedes. It was the driver-who doubtless doubled as a bodyguard-he had to dispense with first. Keeping his Mosquito out of sight, he rapped on the driver’s window with a bare knuckle.

When the driver slid the glass down, Arkadin shoved the Mosquito in his face and pulled the trigger. The driver’s head snapped back so hard the cervical vertebrae cracked. Pulling open the door, Arkadin shoved the corpse aside and knelt on the seat, facing the two men in the backseat. He recognized Sever from an old photograph when Icoupov had showed him the face of his enemy. He said, “Wrong time, wrong place,” and shot Sever in the chest.

As he slumped over, Arkadin turned his attention to Icoupov. “You didn’t think you could escape me, Father, did you?”

Icoupov-who, between the sudden attack and the unendurable pain in his shoulder, was going into delayed shock-said, “Why do you call me father? Your father died a long time ago, Leonid Danilovich.”

“No,” Arkadin said, “he sits here before me like a wounded bird.”

“A wounded bird, yes.” With great effort, Icoupov opened his greatcoat, the lining of which was sopping wet with his blood. “Your paramour shot me before I shot her in self-defense.”

“This is not a court of law. What matters is that she’s dead.” Arkadin shoved the muzzle of the Mosquito under Icoupov’s chin, and tilted upward. “And you, Father, are still alive.”

“I don’t understand you.” Icoupov swallowed hard. “I never did.”

“What was I ever to you, except a means to an end? I killed when you ordered me to. Why? Why did I do that, can you tell me?”

Icoupov said nothing, not knowing what he could say to save himself from judgment day.

“I did it because I was trained to do it,” Arkadin said. “That’s why you sent me to America, to Washington, not to cure me of my homicidal rages, as you said, but to harness them for your use.”

“What of it?” Icoupov finally found his voice. “Of what other use were you? When I found you, you were close to taking your own life. I saved you, you ungrateful shit.”

“You saved me so you could condemn me to this life, which, if I am any judge, is no life at all. I see I never really escaped Nizhny Tagil. I never will.”

Icoupov smiled, believing he’d gotten the measure of his protйgй. “You don’t want to kill me, Leonid Danilovich. I’m your only friend. Without me you’re nothing.”

“Nothing is what I always was,” Arkadin said as he pulled the trigger. “Now you’re nothing, too.”

Then he got out of the Mercedes, walked out on the tarmac to where the NextGen personnel were almost finished off-loading the crates. Without being seen, he climbed onto the hoist. There he hunkered down just beneath the operator’s cab, and after the last crate had been stowed aboard, when the NextGen loaders were exiting the cargo hold via the interior stairwell, he leapt aboard the plane, scrambled behind a stack of crates, and sat down, patient as death, while the doors closed, locking him in.

Bourne saw the German official coming and suspected there was something wrong: An Immigration officer had no business interrogating them now. Then he recognized the man’s face. He told Moira to get back inside the plane, then stood barring the door as the official mounted the stairs.

“I need to see everyone’s passport,” the officer said as he approached Bourne.

“Passport checks have already been made, mein Herr.”

“Nevertheless, another security scan must be made now.” The officer held out his hand. “Your passport, please. And then I will check the identity of everyone else aboard.”

“You don’t recognize me, mein Herr?”

“Please.” The officer put his hand on the butt of his holstered Luger. “You are obstructing official government business. Believe me, I will take you into custody unless you show me your passport and then move aside.”

“Here’s my passport, mein Herr.” Bourne opened it to the last page, pointed to a spot on the inside cover. “And here is where you placed an electronic tracking device.”

“What accusation is this? You have no proof-”

Bourne produced the broken bug. “I don’t believe you’re here on official business. I think whoever instructed you to plant this on me is paying you to check these passports.” Bourne gripped the officer’s elbow. “Let’s stroll over to the commandant of Immigration and ask them if they sent you here.”

The officer drew himself up stiffly. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I have a job to do.”

“So do I.”

As Bourne dragged him down the rolling stairs, the officer went for his gun.

Bourne dug his fingers into the nerve bundle just above the man’s elbow. “Draw it if you must,” Bourne said, “but be prepared for the consequences.”

The official’s frosty aloofness finally cracked, revealing the fear beneath. His round face was pallid and sweating.

“What do you want of me?” he said as they walked along the tarmac.

“Take me to your real employer.”

The officer had one last blast of bravado in him. “You don’t really think he’s here, do you?”

“As a matter of fact I wasn’t sure until you said that. Now I know he is.” Bourne shook the official. “Now take me to him.”

Defeated, the officer nodded bleakly. No doubt, he was contemplating his immediate future. At a quickened pace, he led Bourne around behind the 747. At that moment, the NextGen truck rumbled to life, heading away from the plane, back the way it had come. That was when Bourne saw the black Mercedes and a police car directly behind it.

“Where did that police car come from?” The officer tore himself away from Bourne and broke into a run toward the parked cars.

Bourne, who saw the driver’s-side doors on both vehicles standing open, was at the officer’s heels. It was clear as they approached that no one was in the police car, but looking through the Mercedes’s door, they saw the driver, slumped over. It looked as if he’d been kicked to the passenger’s side of the seat.

Bourne pulled open the rear door, saw Icoupov with the top of his head blown off. Another man had fallen forward against the front seat rests. When Bourne pulled him gently backward, he saw that it was Dominic Specter-or Asher Sever-and everything became clear to him. Beneath the public enmity, the two men were secret allies. This answered many questions, not the least of which was why everyone Bourne had spoken to about the Black Legion had a different opinion about who was a member and who wasn’t.

Sever looked small and frail, old beyond his years. He’d been shot in the chest with a.22. Bourne took his pulse, listened to his breathing. He was still alive.

