The Bourne Enigma

by Robert Ludlum

  She was struck then, a titanic blow that knocked her sideways against the edge of the desk. A bolt of pain ran up from the tips of her ribs, filling her chest with fire, making her gasp. Her attacker was upon her, bending her backward, his foul breath in her face. His knuckles were clad with something that gleamed in the light, and when he hit her in the side, she almost blacked out. Her knees filled with water, her legs were like rubber, and the agony was so intense she could scarcely put two thoughts together. She felt stupid and weak, and this filled her with a black rage; her meticulously honed survival instinct turned her wicked, ruthless, implacable. Remembering her first sight of the desktop as if it were still before her, she reached back. Even that motion was difficult. One of my ribs must be cracked, she thought, even as her fingers scrabbled to find the heavy paper cutter.

  At that instant, her assailant flipped her over onto her stomach. Bent over the desk, she felt him pull her dress up, drape the hem over her waist, exposing her. He pressed himself against her, rubbed up and down like an animal in heat. In her mind, he was barely more than that.

  He held her hips, he was working the zipper of his trousers but was so engorged he was having difficulty freeing himself. Sara grabbed the paper cutter. Her angle worked against her, reducing the leverage she could apply. But she was possessed by the strength of righteous rage, which overrode both the poor leverage and the blinding flashes of pain in her side. Wrenching the long blade from the heavy base of the paper cutter, she pressed one hip into the edge of the desk and, though it was also painful, torqued herself from her hips up through her torso, swung first the flat of the blade into the small of her attacker’s back, then, as he reacted, slashed his throat from side to side, nearly decapitating him in that single prodigious blow.

  Blood fountained, pulse by pulse, inundating both the carpet and his fallen comrade. As he fell, a blurred figure coming through the doorway at speed brought a last savage response from her. She raised the bloody blade, ready to strike, but was halted at the top of her attack arc by a powerful grip on her wrist. She began to struggle, knowing her life hung in the balance, that if she let herself be stopped now she’d be dead within seconds.

  “Sara.”

  The blood ran down the blade, over her fist, thick, still warm. If she didn’t have that, she had other weapons at her disposal.

  “Sara!”

  Her entire body was a weapon. This was how she had been trained; this was how she would use it now in the last defense of her life.

  “Sara, it’s me, Jason.”

  She blinked sweat out of her eyes, saw him before her frenzied brain recognized him. Then, flooded with excruciating pain, she dropped the paper cutter blade, and, with a gasp of both agony and relief, fell against the blessed solidity of his chest, clung to him like an orphan in the adrenaline storm still thundering through her body. She shivered, began to shake uncontrollably, as if with a high fever.

  “Jason,” she whispered. “Jason.”

  “It’s all right now,” Bourne said, stroking her sweat-slick hair.

  “If only that were true,” an urbane voice said from behind him.

  —

  They both turned to see First Minister Timur Savasin aiming a massive .357 Magnum at them.

  He doesn’t leave anything to chance, Bourne thought. That thing will stop a rampaging lion in its tracks. He saw no sign of Mala, and this worried him more than the threat of the Magnum.

  “What is this place?” Bourne said.

  “What? No greeting? No prelude to formal talks among nations?” Timur Savasin was smirking. “Well, what can you expect from an American and an Israeli?” He spat out the last three words as he shook a cigarette out from a pack at his hip pocket, lit it, all with one hand. Apparently, he had practice with this maneuver. He inhaled deeply, expelled a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. He appeared exceptionally fit beneath his open-collared shirt and lightweight linen trousers; a healthy glow suffused his face. “First, drop the gun.”

  Bourne did so.

  “Kick it away.” Savasin nodded. “That’s a good lad. Now get rid of that dirk you have stuffed at your back.”

  Bourne grasped the hilt, began to slide it out.

  “Slowly,” Savasin said. “Very slowly.” He nodded again. “Now drop it and kick it away, too.”

