She started with the texts, which began with an overview of his mission. Right away she noticed something odd—the text was on plain sheets, not, as she would have expected, on FSB electronic docs. That was when she realized that Boris was running a rogue mission, outside the boundaries of FSB.
She read at a faster and faster clip, and, then, as she absorbed the monstrousness of what the Sovereign had put in play in all its Machiavellian deception, she felt her chest constrict, her stomach roil, and she pressed a napkin to her mouth to keep from vomiting.
But it was when she read past the overview, when she began to learn the true nature of Boris’s black mission, that at long last the floodgates she had been holding in check since she had learned of his death let go. Tears rolled down her cheeks, she began to sob so deeply, so profoundly she was certain her heart must split asunder. A chill crept into her, seeping down into her very marrow, as it had when her father, looming big as God, rageful as an enemy, had punished her as a child. She began to shiver and shake. She could not stop crying. Her loss seemed monumental, overwhelming. She was inconsolable. Her world had been not only turned upside down but inside out. Everything she had known to be true was a lie. She had misjudged Boris’s intentions entirely, and now even the thought of the plot she had almost mounted with him as an unknowing dupe made her want to plunge a knife into her soul, to carve out the blackness that must surely lie rotting at its core.
—
Zmeya did not yet know that his twin sister, Irina, was dead. When the call came in from Igor Malachev, he had, in fact, thought it was his sister calling. Not having bothered to look at his mobile’s screen, he was surprised it was not Irina.
“Zmeya,” Malachev said.
Only First Minister Savasin’s people called him Serpent. It was their bit of skullduggery, their oh-so-secret conceit. Every time he heard the word he laughed inside.
“We have a commission for you.”
A commission, like he was a traveling salesman. Well, he reflected, in a way he was—he sold death, a commodity no one wanted and everyone got, sooner or later. With him, it was always sooner.
“Sending now,” Igor Malachev said.
He took the mobile away from his ear, put it on speaker, then clicked on the incoming email, which was textless. Instead it contained a .jpg photo file of a very beautiful young woman.
“This is Rebeka,” Malachev said. “Kidon agent, currently in Cairo.”
“Dossier?”
“She’s Kidon, Zmeya. There is no file.” Malachev took a breath. “Where are you?”
“Close enough.” Then he told his interlocutor his terms and, because he had pissed him off with his tone, he doubled his price. The swift intake of breath mollified him somewhat.
“It will be wired to your account.”
“One half immediately.”
“Of course.” Malachev cleared his throat. “The commission needs to be executed as soon as—”
“It will be executed in the time it takes, not a moment before or after.” He rang off, then, annoyed all over again that this idiot had dared to give him a deadline. Didn’t he know Zmeya’s commissions were custom designed, depending on the target? Meticulous attention to detail was one of the many reasons he had never failed to execute a commission.
The day was still burning hot, dusty and dry. As he drove, he listened to a CD of The Doors, Jim Morrison singing “This is the end, my beautiful friend. This is the end.”
He rode the highway west, toward Cairo, into the pure white glare of sunlight.
He missed Irina with all his heart and his soul. Like many twins he sensed the place inside him she inhabited, and it was now empty. This filled him with a rage beyond anything he had ever known. He had not heard from her, which was unusual, not to say unprecedented. They spoke at least once every day, unless, by prearrangement, they could not—when either of them was traveling, for instance. No such prearrangement had been made. He had no sure knowledge of her death, but that place inside him she inhabited no longer sang to her particular vibration. There was nothing. Nada. The Dead Sea, washed with the salt of unshed tears and nothing else.
