The Bourne Enigma

  Bourne found the houseboat painted a Nile blue. As he crossed its wooden gangplank, the muezzin started his call to prayer. The rising and falling voice from the filigreed wrought-iron balcony high up on the soaring minaret several blocks north floated over the wide river, as if it were a bird diving for its supper.

  Bourne stood absolutely still before the wooden door. The sounds of the thick water lapping, the soft, fitful breeze on which was carried the supple voice of the muezzin—all these together brought Cairo rushing back to him as if he had never left.

  This was Feyd’s home. Bourne had met him before he broke away from Treadstone. Feyd was a Treadstone stringer, one of many the organization had maintained in its worldwide network. For as many years as Bourne could remember he had used Feyd, and Treadstone had, in turn, paid him well. His information was always impeccable and so accurate it inevitably breached the heart of the matter.

  Bourne remembered Feyd as a sturdy man, short of leg and arm, with a wrestler’s deep chest and shoulders. His face, quick to smile, seemed to have won a hard-fought victory over time, each line and crease a misfortune overcome, a face that was at once crumpled and triumphant.

  Bourne raised his hand and knocked on the door.

  It wasn’t long before he heard soft footfalls approaching, then an instant’s silence before the door was wrenched open, and the muzzle of a pistol was aimed at his chest.

  —

  A girl with huge coffee-colored eyes, black hair, and an oval face dark as stained teak peered out at him from the dim interior of Feyd’s houseboat. The handgun she held was steady as a rock. Her forefinger lay alongside the trigger guard but the safety was off. She knew what she was doing.

  “Did Feyd teach you how to use that?” Bourne asked.

  As she looked at him, her initial alarm faded. She cocked her head, her brows drew together, as did her lips into what might have been misinterpreted as a pout. Bourne, however, knew it was not.

  Recognition illuminated her face as from a lightning flash at night. “Uncle Samson!” She lowered the gun and flew into his arms, her body pressed against his. Samson had been his operational name when he had been in Cairo.

  “Amira.” He inhaled the scents of cinnamon and incense wreathing her like a halo. Then he held her at arm’s length. “You were a tiny thing the last time I saw you.”

  Her heavy eyelids fluttered. “Not so tiny, Uncle Samson.” She twitched her narrow shoulders. “But, yes, I suppose I’ve grown taller.”

  “Grown in every way.”

  “I was eleven the last time you saw me. I’m sixteen now—seventeen in five months.”

  “Don’t push it. Time goes too fast.” He smiled. “May I come in?”

  “Of course.” She stepped aside, pulled him over the threshold. “What an idiot I am!”

  “I’ve come to see your father. Where is Feyd? Is he home?”

  Her expression seemed uncertain, then darkened as she turned from leading him into the living room. “My father was killed two weeks ago.”

  “Amira, I’m so sorry.” He stepped toward her, embraced her for a moment before stepping back. “And you’ve been alone since then?”

  She nodded, for the moment mute.

  “Amira I need to ask. Was it an accident or—?”

  “Murdered,” Amira said.

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  She nodded, ringlets bouncing shadows across her cheeks. “But first we must drink and eat, or what a poor host am I?” She made a sound deep in her throat, which could be interpreted either as joy or sorrow, or both. “What, then, would my mother have thought of me, had she been here?”

  She slipped silently into the open kitchen, began preparing food. Behind him, Bourne heard the fairy tinkling of myriad wind chimes made of seashells, an ethereal accompaniment to the muezzin’s controlled wail.

  All around Bourne were photos of Amira’s mother and father, haphazardly placed on shelves, bookcases, side tables, as if often moved according to Amira’s mood or where she was in the room so that some were always in her view. The photos were of the parents alone; there were none of them together.

  The photos, the cheap mementos crowded in around them, spoke of a life well lived, of marriage, of family, of time passing and remembered in all its marvelous complexity.

