The Bourne Enigma

  In fact, Borz had been the reason Boris had been in cipher communication with his team in Cairo earlier in the evening. Goga, his lead man there, claimed he had found traces of Borz—the real Borz this time, so his contacts swore—in the Egyptian capital. It turned out that Borz had peculiar sexual proclivities, a bit of information Boris had shared with Bourne during their last phone call several days ago. If true, it was a decided weakness, one Boris was only happy to exploit. His honeymoon would have to wait until he returned from Cairo, possibly with Borz’s head. He would ask Jason to accompany him. The arrangements had already been made; it would be like old times. Boris suddenly felt in need of old times.

  Being the director of the newly merged FSB and FSB-2 was draining—overseeing the daily intel, devising infiltration plans, as well as dealing with the Kremlin hierarchy in which a terrible schism had appeared, dividing the conservative and the liberal members in constant feuds, backstabbing, and ideologically motivated purges. Picking his way through that land-mined territory was like dancing on the head of a pin, but Boris hardly thought of himself as an angel. Too much blood had run under the bridge for that fantasy. It was a good thing he had his second-in-command, Colonel Vladimir Korsolov, to count on. Korsolov came from a family of high-ranking siloviki, mother and father both. He knew all the trapdoors and a good number of the skeletons, hiding out deep in the Kremlin closets. He made Boris’s job a good deal easier.

  He thought of all this as he hurried down the wide corridor. He was picked up by a pair of bodyguards, who flanked him as he headed toward the bathroom. He waved them off as he went inside, stayed there for three minutes, then returned to the corridor, heading toward the loggia where he had asked Jason to meet him. He wanted no FSB personnel around when he met with his American friend, no CCTV, either, which was why he had hit upon the loggia.

  Pushing through a swinging door, he found himself beneath the east side of the loggia, whose tiled roof was held up by twelve pillars in the shape of caryatids. The women in their Grecian robes regarded him with solemn grace. In the courtyard itself, cherry trees rose up from the four corners. Then it was roses and zinnia all the way to the center, where a marble fountain with water overflowing an urn carried by a female water bearer filled the night air with the sounds of what seemed to him children playing. It recalled to him scenes from his youth, before his life in the service of the siloviki was even a gleam in his eye. How simple everything was then. His parents had a country house, with a cherry orchard ragged from inattention. One morning in early summer when he was ten, his father roused him from sleep. He did so with his great walrus moustache, the feel of which always made Boris giggle.

  “You and I,” his father said, as Boris dressed, “are going to have an adventure!”

  That entire summer, father and son labored in the cherry orchard, raking, watering, feeding, pruning, and later, spreading nets over the budding fruit to keep the birds from stealing it. All of June, July, and August, when they came out to the house, Boris worked from morning till dusk. He and his father scarcely said a word to each other, but his father’s proud smile, and a kiss on the top of his head each night, meant everything to him. It was the happiest summer of his life. Looking back on it, it was perhaps his only happy summer, for his father keeled over and died on the coldest day of the following winter—the ides of February—when snow covered the ground from horizon to horizon. Boris, ever the stoic, watched his father lowered into his grave with dry eyes and nary a sound escaping his lips. But days later, out at the house, he awoke to an icy dawn, drew on his clothes, and padded out to the cherry orchard.

  The trees were bare, pale as bone stripped of flesh and sinew, dead looking. Behind him were the dark imprints of his snow boots. In the center of the orchard, he removed his boots and thick wool socks. He stood in his bare feet, sunken into the snow until they reached the frozen, black earth, and there he sobbed without respite, until he was as dry and empty as the husk of an old and forgotten tree.

  He stepped out into the garden, the light of a full moon falling on him like the memories of his childhood. The memories of a father he rarely thought of now and had all but forgotten. How could he have pushed such a powerful figure into the obscurity of time, cobwebbed and dim, he berated himself, when all that he had accomplished, all that he was, was due to his father’s strict but fair teaching?

