The Bourne Sanction

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “But whatever happened to Arkadin in Nizhny Tagil in his youth—and I don’t profess to know what that might be—has followed him like a ghoul. Believe me when I tell you that you’ve never met a man like him. You’re better off not to.”

  “I know where he is,” Bourne said. “I’m going after him.”

  “Christ.” Maslov shook his head. “You must have a mighty fucking large death wish.”

  “You don’t know my friend here,” Boris said.

  Maslov eyed Bourne. “I know him as much as I want to, I think.” He stood up. “The stench of death is already on him.”

  Twenty-Nine

  THE MAN who stepped off the plane in Munich airport, who dutifully went through Customs and Immigration with all the other passengers from the many flights arriving at more or less the same time, looked nothing like Semion Icoupov. His name was Franz Richter, his passport proclaimed him as a German national, but underneath all the makeup and prosthetics he was Semion Icoupov just the same.

  Nevertheless, Icoupov felt naked, exposed to the prying eyes of his enemies, whom he knew were everywhere. They waited patiently for him, like his own death. Ever since boarding the plane he’d been haunted by a sense of impending doom. He hadn’t been able to shake it on the flight, he couldn’t shake it now. He felt as if he’d come to Munich to stare his own death in the face.

  His driver was waiting for him at baggage claim. The man, heavily armed, took the one piece of luggage Icoupov pointed out to him off the chrome carousel, carried it as he led Icoupov through the crowded concourse and out into the dull Munich evening, gray as morning. It wasn’t as cold as it had been in Switzerland, but it was wetter, the chill as penetrating as Icoupov’s foreboding.

  It wasn’t fear he felt so much as sorrow. Sorrow that he might not see this battle finished, that his hated nemesis would win, that old grudges would not be settled, that his father’s memory would remain sullied, that his murder would remain unavenged.

  To be sure, there had been attrition on both sides, he thought as he settled into the backseat of the dove-gray Mercedes. The endgame had begun and already he sensed the checkmate waiting for him not far off. It was difficult but necessary for him to admit that he had been outmaneuvered at every turn. Perhaps he wasn’t up to carrying the vision his father had for the Eastern Brotherhood; perhaps the corruption and inversion of ideals had gone too far. Whatever the case, he had lost a great deal of ground to his enemy, and Icoupov had come to the bleak conclusion that he had only one chance to win. His chance rested with Arkadin, the plans for the Black Legion’s attack on New York City’s Empire State Building, and Jason Bourne. For he realized now that his nemesis was too strong. Without the American’s help, he feared his cause was lost.

  He stared out the smoked-glass window at the looming skyline of Munich. It gave him a shiver to be back here, where it all began, where the Eastern Brotherhood was saved from Allied war trials following the collapse of the Third Reich.

  At that time his father—Farid Icoupov—and Ibrahim Sever were jointly in charge of what was left of the Eastern Legions. Up until the Nazi surrender, Farid, the intellectual, ran the intelligence network that infiltrated the Soviet Union, while Ibrahim, the warrior, commanded the legions that fought on the Eastern Front.

  Six months before the Reich’s capitulation, the two men met outside Berlin. They saw the end, even if the lunatic Nazi hierarchy was oblivious. So they laid plans for how to ensure their people would survive the war’s aftermath. The first thing Ibrahim did was to move his soldiers out of harm’s way. By that juncture the Nazi bureaucratic infrastructure had been decimated by Allied bombing, so it was not difficult to redeploy his people into Belgium, Denmark, Greece, and Italy, where they were safe from the reflexive violence of the first wave of invading Allies.

  Because Farid and Ibrahim despised Stalin, because they were witness to the massive scale of the atrocities ordered by him, they were in a unique position to understand the Allied fear of communism. Farid argued persuasively that soldiers would be of no use to the Allies, but an intelligence network already inside the Soviet Union would be invaluable. He keenly understood how antithetical communism was to capitalism, that the Americans and the Soviets were allies out of necessity. He felt it inevitable that after the war was over these uncomfortable allies would become bitter enemies.

