The Bourne Initiative

by Robert Ludlum

Bourne let Savasin lead the way. He was torn between needing to get to Dima as soon as possible and his instinct to continually scan the immediate vicinity for Konstantin’s people, although how Savasin’s brother could know where they were now that he had crushed the life out of the GPS, he could not imagine. Still, several times he guided the first minister into a doorway to observe the pedestrians coming up from behind them. He found nothing suspicious, and each time they continued their journey, hurrying now, shouldering their way through the crowds, stepping into the gutter when their way was blocked by knots of people too dense to push through without drawing attention to themselves.

  “Next block,” Savasin announced. “Ekaterina, Dima’s daughter, gave me instructions on how to approach and enter the building.” He pointed to their left, and they turned a corner. “It has a back entrance, of course, but there’s also a side entrance, a small door, painted green, that the concierge uses on occasion. This way.”

  The side street, too narrow for vehicles of any sort, was nearly deserted, and they picked up their pace. It was faced by blank brick walls, nearly black from the soot and the dismal weather.

  Bourne saw the green door coming up on their right. It was, indeed, narrow, hidden by shadows, so that it was easy to miss. Savasin stepped up to it, turned the crusty handle. Nothing happened; the door remained closed.

  “Ekaterina didn’t give you a key?”

  Savasin shook his head. “She said it would be open.”

  Moving the first minister aside, Bourne examined the door. It was made of metal, much dented and as beaten up as a boxer. Here and there slashes of red could be seen, vestiges of an earlier coat of paint. An old lock was rusted into uselessness. Putting his shoulder to the door, he slammed into it once, twice, and with a soft shriek it gave grudging way. It was a poor fit for the frame, the bottom flange scraping the concrete floor of the gloomy hallway within.

  Here, Bourne held them up. They stood, silent, deep in the shadows, while he accustomed himself to the cluster of small sounds—the boiler, water running through the pipes, floorboards creaking, the wind whistling through cracks in the windowpanes. It was like listening to a living thing. The building breathing in its own particular rhythm. Then a baby crying, a violin playing a soft, sad melody, a burst of laughter, quickly throttled. Footsteps on the stairs disappearing behind the sound of a closing door. Now no one on the stairs.

  “Top floor,” Savasin whispered as they emerged from the service area, reaching the vestibule.

  Bourne did not bother to turn on the thirty-second light to illuminate their way. Instead, he indicated to Savasin to follow his lead in slipping off his shoes. Carrying them in one hand, they ascended to the first floor, where Bourne kept them still as he listened. The baby had stopped crying, but the violin was scraping away, occasionally hitting sour notes that made Savasin wince.

  Bourne held them again on the landing to the third floor. The violin was louder now, obviously coming from one of the third-floor apartments. The melody, such as it was, had started all over again from the beginning, note for note the same as before.

  Halfway up to the top floor, Bourne halted them again. He wished he were alone; he did not like dragging Savasin around with him, but he’d needed him to get to Dima Orlov. Now, not so much.

  He began again to ascend, but when the first minister began to follow him, he put an arm out. “Wait here,” he whispered.

  “After coming all this way, after everything Konstantin has thrown at me to stop me, there’s no way I’ll be left standing on the threshold.”

  Bourne studied him for a moment. The young violinist hit the same sour note. “You have the Strizh you took from the gunman?”

  “Sure.” Savasin nodded, slipping it out to show Bourne. “But why would I need it? We’re in the one place in all of Moscow safe from my brother.”

  Bourne said nothing, climbing up the last of the stairs, the first minister on his heels. Savasin had told him to expect the presence of the mountain-size protector named Cerberus and, as they reached the final landing with its riot of thick foliage, its magnificently turned wooden doors banded in iron and sporting the eagle bas-relief in the center of each door, wings spread, talons to the fore, Bourne saw that he hadn’t exaggerated. Cerberus was the largest human being he had ever come across. The guard dog’s raisin eyes regarded Savasin, lit up dully with recognition, then turned his attention on Bourne. He grunted.

  “Hold that thought,” Bourne said. Taking out his sat phone, he dialed the second number Morgana had dictated to him over the phone, the one she found along with the one for Keyre’s mobile, the one without attribution.