  It was a question he was destined never to find the answer to. At that moment a length of shining piano wire, thin as a nerve, was whipped around his neck, pulled so quickly across his throat he didn’t have time to get his fingers up to protect the vulnerable spot, so tight he could not draw another breath.

  Boris struggled. He was not a young man, but he was as fit as any soldier, and a good deal more canny. He had been in numerous lethal situations in his time and had survived them all. At what point he became aware that this time was different he’d never be able to say. But when that moment did come, when he knew that his unknown and unseen assailant was implacable, unstoppable, and would within moments succeed in killing him, he was prepared. In a sense, he had always been prepared. From the moment his father died he had taken a path through life that would familiarize him with death. And now, at the end, he knew why.

  He’d known this moment would come, sooner rather than later. There was no surprise, no sorrow, not even a sense of loss. But then into his mind came all the people he had killed and had ordered murdered, and he grew afraid that their souls were waiting for him, to judge him, and to cast him down. That instant passed as in the misty distance the cherry orchard of his childhood appeared. He made out his father standing in the center of it, looking at him, waiting. As if in a dream, he moved closer to his father. He was in the mist now. It should have felt cold, but instead it was warm and welcoming. Closer and closer he came to his father, until they were one.

  6

  Colonel Vladimir Korsolov had the indifferent gaze of a doctor or a gravedigger. He held the appearance of a man who knew he was different and didn’t much care for it. Perhaps as a child he had been beaten up for it. In any event, he seemed to regard everyone else with a disdain he could not afford to turn inward.

  This assessment ran through Bourne’s mind when Korsolov and three of his FSB minions intercepted him as he hurried toward the loggia. He was late. It had been easy enough to break away from Irina, but then, on his way out of the ballroom, he had been detained by Svetlana, and it had been difficult to cut short his conversation with the bride. To his surprise, two of the agents held Irina between them as if she were a prisoner.

  “Halt,” Korsolov ordered. “Stay where you are, Bourne. Do not move.”

  The third agent positioned himself directly behind Bourne, so close Bourne could hear his stentorian breathing, like a farm animal.

  Korsolov, having introduced himself, now stood in front of Bourne, his eyes steady, his countenance perfectly blank. “Why are you near the loggia?”

  With events clearly overrunning Boris’s timeline, Bourne felt the truth was the best course. “I was on my way to meet Boris.”

  “General Karpov, you mean. Is this correct?”

  “It is.” Bourne craned his neck. “Why is Irina Vasilýevna being held?”

  “I’ll ask the questions, Bourne.” Korsolov took a step closer. He was the FSB colonel who had eyed Bourne and Irina while they were dancing. “Why were you meeting with General Karpov?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Bourne said evenly. He was getting a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach that he couldn’t shake no matter how hard he tried. “Boris told me he wanted to talk. He suggested we meet in the loggia after the first course was served.”

  Korsolov waited a beat before he said, “And?”

  “And nothing. I’m on my way to meet him, and instead here I am talking to you and your goons.”

  Korsolov frowned. “‘Goons’? I don’t know this word.”

  “It’s American slang for ‘FSB agents.’”

  Korsolov’s frown deepe
ned, but behind his back Bourne saw Irina’s brief ironic smile. The colonel took another step closer to Bourne. He lowered his voice. “Listen, Bourne, I don’t like Americans—especially Americans who think they have special privileges in Moscow. Going forward don’t for a minute think you’ll get the kind of lax treatment General Karpov afforded you.”

  Bourne reacted to Korsolov’s use of the past tense. “What do you mean?” The falling sensation in the pit of his stomach accelerated. “Has something happened to Boris?”

  Without a word, Korsolov turned on his heel, led the way down the remaining length of the corridor. Bourne was keenly aware of the goon at his back. He saw Irina shake her head before she, too, was marched down the corridor. The unmistakable sound of a generator threw harsh decibels at them, and Bourne’s heart sank. In this context a generator could only mean one thing: a crime scene.