“I’ll call for an ambulance,” the officer said.

“Do what you have to do,” Bourne said as he scooped Sever up. “I’m taking this one with me.”

He left the Immigration officer to deal with the mess, crossing the tarmac and mounting the rolling stairs.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said as he laid Sever down across three seats.

“What happened to him?” Moira said with a gasp. “Is he alive or dead?”

Bourne knelt beside his old mentor. “He’s still breathing.” As he began to rip off the professor’s shirt, he said to Moira. “Get us moving, okay? We need to get out of here now.”

Moira nodded. As she went up the aisle, she spoke to one of the flight attendants, who ran for the first-aid kit. The door to the cockpit was still open, and she gave the order for takeoff to the captain and the co-pilot.

Within five minutes the rolling stairs had been removed and the 747 was taxiing to the head of the runway. A moment later the control tower cleared it for takeoff. The brakes were let out, the engines revved up, and, with increasing velocity, the jet hurtled down the runway. Then it lifted off, its wheel retracted, flaps were adjusted, and it soared into a sky filled with the crimson and gold of the setting sun.

Forty-Three

IS HE DEAD?” Sever stared up at Bourne, who was cleaning his chest wound.

“You mean Semion?”

“Yes. Semion. Is he dead?”

“Icoupov and the driver, both.”

Bourne held Sever down while the alcohol burned off everything that could cause the wound to suppurate. No organs had been struck, but the injury must be extremely painful.

Bourne applied an antiseptic cream from a tube in the first-aid kit. “Who shot you?”

“Arkadin.” Tears of pain rolled down Sever’s cheeks. “For some reason, he’s gone completely insane. Maybe he was always insane. I thought so anyway. Allah, that hurts!” He took several shallow breaths before he went on. “He came out of nowhere. The driver said, ‘A police car has pulled up behind us.’ The next thing I know he’s rolling down the window and a gun is fired point-blank in his face. Neither Semion nor I had time to think. There was Arkadin inside the car. He shot me, but I’m certain it was Semion he’d come for.”

Intuiting what must have happened in Kirsch’s apartment, Bourne said, “Icoupov killed his woman, Devra.”

Sever squeezed his eyes shut. He was having trouble breathing normally. “So what? Arkadin never cared what happened to his women.”

“He cared about this one,” Bourne said, applying a bandage.

Sever stared up at Bourne with an expression of disbelief. “The odd thing was, I think I heard him call Semion ‘Father.’ Semion didn’t understand.”

“And now he never will.”

“Stop your fussing; let me die, dammit!” Sever said crossly. “It doesn’t matter now whether I live or die.”

Bourne finished up.

“What’s done is done. Fate has been sealed; there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to change it.”

Bourne sat on a seat opposite Sever. He was aware of Moira standing to one side, watching and listening. The professor’s betrayal only went to prove that you were never safe when you let personal feelings into your life.

“Jason.” Sever’s voice was weaker. “I never meant to deceive you.”

“Yes, you did, Professor, that’s all you know how to do.”

“I came to look upon you as a son.”

“Like Icoupov looked upon Arkadin.”

With an effort, Sever shook his head. “Arkadin is insane. Perhaps they both were, perhaps their shared insanity is what drew them together.”

Bourne sat forward, “Let me ask you a question, Professor. Do you think you’re sane?”

“Of course I’m sane.”

Sever’s eyes held steady on Bourne’s, a challenge still, at this late stage.

For a moment, Bourne did nothing, then he rose and, together with Moira, walked forward toward the cockpit.

“It’s a long flight,” she said softly, “and you need your rest.”

“We both do.”

They sat next to each other, silent for a long time. Occasionally, they heard Sever utter a soft moan. Otherwise, the drone of the engines conspired to lull them to sleep.

It was freezing in the baggage hold, but Arkadin didn’t mind. The Nizhny Tagil winters had been brutal. It was during one of those winters that Mischa Tarkanian had found him, hiding out from the remnants of Stas Kuzin’s regime. Mischa, hard as a knife blade, had the heart of a poet. He told stories that were beautiful enough to be poems. Arkadin had been enchanted, if such a word could be ascribed to him. Mischa’s talent for storytelling had the power to take Arkadin far away from Nizhny Tagil, and when Mischa smuggled him out past the inner ring of smokestacks, past the outer ring of high-security prisons, his stories took Arkadin to places beyond Moscow, to lands beyond Russia. The stories gave Arkadin his first inkling of the world at large.

As he sat now, his back against a crate, knees drawn up to his chest in order to conserve warmth, he had good cause to think of Mischa. Icoupov had paid for killing Devra, now Bourne must pay for killing Mischa. But not just yet, Arkadin brooded, though his blood called out for revenge. If he killed Bourne now, Icoupov’s plan would succeed, and he couldn’t allow that, otherwise his revenge against him would be incomplete.

Arkadin put his head back against the edge of the crate and closed his eyes. Revenge had become like one of Mischa’s poems, its meaning flowering open to surround him with a kind of ethereal beauty, the only form of beauty that registered on him, the only beauty that lasted. It was the glimpse of that promised beauty, the very prospect of it, that allowed him to sit patiently, curled between crates, waiting for his moment of revenge, his moment of inestimable beauty.

Bourne dreamed of the hell known as Nizhny Tagil as if he’d been born there, and when he awoke he knew Arkadin was near. Opening his eyes, he saw Moira staring at him.

“What do you feel about the professor?” she said, by which he suspected she meant, What do you feel about me?

“I think the years of obsession have driven him insane. I don’t think he knows good from evil, right from wrong.”

“Is that why you didn’t ask him why he embarked on this path to destruction?”

“In a way,” Bourne said. “Whatever his answer would have been it wouldn’t have made sense to us.”

