The Bourne Initiative

by Robert Ludlum

  “No,” Gora said, taking a step toward them. “No hospital.”

  “All right then. Do you have a pair of large scissors?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “What for?” Gora said.

  “The zipper is in back. I can’t turn her over, she’s in too much pain,” Morgana replied. “I’ll need to cut off her dress to give her some relief.”

  Gora again gestured with his head, and the goon stepped out of the cabin. Morgana could hear his footsteps receding down the corridor. The idea was to get Gora so agitated that he’d fixate on Natalie, giving Morgana room to execute the last, and most delicate, part of the plan.

  Moments later, Goon Number One returned with a pair of kitchen scissors, which he handed to Morgana. “Stay here,” she said. “I need your help. Hold her dress away from her so I won’t cut her.”

  Again, the goon glanced at Gora, who nodded, almost wearily. He was done with being the Good Samaritan. All he wanted now was his alone time with Morgana, her dress rucked, her thighs exposed to his avid gaze.

  As the goon bent over, pulling Natalie’s dress away from her chest, he could not help taking a look down her bodice. That was when Morgana buried the scissor blades into his left side. The goon grabbed her by the throat, callused fingers digging in, trying to rip it out. She struck him hard right above the left kidney with the edge of her hand. He winced, his eyes bloodshot, and she used his own momentum against him, bringing his side back toward her, twisting the scissors in the wound.

  Blood spurted, the goon convulsed, and Gora started, unable to see what had happened. Natalie grabbed the goon’s Strizh and, when Morgana cast the goon’s body aside, pointed it at Gora.

  Morgana turned back to Maslov. “Now, Gora, it’s time for you to answer some ques—” But she saw Natalie’s finger tighten on the trigger, and cried out: “No, no, no!”

  She lunged for Natalie’s hand, but it was too late. Natalie squeezed the trigger once, twice, three times, just as Morgana had done with Niki, the false Larry London. Gora, eyes open wide, grabbed his chest, staggering back, falling to his knees. His fingers convulsed, trying vainly to stanch the blood pouring out of him. He was staring at Natalie, his mouth, leaking blood, working soundlessly.

  “Fuck you, fucker,” Natalie spat as he fell over onto his face. She remained rigid, her right arm like a tree branch, in her mind still the weapon aiming at where Gora Maslov had stood a moment ago.

  Morgana snatched the Strizh out of Natalie’s now compliant hand. As Goon Number Two rushed in, pistol at the ready, having been drawn by the gunfire, she shot him neatly through the heart.

  “Dammit, Nat. I told you no deviations.”

  “I didn’t deviate,” Natalie said, rolling off the bed. “I meant to kill him from the first.” She eyed Morgana. “Why d’you think I agreed to your plan? Just for the money?” Hiking up her skirt, she pulled down her panties, revealing a part of her she’d kept hidden from Morgana: a garden of bruises, deep and dark as secrets. “What’s money without revenge?”

  38

  Jason Bourne received the first call as the Sapsan bullet train was nearing Leningradsky Station in Moscow.

  “Hello, Jason, it’s your old friend Soraya.”

  Bourne was standing between Mala and Savasin, so he stepped away down the corridor.

  “Soraya, it’s really you?”

  “It is.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Back in the saddle.”

  “D.C.? Doing what?”

  “Stepping back into the old pond. Now I’ve been asked to take over Dreadnaught.”

  “And you said yes.”

  “I missed the life, Jason. Too much.”

  “And Sonya.”

  “Thriving.” A pause. “Where are you?”

  “Russia. Moscow, to be exact.”

  “I’m going to give a new operative of mine this number.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Morgana has been on the Initiative now for over a week. She’s a very special person, and she has firsthand intel you need to hear.”

  “Why don’t you relay—”

  “You need to hear it from her, complete with her inflections. Take her opinions seriously, will you?” Before he had a chance to answer, she said, “When this is over, come see me in D.C. I guarantee you safe passage.”

  “No one can do that, Soraya. Not even you.”

