The Bourne Enigma

  “Nah,” said Scarface. “We need to do to him what he did to Foka.”

  “Worse,” said Lobeless. “Pain, pain, and more pain.”

  He came at Bourne, swinging his Kalashnikov butt first. The edge seemed to catch Bourne on the chin, because he went down to one knee, Lobeless grinning over him. Bourne’s fist drove into Lobeless’s crotch, then his fingers opened, grabbed, and pulled hard.

  Lobeless’s scream startled the birds out of the trees, their cries melding with his. Bourne wrenched the Kalashnikov out of his hand, swung the barrel hard into the midsection of the Beard, whose lips drew back from teeth sharpened to points. They snapped at Bourne’s cheek as he doubled over. He grabbed Bourne behind the neck, bringing Bourne’s face closer to the snapping jaws.

  Dropping the Kalashnikov, Bourne slammed his forehead against the Beard’s, heard his teeth clack together, then thrust the ends of his fingers up into the soft triangle beneath his jaw. The Beard’s eyes rolled up in his head as blood gushed out of him.

  Scarface, his disfigurement livid against his engorged face, shouted in rage as he squeezed off three rounds from his handgun. They struck the Beard’s torso, shaking it like a high wind will a tree. Bourne shoved the Beard into Scarface, disarmed him while Scarface was wrestling with the dead weight of his compatriot’s body.

  Scarface freed himself and lunged for Bourne, expecting him to resist. Instead, Bourne waited, patient as the sea, until Scarface was inside his defense. Scarface delivered the first blow—a rock-solid punch to Bourne’s ribs. Bourne immediately locked his extended wrist and pulled while swiveling his own torso to the left. Using Scarface’s momentum as a fulcrum, he dragged his assailant off balance. As Scarface stumbled forward, Bourne drove an elbow into his eye socket. Scarface went down, his face in the dust, and Bourne landed on his neck, knee first, cracking three cervical vertebrae, depriving Scarface’s brain of blood and oxygen.

  As he rose, he saw Irina running back toward the entrance of the warehouse where Mik was standing, watching the carnage unfold. He had a peculiar expression on his face—one Bourne had seen too often. It was the beatific serenity of the Muslim extremist martyr. Into his mind came the glimpse he’d seen of the Arabic arch, the prayer rugs aligned toward Mecca.

  “Irina!” he shouted as he ran toward her.

  But it was too late. Mik had his thumb to the keypad of his mobile phone, and even as the first bullets flew from the Makarov Irina had picked up when Lobeless went down, his thumb depressed the key.

  Bourne, too far away from Irina to rescue her, dove behind her Range Rover. An instant later, the explosion took out the warehouse and everyone in it, along with Mik and Irina.

  19

  Lieutenant Avilov lifted his head out of the protective bowl of his hands. The darkness was the only way to keep reality from frying his brain. “You deliberately kept the door ajar.”

  His beloved, lusted-after Dr. Nova cocked her head. “What did you say?”

  “In my hospital room. The bathroom door,” he said miserably. “You wanted me to watch you.”

  Svetlana stirred, moving from one leg to the other. “What a filthy pervert you are.”

  “You did, didn’t you?” He kept his eyes on Dr. Nova’s, though it cost him in both pain and anguish. “You knew I would take the chance. What do you want from me?”

  “You’re bleeding, Andrei,” the blindingly beautiful Dr. Nova observed.

  He put a hand up to his cheek. It came away bloody. “Something is wrong with your stitches.”

  “My stitches are impeccable,” Dr. Nova said icily. “As always.”

  “Then why am I bleeding?” He felt slow, stupid, his thoughts muddling along like icebergs.

  “You know why, Andrei.”

  And he did know why. The dragon venom had performed a miracle. It had transformed his blood into water, was casting it out of his body through the weakest link of his defense. He held his hand tight against his cheek, but the blood kept coming, seeping through the gaps between his fingers.

  Svetlana held up her right hand. To him it was beautiful because it was bloodless.

  “Do you see what I’ve done?” she cried. “I’ve bitten my nails down to the quick. Made them ugly as sin. Why? Because I had scraps of your skin embedded so deeply under them I had no choice.”

