The Bourne Enigma

by Robert Ludlum

  —

  Bourne, working on the rebus Boris had created, was scarcely aware of time passing. He had parts of the message figured out, but not others. The difficulty with rebuses was that they were puzzles within puzzles. It wasn’t enough to decode the individual groups, you then had to work out what they meant when linked together.

  After hours of brain-bending work he was fairly sure that what Boris had left him wasn’t a message in the normal sense. The rebus was seeming to him more like a guide, or maybe even a map of coordinates important to what Boris was up to just before he was killed.

  Since his mobile wasn’t working inside the museum, he rose and, searching the stacks, pulled down a detailed atlas of the Middle East, brought it back to the table. When he opened it, he consulted the correct page for the first set of coordinates, but found them to be incorrect. Returning to the rebus, he saw now where he had made a mistake. The first glyph set seemed to refer not to letters but to numbers. Ten minutes of more brain-busting work led Bourne to the conclusion that the first glyph set was a date four days from today. That, in itself, sounded ominous.

  He continued. The second glyph-set translated literally as “Red-leaf,” “Hammer-on-toe.” So what was he looking at? “Tea”? Surely not. “Tea” made no sense, even in the off-kilter logic of a rebus. Bourne crossed out “Tea” and wrote “Fall.” Next he tackled “Hammer-on-toe.” He wrote “injury,” “pain.” He wrote “blood,” but immediately crossed it out. There were many better ways to depict “blood.” He looked at his words: “Fall/Pain,” and while they made sense as cause and effect that wasn’t the logic the rebus maker used. Rebus words were never precisely what they looked like, but variations. Figuring out the impreciseness was the most maddening part of the puzzle.

  Bourne looked away, cleared his mind of preconceptions, then studied the glyphs again. How about “Fall” and “Ow”? In rebus parlance: “Follow.”

  He wrote down that word, put lines through the others, then went on with his brain-twisting deciphering. Twenty minutes later, this was what he had: FOLLOW THE MONEY …

  Follow the money where? What money? Something tickled on the edge of his consciousness, something he had seen or heard? He tried hard to find it in the palace of his eidetic memory, but it kept slipping away, like an eel. This was the flaw his amnesia had caused, like a fault line, a rift that occasionally opened up, swallowing what he needed to remember from before he was shot.

  Back to work. From there on, the glyph forms switched from masculine to feminine, which required an entirely different mind-set. Bourne pressed fingers against his closed eyes, trying to massage away the ache building behind them. He opened them again. The entire glyph set was stretched out before him, as if it were a piece of contemporary art. And there was, he saw, a certain kind of beauty in the glyphs, sere slashes that looked like the desert that was their origin. Looking at them as a whole had made him realize how much danger he was in, now that he possessed Boris’s message. Holding on to the original piece of art, beautiful as it was, was far too risky. He studied the whole in a different way, memorized the glyphs, their relationship to one another, then he rose, went out of the library, along the corridor to the men’s room. There, in one of the stalls, he tore the message into bits, flushed them down the toilet. The message existed now only in his head.

  —

  Bats. The bats were everywhere. After having liberated them from their cave enclosure, Sara was as engulfed in their swooping, chirruping dives as was Korsolov. The difference was she had perpetrated the assault—a crucial distinction that had given her the edge with Colonel Pankin. But that edge had been used up. Korsolov was older, wiser, and had had time to recover from the shock of the colony on the loose. Further, he lacked Pankin’s instinctive fear of bats.

  Though he ignored them as best he could, Korsolov instinctively continued slapping them away when they swerved too close. Sensing her chance, Sara rushed at him through the chaotic darkness of the bat cave, moving inside his defensive perimeter, negating the threat of his Makarov pistol. She felt the weight of his body, the acrid odor of his sweat, as she twisted his right wrist, then chopped down on it with the edge of her other hand.

  His fingers loosened, and she shook the Makarov away, kicking it across the cement floor. But in those few seconds, he was able to shift his concentration from shooting her to disabling her with a nerve pinch in the area of her carotid artery.