“Fanatics never make sense,” she said. “That’s why they’re so difficult to counteract. A rational response, which is always our choice, is rarely effective.” She cocked her head. “He betrayed you, Jason. He nurtured your belief in him, and played on it.”

“If you climb on a scorpion’s back you’ve got to expect to get stung.”

“Don’t you have a desire for revenge?”

“Maybe I should I smother him in his sleep, or shoot him to death as Arkadin did to Semion Icoupov. Do you really expect that to make me feel better? I’ll exact my revenge by stopping the Black Legion’s attack.”

“You sound so rational.”

“I don’t feel rational, Moira.”

She took his meaning, and blood rushed to her cheeks. “I may have lied to you, Jason, but I didn’t betray you. I could never do that.” She engaged his eyes. “There were so many times in the last week when I ached to tell you, but I had a duty to Black River.”

“Duty is something I understand, Moira.”

“Understanding is one thing, but will you forgive me?”

He put out his hand. “You aren’t a scorpion,” he said. “It’s not in your nature.”

She took his hand in hers, brought it up to her mouth, and pressed it to her cheek.

At that moment they heard Sever cry out, and they rose, went down the aisle to where he lay curled on his side like a small child afraid of the dark. Bourne knelt down, drew Sever gently onto his back to keep pressure off the wound.

The professor stared at Bourne, then, as Moira spoke to him, at her.

“Why did you do it?” Moira said. “Why attack the country you’d adopted as your own.”

Sever could not catch his breath. He swallowed convulsively. “You’d never understand.”

“Why don’t you try me?”

Sever closed his eyes, as if to better visualize each word as it emerged from his mouth. “The Muslim sect I belong to, that Semion belonged to, is very old-ancient even. It had its beginnings in North Africa.” He paused already out of breath. “Our sect is very strict, we believe in a fundamentalism so devout it cannot be conveyed to infidels by any means. But I can tell you this: We cannot live in the modern world because the modern world violates every one of our laws. Therefore, it must be destroyed.

“Nevertheless…” He licked his lips, and Bourne poured out some water, lifted his head, and allowed him to drink his fill. When he was finished, he continued. “I should never have tried to use you, Jason. Over the years there have been many disagreements between Semion and myself-this was the latest, the one that broke the proverbial camel’s back. He said you’d be trouble, and he was right. I thought I could manufacture a reality, that I could use you to convince the American security agencies we were going to attack New York City.” He emitted a dry, little laugh. “I lost sight of the central tenet of life, that reality can’t be controlled, it’s too random, too chaotic. So you see it was I who was on a fool’s errand, Jason, not you.”

“Professor, it’s all over,” Moira said. “We won’t let the tanker dock until we have the software patched.”

Sever smiled. “A good idea, but it will avail you nothing. Do you know the damage that much liquid natural gas will do? Five square miles of devastation, thousands killed, America’s corrupt, greedy way of life delivered the hammer blow Semion and I have been dreaming of for decades. It’s my one great calling in this life. The loss of human life and physical destruction is icing on the cake.”

He paused to catch his breath, which was shallower and more ragged than ever. “When the nation’s largest port is incinerated, America’s economy will go with it. Almost half your imports will dry up. There’ll be widespread shortages of goods and food, companies will collapse, the stock exchanges will plummet, wholesale panic will ensue.”

“How many of your men are on board?” Bourne said.

Sever smiled weakly. “I love you like a son, Jason.”

“You let your own son be killed,” Bourne said.

“Sacrificed, Jason. There’s a difference.”

“Not to him.” Bourne returned to his agenda. “How many men, Professor?”

“One, only one.”

“One man can’t take over the tanker,” Moira said.

The smile played around his lips, even as his eyes closed, his consciousness fading. “If man hadn’t made machines to do his work…”

Moira turned to Bourne. “What does that mean?”

Bourne shook the old man’s shoulder, but he’d slipped into deep unconsciousness.

Moira checked his eyes, his forehead, his carotid artery. “Without intravenous antibiotics I doubt he’ll make it.” She looked at Bourne. “We’re near enough New York City now. We could touch down there, have an ambulance waiting-”

“There’s no time,” Bourne said.

“I know there’s no time.” Moira took his arm. “But I want to give you the choice.”

Bourne stared down at his mentor’s face, lined and seamed, far older in sleep, as if it had imploded. “He’ll make it on his own, or he won’t.”

He turned away, Moira at his side, and he said, “Call NextGen. This is what I need.”

Forty-Four

THE TANKER Moon of Hormuz, plowed through the Pacific no more than an hour out of Long Beach harbor. The captain, a veteran named Sultan, had gotten word that the LNG terminal was online and ready to receive its inaugural shipment of liquid natural gas. With the current state of the world’s economies, the LNG had become even more precious; from the time the Moon of Hormuz had left Algeria its cargo had increased in value by over 30 percent.

The tanker, twelve stories high and as large as a village, held thirty-three million gallons of LNG cooled to a temperature of -260 degrees. That translated into the energy equivalent of twenty billion gallons of natural gas. The ship required five miles to come to a stop, and because of the shape of its hull and the containers on deck Sultan’s view ahead was blocked for three-quarters of a mile. The tanker had been steaming at twenty knots, but three hours ago he’d ordered the engines into reverse. Well within five miles of the terminal, the ship was down to six knots of speed and still decelerating.

Within the five-mile radius to shore his nerves became a jittery flame, the nightmare of Armageddon always with him, because a disaster aboard the Moon of Hormuz would be just that. If the tanks spilled into the water, the resulting fire would be five miles in diameter. For another five miles beyond that thermal radiation would burn any human to a crisp.

