The Bourne Enigma

  Cooling meant air—a lot of it. And the cooling system had to be vented somewhere close so that the heat would not build up and destroy the components.

  And there it was. He pulled off the grate, camouflaged to look like the surrounding rock wall.

  “Big enough for a human body,” Sara said. “Where does it lead?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Bourne crawled inside, Sara following. The shaft, which was very cold indeed, led them horizontally for only twenty yards or so, before tilting upward so steeply they were obliged to press their knees and the outsides of their shoes against the freezing metal sides. This was particularly difficult for Sara, since she was wearing a sundress and sandals, which afforded her minimal protection in this arctic environment. In fact, she found the sandals a hindrance, and shook them off. They fell down behind her, two small plops like birds hitting a window.

  It quickly got worse: the shaft turned vertical. Now they used elbows as well as knees and feet. Sara shivered. Even that involuntary motion sent shards of pain through her side, but the ties that bound her also saved her, and she thought it a fitting legacy of First Minister Savasin’s despicable life, one he’d hate. And, in fact, it was his inimical hatred that helped her keep going when the agony swept over her, threatening to make her lose her grip. How easy, she thought, to just let go, to let the darkness come rushing up to greet her, to fall into its open arms and rest there for a while before dropping into sleep.

  As if psychically bonded to her, Bourne’s voice broke apart her black thoughts at just the right moment: “Sara, I can see light up above. We’re almost there.”

  Each word was another rung in the lifeline extended to her, pulling her inch by inch out of darkness’s seductive embrace. She had never felt so tired or in pain in her life, not even when she was bleeding out in the back of a taxi in Mexico City. There, she was basically self-anesthetized; here, she was all raw nerve endings and rage.

  Up ahead, she heard Bourne working on another grate, knew that he had stopped, that they were at the end. She clutched her Star of David and said a short prayer. Moments later, Bourne was lifting her out of the air shaft. She wanted to cry out, but her training took hold, and she just gritted her teeth and let the pain wash over her once more. But now she was in the arms of the man she loved, felt his heartbeat and, beyond that, the solace of human warmth.

  —

  Bourne set her down gently. “I’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  “Later,” she said, and smiled at him as she got to her feet. “Or maybe not at all.”

  She looked around. They were on the unfinished second floor. It was just as Bourne had described it. “Tell me what you’ve discovered.”

  “I’ll do more than that,” Bourne said. “I’ll show you.”

  He led her down the wide, curving stairs. “The photos, Sara. What are they of?”

  She frowned. “An oil field,” she said. “Refineries.”

  “Not just any oil field. Vankor.”

  “The oil field the Sovereign sold part of to the Chinese.”

  “The same,” he said, nodding.

  As they moved slowly down, tread by tread, he lifted off each photo. “Of course this bank doesn’t hold banknotes, bearer bonds, stock certificates, or gold. They’re all too cumbersome to transport efficiently at a moment’s notice, which is how this bank’s assets are deployed.”

  Behind the third photo down was a metal plate with a large keypad on it.

  “Oh my God,” Sara said. “Diamonds!”

  Bourne nodded. “Now look at the keypad. It’s not like any other I’ve ever seen.”

  “Me neither,” Sara said. “It’s got thirty-three keys, all of them blank.” She looked from the keypad to Bourne. “How on earth will you open it?”

  “The answer is staring right at us from these photos.”

  “Vankor.”

  “The Russian alphabet is composed of thirty-three letters.” Bourne touched the keypad six times, inputting the Cyrillic equivalent of VANKOR. The door popped open. He put his hand inside, drew out a single red silk bag. It was embroidered with a gold Chinese dragon, and was tied with a drawstring. Opening it up, he spilled a pile of diamonds into Sara’s open palm, shimmering and winking like stars in the night sky.

  “But…” She looked at him. “Surely, that’s not all there is.”

  “There are hundreds of others,” Bourne said.

  “But there won’t be for long.”

  They turned to see the Angelmaker. She held a machine pistol on them, threw a doctor’s satchel made of worn pigskin at Bourne. “Fill it up.”

