The Bourne Sanction

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Willard had always wanted to be an actor—for many years Olivier had been his god—but in his wildest dreams he’d never imagined his acting career would be in the political arena. He’d gotten into it by accident, playing a role in his college company, Henry V, to be exact, one of Shakespeare’s great tragic politicians. As the Old Man said to him when he’d come backstage to congratulate Willard, Henry’s betrayal of Falstaff is political, rather than personal, and ends in success. “How would you like to do that in real life?” the Old Man had asked him. He’d come to Willard’s college to recruit for CI; he said he often found his people in the most unlikely places.

  Finished with the deciphering, Willard had his immediate instructions, and he thanked the powers that be that he hadn’t been tossed aside with the Old Man’s trash. He felt like his old friend Henry V, though more than thirty years had passed since he’d trod a theater stage. Once again he was being called on to play his greatest role, one that he wore as effortlessly as a second skin.

  He folded the paper away under one arm, took up his cell phone, and went out of the lounge. He still had twenty minutes left on his break, more than enough time to do what was required of him. What he had been ordered to do was find the digital camera Tyrone had on him when he’d been captured. Poking his head into the Library, he satisfied himself that LaValle was still sitting in his accustomed spot, opposite Soraya Moore, then he went down the hall.

  Though the Old Man had recruited him, it was Alex Conklin who had trained him. Conklin, the Old Man had told him, was the best at what he did, namely preparing agents to be put into the field. It didn’t take him long to learn that though Conklin was renowned inside CI for training wet-work agents, he was also adept at coaching sleeper agents. Willard spent almost a year with Conklin, though never at CI headquarters; he was part of Treadstone, Conklin’s project that was so secret even most CI personnel was unaware of its existence. It was of paramount importance that he have no overt association with CI. Because the role the Old Man had planned for him was inside the NSA, his background check had to be able to withstand the most vigorous scrutiny.

  All this flashed through Willard’s mind as he walked the sacrosanct hallways and corridors of the NSA’s safe house. He passed agent after agent and knew that he’d done his job to perfection. He was the indispensable nobody, the person who was always present, whom no one noticed.

  He knew where Tyrone’s camera was because he’d been there when Kendall and LaValle had spoken about its disposition, but even if he hadn’t, he’d have suspected where LaValle had hidden it. He knew, for instance, that it wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the safe house, even on LaValle’s person, unless the damaging images Tyrone had taken of the rendition cells and the waterboarding tanks had been transferred to the in-house computer server or deleted off the camera’s drive. In fact, there was a chance that the images had been deleted, but he doubted it. In the short amount of time the camera had been in the NSA’s possession, Kendall was no longer in residence and LaValle had become obsessed with coercing Soraya Moore into giving him Jason Bourne.

  He knew all about Bourne; he’d read the Treadstone files, even the ones that no longer existed, having been shredded and then burned when the information they held became too dangerous for Conklin, as well as for CI. He knew there had been far more to Treadstone than even the Old Man knew. That was Conklin’s doing; he’d been a man for whom the word secrecy was the holy grail. What his ultimate plan for Treadstone had been was anyone’s guess.

  Inserting his passkey into the lock on LaValle’s office door, he punched in the proper electronic code. Willard knew everyone’s code—what use would he be as a sleeper agent otherwise? The door opened inward, and he slipped inside, shutting and locking it behind him.

  Crossing to LaValle’s desk, he opened the drawers one by one, checking for false backs or bottoms. Finding none, he moved on to the bookcase, the sideboard with its hanging files and liquor bottles side by side. He lifted the prints off the walls, searching behind them for a hidden cache, but there was nothing.

  He sat on a corner of the desk, contemplated the room, unconsciously swinging his leg back and forth while he tried to work out where LaValle had hidden the camera. All at once he heard the sound the heel of his shoe made against the skirt of the desk. Hopping off, he went around, crawled into the kneehole, and rapped on the skirt until he replicated the sound his heel had made. Yes, he was certain now: This part of the skirt was hollow.

