The Bourne Sanction

by Robert Ludlum

“Moscow. Some friends of his have gotten into a bit of trouble.”

  “The Russian mob?”

  “Something like that.”

  Best that she believe the simplest explanation, Bourne thought. He watched the play of lamplight reveal her expression. He was certainly no stranger to duplicity, but his heart constricted at the thought that Moira might be playing him as she was suspected of playing Martin. Several times today he had considered bypassing the meet with the new DCI, but he had to admit to himself that seeing the questioned communication between her and Martin had become important to him. Once he saw the evidence he’d know how to proceed with Moira. He owed it to Martin to discover the truth about his relationship with her. Besides, it was no use fooling himself: He now had a personal stake in the situation. His newly revealed feelings for her complicated matters for everyone, not the least himself. Why was there was a price to pay for every pleasure? he wondered bitterly. But now he stood committed; there was no turning back, either from Moscow or from discovering who Moira really was.

  Moira, moving closer to him, put a hand on his arm. “Jason, what is it? You look so troubled.”

  Bourne tried not to look alarmed. Like Marie, she had the uncanny ability to sense what he was feeling, though with everyone else he was adept at keeping his expression neutral. The important thing now was not to lie to her; she’d pick that up in a heartbeat.

  “The mission is extremely delicate. Professor Specter has already warned me that I’m jumping into the middle of a blood feud between two Moscow grupperovka families.”

  Her grip on him tightened briefly. “Your loyalty to the professor is admirable. And after all, your loyalty is what Martin admired most about you.” She checked her watch. “I’ve got to go.”

  She lifted her face to his, her lips soft as melting butter, and they kissed for what seemed a long time.

  She laughed softly. “Dear Jason, don’t worry. I’m not one of those people who ask about when I’ll see you again.”

  Then she turned and, walking into the foyer, saw herself out. A moment later Bourne heard the cough of a car starting up, the crunch of its tires as it performed a quarter circle back down the gravel drive to the road.

  Arkadin awoke grimy and stiff. His shirt was still damp with sweat from his nightmare. Gray light sifted in through the skewed blinds on the window. Stretching his neck by rolling his head in a circle, he thought what he needed most was a good long soak, but the hotel had only a shower in the hallway bathroom.

  He rolled over to find that he was alone in the room; Devra had gone. Sitting up, he slid out of the damp, rumpled bed, scrubbed his rough face with the heels of his hands. His shoulder throbbed. It was swollen and hot.

  He was reaching for the doorknob when the door opened. Devra stood on the threshold, a paper bag in one hand.

  “Did you miss me?” she said with a sardonic smile. “I can see it in your face. You thought I’d skipped out.”

  She came inside, kicked the door shut. Her eyes, unblinking, met his. She put her free arm up. Her hand squeezed his left shoulder, gently but firmly enough to cause him pain.

  “I brought us coffee and fresh rolls,” she said evenly. “Don’t manhandle me.”

  Arkadin glared at her for a moment. The pain meant nothing to him, but her defiance did. He was right. There was much more to her than what she presented on the surface.

  He let go and so did she.

  “I know who you are,” he said. “Filya wasn’t Pyotr’s courier. You are.”

  That sardonic smile returned. “I was wondering how long it would take you to figure it out.” She crossed to the dresser, lined up the paper cups of coffee, set the rolls on the flattened bag. She took out a small bag of ice and tossed it to him.

  “They’re still warm.” She bit into one, chewed thoughtfully.

  Arkadin placed the ice on his left shoulder, sighed inwardly at the relief. He wolfed down his roll in three bites. Then he poured the scalding coffee down his throat.

  “Next I suppose you’re going to hold your palm over an open flame.” Devra shook her head. “Men.”

  “Why are you still here?” Arkadin said. “You could’ve just run off.”

  “And go where? I shot one of Pyotr’s own men.”

  “You must have friends.”

  “None I can trust.”

