The Bourne Deception

  They had booked the evening alone at the beach club. Towels were waiting for them, as well as frosty glasses of mango lassi, and pitchers of tropical juices and ice water. The attendants had discreetly tucked themselves away in the windowless auxiliary kitchen.

  They spent an hour in the ocean, swimming back and forth just beyond the curling surf line. The water was warm, as soft on the skin as velvet. Across the dark beach, hermit crabs went about their sideways business, and here and there bats could be seen winging in and out of a cave at the other end of the beach, just beyond a finger of rocks, part of the western half of the crescent cove.

  Afterward they drank their mango lassis in the pool, guarded by a huge grinning wooden pig with a medallioned collar and a crown behind its ears.

  “He’s smiling,” Moira said, “because I paid homage to our suckling pig.”

  They swam laps, then came together at the end of the pool overhung by a magnificent frangipani tree with its buttery white and yellow blossoms. Beneath its leafy branches, they held each other, watching the moon move in and out of gathering clouds. A gust of wind clattered the fronds of the thirty-foot palms that lined the beach side of the pool deck, and their legs went from pale to dark.

  “It’s almost over, Jason.”

  “What is?”

  “This.” Moira wriggled her hand under the water like a fish. “All of this. In a few days we’ll be gone.”

  He watched the moon wink out, felt the first fat drops on his face. A moment later, rain goose-fleshed the skin of the pool.

  She put her head back against his shoulder, deeper into the shadow of the frangipani. “And what will become of us?”

  He knew she didn’t want an answer, wanted only to taste the thought on her tongue. He could feel the weight of her, her warmth through the water, against his heart. It was a good weight; it made him drowsy.

  “Jason, what will you do when we get back?”

  “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I haven’t thought about it.” But he wondered now whether he would leave with her. How could he when something from his past was waiting for him here, so close he could feel its breath on the back of his neck? He said nothing of this, however, because it would require an explanation, and he had none. Just a feeling. And how many times had this feeling saved his life?

  “I’m not going back to NextGen,” she said.

  His attention returned fully to her. “When did you come to that decision?”

  “While we were here.” She smiled. “Bali has a way of opening the path to decisions. I came here just before I joined Black River. It seems to be an island of transformations, at least for me.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I want to start my own risk management firm.”

  “Nice.” He smiled. “In direct competition with Black River.”

  “If you want to look at it that way.”

  “Other people will.”

  It was raining harder now; the palm fronds clashed against one another, and it was impossible to see the sky.

  “That could be dangerous,” he added.

  “Life is dangerous, Jason, like anything governed by chaos.”

  “I can’t argue with that. But there’s your old boss, Noah Petersen.”

  “That’s his ops name. His real name is Perlis.”

  Bourne glanced up at the white flowers, which now began to fall all around them like snow. The sweet scent of frangipani mingled with the fresh smell of the rain.

  “Perlis was none too happy with you when we ran into him in Munich two weeks ago.”

  “Noah’s never happy.” Moira snuggled deeper into his arms. “I gave up trying to please him six months before I quit Black River. It was a fool’s game.”

  “The fact remains that we were right about the terrorist attack on the liquid natural gas tanker and he was wrong. I’m willing to bet he hasn’t forgotten. Now that you’re encroaching on his territory you’ll have made an enemy.”

  She laughed softly. “You should talk.”

  “Arkadin’s dead,” Bourne said soberly. “He took a header off the LNG tanker into the Pacific off Long Beach. He didn’t survive; no one could.”

  “He was a product of Treadstone, isn’t that what Willard told you?”

  “According to Willard, who was there, Arkadin was Alex Conklin’s first success—and his first failure. He was sent to Conklin by Semion Icoupov, the co-head of the Black Legion and the Eastern Brotherhood until Arkadin killed him for shooting his girlfriend.”

  “And his secret partner, Asher Sever, your former mentor, is in a permanent coma.”

  “We all get what we deserve, in the end,” Bourne said bitterly.

  Moira returned to the subject of Treadstone. “According to Willard, Conklin’s aim was to create a superior warrior—a fighting machine.”

