“I was with Andrei when the door burst open and one of the FSB guards advanced toward me. Andrei stepped between us, they grappled. My view was partially obscured, but I saw blood on Andrei’s face. Then Andrei crumpled to the floor and the guard…” Here she caused her voice to falter. She forced a tear or two from her eyes, kept her head held high, the better for Savasin to observe the tears rolling down her cheeks. Boris always said she should have been an actor. She cleared her throat, said in a clogged voice, “Well, you know the rest.”
“And the FSB guard—how did he die?”
“I think you can guess, First Minister. Andrei came to, pulled the man off me, and knifed him.”
“I see.” Timur Savasin moved so that he was no longer between her and the door. “Do you know why FSB guards were posted at your suite?”
“I assume to protect me.” It was crucial, she knew, to sound rational. No mention must be made of her hysterics, or her trying to get out of the suite to see Boris. “At that point, I knew something must be wrong.”
“Your guards were under the direct command of FSB Colonel Korsolov. Have you any idea why one of them would want to assault you?”
Sell it, Svetlana told herself sternly. Sell it by telling him what he wants to hear. “It was all so confusing.”
“I understand. Still if you could—”
“He was enraged. Well, his boss had just been murdered. He called me a Ukrainian whore, a filthy traitor, a fucking bitch, more.” She wanted him to see that she wanted to turn away, couldn’t, was trapped in the memory of the violence and humiliation of the assault. “Much more.”
Timur Savasin appeared unmoved, but perhaps that was only her take.
“And Andrei?” he asked. “Why was he with you?”
“He came to tell me what had happened to my husband.”
“Yes, Korsolov was otherwise engaged at the, ah, crime scene.” Savasin sighed. Of course, he knew why Avilov was there, but there was always the hope that the widow would say something to incriminate herself, to tell him that she was lying, that she was hiding something. Because he knew she must be hiding something. Ukrainians always did. “What an ordeal you’ve been put through. Again, I am most terribly sorry. Words cannot express…” His train of thought seemed to change midsentence. “Retribution for Andrei knifing one of his men…” His fist clenched. “Colonel Korsolov—though he has just been promoted by the Sovereign to general—must bear responsibility for the wickedness of retribution.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible, since you yourself have said that the Sovereign has promoted him. Is he also the new head of FSB?”
“He was the great General’s choice.” Savasin’s tone made clear his distaste. “I can’t fathom why he chose to personally oversee Korsolov’s rise through the ranks to become his adjutant. The man’s a dangerous psychopath.”
No wonder the Sovereign promoted him to fill the void, Svetlana thought. But on one subject she agreed with the first minister. “On that we agree,” she said. Now to hammer the last nail home, she thought. “First Minister, those FSB guards—General Korsolov’s people—are you aware that they were keeping me prisoner?”
“What do you mean?”
Of course it had been Andrei Avilov who had kept her prisoner while he had abused and assaulted her, but she knew revealing the truth would do her no damn good. “As I told you, I knew something was wrong. After Andrei told me what had happened… I told them I wanted to see my husband—they refused. They pulled weapons to make their intent clear. I was imprisoned on my own wedding night.”
“That is unacceptable behavior. It cannot—it will not—be tolerated.” Savasin popped another cigarette from a pack at his hip, held out a hand. “You have my word, Mrs. Karpova, that these incidents will not go uninvestigated. The culpable people will not go unindicted. Andrei’s death will not go unavenged.”
His smile was quite frightening, as if she were confronting a hungry wolf. “Now here is what I have set up for you. A nice long cruise. We’ll fly you to Amsterdam, where you will board the liner. A top suite has been reserved for you using your maiden name.”
“My maiden name? But why?”
“So you can get on with your life. Leave all this unpleasantness behind.” That smile again, sickening her. “It’s for your own good, trust me.” Timur Savasin lit his cigarette, spread his hands. “I mean, let’s face it, as Mrs. Karpova you’re damaged goods. Here at home, what man will look at you twice?”
