Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Bourne Enigma

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Of course, Borz could simply wait outside for Bourne to exit the pyramid, but it was no sure thing he’d do that through the archeologist’s entrance, and under cover of night, Bourne could easily slip away. No, Borz would come after him, Bourne was certain of it.

  Abruptly, the floor evened out. By the narrow beam of his penlight, Bourne saw that he had reached an antechamber—the first, if his knowledge of the burial chambers of other Egyptian pharaohs held true here, of a number, all connected by narrow passageways that would finally lead to the heart of the interior: the room that held the pharaoh’s sarcophagus, or would have before the pyramid had been looted by grave robbers and archeologists alike.

  In the paneled anteroom, Bourne paused to listen. It was even hotter here than in the downward sloping passage, if that were possible. The air was thicker, drier, dustier, and somehow heavy, as if existing here unbreathed since the dawn of Egypt’s pharaonic age had somehow compressed it into an alien atmosphere.

  Above him, the immense structure rose in blind witness to the passing of centuries. The utter silence was like a living thing, gobbling up the darkness, turning it into a stew of stone, plaster, and wood, so there was no place left to hold air to breathe.

  But suddenly, sound. He heard one—just one. Then the silence closed in again. He stood immobile facing the way he had come, until he could make out a dim penumbra of darkness—the faintest lightening, bobbing in time to the gait of an adult human being. It was enough to assure him that, indeed, someone was coming after him.

  He left the antechamber, passing through three portcullis blocks, along another passage, shorter this time, that opened out into the second antechamber. This one was much larger and, as such, hotter still. The baking air felt fiery in his nostrils and throat.

  Dead ahead was a stepped passage that continued downward. He played the beam of his flash past it, saw a smaller chamber attached to the larger one. If other pyramid interiors were any guide this would be the way down to the pharaoh’s burial chamber. Though from this distance the rear wall projected as blank, Bourne knew there must be a secret door hidden flush with the stone wall. Bypassing the stairs down, he moved into the small chamber, ran his hand over the stones. Not surprisingly, he could feel no nook, no crevice that would mark out the door.

  Moving to one side, he played the flash in a raking beam across the wall, moving it slowly, even when he heard multiple sounds in the passageway leading to the second anteroom. This procedure could not be hurried. Abruptly, he held the beam absolutely still. The raking light—the acute angle to the wall—revealed the seams of the door, minute though they were. He pressed on one side, then the other. With the soft shriek of a ravenous vulture, the secret door swung inward. It led to a less steeply declined passage. There was an altogether different scent as Bourne stepped through the portal. He closed the stone door behind him, but not all the way, leaving the smallest opening, which was not only for himself.

  There was no flight of stairs here, no wood planking, no guardrail, just stone, gritty with age. It was easier going down, he knew, than when he would need to go back up. The scent continued to build as he made his way along the passage, which was wider than any other he had come through. Parts of Egyptian murals lined the walls, depicting scenes of the pharaoh in life on one side, overseen by the goddess Isis, and the descent of his sarcophagus into the netherworld, guided by the gods Horus and Osiris, on the other. Above the thick lintel of the doorway was the inscription: Anet aledy tedkhel hena hedar. You who enter here beware.

  Those ancient Egyptians, Bourne thought, had a flair for the dramatic. Only in this case they might be right.

  He remained still, waiting, listening, hearing nothing. He saw the hieroglyphics, and immediately Boris’s rebus scrolled across the screen of his mind. Switching from masculine to feminine Sumerian, he continued the deciphering. What he came up with was: ALBEDO.

