Page 65 of The Bourne Ultimatum (Jason Bourne 3)

  “Your surveillance is rotten and you know it,” said Alex. “They fall over toilet seats in the women’s room when they’re chasing a guy.”

  “Not this time, for I chose them myself,” insisted Krupkin. “Outside of four of our own people, each trained in Novgorod, they’re defectors from the UK, America, France and South Africa—all with intelligence backgrounds who could lose their dachas if they screw up, as you Westerners say. I really would like to be appointed to the Presidium, perhaps even the Central Committee. I might be posted to Washington or New York.”

  “Where you could really steal,” said Conklin.

  “You’re wicked, Aleksei, very, very wicked. Still, after a vodka or six, remind me to tell you about some real estate our chargé d’affaires picked up in Virginia two years ago. For a song, and financed by his lover’s bank in Richmond. Now a developer wants the property at ten times the price!… Come, the car.”

  “I don’t believe this conversation,” said Bourne, picking up the flight bags.

  “Welcome to the real world of high-tech intelligence,” explained Conklin, laughing quietly. “At least from one point of view.”

  “From all points of view,” continued Krupkin as they started toward the limousine. “However, we will dispense with this conversation while riding in an official vehicle, won’t we, gentlemen? Incidentally, you have a two-bedroom suite at the Metropole on the Marx Prospekt. It’s convenient and I’ve personally shut down all listening devices.”

  “I can understand why, but how did you manage it?”

  “Embarrassment, as you well know, is the Komitet’s greatest enemy. I explained to internal security that what might be recorded could prove most embarrassing to the wrong people, who would undoubtedly transfer any who overheard the tapes to Kamchatka.” They reached the car, the left rear door opened by a driver in a dark brown business suit identical with the one worn by Sergei in Paris. “The fabric’s the same,” said Krupkin in French, noting his companions’ reaction to the similar apparel. “Unfortunately the tailoring is not. I insisted Sergei have his refitted in the Faubourg.”

  The Hotel Metropole is a renovated, prerevolutionary structure built in the ornate style of architecture favored by the czar who had visited fin-de-siècle Vienna and Paris. The ceilings are high, the marble profuse, and the occasional tapestries priceless. Intrinsic to the elaborate lobby is a defiance aimed at a government that would permit so many shabby citizens to invade the premises. The majestic walls and the glittering, filigreed chandeliers seem to stare at the unworthy trespassers with disdain. These impressions, however, did not apply to Dimitri Krupkin, whose baronial figure was very much at ease and at home in the surroundings.

  “Comrade!” cried the manager sotto voce as the KGB officer accompanied his guests to the elevators. “There is an urgent message for you,” he continued, walking rapidly up to Dimitri and thrusting a folded note into Krupkin’s hand. “I was told to deliver it to you personally.”

  “You have done so and I thank you.” Dimitri watched the man walk away, then opened the paper as Bourne and Conklin stood behind him. “I must reach Dzerzhinsky immediately,” he said, turning. “It’s the extension of my second commissar. Come, let us hurry.”

  The suite, like the lobby, belonged to another time, another era, indeed another country, marred only by the faded fabrics and the less than perfect restoration of the original moldings. These imperfections served to accentuate the distance between the past and the present. The doors of the two bedrooms were opposite each other, the space between a large sitting room complete with a copper dry bar and several bottles of spirits rarely seen on Moscow shelves.

  “Help yourselves,” said Krupkin, heading for a telephone on an ersatz antique desk that appeared to be a cross between Queen Anne and a later Louis. “Oh, I forgot, Aleksei, I’ll order some tea or spring water—”

  “Forget it,” said Conklin, taking his flight bag from Jason and heading into the left bedroom. “I’m going to wash up; that plane was filthy.”

  “I trust you found the fare agreeable,” responded Krupkin, raising his voice and dialing. “Incidentally, you ingrate, you’ll find your weapons in your bedside table drawers. Each is a .38 caliber Graz Burya automatic.… Come, Mr. Bourne,” he added. “You’re not abstemious and it was a long trip—this may be a long conversation. My commissar number two is a windy fellow.”

