The Bourne Enigma (Jason Bourne 13)

Mohandiseen, the upscale neighborhood, had originally been built for engineers, and was now a mecca for tourists, foreign embassies, as well as duplex apartments of pharaonic scale. This is where Goga drove Bourne.

Beneath a patchwork sky appearing in the first tiny glimmerings of dawn, Goga drove down Gam’et el Duwal el Arabya, known in English as Arab League Boulevard. Ugly high-rises loomed on either side of them. Goga’s Jeep was equipped with what appeared to be an outsize radio. From it emanated sporadic bursts of Arabic, chopped into slaw by waves of static.

“We’ve been monitoring Ivan Borz’s intermittent electronic traffic,” Goga said. “It’s coming from somewhere here in Mohandiseen. We keep vectoring, closing in on the area. We have it down to a radius of six square blocks. Still a lot of buildings to canvas. But we continue to make progress.”

None of this was helpful to Bourne’s pursuit of Borz.

“Do you know where the Israelis are stationed?” he asked.

“They know where we are, we know where they are. It’s a kind of détente; sometimes that happens when we both find ourselves in enemy territory at the same time.”

“I want to know where they are.” He could have called Sara, of course, but he didn’t want to give her more fuel to feed her obsession with Borz. “No,” he said, “don’t drive me there. Give me directions. I’ll go on foot.”

“It isn’t safe here,” Goga protested.

“Alone.” Bourne got out of the Jeep the instant Goga pulled over. It was still moving, and he ran a few feet to regain his equilibrium. Then he set off toward the apartment complex where Lev Bin was running the Mossad operation against Borz. He remembered Lev from his previous dealings with Mossad, but he did not know him, so he had only Sara’s warning about the agent to go by.

A half hour later, taking a circuitous route along the smoggy canyons of Mohandiseen’s streets, he arrived at the building. According to Goga, the Mossad had set up in an apartment on the top floor. Heading around to the rear of the building, he picked the lock on the service entrance door, let himself into the building. In the lobby, he took the elevator up to the top floor, went down the hall to the fire stairs, pushed through the door, and turned, watching the hallway through the wire-mesh glass panel at head height.

He waited, calm, still, patient. He was so fiercely concentrated on his view of the hallway and the elevator door he almost missed the sound. It caught at the very edge of hearing, could almost have been mistaken for one of the multiple noises every building exhales, from foundations shifting in sandy soil to the HVAC recirculating, resetting itself. But it wasn’t any of those—it was neither geological nor mechanical in nature.

It was man-made.

Bourne whirled in time to receive a powerful blow to the jaw. As he was slammed back against the fire door, his assailant jabbed with his left hand. Between two curled fingers a wicked-looking push-dagger blade extended like the claw of a tiger.

Bourne allowed the lunge. Rather than shrinking back he stepped into the attack. As the blade of the push-dagger slid past his right side, he struck his assailant in the throat with the heel of his hand, disarmed him as he went down to one knee.

Then he hauled him up, and said in Hebrew: “Tell Lev Bin Jason Bourne is here to see him.”

—

“How did you know he was one of mine?”

“I’ve worked with Mossad before,” Bourne said. “Standard operating procedure.”

“It’s depressing when we become predictable,” Lev said.

He had wrinkled his nose in disgust when his man had brought Bourne through the door to their quarters. His disgust had made him pugnacious. Or maybe, Bourne thought, that was simply his nature.

“Dangerous, too,” he said.

“Don’t tell me my business.” Lev stood with his hands on his hips. Behind him, three men were hunched over laptops, shortwave receivers, and broadband interceptors. The stink of warm metal and multitasking electronics imprinted the air with the signature of the modern world racing at hyperspeed. The distant buzz of static and the echoes of dismembered words circled over their heads like malcontent spirits.

Lev moved so that he blocked Bourne’s view of his people at work. “We should speak in the back room.”

“Here will be fine,” Bourne said, and when Lev, being contrary, took a step toward the rear of the apartment, told him: “The Russian team knows where you live.”

