The Bourne Enigma (Jason Bourne 13)

Volkin was all but goggling at him. “I misjudged you, Jason. You need to be locked up.”

“And then,” Bourne went on, ignoring Volkin’s outburst, “we come to Irina Vasilýevna’s seemingly inexplicable behavior at Mik’s. Why did she lead me to the money launderer in the first place? I thought it was because it would bring me one step closer to Borz. Only much later did I realize that she had taken me there to unmask you. She wanted to let me know that Mik was your money launderer.”

When the old man made no comment, Bourne went on. “Irina Vasilýevna had had her fill of you controlling her life. She said as much to me. But, again, I was too preoccupied to see it as a key piece of the puzzle. No, she had broken away, but was too scared to tell you. She was going to show you when I exposed you through Mik’s ledgers.”

Volkin’s eyes were half closed, as if he were on the verge of sleep. “That never happened.”

“Of course it never happened,” Bourne said. “You saw to it that it never happened. Why would Mik blow himself up? I asked myself this question over and over without coming up with an answer.”

“But of course there is an answer,” Volkin said. “There always is.”

“For a man who’s lost two generations of his family,” Bourne said pointedly, “you’re awfully pleased with yourself.”

Volkin screwed up his face, pricked by Bourne’s words. “And so I fucking should be. Mik didn’t commit suicide, he wasn’t the type. But I had to have a fail-safe in case Mik made a mistake. I arranged to have an explosive device planted in his office.” Volkin spread his hands. “You understand, Jason, I couldn’t risk the evidence of money transfers falling into the wrong hands. Like yours, for instance.”

“Or Irina’s.”

Volkin frowned. “That was…unfortunate. It was only a week ago that I discovered that she and Aleksandr had gone into business on their own.” He shook his head. “Without proper upbringing children can be so foolish.”

“How was the bomb rigged?”

“I had remote surveillance installed. I knew everything before it happened.” His smile was as thin as a razor blade. “One of the few benefits of old age is hard-learned knowledge. When it comes to business, never leave anything to chance.”

Bourne took a step to his left. “So. How does it feel, Ivan, to know that you’ve murdered your grandchildren?”

Volkin leapt at Bourne, a stiletto in one hand, drawn from inside the cuff of his greatcoat. Bourne took the thrust, allowed it to pass between his side and his arm. He grabbed Volkin by the throat, and squeezed.

“Don’t just stand there gaping. Do something!” Volkin said in a strangled voice. “Why don’t you do something?”

The Angelmaker remained perfectly still, save for the motion caused by the train’s progress across the diameter of Moscow.

Bourne turned his head. “Why didn’t you kill him yourself? Why did you need me?”

“Your reason for killing him is emotional,” the Angelmaker said. “Mine is purely financial.”

Bourne shook his head. “The time for deluding yourself is over, Mala. Volkin was using you just like the Somali. Their methods might be different, but what they wanted from you was the same.”

“You won’t kill him? Have you become a coward?”

“You know me better than that,” Bourne said. “But I’m tired of other people leading me around by the nose, including you.”

With that, he hurled Volkin across the car. He fetched up against a table, which immediately canted over, crashed to the floor. Volkin rolled onto his stomach, and at last the Angelmaker moved, crossing the car to scoop up the satchel with the diamonds. Then she reached up to pull the emergency stop cord.

“I can’t let you go,” Bourne said. “You’re culpable in all this.”

“You won’t harm me. We both know that.”

And in that moment, while their eyes were fixed on each other, Volkin reached inside his greatcoat, pulled out a small .22 pistol. He aimed squarely at the Angelmaker’s head, which, this close, he couldn’t fail to hit. And he would have, had not Bourne, catching the movement out of the corner of his eye, pushed Mala away. The bullet caught him instead, twisting him to one side. But he rose, advancing on Volkin, who squeezed the trigger a second time an instant after the Angelmaker pulled the emergency cord.

