Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Bourne Enigma

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Inside the enormous anteroom was a hushed susurrus, as if swarms of insects rather than people had congregated in the galleries and stone corridors.

  “Just so you know,” Korsolov said, leading the way toward the periphery of the tour group, “Mokhtar was the father of modern Egyptian sculpture.” He put his forefinger against his lips. “No Russian,” he whispered. “From this point on only English, yes?”

  Pankin nodded. “We should split up.”

  “Hammer and Tongs, eh?”

  “Exactly.”

  Korsolov nodded his assent, and the two men moved to opposite sides of the tour cluster. Korsolov had spotted the guards right away, and, as a prophylactic against their suspicion, struck up a conversation with a young, affluent couple that looked as if they had just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Korsolov swallowed his disgust, put on a welcoming smile, and introduced himself as a professor of Egyptian art. He fed them just enough on Mokhtar for them to accept him as one of their own, and so he passed muster with the guard on his side of the group. They passed a large bas-relief hung on one wall, then two freestanding sculptures Korsolov recalled from his guide, spouted some nonsense that nevertheless fascinated the couple, before he passed on, insinuating himself deeper into the group within which Rebeka had cleverly embedded herself.

  He could hear the tour guide now. Some of the group had donned wireless headsets to better hear the commentary, others preferred to listen on their own. Rebeka was one of the latter. Korsolov caught a glimpse of her in profile. He made a sudden move, a disturbance, though minor, that caused a ripple through the group, like a pebble thrown into a pond. Ever on the alert, Rebeka turned in his direction and saw him. This was the point. He was the Hammer; Pankin the Tongs. Rebeka, recognizing danger, began to edge away from him. He continued toward her, ensuring she would keep her distance, ensuring she would run right into Pankin and be caught in the closing jaws of the Tongs.

  The knots of people swirled around him. The commentary had reached an end; the group was beginning to break up into family units or cliques, to move on, led by the guide. Korsolov saw Pankin, who was closing in on Rebeka with deadly intent.

  —

  Sara saw her tail—or at least part of it. She had spied two of them—one older, broader, one younger, hatchet-faced. They were FSB; there was no mistaking them. It was impossible for them to keep the swagger out of their gait, just as it was impossible for them to hide their discomfort at being in Cairo. She could tell immediately that these were no field agents. They were high-level officers, and the only reason why such as they would come after her themselves was their mistaken idea that she had killed their boss. They wanted to interrogate her here, in Cairo, then kill her. They had no intention of bringing her back to the Lubyanka.

  She wormed her way through the group, as quickly as she was able, but in the back of her mind was the knowledge that there was a second officer. She didn’t see him behind her, so he must be in front. They were trying to maneuver her into a pincer-prey trap, and with the swirls of people all around impeding her progress, let alone her escape routes, they had a good chance of succeeding.

  27

  What if she knows there are two of us? Colonel Pankin asked himself. He had just caught sight of Rebeka, the group commenced moving to the next exhibit, all was in flux, and he himself was in motion, rushing toward her.

  But then he answered his own question: The group that had worked to her advantage was now a major liability, blocking any direct route of escape. They had her between Hammer and Tongs.

  Beyond Rebeka, he caught sight of Korsolov, stuck in the corner of his eye like a fleck of soot. He knew no matter what he did now, how instrumental he was in the capture of a Kidon assassin—a monumental achievement—Korsolov would take all the credit. He knew it was the way of things, but he hated it nonetheless. Hammer and Tongs was his idea, and now here she came straight into his arms. He had only to scoop her up, manacle her wrists as Korsolov came up behind her. Then they would discreetly disengage themselves from the group, hustle her out of the museum into a car he would call. He was looking forward to pulling her apart, piece by piece, to her vomiting up all of Kidon’s secrets, and then to slitting her throat as she had done to General Karpov.

  She was almost upon him, almost close enough, and he began to reach out for her, his fingers stretching to encircle her wrist, when she abruptly lurched to her left, into the chest of one of the guards. She made a moaning sound, let her body go limp.

