Page 21 of The Bourne Sanction (Jason Bourne 6)

  “Colonel Karpov is no longer with FSB.”

  Bourne felt a chill go through him. Russia had not changed so much that lightning-swift dismissals on trumped-up charges were a thing of the past.

  “I need to contact him,” Bourne said.

  “He’s now at the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency.” The voice recited a local number before abruptly hanging up.

  That explained the attitude, Bourne thought. The Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency was headed up by Viktor Cherkesov. But many believed he was much more than that, a silovik running an organization so powerful that some had taken to calling it FSB-2. Recently an internal war between Cherkesov and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, the modern-day successor to the notorious KGB, had sprung up within the government. The silovik who won that war would probably be the next president of Russia. If Karpov had gone from the FSB to FSB-2, it must be because Cherkesov had gotten the upper hand.

  Bourne called the office of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, but he was told that Karpov was away and could not be reached.

  For a moment he contemplated calling the man who had picked up Baronov’s Zil in the Crocus City parking lot, but he almost immediately thought better of it. He’d already gotten Baronov killed; he didn’t want any more deaths on his conscience.

  He walked on until he came to a tram stop. He took the first one that appeared out of the gloom. He’d used the scarf he’d bought at the boutique in Crocus City to cover up the mark the wire had made across his throat. The small seepage of blood had dried up as soon as he’d hit the frigid air.

  The tram jounced and rattled along its rails. Crammed inside with a stinking, noisy crowd, he felt thoroughly shaken. Not only had he discovered a Kazanskaya assassin waiting in Tarkanian’s apartment, but his contact had been murdered by an NSA assassin sent to kill him. His sense of apartness had never been more extreme. Babies cried, men rustled newspapers, women chatted side by side, an old man, big-knuckled hands curled over the head of his walking stick, clandestinely ogled a young girl engrossed in a manga comic. Here was life, bustling all around him, a burbling stream that parted when it came to him, an immovable rock, only to come together when it passed him, flowing on while he remained behind, still and alone.

  He thought of Marie, as he always did at times like this. But Marie was gone, and her memory was of little solace to him. He missed his children, and wondered whether this was the David Webb personality bubbling up. An old, familiar despair swept through him, as it hadn’t since Alex Conklin had taken him out of the gutter, formed the Bourne identity for him to slip on like a suit of armor. He felt the crushing weight of life on him, a life lived alone, a sad and lonely life that could only end one way.

  And then his thoughts turned to Moira, of how impossibly difficult that last meeting with her had been. If she had been a spy, if she had betrayed Martin and meant to do the same with him, what would he have done? Would he have turned her over to Soraya or Veronica Hart?

  But she wasn’t a spy. He would never have to face that conundrum.

  When it came to Moira, his personal feelings were now bound up in his professional duty, inextricably combined. He knew that she loved him and, now, in the face of his despair, he understood that he loved her, as well. When he was with her he felt whole, but in an entirely new way. She wasn’t Marie, and he didn’t want her to be Marie. She was Moira, and it was Moira he wanted.

  By the time he swung off the tram in Moscow Center, the snow had abated to veils of drifting flakes whirled about by stray gusts of wind across the huge open plazas. The city’s lights were on against the long winter evening, but the clearing sky turned the temperature bitter. The streets were clogged with gypsy cabbies in their cheap cars manufactured during the Brezhnev years, trundling slowly in bumper-to-bumper lines so as to not miss a fare. They were known in local slang as bombily—those who bomb—because of the bowel-loosening speed with which they bombed around the city’s streets as soon as they had a passenger.

  He went into a cybercafé, paid for fifteen minutes at a computer terminal, typed in Kitaysky Lyotchik. Kitaysky Lyotchik Zhao-Da, the full name—or The Chinese Pilot in its English translation—turned out to be a throbbing elitny club at proyezd Lubyansky 25. The Kitai-Gorod metro stop let Bourne out at the end of the block. On one side was a canal, frozen solid; on the other, a row of mixed-use buildings. The Chinese Pilot was easy enough to spot, what with the BMWs, Mercedeses, and Porsche SUVs, as well as the ubiquitous gaggle of bombily Zhigs clustered on the street. The crowd behind a velvet rope was being held in check by fierce-looking face-control bullies, so that waiting partygoers spilled drunkenly off the pavement. Bourne went up to the red Cayenne, rapped on the window. When the driver scrolled the window down, Bourne held out three hundred dollars.