But those scenarios were just that: nightmares. In ten years there’d never been even a minor incident aboard his ship, and there never would be, if he had anything to say about it. He was just thinking about how fine the weather was, and how much he was going to enjoy his ten days on the beach with a friend in Malibu, when the radio officer handed him a message from NextGen. He was to expect a helicopter in fifteen minutes; he was to give its passengers-Moira Trevor and Jason Bourne-any and all help they requested. That was surprising enough, but he bristled at the last sentence: He was to take orders from them until the Moon of Hormuz was safely docked at the terminal.

When the doors to the cargo bay were opened, Arkadin was ready, crouched behind one of the containers. As the airport maintenance team clambered aboard, he edged out, then called from the shadows for one of them to help him. When the man complied, Arkadin broke his neck, dragged him into the deepest shadows of the cargo bay, away from the NextGen containers. He stripped and donned the man’s maintenance uniform. Then he stepped over to the work area, keeping the ID tag clipped to it out of full view so that no one could that see that his face didn’t match that on the tag. Not that it mattered: These people were here to get the cargo off-loaded and onto the waiting NextGen trucks as quickly as possible. It never occurred to any of them that there might be an imposter among them.

In this way, Arkadin worked his way to the open bay doors, onto the loading lifts with the container. He hopped onto the tarmac as the cargo was being loaded onto the truck, then ducked away beneath the wing. Finding himself alone on the opposite side of the aircraft, he walked away at a brisk, business-like clip. No one challenged him, no one even gave him a second look, because he moved with the authority of someone who belonged there. That was the secret of assuming a different identity, even temporarily-people’s eyes either ignored or accepted what looked correct to them.

As he went, he breathed deeply of the clear, salt air, the freshening breeze whipping his pants against his legs. He felt free of all the leashes that had bound him to the earth: Stas Kuzin, Marlene, Gala, Icoupov, they were all gone now. The sea beckoned him and he was coming.

NextGen had its own small terminal on the freight side of the Long Beach airport. Moira had radioed ahead to NextGen headquarters, giving them a heads-up and asking for a helicopter to be ready to take her and Bourne to the tanker.

Arkadin beat Bourne to the NextGen terminal. Hurrying now, he used the badge to open the door to the restricted areas. Out on the tarmac he saw the helicopter right away. The pilot was talking to a maintenance man. The moment they both squatted down, examining one of the runners, Arkadin pulled his cap low on his forehead, walked briskly around to the far side of the helicopter, and made himself busy there.

He saw Bourne and Moira emerge from the NextGen terminal. They paused for a moment and he could hear their argument about whether or not she should come, but they must have had it before, because the fight was hammered out in brief, staccato bursts, like shorthand.

“Face facts, Jason. I work for NextGen; without me you won’t get on that copter.”

Bourne turned away, and for an instant Arkadin felt a foreboding, as if Bourne had seen him. Then Bourne turned back to Moira, and together they hurried across the tarmac.

Bourne climbed in on the pilot’s side, while Moira headed to Arkadin’s side of the copter. With a professional smile, he held out a hand, helping her up into the cockpit. He saw the maintenance man about to come across, but waved him off. Looking up at Moira through the curved Perspex door he thought of Devra and felt a lurch in his chest, as if her bleeding head had fallen against him. He waved at Moira, and she lifted her hand in return.

The rotors began to swirl, the maintenance man signaled for Arkadin to come away; Arkadin gave him the thumbs-up sign. Faster and faster the rotors spun, and the copter’s frame began to shudder. Just before it lifted off, Arkadin climbed onto the runner and curled himself into a ball as they swung out over the Pacific, buffeted by a stiff onshore wind.

The tanker loomed large in the passengers’ vision as the copter sped toward it at top speed. Only one other boat could be seen, a commercial fishing vessel several miles away beyond the security limits imposed by the Coast Guard and Homeland Security. Bourne, who was sitting directly behind the pilot, saw that he was working to keep the copter’s pitch at the correct angle.

“Is everything okay?” he shouted over the roar of the rotors.

The pilot pointed to one of the gauges. “There’s a small anomaly in the pitch; probably the wind, it’s gusting up quite a bit.”

But Bourne wasn’t so sure. The anomaly was constant, whereas the wind wasn’t. He had an intuition what-or, more accurately, who-was causing the problem.

“I think we have a stowaway,” Bourne said to the pilot. “Take it in low when you get to the tanker. Skim the tops of the containers.”

“What?” The pilot shook his head. “Too dangerous.”

“Then I’ll take a look myself.” Unstrapping himself, Bourne crept toward the door.

“Okay, okay!” the pilot shouted. “Just get back in your seat!”

They were almost at the bow of the tanker now. It was unbelievably big, a city lumbering through the Pacific swells.

“Hang on!” the pilot shouted as he took them down far more quickly than normal. They could see members of the crew racing across the deck, and someone-no doubt the captain-emerged from the wheelhouse near the stern. Someone was shouting to pull up; the tops of the containers were coming at them with frightening speed. Just before they skimmed the top of the nearest container, the copter rocked slightly.

“The anomaly’s gone,” the pilot said.

“Stay here,” Bourne shouted to Moira. “Whatever happens stay on board.” Then he gripped the weapon lying astride his knees, opened the door and, as she screamed his name, jumped out of the copter.

He landed after Arkadin, who had already leapt down onto the deck and was scuttling between containers. Crew members rushed toward them both; Bourne had no idea whether one of them was Sever’s software engineer, but he raised a hunting crossbow and they stopped in their tracks. Knowing that firing a gun would be tantamount to suicide on a tanker full of liquid natural gas, he’d had Moira ask NextGen to have two crossbows in the copter. How they procured them so quickly was anyone’s guess, but a corporation of NextGen’s size could get just about anything at a moment’s notice.