He took out a little square wrapped in a branded bubble-gum wrapper, popped it in his mouth, let it dissolve. Then he counted backward from one hundred. By the time he got into the thirties the colors around him had begun to luminesce. The huge white sun was throbbing in time with his pulse. Jim Morrison’s voice seemed suspended in the air, each word flitting across the windscreen as if written in Arabic script. He laughed out loud at the sight, wondered what Morrison would have made of it. Probably he would have loved it; certainly he would have understood how high the Serpent was, how far down the rabbit hole his homemade formula of lysergide had taken him. Doubtless Morrison would have gladly shared some with him. He would have understood it as a drug of his time. No one was dropping acid anymore. These days, it was heroin, coke, and X—or some near-lethal combo of cough medicine, nutmeg, drain cleaner, and God knew what else that street punks were always coming up with. Or the cheap-to-make Krokodil, the faddish, flesh-eating synthetic being fed to desperate Russian heroin addicts.
No, when it came to recreational drugs, the Serpent was strictly old-school, and making his own kept him safe. Safe to enable the vivid and meaningful flashbacks to his first real encounters with Irina. The end of childhood, the beginning of lust, obsession, wild, crazy love, and codependency. He was not so self-deluded that he could ignore that last, for he and his twin were certainly conjoined emotionally, if not physically. It was the acid that had made them so irrevocably crazy—he was certain of it. They had discovered this kernel of craziness during the third electrifying year of their illicit meetings in the woodshed, where he had one fateful day come upon Irina in the throes of self-ecstasy, where she had turned to him slyly and, as if she had known he had been watching all along, beckoned him on. The first time her lips closed around his almost painful erection remained the sweetest, most profound moment in his life.
Thereafter, they met for their trysts every day at dawn and dusk. He longed for more—as he imagined she did—but their fear of being found out stayed them. But this same fear steeped their lust for each other in the sweet pain of illicit hours.
They were thirteen when they started their sexual experimentation with each other. Three years later, Aleksandr had gotten his hands on a sheet of acid tabs, which launched their adventures into the furthest reaches of experimentation. It was the acid firing their systems during lovemaking that locked them together in a world of psychedelic color and exquisite, mind-altering sex, drawn out in tantric ecstasy for what seemed days on end. Unless it was all a fever dream, all a fantasy, all a product of their overactive libidos. Who could tell?
The drive into the heart of Cairo took just over three hours, though to the Serpent, wrapped in the arms of his lysergic flashback, time had ceased to exist. The long desert dusk was about to fall as he pulled into a filling station ten blocks from the apartment he maintained in the city. He got out of the car, felt the deep and abiding throb of Cairo as if it were his own heart. If Irina was gone, then where was Bourne—Bourne with the Roman coin that had been sent from Boris Karpov? The moment Irina had been told that General Karpov was running an off-the-books operation covert from both the FSB and the Kremlin, she knew that if they discovered what it was they would have power in the palms of their hands, power to use against everyone else—absolutely everyone.
The coin contained some kind of code that only Karpov’s best friend, Jason Bourne, could decipher. The coin’s secret was the lynchpin to what he and Irina were planning; without knowledge of Karpov’s plan they knew they were dead in the water. Now, if Irina truly was gone, he would have to shoulder all of the load. Meanwhile, the world spun on, uncaring, indifferent, deeply troubled.
While his tank was filling with petrol, he breathed Cairo deeply into his lungs. He could taste it as well as scent it, his mind filled with memories of times here, with and without Irina. But
now to work. He smiled as, feature by feature, he conjured Rebeka’s face from the photo on his mobile. She was here; she was close.
“This is the end, my only friend. The end.”
30
Twilight was in the city’s grasp when Bourne led Sara back to his hotel room. They sat for a time, steeped in a long, trembling silence, side by side, their eyes filled with the sight of each other. They did not touch. For the moment what was happening was enough. It had been some time since they had seen each other, let alone been together in private. Bourne had stripped off his shirt, spattered with bat blood, but hadn’t replaced it.
Outside, the city roared and groaned, Arabic voices rising and falling in a musical downpour. There was something comforting in the small conversations, the sharp arguments, the punctuation of brief laughter—the common language of commerce and friendship that for them normalized what had been a decidedly abnormal afternoon.
