The Bourne Deception (25 page)

“Get my handbag,” Soraya said breathlessly as she sat on the young man’s back, pinning him to the deck. She took deep, even breaths, smoothed her hair back from her face, and felt the water already warmed by the sun trickling over her shoulders.

“Is this the one you’re looking for?” the owner asked anxiously as he handed over the bag. “He’s been here for three days, no more.”

Shaking her hands to dry them, Soraya rummaged for her phone. She opened it, slowed her breathing even more, and punched in Chalthoum’s number. When he answered, she told him where she was.

“Good work. I’ll meet you on the dock in ten minutes,” he said.

Putting her cell away, she glanced down at the young man beneath her.

“Get off me,” he panted. “I can’t breathe.”

Sitting on his diaphragm wasn’t helping, she knew, but she could summon up no sympathy.

“Sonny,” she said, “you are in a world of hurt.”

Bourne awoke into a web of shadows. The soft, intermittent hiss of traffic drew his eyes to a shaded window. Outside, streetlights shone through the darkness. He was lying on his side on what felt like a bed. Moving his head, he looked around the bedroom, which was small and comfortably furnished but didn’t feel well lived in. Beyond an open doorway a slice of living room was visible. He stirred, sensing he was alone. Where was he? Where was Tracy?

In answer to his second question, he heard the front door open in the living room and recognized Tracy’s sharp, quick gait as she came across a wooden floor. When she entered the bedroom, he tried to sit up. “Please don’t, you’ll only aggravate your wound,” she said. She put down some packages and sat beside him on the bed.

“My back was barely scratched.”

She shook her head. “A bit deeper, but I’m talking about the wound in your chest. It’s started seeping.” She unpacked items she had obviously bought at the local pharmacy: alcohol, antibiotic cream, sterile pads, and the like. “Now hold still.”

As she went to work stripping the old bandage and cleaning the wound, she said, “My mother warned me about men like you.”

“What about me?”

“Always getting into trouble.” Her fingers worked quickly, nimbly, surely. “The difference is that you know how to get yourself out of whatever mess blows up around you.”

He grimaced at the pain but didn’t flinch. “I have no choice.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s true.” She bunched up a wad of soiled sterile pads, then took up another, soaking it in alcohol and applying it to the reddened flesh. “I think you go looking for trouble, I think that’s who you are, I think you’d be unhappy—and, worse for you, bored—if you didn’t.”

Bourne laughed softly, but he didn’t think she was far off the mark.

She examined the newly cleaned wound. “Not so bad, I doubt you’ll need a fresh round of antibiotics.”

“Are you a doctor?”

She smiled. “On occasion, when I have to be.”

“That answer requires an explanation.”

She palpated the flesh around his wound. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I got shot, don’t change the subject.”

She nodded. “Okay, as a young woman—a
very
young woman—I spent two years in West Africa. There was unrest, fighting, horrible atrocities perpetrated. I was assigned to a field hospital where I learned triage, how to dress a wound. One day we were so overloaded with wounded and dying, the doctor put an instrument in my hand and said, ‗There’s an entry wound but no exit wound. If you don’t get the bullet out right away your patient will die.’ Then he went off to work on two other patients at once.”

“Did your patient die?”

“Yes, but not because of his wound. He’d been terminal before he’d been shot.”

“That must have helped some.”

“No,” she said, “it didn’t.” Throwing the last of the used pads into a wastebasket, she applied the antibiotic cream and began the bandaging process. “You must promise not to abuse this again. The next time the bleeding will be worse.” She sat back inspecting her work. “Ideally, you should be in hospital, or at least see a doctor.”

“This isn’t an ideal world,” he said.

“So I’ve noticed.”

She helped him to sit up. “Where are we?” he asked.

“An apartment of mine. We’re on the other side of town from Maestranza.”

He transferred to a chair, sat back gingerly. His chest felt as if it were made of lead. It beat with a dull ache as if from pain remembered from long ago. “Don’t you have an appointment with Don Fernando Hererra?”

“I postponed it.” She looked at him inquiringly. “I couldn’t possibly go without you, Professor Alonzo Pecunia Zuiga.” She was speaking of the Goya expert from the Prado he was going to impersonate. Then, abruptly, she smiled. “I like money too much to spend it when I don’t have to.”

