The Bourne Enigma (Jason Bourne 13)

For a moment, she lay faceup, trying to catch her breath. Then she used her knife to cut through the silk draped over her like a shroud. Her lower back and hips felt as if she had gone fifteen rounds in a boxing ring. Her heart was thudding hard in her chest, and she was assailed by the stench of war: blood, burned flesh, human feces, charcoaled plastic, and superhot metal. None of these smells were alien to her—they were, sadly, far too familiar. Pulling herself together, she stuck her head out of her impromptu foxhole in order to get her bearings. She was somewhere southeast of the town, in an encampment of some kind. She saw three buildings—or parts of them, anyway.

Men were strewn everywhere, looking like rag dolls pulled apart by vicious dogs. They interested Sara inasmuch as they were dressed neither as ISIS terrorists nor Kurdish irregulars. Whose compound was this? Could it be Ivan Borz’s? If so, what was he doing setting up shop between ISIS and the Kurds of Turkey?

A lull in the bombardment gave her a chance to scramble out of her foxhole. She snatched up a semiautomatic rifle on the run. She was heading toward two adjacent buildings, one of which was half bombed out—and recently, by the looks of things. As she ran she passed over what could only be a helipad, complete with a ring of purple lights and a luminescent cross at its center to guide pilots in. She remembered the helo being destroyed in midair—most likely from a ground-to-air missile. It must have taken off from here. Had it been carrying Borz to safety? Then where was Jason?

Heart in her throat, she entered the burst building through the jagged hole in its side. A man lay dead on the floor, a table had been knocked over on its side, chairs splintered near it. A dish of food was sprayed across the floor. The other rooms were deserted. She left, crossed outside, and ducked into the second building.

That was when she saw the stage set, the boom mics, the arrays of lights overhead, the makeshift control room. Lights were dimmed, as if not getting enough power. Some were off altogether, their bulbs burst apart, useless filaments dangling, and off to one side, a snaking electrical cable, ripped loose from its mooring, sparked and sizzled on the floor. She stood for a moment, stunned. Then she walked slowly up onto the stage. The area center front was stained so dark it seemed to be the opening to a bottomless pit. Squatting down, she put a fingertip down, then drew it back quickly. She didn’t have to touch it; the stench of it filled her, caused her to rear back. The floor here was covered with many layers of human blood, some of it fairly fresh. It had seeped into the wooden boards, soaking through the grain. She was certain if she sawed one of these boards in half it would be black and bloody all the way through.

She was about to stand up when a voice said, “Rebeka, it’s really you. How did you get here?”

She turned slowly, the voice making her tremble. “Jason!” She rose and rushed into his arms.

46

First there was only a dun-colored blur and the wind rushing through his ears. Then the second explosion blew him sideways, farther over the border. The canopy billowed out, almost collapsing from being on its side. He pulled on the lines, compensating as best he could. A hail of melted plastic bits struck him, burning briefly before spiraling away. He ducked several chunks of metal, twisted and charred beyond recognition. He was swung around so that, for several moments, he was looking back toward Borz’s compound. He thought he saw another parachute, its canopy swinging back and forth, shoved this way and that by the wind currents. Then a shell exploded below, something tore through the canopy, and the chutist began to fall. The figure seemed too small to be a man, but he was too far away to know for certain. Then he was twisted around again, and he lost sight of the falling chutist. He struggled briefly to turn around, to see what had happened, but his own chute was caught by the crosswinds, and in any event, he was almost down.

Here came the Kurds, surrounding Bourne, stripping him of his harness, lifting him up, pressing him with barrage after barrage of questions for which he had no answers.

—

Three times a week, Abdul Aziz took the long, meandering walk through the crooked streets, bustling markets, and back alleys of his beloved Istanbul. Three times a week, he looked forward to getting away from the hectic pace of his import-export business, the incessant yammering of his two sons, who seemed to constantly be coming up with postmodern upgrades, making his mind swarm like a beehive. Without being able to take his pleasure at his favorite Istanbul hammam, he was quite certain he would have had a breakdown years ago.

