The Bourne Deception (50 page)

“Moira,” Soraya said now, “we found the four men outside Khartoum. They were shot once in the head, execution-style, and their bodies dumped in with quicklime. But we managed to salvage something odd from each of them. They look like dog tags, only the writing on them is enciphered.”

Moira felt her heart thumping hard in her chest. “They sound like the tags Black River gives to its field personnel.”

“Then we could prove it was Black River personnel who fired that missile. We could avert this ill-advised and self-serving war.”

“I’d have to see them to make sure,” Moira said.

“I’ll overnight them to you,” Soraya said. “My pal here tells me he can expedite the shipment so you’ll get the tags tomorrow morning.”

“That would be fantastic. If they are what they seem to be, I can get them processed in hours. I’ll just have to make sure they’re delivered into the right hands.”

“That wouldn’t be CI,” Soraya said. “There’s a new director, M. Errol Danziger. Though his appointment hasn’t yet been officially announced, he’s already taken over—and he’s Secretary Halliday’s man.” She took a breath.

“Listen, do you need protection? I can have some of my people to wherever you are within twenty minutes.”

“Thanks very much, but the way things are going the fewer people who know where I am, the better.”

“Understood.” There was another, longer pause. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Jason recently.”

“Me, too.” Moira was thinking how happy she was that Jason wasn’t a part of all this. He needed his time to heal, both physically and mentally. Being a hairbreadth from dying wasn’t something you got over in a few weeks or even months.

“There’s a lot about him to remember.” Half a world away, Soraya was thinking she’d call Jason and update him just as soon she concluded this conversation.

“You and I share that, don’t we?”

“Don’t forget about him, Moira,” Soraya said just before she rang off.

ARKADIN
, alighting from the Air Afrika jet, despised Noah Perlis on sight. For that reason, he was at his most cordial when he, at the head of his twenty-man cadre, met with the Black River operative. At the same time, he was trying his best to ignore the eerie similarities between this section of Iran and Nizhny Tagil, with its sulfurous stench, the particulate-filled air, the ring of oil wells that seemed so much like the guard towers on the highsecurity prisons surrounding his home city.

The rest of Arkadin’s contingent was still in the plane, where they were looking after the pilot and navigator, as they had the entire flight, to make sure they didn’t warn anyone about the larger-than-normal cargo. At a prearranged signal, the men would come pouring out of the belly of the plane, not unlike the Greek warriors who had been taken inside the impregnable walls of Troy in the wooden horse.

“It’s good to meet you at last, Leonid Danilovich,” Perlis said in passable Russian as he gripped Arkadin’s hand. “Your reputation precedes you.”

Arkadin smiled his most welcoming smile and said, “I think you ought to know Jason Bourne is here—”

“What?” Perlis looked as if the world had dropped away from him. “What did you say?”

“—or if he isn’t here yet, he soon will be.” Arkadin kept the smile on his face even as Perlis tried to yank his hand away from the death grip Arkadin had on it. “It was Bourne who infiltrated the Air Afrika building in Khartoum. I know you must have been wondering who it was.”

Perlis appeared to be struggling to understand what Arkadin was up to.

“That’s nonsense. Bourne is dead.”

“On the contrary.” Arkadin jerked back hard on Perlis’s trapped hand.

“And I ought to know. I shot Bourne in Bali. I, too, thought he’d died, but, like me, he’s a survivor, a man with nine lives.”

“Even if all this is true, how would you know Bourne was in Khartoum, let alone at the Air Afrika building?”

“It’s my business to know these things, Perlis.” He laughed. “Now I’m being coy. Actually, I sent Bourne on a course expressly designed to lead him to Khartoum, to the Air Afrika building, to—and this is most important of all—Nikolai Yevsen.”

“Yevsen is at the heart of our plan, why would you do such an idiotic—”

“I wanted Bourne to kill Yevsen. And that’s precisely what he did.”

Arkadin’s smile spread all the way up to his eyes.
This arrogant American
looks good with all the blood drained from his face,
he thought. “I have all of Yevsen’s computer files—all his contacts, clients, and suppliers. Not that that’s a wide circle of people, as you can imagine, but by now they’ve all been informed of Nikolai Yevsen’s death. They’ve also been told they’ll be dealing with me from now on.”

