The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

He continued to stare down the three steep staircases with the undulating dragon banisters. He tried to remember that day: if he’d rushed to this spot, if the woman was already a bloody heap far away as he flew down the steps. He strained to recall anything about the incident, but his mind was enclosed by a gray fog, thick as the stone dragons, fierce and implacable guardians of the temple. Was the fog protecting him from the terrible event here?

The pain in his chest, his constant companion in the aftermath of the shooting, accelerated, spreading out into his entire torso.

His face must have gone gray because Suparwita said, “This way.”

They made their way from the lintel, from the chasm of the past, and walked back onto the temple plaza and into the cool shade of a towering wall into which was carved an army of demons being opposed by the local dragon spirits.

Bourne sat and drank water. The healer stood, hands folded together, waiting patiently. Bourne was reminded of what he liked so much about Moira—no fussing, no coddling, just no-nonsense responses.

At length, Suparwita said, “You came because of Holly. She’d heard about me, I suppose.”

As he breathed into the pain, taking long, deep, controlled breaths, he said, “Tell me what happened.”

“There was a shadow over her, as if she’d brought something horrible with her.” Suparwita’s liquid eyes rested gently on Bourne’s face. “She’d always been placid, she said. No, that’s the wrong word—lacking in affect, that’s better. But now she was terrified. She was up at night, she started at loud noises, she bit her nails to the quick. She told me that she never sat near windows. When you went to a restaurant she’d insist on a table in the rear, where she could look out at the rest of the room. Then you said that even in the shadows, you could see that her hands shook. She’d tried to hide it by holding her glass in a death grip, but you would see it when she reached for a fork or pushed her plate away.”

The soft thrum of an airplane engine could be heard briefly interrupting the bird chatter. Then all was still again. On an adjacent mountainside, thin streamers of smoke rose from the burn-off fires at the periphery of the rice paddies.

Bourne gathered himself. “Perhaps she had somehow come unhinged.”

The healer nodded uncertainly. “Possibly. But I can tell you that her terror came from a real source. I think you knew that, too, because you weren’t humoring her, you were trying your best to help her.”

“So she could have been running from something or someone. What happened next?”

“I cleansed her,” Suparwita said. “She was entangled with demons.”

“Yet she died.”

“And so did you—almost.”

Bourne thought about Moira’s insistence that they see the healer; he thought about Suparwita saying, “All this has happened before, and it will happen again.” Death following on the heels of life. “Are you saying that the two incidents are somehow connected?”

“That wouldn’t be credible.” Suparwita sat beside him. “But Shiva was here then, and Shiva is here now. We ignore these signs at our peril.”

He was the last patient Benjamin Firth was scheduled to see that day. He was a tall, cadaverously thin New Zealander, with yellow skin and feverish eyes. He wasn’t from Manggis or any of the surrounding villages—a small enough area—because Firth knew them all. Yet he seemed familiar and when he gave his name as Ian Bowles, Firth recalled him coming in twice or three times over the past several months with massive migraines. Today he complained of stomach and bowel problems, so Firth had him lie down on the examining table.

As he took his vitals, he said, “How’re your migraines?”

“Fine,” Bowles said absently, and then in a more focused tone, “Better.”

After palpating his stomach and abdomen, Firth said, “I can’t find anything wrong with you. I’ll just do a blood workup and in a couple of days—”

“I require information,” Bowles said softly.

Firth stood very still. “I beg your pardon.”

Bowles stared up at the ceiling as if deciphering the shifting patterns of light. “Forget the vampire tactics, I’m right as rain.”

The doctor shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

Bowles sighed. Then sat up so abruptly, he startled Firth. He grabbed Firth’s wrist with a horribly fierce grip. “Who’s the patient you’ve had here for the last three months?”

“What patient?”

Bowles clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Hey, Doc, I didn’t come here for my health.” He grinned. “You’ve got a patient stashed away here and I want to know about him.”

“Why? What do you care?”

