The Bourne Enigma

  “I was here once with Boris,” Bourne said. He whirled her away from an FSB colonel and his mistress, but not before he saw the man shoot Irina a filthy look. He was handsome in a saturnine way, with the heavily mannered bearing of an aristocrat, odd enough in a Wild West city full of clattering, snorting beasts, but particularly in the buttoned-down FSB. “We were hunting an arms dealer.”

  “Did you catch him?”

  “When it happened it wasn’t pretty. It took the staff days to clean up.”

  “You bad boys.”

  Bourne didn’t yet know how she meant that comment. He glanced around the ballroom. “This hotel used to be one of the czar’s many palaces,” he said. “I wonder what that was like, rattling around in these huge rooms. No matter how many servants and lackeys you had, I imagine it was an incredibly lonely life.”

  A flicker of a shadow passed across Irina’s face. Tiny as it was, a crack seemed to have formed in her facade. “I’ve had enough dancing. Do you mind?”

  They picked their way through the jostling throng, toward the French doors that led to the tiled terrace. Bourne grabbed a couple of flutes of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray. Irina had already downed four glasses, and it wouldn’t hurt to keep them coming. Alcohol had the almost magical effect of loosening people’s tongues.

  The scents of night-blooming jasmine and orange came to them. They passed a pair of guards, who gave them a cursory look before returning to their scans of the overlighted hotel grounds. Somewhere, not far off, a dog barked, then returned to its snuffling.

  “Nothing to complain about as far as security is concerned,” she said so softly that once again Bourne had the impression she was talking to herself.

  He looked out over the grounds, but all his other senses were attuned to her, trying to work out the true nature of the woman beneath the dazzling, erotic surface.

  “I live with loneliness all the time,” he said. “It’s my world—but I don’t know whether I’ve chosen it or it’s chosen me. Normally, I don’t think about it much, but there are times”—he gave her the briefest glance—“when I do.”

  Irina sipped her champagne thoughtfully. “Is that a compliment or…?” She shrugged her beautiful, square shoulders. “Doesn’t matter.”

  The sounds of the dog came again, closer this time. They saw its shadow first, huge and distorted. When it came into view it was at the end of a thick chain leash held by a guard: almost as big as its shadow, its coat bristling, nosing around the bushes for the scent of an intruder. It was wholly intent on scent, until it paused, lifted its leg, and almost disdainfully peed on the bush.

  Irina laughed softly. “I feel sorry for the animal, chained and bound.”

  Bourne said nothing, waiting. And then his patience was rewarded, but not in the way he had anticipated.

  “Tell me,” she said, “have you ever been in love?”

  He kept surprise out of his voice. “Why do you ask?”

  “Last night. You spoke her name.”

  “I don’t believe I spoke anyone’s name.”

  “But you did. While you were asleep. You were restless, dreaming. Perhaps it was a nightmare.”

  “I don’t have nightmares.”

  She smiled at him. “I have nightmares. Everyone does.”

  “Nevertheless, I never spoke a name.”

  “But you did. I heard it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Sara. You called ‘Sara.’”

  Bourne did not care for the turn the conversation had taken. Had he spoken Sara’s name in his sleep? “I don’t know any Sara.”

  “You love her.”

  Something hardened inside him. “Irina, what is this about?” and then she surprised him again.

  “I was in your bedroom last night. I heard you call out her name. ‘Sara,’ you said in the tenderest voice I have ever heard. I was jealous, I admit it. I’ve always wanted a man to speak my name so tenderly.”

  What to make of this woman? It was as if she were many people. “It’s you who were dreaming.”

  She ignored this. “I sat for hours watching you sleep.”

  “I would have known.”

  She took the slightest sip of her champagne. “I was engaged once. I was young enough to have fallen deeply in love. He was just like you, that’s how stupid I was. He worked in your world, on the margins, in the shadows. He was very good—very good, indeed. Many people were terrified of him. But he inhabited this world fully and completely. He stepped out of the shadows only briefly. I soon discovered there was no room for me. Well, you must know all about that.” She wet her lips. “As I say I was young and stupid. I was too besotted to break it off. One day he left for god alone knows where. He never came back. He never left a trace. He vanished off the face of the earth. Poof! Up in smoke, like a magician.”