Not that he didn’t love his sons—they were smart, maybe too smart for their own good. The week after they moved the company’s telecom to an Internet company, he had come back to the office on Monday to find that $50,000 of overseas calls had been made from his numbers but by no one in the organization. Kazakh hackers had rerouted the numbers to high-toll call sites from which they took a percentage. “This never would have happened if we’d stayed with our over-the-air carrier,” he’d told his chagrined progeny. Worse, the Internet telco refused to reimburse them for the fraud. Aziz promptly switched the lines back and, to teach them the hard lesson, took the fifty thousand out of his sons’ salaries month by month. Praise Allah that he’d stopped them from moving the company’s most sensitive material online, where some clever hacker could have gotten to it. Slowly but surely they were learning that in the business they were in going postmodern cyber wasn’t always wise. When it came to security, it was often true that old-school methodology was the best way.

He was just entering the hammam’s front door when his mobile buzzed. Ignoring it, he passed into the cool, dim interior. He was immediately greeted as a preferred customer, as though he were part of the family that had run the hammam for almost a century.

As he was beginning to disrobe in the locker room, his mobile buzzed again, seemingly angrily this time, though he knew that to be impossible. Just as angrily, he took it up, was about to turn it off, when he saw who the call was from.

“As-salamu alaykum, my friend,” he said.

“Wa alaykum as-salam,” Bourne replied at the other end of the connection.

Aziz, who had worked with Bourne before, possessed a kind of sixth sense when it came to his friend. “How serious are your difficulties?”

“I’m on the other side of the border from Kobani.”

“Hayyak Allah!” May Allah grant you life! Aziz cried. He knew better than to ask why Bourne was on the border between Syria and his country. The truth was he didn’t want to know, not unless Jason needed him to, though he fervently hoped that was not the case. He was all too familiar with the horror hanging over Turkey at its border with Syria—disruptions in his shipments was the least of his woes. “You are injured?’

“I’m fine,” Bourne said.

“You would say that even if you were bleeding to death. Please tell me.”

“I’m okay, Abdul. I swear,” Bourne said.

“On the lives of those you love?”

“Yes.”

“All right then,” Aziz said, mollified. You never knew with Jason.

“I need your help,” Bourne said.

“Anything, my friend,” Aziz said, thinking, There goes my afternoon’s peace.

“A plane would make things right—as right as is possible at the moment.”

“Give me your GPS coordinates.” Aziz copied them down on a pad he withdrew from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “Good, there’s a new military airfield not far away just outside Suruc. I’m sure you can commandeer ground transport from your current location.”

“No need. Since I’ve given the coordinates of the ISIS units assaulting Kobanî I’ve got hordes here who will be happy to take me.”

“I’ll need twenty minutes for the fueling and fifty more to get to you.”

“Thanks, Abdul. I’ll be waiting.”

“Until then,” Aziz said, “fi Aman Allah.” Allah protect you.

—

Bourne spent the time until Aziz’s plane arrived to work on the meaning of the word albedo,

the third cluster of Sumerian glyphs in Boris’s rebus. The scientific definition of albedo was “the light or solar radiation reflected off the surface of a planet, such as Earth, or a moon,” but Bourne was reasonably certain science had no role to play in Boris’s message.

What else could albedo be or stand for? For several moments he grew concerned that radiation was the answer, but the thought of the Russian president using nuclear weapons in his invasion made no sense—even for a madman. There would be nothing left of the country he wished to bring back into the Federation fold, not to mention nothing left of the Federation itself when the Western allies retaliated, as they were sure to do.

He pictured the entire rebus—the four sets of glyphs: the first was the date, thirty-three hours away, the second, Follow the money, the third, albedo. Or was it? With a jolt Bourne realized that he had mistranslated the word after he had deciphered it from the female Sumerian. The third group wasn’t albedo; it was tewahedo, a Ge’ez word meaning “One United Nature” as in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the breakaway Oriental Catholic religions. Tewahedo.