Lev halted, turned back, but with a slight curl to his upper lip, said: “I don’t care. I can handle the Russians. All of them are idiots.”

“Not these,” Bourne said. “They were handpicked by General Karpov himself. They’re working a rogue operation, completely off the books.”

Lev sniffed, puffed up with his sense of self-superiority. “Only the Americans work that way, not the Russians.”

“Boris Karpov doesn’t work the way other Russian operatives do.”

“Perhaps that’s why he’s dead.”

Now Bourne knew that even Lev, stuck here half a world away, was being kept well informed. That bit of intel was vital to how he would proceed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The operation was designed to continue with or without the General’s leadership. The directives have all been baked in.”

Lev shook his head. “And you know this how?”

“Through the Director.”

Lev laughed. “Our Director?”

“Eli, yes.” Bourne stood his ground. He had dealt with men like Lev Bin before. They subsisted on the slightest sign of hesitation, which they interpreted as fear—in other words, weakness.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You would say that.”

Lev drew out his mobile. “I’ll just call him and find out the truth of the matter.”

“By all means call him, Lev. But I can guarantee you Eli will not tell you the truth.”

Skepticism ruled Lev’s face, along with a kind of bewildered amusement. “And why would that be?”

“He’s lost confidence in you.”

Lev let out a short bark of a laugh, but his mouth had formed into a rictus, tension whitening the corners of his lips. “Ridiculous. He put me in charge of the operation.”

“No,” Bourne said with a deadly quiet. “He put you in charge of an operation. A decoy for Ivan Borz and the Russians. While he’s watching out for you and Karpov’s people, Rebeka and I head the real mission.”

“Rebeka is in Jerusalem.”

“No,” Bourne said, relentless. “She’s here, with me.”

“I would know if she was. As head of the operation it’s my right to know.”

“Nevertheless, she’s here.”

Bourne said this with such absolute conviction that, for the first time, he saw fear flicker behind Lev’s eyes.

“If what you say is true…” He took a moment, apparently needing a small time-out. “Why are you telling me this?” His tone had altered subtly, concern slipping in front of arrogance.

“I want to get to Ivan Borz before Karpov’s people do.” Bourne knew he had hooked Lev. What was left was to reel him in slowly and delicately so that he wouldn’t escape the hook. “I’ve talked with Goga—their head of ops. He’s the one who drove me into Giza. He would have driven me to your building if I hadn’t stopped him.”

Lev nodded slowly. “I suppose I owe you a vote of thanks for that.”

“Worse for us, Goga’s closer to finding Borz than you are. When he gets within shouting distance of Borz he’ll kill him on the spot. Eli sent me to prevent that. He wants me to interrogate Borz.”

“Why? The fucker deserves to die.”

“No question,” Bourne said. “But not before he gives up all his identities, all his contacts, all his secrets.”

“And you came to me…?”

“I’m asking for your help. This is something only you can do.” This appeal was the essence of the con game. You give your mark your confidence. In return, he gives you precisely what you want.  “Explain, please.”

“I see your operation here. I have more confidence in you than Eli does. He doesn’t have eyes on the ground.”

Lev considered a moment. “We still don’t know precisely where Borz is.”

“There I can help,” Bourne said. “Borz has a thing for anal sex—girls or boys, it doesn’t seem to matter to him.”

Lev’s face lit up. “That’s something I can work with. The military clamps down hard on any form of sex it deems unnatural. There’s an underground electronic bulletin board in Cairo. It’s on the Dark Web, where all the bottom-fishers reside.”

Bourne thought this comment amusing considering Borz’s sexual predilections, but Lev evidently missed the humor. Lev was too busy being reenergized at the thought of redeeming himself in the Director’s eyes. He turned to one of the men operating the electronic equipment, delivered a series of rapid-fire orders in Hebrew. Then he turned back to Bourne.

“The bulletin board is quite specific.”

Bourne didn’t bother asking him how he knew that; frankly, he didn’t care.

