The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

They lay the colonel down on the floor of the Air Afrika jet and the medic crouched over him, beginning his examination.

After five anxious minutes, when he tested and probed, he looked up at Bourne and the men hovering around. “The leg is a simple break and is no problem,” he said. “As for his wound, it could have been worse. The bullet grazed the side of his head, but didn’t crack the skull. That’s the good news.” His hands continued to work on his fallen commander. “The bad news is he’s got a serious concussion. Pressure is building in his brain; I’m going to have to relieve it by drilling a small hole”—he pointed to a spot on Boris’s right temple—“just here.” He took a closer look at Bourne and clucked his tongue. “Still and all, I can only do triage. We need to get him to a hospital as quickly as possible.”

Bourne went up front and gave the Air Afrika pilot and navigator orders to take them back to Khartoum. At once, they began their pre-flight checklist. The engines came on one by one.

“Please strap yourself in,” the medic said when Bourne returned. “I’ll see to you as soon as I’ve got Colonel Karpov’s condition stabilized.”

Bourne was in no condition to argue. He collapsed into a seat, stripped off his jacket and the spent packets of pig blood Arkadin’s bullets had ripped open. He said a silent prayer to the spirit of the pig who’d given its life to spare his own, and could not help seeing in his mind’s eye the great carved pig at the pool in Bali.

He unstrapped the Kevlar vest and buckled up, but his gaze never left Karpov’s prone form. He looked deathly pale, there was blood all over him, and for the first time in Bourne’s spotty memory he looked truly vulnerable. Bourne found himself wondering whether he’d looked like that to Moira after he’d been shot in Tenganan.

As they began to roll down the runway, he had the presence of mind to call Soraya on his sat phone and tell her what happened.

“I’ll get to General LeBowe, who’s commanding the allied forces, and tell him to stand down,” Soraya said. “He’s a good man, he’ll listen. Especially when I tell him that by tomorrow morning we’ll have enough hard evidence to prove it was Black River, not Iranian terrorists, who fired the Kowsar 3.”

“A lot of people in the US government are going to have egg on their faces,” Bourne said wearily.

“With what we have, I’m hoping more than egg for some of them,” Soraya said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time and it sure as hell won’t be the last.”

He heard three huge blasts from somewhere outside. Looking through the Perspex window he saw Perlis’s parting gift: the Black Hawk had fired missiles into each of the wells. They were now all on fire. Doubtless this was his way of ensuring that, even if he survived, Arkadin wouldn’t get his hands on them.

“Jason, you told me Colonel Karpov will be okay, but are you all right?”

Bourne, sitting in the cabin of the jet that was just now airborne, had no idea what to say.

How many times do you have to die, he thought, before you learn how to live?

The moment Moira ripped open the package Soraya had sent her and pulled out the titanium tags, she knew she had the last piece of physical evidence to take Noah and Black River down. The tags were Black River, all right. After she had decoded them, had gotten the names and serial numbers of the four operatives, she took the tags and Humphry Bamber’s laptop with Bardem to the only person she knew she could absolutely trust: Frederick Willard.

Willard accepted her evidence with a controlled amount of glee and, it seemed to her, a curious equanimity that spoke of a degree of foreknowledge. In due course Willard presented the evidence against Black River to a multiplicity of sources, to ensure the evidence would not somehow be deliberately mislaid or otherwise disposed of.

Soraya and Amun Chalthoum returned to Cairo. Despite the fact that Soraya’s people had gathered compelling evidence on the identity of Chalthoum’s enemy, it was not a happy time for them personally. Soraya knew that he’d never leave Egypt, that he felt comfortable only in his homeland. Besides, he still had political battles to fight here, and she knew that even if she hadn’t helped him, he’d never run away from them. She also knew that she’d never leave America to live here with him.

“What are we going to do, Amun?” she said.

“I don’t know, azizti. I love you in a way I’ve never loved anyone in my life. The thought of losing you is unbearable.” He took her hand. “Move here. Live with me. We’ll get married and you’ll have babies and we’ll raise them together.”