  Feeling around with his fingertips, he discovered the tiny latch, pushed it aside, and swung open the door. There was Tyrone’s camera. He was reaching for it when he heard the scratch of metal on metal.

  LaValle was at the door.

  Tell me you love me, Leonid Danilovich.” Devra smiled up at him as he knelt over her.

  “What happened, Devra? What happened?” was all he could say.

  He’d extricated himself at last from the sculpture, and would have gone after Bourne—but he’d heard the shots coming from Kirsch’s apartment, then the sound of running feet. The living room was spattered with blood. He saw her lying on the floor, the Luger still in her hand. Her shirt was dyed red.

  “Leonid Danilovich.” She’d called his name when he appeared in her limited field of vision. “I waited for you.”

  She started to tell him what had happened, but blood bubbles formed at the corners of her mouth and she started to gurgle horribly. Arkadin lifted her head off the floor, cradled it on his thighs. He pushed matted hair off her forehead and cheeks, leaving red streaks like war paint.

  She tried to continue, stopped. Her eyes went out of focus and he thought he’d lost her. Then they cleared, her smile returned, and she said, “Do you love me, Leonid?”

  He bent down and whispered in her ear. Was it I love you? There was so much static in his head, he couldn’t hear himself. Did he love her, and, if he did, what would it mean? Did it even matter? He’d promised to protect her and failed. He stared down into her eyes, into her smile, but all he saw was his own past rising up to engulf him once again.

  I need more money,” Yelena said one night as she lay entangled with him.

  “What for? I give you enough as it is.”

  “I hate it here, it’s like a prison, girls are crying all the time, they’re beaten, and then they disappear. I used to make friends just to pass the time, to have something to do during the day, but now I don’t bother. What’s the point? They’re gone within a week.”

  Arkadin had become aware of Kuzin’s seemingly insatiable need for more girls. “I don’t see how any of this has to do with you needing more money.”

  “If I can’t have friends,” Yelena said, “I want drugs.”

  “I told you, no drugs,” Arkadin said as he rolled away from her and sat up.

  “If you love me, you’ll get me out of here.”

  “Love?” He turned to stare at her. “Who said anything about love?”

  She started to cry. “I want to live with you, Leonid. I want to be with you always.”

  Feeling something unknown close around his throat, Arkadin stood up, backed away. “Jesus,” he said, gathering up his clothes, “where do you get such ideas?”

  Leaving her to her pitiful weeping, he went out to procure more girls. Before he reached the front door of the brothel Stas Kuzin intercepted him.

  “Yelena’s wailing is disturbing the other girls,” he said in his hissing way. “It’s bad for business.”

  “She wants to live with me,” Arkadin said. “Can you imagine?”

  Kuzin laughed, the sound like nails screeching against a blackboard. “I’m wondering what would be worse, the nagging wife wanting to know where you were all night or the caterwauling brats making it impossible to sleep.”

  They both laughed at the comment, and Arkadin thought nothing more about it. For the next three days he worked steadily, methodically combing Nizhny Tagil for more girls to restock the brothel. At the end of that time he slept for twenty hour
s, then went straight to Yelena’s room. He found another girl, one he’d recently hijacked off the streets, sleeping in Yelena’s bed.

  “Where’s Yelena?” he said, throwing off the covers.

  She looked up at him, blinking like a bat in sunlight. “Who’s Yelena?” she said in a voice husky with sleep.

  Arkadin strode out of the room and into Stas Kuzin’s office. The big man sat behind a gray metal desk, talking on the phone, but he beckoned Arkadin to take a seat while he finished his call. Arkadin, preferring to stand, gripped the back of a wooden chair, leaning forward over its ladder back.

  At length, Kuzin put down the receiver, said, “What can I do for you, my friend?”

  “Where’s Yelena?”

  “Who?” Kuzin’s frown knit his brows together, making him look something like a cyclops. “Oh, yes, the wailer.” He smiled. “There’s no chance of her bothering you again.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?” Kuzin’s phone rang and he answered it. “Hold the fuck on,” he said into it. Then he looked up at his partner. “Tonight we’ll go to dinner to celebrate your freedom, Leonid Danilovich. We’ll make a real night of it, eh?”

