The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

Today I woke up thinking of Soraya Moore,” Willard said. “I was thinking that she must still be grieving over your death.”

It was just after sunrise and, as he did every morning at this time, Bourne was sitting through Dr. Firth’s thorough and tedious examination.

Bourne, who had come to know Willard quite well in the three months the two had been together, said, “I haven’t tried to contact her.”

Willard nodded. “That’s good.” He was small and dapper, with gray eyes and a face that could assume any expression with an unconscious ease.

“Until I find out who tried to kill me three months ago and I deal with him, I’m determined to keep Soraya out of the loop.” It was not that Bourne didn’t trust her—on the contrary—but because of her ties to CI and the people with whom she worked, he had decided from the first that the burden of truth would be unfair for her to carry with her to CI every day.

“I went back to Tenganan but I could find no trace of the bullet,” Willard said. “I’ve tried everything else I can think of to discover who shot you, but so far no luck. Whoever he was covered his tracks with commendable ability.”

Frederick Willard was a man who had worn a mask for so long that it had become part of him. Bourne had asked Moira to contact him because Willard was a man for whom secrets were sacred. He had faithfully kept all of Alex Conklin’s secrets at Treadstone; Bourne knew with the instinct of an injured animal that Willard would keep the secret that Bourne was still alive.

At the time of Conklin’s murder Willard was already in his deep-cover position as chief steward at the NSA’s safe house in rural Virginia. It was Willard who had smuggled out the digital photos taken of the rendition and waterboarding cells in the house’s basement that had torpedoed Luther LaValle and had necessitated serious damage control from Secretary of Defense Halliday’s camp.

“Finished,” Benjamin Firth said, getting up off his stool. “Everything is good. Better than good, I might say. The entry and exit wounds are healing at a truly remarkable rate.”

“That’s because of his training,” Willard said confidently.

But privately Bourne wondered whether his recovery was aided by the kencur—the resurrection lily—concoction Suparwita had made him drink just before he was shot. He knew he had to speak to the healer again if he was going to discover what had happened to him here.

Bourne rose. “I’m going for a walk.”

“As ever, I counsel against it,” Willard warned. “Every time you set foot outside this compound you risk compromising your security.”

Bourne strapped on a lightweight backpack with two bottles of water. “I need the exercise.”

“You can exercise here,” Willard pointed out.

“Hiking up these mountains is the only way to build up my stamina.”

This was the same argument they’d had every day since Bourne felt fit enough to take extended walks, and it was one bit of Willard’s advice that he chose to ignore.

Opening the gate to the doctor’s compound, he set off briskly through the steep forested hills and terraced rice paddies of East Bali. It wasn’t only that he felt hemmed in within the stucco walls of Firth’s compound, or that he deemed it necessary to push himself through increasingly difficult stages of physical exertion, though either was reason enough for his daily treks. He was compelled to return time and again to the countryside where the tantalizing flame of the past, the sense that something important had happened to him here, something he needed to remember, was constantly flickering.

On these hikes down steep ravines to rushing rivers, past animistic shrines to tiger or dragon spirits, across rickety bamboo bridges, through vast rice paddies and coconut plantations, he tried to conjure up the face of the silhouetted figure turning toward him that he saw in his dreams. To no avail.

When he felt fit enough he went in search of Suparwita, but the healer was nowhere to be found. His house was inhabited by a woman who looked as old as the trees around her. She had a wide face, flat nose, and no teeth. Possibly she was deaf as well, because she stared at Bourne indifferently when he asked where Suparwita was in both Balinese and Indonesian.