The New Zealander jerked even harder on Firth’s wrist, pulling the doctor closer to him. “You operate here without interference, but all good things come to an end.” His voice lowered significantly. “Now listen up, you idiot. You’re wanted for negligent homicide by the Perth police.”

“I was drunk,” Firth whispered. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You operated on a patient while under the influence, Doc, and he died. That’s it in a nutshell.” He shook Firth violently. “Isn’t it?”

The doctor closed his eyes and whispered, “Yes.”

“So?”

“I have nothing to tell you.”

Bowles moved to slide off the table. “Then off we go to the cops, bud. Your life is toast.”

Firth, trying to squirm away, said, “I don’t know anything.”

“Never gave you a name, did he?”

“Adam,” Firth said. “Adam Stone.”

“That’s what he said? Adam Stone.”

Firth nodded. “I confirmed it when I saw his passport.”

Bowles dug in a pocket, produced a cell phone. “Doc, here’s all you have to do in order to stay out of jail for life.” He held out the cell. “Get me a picture of this Adam Stone. A good, clear one of his face.”

Firth licked his lips. His mouth was so dry he could scarcely speak. “And if I do this you’ll leave me alone?”

Bowles winked. “Bank on it, Doc.”

Firth took the cell with a hollow feeling in his chest. What else was he to do? He had no expertise with these kinds of people. He tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that at least he hadn’t divulged Jason Bourne’s real name, but that gesture would become meaningless the moment he gave this man Bourne’s photo.

Bowles jumped off the table, but he still hadn’t let go of Firth’s wrist. “Don’t get any stupid ideas, Doc. You tell anyone about our little arrangement and sure as I’m standing here someone will put a bullet in the back of your head, follow?”

Firth nodded mechanically. A numbness had spread through him, rooting him to the spot.

Bowles let him go at last. “Glad you could make room for me, Doc,” he said in a louder voice for anyone who might be around. “Tomorrow, same time. You’ll have the test results by then, isn’t that right?”

8

NAGORNO-KARABAKH was in the west of Azerbaijan, a hotly contested area of the country ever since Joseph Stalin tried to ethnically cleanse this part of the former Soviet Union of Armenians. The advantage for Arkadin of staging a strike force in Azerbaijan was that it bordered on the northwestern edge of Iran. The advantage of choosing this particular area was threefold: It was rugged terrain, identical to that of Iran; it was sparsely populated; and the people here knew him because he’d made more than a dozen runs for Dimitri Maslov and then Semion Icoupov, trading semi-automatic rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, and so forth to the Armenian tribal leaders who were waging a continuous guerrilla war against the Azerbaijani regime, just as they had against the Soviets until the fall of the Soviet empire. In exchange, Arkadin received packets of brownish morphine bricks of exceedingly high quality, which he transported overland to the port city of Baku, where they were loaded onto a merchant ship that would take them due north across the Caspian Sea to Russia.

&nbs

p; All in all, Nagorno-Karabakh was as secure a place as Arkadin could possibly find. He and his men would be left alone, and the tribesmen would protect him with their lives. Without the weapons provided by him and the people he worked for they would have been beaten into the dry red dirt of their homeland, exterminated like vermin. Armenians had settled here, between the Kura and Araxes rivers, during Roman times and had remained here ever since. Arkadin understood their fierce homeland pride, which was why he’d decided that Nagorno-Karabakh was the place to commence trading. It was a politically savvy move as well. Since the weapons sold to the Armenian tribesmen helped destabilize the country and thus gave it a rude shove back toward Moscow’s orbit, the Kremlin was all too happy to turn a blind eye to the trades.

Now his strike force was going to train here.

It was hardly a surprise that when he arrived the leaders greeted him like a conquering hero.

Not that this homecoming of sorts was simply pleasant; nothing in Arkadin’s life was simple. Possibly he had misremembered the landscape or perhaps something had changed inside him. Either way, the moment he drove into the Nagorno-Karabakh area it was as if he’d been hurled back into Nizhny Tagil.