Behind him, the chopper set down on the part of the foredeck that had been cleared, and cut the engines. Doubled over to avoid the rotors, he opened the copter door and looked up at Moira. “Arkadin is here somewhere. Please stay out of the way.”

“I need to report to the captain. I can take care of myself.” She, too, was cradling a crossbow. “What does Arkadin want?”

“Me. I killed his friend. It doesn’t matter to him that it was in self-defense.”

“I can help, Jason. If we work together, two are better than one.”

He shook his head. “Not in this case. Besides, you see how slowly the tanker is moving; its screws are in reverse. It’s within the five-mile limit. For every foot we travel forward, the danger to thousands of lives and the port of Long Beach itself grows exponentially.”

She nodded stiffly, stepped down, and hurried along the deck to where the captain stood, awaiting her orders.

Bourne turned, moving cautiously among the containers, in the direction he’d glimpsed Arkadin heading. Moving along the aisles was like walking down the canyons of Manhattan. Wind howled as it cut across corners, magnified, racing down the aisles as if they were tunnels.

Just before he reached the end of the first set of containers, he heard Arkadin’s voice, speaking to him in Russian.

“There isn’t much time.”

Bourne stood still, trying to determine where the voice was coming from. “What d’you know about it, Arkadin?”

“Why d’you think I’m here?”

“I killed Mischa Tarkanian, now you kill me. Isn’t that how you defined it back in Egon Kirsch’s apartment?”

“Listen to me, Bourne, if that’s what I wanted I could have killed you anytime while you and the woman slept aboard the NextGen 747.”

Bourne’s blood ran cold. “Why didn’t you?”

“Listen to me, Bourne, Semion Icoupov, who saved me, whom I trusted, shot my woman to death.”

“Yes, that’s why you killed him.”

“Do you begrudge me my revenge?”

Bourne said nothing, thinking of what he would do to Arkadin if he hurt Moira.

“You don’t have to say anything, Bourne, I already know the answer.”

Bourne turned. The voice appeared to have shifted. Where the hell was he hiding?

“But as I said we have little time to find Icoupov’s man on board.”

“It’s Sever’s man, actually,” Bourne said.

Arkadin laughed. “Do you think that matters? They were in bed together. All the time they posed as bitter enemies they were plotting this disaster. I want to stop it-I have to stop it, or my revenge on Icoupov will be incomplete.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Listen, Bourne, you know we haven’t much time. I’ve avenged myself on the father, but this plan is his child. He and Sever gave birth to it, fed it, nurtured it through its infancy, through its adolescent growing pains. Now each moment brings this floating supernova closer to the moment of destruction those two madmen envisioned.”

The voice moved again. “Is that what you want, Bourne? Of course not. Then let’s join together to find Sever’s man.”

Bourne hesitated. He didn’t trust Arkadin, and yet he had to trust him. He examined the situation from all sides and concluded that the only way to play it was to move forward. “He’s a software engineer,” he said.

Arkadin appeared, climbing down from the top of one of the containers. For a moment, the two men stood facing each other, and once again Bourne felt the dislocating sensation of looking in a mirror. When he stared into Arkadin’s eyes, he didn’t see the madness the professor spoke of; he saw himself, a heart of darkness and pain beyond understanding.

“Sever told me there was only one man, but he also said we wouldn’t find him, and even if we did it wouldn’t matter.”

Arkadin frowned, giving him the canny, feral appearance of a wolf. “What did he mean?”

“I’m not sure.” He turned, walking down the deck toward the crew members who had cleared the space for the copter to land. “What we’re looking for,” he said as Arkadin fell into step beside him, “is a tattoo specific to the Black Legion.”

“The wheel of horses with the death’s head center.” Arkadin nodded. “I’ve seen it.”

“It’s on the inside of the elbow.”

“We could kill them all.” Arkadin laughed. “But I guess that would offend something inside you.”

One by one, the two men examined the arms of the eight crewmen on deck, but found no tattoo. By the time they reached the wheelhouse, the tanker was within two miles of the terminal. It was barely moving. Four tugboats had hove to and were waiting at the one-mile limit to tow the tanker the rest of the way in.

The captain was a swarthy individual with a face that looked like it had been deeply etched by acid rather than the wind and the sun. “As I was telling Ms. Trevor, there are seven more crewmen, mostly involved in engine room duties. Then there’s my first mate here, the communications officer, and the ship’s doctor, he’s in sick bay, tending to a crewman who fell ill two days out of Algeria. Oh, yes, and the cook.”

Bourne and Arkadin glanced at each other. The radioman seemed the logical choice, but when the captain summoned him he, too, was without the Black Legion tattoo. So were the captain and his first mate.

“The engine room,” Bourne said.

At his captain’s orders, the first mate led them out onto the deck, then down the starboard companionway into the bowels of the ship, reaching the enormous engine room at last. Five men were hard at work, their faces and arms filthy with a coating of grease and grime. As the first mate instructed them, they held out their arms, but as Bourne reached the third in line, the fourth man looked at them beneath half-closed lids before he bolted.

Bourne went after him while Arkadin circled, snaking through the oily city of grinding machinery. He eluded Bourne once but then, rounding a corner, Bourne spotted him near the line of gigantic Hyundai diesel engines, specifically designed to power the world’s fleet of LNG tankers. He was trying to furtively shove a small box between the structural struts of the engine, but Arkadin, coming up behind him, grabbed for his wrist. The crewman jerked away, brought the box back toward him, and was about to thumb a button on it when Bourne kicked it out of his hand. The box went flying, and Arkadin dived after it.

“Careful,” the crewman said as Bourne grabbed hold of him. He ignored Bourne, was staring at the box Arkadin brought back to them. “You hold the whole world in your hand.”