  Which implied she trusted him. He had an instinct she wasn’t lying about this. She’d washed off the heavy mascara that had run and smudged last night. Oddly, this made her eyes seem even larger. And her cheeks held a blush now that she’d scrubbed off what had to be white theatrical makeup.

  “I’ll take you to Turkey,” she said. “A small town called Eskisёehir. That’s where I sent the document.”

  Given what he knew, Turkey-the ancient gateway between East and West-made perfect sense.

  The bag of ice slipped off as Arkadin grabbed the front of her shirt, crossed to the window, threw it wide open. Though the action cost him in pain to his shoulder, he hardly cared. The early-morning sounds of the street rose up to him like the smell of baking bread. He bent her backward so her head and torso were out the window. “What did I tell you about lying to me?”

  “You might as well kill me now,” she said in her little-girl voice. “I won’t tolerate your abuse anymore.”

  Arkadin pulled her back inside the room, let go of her. “What are you going to do,” he said with a smirk, “jump out the window?”

  No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than she walked calmly to the window and sat on the sash, staring at him all the time. Then she tipped herself backward, through the open window. Arkadin grabbed her around the legs and hauled her up from the brink.

  They stood glaring at each other, breathing fast, hearts pumping with excess adrenaline.

  “Yesterday, while we were on the ladder, told me that you had nothing much to live for,” Devra said. “That pretty much goes for me, too. So here we both are, brothers under the skin, with nothing but each other.”

  “How do I know the next link in the network is Turkey?”

  She drew her hair back from her face. “I’m tired of lying to you,” she said. “It’s like lying to myself. What’s the point?”

  “Talk is cheap,” he said.

  “Then I’ll prove it to you. When we get to Turkey I’ll take you to the document.”

  Arkadin, trying not to think too much about what she said, nodded his acknowledgment of their uneasy truce. “I won’t lay a hand on you again.”

  Except to kill you, he thought.

  Twelve

  THE FREER GALLERY of Art stood on the south side of the Mall, bounded on the west by the Washington Monument and on the east by the Reflecting Pool, gateway to the immense Capitol building. It was situated on the corner of Jefferson Drive and 12th Street, SW, near the western edge of the Mall.

  The building, a Florentine Renaissance palazzo faced with Stony Creek granite imported from Connecticut, had been commissioned by Charles Freer to house his enormous collection of Near East and East Asian art. The main entrance on the north side of the building where the meet was to take place consisted of three arches accented by Doric pilasters surrounding a central loggia. Because its architecture looked inward, many critics felt it was a rather forbidding facade, especially when compared with the nearby exuberance of the National Gallery of Art.

  Nevertheless, the Freer was the preeminent museum of its kind in the country, and Soraya loved it not only for the depth of art it housed but also for the elegant lines of the palazzo itself. She especially loved the contained open space at its entrance, and the fact that even, as now, when the Mall was agitated with hordes of tourists heading to and from the Smithsonian Metro rail stop on 12th Street, the Freer itself was an oasis of calm and tranquility. When things boiled over in the office during the day, it was to the Freer she came to decompress. Ten minutes with Sung dynasty jades and lacquers acted like a soothing balm to her soul.

  Approaching the north side
of the Mall, she searched past the crowds outside the entrance to the Freer and thought she saw-among the sturdy men with their hard, clipped Midwestern accents, the scampering children and their laughing mothers, the vacant-eyed teenagers plugged into their iPods-Veronica Hart’s long, elegant figure walking past the entrance, then doubling back.

  She stepped off the curb, but the blare of a horn from an oncoming car startled her back onto the sidewalk. It was at that moment that her cell phone buzzed.

  “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Bourne said in her ear.

  “Jason?”

  “Why are you coming to this meet?”

  Foolishly, she looked around; she’d never be able to spot him, and she knew it.

  “Hart invited me. I need to talk to you. The DCI and I both do.”

  “About what?”

  Soraya took a deep breath. “Typhon’s listening posts have picked up a series of disturbing communications pointing to an imminent terrorist attack on an East Coast city. The trouble is, that’s all we have. Worse, the communications are between two cadres of a group about which we have no intel whatsoever. It was my idea to recruit you to find them and stop the attack.”