  Avilov stared at her dully. He was damned if he was going to apologize to this bitch. He was damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction—any satisfaction. “What’s to stop me from heading to the nearest hospital once I leave here, get an antivenom injection?”

  “Go on,” Svetlana said. “We won’t stop you.”

  Avilov made to stand up. His knees and calves shook so badly he was obliged to grab on to the back of the chair as if for dear life. When the trembling reached his thighs, he collapsed back into the chair.

  “So you see,” Dr. Nova said, “it’s too late. As you’ve already demonstrated yourself. You’ll die here in this room while Svetlana stares into your eyes.” She smiled wolfishly. “We’re clever things, us Russian women, despite what you think. When we target someone, we want to be assured our mission is accomplished.”

  “But surely you have the antivenom,” he said in a voice so shaky it appalled him. “What do you want? Name it.”

  “For many years, no one believed a Komodo dragon’s bite was venomous, even though they routinely took down and killed cape buffaloes,” Dr. Nova said with a pitiless voice. “There is no antivenom for a Komodo dragon bite.”

  He had no response to that—the last possible avenue closed. It was only then the ironic absurdity of his situation washed over Avilov like a tsunami. These two crypto-Muslims had trapped and infected him all because of what, a quick diddle and poke? If he had ever been inclined to believe in a supreme deity, this made it clear to him what a fantasy that was. And to top it off, the one woman who had made him feel anything turned out to be a traitor to him and to the Federation. What kind of god would fuck him up so utterly? But he could see now that the Soviets had it right: All was chaos. Best to grab whatever you could from the maelstrom before your time in this veil of tears was over.

  Now he knew what it must be like to be incarcerated in the bowels of the Lubyanka. Worse, to be straitjacketed in the prison’s depth. He’d seen men like that—confined like Russian matryoshka dolls within the Lubyanka’s terrifying walls, a ghastly hall of mirrors with no exit save one. In time, they’d all gone mad. He had no time.

  Dr. Nova leaned over, took his chin in her hand, jerked his head so that he was forced to look her in the eyes. Little did she know how much pleasure and anguish that caused him.

  “How do you feel, Andrei?”

  “If you kiss me,” he whispered, “all will be well.”

  She laughed, and he drew in the scent of her.

  He accepted his fate, just as he had accepted the possibility of early death when he had entered the Kremlin. It was a Russian thing, something these Muslim fanatics would never understand. He held one consolation close to him, like a flame in winter. As Dr. Nova had deceived him, so had Svetlana deceived General Karpov. Honey traps was the old-school term for how field agents trapped their enemies with tainted women, liaisons they could use to turn their enemies, manipulate them to doing their will. He never thought it would happen to him, but it had. Fucking women, he thought, darkness descending over him like a shroud, like an endless night. You love them only to find they’re nothing but trouble.

  “I feel,” he said, the words squeezed out of him, “distinctly unwell.”

  Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he keeled over.

  —

  Wind in the willows on the left bank of the Moskva caused a rustling, as of a swarm of insects. The sun, pale and haggard, struggled to provide heat, any heat at all. A boat horn hooted, as mournful as the cry of a little lost boy. This sound and the reverberations it set off was not uncommon in Moscow.

  “Mossad,” Colonel Korsolov said. “A Mossad field agent inf
iltrated into Moscow executed with a single bullet. Why?”

  “I have a theory,” Captain Pankin said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  The two men walked along the bank, heading toward the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, where it had all begun.

  “I think the double execution is related to General Karpov’s assassination.”

  “You think Lev Isaacs murdered Karpov and then was himself killed to erase any trace.”

  Pankin nodded. “That could be. Or whoever killed the general also killed these two men.”

  Korsolov stopped, hands dug deep in his pockets. “Explain.”

  Pankin bit his lower lip as he sought to order his thoughts into a theory. “It’s like this: Isaacs being in Moscow the same night the general was murdered cannot be a coincidence. Therefore, we have to surmise that the Mossad killed him. The murder was meticulously planned. Moreover, the killer knew not only that the general would be at the hotel last night, but where he would be within the hotel and at what time.”