  “I think I will,” said Jason, dropping his bag by the door to the other bedroom. He crossed to the bar and chose a familiar bottle, pouring himself a drink as Krupkin began talking in Russian. It was not a language he understood, so Bourne walked to a pair of tall cathedral windows overlooking the wide avenue known as the Marx Prospekt.

  “Dobryi dyen.… Da, da—pochemu?… Sadovaya togda. Dvadtsat minut.” Krupkin shook his head in weary irritation as he hung up the telephone. The movement caused Jason to turn toward the Soviet. “My second commissar was not talkative on this occasion, Mr. Bourne. Haste and orders took precedent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We must leave immediately.” Krupkin glanced at the bedroom to the left and raised his voice. “Aleksei, come out here! Quickly!… I tried to tell him that you’d just this second arrived,” continued the KGB man, turning back to Jason, “but he was having none of it. I even went so far as to say that one of you was already taking a shower, and his only comment was ‘Tell him to get out and get dressed.’ ” Conklin limped through the bedroom door, his shirt unbuttoned and blotting his wet face with a towel. “Sorry, Aleksei, we must go.”

  “Go where? We just got here.”

  “We’ve appropriated a flat on the Sadovaya—that’s Moscow’s ‘Grand Boulevard,’ Mr. Bourne. It’s not the Champs-Elysées, but neither is it inconsequential. The czars knew how to build.”

  “What’s over there?” pressed Conklin.

  “Commissar number one,” replied Krupkin. “We’ll be using it as our, shall we say, our headquarters. A smaller and rather delightful annex of Dzerzhinsky Square—only nobody knows about it but the five of us. Something’s come up and we’re to go there immediately.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” said Jason, putting his drink down on the copper dry bar.

  “Finish it,” said Alex, rushing awkwardly back into the bedroom. “I’ve got to get the soap out of my eyes and restrap my lousy boot.”

  Bourne picked up the glass, his eyes straying to the Soviet field officer who looked after Conklin, his brow lined, his expression curiously sad. “You knew him before he lost his foot, didn’t you?” asked Jason quietly.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Bourne. We go back twenty-five, twenty-six years. Istanbul, Athens, Rome … Amsterdam. He was a remarkable adversary. Of course, we were young then, both slender and quick and so taken with ourselves, wanting so desperately to live up to the images we envisioned for ourselves. It was all so long ago. We were both terribly good, you know. He was actually better than me, but don’t you ever tell him I said so. He always saw the broader picture, the longer road than I saw. It was the Russian in him, of course.”

  “Why do you use the word ‘adversary’?” asked Jason. “It’s so athletic, as if you’d been playing a game. Wasn’t he your enemy?”

  Krupkin’s large head snapped toward Bourne, his eyes glass, not warm at all. “Of course he was my enemy, Mr. Bourne, and to clarify the picture for you, he still is my enemy. Don’t, I beg you, mistake my indulgences for what they are not. A man’s weaknesses may intrude on his faith but they do not diminish it. I may not have the convenience of the Roman confession to expiate my sins so as to go forth and sin again despite my belief, but I do believe.… My grandfathers and grandmothers were hanged—hanged, sir—for stealing chickens from a Romanov prince’s estate. Few, if any, of my ancestors were ever given the privilege of the most rudimentary schooling, forget education. The Supreme Soviet revolution of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin made possible the beginning of all things. Thousands upon thousands of mistakes have been made—many i

nexcusable, many more brutal—but a beginning was made. I, myself, am both the proof and the error of it.”

  “I’m not sure I understand that.”

  “Because you and your feeble intellectuals have never understood what we have understood from the start. Das Kapital, Mr. Bourne, envisages stages toward a just society, economic and political, but it does not and never did state what specific form the nuts-and-bolts government will ultimately be. Only that it could not be as it was.”

  “I’m not a scholar in that department.”

  “One does not have to be. In a hundred years you may be the socialists, and with luck, we’ll be the capitalists, da?”