  Bourne had none of this. Try as he might, he could not remember his parents, where he had been born and raised, whether or not he had siblings. All of this reminded him that he had no idea who he was or where he had come from. It brought home to him again that he had nothing of his own. He was an unmoored creature on a sea without any sight of land, drifting with the current or fighting against it, in the end it didn’t matter. And yet in his dreams he kept being drawn back to the moment off the coast of Marseilles. He could hear the shot, a crack of thunder splitting the low sky open, but he couldn’t feel the bullet strike his body. Then the freezing water of the Mediterranean, inky-black, oily. Blackness, blankness. Pulled from the sea by fishermen, part of the early morning’s catch. Their doctor had saved his life, but his memory had died, leaving a great void yearning to be filled.

  This great void inside him was why Sara had become so important to him. Her life, her father, she herself loomed large in his present as well as in his recent past, which meant his entire life. It was why the death of Boris had hit him so hard. When you take a penny from a pauper, what has he left?

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Amira said as she carried two plates of stew to the table on the balcony. “Let’s eat outside where we’ll catch a river breeze.” She inclined her head toward a shallow bowl. “Would you bring the pita?”

  She lit a string of fairy lights. The wind chimes turned and sang in counterpoint to the muezzin’s voice.

  When they were seated, she said, “You taught me that: ‘A penny for your thoughts.’” She laughed. “At the time, I didn’t even know what a penny was.” Her expression grew solemn. “But, Uncle Samson, you looked so lost in thought.”

  Bourne began to eat, breaking off a section of pita, shoveling up some stew onto it using only his right hand. “I lost a good friend yesterday,” he said, once again pushing down his anguish. “And now I find that Feyd is dead.”

  Amira rose, went back inside, crossed to the refrigerator, and returned with two frosty bottles of beer. For a time, they drank and ate in companionable silence broken only by the soft lap of the water, the cry of a bird. Some raucous music played, then abruptly stopped. The muezzin’s call to prayer had ended.

  “But it seemed to me more, as if you were lost in the past,” Amira said, engaging him with her coffee-colored eyes.

  “I have no past,” Bourne said, “to speak of.”

  “That can’t be true. I know you for—”

  “I mean before that. I have no memory of where I was born, who my parents were, if I have sisters or brothers. But you have a brother, I recall.”

  She nodded. “El-Amir, yes. He is in the West. You never met him. He’s so smart, so clever. He finished his A-levels, then went on to the London School of Visual Arts, where he met and married an heiress, and was installed at a high-level position at CloudNet satellite TV, one of his father-in-law’s media companies.”

  “So you must have seen him recently.”

  With a sad smile Amira shook her head. “My father used to say that we Egyptians must look to the future, always. ‘The future is our salvation, my children,’ he would say, always with a kindly smile. ‘Honor the past, yes. But for us to dwell on the past brings only sadness and more loss than we can bear.’”

  “So he left you here on your own.”

  “El-Amir is a big shot now.” Tears sparkled at the corners of her eyes, but did not spill over. “Apart from the occasional postcard and the money he sends us I don’t hear from my brother.”

  “Amira—”

  “It’s no big deal. I still love him. El-Amir is all that’s left of my family. And he looks after me in his own way. He’s very generous.”
She continued to look at him, studying his face as if she were an artist about to sketch out an idea on a fresh canvas. “I don’t begrudge him leaving.” Her mouth half open, she seemed on the verge of continuing, then apparently thought better of it.

  He pushed his plate aside. “Tell me what happened to your father.”

  Amira sighed, looked out over the Nile, where the moon’s reflection rippled and coalesced in an age-old rhythm. “After Treadstone was shut down he fell on hard times. Everyone associated with the organization was discredited. He tried to talk to representatives of the U.S. government, but got nowhere. He was, as he said, radioactive.