  An almost silent pad of feet, a soft phut, and something glanced off the stone near Bourne’s left cheek: a dart, identical to the one that had killed Lev. He doused the penlight, duck-walked the rest of the way into the pharaoh’s burial chamber. The sarcophagus was, of course, long gone, but the massive stones on which it had rested for ages still hunkered against the right-hand wall. Bourne could feel their twin presence as if they were people. Skirting them, he progressed along the wall, carefully feeling his way. Now was not the time to miss even the smallest detail of the chamber. The left-hand wall was as smooth as the others before it had been, as well the one at the rear, save for a semicircular cutout in its center, but the right-hand wall was a different matter. It was composed of a series of vertical niches, rising from floor to ceiling. It was unclear what they had been for, though Bourne thought it likely they had once held immense funerary urns in which the pharaoh’s possessions had been stored, for use once he arrived in the netherworld. These, too, were long gone. Lucky for Bourne. He made use of the niche closest to the entrance opening, flattened himself into the narrow space with his left shoulder jammed up against the niche’s near wall. Even if his pursuer emerged with a bright light, the shadow cast by the niche would hide Bourne from view, giving him time enough to—

  A figure was framed by the doorway. He was bathed in a weird blue light, lit from below like a ghoul in a horror film. Then Bourne saw the LED anklets, spreading the heatless light. The aurora distorted his features, but not enough. Bourne saw that his pursuer was the man who had claimed to be Captain Vanov. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. This man—whoever he really was—had known about the coin—just as Irina had known about the coin. In fact, it was this very man who had directed him to Irina, claiming that Boris had wanted her to serve as Bourne’s partner at the wedding. Another lie. He hadn’t had the time to ask Boris about her, which was a stroke of luck for Irina—the last bit of luck her life had held.

  Yet another piece of the puzzle clicked in. This man and Irina had been working in concert. Irina had taken Bourne to Mik, Borz’s vosdushnik, his moneyman. Her motivation for doing so was still unclear.

  “Bourne,” the false Vanov called, “I have you trapped.” His dart pistol glimmered eerily in the LEDs. “There’s no escape for you.” The muzzle tracked from one side of the chamber to the other. “I know you must have figured out the coin’s secret by now. Just tell me what it is and I’ll leave you in peace. Or you can take the dart I shoot into you. Unlike the one I used on the Israeli, this one will only paralyze you. Then I’ll go to work on you. I’m sure you don’t want that. Hell, I don’t want that.” The pistol’s muzzle kept tracking back and forth in metronomic fashion. “No? Tell you what, give me what I want and I’ll even leave the girl—Amira—in peace.” He chuckled. “That should make your day.”

  Bourne had the sound-suppressed Glock held against his leg. He raised it now and put three shots into the false Vanov’s chest. The man was flung backward into the passage. The doorway was clear.

  37

  Bourne, listening, hearing nothing, moved silently out of his niche, toward the doorway that led back out and up into the Cairo sunlight, which now seemed but a distant memory. He approached the doorway with extreme caution even though he knew precisely where each bullet would have penetrated the false Vanov’s chest: lung, lung, heart. No chance of him still being alive; he was dead before he hit the floor.

  And yet as Bourne passed through the doorway, there he was on his knees, very much alive. The bullets had shredded a section of his shirtfront, revealing the Kevlar vest underneath.

  As Bourne raised the Glock, he heard another phut! and put his left hand up just in time to take the dart in the back of it, instead of in his throat. He pulled the dart out, then squeezed the Glock’s trigger. The bullet went wide of its mark. Bourne aimed again, but found his vision clouded, as if a net had been thrown over him. The figure in front of him morphed into two, then three, he squeezed off more shots until the magazine was empty.

  Grinning, the false Vanov aimed the dart pistol lower. “One in t
he hand just isn’t going to do it fast enough for me,” he said, just before his forehead exploded in a geyser of blood, brains, and skull fragments. He pitched forward, onto what was left of his face, twitched once, and lay still.

  Behind him, barely visible in the blue glow, was a tall, slim man with the ascetic face of a priest. Bourne had encountered him before through Sara’s vivid description of the person who had stolen her Star of David in Moscow.

  Ivan Borz, in the flesh, at last.

  Bourne threw the useless Glock at Borz, but it went wide of the mark, his aim unaccountably off until he remembered the dart in the back of his hand. A wave of vertigo lapped at the edges of his consciousness, and he reeled backward into the darkness. A shot rang out, filling the death chamber with noise without end. At any other time, Bourne would have rushed Borz, would have taken him head-on, but he could no longer rely on his reflexes or his breathing. His only recourse was to find an avenue of escape.

