The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

“Ivan, Ivan Volkin,” he said. “It’s Jason Bourne, Boris’s friend.”

“I know whose friend you are. I’m old, not senile. Besides, you caused enough mayhem when you were here three months ago to remain indelible in the mind of an Alzheimer’s patient.”

“I’m trying to get in touch with Boris.”

“What else is new?” Volkin said tartly. “Why don’t you try calling him instead of bothering me?”

“I wouldn’t be calling you if he answered his cell.”

“Ah, then you don’t have his satellite phone number.”

Which meant, Bourne thought, that Boris had returned to Africa. “You mean he’s back in Timbuktu?”

“¿Timbuktu?” Volkin said. “Where did you get the idea Boris had been in Timbuktu?”

“From Boris himself.”

“Hah! No, no, no. Not Timbuktu. Khartoum.”

Bourne leaned against the glass chilled by the fierce air-conditioning of the lounge. He felt as if the ground were sliding out from under his feet. Why did all strands of the spider’s web lead to Khartoum?

“What’s Boris doing in Khartoum?”

“Something he doesn’t want you, his good friend, to know about.” Volkin laughed throatily. “Obviously.”

Bourne took a stab in the dark. “But you know.”

“Me? My dear Bourne, I’m retired from the world of the grupperovka. Who’s got the bad memory, me or you?”

There was something very wrong with this conversation, and a moment later Bourne knew what it was. Surely, with all his contacts, Volkin must have heard of Bourne’s “death.” And yet there was no surprise in his voice when Bourne announced himself, no awkward questions being asked. Which meant he already knew Bourne had survived the attack on Bali. That meant Boris knew.

He tried another tack. “Do you know a man named Bogdan Machin?”

“The Torturer. Of course I know him.”

“He’s dead,” Bourne said.

“No one’s going to mourn, believe me.”

“He was sent to Seville,” Bourne said, “to kill me.”

“Aren’t you already dead?” Volkin said with an ironic twist.

“You knew I wasn’t.”

“Me, I still have a couple of brain cells left, which is more than could be said for the late, unlamented Bogdan Machin.”

“Who told you? Boris?”

“Boris? My dear fellow, Boris went on a weeklong drunk when he heard—through me, I might add—that you’d been killed. Now, of course, he knows better.”

“So Boris wasn’t the one who shot me.”

The explosion of laughter obliged Bourne to hold the phone away from his ear for a moment.

When Volkin had calmed down, he said, “What an absurd notion! You Americans! Where on earth did you come up with that bit of insanity?”

“Someone in Seville showed me surveillance photos of Boris in a Munich beer hall with the American secretary of defense.”

“Really? On what planet would that happen?”

“I know it sounds crazy but I heard a tape of them talking. Secretary Halliday ordered my death and Boris agreed to it.”

“Boris is your friend.” Volkin’s tone had turned deadly serious. “He’s Russian; friendships don’t come easily to us, and they’re never betrayed.”

“It was a barter,” Bourne persisted. “Boris said he wanted Abdulla Khoury, the head of the Eastern Brotherhood, killed in return.”

“It’s true Abdulla Khoury was killed recently, but I assure you that Boris would have no reason to want him dead.”

“Are you certain?”

“Boris has been working on anti-narcotics, yes? You know this or, at least, must have surmised as much. You’re a clever one, hah! The Eastern Brotherhood was funding its Black Legion terrorists through a drug pipeline that ran from Colombia to Mexico to Munich. Boris had someone inside the cartel who provided him with the other end of the pipeline, namely Gustavo Moreno, a Colombian drug lord living in a vast hacienda outside Mexico City. Boris attacked the hacienda with his elite team of FSB-2 men and shut Moreno down. But the really big prize—Moreno’s laptop with the details of every inch of the pipeline—eluded him. What happened to it? Boris spent two days searching every inch of the compound, to no avail, because before he died Moreno insisted it was in the hacienda. It wasn’t, but Boris being Boris caught a whiff of a strange scent.”