  “When I come out that door, this is my car, right?”

  The driver eyed the money hungrily. “Right you are, sir.”

  In Moscow, especially, American dollars talked louder than words.

  “And if your client comes out in the meantime?”

  “He won’t,” the driver assured Bourne. “He’s in the champagne room till four at the earliest.”

  Another hundred dollars got Bourne past the shouting, unruly mob. Inside, he ate an indifferent meal of an Oriental salad and almond-crusted chicken breast. From his perch along the glowing bar, he watched the Russian silo-viki come and go with their diamond-studded, mini-skirted, fur-wrapped dyevochkas—strictly speaking, young women who had not yet borne a child. This was the new order in Russia. Except Bourne knew that many of the same people were still in power—either ex-KGB siloviki or their progeny lined up against the boys from Sokolniki, who came from nothing into sudden wealth. The siloviki, derived from the Russian word for “power,” were men from the so-called power ministries, including the security services and the military, who had risen during the Putin era. They were the new guard, having overthrown the Yeltsin-period oligarchs. No matter. Siloviki or mobster, they were criminals, they’d killed, extorted, maimed, blackmailed; they all had blood on their hands, they were all strangers to remorse.

  Bourne scanned the tables for Gala Nematova, was surprised to find half a dozen dyevs who might have fit the bill, especially in this low light. It was astonishing to observe firsthand this wheat field of tall, willowy young women, one more striking than the next. There was a prevalent theory, a kind of skewed Darwinism—survival of the prettiest—that explained why there were so many startlingly handsome dyevochkas in Russia and Ukraine. If you were a man in his twenties in these countries in 1947 it meant that you’d survived one of the greatest male bloodbaths in human history. These men, being in the vast minority, had their pick of women. Who had they chosen to marry and impregnate? The answer was obvious, hence the acres of dyevs partying here and in every other nightclub in Russia.

  Out on the dance floor, a crush of gyrating bodies made identification of individuals impossible. Spotting a redheaded dyev on her own, Bourne walked over to her, gestured if she wanted to dance. The earsplitting house music pumped out of a dozen massive speakers made small talk impossible. She nodded, took his hand, and they shoved, elbowed, and squeezed their way into a cramped space on the dance floor. The next twenty minutes could have substituted for a vigorous workout. The dancing was nonstop, as were the colored flashing lights and the chest-vibrating drumming of the high-octane music spewed out by a local band called Tequilajazz.

  Over the top of the redhead Bourne caught a glimpse of yet another blond dyev. Only this one was different. Grabbing the redhead’s hand, Bourne eeled deeper into the gyrating pack of dancers. Perfume, cologne, and sour sweat mixed with the raw tang of hot metal and blazing monster amplifiers.

  Still dancing, Bourne maneuvered around until he was certain. The blonde dyev dancing with the broad-shouldered mobster was, indeed, Gala Nematova.

  It’ll never be the same,” Dr. Mitten said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Anthony Prowess, sitting in an uncomf

ortable chair in the NSA safe house just outside Moscow, barked at the ophthalmologist bent over him.

  “Mr. Prowess, I don’t think you’re in the best shape to hear a full diagnosis. Why not wait until the shock—”

  “A, I’m not in shock,” Prowess lied. “And B, I don’t have time to wait.” That was true enough: Having lost Bourne’s trail, he needed to get back on it ASAP.

  Dr. Mitten sighed. He’d been expecting just such a response; in fact, he would’ve been surprised at anything else. Still, he had a professional responsibility to his patient even if he was on retainer to the NSA.

  “What it means,” he said, “is that you’ll never see out of that eye again. At least, not in any way that’ll be useful to you.”

  Prowess sat with his head back, his damaged eye numbed with drops so the damn ophthalmologist could poke around. “Details, please.”

