Page 29 of The Bourne Sanction (Jason Bourne 6)

  “I understand you wanted to see me.” Maslov’s rattlesnake eyes shone yellow in the harsh light. Then he gestured, holding out his left arm, his hand extended, palm-up, as if he were shoveling dirt away from him. “However, there’s someone who insists on seeing you.”

  In a blur, the figure behind Bourne hurled himself forward. Bourne turned in a half crouch to see the man who’d attacked him at Tarkanian’s apartment. He came at Bourne with a knife extended. Too late to deflect it, Bourne sidestepped the thrust, grabbed the man’s right wrist with his left hand, using his own momentum to pull him forward so that his face met Bourne’s raised elbow flush-on.

  He went down. Bourne stepped on the wrist with his shoe until the man let go of the knife, which Bourne took up in his hand. At once the two burly bodyguards drew down on him, pointing their Glocks. Ignoring them, Bourne held the knife in his right palm so the hilt pointed away from him. He extended his arm across the desk to Maslov.

  Maslov stared instead at the man in the Hawaiian print shirt, who rose, took the knife from Bourne’s palm.

  “I am Dimitri Maslov,” he said to Bourne.

  The big man in the banker’s suit rose, nodded deferentially to Maslov, who handed him the knife as he sat down behind the desk.

  “Take Evsei out and get him a new nose,” Maslov said to no one in particular.

  The big man in the banker’s suit pulled the dazed Evsei up, dragged him out of the office.

  “Close the door,” Maslov said, again to no one in particular.

  Nevertheless, one of the burly Russian bodyguards crossed to the door, closed it, turned and put his back against it. He shook out a cigarette, lit it.

  “Take a seat,” Maslov said. Sliding open a drawer, he took out a Mauser, laid it on the desk within easy reach. Only then did his eyes slide up to engage Bourne’s again. “My dear friend Vanya tells me that you work for Boris Karpov. He says you claim to have information I can use against certain parties who are trying to muscle in on my territory.” His fingers tapped the grips of the Mauser. “However, I would be inexcusably naive to believe that you were willing to part with this information without a price, so let’s have it. What do you want?”

  “I want to know what your connection is with the Black Legion?”

  “Mine? I have none.”

  “But you’ve heard of them.”

  “Of course I’ve heard of them.” Maslov frowned. “Where is this going?”

  “You posted your man Evsei in Mikhail Tarkanian’s apartment. Tarkanian was a member of the Black Legion.”

  Maslov held up a hand. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

  “He was working against people—friends of mine.”

  Maslov shrugged. “That might be so—I have no knowledge of it one way or another. But one thing I can tell you is that Tarkanian wasn’t Black Legion.”

  “Then why was Evsei there?”

  “Ah, now we get to the root of the matter.” Maslov’s thumb rubbed against his forefinger and middle finger in the universal gesture. “Show me the quid pro quo, to co-opt what Jerry Maguire says.” His mouth grinned, but his yellow eyes remained as remote and malevolent as ever. “Though to tell you the truth I’m doubting very much there’s any money at all. I mean to say, why would the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency want to help me? It’s anti-fucking-intuitive.”

  Bourne finally pulled over a chair, sat down. His mind was rerunning the long conversation he’d had with Boris at Lorraine’s apartment, during which Karpov had briefed him on the current political climate in Moscow.

  “This has nothing to do with narcotics and everything to do with politics. The Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency is controlled by Cherkesov, who’s in the midst of a parallel war to yours—the silovik wars,” Bourne said. “It seems as if the president has already picked his successor.”

  “That pisspot Mogilovich.” Maslov nodded. “Yeah, so what?”

  “Cherkesov doesn’t like him, and here’s why. Mogilovich used to work for the president in the St. Petersburg city administration way back when. The president put him in charge of the legal department of VM Pulp and Paper. Mogilovich promptly engineered VM’s dominance to become Russia’s largest and most lucrative pulp and timber company. Now one of America’s largest paper companies is buying fifty percent of VM for hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  During Bourne’s discourse Maslov had taken out a penknife, was busy paring grime from under his manicured nails. He did everything but yawn. “All this is part of the public record. What’s it to me?”