“Let’s see what happens. My man is following the current electronic conversations on the bulletin board, following them backward in time to see if—”

At a prompt from his IT man, he turned back, hunched over his laptop screen, engaging in a short whispered conversation. When he stood up, his smarter-than-thou smirk was back on his face. “A woman named Meira has been in communication with someone using a different burner phone with each conversation, no matter how terse. She’s got another handle on the bulletin board, of course, but we traced her IP address. She works for one of the tour companies that takes people out to the Pyramids in the morning. Hold on.” He raised a forefinger, got the number he was looking for from his man, punched it in on his mobile. The subsequent conversation was brief and to the point.

He disconnected, said to Bourne, “Meira’s out at the Pyramids. We’re in luck. She’ll be off work in forty minutes. She asked for a sub so she could take the rest of the day off.”

“Borz,” Bourne said.

Lev shrugged. “It’s a better shot than we have anywhere else.” He grabbed his handgun out of a desk drawer, shoved it into a shoulder holster. “Let’s go.”

36

The reddish sun—permanently stained by the modern city’s caustic pollution—streamed across the desert, interrupted only by shivering palms and vehicular traffic that raised the temperature five degrees, turning early morning into noontime.

By comparison to the modern city, the Great Sphinx and the Pyramids were structures timeless in their beauty, design, and manufacture. The pyramid of Menkaure, the pyramid of Khafre and the Great Pyramid of Khufu are precisely aligned with the Constellation of Orion. The King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid points to Al Nitak, an important star in Orion, constellation of the ancient Egyptian god, Osiris. The Great Pyramid is located at the center of the land mass of the earth. The east/west parallel that crosses the most land and the north/south meridian that crosses the most land intersect in two places on the earth, one in the ocean and the other at the Great Pyramid. The curvature designed into the faces of the pyramid exactly matches the radius of the earth. The pyramid had built into it a swivel door, weighing some twenty tons, so perfectly balanced that it could be opened by pushing out from the inside with only minimal force, but when closed, was so perfect a fit that from the outside it could scarcely be detected. It was originally sheathed in highly polished limestone, which reflected the sun’s light and made the pyramid shine like a jewel. The original pyramid acted like a gigantic mirror, reflecting light so powerful that it would be visible from the moon as a shining star on earth. Appropriately, the ancient Egyptians called the Great Pyramid Ikhet, meaning “Glorious Light.”

These facts and more, Bourne and Lev learned from the latter part of the lecture Meira gave the ten or so intrepid visitors on her tour, as their bus cowered in the heat, its air-conditioning unit panting, unlike the nearby Sphinx, stolid and inscrutable.

They stood apart in the young morning, beyond the last curved row of intently listening tourists, as innocent bystanders, blending in, posing as just two more visitors to the Great Pyramid. Behind them were the legions of touts selling tacky souvenirs and camel and horseback rides for exorbitant fees; kids with huge eyes and ribs protruding who claimed to be guides, dusty, red-eyed yellow dogs snapping at their heels. And, of course, the military guards, as well as the private ones at either end of the semicircle of Meira’s clients.

And now Bourne knew without a shadow of a doubt they had Borz. Meira was pretty, slight, appeared far younger than she must be. Tracing the line of demarcation from Sara’s devastating attack on Ivan Borz’s business to his deliberately bumping into her on a Moscow street, it seemed clear Sara was right: he was toying with her, trying to frighten her, intimidate her. Bourne knew the danger to Sara was acute. For this alone he deserved the dreadful fate Bourne would wreak upon him.

Five or six of Meira’s group were lining up at the ticket office to pay the tariff for entrance. Bourne looked at his watch. Almost time for Meira to be relieved. Was it also time for Ivan Borz to show up? He looked around, quartering the area, while Lev climbed back into his car in order to take a mobile phone call. Bourne was not only on guard, he was also on the lookout for Sara. He wouldn’t put it past her to have found a place to stash Amira temporarily so she could come after Borz. Possibly no one better than him understood her need to resolve the incident with Borz, to cleanse herself with his blood. But he knew Borz better than she did. He could stand back, ensuring he would not underestimate the man. Sara thought of Borz as a monster—which he was, in every way imaginable. The problem was humans tended to equate monsters with lowered intelligence, which, in Borz’s case, at least, was a delusion. Bourne did not want that to become a fatal delusion for Sara.