She laughed and shook her head. “You know I wouldn’t be happy here.”

“But think how beautiful our children will be, azizti!”

She laughed again. “Idiot!” She kissed him on the lips. She’d meant it as a friendly kiss, but it turned into something else, something deeper, something ecstatic, and it lasted a long time.

When at last they broke apart, she said, “I have an idea. We’ll meet once a year for a week, a different place each year, or wherever you wish.”

He looked at her for a long time. “Azizti, there is nothing else for us, is there?”

“Isn’t this enough? This has to be enough, you must see that.”

“I see very clearly.” He sighed and held her tight. “We’ll make it enough, won’t we?”

Three days later the Black River scandal hit the Internet and newswires with the force of a hurricane, overshadowing even the disbanding of the allied forces on Iran’s borders, which had already been parsed to death by the news media’s talking heads.

“This is it,” Peter Marks told Willard, “both Black River and Secretary Halliday are going down.”

He was surprised when Willard gave him an inscrutable look. “I hope you’re not eager to back out of our deal, princeling.”

That cryptic remark became clear when, hours later, Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday held a press conference condemning Black River’s role in what he termed “a stupefying abuse of power that goes so far beyond the parameters of the company’s stated mission that steps are being taken to dismantle it. I’ve spoken personally to the attorney general, who confirmed to me that both civil and criminal charges are at this moment being prepared against members of Black River, including the principals. I want to make perfectly clear to the American people that the NSA hired Black River in good faith on the basis of that organization’s assurances that they had met with and had come to an agreement with leaders of a pro-democracy group inside Iran. Documentation was provided as to dates, times, names of the principals, and issues discussed, all of which I have turned over to the attorney general as evidence against Black River. I want to assure the American people that at no time did I or anyone in the NSA know that this was a total fabrication on the part of Black River. To that end, a blue-ribbon panel is at this moment being created to investigate the entire matter. My pledge to you today is that the perpetrators of this unthinkable plot will be punished to the full extent of the law.”

Not surprisingly, no link was ever discovered between the NSA, let alone Halliday himself, and Black River other than the one he publicly described. And to Marks’s astonishment, the principals charged by the attorney general were Kerry Mangold and Dick Braun. Nowhere was there a mention of Oliver Liss, the third member of Black River’s triumvirate.

When Marks asked Willard about this, he received the same inscrutable look, which sent him scrambling to Google stories on Black River. What he discovered, after an exhaustive search, was a small article buried in The Washington Post of several weeks back. It seemed that Oliver Liss had tendered his resignation without notice from the company he had helped found “for personal reasons.” Try as he might, Marks could find no mention anywhere of what those personal reasons might be.

That’s when Willard, with a Cheshire Cat grin, told him there weren’t any.

“I trust you’re ready to start work,” Willard said, “because Treadstone is back in business.”

35

ON A MAGNIFICENT

SUNNY DAY in Bali when May had just begun to bud, Suparwita arrived at the sacred temple of Pura Lempuyang. Not a cloud was in the sky as he climbed the dragon staircase and passed through the carved stone portal to the second temple high on the mountainside. Mount Agung, clear, completely free of clouds, and blue as the Strait of Lombok, rose up in all its splendor. Then, as Suparwita made his way toward a group of kneeling penitents, a shadow fell across the stones and he saw that Noah Perlis was waiting for him.

“You don’t look surprised.” Perlis wore his Balinese sarong and T-shirt as uncomfortably as a drug addict wears a suit.

“Why would I be surprised,” Suparwita said, “when I knew you would return?”

“I had nowhere else to go. Back in the States I’m a wanted man. I’m a fugitive now, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“I meant for you to be an outcast,” Suparwita said. “The two are not the same.”

Perlis sneered. “You think you can punish me?”

“I have no need of punishing you.”

“I should have killed you when I had the chance, years ago.”