  The guard caught her, rushed her over to a stone bench against one wall. His companion joined him. Pankin heard snatches of their conversation—“passed out…low blood sugar…mouth to mouth? Not necessary…hospital? See if she comes…and bring a car around, anyway…”—before the rest of the group gathered around, curious and concerned, a hubbub brewing louder.

  The manufactured incident left Pankin and Korsolov helpless, standing pretty much with their dicks in their hands, effectively locked out of getting to her.

  “Bitch!” Pankin said under his breath. “She thinks she’s so clever.”

  “Our pursuit isn’t over. It’s just begun.” Korsolov’s eyes burned with hatred. “And when we do get her I will have my fun with her.”

  “I want a piece of that,” Pankin said, but Korsolov was no longer listening.

  —

  The cipher Boris had left for Bourne was, properly enough, giving him fits. Even though he had been put through cipher training at Treadstone, even though he had been through advanced study on his own, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out Boris’s message. He sat hunched over in the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities’ library, while at the other end of the vast room scholars and visitors came and went in hushed reserve. The inner life of ancient Egypt held an almost holy place among archeologists, architects, religious scholars, and mystics—not to mention grave robbers and tomb looters. Their pantheon of animal-headed deities were arbiters of both awe and fear.

  No matter how he tried to interpret the cuneiform symbols he could not make of them even a single sentence. With the beginning of a headache deep behind his eyes, he rose, went to the window, looked out across the Giza Plateau toward the distant golden pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. He’d been inside two of them—Menkaure had been closed for some time. He might have been inside, but he couldn’t remember—and he’d been fascinated by the hieroglyphics, how they told a story in much the same way a modern rebus did: in pictogram/concept form.

  And then, all at once, he swung away from the window, hurried back to his chair and began to look anew at Boris’s cipher. Which, he thought excitedly, wasn’t really a cipher at all: it was a rebus—Sumerian cuneiform, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, like Mayan pictograms, was a language particularly suited to writing in rebus.

  —

  Sara threw some money at the taxi driver and stepped onto the sidewalk. The guards had escorted her out of the museum and into a waiting taxi, giving instructions to the driver to take his passenger back to the hotel the tour was staying at. Traveling north up the wide Meret Basha Boulevard, Sara abandoned the taxi near the eastern edge of Gabalaya Park. She hurried across Wasim Hasan. Up ahead a pathetically shortened parade of tour buses passed Midan El-Tahreer, where the protest riots had become a symbol of what turned out to be a false and dispiriting Arab Spring. These days, no more than a handful of people were allowed into the square at one time by the military, whose presence was unmistakable. Beyond their myopic gaze rose the aquarium and the Museum of Antiquities.

  In the low-key alarm caused by her medical “emergency” no one had bothered to ask her name or to verify that she was, in fact, part of the tour. The guide, who was her only potential enemy, was thankfully busy assuring the rest of the tour that everything was fine, herding their rising panic like a seasoned cattleman.

  She held no illusions that she was safe from her FSB tails. What she had managed back at the Mokhtar Museum was simply a holding action. Sooner or later they would track her do
wn and find her. She was not a runner; she had learned that fleeing a dangerous predator only got you pulled down from behind and eaten alive.

  As she climbed the stairs to the aquarium, she did not even bother looking behind her. She knew her tails must be there; frankly, she would have been disappointed if she’d lost them so easily. More than that, she wouldn’t have believed it. She’d had numerous field engagements with FSB agents, and had found them nothing less than competent, sometimes frighteningly so, especially the ones personally trained by General Karpov himself.

  She paid the outrageous entrance fee, kicked away some of the garbage strewn in her path, and went through the filthy interior. The aquarium was one of those Cairo attractions that was so run-down and in need of attention it was a crime to see how the fish were suffering.

  But it wasn’t the fish she had come to see. She had been inside the aquarium once before, and she knew where she was headed.