  He had noted that the number had a Russian prefix, as well as one of the very new Moscow exchanges created due to the proliferation of mobile phones. They heard a phone ring behind the decorative doors—a very distinctive melody, Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess.”

  “I know that melody,” Savasin said before it cut out abruptly. “It’s Dima’s favorite.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Bourne said, hearing the voice at the other end of the line say, “Gora?”

  Bourne waved to Cerberus, who opened the doors, allowing them entrance to the Orlovs’ vast atelier-apartment.

  “I told you not to use this number unless—” Ekaterina broke off as she and Dima watched in shock as Bourne strode toward them, his sat phone against his cheek.

  “Not Gora,” he said with a millimeter-thin smile. “Gora’s dead, Ekaterina.” He pointed the Strizh at her heart. “This is the end of the line—for you, your father, for the auction, for the Bourne Initiative.”

  He heard Savasin’s warning shout at the same time the immense blur came hurtling toward him.

  How can someone so big move so fast? he wondered. Cerberus slammed into him, sending him tumbling across the floor. As his right shoulder struck the wooden boards, the Strizh flew out of his hand, skittering just out of reach. No matter, the mountain was upon him, battering him with fists as big and destructive as medieval maces. Bourne felt his left side go numb with the pounding he was taking. He tried to get to his knees, but Cerberus slapped him with the back of his hand. Bourne recoiled, and to the sound of splintering wood, he crashed into the stack of frames waiting to be assembled.

  Giving him no respite, Cerberus closed in. Bourne got in three or four quick blows, which, astoundingly, appeared to have no effect whatsoever. Cerberus was bent over him, his raisin eyes filled with red rage: Bourne had threatened his mistress. Dimly, Bourne could make out Ekaterina calling her guard dog off, but he was beyond hearing, beyond anything but the simple principle of destruction.

  His massive hand closed around Bourne’s neck, squeezing so hard Bourne thought his eyeballs would pop out of his head. His breathing was labored, his heart was racing too fast; black spots appeared before his eyes, clouding his vision. His left side was still numb, useless. All he had was his right hand and, even as his world closed in to a pulsing red spot and his lungs strained for oxygen that wasn’t coming, it scrabbled at his side, found a length of frame and, with the mitered end upward, with his last reserves of strength, drove it through Cerberus’s throat, severing his spinal cord at the spot between the second and third cervical vertebrae.

  All the air seemed to come out of Cerberus along with his blood. He deflated like a balloon stuck with a vandal’s knifepoint.

  Bourne rolled him off and scrambled to his feet as best he could. His training allowed him to go into prana, using long, slow breaths to reoxygenate his system. Not that it mattered. The violin melody from downstairs was gone. In the ensuing silence Konstantin Savasin appeared seemingly out of nowhere, surrounded by two of his men, trench-coated and armed with short-barreled Uzis. One of them had disarmed the first minister who, with his arms behind his back, looked white as a sheet.

  “Taste.” Konstantin, suave, slim, and saturnine, sauntered toward Bourne. “There’s no accounting for it.” He turned to his brother. “When you lie down with dogs, dear brother,
you’re sure to get fleas.”

  Responding to a hand signal, his other man came toward Bourne, the muzzle of the Uzi pointed at his midsection.

  “Keep still,” Konstantin admonished, seeing Bourne’s muscles tense. “The thing will cut you in half in about three seconds.” He shrugged. “Besides, from the look of you, I doubt you have much fight left in you.”

  At that, his man slammed the metal butt of his Uzi into Bourne’s chin, and Bourne went down like a sack of cement. The last he knew a booted foot was closing in on the side of his head.

  Then the silence of a vast and unfathomable night.

  42

  When Bourne awoke it was to see Ekaterina Orlova’s face hovering over him like a full moon in all its glory.

  “Usually,” she said, in her smoky voice, “it’s the last person to speak who’s the mole. Isn’t that the way it works in your world, gospodin Bourne?” She nodded. “But here, in my world, I’m the first to speak with you. I, the mole. The one who’s made the alliances my father was too old or too hidebound to make himself. He couldn’t see how much the world had changed, how much faster it was going to change. Like all old people, he’s not a fan of change.”