  “Not much to go on,” Bourne said. “Doesn’t matter. The group’s name is the Black Legion.”

  “In grad school I studied the link between a branch of Muslim extremism and the Third Reich. But this can’t be the same Black Legion. They were either killed or disbanded when Nazi Germany fell.”

  “It can and it is,” Bourne said. “I don’t know how it managed to survive, but it did. Three of their members tried to kidnap Professor Specter this morning. I saw their device tattooed on the gunman’s arm.”

  “The three horses’ heads joined by the death’s head?”

  “Yes.” Bourne described the incident in detail. “Check the body at the morgue.”

  “I’ll do that,” Soraya said. “But how could the Black Legion remain so far underground all this time without being detected?”

  “They have a powerful international front,” Bourne said. “The Eastern Brotherhood.”

  “That sounds far-fetched,” Soraya said. “The Eastern Brotherhood is in the forefront of Islamic-Western relations.”

  “Nevertheless, my source is unimpeachable.”

  “God in heaven, what’ve you been doing while you’ve been away from CI?”

  “I was never in CI,” Bourne said brusquely, “and here’s just one reason why. You say you want to talk with me but I doubt you need half a dozen agents to do that.”

  Soraya froze. “Agents?” She was on the Mall itself now, and she had to restrain herself from looking around again. “There are no CI agents here.”

  “How d’you know that?”

  “Hart would’ve told me-”

  “Why should she tell you anything? We go way back, you and I.”

  “That’s true enough.” She kept walking. “But something happened earlier today that makes me believe the agents you’ve spotted are NSA.” She described the way she and Hart had been shadowed from CI HQ to the restaurant. She told him about Secretary Halliday and Luther LaValle, both of whom were gunning to make CI a part of the Pentagon clandestine service.

  “That might make sense,” Bourne said, “if there were only two of them. But six? No, there’s another agenda, one neither of us knows about.”

  “Such as?”

  “The agents are vectored perfectly, triangulated on the entrance to the Freer,” Bourne said. “This means that they must have had foreknowledge of the meet. It also means the six weren’t sent to shadow Veronica Hart. If they aren’t here for her, they must have been sent for me. This is Hart’s doing.”

  Soraya felt a chill crawl down her spine. What if the DCI was lying to her? What if she meant all along to lead Bourne into a trap? It would make sense for one of her first official acts as DCI to be the capture of Jason Bourne. It certainly would put her in solidly with Rob Batt and the others who despised and feared Bourne, and who resented her. Plus, capturing Jason would score her big points with the president and prevent Secretary Halliday from building on his already considerable influence. Still, why would Hart have allowed Soraya to possibly muck up her first field op by coming along? No, she had to believe this was an NSA initiative.

  “I don’t believe that,” she said emphatically.

  “Let’s say you’re right. The other possibility is just as dire. If Hart didn’t set the trap, then there’s someone highly placed in CI who did. I went to Hart directly with the request.”

  “Yes,” she said, “using my cell, thank you very much.”

  “Did you find it? You’re on a new one now.”

  “It was in the gutter where you tossed it.”

  “Then stop complaining,” Bourne said, not unkindly. “I can’t imagine Hart told too many people about this meet, but one of them is working against her, and if that’s the case chances are he’s been recruited by LaValle.”

  If Bourne was right… But of course he was. “You’re the grand prize, Jason. If LaValle can take you down when no one in CI could, he’ll be a hero. Taking over CI will be a cakewalk for him after that.” Soraya felt perspiration break out at her hairline. “Under the circumstances,” she continued, “I think you ought to withdraw.”

  “I need to see the correspondence between Martin and Moira. And if Hart is instigating this trap, then she’ll never give me access to the files at another time. I’ll have to take my chances, but not until you’re certain Hart has the material.”

  Soraya, who was almost at the entrance, expelled a long breath. “Jason, I found the conversations. I can tell you what’s in them.”