“Which eventually brought him to Khartoum.”

Volkin deliberately ignored the comment. Perhaps he thought the answer was self-evident. Instead, he said: “Do you have the date this alleged meeting between Boris and the American secretary took place?”

“It was stamped on the photos,” Bourne said. When he told Volkin, the Russian said emphatically, “Boris was here with me for three days, including that date. I don’t know who was sitting down with the American secretary of defense, Bourne, but as sure as Russia is corrupt it wasn’t our mutual friend Boris Karpov.”

“Who was it then?”

“A chameleon, certainly. Do you know any, Bourne?”

“Besides myself, I do. But, unlike me, he’s dead.”

“You seem certain of that.”

“I saw him fall from a great height into the water off the Port of Los Angeles.”

“That is not the same as death. By God, you, of all people, should know,” Volkin said.

A cold chill swept down Bourne’s spine.

“How many lives have you had, Bourne? Boris tells me many. I think it must be the same with Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”

“Are you telling me that Arkadin didn’t drown? That he survived?”

“A black cat like Arkadin has nine lives, my friend, possibly even more.”

So it was Arkadin who’d tried to kill him on Bali. Though the picture had suddenly become clearer, there was still something wrong, something missing.

“Are you sure of all this, Volkin?”

“Arkadin is now the new head of the Eastern Brotherhood, how’s that for being sure?”

“All right, but why would he hire the Torturer when he seems to want so desperately to kill me himself?”

“He wouldn’t,” Volkin said. “The Torturer is much too unreliable, especially against a foe like you.”

“Then who hired him?”

“That, Bourne, is a question even I cannot answer.”

Having decided to take to the field himself in an effort to find the missing Metro police officers, Peter Marks was waiting in front of the bank of elevators to take him to the ground floor when an elevator door slid open. The only person inside was the enigmatic Frederick Willard, up until three months ago the Old Man’s mole inside the NSA’s Virginia safe house. The older man was, as usual, dapper, urbane, utterly self-contained. He wore an impeccable gunmetal-gray, chalk-striped three-piece suit over a crisp white shirt and a conservative tie.

“Hello, Willard,” Marks said as he stepped into the elevator. “I thought you were on leave.”

“I got back several days ago.”

From Marks’s point of view, Willard was remarkably well suited to play the role of steward in the safe house, evincing an old-school professorial air, musty and rather boring. It wasn’t difficult to see how he melted into the woodwork. Being invisible made it so much easier to eavesdrop on intimate conversations.

The door slid shut and they descended.

“I imagine it’s been difficult getting back into the swing of things,” Marks said, more to be polite to the older man than anything else.

“Frankly, it was like I was never gone.” Willard glanced over at Marks with a grimace, as if he’d just come from the surgeon’s office and his agony was of such magnitude that he could not hide it. “How did your interview with the president go?”

Surprised that Willard knew about it, Marks said, “Well enough, I suppose.”

“Not that it matters, you’re not getting the post.”

“It figures. Dick Symes was the logical front-

runner.”

“Symes is out, too.”

Marks’s acceptance turned to consternation. “How do you know that?”

“Because I know who did get the post and, fuck us all, it isn’t anyone from inside CI.”

“But that makes no sense.”

“On the contrary, it makes perfect sense,” Willard said, “if your name happens to be Bud Halliday.”

Marks turned toward the older man. “What’s happened, Willard? Come on, man, out with it!”

“Halliday has used Veronica Hart’s sudden death to his advantage. He’s proposed his own man, M. Errol Danziger, and after meeting with Danziger the president’s agreed.”

“Danziger, the NSA’s current deputy director of signals intelligence for analysis and production?”

“That’s the one.”

“But he knows nothing about CI!” Marks cried.

“I believe,” Willard said with some asperity, “that’s precisely the point.”

The doors opened and the two men stepped out into the marble-and-glass reception area, as chilly as it was vast.