  Double doors opened onto the loggia. Floodlights used to illuminate the hotel entrance for the wedding were being relocated, their electrical cords snaking away behind them, all connected to a large, ungainly-looking generator, coughing like a dragon with emphysema.

  The moment Bourne caught a glimpse of the body, he broke away from the close-knit group. In the periphery of his vision he was aware of the goon who had been behind him start to sprint after him, but be arrested by a hand signal from Korsolov, who, smartly, was more interested in Bourne’s reaction than in keeping him on a close tether.

  Bourne had seen plenty of corpses in his day, some at his own hand, but the sight of the too-wide red smile that ran across Boris’s throat brought him to his knees.

  “Jesus, Boris,” he whispered, “how could you have let this happen?”

  Boris lay on his back, his arms splayed to either side, palms up as if in supplication. Bourne noted the fresh dirt on the knees of his friend’s trousers. What were his last thoughts as the life pumped out of him? Bourne could not guess, but his own thoughts turned to the many times he and Boris had shared both danger and laughs, had gotten drunk on good vodka and bad, had hidden each other, lied to each other when they needed to, but mostly told each other the truth, backed each other up, saved each other. A deep sadness welled up in Bourne where moments before agitation and dread had uncomfortably mixed. Friends of Boris’s nature came only rarely into people’s lives, and in their profession possibly not at all. Boris was a rare bird, and this was no way for him to die.

  He resisted the urge to get up, smash the generator, plunge the loggia into shadows and moonlight, the better to hide the atrocity. Murder was bad enough, but the harsh light stripped Boris’s corpse of all dignity and sense of, if not peace, which was never a word in Boris’s vocabulary, then proper rest.

  With these thoughts threatening to overwhelm his uncanny powers of observation, Bourne brought himself from the brink of despair back to the moment at hand. Tough though it might be, he knew the only way to honor Boris’s memory was to solve the enigma of his murder. He had little doubt that his friend’s sudden demise had something to do with whatever it was Boris had wanted to talk to him about. Even on the evening of his wedding Boris felt it couldn’t wait. The urgency of whatever situation Boris had found himself in was as clear and hot as the spotlights illuminating him.

  The piano wire that had killed him was still embedded in his throat, the center having sawed through the cricoid cartilage. The entire front of Boris’s suit, shirt, and bow tie was black and glistening with the blood that had gushed out of him as he was dying. On either end of the piano wire were wooden handles. They looked like they had already been dusted for fingerprints. Bourne could see none; unsurprisingly, the killer had worn gloves.

  “What do you see, Bourne?”

  With a start, Bourne realized that Korsolov was standing over his shoulder. He realized he’d better get his mind fully in gear. He could mourn for his friend later.

  “There are defensive abrasions on his hands and fingertips.”

  “He tried to fight back. So what?”

  “So there’s material under his fingernails. Maybe it’s shreds of the gloves the killer was wearing, maybe an analysis will lead us somewhere. Or we could get really lucky and a bit of the killer’s skin might be lodged under there.”

  Korsolov seemed unmoved. “What else?”

  “This wasn’t just a murder by a professional, it was a ritualistic killing.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Bourne pointed. “The dirt on his trousers indicates he was on his knees when he died. From that position it’s impossible for him to have then fallen onto his back without having his legs doubled beneath him. And look at how the body is laid out—with precision, with clear religious implications.”

  Korsolov leaned forward. “What d’you mean?”

  “It’s obvious,” Bourne said. “The Christ image.”

  At once, Korsolov hauled Bourne to his feet. “Are you fucking kidding me? I told you…” With a seemingly great effort he caught hold of himself, and in a lower tone of voice, said, “Maybe you could get away with being a wise guy with General Karpov—”

  “I wouldn’t have had to explain the implications to Boris,” Bourne said. “He would’ve seen it himself.”