  Sara stiffened. “You’re not going to let her—hey!”

  Bourne was sweeping the red silk bags of diamonds into the satchel.

  “Thank you for finding the safe and opening it,” the Angelmaker said. “I knew whether I asked you politely or not you’d refuse.” She nodded. “Now set it down and step back.”

  Bourne did as she asked, dragging a reluctant Sara with him.

  The Angelmaker stepped down, put her boot through the satchel’s handles, lifted it up with her leg. When she had hold of it, she peered into its depths, then, pushing the satchel up her arm to hold it in place, put her hand inside the safe, presumably to make sure Bourne had emptied it completely.

  “Now,” she said, “I must be going.” As she backed up the stairs, Sara broke away from Bourne, took a step toward her. “Don’t even,” the Angelmaker said in a tone of unmistakable menace. “I will shoot you dead.” She continued up the stairs. “One shot.”

  Then she vanished into the unfinished upper floor.

  Sara turned to Bourne. “You’re not going after her?”

  “She’s a trained assassin. She meant what she said. I plan to live at least another day.”

  “The better part of valor. All right.” Sara ascended to his level, hefted the diamonds still in her palm. “Why didn’t she threaten to kill me in the vault in order to coerce you into telling her where the diamonds were? That worked for Savasin.”

  “I didn’t know then. I think she suspected that.”

  She shot him a skeptical look, as if she knew something more was at work. But she was too canny to press him. If he wanted to tell her, he would have. “Okay, leaving that aside, can you at least tell me why she left these behind?”

  Breadcrumbs, Bourne thought.

  “No again. You can’t mean after all this the Sovereign will get his money, after all.”

  Bourne shook his head. “He won’t. I need to go back to Moscow.” Where it all began.

  “And the invasion?”

  “Will not now happen. Without these diamonds, the Federation will have trouble feeding its own people, let alone anyone else, including its standing army in Eastern Ukraine.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “You know this for a fact?”

  “As much as anyone can know anything in this life. And in a few months a twenty-one-billion-dollar loan to Rosneft will come due. Where will the Kremlin get the money? If Rosneft, the largest state-run energy company, fails, Russia will be in ruins.”

  At last, she acquiesced. “I’ll accept that. I mean do I have a choice? We’ll go to Moscow together.”

  He shook his head. “You need treatment and then a bit of rest.” He spilled the remainder of the bag into her hand. “Then I’d like you to take on a special mission. As a personal favor.”

  “Of course.” She watched him carefully, searching for a clue to his odd behavior, but none presented itself. Okay, then. She needed to exact some form of concession from him, a test, perhaps—minor perhaps, but significant to her. “But only if you promise to see me afterward.”

  “That,” Bourne said, with a quick kiss to her lips, “was never in doubt.”

  62

  Igor Malachev was reading the morning’s New York Times when he saw the Angelmaker enter the subterranean station. Savasin had a personal copy flown in daily. He was properly suspicious of electronic edition
s of any newspaper or magazine, believing they could be hacked at any time by anyone, their stories turned into propaganda or, worse, disinformation.

  WESTERN POWERS READY TO ACT ON RUSSIA’S NEXT MOVE, ran the headline of the above-the-fold front page story he had just read. Another beside it: IRAQI ARMY RETAKES MAJOR OILFIELD FROM ISIS. And another: ALLEGED ISIS COINAGE NOW A MIRAGE. And still another: UKRAINE IN MAJOR TILT TOWARD NATO. The news was all bad and getting worse. The first minister had better have answers for this, he thought sourly. Otherwise, I’ll be out of a job. Guilt by association was a favorite death sport inside the Kremlin.

  As the Angelmaker approached, he folded the paper under his arm, automatically looking for his boss. It was two days past the deadline Timur Savasin had told him about. Russian troops and tanks were still inside Eastern Ukraine—though this was vehemently denied by their foreign minister and, last night, in a televised speech, by the Sovereign himself—but they had stalled. Now there was even some talk of a gradual withdrawal, a slow slinking back into the shadows of Crimea. Malachev did not know what had transpired over the last forty-eight hours to turn the tides, but he was both eager and anxious to find out from the first minister himself. Savasin had been out of contact since leaving the country with the Angelmaker. He had not asked their destination and the first minister had not volunteered it. He understood the need for compartmentalization and deniability, plausible or otherwise, as well as any siloviki inside the Kremlin.