  “There are no magicians,” Bourne said. “Only illusionists.”

  Her smile was ironic just before she turned away. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “So many things can kill you, so many ways to die.”

  Once more he didn’t know whether she was talking to him or to herself.

  “Have you ever thought about dying, Bourne?”

  “Every day,” he said. “But I’ve already died once. I’m on my second life.”

  “What’s that song? ‘You Only Live Twice’?”

  “Nancy Sinatra.” Bourne laughed. “That’s part of a life long ago and far away.”

  Irina finished off her champagne, reached for his untouched flute. “I want to live twice,” she said.

  A dark note in her voice put him on alert. “Has there been a threat to your life?”

  “This is Russia, Bourne.” She downed his champagne in one long swallow, set the empty flute on top of the balustrade next to hers, peered at them as if they were a psychic’s crystal ball.

  “This estate,” she said, after what seemed a long time. “This palace, so huge and forbidding. Like a knight’s castle, it might as well have a moat around it.” She moved the flutes together until their lips touched. “I know what that kind of loneliness feels like.” Her eyes caught Bourne’s, then slowly drifted away. “I live alone in my house,” she went on. “Three years ago it was different, of course. I had Father and my brother.”

  “Where are they now?” Bourne asked.

  “Dead.” Irina’s eyes searched his for a reaction. “They were murdered.”

  “By whom?”

  She shrugged. “Many guesses, a show investigation by the police, no arrests.” She shrugged again. “I expected nothing more. It’s Russia, after all.”

  “But your family is wealthy.”

  “That was the problem, wasn’t it? It’s the siloviki—the security wonks—who have the political clout. All the oligarchs have is money, and in the dawning of this new era of conservatism and isolationism, money isn’t nearly enough.” She gripped the balustrade, as if for security. “Still, in my father’s case, there was another issue: All oligarchs cast shadows. Some shadows—very, very few, to be sure—are almost as long as the Sovereign’s.” She pursed her lips. “Mikhail Khodorkovsky was lucky. He only got ten years in prison for defying the Sovereign.”

  “So your father was a dissident like Khodorkovsky.” When she nodded, Bourne said, “How were he and your brother killed?”

  “The estate was infiltrated. At night. Alarms were deactivated.”

  “Professionals.”

  She nodded again. “They slaughtered my father and brother in their beds.”

  “I imagine nothing was taken.”

  “That’s right.”

  In America, the place would have been ransacked to make it look like a robbery. Here, there was no need for such a ruse. “And you?”

  “Mercifully, I was away on business.” Her eyes had darkened as her vision turned inward. “This was three years ago. I returned four days after the home invasion. My family was at the mortuary, awaiting my identification.” She wet her lips. “I burie
d them, alone.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Ah, my mother.” Irina produced a wan smile. “I visit her once a week, twice whenever I can. The sanitarium is in a beautiful location, but it’s difficult to get to.”

  “Your mother,” he said at length. “She was hurt in the home invasion.”

  “Oh, no.” Irina swung around toward him. “She’s been locked away ever since we…I…was born. She’s been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.”

  “These days there are a number of drugs—”

  “She’s tried them all.” Irina’s fingers wrapped around the wrought-iron balustrade as if they were bars on a cell. “Nothing’s changed for her. It’s been years now. Years and years. The same for her, but increasingly difficult for me. Sometimes she seems fine, other times she doesn’t know me or mistakes me for the devil.”

  “The devil? Really?”

  Irina nodded. “She hallucinates; it’s all quite real for her, I assure you.” She gave a little laugh that turned into a half sob. “When she mistakes me…I’ve taken to speaking like the person or…entity she thinks I am. The doctors caution me not to do this, but I don’t listen. At least then I can converse with her. Isn’t that better than watching her talk to an invisible demon for an hour?”