  “That was Arkadin,” Bourne said, “but he escaped the Treadstone program back to Russia, where he got up to all sorts of mayhem, hiring himself out to the heads of various Moscow grupperovka.”

  “And you became his successor—Conklin’s success story.”

  “Not if you poll CI’s directorate chiefs,” Bourne said. “They would shoot me dead as soon as look at me.”

  “That hasn’t stopped them from coercing you into working for them when they needed you.”

  “That’s all over with,” Bourne said.

  Moira had just decided to change the subject when the power failed. The lights in the pool and within the open-air beach club itself winked out. The wind and the rain remained swirling in the darkness. Bourne tensed, tried to move her away so he could get up. She could sense him questing in the darkness for the source of the outage.

  “Jason,” she whispered, “it’s all right. We’re safe here.”

  He moved them through the water from where they had been sitting to the other side of the pool. She could feel his accelerated heartbeat, his heightened sense of awareness, of waiting for something terrible to happen, and in that instant she was given an insight into his life she’d never had before.

  She wanted to tell him again not to worry, that power outages happened all the time on Bali, but now she knew it would be useless. He was hardwired for this kind of reaction; nothing she could say or do would change that.

  She listened to the wind and the rain, wondering if he heard anything that she didn’t. For an instant she felt a stab of anxiety: What if this wasn’t a simple power outage? What if they were being stalked by one of Jason’s enemies?

  All at once, power was restored, causing her to laugh at her foolishness. “I told you,” she said, pointing to the smiling carved pig spirit. “He’s protecting us.”

  Bourne lay back in the water. “There’s no escape,” he said. “Even here.”

  “You don’t believe in spirits, good or evil, do you, Jason?”

  “I can’t afford to,” he said. “I come across enough evil as it is.”

  Picking up on his tone, Moira at last broached the subject closest to her heart. “I’m going to have to do some heavy recruiting right off the bat. It’s certain we’ll see a lot less of each other, at least until I set up my new shop.”

  “Is that a warning or a promise?”

  He couldn’t help noting that her laughter had a brittle edge to it. “Okay, I was nervous about bringing it up.”

  “Why?”

  “You know how it is.”

  “Tell me.”

  She turned in his arms, sat straddling him in the dimpled water. The rush of the rain through the leaves was all they could hear.

  “Jason, neither of us are the kind of people… I mean, we both live the kind of life that makes it difficult to hold on to a steady anything, especially relationships, so—”

  He cut her off by kissing her. When they came up for air, he said in her ear, “It’s okay. We have this now. If we need more, we’ll come back.”

  Her heart was gripped by joy. She hugged him tight. “It’s a deal. Oh, yes, it is.”

&
nbsp; Leonid Arkadin’s flight from Singapore arrived on time. At customs, he paid for his entry visa, then walked quickly through the terminal until he found a men’s room. Inside, he went into a stall, shut the door, and latched it. From a shoulder pack he took out the bulbous latex nose, three pots of makeup, soft plastic cheek inserts, and gray contact lenses he’d used in Munich. Not more than eight minutes later, exiting the stall, he went to the line of sinks and stared at his altered appearance, which was once again the very image of Bourne’s friend, the FSB-2 colonel Boris Karpov.

  Packing up the case, he crossed the terminal, out into the heat and the dense texture of humanity. Climbing into the air-conditioned car he’d hired was a blessed relief. As the taxi exited Ngurah Rai International Airport, he leaned forward, said “Badung Market” to the driver. The young man nodded, grinned, and, along with an armada of kids on motor scooters, promptly got stuck behind an enormous truck lumbering toward the Lombok ferry.

  After a harrowing twenty-minute ride during which they overtook the truck by dodging oncoming traffic, played chicken with a pair of teenagers on motorbikes, and almost ran over one of the thousands of feral dogs on the island, they arrived on Jl. Gajah Mada, just across the Badung River. The taxi slowed to a crawl until the seething crowds made further forward progress impossible. Arkadin paid for the driver to hang around until he was ready to be picked up, exited, and went into the tented market.

