The Bourne Deception (41 page)

Arkadin watched one of the girls playing in the backseat of the car. Her two sisters had fallen asleep, one against the door, the other with her head on her sleeping sister’s shoulder. In the pale, ethereal light slanting in they looked like the fairies in their mother’s stories.

“We must find a place soon to immolate my son.”

“What?”

“He was born on the solstice of the fire-god,” she explained, “so the fire-god must take him across into the death-lands, otherwise he will wander the world forever alone.”

“All right,” Arkadin said. He was impatient to get to Moscow, but considering his complicity in Yasha’s death he felt he was in no position to refuse her. Besides, she and her family were his responsibility now. If he refused to take care of them, no one else would. “As soon as Tarkanian and Oserov return we’ll head out into the woods so you can find a suitable spot.”

“I will need you to help me. Mari custom dictates a male’s participation. Will you do this for Yasha, and for me?”

Arkadin watched the play of light and dark chasing themselves across the flat planes of her face as vehicles swept by, their headlights pushing back the oncoming night. He didn’t know what to say, so he nodded mutely.

In the near distance, the spire of the Orthodox church rose up like a reproachful finger, in admonition to the world’s sinners. Arkadin wondered why so much money was spent in the service of something that couldn’t be seen, heard, or felt. Of what use was religion? he wondered. Any religion?

As if reading his thoughts, Joškar said, “Do you believe in something, Leonid—god or gods—something greater than yourself?”

“There’s us and there’s the universe,” he said. “Everything else is like those stories you tell your children.”

“I saw you listening to those stories, Leonid. They caught and held something inside you even you might not know about.”

“It was like watching movies. They’re entertainment, that’s all.”

“No, Leonid, they are history. They speak of hardship, migration, sacrifice. They speak of deprivation and subjugation, of prejudice and of our unique identity and our will to survive, no matter the cost.” She studied him closely. “But you’re Russian, you are the victor, and history belongs to the victor, doesn’t it?”

Funny, he didn’t feel like a victor, and he never had. Who had ever stood up and spoken for him? Weren’t your parents supposed to be your advocates, weren’t they supposed to protect you, not imprison you and abandon you? There was something about Joškar that touched a place inside him that, as she’d said, he hadn’t known existed.

“I’m a Russian in name only,” he said. “There is nothing inside me, Joškar. I’m a hollow man. In fact, when we place Yasha on the funeral pyre and light the wood I’ll envy him the pure and honorable method of his dissolution.”

She looked at him with her bourbon eyes and he thought,
If I see pity in
her face I’ll have to strike her
. But no pity was evident to him, just a singular curiosity. He glanced down and saw that she was holding out her hand to him. Without knowing why, he took it, felt her warmth, almost as if he could hear the blood singing in her veins. Then she turned, went back to the car, and gently drew out one of her daughters, whom she deposited in his arms.

“Hold her like this,” she directed. “That’s right, shape your arms into a cradle.”

She turned and stared up into the night sky where the first saltings of stars were becoming visible.

“The brightest ones come out first, because they’re the bravest,” she said in the same voice she used when telling her stories of gods, elves, and fairies. “But my favorite time is when the most timid appear, like a band of gossamer lace, the last decoration of night before morning comes and spoils it all.”

Through this all, Arkadin held the slender-limbed child in his arms, his skin brushed by her diaphanous hair, her small fist already curled around one of his calloused forefingers. She lay within the heart of him. He could feel her deep, even breathing, and it was as if a core of innocence had been returned to him.

Without turning around, Joškar said softly, “Don’t make me go back to him.”

“No one is sending you back. What makes you say that?”

“Your friend wants no part of us. I know, I see how he looks at me, I feel his contempt burning my skin. If it weren’t for you, he’d have dumped us at one of the rest stops and I’d have no choice but to go back to Lev.”

“You’re not going back to him,” Arkadin said, hearing the sleeping girl’s heartbeat close to his own. “I’ll die before I let that happen.”

This is where we part company,” Bourne said to Tracy the next morning. As close as he could tell, they were five blocks from 779 El Gamhuria Avenue. “I told you I wasn’t going to put you at risk. I’ll make my own way into the building.”