  “Then I’ll come to you.”

  The second call came as they were pulling into the station, readying themselves to disembark.

  “Bourne.”

  “I have very little time, Morgana.”

  “None of us do.” Morgana’s voice buzzed in his ear like an insistent fly. “The Initiative contains a zero-day trigger.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you also know that there’s exactly twenty hours before the Initiative is deployed?” Silence. “I didn’t think so.” She took a breath. “I still don’t know what it’s going to be deployed against, but I will tell you that Gora Maslov was involved up to his eyeballs.”

  Bourne caught the past tense. “Was?”

  “He’s dead, Bourne.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She barked a laugh. “I was there. His half sister, Alyosha Orlova, is dead as well.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  She took another breath. “Two international phone numbers on a Post-it I found on Gora’s boat might be everything you need.”

  “Tell me.”

  She recited the first number. “There’s a name or a place written after it: Keyre.”

  “A name. A Somali arms dealer—he filled the vacuum when the authorities caught up to Victor Bout.”

  “That bad.”

  “Worse, if that’s possible.” The train had stopped, passengers were disembarking, dragging their luggage. The ones with briefcases were on their mobiles, talking without seeing. “And the second number?”

  “No name.” She read off the string of numbers; Bourne memorized them. “That it?”

  “One more thing.” He heard her breathing down the line and knew she was working herself up to what was most difficult for her. “Alyosha and Nikolay Rozin were also involved in the Initiative, in a way I can’t yet work out, except that Alyosha’s father was Dimitri Maslov.”

  Bourne was stepping onto the platform while talking to Morgana. His mind was working overtime, but at the same time his eyes were quartering the platform and, indeed, the entire expanse of the station in his field of vision. He did this unconsciously, as a matter of course, every detail caught in the web of his gaze.

  “Soraya was right about you,” he said. “Let’s keep in touch.”

  With that he folded away his sat phone. Mala and Savasin were in front of him, the first minister’s people grouped at the end of the platform, waiting for them. The remaining two guards who had been on the train with him were busy off-loading the corpses of the two who had been killed during the journey.

  The crowd of debarking passengers had thinned, a majority of them shying away from the huddled group of FSB operatives with their long coats and grim faces. The grayness of Moscow hung like a pall over the tracks, and the atmosphere was considerably chillier and sharper, as if the station’s HVAC system were pumping out blasts of air imported from Siberia.

  Echoes of voices and shoe soles on concrete were dying away like embers losing their inner glow. Steps ahead of him, Mala was taking her time digging a verbal knife between Savasin’s ribs. Four repairmen on an electric cart, laden with substantial toolboxes, plus a well-secured rectangle of tempered glass, passed them by, stopped outside the first class car, then clambered in with the slab of glass. Clearly, they had been alerted by the crew to the damaged window and carpet in the conference cabin.

  Farther along, at the mouth of the vast station hall, the FSB gang shifted on their feet. Bourne, who had completed his inventory of passenger faces, turned his full attention toward Savasin’s greeting committee. His penetrati
ng gaze moved from one face to another, and what he saw gave him pause. One would think that they’d been looking around as he had, the better to pick up any potential threats to the first minister. Such was not the case, however. All of them—Bourne counted seven—were staring fixedly at Savasin.

  Bourne checked their surroundings. They were almost at the head of the bullet train, which was on their right. To the left, across the platform, the next track was empty. Two other platforms and three tracks extended further in that direction.

  Hurrying to catch up with Timur and Mala, Bourne kept his eyes on the FSB men, who had begun to stir in the manner of bees when their hive is invaded by a human hand. A sudden dull flash of metal, and Bourne had caught Mala by the collar, was swinging her around and down onto the platform. The guns were out now, and he pointed to the gap between the Sapsan and the platform. As Mala wriggled herself into the gap, vanishing beneath the train, the first spray of bullets peppered the side of the train nearest Savasin. Whatever passengers remained ran for cover, and the pair of security guards attracted to the gunshots took one look at the perpetrators and, without a word, melted back into the interior of the station.