  “Which argues for an accomplice inside.”

  “Precisely.”

  It was at that moment that Korsolov remembered where he had seen the man who had been murdered with Isaacs—the hotel! The papers on his body identified him as Belov, Veniamin Nazarovich Belov, a Jew. But that certainly wasn’t the name the man had used at the hotel. “Good Lord, Pankin, I think they were both Mossad agents.” And he told Pankin what he had just remembered.

  “Do we have any proof?”

  Korsolov snorted. “With Mossad there’s never any proof. One need only go on instinct.” He touched the side of his nose. “And I can smell them like a ratter.”

  “Two Mossad agents, one an inside man, and then shortly after the general is killed, they’re both executed. You said Belov was in the hotel. He could have murdered Karpov.”

  “Perhaps,” Korsolov said. “Or there’s a third Mossad agent we don’t yet know about. An assassin who killed all three.”

  The two men looked at one another, and said at the same time, “Kidon.”

  20

  You did your best, Jason.” The old man shook his head. “It’s not your fault.”

  Bourne sat on the old, blowsy sofa in Ivan Volkin’s homey apartment. Sun streamed in through the windows, setting up diagonal columns in which dust motes rose and fell, as if the sunlight was breathing. He was surrounded by souvenirs from all over the world, old photographs of family and friends, Volkin with a dizzying number of world figures. And then the photo of Irina as a child.

  “Even then she wasn’t with her parents,” Ivan said as he served them tea, “but sat alone, by herself, off to one side.” He lowered himself into an overstuffed chair, sighed. “I’m afraid she was born a wild child.” He plopped six sugar cubes into his glass but forgot to stir them in, perhaps the only outward sign of his distress. “She had secrets, Jason. The life she chose for herself was built on them. I understand that.” He sipped his tea, made a face, set the glass down in the center of its saucer. “But I never understood her. She was a complete enigma to me.” He shook his head again, possibly for the first time in his life bewildered. “Why she would get involved with a vosdushnik—well, that’s just beyond my comprehension.” He looked up at Bourne, his eyes beseeching. “What did she want, Jason? What was she seeking?”

  Bourne wrapped his hands around his glass, felt the heat from the tea stealing into his palms, and from there up his arms. The heat felt good. He’d been cold as ice on the drive away from the ruined warehouse to Ivan’s unprepossessing neighborhood.

  “I didn’t know her that long, Ivan, but if I had to guess I’d say that she was searching for a place for herself in the world.”

  “Why? She had everything she could possibly—”

  Bourne’s expression stopped him dead. “Imagine, Ivan, having you as a grandfather. Imagine feeling stifled by your power, all the things you did for her.”

  “Isn’t that what a grandfather does with his grandchild?”

  “Maybe all she wanted, Ivan, was to do those things for herself.”

  “But she didn’t have the wherewithal. She was young. Worse, she was female. In this world—”

  “Stop,” Bourne said. “Listen to yourself.” He leaned forward. “Ivan, Irina was obviously a woman who knew her own mind, who flouted convention. She must have worked hard to devise her own ways of getting what she wanted. And I can imagine she felt the need to be secretive about them to keep you at arm’s length, to keep you from continually stepping in, intervening in every decision she made.”

  Ivan sat back, seemed somehow shrunken by the chair or perhaps by his realization of what Irina had been and of what he had missed at every turn.

  He put a hand to his temple. “I failed her. Her death is my fault. She never would have gone near that vosdushnik.”

  “She would have found Mik no matter what you did or didn’t do, Ivan. Your exalted position has affected the way you see the world. You can’t manipulate everyone. You’re not God.”

  Ivan glared at Bourne for a moment, his fingers at his temple trembled. “No. No, you’re right, Jason.” He sighed. “The truth is power disconnects you from the real world. Great power even more so. I’ve had it for so long that I often forget what life must be like for the little people scurrying around their little lives.”

  Bourne could have made a comment here but he chose to keep his own counsel.

  “So.” Ivan picked up his glass, stared into the depths made murky by the semidissolved sugar cubes. “What was she doing with the vosdushnik?”