  Her smile was like that of a badger—territorial and belligerent. And like a badger she had small, sharp teeth. She eased herself down onto a straight-backed chair, and Bourne realized he was similarly seated, save that his wrists were tied behind his back, his ankles strapped to the front chair legs. It was a metal chair, very heavy, which he discovered when he tried to rock it back and forth without success.

  “I had a choice, you see—between the two brothers. Once Boris was gone, my father’s power crumbled into so much sand. We could not stand alone; he did not understand that.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he didn’t choose to understand. His fire is banked low; most days he’s content to cozy up to his plants and his painting. Pasture work, if you catch my drift. So I chose the stronger of the brothers. Konstantin has plans and, with the Somali’s help, the wherewithal to implement them. Plans poor Timur Ludmirovich could not even comprehend.” She pursed her lips. “He tries, poor dear, but, well, we both know his elevator’s not going too high.”

  Her laugh sent shivers down Bourne’s spine, not that Bourne could feel them. The numbness on his left side had spread to his spine—not a good sign.

  “Actually, much as I liked Boris, his death was an unexpected blessing. We were slated to make a great deal of money when the cyber weapon he’d had made shut down the ten targeted banks worldwide. Now, however, there is far more money to be made by going to auction. Including us, there are fifteen entities—individuals, governments, rogue military entities, industrial conglomerates—drooling to get their hands on it.”

  He was split in two now. Part of him was listening carefully to every word Ekaterina said while the other part was working on repairing whatever the hell Cerberus had done to him.

  “One of those is, of course, Konstantin. He wants the Bourne Initiative so that he can present it to the Sovereign, thereby cementing his power in the Federation for a very long time.” She wrinkled her nose, leaned close enough for him to smell her stale breath. “The fly in the ointment, and where I come in, is that Konstantin and the Somali, Keyre, are at war. Konstantin was stupid enough to have underestimated Keyre, delivering a shipment of Kalashnikovs of which some were defective. He claimed innocence, of course, but Keyre didn’t believe him. Then, several weeks ago, Konstantin blundered again. Responding to actionable intel that it was Keyre who had taken the Initiative and was trying to short-circuit the auction, he had Gora send a cadre of men into the Somali’s camp to steal the Initiative. Big mistake. Keyre caught them and beheaded them all. He sent the heads back to Konstantin packaged in dry ice via DHL.”

  Having been partially revived by his inner self, the outer self bestirred, albeit creakily. “So Konstantin had become a liability.”

  “In the medium term,” Ekaterina confirmed. “But as for now, he still serves an important purpose.” She reached out, drew her fingertips along Bourne’s cheek. “One piece is still missing: whatever it is Boris left you regarding the Initiative. We all think the coding is complete, but we can’t be sure until you tell us.”

  “Why don’t you ask the coders?”

  “Why don’t I? That would be so simple.” Ekaterina rested her elbows on her knees. “Unfortunately, life’s never simple. The fact is I don’t know what group of hackers Boris dug up on the dark web and paid to build this cyber weapon, and neither does anyone else.” She pointed a finger at him. “That leaves you.”

  “I can’t tell you anything,” Bourne said between thickened lips. “Boris didn’t leave me anything.”

  “Liar!” She was in his face now. “He left you his boat. You were on it. You must have searched it, don’t tell me you didn’t.”

  “Of course I did, but if he left anything for me I didn’t find it.”

  The disconcerting smile again, more teeth showing this time. “Sorry, gospodin, but no one believes you.”

  “It’s the truth, whether you believe it or not.”

  “I don’t. None of us does. Which is where Konstantin comes in.” She rose. “I’ll leave you to his not-so-tender mercies.” The smile turned crooked, like the expression on a jack-o’-lantern. “Are you familiar with the fizzy drink trick? You will be soon enough.”

  Her laugh drifted after her as she left the room and closed the door. It was only then that Bourne realized that he was in a small, windowless room off to one side of the atelier. The door was reinforced metal and had a peephole at eye height. He barely had time to register these details before Konstantin and one of his men entered. The man was carrying a funnel and a case of thirty-two-ounce bottles of soda. He put the case down by the left side of Bourne’s chair, then stood at attention. He held the funnel as if it were his Uzi: it had a long, curved snout.