She stood, moving him back to the bed. “But now you must rest.”

He was going to answer her but his eyelids had already slid down. With the darkness came a deep and peaceful sleep. Arkadin pushed his recruits through the desolate landscape of NagornoKarabakh, working them twenty-one hours a day. When they began to doze on their feet, he slammed them with his baton. He never had to hit any of them twice. For three hours they slept wherever they happened to be, sprawled on the ground, all except Arkadin himself for whom sleep had been completely banished months ago. Instead, his mind was filled with scenes from the past, from the end of his days in Nizhny Tagil, when Stas’s men were closing in on him and it seemed as if his only choice was to kill as many of them as he could before they shot him to death.

He wasn’t afraid to die, that was clear to him from the outset of his forced incarceration in the basement, venturing out only at night for quick forays for food and fresh water. Above him was a hive of activity as the remaining members of Stas’s gang feverishly coordinated the ever-intensifying search for him. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, he might have had reason to think that the gang would move on to other matters, but no, they nursed their grudge like a colicky baby, inhaling its poison until to a man they were gripped by an unshakable obsession. They wouldn’t rest until they dragged his corpse through the streets as an object lesson for anyone else who might think of interfering with their business.

Even the cops, who were, in any event, on the gang’s payroll, had been co-opted into the citywide dragnet by the random storms of violence visited on Nizhny Tagil night after night. They were used to turning a blind eye, even at times laughed about it, but not now—the attacks had escalated to a level that made them a laughingstock in the eyes of the state police. It was typical of their thinking that rather than clamping down on Stas’s gang, they took the easy way and capitulated to its demands. So almost everyone was on the lookout for Arkadin, there was no surcease, there could only be a nasty end.

That was when Mikhail Tarkanian, whom Arkadin would eventually call Mischa, arrived in Nizhny Tagil from Moscow. He had been sent by his boss, Dimitri Ilyinovich Maslov, head of Kazanskaya, the most powerful family of the Moscow
grupperovka
, the Russian mafia, involved in drugs and black-market cars. Through his many eyes and ears Maslov had heard of Arkadin, had heard of the bloodbath he’d single-handedly caused and its stalemate aftermath. He wanted Arkadin brought to him. “The problem,” Maslov told his men, “is that Stas’s men want to tear him limb from limb.” He handed them a file. Inside were a sheaf of grainy black-and-white surveillance shots, a gallery of Stas’s remaining crew, each with his name carefully written on the reverse. Maslov’s eyes and ears had been busy, indeed, and it occurred to Tarkanian, even if it didn’t to the scowling Oserov, that Maslov must want Arkadin very badly to go to so much trouble to extract him from what seemed like an intractable situation.

Maslov could have sent his chief enforcer, Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov, at the head of a raiding party to take Arkadin by force, but Maslov was a canny dispenser of his power. Far better to make Stas’s gang part of his empire than to start a blood feud with whoever was left after his own people got through with them.

So instead he sent Tarkanian, his chief political negotiator. He ordered Oserov along to protect Tarkanian, an assignment Oserov openly despised, adamant that if Maslov had listened to him he, Oserov, could easily have taken Arkadin from the hick baboons of Nizhny Tagil, as he called them. “I’d have this Arkadin back in Moscow within forty-eight hours, guaranteed,” he told Tarkanian several times during their tedious journey into the foothills of the Ural Mountains.

By the time they arrived in Nizhny Tagil, Tarkanian was sick to death of Oserov who, as he later told Arkadin, “felt like a woodpecker attached to my head.”

In any event, even before Maslov’s emissaries left Moscow, Tarkanian had formed the outline of the plan to extract Arkadin from his predicament. He was a man with a natural Machiavellian mind. The deals he made for Maslov were legendary in both their bewildering complexity and their unerring effectiveness.

“The mission is misdirection,” Tarkanian told Oserov as they approached their destination. “To that end we need to create a straw man for Stas’s gang to go after.”

“What do you mean
we
?” Oserov said with typical surliness.

“I mean you’re the perfect man to establish the straw man for me.”

“Oserov looked at me with that dark look of his,” Tarkanian told Arkadin much later, “but he was powerless to do more than yelp like a kicked dog. He knew my importance to Dimitri, and this kept him in line. Barely.”