Suparwita regarded him with his large liquid eyes. “It wasn’t enough that you killed Holly?”

Perlis appeared startled. “You have no proof of that.”

“I don’t need what you call proof. I know what happened.”

Perlis took a step toward him. “Which is what, exactly?”

“You followed Holly Marie Moreau back here from Europe. What you were doing with her there I can’t presume to know.”

“Why not?” The sneer hadn’t left Perlis’s face. “You claim to know everything else.”

“Why did you follow Holly back here, Mr. Perlis?”

Perlis kept his mouth shut, then he shrugged as if feeling that it no longer mattered. “She had come into possession of something of mine.”

“And how did that happen?”

“She stole it, goddammit! I came back here to retrieve what was mine. I had every right—”

“To kill her?”

“I was going to say that I had every right to take back what she had stolen. Her death was an accident.”

“You killed her without purpose,” Suparwita said.

“I got it back from her. I got what I wanted.”

“But of what use was it? Did you ever crack its secret?”

Perlis remained silent. If he knew how to mourn, he would have done so already.

“This is why you’ve come back here,” Suparwita said, “not just to Bali, but to the very spot where you murdered Holly.”

Perlis suddenly experienced a flicker of anger. “Are you a policeman now as well as a holy man or whatever it is you call yourself?”

Suparwita produced the ghost of a smile that held nothing for Perlis to cling to. “I think it’s fair to say that what Holly took from you, you yourself stole.”

Perlis went white. “How could you possibly… how could you possibly know that?” he whispered.

“Holly told me. How else?”

“Holly didn’t know that, only I knew it.” He tossed his head contemptuously. “Anyway, I didn’t come here to be interrogated.”

“Do you know now why you came?” Suparwita’s eyes burned so brightly their fire was scarcely dimmed by the sun.

“No.”

“But you do.” Suparwita raised an arm, pointing to the bulk of Mount Agung rising in the stone archway.

Perlis turned to look, shading his eyes from the glare, but when he turned back Suparwita had vanished. The people were still at their endless praying, the priest was absorbed in God alone knew what, and the man beside him was counting his money in a mesmerizingly slow, even rhythm.

Then, as if without his own volition, Perlis found himself walking toward Mount Agung, the carved stone gate, and the top of the stairs where, years before, Holly Marie Moreau had been sent to her death.

Perlis awoke with a shout of false denial trapped in his throat. Despite the air-conditioning of his room, he was sweating. He had bolted to a sitting position from a deep sleep or, more accurately, from the deep dream of Suparwita and Pura Lempuyang. He felt the pain around his pumping heart that always accompanied the aftermath of these dreams.

For a moment, he couldn’t recall where he was. He’d been on the run ever since he’d ordered the Iranian oil fields set on fire. What had gone wrong? He’d asked himself that painful question a thousand times and finally, he was left with one answer: Bardem had failed to predict this outcome because of the introduction of two almost identical variables outside the million parameters with which it had been programmed—Bourne and Arkadin. In the world of finance, the appearance of a game-changing event that no one was anticipating was called a Black Swan. In the hermetic world of esoteric software programmers, a circumstance outside the parameters that crashed the program was called Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. For one Shiva to appear was rare enough, but two was unthinkable.

Days and nights had passed as if in one of Perlis’s dreams; often now he was unsure as to which was a dream and which waking life. In any event, nothing seemed real anymore, not the food he ate, the places in which he stayed, the shallow sleep he managed to snatch. Then yesterday he’d arrived in Bali, and for the first time since the Black Hawk lifted off from the ruins of Pinprick, something changed inside him. His work at Black River had been his family, his comrades—he was able to see nothing beyond its parameters. Now, without it, he had ceased to exist. But no, it was far worse than that, because come to think of it, for all the time he’d worked at Black River, he’d made himself cease to exist. He’d reveled in all the roles he’d had to play because they took him further and further away from himself, a person he’d never liked or had much use for. It was the real Noah Perlis—pathetic weakling that he was, not heard from since his childhood—who had fallen in love with Moira. Joining Black River was like donning armor, a protection against the weakling full of feelings that lurked like a spineless wretch inside him. Now that he no longer had Black River, he’d been stripped of that armor, and his little pink mewling self was exposed. A switch had been thrown, from positive to negative, and all the energy that used to come to him was flowing out of him.