The sun beat down mercilessly. The city itself might be swaddled in the particulate smog of civilization, but out here on the desert plateau the sky was a dazzling blue. Bourne ducked down, poking his head through the car’s open shotgun seat window. The car was old, beaten up, the better to blend in with the junk on Cairo’s streets. What air-conditioning it might once have had was long dead and buried in rust. As a consequence Lev had all the windows cranked down.

Bourne was reaching for a bottle of water when he realized that Lev was leaning to one side. He grabbed the Mossad agent’s shoulder, felt the dead weight of his torso. Turning him slightly, he saw the back end of a tiny dart that had been shot into the side of Lev’s neck. The dart must have been coated with some form of fast-acting poison. Fingers on Lev’s carotid, beneath his nostrils, confirmed he was already dead.

Immediately, Bourne searched inside the glove compartment, grabbed a pen flashlight, a Glock 9mm, a noise suppressor he could screw on the muzzle. He withdrew from the car’s interior, stepped back into the blinding sunlight, where the touts shouted and waved at him, the kids and their dogs circled him, hollering, begging. Bourne distanced himself from the car and its corpse. Keeping to the open would save him now. No one would attempt to kill him here under the vigilant gaze of multiple security guards. No one would attempt to kill him as long as he possessed the coin. Of these two things, and these two things only, was he was certain.

But the coin was no longer the coin; it was merely dead weight, a reproduction that Bourne had stripped of its purpose and design. But only he knew that. He continued to monitor the environment, as he moved farther away from the pyramid of Khufu, toward the smaller and, in some ways, even more mysterious pyramid of Menkaure. No one knew much about this pharaoh, even precisely when he lived. Only legends remained, most, in the manner of myths, either contradictory or implausible. It was the only one of the three Pyramids whose interior was still closed to the public, and so seemed the best bet for what he had in mind.

Bourne was under no illusions. He knew Lev had been killed for a reason. He was being cut off from his resources—isolated,

so as to be more easily taken prisoner. As in all warfare, the trick was to turn that strategy on its head, make it work for him, rather than against him. The success or failure of that would determine the outcome. Either way, to give himself a chance, he had to find home territory in a hostile environment. His only choice was this: utter darkness, a place where, having entered first, he might yet gain the figurative higher ground, and thus the upper hand.

Approximately a third of the way up the north face of the stepped pyramid was a long vertical slash, remnant of the time when the structure had been set to be demolished. But the pyramid had defeated those who sought to ruin the monument. That would, of course, be the easiest way in, but he was certain to be seen and stopped by the guards before he was halfway up.

Bourne moved closer to the pyramid, to where sawhorses roped off the entrance that had been used by the archaeologists before their various institutions deemed their presence in Cairo too expensive due to the volatile situation. It was currently off-limits to tourists. The area was deserted; not even a guard stood watch outside. A thick wooden door on oversize iron hinges had been fashioned to block the entrance, the planks joined by heavy iron bands. It was secured by a padlock that revealed its secret to Bourne in under twenty seconds. He ducked inside.

Five steps from the entrance the interior became black as pitch. He switched on the penlight, played the beam around. He found himself in a claustrophobically narrow shaft that sloped downward, the ceiling so low he was obliged to hunch over in order to make his way through it. It was dusty, dry, and oven hot. Electric lights had been placed along the way, but now they were inoperative. The floor of the shaft had been overlaid with sheets of wood to which had been affixed horizontal slats at eight-inch intervals, along with rough wooden handrails to help people in their descent into the Egyptian tomb. The weight of ages pressed down on him, tons of limestone flexed their muscles above him. He began to wonder whether he had made a mistake, but what choice did he have? He could not have successfully escaped in the car, not with Lev’s corpse sprawled on the seat. Besides, he had to flush out whoever had come after him. It would be easy to assume it was Borz, even easier, in fact, to assume that Borz had laid an electronic trap to lead the FSB or Mossad to Meira so he could eliminate them.