Bourne knew the High Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church was in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. That was where he was headed next. The vehicle had stopped at the airfield’s gates, where a rapid-fire conversation ensued between one of the Kurds who had taken Bourne under their wing and the guard. Bourne thought they might have been cousins. They were talking about an upcoming party of some kind. Eventually, they were waved through with a nod and a smile.

Above him, he could hear the drone of Abdul’s private jet, a silver bullet streaking through the sky. The Jeep slowed, then stopped beside the runway.

Here comes my ride, Bourne thought, his hair caught in the mighty downdraft.

47

Sara put her forehead against Bourne’s chest. It was then she knew something was seriously amiss. With a lover’s unerring instinct, nothing felt right—not the muscles, not the heartbeat, and certainly not the smell.

“What—?”

But it was too late. The needle slid into the side of her neck, and everything around her began to melt. She tried to push herself away from the imposter with Jason’s face, but she seemed to have lost the ability to move her limbs. She was caught as her legs gave out, and laid gently down on the blood-smeared stage floor.

She stared up at Bourne’s face. It wasn’t Bourne, but the uncanny resemblance dizzied her. She was fully conscious, but she was paralyzed. He’s shot me up with Rohypnol, one of the prime predator drugs, Sara thought as if from a shadowed place where she was drowsing.

As he straddled her, he said, “How does it feel now, to be utterly helpless?”

She was aware of the silence around them as a physical thing out of which his voice loomed over her like a stone tower. The shelling had ceased, at least for the moment. But paralyzed as she was, this interruption in the war was in its way worse than the assaults themselves; it forced her to feel the fear flooding through her, growing into a beast beyond her control.

“I allowed Bourne to slip through my fingers. He was here and now he’s gone. But not to worry, I’ll pick up his trail soon enough.” He bent close enough for her to smell his breath, rank as a flesh-eating animal’s. “But now I have my consolation prize; one beyond measure. You’re here with me now, dearest Rebeka. We’re together.”

He reached up and, one by one, removed the prosthetics, the colored lenses, wiped his face of the theatrical paint that had helped maintain the illusion of Jason Bourne’s features rather than his.

“And now here I am, revealed to you at last.”

Revealed as the man who had bumped into her in Moscow, the man who had pilfered her gold Star of David on its chain, had buried it in the bloody mess he had made of Boris Karpov’s throat.

Ivan Borz. But even that wasn’t his real name—not by a long shot. He had more legends than she did. She wanted to ask him, but her lips were beyond her control.

As if he had heard her, as if he had crept inside her brain, he leaned over and whispered, “Not Ivan, not Borz. You and only you, dearest Rebeka, will know me by my real name, Radu Ozer, birthplace unknown, likewise parents. An orphan in the storm, in other words. I count myself lucky, not having parents. I have no wish to see people grow old, feeble, and die.”

He began to unbutton his shirt. “Homeless and homicidal, that was me, burned my foster family’s house down with them in it. That was in Carpathian Romania. You know those stories you heard about Romanian mothers? They’re all true. Not a drop of compassion; not an instant touching or holding. Romanians bite, though, at least my older brother did until I burned him to a crisp. I stood outside and listened while they screamed. My mother tried to burst through the front door. I poked her back inside with her own broom, a flaming torch she recoiled from, rushing back inside to her doom.

“There was never any danger to me. Any lawyer worth his thousand dollars an hour would trot out all the atrocities visited on me. He would tell the jury that I was justified in what I did, and he’d probably convince them. People are such sheep, don’t you think? The truth is I enjoyed every minute, watching that house burn, knowing they were in there, flesh curling back from sinew and muscle, fat turning to liquid while the rest blackened was for me a kind of ecstasy. And when I forced my foster mother back inside that burning hell I nearly orgasmed.”