  Dr. Mitten was a tall, thin man with narrow shoulders, a wisp of a comb-over, and a neck with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed comically when he spoke or swallowed. “I believe you’ll be able to discern movement, differentiate light from dark.”

  “That’s it?”

  “On the other hand,” Dr. Mitten said, “when the swelling goes down you may be completely blind in that eye.”

  “Fine, now I know the worst. Just fix me the hell up so I can get out of here.”

  “I don’t recommend—”

  “I don’t give a shit what you recommend,” Prowess snapped. “Do as I tell you or I’ll wring your scrawny little chicken neck.”

  Dr. Mitten puffed out his cheeks in indignation, but he knew better than to talk back to an agent. They seemed born with hair-trigger responses to everything, which their training further honed.

  As the ophthalmologist worked on his eye, Prowess seethed inside. Not only had he failed to terminate Bourne, he’d allowed Bourne to permanently maim him. He was furious at himself for turning tail and running, even though he knew that when a victim gains the upper hand you have to exit the field as quickly as possible.

  Still, Prowess would never forgive himself. It wasn’t that the pain had been excruciating—he had an extremely high pain threshold. It wasn’t even that Bourne had turned the tables on him—he’d redress that situation shortly. It was his eye. Ever since he was a child, he had a morbid fear of being blind. His father had been blinded in an accidental fall getting off a transit bus, when the impact had detached both his retinas. This was in the days before ophthalmologists could staple retinas back in place. At six years old the horror of watching his father deteriorate from an optimistic, robust man into a bitter, withdrawn nub had imprinted itself forever in his mind. That horror had kicked in the moment Jason Bourne had dug his thumb deep into his eye.

  As he sat in the chair, brooding amid the chemical smells emitted by Dr. Mitten’s ministrations, Prowess was filled with determination. He promised himself he’d find Jason Bourne, and when he did Bourne would pay for the damage he’d inflicted, he’d pay dearly before Prowess killed him.

  Professor Specter was chairing a chancellors’ meeting at the university when his private cell phone vibrated. He immediately called a fifteen-minute break, left the room, strode down the hall and outside onto the campus.

  When he was clear, he opened his cell, and heard Nemetsov’s voice buzzing in his ear. Nemetsov was the man Baronov had called to switch cars with at Crocus City.

  “Baronov’s dead?” Specter said. “How?”

  He listened while Nemetsov described the attack in the car outside Tarkanian’s apartment building. “An NSA assassin,” Nemetsov concluded. “He was waiting for Bourne, to garrote him as he did Baronov.”

  “And Jason?”

  “Survived. But the assassin escaped as well.”

  Specter felt a wave of relief wash over him. “Find that NSA man before he finds Jason, and kill him. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly. But shouldn’t we also try to make contact with Bourne?”

  Specter considered a moment. “No. He’s at his best when working alone. He knows Moscow, speaks Russian fluently, and he has our fake IDs. He’ll do what must be done.”

  “You’ve put your faith in this one man?”

  “You don’t know him, Nemetsov, otherwise you wouldn’t make such a stupid statement. I only wish Jason could be with us permanently.”

  When, sweaty and entangled, Gala Nematova and her boy toy left the dance floor, so did Bourne. He watched as the couple made their way to a table where they were greeted by two other men. They all began to guzzle champagne as if it were water. Bourne waited until they’d refilled their flutes, then swaggered over in the style of these new-style gangsters.

  Leaning over Gala’s companion, he shouted in her ear, “I have an urgent message for you.”

  “Hey,” her companion shouted back with no little belligerence, “who the fuck’re you?”

  “Wrong question.” Glaring at him, Bourne pushed up the sleeve of his jacket just long enough to give him a glimpse of his fake Anubis tattoo.

  The man bit his lip and sat back down as Bourne reached over, pulled Gala Nematova away from the table.

  “We’re going outside to talk.”

  “Are you crazy?” She tried to squirm away from his grip. “It’s freezing out there.”

  Bourne continued to steer her by her elbow. “We’ll talk in my limo.”

  “Well, that’s something.” Gala Nematova bared her teeth, clearly unhappy. Her teeth were very white, as if scrubbed to within an inch of their lives. Her eyes were a remote chestnut, large with uptilted corners that revealed the Asian blood in her ancestry.