They had exited their
raksha
when El Gamhuria Avenue had become permanently blocked by a military rally that had attracted a huge, vocal crowd, gathered around a portable dais on which stood a pantheon of officers in khaki, dark green, and blue uniforms, depending on their rank. These officers, their freshly shaved faces shining in the sun, huge smiles on their faces, waved to the crowd as if they were genial uncles. With all the noise and confusion it was impossible to understand what they were shouting or celebrating. Nearby, on a side street, a manned tank, bristling with weaponry, hunkered like a fat tomcat licking its chops. They paid their fare and, skirting the agitated crowd, picked their way along the palm-lined avenue.

Bourne glanced at his watch. “What time do you have?”

“Nine twenty-seven.”

“Do me one favor.” Bourne adjusted his watch slightly. “Give me fifteen minutes, then walk directly to Seven Seventy-nine, go in through the front door, and announce yourself to the receptionist. Hold the receptionist’s attention and don’t let go until either Noah sends for you or he comes out to get you.”

She nodded. Her nervousness had returned. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Listen to me, Tracy. I’ve told you that I don’t trust Noah Perlis. I particularly don’t like the fact that he wouldn’t come to the hotel last night to complete the deal.”

With him as a shield, she raised her dress to reveal a gun in a sleek holster strapped to a thigh. “When you’re a transporter of precious objects, you can’t be too careful.”

“If Seven Seventy-nine Gamhuria has any kind of security, they’d find that,” he said.

“No, they won’t.” She tapped the butt. “It’s ceramic.”

“Clever girl. I assume you know how to use it.”

She laughed at the same time she gave him a withering look. “Please be careful, Adam.”

“You, too.”

Then he walked off into the crowd, disappearing almost at once.

SEVEN
SEVENTY-NINE
El Gamhuria Avenue was a large, three-tiered structure of modernist lines constructed of chunky concrete and green-glass blocks. Above the first floor, the second and third stepped back, like a ziggurat. There was about the building the unmistakable feeling of a fortress, both in design and in intent, which the rooftop garden, whose treetops were visible from the street, did little to allay.

However, it was the garden that seemed most vulnerable to Bourne, who, immersed in the hectic street traffic, had quickly made two circuits of the building. There were, of course, entrances other than the gleaming wenge-wood front doors—two for deliveries, in fact—but they were both exposed and guarded.

A large truck was parked at one of these freight entrances, made humpbacked by the oversize refrigeration unit on its top. Bourne judged distances and vectors as he crossed the street, approaching the truck from the side facing away from the building. Two men were busy unloading large crates from the open back of the truck, overseen by a grim-looking security guard. Bourne made a mental note of everyone’s position relative to the truck as he passed by.

Several hundred yards down the street, one of the city’s numerous doorway lurkers leaned in the shadows, smoking languidly. He watched with bored suspicion as Bourne approached him.

“Tour?” he said in very bad English. “Best guide in all of Khartoum. Anything you want to see I take, even forbidden.” His grin seemed like more of a yawn. “You like forbidden, yes?”

“How about a cigarette?”

The sound of his own language surprised the lurker so much he righted himself and his half-glazed eyes seemed to clear. He handed Bourne a cigarette, which he lit with a cheap plastic lighter.

“You like money better than you like standing in this doorway?”

The lurker nodded with a quick, disjointed bob of his head. “Show me a man who doesn’t revere money and I’ll mourn his death.”

Bourne fanned out some bills and the lurker’s eyes widened; the poor man couldn’t help it, it was a reflex action. Bourne was willing to bet he’d never imagined possessing so much money.

“Certainly.” The man licked his lips. ”
All
the forbidden places in Khartoum will be open to you.”

“I’m only interested in one,” Bourne said. “Seven Seventy-nine El Gamhuria Avenue.”

For a moment the man blanched, then he licked his lips again and said,

“Sir, there is forbidden and then there is
forbidden
.”

Bourne increased the number of bills he fanned out. “This amount will cover it, won’t it.” It wasn’t a question; neither was it a statement. It was, rather, a command, which caused the lurker to twitch uncomfortably. “Or should I find someone else?” Bourne added. “You did say that you were the best guide in the city.”