“You’re right about one thing, we’re dealing with baboons,” he told Oserov, throwing him a bone. “And baboons are motivated by only two things: the carrot and the stick. I’m going to provide the carrot.”

“Why should they want anything to do with you?” Oserov said.

“Because the moment you hit town you’re going to do what you do best: make life a living hell for them.”

This answer drew a rare smile from Oserov’s face.

“And do you know what he said to me then?” Tarkanian whispered to Arkadin much later. “He said, ‗The more blood, the better.’”

And he meant it. Forty-three minutes from the moment he entered Nizhny Tagil, Oserov found his first victim, one of Stas’s oldest, most loyal soldiers. He put a bullet through one ear at close range, then went to work butchering him. The head he left intact, looking out from the chest cavity in a gruesome parody of a cheap horror film.

Needless to say, the rest of Stas’s men were incensed. Business ground to a halt. Three death squads with three men each were sent out, searching for this new killer. They knew it wasn’t Arkadin because the killing wasn’t his typical method.

They weren’t frightened yet, but that would come. If there was anything Oserov knew how to engender in others, it was fear. Choosing another victim at random among the photos in the dossier Maslov had given them, Oserov stalked the gang member. Finding him on the doorstep of his house, with the door open and his children peeping out, Oserov shot him, shattering the bone in his right thigh. With his victim’s children screaming and his wife running to the front door from the kitchen, Oserov sprinted across the pavement, leapt up the concrete steps, and put three bullets in the man’s abdomen in precisely the places where he’d bleed most heavily.

That was day two. Oserov was just warming up, there was far worse to come.

Pinprick
,” Humphry Bamber said. “What do you mean,
Pinprick
?”

Veronica Hart shot Moira a nervous look. “I was hoping you could tell us,” she said.

Hart’s cell buzzed and she walked out of earshot to take it. When she returned, she said, “The backup I ordered is waiting outside.”

Moira nodded, leaned forward, toward Bamber, forearms resting on her crossed knee. “The word
pinprick
was paired with the name of your software program.”

He looked from her to the
DCI
. “I don’t understand.”

Moira felt the air go out of her. “I met with Steve just before… before he disappeared. He was terrified of what was going on at the DoD and the Pentagon. He intimated that the fog of war had already started to permeate the atmosphere at both places.”

“And, what, you think Bardem has something to do with that fog of war?”

“Yes,” Moira said firmly. “I do.”

Bamber had begun to sweat. “Christ,” he said, “if I had any idea the real-world situation Noah was going to use the program for included war—”

“Excuse me,” Moira said hotly, “but Noah Perlis is a high-ranking member of Black River. How could you not know—or at least suspect?”

“Back off, Moira,” Hart said.

“I will not back off. This—idiot savant—has given Noah the keys to the castle. Because of Bamber’s stupidity Noah and the
NSA
are planning something.”

“Something what?” Bamber’s voice was almost pleading. He seemed desperate to know what he was complicit in.

Moira shook her head. “That’s just it, we don’t know what, but I’ll tell you one thing: Unless we find out and stop them I’m afraid that we’ll all live to regret it.”

Bamber, clearly shaken, rose. “Whatever I can do, however I can help, just tell me.”

“Go get dressed,” Hart said. “Then we’d like to take a look at Bardem. My hope is that we’ll get a better idea from the program itself what Noah and the
NSA
have in mind.”

“It won’t take me a minute,” he said. He ducked out of the office.

For a time, the two women sat in silence. Then Hart said, “Why do I get the feeling that I’m being outmaneuvered?”

“You mean Halliday?”

Hart nodded. “The secretary of defense has decided to reach out to the private sector for whatever he has in mind—and make no mistake, no matter how clever Noah Perlis is, he’s taking his orders from Bud Halliday.”

“Taking his money, too,” Moira said. “I wonder what Black River’s bill for this little escapade is going to be.”

“Moira, whatever differences we’ve had in the past, we agree on one thing—that our former employer is without scruples. Black River will do anything if the price is right.”

“Halliday has a virtually unlimited source, the US Mint. You and I both saw the flats of hundred-dollar bills Black River transshipped from here to Iraq during the first four years of the war.”