Meanwhile Bourne pushed up his shirtsleeve. The man’s arm was smeared with grease, deliberately so, it seemed, because when Bourne took a rag and wiped it off, the Black Legion tattoo appeared on the inside of his left elbow.

The man seemed totally unconcerned. His entire being was focused on the box that Arkadin was holding. “That will blow up everything,” he said, and made a lunge toward it. Bourne jerked him back with a stranglehold.

“Let’s get him back up to the captain,” Bourne said to the first mate. That’s when he saw the box up close. He took it out of Arkadin’s hand.

“Careful!” the crewman cried. “One slight jar and you’ll set it off.”

But Bourne wasn’t so sure. The crewman was being too vocal with his warnings. Wouldn’t he want the ship to blow now that it had been boarded by Sever’s enemies? When he turned the box over, he saw that the seam between the bottom and the side was ragged.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” The crewman was so agitated that Arkadin slapped him on the side of the head in order to silence him.

Inserting his fingernail into the seam, Bourne pried the box apart. There was nothing inside. It was a dummy.

Moira found it impossible to stay in one place. Her nerves were stretched to the breaking point. The tanker was on the verge of meeting up with the tugboats; they were only a mile from shore. If the tanks went, the devastation to both human life and the country’s economy would be catastrophic. She felt useless, a third wheel hanging around while the two men did their hunting.

Exiting the wheelhouse, she went belowdecks, looking for the engine room. Smelling food, she poked her head into the galley. A large Algerian was sitting at the stainless-steel mess table, reading a two-week-old Arabic newspaper.

He looked up, gesturing at the paper. “It gets old the fifteenth time through, but when you’re at sea what can you do?”

His burly arms were bare to the shoulders. They bore tattoos of a star, a crescent, and a cross, but not the Black Legion’s insignia. Following the directions he gave her, she found the infirmary three decks below. Inside, a slim Muslim was sitting at a small desk built into one of the bulkheads. In the opposite bulkhead were two berths, one of them filled with the patient who had fallen ill. The doctor murmured a traditional Muslim greeting as he turned away from his laptop computer to face her. He frowned deeply when he saw the crossbow in her hands.

“Is that really necessary,” he said, “or even wise?”

“I’d like to speak with your patient,” Moira said, ignoring him.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible.” The doctor smiled that smile only doctors can. “He’s been sedated.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

The doctor gestured at the laptop. “I’m still trying to find out. He’s been subject to seizures, but so far I can’t find the pathology.”

“We’re near Long Beach, you’ll get help then,” she said. “I just need to see the insides of his elbows.”

The doctor’s eyebrows rose. “I beg your pardon?”

“I need to see whether he’s got a tattoo.”

“They all have tattoos, these sailors.” The doctor shrugged. “But go ahead. You won’t disturb him.”

Moira approached the lower berth, bending over to pull the thin blanket back from the patient’s arm. As she did so, the doctor stepped forward and struck her a blow on the back of her head. She fell forward and cracked her jaw on the metal frame of the bunk. The pain pulled her rudely back from a precipice of blackness, and, groaning, she managed to roll over. The copper-sweet taste of blood was in her mouth and she fought against wave after wave of dizziness. Dimly she saw the doctor bent over his laptop, his fingers racing over the keys, and she felt a ball of ice form in her belly.

He’s going to kill us all. With this thought reverberating in her head, she grabbed the crossbow off the floor where she’d dropped it. She barely had time to aim, but she was close enough not to have to be accurate. She breathed a prayer as she let fly.

The doctor arched up as the bolt pierced his spine. He staggered backward, toward where Moira sat, braced against the berth frame. His arms extended, his fingers clawing for the keyboard, and Moira rose, swung the crossbow into the back of his head. His blood spattered like rain over her face and hands, the desk, and the laptop’s keyboard.

Bourne found her on the floor of the infirmary, cradling the computer in her lap. When he came in, she looked up at him and said, “I don’t know what he did. I’m afraid to shut it off.”

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. “The ship’s doctor was Sever’s man.”

“So I see,” he said as he stepped over the corpse. “I didn’t believe him when he told me he had only one man on board. It would be like him to have a backup.”

He knelt down, examined the back of her head. “It’s superficial. Did you black out?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

He took a large gauze pad from the supply cabinet, doused it with alcohol. “Ready?” He placed it against the back of her head, where her hair was plastered down with blood. She moaned a little through gritted teeth.

“Can you hold it in place for a minute?”

She nodded, and gently Bourne lifted the laptop into his arms. There was a software program running, that much was clear. Two radio buttons on the screen were blinking, one yellow, the other red. On the other side of the screen was a green radio button, which wasn’t blinking.

Bourne breathed a sigh of relief. “He brought up the program, but you got to him before he could activate it.”

“Thank God,” she said. “Where Arkadin?”

“I don’t know. When the captain told me you’d gone below I took off after you.”

“Jason, you don’t think…”

Putting the computer aside, he helped her to her feet. “Let’s get you back up to the captain so you can give him the good news.”

There was a fearful look on his face. “And you?”

He handed her the laptop. “Go to the wheelhouse and stay there. And Moira, this time I really mean it.”

With the crossbow in one hand, he stepped into the passageway, looked right and left. “All right. Go. Go!”

Arkadin had returned to Nizhny Tagil. Down in the engine room, surrounded by steel and iron, he realized that no matter what had happened to him, no matter where he’d gone, he’d never been able to escape the prison of his youth. Part of him was still in the brothel he and Stas Kuzin had owned, part of him still stalked the nighttime streets, abducting young girls, their pale, fearful faces turned toward him as deer turn toward headlights. But what they’d needed from him he couldn’t-or wouldn’t-give them. Instead, he’d sent them to their deaths in the quicklime pit Kuzin’s regime had dug amid the firs and the weeping hemlocks. Many snows had passed since he’d dragged Yelena from the rats and the quicklime, but the pit remained in his memory, vivid as a blaze of fire. If only he could have his memory wiped clean.