“That I am, sir!” The lurker snatched the bills and stuffed them away.

“No one else in the entire city could get you in to Seven Seventy-nine. They are most careful about visitors, but”—he winked—”my cousin’s cousin is a guard there.” He pulled out a cell phone, made a local call, and talked rapid-fire Arabic. There ensued a short argument that seemed to concern money. Then the lurker put away his cell and grinned. “This is no problem. My cousin’s cousin is downstairs now, while the truck you see there is unloading. He says it’s an excellent time, so we go now.”

Without another word Bourne followed him back down the street.

Checking her watch one last time, Tracy strode across El Gamhuria Avenue and opened the wooden front door. Directly inside was a metal detector overseen by two grim-faced guards, which she and the wrapped Goya went through without incident. This place didn’t seem like the headquarters of any airline she’d ever encountered.

She walked up to the circular desk, as high and harsh looking as the exterior of the building itself. A young man with an unfriendly, angular face glanced up at her approach.

“Tracy Atherton. I have an appointment with Noah Per—Petersen.”

“Passport and driver’s license.” He held out a hand.

She expected him to check her ID then hand the documents back to her, but instead he said, “These will be returned to you at the end of your visit.”

She hesitated for just a moment, feeling as if she’d turned over the keys to her apartment in Belgravia. She was about to protest, but the man with the unfriendly face was already on the intrabuilding phone. The moment he cradled the receiver his demeanor changed. “Mr. Petersen will be down to fetch you momentarily, Ms. Atherton,” he said with a smile. “In the meanwhile, please make yourself comfortable. There’s tea and coffee, as well as a variety of biscuits on the sideboard against the wall. And if there’s anything else you require, just ask.”

She kept up a monologue of meaningless chatter, all the while taking in her surroundings, which seemed as oppressive in their way as the interior of a church. Instead of being dedicated to the glory of God, the architecture seemed to deify money. In just the same way churches—particularly those of the Roman Catholic religion—were meant to draw a reverence from the parishioner, to put him squarely in his lowly place vis-a-vis the divine, so the Air Afrika headquarters sought to intimidate and demean those penitents entering its portals who could not conceive of the half-a-billion-dollar cost of construction.

“Ms. Atherton.”

She turned to see a slim man, handsome despite his hatchet face, with salt-and-pepper hair and an amiable demeanor.

“Noah Petersen.” He smiled winningly and stuck out his hand for her to shake. It was firm and dry. “I put great store in punctuality as a human trait.” He lifted a hand, indicating they should walk back the way he had come. “It says so much about an orderly mind.”

He slipped a metal key-card in a slot, and after a moment of clicks a red light turned green. He leaned on part of the wall, which turned out to be a door set flush with the massive concrete panels on either side. Inside, Tracy was obliged to put her package through an X-ray scanner, then they rode up to the third floor in a small elevator. Exiting, he took her down a corridor with twelve-foot mahogany doors. These doors had neither a name nor a number on them and, after negotiating several turns, she had the sensation of being in a labyrinth. Music was playing out of hidden speakers. Occasionally they passed a photo close-up of part of an Air Afrika plane with a half-clad model posing beside it.

The conference room into which he led her was decorated for a party, with colored balloons, the long table covered with a gaily striped cloth and groaning with a seemingly endless array of savory food, sweet-meats, and fruit.

“Having the Goya here at last is cause for celebration,” Noah said, which was apparently all the explanation she was going to get. He pulled a slim briefcase out from under the striped cloth and, setting it on the one clear space on the tabletop, twiddled the combination lock and disengaged the snaps.

Inside, Tracy saw, was the cashier’s check for the balance of her fee, made out to her. Seeing this, she stripped off the packing to reveal the Goya.

Noah barely glanced at it. “Where’s the rest?”

She handed over the document of authenticity, signed by Professor Alonzo Pecunia Zuigaof the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Noah studied it for a moment, nodded, and put it alongside the painting.

“Excellent.” He reached into the attaché case and handed her the check.