One morning that was already becoming hot and steamy, he paused above the highest terrace of a rice paddy, crossing the irrigation conduit to sit in the cool shade of a warung, a small family-run restaurant that sold snacks and drinks. Sipping green coconut water through a straw, he played with the youngest of the three children, while the eldest, a girl of no more than twelve, watched him with dark, serious eyes as she wove thin-cut palm fronds into an intricate pattern that would become a basket. The child—a boy of not more than two months—lay on the tabletop where Bourne sat. He gurgled while exploring Bourne’s fingers with his tiny brown fists. After a while, his mother took him up in her arms to feed him. The feet of Balinese children under the age of three months were not allowed to touch the ground, which meant they were held almost all the time. Maybe that was why they were so happy, Bourne reflected.

The woman brought him a plate of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf, and he thanked her. While he ate, he chatted with the woman’s husband, a wiry little man with large teeth and a cheery smile.

“Bapak, you come here every morning,” the man said. Bapak meant “father.” It was the Balinese way of address, at once formal and intimate, another expression of life’s underlying duality. “We watch you as you climb. Sometimes you must stop to catch your breath. Once my daughter saw you bend over and vomit. If you are ill, we will help you.”

Bourne smiled. “Thank you, but I’m not ill. Just a bit out of shape.”

If the man disbelieved him, he didn’t show it. His veiny, big-knuckled hands lay on the table like chunks of granite. His daughter, finished with her basket, stared at Bourne while her nimble fingers, as if of their own accord, began work on another. Her mother came over, set her little boy in Bourne’s lap. Bourne felt his weight and his heartbeat against his chest, and was reminded of Moira, with whom he’d deliberately had no contact since she’d left the island.

“Bapak, in what way can I help you get back in shape?” the boy’s father said softly.

Did he suspect something or was he just being helpful? Bourne asked himself. Then he shrugged mentally. What did it matter, after all? Being Balinese, he was being genuine, which, in the end, was all that mattered. This was something Bourne had learned from his interaction with these people. They were the polar opposites of the treacherous men and women who inhabited his own shadow world. Here the only shadows were demons—and, furthermore, there were ways in which you could protect yourself against them. Bourne thought of the double ikat cloth that Suparwita had told Moira to buy for him.

“There is a way,” Bourne said now. “You can help me find Suparwita.”

“Ah, the healer, yes.” The Balinese paused, as if listening for a voice only he could hear. “He’s not at his home.”

“I know. I was there,” Bourne said. “I saw an old woman without teeth.”

The man grinned, showing his white teeth. “Suparwita’s mother, yes. A very old woman. Deaf as a coconut; mute as well.”

“She was no help.”

The man nodded. “What is inside her head, only Suparwita knows.”

“Do you know where he is?” Bourne said. “It’s important I find him.”

“Suparwita is a healer, yes.” The man studied Bourne in a kindly, even courteous, manner. “He has gone to Goa Lowah.”

“Then I will go there.”

“Bapak, it would not be wise to follow him.”

“To be honest,” Bourne said, “I don’t always do the wise thing.”

The man laughed. “Bapak, you are only human, after all.” His grin showed again. “Not to worry. Suparwita forgives foolish men as well as wise ones.”

The bat, one of dozens clinging to the damp walls, opened its eyes and stared at Bourne. It blinked, as if it couldn’t believe what it was seeing, then returned to its diurnal slumber. Bourne,

the lower half of his body wrapped in a traditional sarong, stood in the flowing heart of the Goa Lowah temple complex amid a welter of praying Balinese and Japanese tourists taking time out from their shopping sprees.

Goa Lowah, which was near the town of Klungkung in southeast Bali, was also known locally as the Bat Cave. Many large temple complexes were built around springs because this water, erupting from the core of the island, was deemed sacred, able to spiritually cleanse those who worshipped there and partook of the water by both drinking it and sprinkling it over their heads. The sacred water at Goa Lowah bubbled up from the earth at the rear of a cave. This cave was inhabited by hundreds of bats that by day hung from the seeping calcite walls sleeping and dreaming, and by night flew into the inky sky in search of insects to gorge on. Though the Balinese often ate bats as a matter of course, the bats of Goa Lowah were spared that fate because anything that lived within a sacred space became sacred as well.