  Now here came the Angelmaker, an old-fashioned doctor’s satchel swinging easily from her left hand. She smiled as she approached him beneath the domed tile ceiling of the first minister’s private subway station. But it was an odd, inward smile, as if she had just told herself an amusing joke. On this morning, Malachev’s vestigial sense of humor had vanished.

  Already on edge, having ingested the Kremlin’s panic-mode stress level over the last two days, Malachev took a step forward, anticipating his sighting of the first minister; he needed explanations that were not forthcoming in the offices or even the gossipy halls of the Kremlin. Soon enough, however, it became clear that the Angelmaker had arrived by herself.

  “Where is he?” he asked the Angelmaker when she stopped in front of him. “Where is the first minister?”

  “Timur has been unavoidably delayed,” she said.

  Her smile was so completely gone, he wondered whether he had imagined it.

  “Delayed by the cluster-fuck at the Kremlin, I imagine.” When she made no response, he added: “When can I expect him?”

  “He told me to board his train, and wait.”

  Malachev immediately blocked her path. Just behind him Timur Savasin’s opulent train stood waiting, its doors open. But he had strict orders not to allow anyone on the train without direct orders—oral or written—from the first minister.

  “You didn’t answer my question. How long is the first minister expected to be delayed?”

  There was that off-kilter smile again. Malachev hated it and her.

  “His delay,” she said, “is permanent.”

  Then she swung the satchel, catching him flush on the face. As he staggered back, she shot him three times in the chest, making a neat isosceles triangle. Malachev had just enough time for his brain to register shock and outrage before he fell backward onto the platform. Around him, the pages of the paper settled like nesting cranes.

  “Time,” the Angelmaker called. “I’ve cleared the way.”

  A small figure, his greatcoat swirling around his ankles, removed himself from the deepest shadows behind her, moving swiftly into the light.

  “Pity about Malachev,” she said, her critical eye appraising the corpse.

  “He was an idiot.” Ivan Volkin fastidiously lifted the hem of his greatcoat as he stepped over the bloody corpse, into the parlor car.

  The Angelmaker followed him, the door closed behind her, and, as Volkin, the eminence gris of all the Russian grupperovka, took his seat in the chair normally reserved for Timur Savasin, the train lurched into motion, sliding out of the station, into the tunnel burrowed under all the others, snaking beneath Moscow.

  Volkin looked around the interior of the car. “I’ve dreamed about this moment for years.” A wolfish smile overtook his face. “And now I know just how comfortable this chair is.”

  The Angelmaker, feet spread wide, balanced easily to the rocking motion. She swung the doctor’s satchel up onto his lap.

  He looked up at her. “And difficulties?”

  “None I couldn’t handle.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “Good.” He flipped open the brass catch, opened the satchel’s jaws, peered into the interior. He removed one of the red silk bags, the gold dragon glinting in the car’s warm lamplight. Spilling the diamonds into his cupped palm, he said, “How many bags?”

  “One hundred seventy.”

  “Have you calculated the amount?”

  “North of seventy-seven billion dollars, depending on the final examination of the diamonds.”

  “You looked at them?”

  “I took a random sampling.”

  “And?”

  “High grade,” she said. “Very.”

  “Then I have it all. All the Sovereign’s wealth.”

  “Not all,” Bourne said, opening the door and stepping out of the bedroom car. He held up the red silk bag Mala had left for him—her breadcrumb through the last section of the dazzling mirrored labyrinth Ivan Volkin had built. The bag was empty of diamonds. It was weighted by pebbles from the Nicosia beach, but no point in telling the old man that.

  A slow smile creased Volkin’s face. “By God, Jason, you are persistent. I won’t even ask how you got in here unobserved. That’s your stock in trade, after all.” He waved a hand. “Do sit down. You look like hell.”