She felt the heat sweep up her neck into her cheeks. Her heartbeat felt like a sledgehammer, and there was a red rage behind her eyes. It was all she could do not to leap at him, scratch his eyes out.
Already, she thought, her answering smile a rictus of pain and humiliation, the outrages perpetrated against me are multiplying exponentially. Is there in truth no justice?
—
Early morning and it was already broiling. Sara, in the midst of Cairo’s traffic chaos, realized she hadn’t been back in more than five years. Back then, she had arrived uninvited and unsanctioned, to take care of a bit of business that would otherwise have gone unattended because it was a minor matter to everyone at Mossad save her.
As she made her way through the exhaustingly clogged city she kept reminding herself of what would be awaiting her when she returned to Jerusalem. By now her father must know she was in Cairo, and why. Ivan Borz. She had history with him. In fact, Ivan Borz was the reason she had come to Cairo five years ago.
As the world’s largest arms dealer, he was well known to Mossad, deemed a major threat, and therefore targeted. After three frustrating years trying to find and terminate him, her father had had enough. He sent her to find Ivan Borz and eradicate him. She had been warned that, unlike the majority of Kidon missions, this one was likely to be long-term. She didn’t mind; she had nothing going in either Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. She was, in fact, bored—the first and most definitely the last time she’d feel any form of tedium.
In the pursuit of her objective she had met an Egyptian money broker. Over the course of a month and a half she gained his trust. He wasn’t a bad man, per se, but he was up to his neck in them. Sara should not have had a moment’s compunction in using him, nevertheless in one of those moments in time that change everything, a moment you wish you could take back, she had. By one of those astonishing strokes of luck that sometimes happen in the ever-fluid field, he was lending money to one of Borz’s two current clients. Which was how she gained knowledge of the site of the gathering between Borz and his clients to consummate an enormous arms deal. Shortly thereafter, the moneylender was found beheaded in his office. Whether it had been Borz or one of the men working for his now-deceased client, Sara never found out. Not that it mattered to the moneylender. Dead is dead. Her larger regret was that she had failed to kill Ivan Borz.
If Eli was disappointed in the outcome of her mission he never mentioned it. Instead, his sole message to her was that Cairo—anywhere in Egypt, for that matter—was off-limits to her until further notice.
Further notice had come to her in the form of the dossier Dov had left on her father’s desk. Five years on. And now here she was, back in Cairo. She exited her taxi, walked a mile and a half, turned into a shop selling hijabs. She bought one, wrapped her head, then went into the rear of the shop. An old man with a face the color of a betel nut and as creased as tree bark looked up from his work, smiled as she said, “How is your daughter, Uncle?” in perfect Arabic.
“You mean Sidra?”
“No. Ermina.”
His smile widened. “She is well and thriving.”
Finished with their recognition parole, the old man rose, beckoned her to follow him down a dimly lit corridor. He opened a locked door, led her into a tiny storeroom lined with shelves on which were piled fabrics he would fashion into stylish hijabs, along with ready-made ones.
Stronger than he appeared, he pulled on one set of shelves, which swung out on massive hinges, and they stepped into a deep alcove.
This space, too, contained shelves, but they were piled with weaponry of all kinds.
He stepped back, gestured for her to make her choices.
As always, Sara chose wisely.
26
As the sun rose Bourne slept in a lumpy bed in a groaning hotel in a seedy neighborhood, while the ancient air-conditioning unit gasped and struggled to mitigate the heat that was only just beginning.
He awoke, showered, and dressed, and was out the door, enduring the blinding glare of sunlight that accompanied the inchoate roar of the city. He had made three calls to the best jeweler shops in the city, hitting pay dirt on the last one.
Across town, he purchased a loupe and a beautiful set of jeweler’s tools in a soft velvet-lined case. He paid cash and walked out of the shop. He needed a quiet place—certainly not his hotel room—where he would be undisturbed.
