The Bourne Deception (40 page)

“I don’t want to be caught napping when I walk in the door,” she’d said as they checked into a hotel in the main section of the city. “That’s why I told Noah I wasn’t coming over until tomorrow morning. Tonight I need a good night’s sleep more than I need his money.”

“What did he say?”

They rode up in the mirrored elevator, heading for the top floor, which Tracy had requested.

“He wasn’t happy, but what could he say?”

“He didn’t offer to come here?”

Tracy’s nose wrinkled. “No, he didn’t.”

Bourne thought that odd. If Noah was so anxious to take possession of the Goya, why wouldn’t he offer to complete the transaction at the hotel?

They had adjoining rooms with nearly identical views of al Mogran—the junction of the Blue and White Nile rivers—and a connecting door that locked from either side. The White Nile flowed north from Lake Victoria, while the Blue Nile flowed west from Ethiopia. The Nile itself, the main river, continued north into Egypt.

The decor in the room was shabby. Judging by both the style and the wear, it certainly hadn’t been updated since the early 1970s. The carpets stank of cheap cigarettes and even cheaper perfume. Putting the Goya on the bed, Tracy crossed directly to the window, unlocked it, and pushed it up as far as it would go. The rush of the city was like a vacuum, sucking all the hums out of the room.

She sighed as she returned to sit beside her prize. “I’ve been traveling too much, I miss home.”

“Where is that?” Bourne asked. “I know it’s not Seville.”

“No, not Seville.” She pushed her hair back off the side of her face. “I live in London, Belgravia.”

“Very posh.”

She laughed wearily. “If you saw my flat—it’s a tiny thing, but it’s mine and I love it. There’s a mews out back with a flowering pear tree that a pair of house martins nest in come spring. And a nightjar serenades me most evenings.”

“Why would you ever leave?”

She laughed again, a bright, silvery sound that was easy on the ears. “I have to earn my way in the world, Adam, just like everyone else.” Lacing her fingers together, she said more soberly, “Why did Don Hererra lie to you?”

“There are many possible answers.” Bourne stared out the window. The bright lights illuminated the bend in the Nile, reflections of the city dancing across the dark, crocodile-infested water. “But the most logical one is that he’s somehow allied with the man I’m trying to find, the one who shot me.”

“Isn’t that too much of a coincidence?”

“It would be,” he said, “if I wasn’t being set up for a trap.”

She seemed to digest this news for a moment. “Then the man who tried to kill you wants you to come to Seven Seventy-nine El Gamhuria Avenue.”

“I believe so.” He turned to her. “Which is why I’m not going to be with you when you knock on the front door tomorrow morning.”

Now she appeared alarmed. “I don’t know whether I want to face Noah alone. Where are you going to be?”

“My presence will only make things dangerous for you, believe me.” He smiled. “Besides, I’ll be there, I just won’t go in through the front door.”

“You mean you’ll use me as a distraction.”

She was not only uncommonly smart, Bourne thought, but quick as well. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. And you’re right, I will be safer if I go in alone.” She frowned. “Why is it, I wonder, that people feel the need to lie altogether?”

Her eyes found his. She seemed to be comparing him with someone else, or perhaps only with herself. “Would it be so terrible if everyone just told each other the truth?”

“People prefer to remain hidden,” he said, “so they won’t get hurt.”

“But they get hurt just the same, don’t they?” She shook her head. “I think people lie to themselves as easily as—if not more easily than—they do to others. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re doing it.” She cocked her head to one side. “It’s a matter of identity, isn’t it? I mean, in your mind you can be anyone, do anything. Everything is malleable, whereas in the real world, effecting change—any change—is so bloody difficult, the effort is wearying, you get beaten down by all the outside forces you can’t control.”

“You could adopt an entirely new identity,” Bourne said, “one where effecting change is less difficult because now you re-create your own history.”

She nodded. “Yes, but that has it own pitfalls. No family, no friends—

unless, of course, you don’t mind being absolutely isolated.”

“Some people don’t.” Bourne looked beyond her, as if the wall with its cheap print of an Islamic scene was a window into his thoughts. Once again, he wondered who he was—David Webb, Jason Bourne, or Adam Stone. His life was a fiction, no matter in which direction he looked. He’d already determined that he couldn’t live as David Webb, and as for Jason Bourne, there was always someone, somewhere in the world, hidden in the shadows of his forgotten former life, who wished him ill or wanted him dead. And Adam Stone?