The camp had been set up precisely to his specifications: Ten tents made of camouflage material ringed a large oval compound. To the east was the landing strip where his plane had touched down. At the other end of it was a short L-shaped extension on which was sitting an Air Afrika Transport cargo plane. The tents had an aspect he hadn’t anticipated: They reminded him of the ring of high-security prisons that girdled Nizhny Tagil, the town in which he’d been born and raised, if you could call living with psychotic parents being raised.

But again, memory was not a simple matter. Twenty minutes after arriving, having entered one of the tents that had been set up as his command station, he was inspecting the impressive array of weaponry he’d had transshipped: AK-47 Lancasters, AR15 Bushmasters and LWRC SRT 6.8mm assault rifles, World War II US Marine M2A1-7 flamethrowers, armor-piercing grenades, shoulder-fired FIM-92 Stinger missiles, mobile howitzers, and, the key to his mission, three AH-64 Apache helicopters loaded with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles with specially made dual-charge nose cones of depleted uranium, unconditionally guaranteed by the seller to penetrate even the most heavily armored vehicle.

Dressed in camo fatigues, armed with a metal baton on one hip and an American Colt .45 on the other, Arkadin emerged from the largest of the tents and was met by Dimitri Maslov, the head of the Kazanskaya, the most powerful family of the Moscow mob. Maslov looked like a street fighter who was calculating how to pin you in the least amount of time and with the maximum pain. His hands were large, thick, and broad, and looked like they could wring the neck of anyone and anything. His muscular legs ended in outlandishly dainty feet, as if they’d been grafted on from someone else’s body. He’d grown his hair since the last time Arkadin had seen him and, dressed in lightweight camo fatigues, had something of the anarchic air of Che Guevara.

“Leonid Danilovich,” Maslov said with false heartiness, “I see you’ve wasted no time in putting our war matériel to use. Well, good, it cost a fucking fortune.”

With Maslov were two no-neck bodyguards, their fatigues sporting immense sweat rings, clearly out of their element in this hot climate.

Looking past the human weapons, Arkadin eyed the grupperovka chief with a kind of impersonal distrust. Ever since he’d defected from being the Kazanskaya’s main enforcer to working exclusively for Semion Icoupov, he wasn’t sure where he stood with the man. That they were doing business now meant nothing; a combination of compelling circumstance and powerful partner thrust them together. Arkadin had the impression that they were two pit bulls deciding how to finish the other off. This was borne out when Maslov said, “I still haven’t gotten over the loss of my Mexican pipeline. I can’t help feeling that if you’d been available, I wouldn’t have lost it.”

“Now I believe you’re exaggerating, Dimitri Ilyinovich.”

“But instead you dropped out of sight,” Maslov continued, deliberately ignoring Arkadin. “You were unreachable.”

Arkadin thought he’d better pay attention now. Did Maslov suspect that he had taken Gustavo Moreno’s laptop, a prize that Arkadin was certain Maslov thought was rightfully his?

Arkadin thought it best to change the subject. “Why are you here?”

“I always like to see my investments firsthand. Besides, Triton, the man coordinating the entire operation, wanted a firsthand report on your progress.”

“Triton need only have called me,” Arkadin said.

“He’s a cautious man, our Triton, or so I’ve heard. I’ve never met him myself—frankly, I don’t know who he is, only that he’s a man with deep pockets and the wherewithal to mount this ambitious project. And don’t forget, Arkadin, it was I who recommended you to Triton. ‘There’s no one better to train these men,’ I told him in no uncertain terms.”

Arkadin thanked Maslov, even though privately it pained him to do so. On the other side of the ledger, it warmed him to know that Maslov had no idea who Triton was or who he worked for, whereas he himself knew everything. Maslov’s amassed millions had made him overconfident and sloppy, which in Arkadin’s opinion made him ripe for the slaughter. That would come, he told himself, in time.