  Ibrahim had no recourse but to agree with his friend’s thesis, and indeed this was how it turned out. At every step, Farid and Ibrahim brilliantly outmaneuvered the postwar German agencies in keeping control of their people. As a result, the Eastern Legions not only survived but in fact prospered in postwar Germany.

  Farid, however, fairly quickly uncovered a pattern of violence that made him suspicious. German officials who disagreed with his eloquent arguments for continued control were replaced by ones who did. That was odd enough, but then he discovered that those original officials no longer existed. To a one, they had dropped out of sight, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Farid bypassed the weakling German bureaucracy and went straight to the Americans with his concerns, but he was unprepared for their response, which was one big shrug. No one, it seemed, cared the least bit about disappeared Germans. They were all too busy defending their slice of Berlin to be bothered.

  It was about this time that Ibrahim came to him with the idea of moving the Eastern Legions’ headquarters to Munich, out of the way of the increasing antagonism between the Americans and the Soviets. Fed up with the American’s disinterest, Farid readily agreed.

  They found postwar Munich a bombed-out wreck, seething with immigrant Muslims. Ibrahim wasted no time in recruiting these people into the organization, which by this time had changed its name to the Eastern Brotherhood. For his part, Farid found the American intelligence community in Munich far more receptive to his arguments. Indeed, they were desperate for him and his network. Emboldened, he told them that if they wanted to make a formal arrangement with the Eastern Brotherhood for intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain, they had to look into the disappearances of the list of former German officials he handed them.

  It took three months, but at the end of that time he was asked to appear before a man named Brian Folks, whose official title was American attaché of something-or-other. In fact, he was OSS chief of station in Munich, the man who received the intel Farid’s network provided him from inside the Soviet Union.

  Folks told him that the unofficial investigation Farid asked him to undertake had now been completed. Without another word, he handed over a slim file, sat without comment as Farid read it. The folder contained the photos of each of the German officials on the list Farid had provided. Following each photo was a sheet detailing the findings. All the men were dead. All had been shot in the back of the head. Farid read through this meager material with an increasing sense of frustration. Then he looked up at Folks and said, “Is this it? Is this all there is?”

  Folks watched Farid from behind steel-rimmed glasses. “It’s all that appears in the report,” he said. “But those aren’t all the findings.” He held out his hand, took the file back. Then he turned, put the sheets one by one through a shredder. When he was finished, he threw the empty folder into the wastebasket, the contents of which were burned every evening at precisely 5 PM.

  Following this solemn ritual, he placed his hands on his desk, said to Farid, “The finding of most interest to you is this: Evidence collected indicates conclusively that the murders of these men were committed by Ibrahim Sever.”

  Tyrone shifted on the bare concrete floor. It was so slippery with his own fluids that one knee went out from under him, splaying him so painfully that he cried out. Of course, no one came to help him; he was alone in the interrogation cell in the basement of the NSA safe house deep in the Virginia countryside. He had to quite literally locate himself in his mind, had to trace the route he and Soraya had taken when they’d driven to the safe house. When? Three days ago? Ten hours? What? The rendition he’d been
subjected to had erased any sense of time. The hood over his head threatened to erase his sense of place, so that periodically he had to say to himself: “I’m in an interrogation cell in the basement of the NSA safe house in”—and here he would recite the name of the last town he and Soraya had passed… when?

  That was the problem, really. His sense of disorientation was so complete, there were periods when he couldn’t distinguish up from down. Worse, those periods were becoming both longer and more frequent.

  The pain was hardly an issue because he was used to pain, though never this intense or prolonged. It was the disorientation that was worming its way into his brain like a surgeon’s drill. It seemed that with each bout he was losing more of himself, as if he were made up of grains of salt or sand trickling away from him. And what would happen when they were all gone? What would he become?

  He thought of DJ Tank and the rest of his former crew. He thought of Deron, of Kiki, but none of those tricks worked. They’d slip away like mist and he’d be left to the void into which, he was increasingly sure, he’d disappear. Then he thought of Soraya, conjured her piece by piece, as if he were a sculptor, molding her out of a lump of clay. And he found that as his mind lovingly re-created each minute bit of her, he miraculously stayed intact.