“You—you’re taking over Yevsen’s business?” Despite what he’d just heard, Perlis couldn’t stop himself from laughing in Arkadin’s brutal face. “You have delusions of grandeur, my friend. You’re nothing but an uneducated, lowIQ Russian hood who’s inexplicably come into some good luck. But in this business good luck will get you only so far, then it’s time for the professionals to take you out.”

Arkadin resisted the urge to turn the American’s face into bloody pulp. That time would come, but first he required an audience for what he was about to do. Still holding on to Perlis’s hand, he thumbed open his cell phone and sent a three-digit text message. A moment later the belly of the Air Afrika jet seemed to split open with the remaining eighty men in Arkadin’s private army.

“What’s this?” Perlis said, as he watched his own personnel being overpowered, disarmed, thrown to the ground, where they were systematically bound and gagged.

“It isn’t only Yevsen’s business I’m taking over, Mr. Perlis, it’s these oil fields. What’s yours is now mine.”

The Russian Mi-28 Havoc combat helicopter carrying Bourne and Colonel Boris Karpov, two of his men, as well as a two-man crew and a full complement of weapons, banked low over the Iranian oil fields in Shahrake Nasiri-Astara, and immediately they saw the two planes—one the Air Afrika jet Karpov’s IT

man in Khartoum had tracked here, the other a Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk painted matte black but with no markings: Black River transport.

“According to my intel in Moscow, the American-led allied forces have not yet crossed over into Iranian territory,” Karpov said. “We may still have time to avert this catastrophe.”

“If I know anything about Noah Perlis, he’s sure to have made contingency plans.” Bourne, peering down at the swiftly changing terrain, was mulling over everything Soraya had told him. At last he had all the pieces of the puzzle, save one: Arkadin’s angle. He had to have one, Bourne was as certain of that as he was of anything in this delicately constructed spider’s web.

And there was the spider, he thought, as the Havoc swept down like a bat out of hell, passing directly over the figures of Arkadin and Perlis. As Karpov directed the pilot to land, Bourne felt the deep throbbing pain in his chest wound, returning like an old enemy to dog him. Ignoring it, he tried to work out what was going on. Five men and one woman were lying facedown on the ground, trussed like suckling pigs ready for the rotisserie. Bourne counted a hundred heavily armed men in camo uniforms that were clearly not American military issue.

“What the fuck is happening down there?” Boris had just now switched his attention to the same scene that absorbed Bourne. “And there’s that fucker, Arkadin.” He clenched his fist. “How I want his nuts in a sling, and now by God I’ll have them.”

By this time the Havoc had come under small-arms fire and the pilot, sitting in his raised cabin in the rear, was taking evasive maneuvers, the two TV3-117VMA turboshaft engines whining in response. Neither Bourne nor Karpov was particularly concerned by the semi-automatic fire, since the Havoc was outfitted with an armored cabin able to withstand the impact of 7.62 and 12.7mm bullets as well as 20mm shell fragments.

“Are you all set?” Karpov asked Bourne. “You look ready for anything, just like an American should.” And he laughed tonelessly.

The weapons man yelled a warning. Looking to where he was pointing, they saw one of the men slide a Redeye missile into its launcher, and his compatriot swing it up onto his shoulder, aim it at them, and pull the trigger.

The moment Arkadin saw the Redeye rammed home into its launcher, he delivered a vicious uppercut to Perlis’s jaw and, releasing his hand as the American went down, ran toward the man who was about to fire at the Havoc. He shouted for the man to stop, but it was useless, the noise of the helicopter rotors was too loud. He knew what had happened. His men had seen the Russian combat Havoc and had reacted instinctively against an enemy.

The Redeye shot into the air, detonating against the Havoc’s fuel tanks. That was a mistake because the Havoc’s tanks were insulated with polyurethane foam to protect them from being set on fire. Plus, any rents in the tanks themselves were instantly closed with latex in the self-healing covers. Even if the blast had ruptured one of the fuel lines, which seemed likely because the Havoc was at a low altitude when it was hit, the fuel feed system operated in a vacuum, which prevented the fuel from leaking into areas where it could be ignited.

In the aftermath of the hit, the Havoc swung back and forth like a disoriented insect; then what Arkadin feared most happened: two Shturm antitank missiles streaked out from the underbelly of the wounded Havoc toward the surface. The resulting detonations took out three-quarters of Arkadin’s cadre.