  “Wicked looking thing, isn’t it?” Konstantin said. “I don’t really like to use it. Court of last resort. But that’s where you find yourself, Bourne. And time is rapidly running out.”

  He sat down in the chair Ekaterina had vacated, a buff-colored folder on his lap. “I’m not going to ask you nicely the way Katya did because I know you won’t answer. So we’ll just start the process further along the line.”

  “I know this trick,” Bourne said. “It won’t work.”

  “Oh, I know,” he said, grinning like a jackal. “But one has to have a bit of fun now and then.” He picked up the folder, waved it in front of Bourne’s face. “In any case, I’ve read your file.”

  “What file?”

  “Your Treadstone file, gospodin Bourne.” Konstantin fluttered the folder like a fan. “I know every bit of your training.”

  “You’re lying. All Treadstone files are buried so deep—”

  Opening the folder, Konstantin read out several lines to verify his claim, then he closed it with a slap of his palm. “One has to have friends in high places.” He shrugged. “Otherwise what’s the point.”

  He gestured with his head. “Vlad.”

  Vlad took a rubberized bung out of his pocket. It was an obscene shade of pink. He pried open Bourne’s jaws and crammed it into Bourne’s mouth, even as Bourne shook his head violently from side to side. The moment the rubber came in contact with his saliva it expanded, filling his mouth so completely he had only his nose to breathe through.

  Vlad inserted the end of the funnel into Bourne’s left nostril, pushing it down through his sinuses. Bending, he drew up a bottle of soda from the case, unscrewed its top.

  “Here we go, Bourne,” Konstantin said. “We’re dropping you into the Marianas Trench. Be sure to let me know how you like it.”

  Vlad tipped the bottle, poured the carbonated water into the funnel. That was hellish enough, when the carbon dioxide hit the back of Bourne’s throat and burned its way down his esophagus and into his stomach, but Vlad kept pouring.

  Bourne jerked and twisted. His insides felt as if
they were being fried and then turned inside out. His head felt as if it were about to explode. All this was experienced by the outer part of him, while the inner part, the one that had been busy limiting the damage Cerberus had done to him, worked assiduously to bring feeling back first into his spine and then to his left side. He had been trained well. The only way to survive articulated interrogation was to wall off a part of your mind so securely that nothing could breach its defenses. That accomplished, one form of torture was pretty much like the next, or the one before it, for that matter. Whatever agonizing indignities were perpetrated on the body, that part of the mind remained safe, keeping you sane in the face of a thousand dark paths to insanity.

  Bourne’s body gagged, got hold of itself, gagged again. The other Bourne, the inner one, stared up at the ceiling, turning it into blue sky with birds wheeling freely. And Vlad kept pouring, and Bourne kept gagging so vociferously that once the bung bulged out of his mouth before Vlad rapped it back in with his knuckled fist. More fizzy water, more agony. Bourne’s eyes watered; the whites turned red. He was drenched in sweat, and the muscles in his extremities trembled uncontrollably. And still, Bourne’s gaze never wavered from the birds high above. As they breathed, he breathed. As they lived, he lived. They spoke to him, soothed him, circling, circling…

  43

  Until from far away he heard Konstantin say:

  “Enough.”

  And then, “Unplug him, Vlad. Bring him back to the surface.”

  When Bourne came to, Timur Savasin was standing in front of him. He had no memory of vomiting up an entire bottle of soda, but the evidence was all around him. The floor, his shoes and socks, the bottoms of his pants legs were sopping wet.

  Konstantin clucked his tongue. “Look at you, Bourne. Back from the dead, yes, but looking the worse for wear. Did you enjoy your little vacation?”

  It was then that Bourne saw Konstantin had a gun pressed against the side of his brother’s head. “So now to the finale,” he said. “Or, rather, I should say the starting line.” He tilted his head. “Your Treadstone file revealed your one weak spot, Bourne. You’re a humanist. You actually care about human lives.” He pursed his lips. “Which makes you some kind of conundrum I’m at a loss to explain.” He shrugged. “Well, I suppose some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved. No matter. The point here is that if you don’t tell me what Boris Karpov left you, I’m going to blow my brother’s brains all over your face. How’s that for a succinct message?”