  When Bourne had done as he was ordered, the first minister took another puff on his cigarette, said, “To answer your question, this place is precisely what it purports to be: the Omega and Gulf Bank.”

  “Bullshit!” Sara snapped. She appeared to have recovered a bit of her core energy. “There are no tellers, no safes, no money. It’s no bank at all.”

  Timur Savasin looked only at Bourne. Smoke drifted past one eye. “It is a bank because I say it’s a bank.”

  “That, unfortunately, isn’t enough, First Minister,” Bourne said, even as he squeezed Sara, warning her to keep her mouth shut. “Rebeka is correct. There’s nothing here to indicate it’s anything but a hollow shell, a half-finished stage set.”

  “That’s because you haven’t seen the vault.” Savasin’s eyes gleamed like unholy lamps in the dark. “You haven’t taken the journey down to level one. The journey we’re going to make right now.” He gestured with the barrel of the Magnum as he backed carefully out of the doorway. Dropping the butt, he ground it out beneath his heel. Then he gestured in a mock bow. “After you.”

  —

  They took an elevator, so large it could have served as a freight lift, down one level. The door slid back, and they found themselves in a small, almost claustrophobic space excavated out of the island’s bedrock. Savasin turned on the electric lights, revealing the immense circular steel door of the bank’s vault, gleaming like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He had not lied. Here before them lay the repository of the Sovereign’s new wealth, courtesy of the mainland Chinese.

  As the three of them stood before the vault door, Timur Savasin said, “Here is the nub of my dilemma, Bourne. I need to open the vault, yet I do not have the code to open the door.” He stepped closer to the vault, but at the same time kept his distance from Bourne. “You, I believe, do.”

  “In that,” Bourne said, “you’re mistaken.”

  “Well, you see, I don’t believe you, Bourne.” Savasin leveled the Magnum. “And to prove it I will give you precisely one minute to input the code into the keypad at the center of the door.”

  “I can’t do it,” Bourne said truthfully. “I don’t have the code.”

  “You have fifty seconds left, Bourne. At the end of that time I will shoot your inamorata, though how you can bear to touch Israeli animal flesh is beyond my ken.”

  Sara made to move, but Bourne restrained her. “Don’t,” he whispered in her ear. “Don’t do or say anything. He will shoot you at the least provocation, of that I’m sure.”

  She subsided, but he could feel her seething just as if he shared her body. “How will you stop him?” she whispered in return.

  “By opening the vault.”

  Her eyes opened wide. “How?”

  “Well, that’s the enigma I need to solve.” He released his grip on her. “Can you stand on your own?”

  Her eyes flashed fire. “Don’t be absurd.”

  He gave her a hard grin before stepping to the input plate on the vault door. It was a touch screen with numbers from one to zero. No letters. This confused him.

  “Thirty seconds,” Timur Savasin called from behind him. “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”

  No letters, only numbers. But there were no numbers in Boris’s message. It had said, Follow the money, it had contained the place and the bank name, but no clue as to the code. The only numbers were today’s date—the commencement of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

  “Fifteen seconds, fourteen, thirteen…”

  Bourne stared at the touch pad. No letters, only numbers. And then he had it. The date! The date was the code!

  “Ten, nine, eight�
��”

  He inputted the date, turned the bar. It wouldn’t budge.

  “Six, five…”

  Sweat broke out on his forehead and upper lip. The nape of his neck was wet.

  “Four, three…”

  Then he saw his mistake. He had inputted the date in the American manner with the month first, then the day. Now he reversed it, tapping the day first, then the month, in the European fashion. He finished with the year.

  “Two, one…”

  He gripped the handle. It released down, he heard the tumblers clicking away, a whirring as the thick solid steel bolts retracted, and the vault door swung open.

  —

  The three of them stepped in to find that the interior was completely barren. No skids of dollars, euros, or yen. No bars of gold. No thick stacks of bearer bonds or stock certificates. They were confronted with nothing at all.