  “Tell me something,” said Jason, hearing, as Krupkin also did, the water faucets in Conklin’s room being turned off. “Could you kill Alex—Aleksei?”

  “As surely as he could kill me—with deep regrets—if the value of the information called for it. We are professionals. We understand that, often reluctantly.”

  “I can’t understand either one of you.”

  “Don’t even try, Mr. Bourne, you’re not there yet—you’re getting closer, but you’re not there.”

  “Would you explain that, please?”

  “You’re at the cusp, Jason—may I call you Jason?”

  “Please do.”

  “You’re fifty years of age or thereabouts, give or take a year or two, correct?”

  “Correct. I’ll be fifty-one in a few months. So what?”

  “Aleksei and I are in our sixties—have you any idea what a leap that is?”

  “How could I?”

  “Let me tell you. You still visualize yourself as the younger man, the postadolescent man who sees himself doing the things you did only moments ago in your mind, and in many ways you are right. The motor controls are there, the will is there; you are still the master of your body. Then suddenly, as strong as the will is and as strong as the body remains, the mind slowly, insidiously begins to reject the necessity to make an immediate decision—both intellectually and physically. Simply put, we care less. Are we to be condemned or congratulated on having survived?”

  “I think you just said you couldn’t kill Alex.”

  “Don’t count on it, Jason Bourne—or David whoever you are.”

  Conklin came through the door, his limp pronounced, wincing in pain. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Did you strap it wrong again?” asked Jason. “Do you want me to—”

  “Forget it,” broke in Alex irritably. “You have to be a contortionist to get the goddamned thing right all the time.”

  Bourne understood; he forgot about any attempt on his part to adjust the prosthesis. Krupkin again looked at Alex with that strange admixture of sadness and curiosity, then spoke rapidly. “The car is parked up the street in the Sverdlov. It’s less obvious over there, I’ll have a lobby steward fetch it.”

  “Thanks,” said Conklin, gratitude in his glance.

  The opulent apartment on the busy Sadovaya was one among many in an aged stone building that, like the Metropole, reflected the grand architectural excesses of the old Russian Empire. The flats were primarily used—and bugged—for visiting dignitaries, and the chambermaids, doormen and concierges were all frequently questioned by the KGB when not directly employed by the Komitet. The walls were covered with red velour; the sturdy furniture was reminiscent of the ancien régime. However, to the right of the gargantuan ornate living-room fireplace was an item that stood out like a decorator’s nightmare: a large jet-black television console complete with an assortment of tape decks compatible with the various sizes of video cassettes.

  The second contradiction to the decor, and undoubtedly an affront to the memory of the elegant Romanovs, was a heavyset man in a rumpled uniform, open at the neck and stained with vestiges of recent meals. His blunt face was full, his grayish hair cut close to his skull, and a missing tooth surrounded by discolored companions bespoke an aversion to dentistry. It was the face of a peasant, the narrow, perpetually squinting eyes conveying a peasant’s shrewd intelligence. He was Krupkin’s Commissar Number One.

  “My English not good,” announced the uniformed man, nodding at his visitors, “but is understanding. Also, for you I have no name, no official position. Call me colonel, yes? It is below my rank, but all Americans think all Soviets in Komitet are ‘colonel,’ da? Okay?”

  “I speak Russian,” replied Alex. “If it’s easier for you, use it, and I’ll translate for my colleague.”

  “Hah!” roared the colonel, laughing. “So Krupkin cannot fool you, yes?”

  “Yes, he can’t fool me, no.”

  “Is good. He talks too fast, da? Even in Russian his words come like stray bullets.”

  “In French, also, Colonel.”

  “Speaking of which,” intruded Dimitri, “may we get to the issue at hand, comrade? Our associate in the Dzerzhinsky said we were to come over immediately.”

  “Da! Immediate.” The KGB officer walked to the huge ebony console, picked up a remote control, and turned to the others. “I will speak English—is good practice.… Come. Watch. Everything is on one cartridge. All material taken by men and women Krupkin select to follow our people who speak the French.”

  “People who could not be compromised by the Jackal,” clarified Krupkin.