  Then he returned to his call.

  Arkadin felt frozen in time, as if he was now doomed to relive this moment for the rest of his life. Mute, he walked like an automaton out of the office, out of the brothel, out of the building he owned with Kuzin. Without even thinking, he got into his car, drove north into the forest of dripping firs and weeping hemlocks. There was no sun in the sky, the horizon was rimmed with smokestacks. The air was hazed with carbon and sulfur particles, tinged a lurid orange-red, as if everything were on fire.

  Arkadin pulled off the road and walked down the rutted track, following the route the van had taken previously. Somewhere along the line he found that he was running as fast as he could through the evergreens, the stench of decay and decomposition billowing up, as if eager to meet him.

  He brought himself up abruptly at the edge of the pit. In places, sacks of quicklime had been shaken out in order to aid the decomposition; nevertheless it was impossible to mistake the content. His eyes roved over the bodies until he found her. Yelena was lying in a tangle where she’d landed after being kicked over the side. Several very large rats were picking their way toward her.

  Arkadin, staring into the mouth of hell, gave a little cry, the sound a puppy might make if you mistakenly stepped on its paw. Scrambling down the side, he ignored the appalling stench and, through watering eyes, dragged her up the slope, laid her out on the forest floor, the bed of brown needles, soft as her own. Then he trudged back to the car, opened the trunk, and took out a shovel.

  He buried her half a mile away from the pit, in a small clearing that was private and peaceful. He carried her over his shoulder the whole way, and by the time he was finished he smelled like death. At that moment, crouched on his hamstrings, his face streaked with sweat and dirt, he doubted whether he’d ever be able to scrub off the stench. If he knew a prayer, he would have said it then, but he knew only obscenities, which he uttered with the fervor of the righteous. But he wasn’t righteous; he was damned.

  For a businessman there was a decision to be made. Arkadin was no businessman, though, so from that day forward his fate was sealed. He returned to Nizhny Tagil with his two Stechkin handguns fully loaded and extra rounds of ammunition in his breast pockets. Entering the brothel, he shot the two ghouls dead as they stood at guard. Neither had a chance to draw his weapon.

  Stas Kuzin appeared in the doorway, gripping a Korovin TK pistol. “Leonid, what the fuck?”

  Arkadin shot him once in each knee. Kuzin went down, screaming. As he tried to raise the Korovin, Arkadin trod heavily on his wrist. Kuzin grunted heavily. When he wouldn’t let go of the pistol, Arkadin kicked him in the knee. The resulting bellow brought the last of the girls from their respective rooms.

  “Get out of here.” Arkadin addressed the girls, though his gaze was fixed on Kuzin’s monstrous face. “Take whatever money you can find and go back to your families. Tell them about the lime pit north of town.”

  He heard them scrambling, babbling to one another, then it was quiet.

  “Fucking sonovabitch,” Kuzin said, staring up at Arkadin.

  Arkadin laughed and shot him in the right shoulder. Then, jamming the Stechkins in their holsters, he dragged Kuzin across the floor. He had to push one of the dead ghouls out of the way, but at last he made it down the stairs and out the front door with the moaning Kuzin in tow. In the street one of Kuzin’s vans screeched to a halt. Arkadin drew his guns, emptied them into the interior. The car rocked on its shocks, glass shattered, its horn blared as the dead driver fell over onto it. No one got out.

  Arkadin dragged Kuzin to his car and dumped him in the backseat. Then he drove out of town to the forest, turning off at the rutted dirt track. At the end of it, he stopped, hauled Kuzin to the edge of the pit.

  “Fuck you, Arkadin!” Kuzin shouted. “Fuck—”

  Arkadin shot him point-blank in the left shoulder, shattering it and sending Kuzin down into the quicklime pit. He peered over. There was the monster, lying on the corpses.

  Kuzin’s mouth drooled blood. “Kill me!” he shouted. “D’you think I’m afraid of death? Go on, do it now!”