  —

  “It’s a miracle anything’s left alive in here,” Pankin said, craning his neck to peer through the dim fug of the aquarium’s interior. “They have a fucking nerve charging to get into this pigsty.”

  “Even our pigs have it better than this,” Korsolov said as they passed tanks with cracked glass, mossy green water, semiconscious fish hovering near the bottom, their gills struggling to suck in the oxygen-depleted water.

  Pankin laughed. “At least until they’re slaughtered.”

  “At least slaughtering is quick,” Pankin said. “This is slow torture.”

  “Something we both know a bit about.”

  The two flitted from shadow to shadow. What little light there was came from the tanks, aqueous and sludgy. They were both tinting green, like zombies in a horror movie.

  “Where the hell is she going?” Pankin said.

  “Away from us. But this time there’s no splitting up—she’ll expect that.”

  The darkness continued to descend, as if from the twilight of evening into the black of night. As they entered the next chamber, the walls seemed to narrow, become rough-hewn, as though they had entered a cave. Plus, the rank smell of guano and urine assaulted them with an almost physical blow.

  “Kakógo chërta!” Pankin said. What the hell! “Where the fuck are we?”

  At that moment, something flew right into his face. He shouted, more in shock than anything else. Then, as he saw the red eyes, the wingspread, and the hideous face he screamed in fear.

  “It’s a bat!” Korsolov shouted.

  “Króme shútok!” No kidding! Pankin drew his weapon and fired at the bat, which wheeled away.

  “Stop it!” Korsolov shouted. “Someone will hear you!”

  Then it seemed as if an entire bat colony was descending on them. Pankin was too busy batting them away to pay attention as a shadow detached itself from a larger one, thrown by the outcropping of the cave-like wall. It was only after the knife slipped between his third and fourth ribs, and just before the tip carved its name into his heart that he realized what had happened. And by then it was too late—too late for everything.

  28

  Svetlana exited the big Mercedes First Minister Savasin had provided to transport her to Sheremetyevo airport, telling the driver to wait. She plodded across the lawn, up the stone steps, used her key to unlock the door to the dacha.

  How could she leave Moscow, how could she leave Boris without first saying good-bye to his beloved dacha? As she moved through the rooms she saw him in photos, smelled him, heard his rough, deep voice rolling up out of his barrel chest. She recalled his laugh most of all, a laugh that came from deep inside him, rumbled from his lower belly. “Don’t try to make me lose weight, Lana, my pet. Like the Japanese sumo, my strength lies in my lower belly.”

  At first, she had thought he was joking, but after a while she had come to realize that he was perfectly serious, and she stopped trying to regulate his intake of food and vodka. And, oh, the man loved his vodka! Almost as much as he loved Tony Soprano. His most treasured gift was the complete DVD set given to him by Jason Bourne. Hard to credit it, but Boris adored that show. He identified with Tony—though God alone knew why. Could Boris really have been as big a monster as Tony? And yet Tony had loved that horse—what was its name?—Pie-O-My. What kind of a name was that for a racehorse? She shook her head, crying and smiling at the same time, as she touched all the possessions he’d loved—a fierce-looking plush bear she had given him, on which he had pinned several of his medals; his silver biathlon medal from his adolescence; the political cartoons he had painstakingly cut out of papers and magazines, some making fun of NATO, the EU, and America, but others laughing at the expense of Russia and, especially, the Sovereign. Beside a widely published photo of the Sovereign bare-chested, riding his horse, was one of a Russian citizen in a fur hat, looking morose. By his side is an open gift box, in front of him a line of nesting dolls, all in the Sovereign’s image. “I want a refund,” the citizen says.

  Svetlana laughed, despite herself, but it quickly turned into a sob. At the open doorway to the master bedroom, she hesitated. Then she turned, retraced her steps. At the sidelights beside the front door, she peered through the curtains. The car was waiting for her, the driver, smoking, his head cocked back, clearly daydreaming. Even though she knew there was no one around, still she could not help looking. Some habits were so ingrained they never died.