  “Jesus Christ,” Timur Savasin said. Clearly he was as surprised as Bourne and Sara. “What the hell—”

  Then the door slammed shut behind them, the bolts slid to.

  60

  They were locked inside. This was Mala’s work, Bourne knew. The devil’s work.

  “The Angelmaker has fucked you, First Minister,” he said.

  “The bitch has fucked us all,” Savasin howled.

  He turned the Magnum on Sara, as if she, not the Angelmaker, had betrayed him, and in a more fundamental way, she had. She was a Jew. Worse, she was Israeli, his implacable enemy, the ready tip of the bayonet that had been thrust through so many of his comrades.

  He fired at her at the same moment Bourne’s shoulder slammed into him. Sara went down, but whether she had been hit or had simply ducked out of harm’s way Bourne had no way of telling. He had his hands full with the first minister.

  Timur Savasin, the martial arts expert, possessed a fierce will not merely to survive but to triumph. Anything other than victory was not only unacceptable, it was unthinkable. Beyond that, he completely surprised Bourne with his understanding and practice of haragei—the art of balance and power emanating from the lower belly. Haragei was the basis of all Japanese martial arts, from sumo to karate to the almost extinct harakei.

  The first minister’s chosen expertise was, like Bourne’s, in aikido. While firing his Magnum—a distraction, nothing more—he slid into Bourne attack, bending his torso, while sweeping his feet in a shallow arc that struck Bourne’s leading ankle, taking him off his feet.

  With the Magnum out of bullets, Savasin reversed his grip, swinging the butt into Bourne’s chin. Bourne’s head slammed back against the rock floor. On the verge of blacking out, Bourne raised his arms in defense, but Savasin was already inside his semicircle of defense, and he smashed his fist three, four times into Bourne’s side, aiming for the muscle over Bourne’s kidneys.

  But even while being battered, Bourne gathered himself. The true beauty of aikido was that it taught not only the inner centralization and coordination of power, but also emphasized the building up of the mental core, eliminating normal inhibitions in order to attain a single focus, so that even injured a proponent could not only persevere but gain victory.

  But, again, Savasin was turning out to be an aikido savant. He immediately knew that Bourne had retreated into haragei, knew what he was doing, and sought to counter it by attacking Bourne’s source of power, his lower belly. Again and again, he struck Bourne as he raised up over him, his thighs locked against Bourne’s hips to keep him from rolling or wriggling away.

  Bourne could feel the darkness of unconsciousness lapping at the edges of his vision, while blinding sparks exploded like fireworks in the center, making him effectively blind. But none of that mattered, because, in fact, Savasin did not know Bourne; he had only files and hearsay to go by, and those were not nearly enough. Not by a long shot. Now he found out.

  —

  Bourne grabbed the cigarette pack out of Savasin’s hip pocket, ground the cigarettes, tossed a blizzard of tobacco in his face. Savasin could not see the calloused edges of Bourne’s hands rising up like serpents, but he certainly felt them strike him, causing him to loosen his grip on his prey’s hips. He stared sightless, helpless, while Bourne tossed him aside, and was just about to regain a semblance of his faculties when the hammer came down.

  Blood filled his cracked lungs, rose up into his throat and mouth. He was drowning in his own fluids.

  —

  Bourne stared into First Minister Timur Savasin’s bloodshot eyes, watched more and more blood overflow the corners of his mouth.

  “It wasn’t enough that you murdered my friend,” he said, “you had to kill Svetlana as well.”

  Savasin’s mouth worked spasmodically. Animal noises emanated from him that might once have been intelligible words. Then he turned his head to one side, spat out a gobbet of blackish blood with a shard of his own lung embedded in it. When he turned back to Bourne, he spoke. The hateful words, though slightly garbled, were unmistakable as he spat them at Sara: “Jew bitch should never have been born.”

  Those were also the last words he ever spoke. Bourne took up the empty Magnum, shoved the long barrel through the top of Timur Savasin’s palette, through his sinuses, into his brain. There, he stirred the pot until all light faded from the first minister’s eyes. Life abandoned him, as if it could not flee fast enough.