  Sara felt her knees turn to jelly, her breath came hot and fast—too fast—she was losing oxygen as her lungs struggled to suck in air. She felt the weakness spreading through her arms, shoulders, into her upper torso. Soon she’d be completely helpless.

  “You little bitch,” Korsolov whispered in her ear. “Did you think I’d be as easy to kill as that wet-behind-the-ears Pankin? Why, he’d never left Russia before this. A pirogi out of the sauce.” He laughed, his breath hot and biting as his words.

  Sara struggled for purchase with her hands, forearms, and elbows, but the strength had been sucked out of her. Her head felt so heavy. It dropped onto his shoulder, and he laughed again, this time more loudly, more acidly as he bent his own head down as if to kiss her, as if they were lovers.

  In that instant of forced intimacy, Sara gave a silent roar. Her jaws opened, her teeth bared, and Korsolov howled in pain and astonishment as she took a bite out of his cheek. Her teeth punctured skin and flesh, and he reared back instinctively, but she held on, her teeth driving deeper until they struck his own. Then she whipped her head back and forth, ripping the ragged pink flesh off him, spitting it out, lunging at him again, growling this time, her eyes wide and staring, fixed on his nose this time.

  Her jaws snapped closed, just missing taking off the tip of his nose. Korsolov, bleeding profusely, eyes tearing, his breath sucked in fits and starts, had had enough. He broke away from her and stumbled away, running erratically through the whirling colony of bats, moaning as they struck his ragged wound, smelling blood, coming after him, bats out of hell.

  Sara tried to go after him, but his terrible grip had enervated her for the moment. She looked out into a violent darkness, and thought, Let the bats do with him what they will.

  —

  The bats did what bats will do: they tunneled through the darkness of the cave, swirling, beating their wings, swooping en masse, driving through the filthy, sparsely attended aquarium building to the outside.

  Bourne saw them darken the sky through the streaked windows of the library, and knew instinctively something was wrong. Bats at the time of day where there should be no bats. Rolling up his jeweler’s kit, he left the library, exited the building, and made his way quickly toward the aquarium, knifing through the crowds of people either staring, dumbstruck, into the sky or, in the case of mothers, hustling their little children away from the area. Gripped by the human instinctive fear of bats.

  His keen eye was forever on the lookout for the reasons for anomalies, and so he focused on the people pouring out of the aquarium building rather than watching the bats swirl and swoop in a dark, trailing cloud. That was how he saw General Korsolov—though Bourne was as yet unaware of his promotion from colonel. He had met him at Boris’s wedding reception. Boris himself had introduced them, but in a way that had made Bourne wary of him, despite the fact that he was Boris’s second-in-command. Boris had always been a student of Sun-Tzu, whose Art of War he considered one of his three professional bibles. Keep your friends close, Sun-Tzu had written. Your enemies closer. The manner in which Boris had introduced Korsolov had led Bourne to the conclusion that the colonel was one of the latter, not the former. In which case, Boris was telling him, he was a dangerous man who bore watching closely.

  Now Bourne recognized him, running in a ragged line out of the building, oddly surrounded by a cloud of bats. Then, as Bourne came closer, he saw the blood leaking around the hand Korsolov had slapped against his cheek. He was bleeding profusely, and though many of the freed bats were fruit-eating, there were clearly some v
ampire bats that fed on the blood of small mammals. Korsolov could hardly be termed a small mammal—but despite his efforts to stanch the flow, there was plenty of fresh blood all over him.

  Shielding himself with the people streaming past him, Bourne approached Korsolov with an almost obsessive resolve. There was only one reason an FSB colonel would be here in Cairo at this very moment—he was after Sara. Which meant she must be somewhere close, possibly even among the crowds on the plaza. But for the moment, at least, his attention was on Korsolov. Nearing him, Bourne could see the ragged hole in his cheek, knew it couldn’t have been made by bats, but by a large predator, doubtless human. Sara. He had made contact and she had fought back. A stab of anxiety stabbed through him. Was she all right? Had Korsolov injured her—or worse? He refused to contemplate the idea; dwelling on it would do no good—worse, it would distract him from what he needed to do to Korsolov.