  Assured she and the driver were alone in the forest clearing, she shrank back into the shadows of the entryway, pulled out the burner phone she had purchased to contact Belov, the Ukrainian patriot and her contact. He had failed to check in. He was hours overdue. With a distinct foreboding, she dialed a local number, left a three-word message. She disconnected, waited the requisite amount of time, and dialed the number again. As before, the voice mail clicked on immediately, meaning Belov’s mobile was off. Her sense of foreboding morphed into anxiety. What if Belov had been captured by the FSB? What if he had given her up? What if the first minister was just playing with her? What if this driver had orders other than to drive her to the airport?

  She had one more shot left. She punched in the fallback number, to be used only in emergencies, if Belov’s mobile burner somehow had been compromised. She listened, her hand sweaty and rigid. Dead air. Her anxiety grew into a kind of controlled panic.

  Get hold of yourself, she admonished. Everything will be all right. She heard herself and had to laugh. How could anything be right now that Boris was dead? Belov, also, very possibly. She never should have…

  With a convulsive motion, she hurled the burner into the stone fireplace, where it struck the carbonized back wall and shattered. Kneeling, she took the pieces, went into the kitchen, put them down the Disposall in the sink. Grinding them to powder, one by one, settled her a bit. Like washing dishes it was a task whose purpose was known, whose outcome was immediate.

  Done, she thought with a furious mixture of emotions. Done and gone.

  In the master bedroom, she sat on the bed in which she and Boris had often made love. That world seemed long ago and far away, like a dream of the adult world she’d had as a child. She stroked the bedspread she had bought him with the flat of her hand. It felt soft and wiry at the same time, like his hirsute chest. She looked at the plasma TV screen affixed to the wall opposite the bed, where, after their sweaty bouts of lovemaking they would watch episodes of The Sopranos, which left her deeply depressed, but which Boris absorbed in their entirety—every shot, every scene, every sequence. She thought he might have been a little bit in love with Dr. Melfi, but only because Tony had been. The shrink had been the only eligible woman in the show who hadn’t wanted him.

  With a heavy sigh, she rose. She was aware that the car was waiting for her, and yet she was reluctant to leave. She wanted to take something with her, something tangible, that would keep her close not only to Boris but to what they had had together. The bear, perhaps? But that had been something for him, and with the medals pinned to its furry chest, it was a reminder of th
e FSB.

  It was then her eye fell on the boxed set of The Sopranos DVDs. Finding Boris’s leather overnight bag in the closet she grabbed that, set it on the bed. She took the DVDs from the shelf below the DVD player, began to shovel them into the empty bag. But she was weeping in earnest now, her vision blurred and distorted by tears, and she fumbled the last one. It bounced off the bed, hit the floor, and she moaned. If the DVDs were damaged she’d never forgive herself. Each disc had suddenly become as precious to her as Boris’s booming sumo laugh.

  She knelt down, as if in prayer. The separate packs had spilled out of their case, and she found herself reverently opening each one to reassure herself that the discs remained unscratched. At precisely what point she discovered the micro SD flash memory card she could not, later, say. Perhaps it had been stashed beneath the last disc in the series, the one that contained the finale that they had debated about endlessly. She had maintained that Tony had been killed just after the shocking blackout. Boris was just as certain he remained alive. They both had arguments that seemed to prove their respective points of view. But at some juncture Svetlana told him she had changed her mind. She conceded she’d been wrong, that Boris was right, because it became clear to her that Tony being alive was important to him.

  Ironic, isn’t it? she asked herself as her palm cradled the microcard. Now it’s important to me that Tony survived, because it means that in some dimension close to me Boris has survived, is still alive and laughing.

  Secreting the microcard on her person, she quickly stuffed the packs into their case, stowed it in Boris’s bag, and, grasping its handles, left the dacha without a backward glance.

  Moments later, the Mercedes pulled away, growing smaller and smaller, until it turned onto the main road, and all that was left was a thin blue cloud of exhaust, quickly vanishing on the piney wind.