He might be called a blank slate, but that would be, in practice, untrue because the people who encountered this identity reacted to him—reacted to whoever the real Bourne was. The more he was with people like Tracy, the more he learned about himself.

“What about you?” she said now as she joined him at the window. “Do you mind being alone?”

“I’m not alone,” he replied. “I’m with you.”

She laughed softly and shook her head. “Listen to you, you’ve perfected the art of answering personal questions without revealing one iota of yourself.”

“That’s because I never know who I’m talking with.”

She watched him for a moment out of the corner of her eyes as if trying to figure out the real meaning of what he’d just said, then she stared out the window at the two Niles winding their way through North Africa, like a story you read while falling asleep. “At night, everything becomes transparent, or insubstantial.” Reaching out, she touched their reflections in the window. “And yet our thoughts—and why is it especially our fears?—are somehow magnified, taking on the proportions of titans, or gods.” She stood very close to him, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. “Are we good or evil? What’s really in our hearts? It’s dispiriting when we don’t know, or can’t decide.”

“Perhaps we’re both good and evil,” Bourne said, wondering about himself, about all his identities, and where the truth lay, “depending on the time and the circumstance.”

Arkadin was lost in the star-dazzled Azerbaijani night. Starting promptly at five in the morning, he and his one-hundred-strong cadre of hardened soldiers had hiked into the mountains. Their mission, he’d told them, was to find the snipers hiding along their route and shoot them with the long-range paintball guns that looked and felt exactly like AK-47s that had been shipped at his request to Nagorno-Karabakh. Twenty members of the indigenous tribe, equipped with paintball sniper rifles, had secreted themselves along the route. When Arkadin had handed them out, he’d had to explain their use to men who thought them both amusing and idiotic. Still, within half an hour the tribesmen had become proficient with the pseudo-weapons.

His men had missed the first two snipers completely, so two of the hundred had been “killed” before they hunkered down and learned from their inattention and lapses in judgment.

This exercise had lasted all day and into the swiftly falling dusk, but Arkadin drove them on, deeper and deeper into the mountains. They stopped once for fifteen minutes, to eat their rations, then it was on again, climbing ever upward toward the clear, shining vault of heaven.

Toward midnight, he called a completion to the exercise, graded each man as to performance, stamina, and ability to adapt to a changing situation, then allowed them to make camp. As usual, he ate little and slept not at all. He could feel his body’s aches and strains, but they were small and, it seemed to him, very far away, as if they belonged to someone else, or to a different Arkadin he knew only in passing.

Dawn had arrived before he stilled his feverishly working mind and, marshaling his energies, pulled out his satellite phone and punched in a specific set of numbers, connecting him to an automated “zombie” line that switched his call several times. With each switch, he was required to punch in a different code, which allowed him to continue the call. At length, after the last code was digested by the closed system at the other end of the line, he heard a human voice.

“I didn’t expect to hear from you.” There was no rebuke in Nikolai Yevsen’s voice, only a faint curiosity.

“Frankly,” Arkadin said, “I didn’t expect to call.” His head tilted up, he was staring at the last stars as they were banished by the pink and blue light. “Something has come to my attention I thought you should know.”

“As always, I appreciate your thoughtfulness.” Yevsen’s voice was as harsh as a saw cutting through metal. There was about it something feral, a fearsome kind of power that was his alone.

“It has come to my attention that the woman, Tracy Atherton, is not alone.”

“How is this information of interest to me?”

Only Yevsen, Arkadin thought, could convey a lethal stillness with the mere tone of his voice. In the course of his freelance career with the Moscow
grupperovka
he had gotten to know the arms dealer well enough to be exceedingly wary of him.

“She’s with a man named Jason Bourne,” he said now, “who is out for revenge.”

“We all are, in one way or another. Why would he seek it here?”

“Bourne thinks you hired the Torturer to kill him.”

“Where would he get that idea?”

“A rival, possibly. I could find out for you,” Arkadin said helpfully.

“It doesn’t matter,” Yevsen said. “This Jason Bourne is already a dead man.”