“Under the circumstances, I think we need to talk,” Willard said. “But not here.”

“Certainly not.” Marks was about to propose a meeting for later, but then changed his mind. Who better than this mysterious veteran with a thousand and one sources, who knew all of Alex Conklin’s back-channel intelligence secrets, to help him find the missing cops? “I’m off on an investigation in the field. Care to join me?”

A smile creased Willard’s face. “Ah, me, it’ll be just like I’ve dreamed!”

When Arkadin approached Joškar, she spat at him, then turned her face away. All her four children—the three girls and the dead son—were clustered around her like foam surrounding a basalt outcropping rising from the sea. They, the living, little ones, rose up as he approached as if to protect her from an assault or an unwanted intrusion.

Tearing off one shirtsleeve, Arkadin leaned in and dabbed the blood off her face. It was when he touched the point of her chin to turn her face back toward him that he saw the deep bruises on her face, the welts on her neck. Rage at Oserov flared anew inside him, but then he noticed that the welts and bruises weren’t recent—he was certain they hadn’t been made in the last several days. If Oserov hadn’t caused them then, in all likelihood, her husband, Lev Antonin, had.

Her eyes met his for a moment, and in them he saw a bleak reflection of the bedroom upstairs, filled with both her intimate scent and her abject solitude.

“Joškar,” he said, “do you know who I am?”

“My son,” she said, hugging him to her breast. “My son.”

“We’re going to get you out of here, Joškar, you and your children. You don’t have to be afraid of Lev Antonin anymore.”

She stared at him, as dumbfounded as if he’d told her she was getting her lost youth back. The crying of her youngest girl brought her around. She looked at Tarkanian who, with her car keys in one hand, had slung Oserov over his shoulder.

“He’s coming with us? The man who killed my Yasha?”

Arkadin said nothing, because the answer was clear.

When she turned back to him, a light had gone out in her eyes. “Then my Yasha comes, too.”

Tarkanian, bent over like a coal miner, was already carrying his heavy load to the front door. “Leonid Danilovich, come on. The dead have no place among the living.”

But when Arkadin took Joškar’s arm, she snatched it away.

“What about that piece of filth? The moment he killed my Yasha he died, too.”

With a grunt, Tarkanian opened the door. “We don’t have time for negotiation,” he said brusquely.

“I agree.” Arkadin took Yasha into his arms. “The boy comes with us.”

He said it in such a tone that Tarkanian gave him another of his penetrating looks. Then the Muscovite shrugged. “She’s your responsibility, my friend. All of them are your responsibility now.”

They trooped out to the car, Joškar herding her three confused and shivering daughters. Tarkanian placed Oserov in the trunk and tied the lid to the bumper with a length of twine he’d found in a kitchen drawer so that his compatriot would have fresh air. Then he opened the two doors on the near side, and went around to slide behind the wheel.

“I want to hold my son,” Joškar said as she urged her daughters into the backseat.

“Better that I take him up front,” Arkadin said. “The three girls need your undivided attention.” When she hesitated, pushed the hair back from her son’s forehead, he said, “I’ll take good care of him, Joškar. Don’t worry. Yasha will be right here with me.”

He got into the front passenger’s seat and, with the boy cradled in one arm, closed the door. He noted that they had almost a full tank of gas. Tarkanian fired the ignition, let out the clutch, and put the car in gear. They took off.

“Get that thing off me,” Tarkanian said as they took a corner at speed and Yasha’s head brushed against his arm.

“Show some fucking respect,” Arkadin snapped. “The boy can’t hurt you.”

“You’re as loony as a tyolka in heat,” Tarkanian retorted.

“Who’s got a friend locked in the trunk?”

Tarkanian honked the horn mightily at a truck lumbering in front of him. Maneuvering around, he braved oncoming traffic to pass the huge vehicle, ignoring the angry blare of horns and the near misses as cars coming the other way scrambled to get out of his way.

When they were back on their side of the road, Tarkanian glanced over at Arkadin. “You’ve got a soft spot for this kid, huh.”