  When Bourne made no move, Volkin shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Bourne, standing with legs apart, faced Mala, with Volkin between them. Volkin turned, picked a green bottle out of a bucket of ice, bracketed to the floor. “Champagne? No?” He grinned. “Considering the company, me neither.” He dropped the bottle back into the bucket, the sound of a body falling through thin ice.

  Crossing his hands in his lap, he said, “So, Jason, what can I do for you? I have the diamonds now. I’ve saved the world from the psychopath who runs this country—at least for the moment. Honestly, I think I deserve a medal.”

  “You deserve more than that,” Bourne said. “It took me a while—longer than it should have, maybe. But you were counting on that. You knew how very few friends I have. You knew the only way to shake me up was to kill one of them. You picked Boris for many reasons, though only now are they fully clear to me.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The train slowed, going around a bend in the tunnel. Both Bourne and Mala leaned more heavily on their flexed left leg. Volkin closed the satchel, placed it beside his chair.

  Bourne, watching everything, said, “I started to wonder how Boris had obtained the information he sent me. One of his lieutenants at FSB? I didn’t think so. The intel on what the Sovereign was up to was too hot for anyone but Boris to have seen. So the enigma remained, and got more knotty when I realized that his ciphered message to me contained the means to stop Russia in its tracks. Now there’s intel you don’t pick up from contacts or from the usual rumor mills.”

  Volkin stared at Bourne, unblinking, hands still folded placidly on his lap. “So how do you think Boris got the intel? I’m curious to hear your theory.”

  “He got it from you, Ivan. And that’s no theory.”

  One of Volkin’s eyebrows arched up. “No?”

  “It’s a fact.”

  “Now you sound like a madman.”

  Bourne smiled. “I’ll admit that for the longest time you had me fooled. I was sure Savasin had ordered Boris’s death.”

  “You mean he didn’t?”

  “He had Svetlana killed in Cairo. That much I can pin on him. But Boris…?” He sh
ook his head slowly. “You see, I had assumed that Borz was working on Savasin’s orders. It made perfect sense. The first minister hated Boris, would have done just about anything to destroy his reputation. But order his execution? No, that was not his way.”

  “I’ve known Savasin longer than you do, and far, far better. It would be a mistake to underestimate how badly he wanted Boris out of the way.”

  “But you see, Ivan, I underestimated how badly you wanted Boris out of the way.”

  Volkin’s upper lip curled in a sneer. “You couldn’t be more wrong. I liked Boris. He saved my twins from certain death.”

  “True enough. And your fondness for each other might have survived, except that for you the world wasn’t enough. You decided to step out of the shadows, to straddle all three upper layers of Russian rule. You became a friend and advisor to everyone, but underneath you played the mobs against the oligarchs, the oligarchs against the Kremlin’s siloviki. All to increase your power exponentially.

  “But Boris was smarter than you in many ways. He saw through you, saw what you were up to, and he found it intolerable. Worse for you, he proved incorruptible. You tried every way you knew how to keep his nose out of your business, but he wouldn’t listen. That’s Boris, through and through.”

  “Do you hear this?” Volkin said, addressing the Angelmaker. “Can you beat this? He’s raving like a madman.”

  “What I forgot about in the morass you were throwing at me, Ivan, was right in front of me all along. Your hall of mirrors began with your grandson pretending to be Boris’s courier, handing me the false coin in Hamburg. He intercepted Boris’s real courier. How did he know Boris had dispatched a courier, let alone where he was going and who he was going to meet?”

  “Savasin could have—”

  “No, Ivan. Boris knew every one of Savasin’s people—even the ones embedded inside the FSB. No, it had to be someone else. And once I knew the impersonator’s real identity, I should have put it together. But I didn’t. I had more pressing things on my mind, including the loss of my best friend. You were dead on about that, anyway.

  “You saw to it I received Boris’s cipher, but only under your control. You knew about the Sovereign’s plans, about the Omega and Gulf Bank. What you didn’t know—and neither did Savasin—was how to get the money out. That’s why you needed me.”