Bourne had not found Suparwita. Instead he had come upon a small, wizened priest with splayed feet and teeth like a jackrabbit, performing a cleansing ceremony in front of a small stone shrine in which were set a number of flower offerings. About a dozen Balinese sat in a semicircle. As Bourne watched in silence, the priest took a small, plaited bowl filled with holy water and, using a palm leaf switch that he dunked into the water, sprinkled the heads of those in attendance. No one looked at Bourne or paid him the slightest attention. For them, he was part of another universe. This ability of the Balinese to compartmentalize their lives with utter and absolute authority was the reason their form of Hinduism and unique culture remained uncorrupted by outsiders even after decades of tourist invasions and pressure from the Muslims who ruled every other island in the Indonesian archipelago.

There was something here for him, Bourne knew, something that was second nature to the Balinese, something that would help him to find out who he really was. Both David Webb, the person, and the Jason Bourne identity were incomplete: the one irrevocably shattered by amnesia, the other created for him by Alex Conklin’s Treadstone program.

Was Bourne still the conflation of Conklin’s research, training, and psychological theories put to the ultimate test? Had he begun life as one person only to evolve into someone else? These were the questions that went to Bourne’s very heart. His future—and the impact he had on those he cared about and those he might even love—depended on the answer.

The priest had finished and was putting away the plaited bowl in a niche in the shrine when Bourne felt an urgent need to be cleansed by that holy water.

Kneeling behind the Balinese, he closed his eyes, allowed the priest’s words to flow over him until he was dislocated in time. He’d never before felt free of both the Bourne identity given to him by Alex Conklin and the incomplete person he knew as David Webb. Who was Webb, after all? The fact was, he didn’t know—or more accurately he couldn’t remember. There were pieces of him, to be sure, stitched together by psychologists and Bourne himself, and periodically other pieces, dislodged by some stimulus or other, would breach the surface of his consciousness with the force of a torpedo explosion. Even so, the truth was he was no closer to understanding himself—and ironically, tragically, there were times when he felt he understood Bourne far better than he did Webb. At least, he knew what motivated Bourne, whereas Webb’s motivations were still a complete mystery. Having tried and failed to reintegrate himself into Webb’s academic life, he’d decided to disengage himself from Webb. With a palpable start he realized that here on Bali he’d also begun to disengage from the Bourne identity with which he’d come to associate so closely. He thought about the Balinese he’d encountered here, Suparwita, the family that ran the mountain warung—even this priest whom he didn’t know at all, but whose words seemed to cloak him in an intense white light—and then he contrasted them with the Westerners, Firth and Willard. The Balinese were in touch with the spirits of the land, they saw good and evil and acted accordingly. There was nothing between them and nature itself, whereas Firth and Willard were creatures of civilization with all its layers of deceit, envy, greed. This essential dichotomy had opened his mind as nothing before. Did he want to be like Willard or like Suparwita? Was it a coincidence that the Balinese didn’t allow their children’s feet to touch the ground for three months—and that he’d been on Bali for precisely the same amount of time?

Now, for the first time in his defective memory, unmoored from everything and everyone he knew, he felt able to look inside himself, and what he saw was someone he didn’t recognize—not Webb, not Bourne. It was as if Webb were a dream, or another identity assigned to him just as Bourne had been.

Kneeling outside the Bat Cave with its thousands of denizens stirring restively, with the priest’s intonations transforming the intense Southern Hemisphere sunshine into prayer, he contemplated the chimeric landscape of his own soul, a place singularly twilit, like a deserted city an hour before dawn or the desolate seashore an hour after dusk, a place that slipped away from him, shifting like sand. And as he journeyed through this unknown country he asked himself this question:

Who am I?

5

THE JOINT NSA-DHS forensics team arrived in Cairo and, to the consternation of everyone except Soraya, was met at the airport by an elite contingent of al Mokhabarat, the national secret police. Team members and their belongings were poured into military vehicles and driven through the blistering heat, blazing sun, and urban chaos of Cairo. Heading southwest out of the city, they traveled toward the desert in glum and silent single file.