The train lurched, losing speed with such rapidity that the shot, which otherwise would have penetrated Bourne’s heart, struck his shoulder instead. Bourne kicked out, the toe of his shoe catching Volkin on the point of his chin. His head rocketed back at such an angle that when it slammed into the upended table edge, his neck cracked, fracturing multiple vertebrae. He was dead in an instant.

The train shuddered, lurching again with such violence that Bourne, bleeding from both wounds, lost his balance, slid to the floor. The train, jerking and juddering, came at last to rest in the middle of the tunnel, where it crouched panting, as if after a too-long run. In a moment, the engineer, no doubt armed, would be racing back to deal with the emergency.

The Angelmaker slammed the heel of her hand onto the manual override, and the car doors slid open. Staggering, Bourne regained his feet, launched himself after her, but as he reached her he lost consciousness.

As he slipped down, she caught him in her free arm. For a moment, she stood with him in her arms, uncertain as to what to do. The anxious sound of hurried footfalls galvanized her. The engineer was coming. Setting the satchel down for a moment, she bent her knees, hoisted Bourne up over her shoulder in the classic fireman’s lift and, at the edge of the car, leaped the two feet onto the tracks.

She headed away from the engineer, hurrying down the tunnel the way they had come. She could feel Bourne’s blood running down her neck, into the channel of her spine. It dripped down her arm, scrolling across the pigskin of the satchel she gripped with a kind of desperation.

She heard an alarmed shout from behind her. “Hey! Hey, wait! Come back!” A warning shot had her scurrying to the side of the tunnel. In the shadows between two caged bulbs, she found a narrow metal maintenance door. It was locked. Setting down her precious satchel, she fiddled with the lock, using one of the dozen picks she carried with her. The lock was no match for her expertise. She gathered up the satchel, opened the door, stepped through, pulled it shut behind her.

Using the light app on her mobile, she took a look around. Flicking a switch on the wall beside her gave her all the illumination she needed. Stuffing the mobile into her pocket, she went on, unmindful of the weight on one shoulder. She had carried heavier weights than Bourne for longer distances. She possessed the endurance of the long-distance runner.

She found herself on the edge of a maintenance air shaft that ran vertically, upward to the public transport tunnel, downward into God alone knew what. It was black as pitch down there, impossible to make out a thing. An iron ladder bolted to one wall led up the vertical shaft. She heard the sound of the engineer’s voice calling, and knew it was only a matter of time until he pulled the maintenance door open and found her.

Only one way out. She started to climb, one rung at a time. The ascent was awkward. Owing to Bourne’s body, she was obliged to lean out farther than she would have liked, and her only grab hold was with the hand clutching the satchel. No matter. She’d had more difficult obstacles to overcome; she would overcome this one, as well.

She was perhaps a hundred yards up the ladder when Bourne suddenly came to. He started to flail, knocking her sideways so violently she was forced to stab out for the next rung. In so doing, she lost her hold on the satchel, which plummeted straight down. Down and down it sailed, until it was lost to sight in the blackness of the shaft. She listened for it to hit bottom, to get a reading on how far down she’d have to climb to retrieve it. She counted off the seconds, and when she heard it hit bottom, she did her calculation. At almost the same time, a fresh gout of blood from Bourne’s wounds inundated her. She had her choice starkly laid out before her. If she went back down for

the satchel Bourne would surely bleed out. If she took him up into the light and safety, the diamonds would be lost forever. The engineer would have raised the alarm, and when Volkin and Malachev were found the lower tunnel would be crawling with FSB agents. Then it would be sealed up for all time.

She couldn’t save both. It was either the diamonds or Bourne. It took her less than a minute to make her decision.

FORTY DAYS LATER

Christmas Eve. A fresh snowfall lay on Manhattan’s sidewalks, obliterating the crunchy overlay of salt crystals. The gutters ran with filthy water, and already the heavy holiday traffic had churned the street beds to slush. Cars hissed by Lincoln Center, where, in the David H. Koch Theater, the evening’s performance of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker was just getting under way. The New York City Ballet production was, as usual, both lavish and impeccable, the audience—adults and children alike—was alight with the dance, the music, and the spectacle that for many epitomized Christmas.