  61

  There’s no stopping you,” Bourne said, as he raised Sara to a sitting position.

  Her smile was leavened with the pain from her ribs. “There’s no stopping either of us, it seems.” She indicated with her head. “What the hell did you do to him, anyway?”

  “Nothing less than he deserved.” He pulled her to her feet with one arm at the small of her back. “How badly are your ribs hurt?”

  “Let’s find a way out of here first.”

  He shook his head. “No chance. As long as the filtration system is working we’ll be—”

  At that instant complete silence engulfed them. Someone—most likely Mala—had turned off the internal air in the vault.

  “All right?” Sara asked archly. “Is that what you were going to say? Now what do you say about finding a way—”

  But Bourne had already stripped off the first minister’s shirt and was tearing it into lengths he knotted together. He bound her midsection, tying the material off tightly.

  “I can hardly breathe. I feel like I’m wearing a corset.”

  “Good. Now let’s see where we stand.” He crossed to the closed door. “There’s always a safety mechanism to open a door like this from the inside.” He found it. “Ah, here we go.” He pressed the emergency release, but nothing happened.

  “The Angelmaker has disabled it,” Sara said. “It looks like she’s living up to her name. I guess it is possible to hate someone you’ve never met.” She glanced at Bourne. “And, by the way, why did your good friend Boris Karpov lead you here? There’s no staff, no money. To me, it looks like a dead end. It’s time to face the fact that he was conned, and so were we. There’s nothing here for us. The Russian invasion will begin this evening dead on schedule.”

  Bourne shook his head. “I’m convinced this place is ground zero for the Sovereign’s Chinese money. I’m missing something.” He spun slowly, looking around the bare vault. “Something vital.”

  “Like what?”

  His eyes lit up. “Like this.” He recrossed the vault to the wall where Savasin’s shots had chipped away at the rock face. And rock face it was, in every sense of the word. His fingertips roamed over the surface beneath. “Look here.”

  Sara winced as she bent stiffly to look at where he was pointing. “It’s smooth!” she exclaimed. “And it’s metal!”

  Retrieving the Magnum, Bourne wiped off the barrel on the First Minister’s trousers, then returned to the chipped wall, hacking at the thin facade—which, as it turned out, wasn’t stone at all, but plaster molded and painted to resemble stone—until he revealed an array of electronic equipment. Checking the monitor, he saw th
at the array was connected to the Dark Web, a place in cyberspace where illicit matériel of every sort imaginable was bought, bartered, and sold.

  “There’s a powerful antennae array up on the roof,” Bourne said. “It’s invisible from the street. I wondered what it connected to. There was nothing on the second floor.”

  “And all the offices on the ground floor are empty—looking like dummies—a stage set,” Sara said. “And yet spotless, which means someone must come in periodically to clean.”

  “I’m willing to bet it isn’t anyone local,” Bourne said.

  “So now we know the bank is used for something. But what? If there are no banknotes, no bonds, no certificates of deposit, no gold, then what is the bank for?”

  “I think I know,” Bourne said. “But first we need to get out of here.”

  “As I was saying.” Sara was watching him carefully. “Any ideas?”

  “Just one,” Bourne said. “The Angelmaker.”

  Sara blinked hard. “I beg your pardon?”

  “She’s not going to let us die in here.”

  “That’s why she turned off the air, right?”

  The air! Bourne thought. Of course.

  “The Angelmaker knows this place better than we do,” he said. “I would wager she’s been here before—more than once.”

  “Doing what?” Sara said. “Mopping and dusting?”

  At last, he found what he was searching for. The air vent was almost as cleverly hidden as the banks of electronic equipment it serviced. Any form of stacked electronics threw off tremendous heat, requiring powerful fans and heat sinks. The heat problem was bad enough out in the open, but when the components were secreted as these were, they required an immense amount of cooling.