Bourne, thrown face-first against a bulkhead, felt the explosion of pain in his chest radiating out into his arms. For an instant he thought the trauma to his wound had caused a heart attack. Then he got himself under control, mentally tamped down on the pain, and, extending a hand, pulled Karpov off the deck of the Havoc. Smoke drifted into the cabin, which made it more difficult for him to catch his breath, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether it was from damage the helicopter had sustained or from the shallow craters on the ground where the Shturms had struck.

“Set this bucket down, and I mean now!” Karpov ordered over the racket of the engines.

The pilot, who had been battling the controls ever since they were hit, nodded and they descended vertically. The moment they made contact with a bone-rattling jar, Karpov wrenched the door open and dropped to the ground. Bourne followed him with a grimace of pain. His breath was hot in his throat. Both of them ran, crouched over, under the aircraft’s wind-sweep, until they were outside the circumference of the rotors.

What they came upon was hell on earth. Or, rather, war. In the air, the virile whoosh of the missiles had been exhilarating, especially as retaliation for the first strike, but here on the ground, without the cool detachment of a God’s-eye view, all was devastation. Great mounds of black earth, scorched and smoking as if from the pits of the underworld, halfcovered random bits and pieces of bodies, as if some insane creature had decided to improve on the human form by first dismantling it. The stench of roasted flesh mingled with the foul odors of excrement and exploded ordnance.

To Bourne, the scene had the nightmarish quality of Goya’s half-mad Black Paintings come to life. When so much death presented itself, when all was horror in every direction, the mind interpreted it as surreal in order not to go mad.

The two men spotted Arkadin at the same time and took off after him. The problem was that the pain in Bourne’s chest was growing in size and heat. Whereas only moments before it had seemed to be the size of a pinball it now seemed larger than a fist. It seemed, moreover, to have encompassed his heart. As he went down on one knee, he saw Karpov vanish into a plume of black, oily smoke. He couldn’t see Arkadin, but what was left of his cadre was engaged with the Iranian oil field guards in a pitched hand-to-hand battle for every inch of territory that hadn’t been turned into an infernal pit. As for the Black River operatives, none that he could see remained alive, having been either killed in the missile attack or executed by Arkadin’s forces. All was chaos.

Bourne forced himself to his feet, staggering past the bodies into the curling smoke that reached up into the sky. What he encountered on the other side was not encouraging. Boris lay on the slope of one of the craters, one leg at an unnatural angle underneath the other. White bone shone through. Standing astride him was Leonid Danilovich Arkadin. In Arkadin’s hand was a

.38
SIG
Sauer.

“You thought you could fuck me up, Colonel, but I’ve waited a long time for this moment.” Arkadin’s voice could just be heard over the screams and the harsh, rat-a-tat sounds of weapons of war. “And now my time is here.”

He turned abruptly, facing Bourne, and a slow smile spread across his face as he squeezed off three shots in a tight triangle into Bourne’s chest.

BOURNE
WAS
BLOWN
BACK
off his feet by the concussion of the bullets striking him. Searing pain racked him; he must have passed out for a moment, because the next thing he knew Arkadin had climbed up to the lip of the crater, looking down at him with an odd expression that might have been pity or even disappointment.

“Here we are,” he said as he walked toward Bourne. “Karpov isn’t going anywhere and Perlis’s men are dead, if not buried. They’re both dead men. So now it’s just you and me, the first and last Treadstone graduates. But you’re on the verge of death as well, aren’t you?” He crouched down. “You are complicit in Devra’s death and I made you pay, but there’s something I want to know before you die. How many more graduates are there? Ten? Twenty?

More?”

Bourne could barely speak, he felt paralyzed. There was blood all over the front of the jacket Boris had given him.

“I don’t know,” he managed to get out. Breathing was more difficult than he’d expected, and the pain was incredible. Now that he was in the center of the web, now that he had found the clever spider who crouched there spinning his intricate strands, he felt helpless.

“You don’t know.” Arkadin cocked his head to one side, mocking him.

“Well, here’s what I know and, unlike you, I don’t mind sharing. I imagine you think I hired the Torturer, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Why would I hire someone to do something I’m itching to do myself? Doesn’t make sense, does it? But here’s what does make sense: The Torturer was hired by Willard. Yes, that’s right, the man who remade you in Bali, after you somehow survived a bullet to the heart. How did you manage that, by the way?