When Maslov had phoned him with the proposition laid out by Triton, he’d at first refused. Now that he was the power behind the Eastern Brotherhood he neither needed nor wanted to hire himself out as a freelancer. When Maslov’s flattery, describing Arkadin and the Black Legion’s crucial part in the plan, had failed to move him, the twenty-million-dollar fee was dangled in front of his face. Still, he hesitated, until he’d learned that the target was Iran, the objective to overthrow the current regime. Then the dazzling prospect of Iran’s oil pipeline danced through his head: untold billions, untold power. This prize took his breath away. He was canny enough to know, though Maslov was careful not to mention it, that Triton’s aim must be the pipeline, too. His endgame was to double-cross Triton at the last minute, to snatch the pipeline for himself, but to do that he needed to properly assess his enemy’s resources. He needed to know who Triton was.

He saw someone emerge from the interior of the jeep that he’d been warned by tribal lookouts had brought Maslov and his thugs here. At first the heat rising from the freshly laid tarmac obscured the man’s face. Not that it mattered; Arkadin recognized that easy, loping gait, so deliberately like Clint Eastwood’s in A Fistful of Dollars.

“What’s he doing here?” Arkadin struggled to keep the sharp edge out of his voice.

“Who? Oserov?” Maslov said in all innocence. “Vylacheslav Germanovich is now my second in command.” He shook his head ingenuously. “Did I fail to mention that? I would have if I’d been able to get hold of you to protect my Mexican interests.” He shrugged. “But, alas…”

Oserov was smiling now, in that half-ironic, half-condescending expression that had been tattooed into Arkadin’s brain in Nizhny Tagil. Was graduating Oxford a license to act superior to every other grupperovka member in Russia? Arkadin didn’t think so.

“Arkadin, really?” Oserov said in British English. “Bloody shocking you’re still alive.”

Arkadin hit him hard on the point of the chin. Oserov, that vile smile still stitched to his face, was already on his knees, his eyes rolling, by the time Maslov’s bodyguards stepped in.

Maslov held up one hand to stay them. Nevertheless, his face was dark and congested with anger. “You shouldn’t have done that, Leonid Danilovich.”

“You shouldn’t have brought him.”

Unmindful of the weapons drawn on him, Arkadin knelt beside Oserov. “So here you are in the blazing Azerbaijani sun, so far from home. How does it feel?”

Oserov’s eyes were bloodshot and a thin trail of pink drool descended like a strand of a spider’s web from one corner of his mouth, but he never stopped smiling. All at once, he reached out and grabbed Arkadin by his s

hirtfront, jerking him closer.

“You’ll live to regret this insult, Leonid Danilovich, now that Mischa is no longer alive to protect you.”

Arkadin sprang away and rose to his feet. “I told you what I’d do to him if I saw him again.”

Maslov’s eyes narrowed. His face still had that congested look. “That was a long time ago.”

“Not for me,” Arkadin said.

Now he had made his stand, made an unequivocal statement that Maslov couldn’t ignore. Nothing would be the same between them, which came as a distinct relief to Arkadin, who had the captive’s innate horror of inaction. To him, change was life. Dimitri Maslov had always thought of Arkadin as a workman, someone he hired and then forgot about. That perception needed to change. Maslov had to be made aware that the two men were now equals. Arkadin didn’t have the luxury of time to finesse his new, elevated status.

As Oserov regained his feet, Maslov threw his head back and laughed, but he sobered quickly enough. “Get back to the car, Vylacheslav Germanovich,” he said under his breath to Oserov.

Oserov was about to say something, but changed his mind. With a murderous look at Arkadin, he turned on his heel and stalked away.

“So, you’re a big man now,” Maslov said in an easy tone that didn’t quite mask the undertone of menace in his voice.

Which meant, Arkadin understood, I knew you when you were nothing but a ragged fugitive from Nizhny Tagil, so if you mean to come after me, don’t.

“There are no big men,” Arkadin replied with equanimity, “only big ideas.”

The two men stared at each other in total silence. Then, as one, they began to laugh. They laughed so hard, the bodyguards looked at each other questioningly and holstered their handguns. Meanwhile, Arkadin and Maslov punched each other lightly, then embraced as brothers. But for Arkadin, he knew he had to be even more wary of a knife being slipped between his ribs or a bit of cyanide in his toothpaste.