Designed in the neoclassical style by Marcel Dourgnon, the dusky-rose-colored Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, at Tahrir Square, was the first purpose-built museum edifice in the world. In 1902, the thousands of artifact treasures, spanning five thousand years of Egyptian dynastic history, were transferred there from the palace of Ismail Pasha in Giza, where they had been displayed for more than a decade.
Bourne found his way to the museum’s library, an oasis of calm and virtually silent. The room was subtly perfumed by the scent of paper and bindings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and possessed an atmosphere he found appropriate for the work at hand. He settled himself at the far end of one of the long refectory tables, near one of the small, green-shaded lamps, and unwrapped his new jeweler’s case, then took out the fake Roman coin Boris had sent him. He peered at it through the jeweler’s loupe. In the pool of aqueous light cast upon the table, he examined the coin on end. There was the hairline join that circumnavigated the edge.
Choosing a .8 precision screwdriver, the smallest available, he placed the tip against the join, began to carefully apply pressure. At first nothing happened. He applied more pressure, this time from a slight angle. Still nothing. He was just wondering whether the hairline was a join at all, when he felt the tip of the implement sink inward. It was a tiny bit, but it might be enough. He twisted the screwdriver, the tip applied torque to the two sides of the join, and the coin opened like a clam.
Inside he found a piece of onionskin, tightly folded and refolded in upon itself. Taking up a tweezers from his kit, he slowly and carefully opened the bit of onionskin. Little by little, the text Boris had laboriously written revealed itself. Morning mists lifting off a graveyard.
—
“This town is just fucking weird,” Boris had said, as he and Bourne sat at an outdoor café in Jerusalem, drinking strong coffee and eating couscous.
A square of undyed muslin flapped overhead, keeping the scorching sunlight off them. The voices of hawkers were everywhere, and the passing parade of people moved with aggressive, purposeful strides or with the delicacy of deer. It was a clear day four years ago.
“I mean who’s going to tell you the truth—Mossad? An Arab? From which sect, from which faction within that sect? The trouble with Israel is that it’s controlled by the religious right. Those fanatics have the prime minister and Mossad in their pocket. Everybody falls in line; everybody does what they’re told.” He shrugged his big, meaty shoulders. “So what are you going to do? Everyone has an axe to grind, and believe me it’s an ancient one, buried so deep in their bones even Hercules couldn’t wrench it out.”
He dug into his couscous with an uncharacteristic fury. “Fuck all organized religion, that’s what I say. Think of what the world would be like without any religion.”
“We’d all be Communists,” Bourne said with a small laugh.
Boris saw no humor in that. “Communism is a dead end, my friend. Does it exist in Russia today? We learned our lesson. In China? They know better. Even Cuba is beginning to see what they’ve done to themselves. Okay, maybe North Korea, but a sadder, more deluded, more threadbare country never existed in the history of the world.”
Boris sat, hunched over, brooding for some minutes. Bourne had seen this mood before, and he was loathe to interrupt it.
“Speaking of the history of the world, I’ve been working on a private side project. Ever since cyber-spying hacks have become so sophisticated and supercomputers are being used to decode even the most sophisticated ciphers, I’ve been on a hunt for new ways to communicate securely. The FSB now uses typewriters for all internal memos and project reports. Nothing concerning ongoing projects is on our servers, otherwise GhostNet would be all over us.” He meant PLA Unit 61398, the Chinese Army’s hacking unit. “But how to communicate to agents in the field? That was the more vexing problem.”
He grunted as he called for more coffee. “I thought about this long and hard, then did some research on my own. What I came up with was this: Sumerian.”
He sat back as the coffee was set down in front of them. When they were alone again, he segued smoothly from his preface to his thesis. “Sumerian has many unique qualities, not the least of which is that it’s riddled with homophones. That, and the fact that there are two branches—the so-called male and female—makes it, in my opinion, a perfect cipher language. You can bunch the glyphs into groups, like looking at Morse code. And, of course there’s always the false group hidden somewhere in the message in the event a hostile figures out the cipher key.”