Decompressing from kneeling at the brink of death was no easy thing, no matter how long it had been a part of your life. Being together now, united in those moments of fear and adrenaline, when your wits, your strength, your cunning, and courage all were entwined, working at peak levels, made the aftermath sweet, rather than hollowed-out.
Bourne took out the gold star, blunted on one point, handed it to her.
Sara looked at him as she enclosed her beloved star in her fist. “Where did you find this?”
“Lodged inside the fatal wound across Boris Karpov’s throat.”
“I know he was your friend,” she said. “I don’t want to lie and say I’m sorry.”
This was where her adamantine hardness came out. In many ways, she was tougher than her father, perhaps because she had had to be.
“In his day General Karpov ordered many Kidon killed, some of them close to me.”
“And your father ordered many of his men killed, some of them close to him.”
Now real sadness crept into her face. “This conversation has veered into the wrong lane.”
Bourne nodded. He looked at her, said gently, “What was your star doing in Boris’s throat, Sara?”
Her face clouded over. “You don’t think I killed him.”
“I already went through that possibility with your father. I think someone wanted the FSB to think you were responsible. Who knew you were in Moscow?”
“My father; Amir Ophir, head of Metsada; Dov Liron, my direct boss; and the people in the Scrivener Directorate who forged my legend.”
“No one else?”
She shook her head.
Bourne considered this a moment. “How did you lose the star?”
“I don’t really know.” Sara frowned. “But, thinking back on my time in Moscow, maybe I do. A man bumped into me on the street. He had packages in his arms. The contents fell all over and I helped him pick them up. It was some time after that when I realized it was gone.”
“Describe him.”
“Slim, handsome, in his late thirties or early forties, I would say. Approximately six feet, one hundred and eighty pounds or so.”
“Face.”
“Let’s see.” Sara ran the tip of her tongue around her partly open lips. “Dark, curly hair, long nose—an Arab nose, maybe. Sunken cheeks. An ascetic look—like a priest—a man who, at the very least, ate little and slept less.”
“Speech?”
“He spoke to me in Russian, but that wasn’t his native tongue. Beyond that I can’t say.”
“Ethnic background?”
“Burnished skin the color of tea with a bit of milk in it—an Arab, but not a Bedouin, and surely not Indian or Pakistani. A Turk, then, or an Armenian. Maybe Eastern European—there’s a lot of Ottoman Empire blood still there.”
“Chechen?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Why?”
He told her about Ivan Borz being in Moscow the same time she was.
For a long time she said nothing, but her features had whitened, as if she were under extreme duress.
Concerned, Bourne said, “What is it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.” But her voice came out strange, strangled. She looked at him. “You don’t know for sure the man I ran into was Borz.”
“Consider the chain of events. Borz was in Moscow when we were. A man bumps into you. Shortly thereafter you realize your Star of David is missing. You can’t possibly think his bumping into you was a coincidence?”
“But we don’t know what he really looks like, or even if Ivan Borz is his real name. He may only be posing as a Chechen.”
“Whatever he is or isn’t, Sara, one thing’s clear. He knows who you are. He bumped into you on purpose, stole your Star of David to plant on Boris after he’d garroted him.”
Silence fell like a deposit of ash, blown in through the window. A vendor called, over and over, like a dog barking. Vehicles slid past on the streets below.
At length, Sara said, “You haven’t touched me.”
Bourne slipped his hand into hers. He felt the soft burr of the star she clutched in the center of her palm.
She smiled sadly. “I’m not sure that’s what I meant.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Your obsession with Borz.”
“You know the reasons.”
“Of course I do. It’s just that…” She shook her head. “We’re so much alike, Jason. I see me in you, I see how I would react—how I have reacted—when someone close to me dies.”
“I’m closer to finding Borz than ever before,” Bourne said. “I have work to do.”
She took her free hand, ran it through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead. “It’s grown so long.”