Their excitement reached a fever pitch during the Arabian dance. There was a new soloist, recently promoted from the corps, and reviewers in plum orchestra seats and dancers in the company not onstage at the moment strained to see how the newcomer, Liis Ilves, would perform the sinuous dance. Liis was Estonian, the program informed the audience. Her surname meant “lynx,” and she was proving to be every inch the lithe animal her family was named for as she whirled and pirouetted. The applause, when it came, was a tidal roar of acclamation, and much later, at her stall backstage, bouquets of flowers were brought in, lined up as on a florist’s bench, in green glass vases.

Sara watched the young girl, with whom she had bonded over the past five days, with a growing sense of pride and affection that surprised her. The girl was an unusual mixture of naïveté and mental toughness. She still seemed lost in New York, grateful for the hermetically sealed world of ballet. She fed off the toughness of the exercises and rehearsals, reveled in the constant pressures imposed on body and mind. It was only latterly that Sara came to understand that this was a form of seeking shelter from a larger world which was frightening and, in every way, senseless. A drowning princess, she clung to her emaciated company with all the considerable will she possessed.

Bourne arrived, as he always did, unexpectedly, while Liis was in the tiny room she used to change in and out of street clothes.

“Did you get here on time?” Sara asked, after their first, fierce embrace. “Did you see her?”

“I did.”

“She was magnificent!” Sara’s eyes were shining. “Thank you for introducing me to her.”

“You’re wearing a brace,” he said.

“Leave it to you to kill a good mood.”

“Seriously. How are your ribs? And don’t tell me ‘fine.’”

She gave him a wry smile. “It only hurts when I breathe, doc.” Then she laughed. “It only hurts when I twist too quickly. Israeli doctors—they’re all grin-and-bear-it types.”

“And your father?”

“Pissed as hell.”

“But he’s forgiven you.”

“Not exactly,” she said. “I’m on what you might call probation.”

Bourne nodded. “That sounds about right.”

It was then, as she drew back, that she got a good look at his face. “Jason, what happened to you?”

He told her what had transpired in the tunnel deep within the bedrock of Moscow.

“So it was Volkin all along,” she said. “Volkin, who helped you. Volkin, your friend.”

“He helped me,” Bourne said, “because it also benefited him. And as for being my friend…” He shrugged. “He was Boris’s friend once, when it suited him.”

“And the diamonds?”

“Gone,” Bourne said, moving out of the way of two corps members. “All except for the ones I gave to you.”

“Which I had appraised and sold in Amsterdam, after which I flew back to Cairo, and, as you instructed, gave one-third of the proceeds to Amira. She can buy a new houseboat now. Hell, she can buy a fleet of them.”

“More likely, she’ll leave Egypt forever.”

Sara nodded. “That’s my guess, as well.” She paused, waiting until one of the tall male dancers passed by on what seemed silent cat’s feet. “Then it was on to Paris, where I met up with Soraya and her daughter.” Soraya was a longtime friend who had worked alongside Bourne, before marrying and having a child. Her husband had been brutally murdered last year. “A third went to them.”

“Then you flew here.”

“The final third was turned into the trust you had me set up for Liis. She’ll have use of the interest until she turns twenty-five, when the principal is hers, just as you wanted.”

“I would have been here sooner, but I took a couple of days to visit old sites.”

“Boris’s grave.”

He nodded. A cloud crossed his face. “His dacha was razed. It’s as if it had never existed.”

“The famous Russian revisionism at work. I’m sorry.”

Seeing so much of Boris’s life’s work erased had been difficult to stomach, and he had been shadowed all the time. No one had dared approach him, though. Lucky for them; he’d been in a homicidal frame of mind. In shadows, he had mourned his friend and compatriot on so many adventures. He felt Boris’s absence as a child feels a hole in his pocket through which he had lost something personal, something valuable. There were tears inside him, but they refused to budge. They stayed hidden as he traced the nighttime streets of Moscow, looking for trouble, finding only a life apart. A solitary man shadowed, always shadowed. His expression was grimly determined. “They can’t erase my memories.”