  “For a while, he did odd jobs, whatever he could get, nothing much really, but enough for us to make ends meet. Then about a year ago he began to work as a guide for one of the big tourist hotels. He expected great things, but, you know, after the Arab Spring almost no tourists come to Egypt anymore. He was left with boring businessmen, always with one foot out the door, waiting to be contacted.” She shrugged. “One day his past caught up with him. I suppose he knew it would happen sooner rather than later.” Her expression grew pensive. “I think now he was marking time, waiting for it to happen. Maybe that’s why he took the job—so he would be more visible, easier to contact.”

  “Who contacted him? CIA? Typhon?”

  “Neither.”

  A boat drifted into view, lying low in the water. The sound of its diesel engine came to them like the sputter of an old man clearing his throat.

  She turned to look at him. “It was the Russians.”

  A tiny chill slithered down Bourne’s spine. The boat, clearer now across the water, looked like a tourist barge. Dual sphinxes rose from the curving prow. It was almost empty.

  “Who?” he said. “Who was it who contacted him?”

  “He said he was a general in the FSB.” Amira had been fiddling with the last piece of pita. Now she set it down on her plate. “His name was Karpov. Boris Karpov.”

  23

  The moon silvered the edges of the Pyramids of Giza, which otherwise glowed a pale melon in the powerful uplights buried in the sand. Ivan Borz, sitting with his legs up, ankles crossed on the top of the wrought-iron balcony railing of his residence in Giza, peered across the desert at the immense Pharaonic necropolis that had cost so many their lives. “And for what?” he wondered aloud. “The ancient Egyptians had it all wrong.”

  He looked from the Pyramids to the five-sided box sitting on the chair next to him. The top was off, the face of the head turned toward him. The American head. So beautifully preserved.

  He drew his computer onto his lap, opened it, and displayed one TV show after another to the head. “You see this shit?” He pointed to the screen on which grotesquely built men and women were vying for control of something—different things on the different shows that flickered across the screen—but always control. “These must be familiar to you, yes? European and American reality shows. This is the soul-rotting drivel we must protect our people from. There are no Muslim values here—no values whatsoever, except greed, avarice, and betrayal.”

  With an angry gesture, he closed the laptop, put it away. He stared down at the head for a moment. Then he smiled. “You know,” he said, “you are my only friend in this godforsaken wilderness, the only one I can talk to. The only one I trust.” He sighed deeply. “Being Muslim, being a student of history, I know how to talk to the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor shits who have nothing, no prospects ever to be anything. But you already know this, don’t you? You know everything that’s in my head, every thought, every memory. No crevice too deep.” He laughed. “But I digress. Where was I? Ah, yes! I give them martyrdom. After I’m through with them, that’s all they long for.” His smile, though widening, had turned rueful. “But, let’s face it, who wants to be stuck here in Cairo or in Syria or Iraq recruiting? Not you. Not I. But for the amount of money I’m being paid, for the assurance of being left alone by the FSB to do whatever the fuck I want, it’s worth it.” He tousled the black hair. “Don’t you think?” He laughed. “Of course you do.”

  He pulled out a Cuban cigar from a secret inner pocket, bit off the end, lit it slowly with a solid silver lighter, took his first few puffs. “Have patience, my friend. The one who murdered you will pay, this I have sworn. You will be revenged.”

  Footfalls came to him, soft and delicate as a woman leaving her bath. “Keep your own counsel now,” Borz whispered to the head. “We do not want this one to know our business. I recruited him in a dazzling display of Muslim activism, the twisting of the Qur’an that suits our aims. He is a believer, my friend. I am not. But soft now. He comes.”

  But it was no woman who came up behind him now, breathing softly as a lover.

  “El-Amir,” he said without turning around. “Punctual as usual.”

  “I smelled the smoke from a distance,” the young man said, stepping around to face his boss.

  “In this godforsaken shithole one must take one’s pleasures, tiny though they may be.”

  El-Amir was clothed in an outfit straight from the best tailors in London. He had the dirty-blond hair and light eyes that set the British upper classes and the polo masters off from everyone else. On close inspection, however, it was possible to discern that his hair was dyed, that he wore blue contact lenses. His upper-class British accent might have been fake, as well, but none save a linguist could tell. He carried a slim, crocodile-skin laptop case that, like the powerful computer inside, had been handmade expressly for him.