Arkadin did not respond. Though he was staring straight ahead, his gaze had turned inward. He was acutely aware of Yasha’s weight, even more his presence, which had opened a door into his own childhood. When he looked down at Yasha’s face it was as if he were looking at himself, carrying his own death with him like a familiar companion. He wasn’t frightened of this boy, as Tarkanian clearly was. On the contrary, it seemed important for him to hold Yasha, as if he could keep safe whatever remained of a human being, especially such a young and innocent one, after death. Why did he feel that way? And then a murmuring from the backseat compelled him to lean over to peer at the reflections in the rearview mirror. He saw Joškar with her three young daughters gathered around her, her arms encompassing them, sheltering them from further harm, fear, and indignities. She was telling them a story filled with bright fairies, talking foxes, and clever elves. The love and devotion in her voice was like an alien communication from a distant, unexplored galaxy.

All of a sudden a profound wave of sorrow swept through him, so that he bent his head over Yasha’s thin blue eyelids, as if in prayer. In that moment, the boy’s death and the part of his childhood his mother had torn from his breast merged, became one, indistinguishable both in his febrile mind and his damaged soul.

Humphry Bamber was waiting anxiously for Moira when she returned to Lamontierre’s brownstone.

“So, how did it go?” he said, as he ushered her into the living room. “Where’s the laptop?”

When she handed him the wrecked disk, he turned it over and over. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I wish I was,” Moira said wearily.

She sat heavily on the sofa while he went to fetch her a drink. When he returned, he sat opposite her. His face looked haggard and drawn, the first signs of constant anxiety.

“These disks are utterly useless,” he said, “you realize that?”

She nodded and sipped at her drink. “Just like the cell I got off the guy who pulled the hard drive from my laptop. It was a burner.”

“A what?”

“A disposable cell phone you can buy in practically any drug- or convenience store. It has a set number of pre-paid minutes. Criminals use them and discard them daily; that way their conversations can’t be tapped and their whereabouts can’t be traced.”

She waved her own words away. “Not that it matters now. Where tap

ping into Noah’s computer is concerned, we’re essentially screwed.”

“Not necessarily.” Bamber hunched forward. “At first, when you left I thought I’d go out of my mind. I kept replaying you pulling me out of the Buick, seeing Hart behind the wheel, and then the whole thing exploded to hell.” His eyes slid away. “My stomach rebelled. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing because while I was splashing cold water on my face I got the idea.”

Moira put her empty glass down beside the wreck of the hard drive disks. “What idea?”

“Okay, it occurred to me that each time I deliver a new iteration of Bardem, Noah insists that I download it directly to his laptop.”

“Security reasons, I’m sure. So?”

“Well, in order for the program to install correctly, he’s got to shut down all other programs.”

Moira shook her head. “I’m still not following.”

Bamber drummed his fingers for a moment as he thought of a suitable example to illustrate his point. “Okay, you know how when you install some programs, the install shield asks you to shut down all programs including your virus protection?” When she nodded, he went on. “That’s to ensure they load properly. It’s the same with Bardem, only to the nth degree. It’s so complex and so sensitive that it needs a completely clear field, as it were, to install properly. So here’s my thought. I could contact Noah and tell him I found a bug in his current version of Bardem, that I need to send him an update. Usually, the new version overwrites the previous one, but with a bit of work I think I can upload his version while I download the new one.”

Moira, suddenly galvanized, sat up straight. “Then we’ll have everything that’s in his program, including the scenarios he’s been running. We’ll know precisely what he’s planning, and where!”

She jumped up and kissed Bamber on the cheek. “That’s brilliant!”

“Plus, I could embed a tracer in the new version that would let us track what he’s inputting in real time.”

She knew just how clever—and paranoid—Noah was. “Could he find out about the tracer?”

“Anything’s possible,” Bamber said, “but it’s highly unlikely.”

“Then let’s not get too cute.”