  As he struggled back to a position that was tolerably painful, he heard a metallic scrape, and his head came up. Before anything else could transpire, the scents of freshly cooked eggs and bacon came to him, making his mouth water. He’d been fed nothing but plain oatmeal since he was brought here. And at inconsistent times—sometimes one meal right after the other—in order to keep his disorientation absolute.

  He heard the scuff of leather soles—two men, his ears told him.

  Then General Kendall’s voice, saying imperiously, “Set the food on the table, Willard. Right there, thank you. That will be all.”

  One set of shoe soles clacked across the floor, the sound of the door closing. Silence. Then the screech of a chair being hitched across the concrete. Kendall was sitting down, Tyrone surmised.

  “What have we here?” Kendall said, clearly to himself. “Ah, my favorite: eggs over easy, bacon, buttered grits, hot biscuits and gravy.” The sound of cutlery being taken up. “You like grits, Tyrone? You like biscuits and gravy?”

  Tyrone wasn’t too far gone to be incensed. “On’y ting I like betta is watermelon, sah.”

  “That’s a damn fine imitation of one of your brethren, Tyrone.” He was obviously talking while eating. “This is damn fine chow. Would you like some?”

  Tyrone’s stomach growled so loudly he was sure Kendall heard it.

  “All you gotta do is tell me everything you and the Moore woman were up to.”

  “I don’t rat anyone out,” Tyrone said bitterly.

  “Um.” The sounds of Kendall swallowing. “That’s what they all say in the beginning.” He chewed some more. “You do know this is just the beginning, don’t you, Tyrone? Sure you do. Just like you know the Moore woman isn’t going to save you. She’s going to hang you out to dry, sure as I’m sitting here eating the most mouthwatering biscuits I ever had. You know why? Because LaValle gave her a choice: you or Jason Bourne. You know her history with Bourne. She might claim she didn’t fuck him but you and I know better.”

  “She never slept with him,” Tyrone said before he could stop himself.

  “Sure. She told you that.” Munch, munch, munch went Kendall’s jaws, shredding the crisp bacon. “What’d you expect her to say?”

  The sonovabitch was playing mind games with him, Tyrone knew that for a fact. Trouble was, he wasn’t lying. Tyrone knew how Soraya felt about Bourne—it was written all over her face every time she saw him or his name came up. Though she’d said otherwise, the question Kendall had just raised had gnawed at him like an addict at a candy bar.

  It was difficult not to envy Bourne with his freedom, his encyclopedic knowledge, his friendship as equals with Deron. But all these things Tyrone dealt with in his own way. It was Soraya’s love for Bourne that was so hard to live with.

  He heard the scrape of chair legs and then felt the presence of Kendall as he squatted down beside him. It was astonishing, Tyrone thought, how much heat another human being gave off.

  “I have to say, Tyrone, you really have taken a beating,” Kendall said. “I think you deserve a reward for how well you’ve held up. Shit, we’ve had suspects in here who were crying for their mamas after twenty-four hours. Not you, though.” The quick click-clack of a metal utensil against a china plate. “How about some eggs and bacon? Man, this was some big plate of food, I surely can’t finish it myself. So come on. Join me.”

  As the hood was raised high enough to expose his mouth Tyrone was conflicted. His mind told him to refuse the offer, but his severely shrunken stomach yearned for real food. He could smell the rich flavors of bacon and eggs, felt the food warm as a kiss against his lips.

  “Hey, man, what’re you waiting for?”

  Fuck it, Tyrone said to himself. The tastes of the food exploded inside his mouth. He wanted to moan in pleasure. He wolfed down the first few forkfuls fed to him, then forced himself to chew slowly and methodically, extracting every bit of flavor from the hickory-smoked meat and the rich yolk.

  “Tastes good,” Kendall said. He must have regained his feet because his voice was above Tyrone when he said, “Tastes real good, doesn’t it?”

  Tyrone was about to nod his assent when pain exploded in the pit of his stomach. He grunted when it came again. He’d been kicked before, so he knew what Kendall was doing. The third kick landed. He tried to hold on to his food, but the involuntary reaction had begun. A moment later he vomited up all the delicious food Kendall had fed him.