  Whether she was seeking a form of validation or simply asking a rhetorical question was unclear. Either way, Bourne said nothing, wanting to give her more space. The trick was simple but effective. The more she talked the better sense he had of her. But as the silence grew longer, it was clear she was in need of prompting.

  “Why the devil, do you think?”

  “Oh, that’s clear enough,” Irina said. “My mother is convinced her disease is actually a demonic possession. She feels she’s doing penance for her sins.”

  “What sins?”

  “No idea, but, well, you know they could just as well be imagined as real.” When Irina unwound her fingers from the balustrade they left damp marks.

  Bourne did not need that telltale clue to know she was lying, just as she had been lying when she had confirmed Bourne’s statement that her father was a dissident. He could see the truth hiding behind her eyes. She knew perfectly well what her mother’s sins were. He was beginning to wonder whether they were knowing what her husband and son were really into.

  4

  For Veniamin Belov, the hotel—the former palace—was nothing less than a prison. It was only when he was quits with it, having driven his car outside the grounds, that his breathing returned to normal. Not that Belov breathed easy anywhere in Moscow these days. He would have liked nothing more than to flee the country entirely, make himself a new home somewhere where Jews weren’t hated and persecuted. Where might that be? he often found himself wondering. These days, the dangers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were ever more serious. Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, these were all implacable enemies bent on Israel’s destruction. And with the way the Israeli right wing was acting—pushing Israel’s borders further and further into the Gaza Strip—was it any wonder? He felt a terrible sadness at the political direction Israel had chosen. He had no love for the Palestinians per se, but didn’t they deserve their own land as Israelis did? The exigencies of the implications had made him realize that all the paths laid out before him would put him in harm’s way. After much fretful consideration, he had chosen. But was it the right one? He had yet to find out.

  Several miles from the hotel, Belov consulted an app on his mobile that showed the location of every traffic surveillance camera in Moscow in real time, since the police and FSB were continually adding more. Satisfied, he turned off, went down a side street, and pulled to the curb. There he switched license plates, using one—one of many—stowed in a secret compartment in the trunk he had built himself.

  In a burned-out lot in Chelobityevo, a Muslim slum of unrelieved squalor not far from the Garden Ring Road, Belov disposed of the identity that allowed him access to the hotel. The lot was a pit that stank of unwashed flesh, human excrement, and despair. Ignoring the furtive life all around him—old men sleeping while young boys copulated—he made a pile of his passport, driver’s license, and siloviki identity card. From the inside pocket of his jacket he retrieved a small box made of thin sheets of granite. It was cool, despite having been near his body. From within, he extracted a disc not larger than a throat lozenge. This he placed atop the pile, then he lit a match and dropped it. The result was a sudden flare of green-white as the phosphorus compound ignited.

  Forty minutes later, a new identity intact, he was down on the right bank of the Moskva River, beneath the shadowed bulk of the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, a surveillance-free zone, at least at the moment. At the western edge of the Kremlin, it was the first span across the river, its earliest fifteenth-century incarnation being a live bridge of boats, linking the Kremlin with Zamoskvorechye, on the southern bank. The more modern stone bridge had given way to the present-day span made of steel.

  In deepest shadow, Belov saw the tiny red glow of a cigarette end, and he slipped down the bank toward it. The moon was full and riding high in a sky largely devoid of clouds. He felt its cold, silver light on his shoulders like a mantle. He did not believe in werewolves or elves. He did not even believe in the Golem forged in the ghetto of the Polish Jews. But he did believe that demons stalked the earth. The horror that was being visited on Ukraine by Russia on his own doorstep was proof enough.

  The question of how well Svetlana knew General Karpov, whether he would willingly or unwillingly follow her direction in undermining the Sovereign’s planned full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was to be the subject of tonight’s rendezvous. His contact claimed to possess intel Svetlana needed to help keep their beloved Ukraine free of the Sovereign’s pernicious influence. It was too sensitive to be transmitted. Any electronic transmission, no matter how secure, was a potentially lethal liability to people like Belov. In these days of complete network surveillance the old-school methodology had returned as the most secure way of transferring information from one agent to another.

  The contact threw down the butt of his cigarette, mashed it underfoot as Belov came up.