  Grabbing the first minister, Bourne dragged him down to a prone position, slithered into the gap, hauling Timur into it after him. Behind them, the bristling hive was in motion, as coordinated as bees in flight. Four agents raced down to the front of the Sapsan, while the other three peeled off to patrol the platform on the other side of the train. Two men slid down into the gap, following Bourne, while the remaining two paced along the platform, eyes focused on the gap between the Sapsan and the platform for the slightest sign of movement.

  Below the gap, where the Sapsan’s narrow undercarriage dwelled, the space widened out, black as pitch, but with room to both hide and maneuver.

  Bourne, shadowed and all but invisible, struck the first of the FSB men on the side of the neck, a blow so devastating that the man dropped his Strizh from nerveless fingers. Bourne grabbed him and drew the man into the shadows with him. The second agent made his appearance in the narrow space. When, gun drawn, he crouched down to check out the shadowed area, Bourne shoved his comrade at him. As Bourne had anticipated, the second man shot first and asked questions after. He put a bullet through his comrade’s chest before Bourne, emerging from the darkness, grabbed him by the front of his coat, and slammed the heel of his hand into the man’s nose. Blood fountained; the man reared back right into Mala’s grip. Wrapping her arm around his neck, she twisted hard with her other hand, breaking the man’s neck.

  “It looks like there was a coup in your absence, Timur,” Bourne said as he and Mala armed themselves with the fallen men’s weapons.

  “My brother,” Savasin said with active distaste.

  “Going after the first minister,” Mala said. “That takes brass stones.”

  Bourne waved them to silence as he got down on his stomach. They followed suit, and the three of them made their wriggling way between the rails, where there was enough clearance for their prone bodies but not much more. Bourne went as fast as he could, knowing that the gunshot would bring the others converging on the spot the explosion came from.

  In fact, he was counting on this. There were five remaining FSB agents. Having all of them in a group was much more to his liking than having them spread out over the station. Having worked their way halfway down the Sapsan, he tapped Savasin on the shoulder, mouthed for him to stay where he was. Then he signed to Mala, who snaked her way to their left, toward the platform on the far side of the train.

  Bourne himself rolled to his right, moving toward the gap between the train and the platform. On the verge of being able to get to his feet, he paused, watching for moving shadows, listening for hushed conversations, or even single voices.

  When, after five minutes of the only form of surveillance available to him, he discerned that at least the spot he had chosen was clear, he picked his way forward into the gap. Again, he paused to listen; again he heard nothing but the normal noises attributable to engines, steel wheels, sighing hydraulics, and, every once in a while, the conversation of the repairmen coming through the broken window in the conference cabin.

  Working his way backward, he headed for the front of the train.

  39

  Ivan was nearing the end of the line. He’d been working on trains more or less his whole adult life—actually even before that. His father had worked on the trains in Moscow, though of course he’d never even dreamed of anything like the Sapsan. But the Sapsan had been Ivan’s baby from the moment it had rolled into the yard at Leningradsky Station. He’d had to spend a week in a stuffy glass box of a classroom where he was taught every aspect of the Sapsan’s workings, then another week working hands-on in the yard. That was how he came to love the Sapsan, and he thought of his father every time his gnarled hands touched the sleek outer shell or the even sleeker innards.

  Unfortunately, Ivan thought as he surveyed the destruction of his most luxurious conference cabin, he was saddled with a trio of near-idiots. They were young, it was true, but they were also lazy, unteachable, and almost always high on some illegal substance that Ivan refused to acknowledge, let alone identify.

  It was not always thus, he thought with an inward sigh. When he came up through the ranks the youngsters were enthusiastic, eager to learn an honorable trade. No more. Nowadays, the young ones were infected by modern-day culture. Clubbing, whoring, and hanging out drinking, smoking, and making mischief were their off-hours avocations. Useless carbuncles on the ass of decent society, that’s what they were, Ivan thought sourly as he directed Fool Number One to scrub out the carpet with a solution he had concocted to take out vomit and bloodstains from the special carpet in first class without affecting the color.