  He was immediately seized by a score of pungent odors—black shrimp paste, chilies, garlic, karupuk, cinnamon, lemongrass, pandan leaf, galangal, kencur, Salam leaf—and raised voices selling everything from fighting cocks, their plumage dyed pink and orange, to live piglets trussed and tied to bamboo poles for easy transport.

  As he passed a stall filled with widemouthed baskets of spices, the proprietor, an old woman with no upper lip, dug her claw-like hand into a vat of roots, held a palmful out to him.

  “Kencur,” she said. “Kencur very good today.”

  The kencur, Arkadin saw, looked something like ginger, only smaller. Repelled by both the root and its hideous seller, he waved away the kencur and pressed on.

  It was to one of the pig stalls he headed. Halfway there, he was stopped by an insistent tapping on his arm, like the dry scratch of a chicken’s foot. He turned to see a young woman holding a baby in her arms, her eyes beseeching while her brown fingers continued to tap his arm as if it was all they were good for. Ignoring her, he pushed on through the crowd. Aware that if he gave her anything, he’d be immediately besieged by a multitude of others.

  The middle pig dealer was a wide man, squat as a frog, with glittering black eyes, a moon face, and a pronounced limp. After Arkadin spoke the specified phrase in Indonesian, the man led him back through the ranks of trussed piglets, their bodies quivering, their terrified eyes staring straight ahead. In the shadows at the rear of the tent were two stacks of hogs, gutted, skinned, ready for the spit. From the belly cavity of one the man drew out a Remington 700P, which he tried to palm off on Arkadin, until Arkadin refused enough times for him to go on to Plan B, which turned out to be precisely what Arkadin wanted: a Parker Hale M85, a super-accurate bolt-action, heavy-barreled rifle. It had a guaranteed first-round-hit capability up to seventy-eight yards. To this, the vendor added a Schmidt & Bender Police Marksman II 4-16x50 rifle scope. The price for both seemed a bit high even after some vigorous bargaining took it down from the stratosphere, but this close to his prey he wasn’t in any mood to nitpick. Besides, he was getting top-of-the-line product all the way. He got the pig man to throw in a box of full-metal-jacket .30-caliber M118 cartridges and called it a success. He paid and the dealer broke down the rifle, boxed it and the scope into a hard-sided case.

  On the way out, he bought himself a bunch of milk bananas, and ate them slowly and methodically as the taxi made its painfully slow way out of Denpasar. Once on the highway, their speed increased dramatically. The lack of heavy traffic made it easier to get around the trucks that clogged the road.

  In Gianyar he saw an open-air market on his left and told the driver to pull over. Despite the bananas—or perhaps because of them—his stomach was growling for some real food. At the market, he ordered a plate of babi guling, roast suckling pig, and, served on a broad vivid green banana leaf, lawar, coconut and strips of spiced turtle. Its sauce of uncooked blood appealed to him particularly. He rent the succulent meat of the piglet between his teeth, swallowing quickly to take another bite.

  Because of the clamor of the market, he periodically checked his cell phone. The longer he waited, the greater his tension, but he needed to be patient because it would take some days for his man to be sure of Bourne’s comings and goings. Still, he was uncharacteristically on edge. He put it down to being this close to Bourne, but that only caused him more discomfort. There was something about Bourne that had gotten under his skin, that had become an itch he couldn’t scratch.

  In an effort to control himself, he turned his thoughts to the recent events that had led him here. Two weeks ago Bourne had thrown him off the side of the LNG tanker. It was a long way down into the Pacific, and he had prepared himself by turning his body into a spear, keeping it perfectly vertical so that when he hit the water he wouldn’t break his back or his neck. He went in feetfirst, the force of the fall pushing him so deep the world fell into twilight and he was gripped by a terrible chill that worked its way into his bones before he’d even begun his double-kick upward.

  By the time he broke the surface, the tanker was a blur, steaming toward the docks at Long Beach. Treading water, he swiveled his body around as a submarine captain might swivel his periscope to get the lay of the land, as it were. The vessel nearest to him was a fishing trawler, but until it was an emergency, he wanted no part of it. The captain would be bound to report rescuing a man overboard to the American Coast Guard, which was precisely what Arkadin didn’t want: Bourne was sure to check the records.