  “Yasha,” he said, “what have I always told you? Leave no sign.”

  “It’s one of those terrible cheap Russian brands. The kind found around here all the time.” With an almost theatrical sigh, Yasha bent down, snatched up the flattened butt, put it in his pocket. He was a small man, pale, his eyes big in his skull-like head. With his undershot jaw, he looked harmless as a mouse, which was the point. “We have only six days,” he said.

  Belov sucked in his breath. “So short a time. I was sure we had more.”

  “Well, we don’t. The economic sanctions imposed by the West have put enormous pressure on the Sovereign. The ruble is plunging, along with the stock market. Food, already scarce, is getting scarcer. There are daily demonstrations in the Moscow streets. Far worse, the oligarchs are getting restless; their holdings are shrinking daily. He has to act before his coalition of siloviki and oligarchs fractures.” Yasha’s voice, which should have been triumphant, was instead sulky. He was a bit of a drama queen, but he was a fine agent for all that—slippery as an eel. “Our plan now seems untenable at best—at worst, impossible.”

  “That’s why we have someone on the inside working for us.”

  Yasha made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “How can you trust her? I mean, she’s Russian.”

  “She’s half Ukrainian, which makes all the difference. Besides, I’m Russian, Yasha.”

  “Sadly, that’s true,” Yasha said with a crooked smile.

  Belov opened his mouth in time to eat the bullet fired from the Makarov that had appeared in Yasha’s hand. As he staggered back, blood spurting, clawing at his mouth, Yasha whirled, reacting to a movement in the periphery of his vision.

  He blinked as he saw an unexpected figure in the wavering light of a passing ship.

  “Rebeka!” he said. “Why are you here?”

  She landed a
vicious kick, sending his Makarov spinning out into the river.

  “Rebeka, please! I was taking care of the leak!”

  “You’re not the solution, Yasha,” she said. “You’re the problem. Belov wasn’t the leak; it was you. You sold him—and the people like us—out to the FSB. We stood ready to help the Ukrainians’ pivot to the West succeed. But now…”

  The ship’s horn sounded mournfully, ushering Yasha into oblivion as a bullet fired from a Glock fitted with a noise suppressor entered his forehead and penetrated his brain.

  5

  At roughly the same time Belov was gasping his last breath, the final table of wedding guests was served their appetizers. Boris Karpov excused himself from the crowd of well-wishers surrounding him and Svetlana at their table in the hotel’s ballroom and rose to slip away. With a hand on his forearm, Svetlana held him up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “What? Now I’m married I can’t even take a piss without explaining myself?” he said only half jovially.

  Svetlana stared hard into his eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

  Boris’s expression hardened. “Shall we proceed directly to the divorce without even the bliss of our wedding night?”

  She laughed suddenly, her face brightening like the moon in the sun’s reflected light. “There will be many things for us both to get used to, my love, not the least of which is sharing the same space. I know you were a confirmed bachelor.”

  Boris laid a hand on her cheek. “Until I met you.”

  “With many, many female conquests.”

  “Every man is required to sow his wild oats.”

  “As long as they’re not too wild.” She leaned in and kissed him hard on the mouth. “Don’t be long, my love. We’ve more dancing and toasting to do.”

  In truth, Boris’s bladder was not the pressing issue of the moment; it was his preplanned meeting with Jason Bourne. He knew why Bourne had come to Moscow, and it wasn’t primarily to attend the wedding. He was on the trail of Ivan Borz, the master terrorist-arms dealer, who might be Chechen or might very well not be. Even the FSB wasn’t sure, just as they had in their possession over a dozen surveillance photos claiming to be of Ivan Borz, all of them of different men. Bourne had thought he’d killed Borz twice last year, only to discover that both men were not Borz at all, but stalking horses. Borz had been running El Ghadan, the terrorist who had attempted to force Bourne to kill the American president. How Bourne had managed to wriggle out of that spider’s web was still a mystery to Boris, one he meant to have his friend answer tonight. But before they got to reminiscing there was vital intel Boris needed to impart to Bourne—intel that concerned Ivan Borz.