  As the colonel made a gesture to one of his goons, Bourne added, “If you take me into custody I won’t be able to help you solve Boris’s murder.”

  “Who the fuck needs you? My men are quite capable—”

  “No,” Bourne said, “they’re not.” He looked Korsolov in the eye. It was the only way to stand up to a bully. “No one knew Boris the way I did—not you, not anyone inside the FSB.”

  “If I thought for a minute that you had killed the general—”

  “But you don’t. I was on my way to see him when you waylaid me.”

  “The only reason I don’t—”

  “He was my friend.”

  “You’re an American. That’s three strikes against you in my book.” Sensing he had gained the upper hand at last, Korsolov’s lips twitched in a bitter smile. But he was wrong.

  “As his second in command you had more of a motive than I did,” Bourne observed.

  “What?”

  “That’s right. You’re an ambitious man—what deputy director of FSB wouldn’t be? But as long as Boris was alive you’d gone as far as you could.” Bourne sensed the stirring in the rank of goons, and he forged on. “Boris told me about you.” That was a lie, but no one had to know. “He told me you’d become restless as his number two.”

  “That’s a lie!” Korsolov snarled.

  “So restless that he was contemplating assigning you to a post overseas.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  Bourne shook his head. “But the truth will never come out, now that Boris is dead.”

  “You are fabricating a monstrous lie.”

  “You’ll never know.” There was satisfaction in hammering nails into the supercilious ass’s coffin. “Not that it matters. As a Russian you know firsthand if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth.”

  Now Korsolov’s grin widened. “You’ve overplayed your hand, Bourne, because where you’re going no one will hear you, let alone begin to wonder about me.” He nodded to one of his goons, who shook out a pair of manacles, preparing to cuff Bourne’s wrists behind his back.

  “You have forgotten many things tonight, Colonel,” Bourne said, “but the most important is the hit Boris’s murder will exact on your reputation. Do you think the president is going to promote the man who allowed his boss to be murdered under his own nose?”

  The goon snapped the manacle around Bourne’s right wrist.

  “The man whose security failed to spot the assassin, the worst kind of criminal who infiltrated the venue where the president himself was vulnerable, gorging himself on caviar, champagne, and vodka.”

  The goon had grabbed Bourne’s left wrist when Korsolov raised a hand to halt him.

  His eyes narrowed. “Sooner or later, Bourne, I will bury you.”

&nbs
p; “You aren’t going to pound a tabletop with your shoe?” Bourne shook his head. “You need me, Colonel, if you’re going to survive this disaster.”

  “No, Bourne. All I need is a perp. And I have a ready-made one in this woman.” He pointed to Irina. “Her father and brother were known criminals. She despised the FSB doing its job and flushing them down the drain. The general was its head. You see where this is going? Who better to kill than him? And what better suspect could I have?”

  “The one who actually murdered Boris.”

  “And if she’s guilty?”

  “First, garroting is more a matter of leverage than strength, and she lacks the height. Boris was like a bull—even you know that, Colonel. Second, this is a fetish killing, which means whoever did it isn’t going to stop with Boris. If you charge Irina with this crime you’ll find another FSB officer dead in a week, maybe only a couple of days. There’s something to look forward to while you contemplate the end of your career.”

  Korsolov gave a snort of derision, but at the same time he signed to his minion who freed Bourne’s right wrist and stepped back.

  “Okay, smart guy, it seems I’m stuck with you, at least for the moment. But I need an insurance policy to keep you on the straight and narrow, because I know the straight and narrow isn’t your long suit, to say the least.” He made another hand sign, and the goon who had been behind Bourne stepped behind Irina and snapped the manacles on her. “The woman is going into the Lubyanka, Bourne. Nothing you can say will change that; it’s set in stone.” He glanced at his watch. “You have precisely forty-eight hours from now to identify the murderer and bring him to me. Otherwise, Irina Vasilýevna will be bound over for a show trial for the murder of General Karpov. And what a show it will be, believe me. Then she’ll die.”