  “It’s not for me to kill you, Stas.”

  “Kill me, I said. For fuck’s sake, finish it now!”

  Arkadin gestured at the corpses. “You’ll die in your victims’s arms, hearing their curses echoing in your ears.”

  “What about all your victims?” Kuzin shouted when Arkadin disappeared from view. “You’ll die choking on your own blood!”

  Arkadin paid him no mind. He was already behind the wheel of his car, backing out of the forest. It had begun to rain, gunmetal-colored drops that fell like bullets out of a colorless sky. A slow booming coming from the smelters starting up sounded like the thunder of cannons signaling the beginning of a war that would surely destroy him unless he found a way out of Nizhny Tagil that wasn’t in a body bag.

  Forty

  WHERE ARE YOU, Jason?” Moira said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “I’m in Munich,” he said.

  “How wonderful! Thank God you’re close by. I need to see you.” She seemed slightly out of breath. “Tell me where you are and I’ll meet you there.”

  Bourne switched his cell phone from one ear to the other, the better to check his immediate surroundings. “I’m on my way to the Englischer Garten.”

  “What are you doing in Schwabing?”

  “It’s a long story; I’ll tell you about it when I see you.” Bourne checked his watch. “But I’m due to meet up with Soraya at the Chinese pagoda in ten minutes. She says she has new intel on the Black Legion attack.”

  “That’s odd,” Moira said. “So do I.”

  Bourne crossed the street, hurrying, but still alert for tags.

  “I’ll meet you,” Moira said. “I’m in a car; I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Not a good idea.” He didn’t want her involved in a professional rendezvous. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m through and we can—” All of a sudden, he realized he was talking to dead air. He dialed Moira’s number, but got her voice mail. Damn her, he thought.

  He reached the outskirts of the garden, which was twice the size of New York’s Central Park. Divided by the Isar River, it was filled with jogging and bicycle paths, meadows, forests, and even hills. Near the crown of one of these was the Chinese pagoda, which was actually a beer garden.

  He was naturally thinking of Soraya as he approached the area. It was odd that both she and Moira had intel on the Black Legion. Now he thought back over his phone conversation with her. Something about it had been bothering him, something just out of reach. Every time he strained for it, it seemed to move farther away from him.

  His pace was slowed by the hordes of tourists, American dip
lomats, children with balloons or kites riding the wind. In addition, a rally of teenagers protesting new rulings on curriculum at the university had begun to gather at the pagoda.

  He pushed his way forward, past a mother and child, then a large family in Nikes and hideous tracksuits. The child glanced at him and, instinctively, Bourne smiled. Then he turned away, wiped the blood off his face, though it continued to seep through the cuts opened during his fight with Arkadin.

  “No, you can’t have sausages,” the mother said to her son in a strong British accent. “You were sick all night.”

  “But Mummy,” he replied, “I feel right as rain.”

  Right as rain. Bourne stopped in his tracks, rubbed the heel of his hand against his temple. Right as rain; the phrase rattled around in his head like a steel ball in a pachinko machine.

  Soraya.

  Hi, it’s me, Soraya. That’s how she’d started off the call.

  Then she’d said: Actually, I’m in Munich.

  And just before she’d hung up: Right as rain. I can make it. Can you?

  Bourne, buffeted by the quickening throngs, felt as if his head were on fire. Something about those phrases. He knew them, and he didn’t, how could that be? He shook his head as if to clear it; memories were appearing like knife slashes through a piece of fabric. Light was glimmering…

  And then he saw Moira. She was hurrying toward the Chinese pagoda from the opposite direction, her expression intent, grim, even. What had happened? What information did she have for him?

  He craned his neck, trying to find Soraya in the swirl of the demonstration. That was when he remembered.

  Right as rain.

  He and Soraya had had this conversation before—where? In Odessa? Hi, it’s me coming before her name meant that she was under duress. Actually coming before a place where she was supposed to be meant that she wasn’t there.

  Right as rain meant it’s a trap.

  He looked up and his heart sank. Moira was heading right into it.