He swung his legs out of bed and walked to the window. What was it about this place? He’d been to many paradisiacal islands in his time—spots strewn all across the globe in diamond-like glitter. But Bali seemed to throb against his eyes with an ethereal presence. He was a man who did not believe in the ethereal. Even as a child, he’d been pragmatic. He had spent virtually his entire adult life isolated, without family or friends; a situation entirely of his own making, since both friends and family had the habit of betraying you without even knowing it. Early on in his life, he’d discovered that if you felt nothing you couldn’t get hurt. Nevertheless, he had been hurt, not only by Moira.

He showered and dressed, then went out into the moist heat and the glare. The sky was precisely as cloudless as it had been in his dream. In the far distance, he could see the blue bulk of Mount Agung, a place of eternal mystery to him, and of fear, because it seemed to him that something he didn’t want to know about himself dwelled on that mountain. This thing—whatever it was—drew him as powerfully as it repelled him. He tried to regain some semblance of equilibrium, to push down the emotions that had erupted inside him, but he couldn’t. The fucking horses had bolted from the stable and without the iron discipline of Black River, without his armor, there was no getting them back in. He stared down at his hands, which shook as violently as if he had the DTs.

What’s happening to me? he thought. But he knew that wasn’t the right question to ask.

“Why did you come?” That was the right question, the one Suparwita had asked him in his dream. From what he’d read on the subject all the people in your dreams were aspects of yourself. This being so, he had been asking himself the question. Why had he returned to Bali? When he’d left after Holly Marie’s death he was certain that he’d never return. And

yet, here he was. Moira had hurt him, it was true, but what had happened with Holly had hurt him most of all.

He ate a meal without tasting it, and by the time he had reached his destination, he could not have said what it was. His stomach felt neither full nor empty. Like the rest of him, it seemed to have ceased to exist.

Holly Marie Moreau was buried in a small sema—cemetery—southwest of the village where she’d been raised. As a rule, modern-day Balinese cremated their dead, but there were pockets of people—original Balinese like those in Tenganan, those who weren’t Hindu—who did not. Balinese believed that seaward-west was the direction of hell, so sema were always built—when they were built at all—to the seaward-west of the village. Here, in the south of Bali, that was southwest. The Balinese were terrified of cemeteries, certain that the uncremated bodies were the undead, wandering around at night, being raised from their graves by evil spirits, led by Rudra, the god of evil. Consequently, the place was utterly abandoned—even, it appeared, by birds and wildlife.

Thick stands of trees were everywhere, casting the sema in deepest shadow, so that it seemed lost in the inky blues and greens of a perpetual twilight. Apart from one grave site, the place had a distinctly unkempt aspect that bordered on the disreputable. This particular grave site bore the headstone of Holly Marie Moreau.

For what seemed an eternity, Perlis stood staring at the slab of marble engraved with her name and dates of birth and death. Beneath the impersonal information was one word: beloved.

As with whatever was waiting for him on Mount Agung, he felt an inexorable pull and repulsion toward her grave. He walked slowly and deliberately, his pace seemingly dictated by the beat of his heart. All at once, he stopped, having glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a shadow darker than the others flit from tree to tree. Was it something or nothing, a trick of the crepuscular light? He thought of the gods and demons said to inhabit semas and laughed to himself. Then he saw the shadow, more clearly this time. He could not make out the face but saw the long, streaming hair of a young woman or a girl. The undead, he told himself, as a continuation of the joke. He was quite close to Holly’s grave, practically standing on top of it, and he looked around, concerned enough to draw his gun, wondering if the sema was as deserted as it appeared.