“Our destination is near Wadi AlRayan,” Amun Chalthoum, the head of al Mokhabarat, said to Soraya. He had spotted her immediately, culled her out of the team to sit beside him in his vehicle, which was second behind a heavily armored halftrack that Chalthoum was doubtless using to flex his muscles in the face of the Americans.

For Chalthoum time seemed to have stood still. His hair was still thick and dark, his wide copper-colored forehead still unlined. His black crow’s eyes deeply set above the hawk-beak of his nose still smoldered with suppressed emotion. He was large and muscular with the narrow hips of a swimmer or a climber. By contrast, he had the long, tapered fingers of a pianist or a surgeon. And yet something important had changed, because there was about him the sense of a fire barely banked. The nearer one got to him, the more one felt the quivering of his leashed rage. Now that she was sitting beside him, now that she felt the once familiar stirrings inside her, she realized why she hadn’t told Veronica Hart the whole truth: because she wasn’t at all certain that she could handle Amun.

“So quiet. Are you not stirred by being back home?”

“Actually, I was thinking about the last time you took me to Wadi AlRayan.”

“That was eight years ago and I was simply trying to get at the truth,” he said with a shake of his head. “Admit it, you were in my country passing secrets—”

“I admit nothing.”

“—which by right belonged to the state.” He tapped his chest. “And I am the state.”

“Le Roi le Veut,” she murmured.

“The king wills it.” Chalthoum nodded. “Precisely.” And momentarily he took his hands off the wheel and spread his arms wide to encompass the desert into which they were just now driving. “This is the land of absolutism, Umm al-Dunya, the Mother of the Universe, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. After all, you’re Egyptian, like me.”

“Half Egyptian.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m here to help my people find out what happened to the airliner.”

“Your people.” Chalthoum spat out the words as if even the thought of them left a bitter taste in his mouth. “What about your father? What about his people? Has America so thoroughly destroyed the wild Arabian inside you?”

Soraya put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. She knew she’d better get her own feelings under control and soon, otherwise the entire mission could spiral out of control. Then s

he felt Amun’s arm brush up against hers and the hair at the back of her neck stirred. Good God, she thought, I can’t feel this way about him. And then she broke out in a cold sweat. Was this why I withheld the truth from Veronica—because I knew that if I told her everything she’d never have allowed me to come back here? And all at once she felt herself in jeopardy, not because of Amun but because of herself, her own runaway emotions.

In an effort to regain some form of equilibrium she said, “My father never forgot he was Egyptian.”

“So much so he changed his family name from Mohammed to Moore,” Chalthoum said bitterly.

“He fell in love with America when he fell in love with my mother. The deep appreciation I have of it comes from him.”

Chalthoum shook his head. “Why hide it? It was your mother’s doing.”

“Like all Americans, my mother took for granted everything her country had to offer. She couldn’t have cared less about the Fourth of July; it was my father who took me to the fireworks celebrations on the Mall in Washington, DC, where he spoke to me about freedom and liberty.”

Chalthoum bared his teeth. “I have to laugh at his naïveté—and yours. Frankly, I assumed you had a more… shall we say pragmatic outlook on America, the country that exports Mickey Mouse, war, and occupying armed forces with equal abandon.”

“How convenient of you to forget that we’re also the country that keeps you safe from extremists, Amun.”

Chalthoum clenched his teeth and was about to respond when the jouncing vehicle rolled through a cordon of his men, armed with submachine guns, keeping the mass of clamoring international press at a safe remove from the crash site, and ground to a halt. Soraya was the first out, settling her sunglasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose and the lightweight hat on her head. Chalthoum had been right about one thing: The airliner had fallen out of the sky not six hundred yards from the southeastern tip of the wadi, a body of water, complete with waterfalls, all the more spectacular because it was surrounded by desert.