  He was close now, and though up until now he had hidden himself well a sudden gap in the people exposed him to Korsolov’s gaze as he looked wildly around for respite from the flock of bats that circled him like a black aura.

  Korsolov’s expression momentarily froze, then hardened. He recognized Bourne, and now he had a solid object on which to project his rage and frustration. He was a grotesque sight as he dropped his bloody hand, groped for a switchblade, which he snicked open, lunging at Bourne in almost the same motion.

  Bourne, turning sideways, grasped Korsolov’s extended wrist, pulling it forward and down, unbalancing the Russian, tipping him past his center of gravity. Bourne chopped down on Korsolov’s neck with the edge of his hand. Korsolov coughed, shuddered, then drove his bent-over body into Bourne’s side.

  They both went down, rolled over amid those streaming past. No one seemed to give them a second look. The bats swooping and chittering kept their attention high above the pavement.

  As Bourne hit the ground, his grip on Korsolov’s wrist was dislodged, the switchblade came free and slashed across Bourne’s throat. Blood flew from the blade, like droplets in the rain, but the blade had sliced a bat in half. Now Korsolov, still bedeviled by the flying beasts, reversed his grip on the knife, plunged it down toward Bourne’s chest. Bourne twisted and the point of the blade pierced his shirt, missing his arm by inches. The bats closed in again, and Bourne, worming out from under, wrapped his left arm around Korsolov’s neck, placed the base of his right palm against the side of the Russian’s head, and gave a violent wrench. Korsolov’s cervical vertebrae cracked, he gave a little sigh, his eyes rolled up into his head, and the bats settled onto his ruined face.

  —

  Bourne lay, panting. Beneath the flurry of leather wings, he could hear the wail of police and emergency vehicle sirens, and knew he had to vanish as quickly as possible. As he rose to his knees, a hand was extended, and he took it, looking up into Sara’s smiling face.

  “We all get what we deserve,” she said, “in the end.”

  29

  There was a private—and like everything government-related—secret exit from the east side of the Russian White House. It was an interior exit, invisible on the outside. Through three thick metal doors, resembling the flood-barrier watertight doors on a submarine, First Minister Timur Savasin and his new aide, Igor Malachev, the replacement for the late, lamented Lieutenant Avilov, trotted down three flights of steel stairs, into a subway station, as magnificent in appointments as it was deserted.

  Timur Savasin’s private train sat waiting for him, doors open. Savasin led the way into the first car, the doors closed, and the moment the first minister took his seat behind his desk, the train pulled silently out of the station. The train itself had been built entirely to Savasin’s specifications. The interior had the appearance of a plush home. Paneled teak walls, marble floors over which were scattered expensive carpets, mullioned windows, one of which was of stained glass, upholstered furniture in the old European style, over which hung an ornate crystal chandelier. There was even a fireplace in which faux coals were heated by electricity. In the mantel were ornamental items small and large from the time of the czars, including an ormolu clock. The first car, in which the two men now sat, was a combination office and Pullman, with sofas and deep, upholstered chairs, as well as a Louis XVI desk and a pair of straight-backed chairs, in one of which Malachev sat, spine straight, one impeccably clad leg crossed over the other.

  Unlike Avilov, who had been a military man, Malachev was a ranking Kremlin silovik, part of Timur Savasin’s powerful coalition. Malachev was young, self-assured, and smart. He was also ambitious in a way that did not dismay his boss. Avilov’s appetite for power had been animal; Malachev’s was cerebral.

  The second car contained the bedroom. Everything in it was oversize, as befitted Savasin’s own appetites. Not many people had seen it—not even Savasin’s wife, and certainly not his three children. But the first minister’s parade of mistresses had. Rumor had it that more than one per night were often on tap as the train rolled back and forth on the private line between his office in the White House and his sprawling dacha in the piney forests outside Moscow.