  “Do you think you could quote them to me verbatim?” he said. “Anyway, it’s not that simple. Karim al-Jamil doctored hundreds of files before he left. I know the method he used to alter them. I have to see them myself.”

  “I see there’s no way I can talk you out of this.”

  “Right,” Bourne said. “When you’ve made sure the material is genuine, beep my cell once. Then I need you to move Hart into the loggia, away from the entrance proper.”

  “Why?” she said. “That’ll only make it more difficult for you to-Jason?”

  But Bourne had already disconnected.

  From his vantage point on the roof of the Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue, Bourne tracked his high-powered night-vision glasses from Soraya as she moved toward the DCI, past clots of tourists hurrying about, to the agents in place around the west end of the Mall. Two lounged, chatting, at the northeast corner of the Department of Agriculture North Building. Another, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, was crossing diagonally southwest from Madison Drive toward the Smithsonian. A fourth was behind the wheel of an illegally parked car on Constitution Avenue. In fact, he was the one who’d given the game away. Bourne had spotted the car illegally parked just before a Metro police cruiser stopped parallel to it. Windows were rolled down, a conversation ensued. ID was briefly flashed by the driver of the illegally parked car. The cruiser rolled on.

  The fifth and sixth agents were east of the Freer, one approximately midway between Madison and Jefferson drives, the other in front of the Arts Industries Building. He knew there had to be at least one more.

  It was almost five o’clock. A short winter twilight had descended, aided by the twinkling lights wound festively around lampposts. With the location of each agent memorized Bourne returned to the ground, using the window ledges for hands and feet.

  The moment he showed himself the agents would start moving. Estimating the distance they were from where the DCI and Soraya stood, he calculated he’d have no more than two minutes with Hart to get the files.

  Hidden in shadows, waiting for Soraya’s signal, he strained to pick out the remaining agents. They couldn’t afford to leave Independence Avenue unguarded. If Hart didn’t in fact have the files, then he’d do as Soraya first suggested and get out of the area without being spotted.

  He
imagined her at the entrance to the Freer, talking with the DCI. There would be the first nervous moment of acknowledgment, then Soraya would have to direct the conversation around to the files. She’d have to find a way for Hart to show them to her, to make sure they were authentic.

  His phone beeped once and was still. The files were authentic.

  He accessed the Internet, navigating to the DC Metro site, checked the up-to-the-minute transit schedules, checking his options. This procedure took longer than he would have liked. The very real and immediate danger was that one of the six agents was in contact with home base-either CI or the Pentagon-whose sophisticated electronic telemetry could pinpoint his phone and, worse, spy on what he was pulling up from the Net. Couldn’t be helped, however. Access had to be made on site and at the immediate moment in case of unforeseen transit delays. He put the worry out of his head, concentrated on what he’d have to do. The next five minutes were crucial.

  Time to go.

  Moments after Soraya secretly contacted Bourne she said to Veronica Hart, “I’m afraid we may have a problem.”

  The DCI’s head whipped around. She’d been scanning the area for any sign of Bourne’s presence. The crowds around the Freer had thickened as many made their way to the Smithsonian Metro station around the corner, returning to their hotels to prepare for dinner.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I think I saw one of the NSA shadows we picked up at lunch.”

  “Hell, I don’t want LaValle knowing I’m meeting with Bourne. He’ll have a fit, go running to the president.” She turned. “I think we ought to leave before Bourne gets here.”

  “What about my intel?” Soraya said. “What chance are we going to have without him? I say let’s stay and talk to him. Showing him the material will go a long way toward winning his trust.”

  The DCI was clearly on edge. “I don’t like any of this.”

  “Time is of the essence.” Soraya took her by the elbow. “Let’s move back here,” she said, indicating the loggia. “We’ll be out of the shadow’s line of sight.”

  Hart reluctantly walked into the open space. The loggia was especially crowded with people milling about, discussing the art they’d just seen, their plans for dinner and the next day. The gallery closed at five thirty, so the building was starting to clear out.