  He felt no panic, or even concern. He knew he wouldn’t drown. He was a powerful swimmer with great endurance, even after his exhausting hand-to-hand fight with Bourne aboard the tanker. The sky was blue, except where the brown haze hung over the shore, stretching inland to Los Angeles. The waves lifted him up and swept him into their valleys. He kicked to maintain his position. Now and again curious gulls wheeled overhead.

  After twenty minutes his patience was rewarded. A sixty-foot pleasure craft hove into view, moving at about four times the speed of the trawler. Soon it was near enough to him for him to begin waving. Almost immediately the boat altered course.

  Another fifteen minutes and he was on board, wrapped in two towels and a blanket because his core temperature had dropped below acceptable levels. His lips were blue and he was shivering. The owner, whose name was Manny, fed him some brandy and a chunk of Italian bread and cheese.

  “If you excuse me a minute, I’ll get on the horn with the Coast Guard, tell them I’ve picked you up. What’s your name?”

  “Willy,” Arkadin lied. “But I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Manny made an apologetic gesture with his meaty shoulders. He was of middle height, red-faced, balding. He was dressed casually but expensively. “Sorry, pal. Rules of the road.”

  “Wait, Manny, wait. It’s like this.” Arkadin was speaking English with a native’s Midwestern twang. His time in America had served him well on many fronts. “Are you married?”

  “Divorced. Twice.”

  “See there? I knew you’d understand. See, I’d chartered a boat to take my wife out for a nice day, maybe head over to Catalina for drinks. Anyway, how was I to know my girlfriend stowed away on board. I’d told her I was going fishing with the guys so she thought she’d surprise me.”

  “She did surprise you.”

  “Shit,” Arkadin said, “did she ever!” He finished off his brandy, shook his head. “Anyhoo, things got kinda wild. I mean all hell broke loose. You don’t know my wife, she can be a real queen bitch.”

  “I think I was married to her onc
e.” Manny sat back down. “So what did you do?”

  Arkadin shrugged. “What could I do? I jumped overboard.”

  Manny threw his head back and laughed. He slapped his thigh. “Goddammit! Willy, you sonovabitch!”

  “So you see why it’d be so much better if no one knows you picked me up.”

  “Sure, sure, I understand, but still…”

  “Manny, what’s your line of work, if I might ask?”

  “I own a company that imports and sells high-end computer chips.”

  “Well, now, isn’t that something?” Arkadin had said. “I think I might have a deal that could net both of us a boatload of money.”

  Arkadin, finishing the last of his lawar at the Gianyar market, laughed to himself. Manny got two hundred thousand dollars, and through one of his regular business shipments Arkadin received the Mexican drug lord Gustavo Moreno’s laptop in Los Angeles without either the FSB-2 or the Kazanskaya being any the wiser.

  He found a bed-and-breakfast—what the Balinese called a home stay—on the outskirts of Gianyar center. Before he settled down for the night he took out the rifle, put it together, loaded it, unloaded it, broke it down. He did this twelve times exactly. Then he pulled the mosquito netting closed, lay down on the bed, and stared unblinking at the ceiling.

  And there was Devra, pale, already a ghost, as he had found her in the artist’s apartment in Munich, shot by Semion Icoupov when her concentration was diverted by Bourne entering the room. Her eyes searched his, looking for something. If only he knew what.

  Even this evil demon of a man had his vanities: Since Devra’s death, he had convinced himself that she was the only woman he had loved or could have loved, because this fueled his desire for one thing: revenge. He had killed Icoupov, but Bourne was still alive. Not only had Bourne been complicit in Devra’s death, but he had also killed Mischa, Arkadin’s best friend.

  Now Bourne had given him a reason to live. His plan to take over the Black Legion—in order to complete his revenge against Icoupov and Sever—wasn’t enough, though his plans for it were large and far ranging, beyond anything either Icoupov or Sever could conceive. But he craved more: a specific target on which to vent his rage.