  Ivan Borz produced another cigar, held it up. “Here.” He flicked open the lighter as El-Amir took the cigar from him, rolled it between his fingers, inhaled its rich aroma. “I’ll light it for you with the present you gave me.”

  When the second Cuban was lit, El-Amir took a seat on the other side of the boxed head. He was tall and lanky. His face seemed to belong to a long-dead age. Three hundred years ago, he might have been mistaken for a crafty Jesuit, save for his lens-clad eyes, which were like stones weirdly glimmering underwater.

  “How long are you going to keep that thing?”

  “For as long as I can converse with it.”

  El-Amir shook his head. “You’re bonkers.”

  Borz leapt up, was at El Amir’s throat all within the space of a single heartbeat. “Shut your fucking mouth.” Eye to eye, breath mingled, the two men stared at each other, each thinking their own thoughts. All at once, Borz stood back, stared down at El-Amir. “Speak not about things of which you are ignorant.”

  El-Amir swallowed hard, held his hands up, palms outward in a gesture of calm and peace. “Apologies. I didn’t—”

  “I saw the video, by the way.” Borz retook his seat. His demeanor serene, as if nothing untoward had happened. “Magnificent production values.”

  El-Amir nodded, not knowing whether or not to smile. “That’s what you get when you hire professionals.” Leaning over, he slipped the laptop out of its case, fired it up. He inserted a flash drive into one of the USB slots, navigated to the files therein.

  Up popped one video after another—beautifully lit, exquisitely framed, even though they were obviously shot with a handheld camera. The camera’s movement added to the urgency of the images of black-clad Islamics taking over one Syrian town after another. Jump-cut to a map of the area, showing how far the movement had spread, how close they now were to the Turkish border.

  “Here’s our latest, and it’s killer.” He laughed. “Literally.” He focused the screen on a video of terror chieftains sitting around a campfire in what might have been a desert, except for the fact that bombed-out buildings like the cracked, rotten teeth of a wino formed the dramatic backdrop.

  There was no talk, no subtitles. Instead, the men passed around a series of weapons: submachine guns, mortars, bazookas, flamethrowers, antitank missiles. The metallic sounds of the war matériel seemed somehow heightened, to come at the viewer like shots. They were passed from left to right as one reads the Qur’an. As ea
ch weapon was handed to the last man on the left, he gave it to a female, fully clothed in black from head to foot. Only her eyes were visible, gleaming, lambent from the firelight. The camera zoomed in slowly, lovingly on her eyes.

  El-Amir hit the Pause button. “Look at those eyes,” he said admiringly. “I spent five days finding this young woman. Those eyes are huge, dark, exotic, and, most of all, expressive. These are eyes the viewer falls in love with. The way this section is framed you can’t help it. Now the viewer, in thinking ‘How beautiful!’ has become complicit in the video. He’s drawn in despite himself. In such beauty the camera finds power.”

  El-Amir hit the Play button and the image unfroze. The camera moved back to show the upper half of the young woman. She brought each weapon toward the camera like a religious relic, offering it up to the viewer. In extreme close-up one could see that the weapons were American made. The camera raked over their serial numbers in pitiless slow motion, so there could be no doubt that the Islamic terrorists were using American weapons that had been “liberated” from the Syrian military.

  Now the fire-lit group broke up, the camera followed them closely as they approached a towering cache of weapons and ammunition, still in their original shipping crates. Jump-cut to the terrorists using the weapons to kill everyone who stood in their way as they moved through the last Syrian town before the border to Turkey.

  The screen went black, but the sounds of weapons fire, the shouts and screams of the dead and dying, persisted, heightened not by increased volume but by the lack of visual. At last, one line in Arabic appeared, and, below it, the English translation: THANK YOU, AMERICA! WE WILL NOT FORGET YOU!