  The Munich courier is the last one in the network,” Devra said. “His name is Egon Kirsch, but that’s all I know. I never met him; no one I know did. Pyotr made sure that link was completely compartmentalized. So far as I know Kirsch dealt directly with Pyotr and no one else.”

  “Who does Kirsch deliver his intel to?” Arkadin said. “Who’s at the other end of the network?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He believed her. “Did Heinrich and Kirsch have a particular meeting place?”

  She shook her head.

  On the Lufthansa flight from Istanbul to Munich he sat shoulder-to-shoulder with her and wondered what the hell he was doing. She’d given him all the information he was going to get from her. He had the plans; he was on the last lap of his mission. All that remained was to deliver the plans to Icoupov, find Kirsch, and persuade him to lead Arkadin back to the end of the network. Child’s play.

  Which begged the question of what to do with Devra. He’d already made up his mind to kill her, as he’d killed Marlene and so many others. It was a fait accompli, a fixed point detailed in his mind, a diamond that only needed polishing to sparkle into life. Sitting in the jetliner he heard the quick report from the gun, leaves falling over her dead body, covering her like a blanket.

  Devra, who was seated on the aisle, got up, made her way back to the lavatories. Arkadin closed his eyes and was back in the sooty stench of Nizhny Tagil, men with filed teeth and blurry tattoos, women old before their time, bent, swigging homemade vodka from plastic soda bottles, girls with sunken eyes, bereft of a future. And then the mass grave…

  His eyes popped open. He was having difficulty breathing. Heaving himself to his feet, he followed Devra. She was the last of the passengers waiting. The accordion door on the right opened, an older women bustled out, squeezed by Devra then Arkadin. Devra went into the lavatory, closed the door, and locked it. The occupied sign came on.

  Arkadin walked to the door, stood in front of it for a moment. Then he knocked on it gently.

  “Just a minute,” her voice came to him.

  Leaning his head against the door, he said, “Devra, it’s me.” And after a short silence, “Open the door.”

  A moment later, the door folded back. She stood in front of him.
>
  “I want to come in,” he said.

  Their eyes locked for the space of several heartbeats as each tried to gauge the intent of the other.

  Then she backed up against the tiny sink, Arkadin stepped inside, with some difficulty shut the door behind him, and turned the lock.

  Thirty

  IT’S STATE-OF-THE-ART,” Gunter Müller said. “Guaranteed.”

  Both he and Moira were wearing hard hats as they walked through the series of semi-automated workshops of Kaller Steelworks Gesellschaft, where the coupling link that would receive the LNG tankers as they nosed into the NextGen Long Beach terminal had been manufactured.

  Müller, the team leader on the NextGen coupling link project, was a senior vice president of Kaller, a smallish man dressed impeccably in a conservatively cut three-piece chalk-striped suit, expensive shoes, and a tie in black and gold, Munich’s colors since the time of the Holy Roman Empire. His skin was bright pink, as if he’d just had his face steam-cleaned, and thick brown hair, graying at the sides. He talked slowly and distinctly in good English, though he was rather endearingly weak with modern American idioms.

  At each step he explained the manufacturing process with excruciating detail, great pride. Spread out before them were the design drawings, along with the specs, to which Müller referred time and again.

  Moira was listening with only one ear. How her situation had changed now that the Firm was out of the picture, now that NextGen was on its own with the security of its terminal operations in Long Beach, now that she had been reassigned.

  But the more things change, she thought, the more they stay the same. The moment Noah had handed her the packet for Damascus she knew she wouldn’t disengage herself from the Long Beach terminal project. No matter what Noah or his bosses had determined she couldn’t leave NextGen or this project in jeopardy. Müller, like everyone else at Kaller and, for that matter, nearly everyone at NextGen, had no idea she worked for the Firm. Only she knew she should be on a flight to Damascus, not here with him. She had a grace period of mere hours before her contact at NextGen would begin to ask questions as to why she was still on the LNG terminal project. By then, she hoped to convince NextGen’s president of the wisdom of her disobeying the Firm’s orders.