He started at the sound of Stas Kuzin screaming at him. What about all your victims?

But it was Bourne, descending the steel companionway to the engine room. “It’s over, Arkadin. The disaster has been averted.”

Arkadin nodded, but inside he knew better: The disaster had already occurred, and it was too late to stop its consequences. As he walked toward Bourne he tried to fix him in his mind, but he seemed to morph, like an image seen through a prism.

When he was within arm’s length of him, he said, “Is it true what Sever told Icoupov, that you have no memory beyond a certain point in time?”

Bourne nodded. “It’s true. I can’t remember most of my life.”

Arkadin felt a terrible pain, as if the very fabric of his soul was being torn apart. With an inchoate cry, he flicked open his switchblade, lunged forward, aiming for Bourne’s belly.

Turning sideways, Bourne grabbed his wrist, began to turn it in an attempt to get Arkadin to drop the weapon. Arkadin struck out with his other hand, but Bourne blocked it with his forearm. In doing so, the crossbow clattered to the deck. Arkadin kicked it into the shadows.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Bourne said. “There’s no reason for us to be enemies.”

“There’s every reason.” Arkadin broke away, tried another attack, which Bourne countered. “Don’t you see it? We’re the same, you and me. The two of us can’t exist in the same world. One of us will kill the other.”

Bourne stared into Arkadin’s eyes, and even though his words were those of a madmen Bourne saw no madness in them. Only a despair beyond description, and an unyielding will for revenge. In a way, Arkadin was right. Revenge was all he had now, all he lived for. With Tarkanian and Devra gone, the only meaning life had for him lay in avenging their deaths. There was nothing Bourne could say to sway him; that was a rational response to an irrational impulse. It was true, the two of them couldn’t exist in the same world.

At that moment Arkadin feinted right with his knife, drove left with his fist, rocking Bourne back onto his heels. At once he stabbed out with the switchblade, burying it in the meat of Bourne’s left thigh. Bourne grunted, fought the buckling of his knee, and Arkadin jammed his boot into Bourne’s wounded thigh. Blood spurted, and Bourne fell. Arkadin jumped on him, using his fist to pummel Bourne’s face when Bourne blocked his knife stabs.

Bourne knew he couldn’t take much more of this. Arkadin’s desire for revenge had filled him with an inhuman strength. Bourne, fighting for his very life, managed to counterpunch long enough to roll out from under Arkadin. Then he was up and running in an ungainly limp to the companionway.

Arkadin reached up for him as he was half a dozen rungs off the engine room deck. Bourne kicked out with his bad leg, surprising Arkadin, catching him under the chin. As he fell back, Bourne scrambled up the rungs as fast as he could. His left leg was on fire, and he was trailing blood as the wounded muscle was forced to work overtime.

Gaining the next deck, he continued up the companionway, up and up, until he came to the first level belowdecks, which according to Moira was where the galley was. Finding it, he raced in, grabbed two knives and a glass saltshaker. Stuffing the shaker into his pocket, he wielded the knives as Arkadin loomed in the doorway.

They fought with their knives, but Bourne’s unwieldy carving knives were no match for Arkadin’s slender-bladed switchblade, and Bourne was cut again, this time in the chest. He kicked Arkadin in the face, dropped his knives in order to wrest the switchblade out of Arkadin’s hand, to no avail. Arkadin stabbed at him again and Bourne nearly suffered a punctured liver. He backed away, then ran out the doorway, up the last companionway to the open deck.

The tanker was at a near stop. The captain was busy coordinating the hookups with the tugboats that would bring it the final distance to the LNG terminal. Bourne couldn’t see Moira, which was a blessing. He didn’t want her anywhere near Arkadin.

Bourne, heading for the sanctuary of the container city, was bowled over as Arkadin leapt on him. Locked together, they rolled over and over until they fetched up against the port railing. The sea was far below them, churning against the tanker’s hull. One of the tugs signaled with its horn as it came alongside, and Arkadin stiffened. To him it was the siren sounding an escape from one of Nizhny Tagil’s prisons. He saw the black skies, tasted the sulfur smoke in his lungs. He saw Stas Kuzin’s monstrous face, felt Marlene’s head between his ankles beneath the water, heard the terrible reports when Semion Icoupov shot Devra.

He screamed like a tiger, pulling Bourne to his feet, pummeling him over and over until he was bent back over the railing. In that moment, Bourne knew that he was going to die as he had been born, falling over the side of a ship, lost in the depth of the sea, and only by the grace of God being brought in to a fishing boat with their catch. His face was bloody and swollen, his arms felt like lead weights, he was going over.

Then, at the last instant, he pulled the shaker from his pocket, broke it against the rail, and threw the salt in Arkadin’s eyes. Arkadin bellowed in shock and pain, his hand flew up reflexively, and Bourne snatched the switchblade from him. Blinded, Arkadin still fought on, and he grasped the blade. With a superhuman effort, not caring that the edges cut into his fingers, he wrested the switchblade away from Bourne. Bourne heaved him backward. But Arkadin had control of the knife now, he had partial vision back through his tearing eyes, and he ran at Bourne with his head tucked into his shoulders, all his weight and determination behind the charge.

Bourne had one chance. Stepping into the charge, he ignored the knife, grabbed Arkadin by his uniform jacket and, using his own momentum against him, pivoted from the hip as he swung him around and up. Arkadin’s thighs struck the railing, his upper body continuing its flight, so that he toppled head-over-heels over the side.