  He ordered Fool Number Two to vacuum up the shards of glass from the blown-out window. Luckily, there weren’t many of them, as the blow had come from the inside, but those that were there were bloody, and they all donned thick rubber gloves to protect themselves. Fool Number Three was in charge of making sure the pane of glass didn’t strike any hard surface or topple over. Nevertheless, as Ivan picked his way over to the blown-out window he kept an eagle eye on Fool Number Three, the youngest, rawest, and highest of the trio.

  Possibly that was why he didn’t sense the Angelmaker until she was in his face. She grabbed the front of his uniform, pulled him hard against the chrome frame of the window, and put a forefinger across her lips in the universal sign for silence. Then she grinned at him, though all his terrified mind registered was her bared teeth. He had the irrational thought—though considering what was going on in the world today it was hardly impossible—that she was going to tear into his throat with those sharp, white teeth.

  Instead, she drew him to one side while a man with the watchful, steely eyes of someone who saw and understood everything at first glance climbed in through the open space where the window had been. It was a long window; there was plenty of space. When the man looked at Ivan, Ivan’s guts turned to water, and he felt an urgent need to piss. Then the man smiled at him, not in the feral way the woman had, but rather it was the smile of a comrade, an old hand with whom you could share a cold vodka and a cigarette at the end of a long day. He asked the woman to let go in perfect, fluid, Moscow-inflected Russian. He looked Russian, too. Ivan relaxed somewhat.

  As for the three Fools, only the youngest one, mouth gaping open, noted the man’s appearance. The other two were too occupied in trying to attend to their duties to notice, let alone care.

  “What’s your name?” the man said.

  “Ivan Ivanovich,” Ivan said, blinking like an owl in sunlight.

  “Well, Ivan Ivanovich, my name is Fyodor Ilianovich,” Bourne said, using a legend he’d employed before in Moscow. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

  Ivan stared at him as if mesmerized. He did not know what to say. He suddenly longed for a glass of strong tea, or better yet, a vodka. Even a cigarette would do, he thought, b
ut none of these amenities were on offer.

  Bourne turned, and so did Ivan, gaping at two more figures clambering through the opening. One was the woman with the feral smile. The other was a figure out of the newspapers and state TV. Ivan goggled. It couldn’t be!

  And yet Fyodor Ilianovich confirmed his tentative identification. “May I introduce Timur Ludmirovich Savasin, First Minister of the Russian Federation. First Minister, this is Ivan Ivanovich, an upright citizen, and I trust a patriot, of the Russian Federation.”

  If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, Ivan thought, I wouldn’t believe it. What on earth is the First Minister doing climbing through the window of my carriage?

  “Of course, of course!” Ivan said, coming out of his brief stasis. It was totally lost on him that no one bothered to introduce the woman with the feral smile. In point of fact, he was relieved. “Of course a patriot, First Minister.”

  “Ivan Ivanovich, it is an honor to meet a true patriot of Mother Russia such as yourself,” Savasin said in his most formal voice.

  Ivan all but passed out. To his utter chagrin, he was sweating profusely. “The honor is all mine, First Minister, I assure you.”

  Savasin smiled. “I—we—need your help.”

  “Anything, First Minister,” Ivan said. “I am entirely at your service.”

  —

  And so it was that Ivan Ivanovich, nearing the end of the line, experienced the greatest day of his life—notwithstanding it being an experience he swore never to tell anyone, not even his wife and three sons. Twenty minutes after they had crawled through his window he was leading the first minister, Fyodor, and the woman with the feral smile out of the first class carriage and into the electric cart. All of them were wearing train yard workman’s uniforms and caps, stripped off Fools One, Two, and Three, who had been bound and gagged virtually naked, and thrust into the bathroom, under his benign and—he had to admit it!—amused gaze. Ivan locked them in himself with his master key that opened every door on every train and in the train yard itself. After thirty years on the job, he had amassed any number of privileges.