He lifted a forefinger as if testing the air for a change in the weather. “So now I will show you the glyphs while I pronounce them in Russian, and, naturally, you will memorize them as I draw them. Finally, we will each write a cipher for the other to decode. A game, if you will. Our kind of game. And like all our games, one with the possibility of deadly consequences. If you’re ready, we’ll begin.” And dipping the tip of a finger into his coffee, he started to draw cuneiform glyphs on the tabletop.
—
Twenty-four glyphs, each one representing not a letter, not a word, but a concept, arranged into four groups, written in Boris’s own hand, an artifact that seemed to have resurrected him from the dead. It was as if he were sitting across from Bourne now, in the dim antiquity of the museum library.
This was what Bourne was staring at now, written on the unfolded bit of onionskin. Boris had drawn the mixed male and female Sumerian symbols, just as he had four years ago on the café’s tabletop in Jerusalem. This time, however, they were in a different progression. Boris had left him a cipher.
Now Bourne had hard evidence that his friend had had an intimation of his death. Why else send a courier on an urgent mission to Frankfurt to find Bourne and deliver the coin? Boris could have waited until he saw Bourne at the wedding, but obviously he felt there was no time or he didn’t want to chance a direct handoff. He had diligently followed decades of security protocol.
Momentarily overcome with emotion, Bourne looked up at the dusty windows, where light filtered in, so weakly he could have been underwater. The shadows of palm fronds fluttered like sea anemones. Being aboard ship with Boris had always been difficult; the man was continually green about the gills. But instead of griping about it, he made jokes, poked fun at himself. He had a highly developed sense of humor, especially for a Russian. He was like a laughing child with his toys—especially his newest ones, bright and shiny and oh so valuable. For Boris, his secrets were his toys.
“Boris,” he whispered under his breath, “what are you trying to tell me?”
—
Sara knew she should rendezvous with Lev Bin, the agent in charge of the operation Mossad was mounting against Ivan Borz, but she didn’t, for two reasons. First, she didn’t like Bin, nor did she entirely trust him. Second, she could hardly believe he would welcome her with open arms.
Now there was a third, far more urgent reason: she had picked up a tail.
Not surprising given her father’s intel that she had been made at Sheremetyevo. She thought it safe to assume that the police had turned over the double murder under the B
olshoy Kamenny Bridge to the FSB. Finding her on the airport CCTV would connect her, at least in theory, to the murders. They’d want her blood, no question.
Walking at a normal pace, she melted into a group of high-end tourists, with their own bodyguards.
—
“This city is a fucking disgrace,” the newly minted Colonel Pankin said. He gestured at the uncontrolled shouting, honking, exhaust-pluming chaos that was Cairo. “It’s a goddamned hellhole of heathens.”
The newly minted General Korsolov raised an eyebrow. “Never having been out of the Federation can be a liability as well as a blessing.”
“The Middle East,” Pankin said with a whiff of disdain. “My field of expertise has always been Ukraine and the former Soviet States.”
“Was,” Korsolov said. “With your promotion comes new responsibilities. The Sovereign wants us both to broaden our horizons.”
“There she is,” Pankin said without pointing, and the two FSB officers moved off after the Kidon assassin they knew only as Rebeka.
“She’s with a tour group,” Korsolov said. “They’re heading for the Mahmoud Mokhtar Museum.”
“How d’you know about these things?” Pankin asked.
“Didn’t you read the detailed tour guide supplied to us?”
“I was catching up on sleep.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” Korsolov said with a growl of annoyance. “You were basking in the afterglow of your promotion, Colonel.” He picked up their pace, as they passed between the monumental square columns of the entrance. “Keep your xenophobia on a tight leash, your eye on the prize. Otherwise, your promotion will be short-lived.”