Falling, falling, falling… the equivalent of twelve stories, before plunging beneath the waves.

Forty-Five

I NEED A VACATION, “Moira said. “I’m thinking Bali would do me quite well.”

She and Bourne were in the NextGen clinic in one of the campus buildings that overlooked the Pacific. The Moon of Hormuz had successfully docked at the LNG terminal and the cargo of the highly compressed liquid was being piped from the tanker to onshore containers where it would be slowly warmed, expanding to six hundred times its present volume so it could be used by individual consumers and utility and business power plants. The laptop had been turned over to the NextGen IT department, so the software could be parsed and permanently shut down. The grateful CEO of NextGen had just left the clinic, after promoting Moira to president of the security division and offering Bourne a highly lucrative consulting position with the firm. Bourne had phoned Soraya, each of them bringing the other up to date. He’d given her the address of Sever’s house, detailing the clandestine operation it housed.

“I wish I knew what a vacation felt like,” Bourne said when he’d finished the call.

“Well…” Moira smiled at him. “You’ve only to ask.”

Bourne considered for a long time. Vacations were something he’d never contemplated, but if ever there was a time to take one, he thought, this was it. He looked back at her and nodded.

Her smile broadened. “I’ll have NextGen make all the arrangements. How long do you want to go for?”

“How long?” Bourne said. “Right now, I’ll take forever.”

On his way to the airport, Bourne stopped at the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where Professor Sever had been admitted. Moira, who had declined to come up with him, was waiting for him in the chauffeured car NextGen had hired for them. They’d put Sever in a private room on the fifth floor. The room was deathly still, except for the respirator. The professor had sunk deeper into a coma and was now unable to breathe on his own. A thick tube emerged from his throat, snaking to the respirator that wheezed like an asthmatic. Other, smaller tubes were needled into Sever’s arms. A catheter attached to a plastic bladder hooked to the side of the bed caught his urine. His bluish eyelids were so thin Bourne thought he could see his pupils beneath them.

Standing beside his former mentor he found that he had nothing to say. He wondered why he’d felt compelled to come here. Maybe it was simply to look once more on the face of evil. Arkadin was a killer, pure and simple, but this man had made himself brick by brick into a liar and a deceiver. And yet he looked so frail, so helpless now, it was difficult to believe he was the mastermind of the monstrous plan to incinerate much of Long Beach. Because, as he’d said, his sect couldn’t live in the modern world, it was bound to destroy it. Was that the real reason, or had Sever once again lied to him? He’d never know now.

He was abruptly nauseated by being in Sever’s presence, but as he turned away a small dapper man came in, allowing the door to close at his back.

“Jason Bourne?” When Bourne nodded, the man said, “My name is Frederick Willard.”

“Soraya told me about you,” Bourne said. “Well done, Willard.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Please don’t call me sir.”

Willard gave a small, deprecating smile. “Pardon me, my training is so ingrained in me that’s all I am now.” He glanced over at Sever. “Do you think he’ll live?”

“He’s alive now,” Bourne said, “but I wouldn’t call it living.”

Willard nodded, though he seemed not at all interested in the disposition of the figure lying in the bed.

“I have a car waiting downstairs,” Bourne said.

“As it happens, so do I.” Willard smiled, but there was something sad about it. “I know that you worked for Treadstone.”

“Not Treadstone,” Bourne said, “Alex Conklin.”

“I worked for Conklin, too, many years ago. It’s one and the same, Mr. Bourne.”

Bourne felt impatience now. He was eager to join Moira, to see the sherbet skies of Bali.

“You see, I know all of Treadstone’s secrets-all of them. This is something only you and I know, Mr. Bourne.”

A nurse came in on her silent white shoes, checked all of Sever’s feeds, scribbled on his chart, then left them alone again.

“Mr. Bourne, I thought long and hard about whether I should come here, to tell you…” He cleared his throat. “You see, the man you fought on the tanker, the Russian who went overboard.”

“Arkadin.”

“Leonid Danilovich Arkadin, yes.” Willard’s eyes met Bourne’s, and something inside him winced away. “He was Treadstone.”

“What?” Bourne couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Arkadin was Treadstone?”

Willard nodded. “Before you-in fact, he was Conklin’s pupil just before you.”

“But what happened to him? How did he wind up working for Semion Icoupov?”

“It was Icoupov who sent him to Conklin. They were friends, once upon a time,” Willard said. “Conklin was intrigued when Icoupov told him about Arkadin. Treadstone was moving into a new phase by then; Conklin believed Arkadin was perfect for what he had in mind. But Arkadin rebelled. He went rogue, almost killed Conklin before he escaped to Russia.”

Bourne was desperately trying to process all this information. At last, he said, “Willard, do you know what Alex had in mind when he created Treadstone?”

“Oh, yes. I told you I know all of Treadstone’s secrets. Your mentor, Alex Conklin, was attempting to build the perfect beast.”

“The perfect beast? What do you mean?” But Bourne already knew, because he’d seen it when he’d looked into Arkadin’s eyes, when he understood that what he was seeing reflected there was himself.

“The ultimate warrior.” Willard, one hand on the door handle, smiled now. “That’s what you are, Mr. Bourne. That’s what Leonid Danilovich Arkadin was-until, that is, he came up against you.” He scrutinized Bourne’s face, as if searching for a trace of the man who’d trained him to be a consummate covert operative. “In the end, Conklin succeeded, didn’t he?”

Bourne felt a chill go through him. “What do you mean?”

“You against Arkadin, it was always meant to be that way.” Willard opened the door. “The pity of it is Conklin never lived to see who won. But it’s you, Mr. Bourne. It’s you.”