He threw his shirt to one side, baring his chest. It was dark as an Arab’s, covered with a crisscrossed welter of raised scars, white and pink as a little girl’s dollhouse. “Like the Arabesque? It was built up over time and space. Think of it as a map of this pilgrim’s progress, business deals stretching across the globe in a network like a spider’s web.

“My killing sprees stopped abruptly when I stole and embezzled enough money to start my own business. That was the beginning, the metamorphosis from maniacal caterpillar to cutthroat moth. But only the beginning.”

Suddenly, there was a knife in his hand. He tapped the valley between her breasts with its sharp point. “I know you’d cringe were you able. But why, dearest Rebeka? Bourne and I are virtually the same: we’re both high-functioning sociopaths. Not too many of us on this rarified level, and you’re drawn to us both.”

He laid a stroking finger against her jaw. “What does that say about you? You’re as homicidal as the rest of us. You murder on command. If I hadn’t stepped in, speeding the demise of General Karpov, you would have been given the order. Sooner or later, your paths would have crossed, and he would be dead. So we’re all in this sandbox together. We all have the same expertise, we all play with the same toys. We know how to take a life and go on with our lives until the next savage bloodletting.”

His grin grew broader. “You know I’m right, even if at the present time you can’t say so. But in the end, we’re told time and again, we will all admit to our sins. The grossest of lies. I have committed no sins. Like you, like Bourne, I have lived! That’s the sum and substance of it. I live; others die. Isn’t that how life works? Of course it is.

“I had expected you sooner because recently wherever Jason shows up, sooner or later so do you. That was the sole purpose of Karpov’s murder. Bourne would follow the breadcrumbs, as he always so cleverly does, and you—you, my dear, would be right on his heels, yes? Of course you would! I stole something precious to you, I used that thing to turn you into the murderer you are.” His laugh sounded sharp-edged, metallic. Weaponized. “I mean, who’s the terrorist here, me or you?” He spat sideways. “I could have killed you there in the streets of Moscow, Kidon, but that would have been too easy. You wouldn’t have suffered, and, after all, suffering is what this thing between you and me is all about.” His nostrils flared, as if catching her scent. “I waited for you in Cairo, but you didn’t come. I had almost lost hope. When I saw you descending through the clouds and smoke I couldn’t believe the lengths you had gone to find him.”

His smile had about it a bone-chilling tenderness. Like a psychopath feigning compassion

the sight was incongruous, dislocating. “Which brings us to the main event: the two of us. Many things I can forgive, yakirati.” She shivered internally at his use of the Hebrew endearment. “But you made an unforgiveable transgression—you cost me money. A great deal of money. You made me look bad. As a consequence of your meddling my business suffered. It took me some time to regain the full trust of my clients.”

Sara seemed submerged in a tub of ice water. She was so cold her bones seemed brittle, about to snap with any harsh treatment. She had no choice but to stare up into the face of the man she had almost killed, whom she had subsequently encountered on the crowded Moscow streets, when he had deliberately run into her, when he had stolen from her that which was most precious. The thought of her beloved star in his possession was like a twist of a knife in her side, in a place she could not reach to pull it out.

He ripped open her shirt, placed a knife blade between her breasts. There must be a way out of here, said the joker to the priest. She was sure Bob Dylan never envisioned this literal iteration of his metaphysical lyrics, but here she was, the joker talking in her mind to the priest looming over her.

“There’s no hope for you,” he said. “You’ll never leave here alive.”

48

Rohypnol, like all predator drugs, was a central nervous system inhibitor. Its main antagonist, outside of a countervailing drug, which was unavailable to Sara, was adrenaline. Part of her Kidon training included methods of hyperadrenalizing her body in preparation for a termination and/or escape. Hyperadrenalizing was not without risks. It could, for instance, lead to bleeding out, which almost happened to her in Mexico City when Bourne felt sure she had died. Still, it was either risk a brush with death or allow herself to submit to whatever atrocities Radu Ozer had in store for her. In any case, she did not know whether the metamorphosis could be actuated with the Rohypnol in her system.