“I haven’t had time—”
“But, you see, that’s my point. You haven’t given yourself time.” Her fingers curled, grabbed his hair, pulled gently. “To remember Boris, to think about your time together, what great friends you two were. To acknowledge the terrible loss. We let so few people into our lives—really in, I mean. Boris was one of those few, wasn’t he, Jason?”
“He was,” Bourne acknowledged with a suddenly heavy heart.
“Then you must make time to mourn him.”
“I can’t. Where Borz is concerned there is no time.”
“No, my sweet. Where you’re concerned there is no time.” She cocked her head. “What, do you think mourning your loss is a sign of weakness?”
Bourne studied her for a moment. “When I thought you were dead, I was on the verge of giving up—this work, this shadow world I live in—everything. Your father convinced me otherwise. He sent me on a mission to avenge your supposed death.”
“He saved you, in other words.”
“In a manner of speaking. He reawakened my appetite for revenge. He brought me back from the brink of despair.”
“And now,” she said, pulling him to her with her hand in his hair, “it’s high time I did the same.”
When their lips met and Bourne felt hers open under his, tasted her, an alchemical reaction delivered him from what seemed to him so many days wandering in the desert of his rage and sorrow at Boris’s demise. The tension that had gripped him from the moment he had seen Boris lying in a pool of his own blood, black in the FSB floodlights, as if oil ran through his veins and arteries instead of blood. Like a snake sheds its old skin in a ritual of rebirth, Sara’s hands and mouth and naked body on him served to lift him up into yet another resurrection—the latest of so many in his life he had lost count. And yet this one seemed the most dramatic, the most profound, plumbing the deepest darkness from which he had emerged, saved from the bullet wound and the squally depths of the Mediterranean.
And when he entered her, when he heard the groan pulled out of her own depths, his head came down, his face pressed into the fragrant hollow of her shoulder. Hot tears filled that hollow to overflowing as his rage and sorrow broke like a tidal wave that could no longer be held back. There had been no one in his life like Boris, no man he admired so much, trusted im
plicitly and explicitly, a man who knew him, who saw through the unknown core that even he, Bourne, could not penetrate. Boris had been like an older brother—no, more than that, like the father Bourne could not recall no matter how hard he tried. He had been family, and now he was no more. Gone, but as Sara so rightly pointed out, not forgotten. Not forgotten at all.
In the aftermath of their hectic, bittersweet lovemaking, Sara held him, caressed him, kissed him tenderly, wordlessly, until, at last, his own tenderness was coaxed to the surface, and they made love again, slowly this time, lovingly, truthfully, washed in the purifying white-water rapids of dreams. And in so doing he fell into a state of grace: a kind of solace stole over him, an emotion with which he was unfamiliar, and yet, nevertheless, he instantly understood and for which he was profoundly grateful.
31
The government response to the disturbance outside the aquarium culminating in the death of a foreign national would have been quicker and, doubtless, more vigorous had there not been a serious explosion outside the Egyptian Foreign Ministry at more or less the same time. A suicide bomber had blown himself up, killing two police guards and a junior minister on his way back from a meeting, and injuring a handful of army personnel. The generals who ran Egypt were far more concerned with their own dead and wounded than about the death of a foreign national. And when, finally, it was discovered that he was both Russian and, most probably, a spy, what investigation had been contemplated turned into a diplomatic accusation delivered forthwith to the Russian ambassador.
The athletic young man Bourne had met in the Meisterstuck Hotel in Frankfurt watched the aftermath of the bombing from the sidelines. Hands in pockets, he whistled a little fairy tale tune as if he were trying to soothe a crying infant. First Minister Savasin and silovik Malachev knew him as Zmeya. In truth Zmeya did not exist, but in his world truth did not exist, so never mind.
As the Serpent watched the military cleanup crews his sat phone buzzed. Melting back through the crowd, and then away where there was marginally less ambient noise, he thumbed the phone on, put it to his ear.