  “I couldn’t hazard a guess,” Bourne said. “They seemed on intimate terms, but then he tried to kill us both, so who knows?” He paused for a moment. “Unless it had something to do with what her father and brother were into.”

  Ivan was still staring into his tea, as if he wanted nothing more than to be a million miles away from his granddaughter’s death.

  “Ivan?”

  Volkin finally stirred. When he looked up his eyes were for a moment vacant, dead. “I’ve lost a son, a grandson, and now Irina. Where does it end?” Then his eyes snapped into focus. “No death happens in a vacuum, Jason. At least not in our world, eh? Like ripples spiraling out from a stone thrown into a lake I think now there are implications to Irina’s death.” He lapsed back into silence, his concentration as wavering as the dust motes trapped inside their shafts of sunlight.

  Bourne sensed this was a crucial moment, felt that if he pushed Ivan now the old man would only push back, and Bourne would get nothing more out of him. He finished his tea and rose.

  “I need to get back to Irina’s, clean up, change my clothes.”

  Ivan possibly didn’t hear his words but he registered that Bourne was about to leave. He raised a hand. “Hold on.” His finger pointed. “Sit back down a moment.”

  Bourne complied. He’d taken the right course.

  Ivan scrubbed his wrinkled forehead with the tips of his fingers. “Forgive me, Jason, I misspoke before. I know exactly why Irina went to Mik.”

  He placed his hands in his lap, stared at their veiny backs as if they were road maps that could get him to a different destination. “My son and grandson were up to their armpits in shit. Their under-the-table dealings were draining their legitimate business. They were becoming more and more desperate. When I tried to help them, when I discovered what they had gotten themselves into, I backed away. They were in so deep even my associates wouldn’t help them.”

  He looked up suddenly, his eyes enlarged, rheumy. Every year of his life seemed etched on his face. “You already know my position on the Muslims of the Federation. I despise all Chechens. You say some are good, hardworking men and woman. I say they’re all a scourge. They won’t be content until they have exacted the full measure of revenge for the two wars we waged on them.” He raised a hand. “Don’t try to dissuade me. I know I’m right.”

  “Mik and his associates were of interest to me only while they were alive,” Bourne sai
d. “I’m interested in only one Chechen: Ivan Borz. He’s assumed to be Chechen, but frankly I have my doubts. In any event, Mik moved Borz’s money around, but now that lead is in ashes.”

  “Perhaps not.” Ivan laced his fingers over his thin belly. He seemed to have come back from the misty graveyard he had retreated into when Bourne had given him the news of Irina’s death. “One thing I did find out—because my grandson told me before the FSB raid—is that the money Mik appropriated out of thin air for Borz was all headed to Cairo.”

  Where Boris had set up his operation on Borz, Bourne thought.

  “I need to get to Cairo yesterday,” Bourne said. “Can you get me there?”

  —

  Kidon. A Hebrew word for “bayonet.” Used to describe Mossad’s elite corps of infiltrators, wet work specialists, the best of the best when it came to combat and silent killing.

  Korsolov and Pankin were looking for a Kidon assassin—an exterminating angel. Their best bet was to study the CCTV tapes from Moscow airports and train stations, searching for a face that found a match in the FSB’s admittedly incomplete and slightly out-of-date database.

  Not that they were alone in the endeavor. The colonel had dragooned upward of a hundred people into the search, and their computer screens were all running hot as they sifted through the constant flow of people coming into the Federation through Moscow, two to a screen to ensure nothing was missed. He had considered sending a contingent to the nearest seaport but, as Pankin was quick to remind him, the Kidon relied on speed—in and out before anyone knew one of theirs had ever been there. That argued against transport by sea. Pankin would have liked to go back to Piotr and his mysterious contact to harness the facial recognition system the Chinese had hijacked from Interpol and the U.S. Feds, but he knew FSB’s Kidon database, incomplete though it was, was far better than that of either of the foreign agencies. Mossad was, after all, the Federation’s enemy. The FSB’s threat assessment directorate had cause to keep track of its agents as best it could.