  “That shot would have struck you if I’d wanted it to,” Borz said in Arabic.

  Stumbling backward, Bourne ran into the rear wall before he knew it. Behind him, he heard Borz step into the burial chamber.

  “It’s been a long time,” Borz said in Russian. Then, switching to English, “But I don’t suppose you remember our previous shared experience.”

  Bourne was hunched down in the semicircular cutout, his hands pressed against the stone floor to support himself. There was a buzzing in his ears that matched the fizzing in his veins as the paralytic spread through his system. He knew that if the dart had found its mark he would be completely helpless by now, unable to move or even to think clearly until given the antidote or the effects wore off.

  “I’ve had it on unimpeachable authority that your memory isn’t working the way it should,” Borz went on, “that it’s a blank past a certain date in time when you were shot in Marseilles. I was so sure you’d been killed, Bourne. How you disappointed me!”

  Bourne’s fingers—at least the ones on his right hand, which still felt normal, had encountered one of those clever flush ball-and-socket features so beloved of ancient Egyptian architects, who had outfitted the pyramid interiors with a system of secret chutes and ladders—shortcuts they used when ensuring their designs were being followed to the letter.

  “By guile or good fortune, you somehow made it out of the Mediterranean. But pressing matters necessitate I stop throwing doppelgangers at you; the game is at an end. Your miraculous rebirth is just one of the things you’ll tell me now that Aleksandr Volkin’s toxin has tamed you.”

  At the sound of the name Bourne froze for a moment, and his straining heart seemed to skip a beat. “Aleksandr—”

  “Volkin,” Borz provided helpfully. “I knew that would focus your attention.” He was in the chamber now, silhouetted by the blue glow that seemed fainter and fainter by the second, as if with Aleksandr dead, the LEDs too were dying. “That’s right, Aleksandr is—excuse me, was—old man Volkin’s last remaining grandchild. He was Irina’s twin brother. I bet you didn’t know that, either.”

  Bourne, of course, hadn’t, but at the moment he had bigger problems to occupy his mind. The first was getting out of this locked burial chamber. The second was how to stave off the effects of the paralytic. First things first.

  Lifting the ball out of the socket, he turned it forty-five degrees, and was rewarded with the bottom of the cutout swinging down. He fell from darkness to darkness, landing painfully on his right hip because his legs would no longer fully support the weight of his head and torso.

  “Where have you gone, Bourne?” From the sound of Borz’s voice, speaking in dulcet upper-class British tones, he seemed to be crouched over the void in the floor. “Down the rabbit hole, I expect.” He chuckled. “No escape for you, down there, however. Not with those unsteady pins of yours. The toxin must be speeding its way to your autonomous nervous system by now, and, ironically, the faster you move, the more quickly you’re pushing it along.”

  Bourne, ignoring the taunts, began to pull himself away from the wall, away from the chute down which he had plummeted. He could feel his heartbeat as if it was in his throat, but it was slowing, slowing. He could no longer feel his left hand, and half of that arm was tingling as it verged on numbness. Only moments left, he knew, so he continued on, like a snail trying to get across a nighttime garden. He had lost his penlight in the fall. He was in a chamber even lower than the pharaonic burial chamber with no idea what it was used for, no idea whether it held anything he could use as a weapon. He had only one hand with which to grope forward, seeking something—anything—that would help him defend himself.

  From behind him he heard the sound of boots landing on the ground, the soft grunt as bent legs absorbed the fall.

  “The thing of it is, Bourne, I don’t even need to see you,” Borz said in Hebrew. “I know where you are: dead ahead of me. I know where you’re going: nowhere. I’m thinking you can scarcely move at this point.” He strode toward where Bourne lay, unable to go on, helpless. “But that’s all right, my friend. Don’t concern yourself about how you’ll escape. You can’t. You won’t.”

  Bending over, he slammed the back of Bourne’s head with the butt of his handgun.

  Bourne’s last thought was: How fitting to die in a tomb.

  Then all was silence.