  A frigid wind swept off the canal, blocked only partially by the gridlock of expensive cars and bombily. Bourne rapped on the Porsche’s door and the driver, recognizing him, unlocked the doors. Bourne and the dyev piled in.

  Gala, shivering, hugged her inadequately short fur coat around her. Bourne asked the driver to turn up the heat. He complied, sank down in his fur-collared greatcoat.

  “I don’t care what message you have for me,” Gala said sullenly. “Whatever it is, the answer’s no.”

  “Are you sure?” Bourne wondered where she was going with this.

  “Sure I’m sure. I’ve had it with you guys trying to find out where Leonid Danilovich is.”

  Leonid Danilovich, Bourne said to himself. There’s a name the professor never mentioned.

  “The reason we keep hounding you is he’s sure you know.” Bourne had no idea what he was saying, but he felt if he kept running with her he’d be able to open her up.

  “I don’t.” Now Gala sounded like a little girl in a snit. “But even if I did I wouldn’t rat him out. You can tell Maslov that.” She fairly spat out the name of the Kazanskaya’s leader, Dimitri Maslov.

  Now we’re getting somewhere, Bourne thought. But why was Maslov after Leonid Danilovich, and what did any of this have to do with Pyotr’s death? He decided to explore this link.

  “Why were you and Leonid Danilovich using Tarkanian’s apartment?”

  Instantly he knew he’d made a mistake. Gala’s expression changed dramatically. Her eyes narrowed and she made a sound deep in her throat. “What the hell is this? You already know why we were camped out there.”

  “Tell me again,” Bourne said, improvising desperately. “I’ve only heard it thirdhand. Maybe something was left out.”

  “What could be left out? Leonid Danilovich and Tarkanian are the best of friends.”

  “Is that where you took Pyotr for your late-night trysts?”

  “Ah, so that’s what this is all about. The Kazanskaya want to know all about Pyotr Zilber, and I know why. Pyotr ordered the murder of Borya Maks, in prison, of all places—High Security Prison Colony 13. Who could do that? Get in there, kill Maks, a Kazanskaya contract killer of great strength and skill, and get out without being seen.”

  “That’s precisely what Maslov wants to know,” Bourne said, because it was the safe comment to make.

  Gala

picked at her nail extensions, realized what she was doing, stopped. “He suspects Leonid Danilovich did it because Leonid is known for such feats. No one else could do that, he’s sure.”

  Time to press her, Bourne decided. “He’s right on the money.”

  Gala shrugged.

  “Why are you protecting Leonid?”

  “I love him.”

  “The way you loved Pyotr?”

  “Don’t be absurd.” Gala laughed. “I never loved Pyotr. He was a job Semion Icoupov paid me handsomely for.”

  “And Pyotr paid for your treachery with his life.”

  Gala seemed to peer at him in a different light. “Who are you?”

  Bourne ignored her question. “During that time where did you meet Icoupov?”

  “I never met him. Leonid served as intermediary.”

  Now Bourne’s mind raced to put the building blocks Gala had provided into their proper order. “You know, don’t you, that Leonid murdered Pyotr.” He didn’t of course know that, but given the circumstances it seemed all too likely.

  “No.” Gala blanched. “That can’t be.”

  “You can see how it must be what happened. Icoupov didn’t kill Pyotr himself, surely that much must be clear to you.” He observed the fear mounting behind her eyes. “Who else would Icoupov have trusted to do it? Leonid was the only other person to know you were spying on Pyotr for Icoupov.”

  The truth of what he said was written on Gala’s face like a road sign appearing out of the fog. While she was still in shock, Bourne said, “Please tell me Leonid’s full name.”

  “What?”

  “Just do as I tell you,” Bourne said. “It may be the only way to save him from being killed by the Kazanskaya.”

  “But you’re Kazanskaya.”

  Pushing up his sleeve, Bourne gave her a close-up look at the false tattoo. “A Kazanskaya was waiting for Leonid in Tarkanian’s apartment this evening.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Her eyes widened. “What were you doing there?”

  “Tarkanian’s dead,” Bourne said. “Now do you want to help the man you say you love?”