She studied him closely, moved her hand experimentally under his coat. “Volkin shot you twice before you got to him.”

“Once in the shoulder, once in the meat of my biceps.” He had not told her that he’d taken the first shot protecting the Angelmaker, though he could not quite figure out why. “The arm wound was nothing, the bullet went clear through, but the first shot nicked an artery. I lost a lot of blood. I don’t remember much after that, I was out cold. The next thing I knew I was in a Moscow hospital. No one could tell me who had brought me in.”

“But you knew. It was the Angelmaker who saved you.” Her eyes were wide and staring. “Why did she do that? And why… Helping Amira and Soraya now that she’s a widow I understand. But why have you done this for Liis?”

At that moment, Liis stepped out of her changing closet, saw Bourne and, with a shriek, flew into his arms. She swung against his chest like a perfect porcelain doll. “And now here you are in the flesh! My very own Christmas present! Thank you! Thank you for everything!”

She hugged him again, and then, almost immediately pushed back. “Mala. Where is she? I know she’d want to be here. I was so counting on seeing her.”

“She’ll come,” Bourne said with a wide smile. “She’ll come,” he repeated without knowing whether it was the truth or a lie, “one of these days.”

—

The Angelmaker sat in the last row of the theater balcony, off to the side, in a darkened corner. She had shrunk her presence down, clung to the shadows, so that when, one by one, the banks of spots winked off, until only one light remained on at center stage, no one noticed her.

It was from this high eyrie that she had watched her little sister perform, her eyes moist, her heart fluttering like a bird’s in her chest. There were no words to describe what she was feeling. High emotions clogged her like a stopped-up drain, made whatever words she wished to say to Liis impossible for her to voice. Besides, considering her profession, it was far wiser to keep her distance from her sister, painful though it was.

But, then again, pain was her life. She had lived with it from the moment she had been abducted. It had never occurred to her that the pain would lessen, let alone go away, when she was saved by Jason Bourne. He had removed her from the basis of her physical pain, but the rest of it, nesting at the emotional, the psychic levels o

f her being, could not be exorcised, even by the phalanx of psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and cognitive therapists she had been subjected to, like a butterfly pinned to a sheet of paper. There was nothing anyone could do. The pain had been embedded so deeply inside her there were days when her bones ached from it. But it was a familiar ache, which, in time, had morphed from a parasite to a passenger to a form of symbiosis, until she had convinced herself that it had always been a part of her, waiting for the right circumstances to step out into the light. Bourne meant well, and she was eternally grateful to him, but he didn’t understand. How could he? How could anyone?

At length, she rose, slipped from the silenced building to wait with the crowd of balletomanes, oblivious to the snow and the bitter cold that was not so different from Moscow this time of year. She watched her sister, in the intoxicated arms of excitement and cheer, emerge from the stage door. The expectant clutch of people rushed forward, Playbills and autograph books extended toward the New York City Ballet’s newest rising star. She resisted the tide, pushing back against it until she was at the outer fringe, almost in the gutter.

Liis, her cheeks flushed with her triumph as much as the cold, handed off a bouquet of roses—the very ones the Angelmaker had sent—to Rebeka, the beautiful woman who had been with Bourne at the Omega + Gulf Bank in Nicosia. Had she saved him for this? For Rebeka? He stood on the other side of Liis, almost unrecognizable in a suit and tie, a beautiful tweed overcoat. He’d had his hair trimmed, his stubble scraped off. He could pass for anyone in the real world of bright lights and nine-to-five jobs. Almost. She smiled to herself. But not quite. She saw how his eyes darted from person to person, his brain assessing risk, always and forever. She saw how he stood, very still but at the same time ready to spring into action at an instant’s notice. In that, they were the same: the instincts of a feral creature, faculties undulled, unsullied by human civilization.