  As Malachev watched, the door to the bedroom opened and in walked a young woman, svelte, stylish, and very beautiful. She was sheathed in a pale-green dress that hugged her figure and complimented her skin tone. She wore high heels that set off her calves, butt, and breasts perfectly. In short, Malachev was entranced. She came across the parlor car and sat with a shivery sound of hosiery. She was not introduced; she said not a word, but studied the two men as a cat stares at a shadow upon a wall, with a curious and unknowable intensity.

  Savasin lit a cigarette, steepled his fingertips on the desktop, and inhaled deeply. “Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, Korsolov and his pet swine Pankin,” he said on the exhale, “are never going to capture the Israeli agent Rebeka.”

  “With good luck, she will kill them in Cairo,” Malachev said.

  “That would be convenient. But who will terminate her?” Savasin tapped his fingers together contemplatively.

  “There are any number of agents I can summon.”

  “No doubt. But this situation requires an outsider, someone so clever, so deadly—”

  “I have just the right man.” Malachev reached for his mobile. The train was equipped with Wi-Fi and uninterrupted cell service.

  “Not him,” the First Minister said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “After what he’s done, he needs to lay low. Less exposure for him now is the wiser choice.”

  “Then who?”

  “Who, indeed?” Savasin returned to tapping his fingertips together, as if he were listening to a melody only he could hear. He glanced over at the bookcase built into the teak paneling. There his eye rested on his two favorite novels. The phrase that Humbert Humbert repeats in Lolita—”Dolores, Lo, Lo-li-ta.” A phrase with a decided lilt. “Curiouser and Curiouser,” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland also had a lilt. Both novels were steeped in childhood dreams, made dark and ominous by the looming shadow of adult pedophilia—and, in the case of Lolita, rape and murder. Leave it to a Russian to make explicit what a closeted Brit like Lewis Carroll could only sublimate through his writing. Still, Savasin found it odd that a Russian and an Englishman could have an obsession in common. He hated the English with a vibrant passion. Carroll wrote: “‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ says the White Queen to Alice.” Whereas any good apparatchik knew it was the opposite: the best memory must work backward, in order to erase the inconveniences of history.

  “First Minister?”

  Hauled out of his contemplation, Timur Savasin’s gaze returned to Malachev. There was a reason his thoughts had turned to Lo and Alice, two preternaturally clever girls. It would take a special sort of person to match them. As with Lo and Alice, so Rebeka. For just an instant, his gaze flickered to the woman who had emerged from his bedroom. Then, as if a mental door—a decision door—had closed, his heavy gaze fell once again upon Malachev. “I’m thinking of Zmeya
,” he said.

  Malachev’s eyes opened wide.

  The first minister nodded. “The Serpent.” No one knew his real name, not even Savasin. Zmeya, his operational name, was Russian for “serpent.”

  “He’s meant to be the best in the business,” Malachev said with some hesitation. “I hear he’s also volatile, unpredictable, prone to changing plans on the fly.”

  “All traits that make him invaluable. Plus, crucially, he’s close to the field of action.” Savasin nodded. “Call him. Agree to all his terms, no matter how outlandish they may seem to you. He has a one hundred percent success rate with me. In the case of Rebeka that’s all that matters.”

  —

  Svetlana waited until the airplane took off, until dinner had been served and consumed, and the coffee and chocolates were in front of her. The first minister had been generous enough to seat her in first class, so there was no one sitting next to her. Still, she pulled up her privacy screen.

  She stirred sugar and cream into her coffee with a tiny spoon. When she unwrapped the foil from the square of Belgian chocolate she found her fingers trembling. Popping the square into her mouth, she took out her mobile, opened the back, slipped out the 8 GB micro SD memory card in her phone, replaced it with the 64 GB card Boris had secreted inside the Sopranos DVD. Whatever was on there must be huge.

  Fitting the back onto the mobile, she turned it over, fired it up in airplane mode. She had to put it on her tray table, her hands were shaking so badly. While she waited for it to boot up, she took a sip of coffee. She had to hold the cup in both hands to ensure she wouldn’t spill any. Now she felt she was ready for whatever might come. The cup clattered a little as she set it in its saucer. Then she took up her mobile, navigated to the material on the SD card. There were three kinds of files: text, photos, and videos. No wonder he had needed 64 GB.