  PART THREE

  Modern empires rise and fall not on armies, ideology, or violence,

  but on the instantaneous flow of capital.

  —Boris Karpov

  38

  She’s going to be all right,” Dr. McGuire said.

  Sara looked down at Amira, lying on Dr. McGuire’s home-surgery table. “She’s as white as the moon.”

  Dr. McGuire nodded, the powerful overhead lights flicking off the thick owlish lenses of her wire-rimmed spectacles. “She’s lost a lot of blood. It’s fortunate that she had you, my dear Rebeka. Otherwise…” Her spectral voice trailed off. She looked down at her patient and smiled, her very white teeth shining from out of her wide, open face, the kind of face everyone liked, believed in, trusted. No one would suspect that Martha McGuire was anything but a first-class surgeon. “Not to worry, my dear. You’re going to be right as rain in no time.” She had the habit of using old British phrases, especially with her younger patients. She claimed it helped allay their anxiety.

  “How is that going to happen?” Sara wanted to move the doctor away to the other side of the surgery in order to talk to her in private, but Amira’s hand was clutching hers with such desperation that she could not bring herself to leave her. “She needs blood.”

  “And she shall have blood!” Dr. McGuire’s face now split into a grin. “Happily Amira has AB-positive, the universal recipient blood type. My assistant has kindly consented to donate.”

  Martha McGuire’s assistant, who had just finished treating the burns on Sara’s back, was a roly-poly Egyptian with a constant smile on her face, even when she was working hard at cooking or cleaning. Dr. McGuire sat her in a chair beside the table. Her right arm was already bared. Clearly she had done this before.

  A shard of wood, turned by the explosion into a spear, had pierced Amira’s side, in the soft area below the rib cage and above the kidney. So it could have been worse, but there was serious bleeding. While navigating the boat downriver, Sara had called Martha McGuire—the field name of Mossad’s surgeon in Cairo—and described the injury in detail. Long experience in the field guided her; she knew what was important to a surgeon and what could wait until she saw Amira in person.

  Now Dr. McGuire inserted the needle, was in the process of connecting the two women, setting the apparatus in motion. Sara, keeping hold of the young woman’s hand, stared down into her large, liquid eyes.

  All at once they rolled up in her head and she lay deathly still.

  —

  Svetlana arrived in Cairo and immediately felt overwhelmed by the stifling heat, the densely packed area outside arrivals, the shoving, the chaos of shouts, cr
ying babies, and imprecations from touts and hideously disfigured beggars.

  She stood, suitcase in hand, momentarily paralyzed by the whirlwind, buffeted on all sides like an underpowered boat in an increasingly choppy sea. It was about then, as she was looking around for someone to help her navigate the chaos, when she saw a man she thought she recognized. A terrible chill seemed to fracture her bones; the suitcase slipped out of her nerveless hand. The man was Russian, the man was FSB, the man was watching her the way, she was sure, a hawk watches a baby rabbit.

  Svetlana had never wanted for bravery, had never been cowed or intimidated by men. That was one of her traits Boris liked best. She had learned that in order to stay on top of situations, she had to take the initiative. Waiting—indecision—meant slavery. Acting on a decision—even if turned out to be the wrong one—was better than doing nothing.

  But that was in Moscow, which she knew with the intimacy of a longtime lover. Only this lover she never tired of. But now she was here in Cairo, a city totally alien to her, with Arabic flying every which way toward her and around her like hand-tossed missiles. I am Russo-Ukrainian, she thought. And I am lost.

  Not only lost, but on the cusp of being hunted down and terminated. She had felt it when Savasin had insisted she take the sea cruise. She had felt it more strongly when she had reached the pier where the liner was docked. She had changed her plans without telling anyone, except Boris’s friend, Jason Bourne, and now her past was hanging on to her like a street cur whose jaws were clamped to her trouser cuff. Watching this man watching her clarified what she had suspected all along: that Savasin had attached someone to her to see her onto the ship, and then to dispatch her during the cruise. Pushed overboard on a romantic cruise—a novel way for her to die, she had to give him that.