  “Watch!” insisted the peasant-colonel, pressing a button on the remote control.

  The screen came alive on the console, the opening shots crude and choppy. Most had been taken with hand-held video cameras from car windows. One scene after another showed specific men walking in the Moscow streets or getting into official vehicles, driving or being driven throughout the city and, in several cases, outside the city over country roads. In every case the subjects under surveillance met with other men and women, whereupon the zoom lenses enlarged the faces. A number of shots took place inside buildings, the scenes murky and dark, the result of insufficient light and awkwardly held concealed cameras.

  “That one is expensive whore!” laughed the colonel as a man in his late sixties escorted a much younger woman into an elevator. “It is the Solnechy Hotel on the Varshavkoye. I will personally check the general’s vouchers and find a loyal ally, da?”

  The choppy, cross-cutting tape continued as Krupkin and the two Americans grew weary of the seemingly endless and pointless visual record. Then, suddenly, there was an exterior shot of a huge cathedral, crowds on the pavement, the light indicating early evening.

  “St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square,” said Krupkin. “It’s a museum now and a very fine one, but every now and then a zealot—usually foreign—holds a small service. No one interferes, which, of course, the zealots want us to do.”

  The screen became murky again, the vibrating focus briefly and wildly swaying; the camcorder had moved inside the cathedral as the agent operating it was jostled by the crowds. Then it became steady, held perhaps against a pillar. The focus now was on an elderly man, his hair white in contrast to the lightweight black raincoat he was wearing. He was walking down a side aisle pensively glancing at the succession of icons and the higher majestic stained-glass windows.

  “Rodchenko,” said the peasant-colonel, his voice guttural. “The great Rodchenko.”

  The man on the screen proceeded into what appeared to be a large stone corner of the cathedral where two thick pedestaled candles threw moving shadows against the walls. The video camera jerkily moved upward, the agent, again perhaps, standing on a portable stool or a hastily obtained box. The picture grew suddenly more detailed, the figures larger as the zoom lens was activated, thrusting through the crowds of tourists. The white-haired subject approached another man, a priest in priestly garb—balding, thin, his complexion dark.

  “It’s him!” cried Bourne. “It’s Carlos!”

  Then a third man appeared on the screen, joining the other two, and Conklin shouted.

  “Jesus!” he roared as all eyes were riveted on the television set. “Hold it there!” The KGB commissar instantly co

mplied with his remote; the picture remained stationary, shaky but constant. “The other one! Do you recognize him, David?”

  “I know him but I don’t know him,” replied Bourne in a low voice as images going back years began filling his inner screen. There were explosions, white blinding lights with blurred figures running in a jungle … and then a man, an Oriental, being shot repeatedly, screaming as he was hammered into the trunk of a large tree by an automatic weapon. The mists of confusion swelled, dissolving into a barrackslike room with soldiers sitting behind a long table, a wooden chair on the right, a man sitting there, fidgeting, nervous. And without warning, Jason suddenly knew that man—it was himself! A younger, much younger self, and there was another figure, in uniform, pacing like a caged ferret back and forth in front of the chair, savagely berating the man then known as Delta One.… Bourne gasped, his eyes frozen on the television screen as he realized he was staring at an older version of that angry, pacing figure in his mind’s eye. “A courtroom in a base camp north of Saigon,” he whispered.

  “It’s Ogilvie,” said Conklin, his voice distant, hollow. “Bryce Ogilvie.… My God, they did link up. Medusa found the Jackal!”

  36

  “It was a trial, wasn’t it, Alex?” said Bourne, bewildered, the words floating, hesitant. “A military trial.”

  “Yes, it was,” agreed Conklin. “But it wasn’t your trial, you weren’t the accused.”

  “I wasn’t?”

  “No. You were the one who brought charges, a rare thing for any of your group to do then, in or out of the field. A number of the army people tried to stop you but they couldn’t.… We’ll go into it later, discuss it later.”

  “I want to discuss it now,” said Jason firmly. “That man is with the Jackal, right there in front of our eyes. I want to know who he is and what he is and why he’s here in Moscow—with the Jackal.”