Exactly what I wanted to hear,
Arkadin thought as he could not stop his mind from turning toward the past.

Approximately five hundred miles from Nizhny Tagil, when daylight had bled into dusk and dusk fell victim to night, Tarkanian drove toward the village of Yaransk to look for a doctor. He had stopped three times on the way, so everyone could relieve themselves and get a bite to eat. At those times, he checked on Oserov. The third stop, near sunset, he’d found that Oserov had peed himself. He was feverish and looked like death.

During the long drive at high speed over incomplete highways, rough detours, and suspect roads, the children had been remarkably quiet, listening with rapt attention to their mother spin tales—fabulous adventures and magnificent exploits of the god of fire, the god of wind, and especially the warrior-god, Chumbulat.

Arkadin had never heard of these gods and wondered whether Joškar had made them up for her daughters’ benefit. In any event, it wasn’t just the three girls who were held rapt by the stories. Arkadin listened to them as if they were news reports from a distant country to which he longed to travel. In this way, for him, if not for Tarkanian, the long day’s journey into night passed with the swiftness of sleep. They arrived in Yaransk too late to find a doctor’s office open, so Tarkanian, asking several pedestrians, followed their directions to the local hospital. Arkadin was left with Joškar in the car. They both climbed out to stretch their legs, leaving the girls in the backseat, playing with the sets of painted wooden nesting dolls Arkadin had bought them during one of the rest stops.

Her head was partly turned away from him as she glanced back at her children. Shadows hid most of the damage done to her face, while the sodium lights drew out the exoticism of her features, which seemed to him a curious mixture of Asian and Finnish. Her eyes were large and slightly uptilted, her mouth was generous and full-lipped. Unlike her nose, which seemed formed to protect her face from life’s tougher blows, her mouth exuded a sensuality bordering on the erotic. That she seemed quite unaware of this quality in herself made it all the more magnetic.

“Did you make up the stories you were telling your children?” he asked.

Joškar shook her head. “I was told them when I was a little girl, looking out at the Volga. My mother was told them by her mother, and so on back in time.” She turned to him. “They’re tales of our religion. I’m Mari, you see.”

“Mari? I don’t know it.”

“My people are what researchers call Finno-Ugrik. We’re what you Christians call pagans. We believe in many gods, the gods of the stories I tell, and the demi-gods who walk among us, disguised as humans.” When she turned her gaze on her girls something inexplicable happened to her face, as if she had become one of them, one of her own daughters. “Once upon a time, we were eastern Finns, who over the years intermarried with wanderers from the south and east. Gradually, this mixture of Germanic and Asian cultures moved to the Volga, where our land was eventually incorporated into Russia. But we were never accepted by the Russians, who hate learning new languages and fear customs and traditions other than their own. We Mari have a saying:

‗The worst your enemies can do is kill you. The worst your friends can do is betray you. Fear only the indifferent, because at their silent consent, treachery and death flourish!’”

“That’s a bleak credo, even for this country.”

“Not if you know our history here.”

“I never knew you weren’t ethnic Russian.”

“No one did. My husband was deeply ashamed of my ethnic background, just as he was ashamed of himself for marrying me. Of course, he told no one.”

Looking at her, he could see why Lev Antonin had fallen in love with her.

“Why did you marry him?” he said.

Joškar gave an ironic laugh. “Why do you think? He’s ethnic Russian; moreover, he’s a powerful man. He protects me and my children.”

Arkadin took her chin, moving her face fully into the light. “But who protects you from him?”

She snatched her face away as if his fingers had burned her. “I made certain he never touched my children. That was all that mattered.”

“Doesn’t it matter that they should have a father who, unlike Antonin, genuinely loves them?” Arkadin was thinking of his own father, either falling-down drunk or absent altogether.

Joškar sighed. “Life is full of compromises, Leonid, especially for the Mari. I was alive, he’d given me children whom I adore, and he swore to keep them from harm. That was my life, how could I complain when my parents were murdered by the Russians, when my sister disappeared when I was thirteen, probably abducted and tortured because my father was a journalist who repeatedly spoke out against the repression of the Mari? That was when my aunt sent me away from the Volga, to ensure I stayed alive.”