  “What isn’t known is that Mogilovich cut himself a deal giving him a sizable portion of VM’s shares when the company was privatized through RAB Bank. At the time, questions were raised about Mogilovich’s involvement with RAB Bank, but they magically went away. Last year VM bought back the twenty-five percent stake that RAB had taken to ensure the privatization would go through without a hitch. The deal was blessed by the Kremlin.”

  “Meaning the president.” Maslov sat up straight, put away the penknife.

  “Right,” Bourne said. “Which means that Mogilovich stands to make a king’s ransom through the American buy-in, by means the president wouldn’t want made public.”

  “Who knows what the president’s own involvement is in the deal?”

  Bourne nodded.

  “Wait a minute,” Maslov said. “Last week a RAB Bank officer was found tied up, tortured, and asphyxiated in his dacha garage. I remember because the General Prosecutor’s Office claimed he’d committed suicide. We all got a good laugh out of that one.”

  “He just happened to be the head of RAB’s loan division to the timber industry.”

  “The man with the smoking gun that could ruin Mogilovich and, by extension, the president,” Maslov said.

  “My boss tells me this man had access to the smoking gun, but he never actually had it in his possession. His assistant absconded with it days before his assassination, and now can’t be found.” Bourne hitched his chair forward. “When you find him for us and hand over the papers incriminating Mogilovich, my boss is prepared to end the war between you and the Azeri once and for all in your favor.”

  “And how the fuck is he going to do that?”

  Bourne opened his cell phone, played back the MP3 file Boris had sent to him. It was a conversation between the kingpin of the Azeri and one of his lieutenants ordering the hit on the RAB Bank executive. It was just like the Russian in Boris to hold on to the evidence for leverage, rather than go after the Azeri kingpin right away.

  A broad grin broke out across Maslov’s face. “Fuck,” he said, “now we’re talking!”

  After a time, Arkadin became aware that Devra was standing over him. Without looking at her, he held up the cylinder he’d taken from Heinrich.

  “Come out of the surf,” she said, but when Arkadin didn’t make a move, she sat down on a crest of sand behind him.

  Heinrich was stretched out on his back as if he were a sunbather who’d fallen asleep. The water had washed away all the blood.

  After a time, Arkadin moved back, first onto the dark sand, then up behind the waterline to where Devra sat, her legs drawn up, chin on her knees. That was when she noticed that his left foot was missing three toes.

  “My God,” she said, “what happened to your foot?”

  It was the foot that had undone Marlene. The three missing toes on Arkadin’s left foot. Marlene made the mistake of asking what had happened.

  “An accident,” Arkadin said with a practiced smoothness. “During my first term in prison. A stamping machine came apart, and the main cylinder fell on my foot. The toes were crushed, nothing more than pulp. They had to be amputated.”

  It was a lie, this story, a fanciful tale Arkadin appropriated from a real incident that took place during his first stint in prison. That much, at least, was the truth. A man stole a pack of cigarettes from under Arkadin’s bunk. This man worked the stamping machine. Arkadin tampered with the machine so that when the m

an started it up the next morning the main cylinder dropped on him. The result wasn’t pretty; you could hear his screams clear across the compound. In the end, they’d had to take his right leg off at the knee.

  From that day forward he was on his guard with Marlene. She was attracted to him, of this he was quite certain. She’d slipped from her objective pedestal, from the job Icoupov had given her. He didn’t blame Icoupov. He wanted to tell Icoupov again that he wouldn’t harm him, but he knew Icoupov wouldn’t believe him. Why should he? He had enough evidence to the contrary to make him suitably nervous. And yet, Arkadin sensed that Icoupov would never turn his back on him. Icoupov would never renege on his pledge to take Arkadin in.

  Nevertheless, something had to be done about Marlene. It wasn’t simply that she’d seen his left foot; Icoupov had seen it as well. Arkadin knew she suspected the maimed foot was connected with his horrendous nightmares, that it was part of something he couldn’t tell her. Even the story Arkadin told her did not fully satisfy her. It might have with someone else, but not Marlene. She hadn’t exaggerated when she’d told him that she possessed an uncanny ability to sense what her clients were feeling, and to find a way to help them.

  The problem was that she couldn’t help Arkadin. No one could. No one was allowed to know what he’d experienced. It was unthinkable.

  “Tell me about your mother and father,” Marlene said. “And don’t repeat the pabulum you fed the shrink who was here before me.”

  They were out on Lake Lugano. It was a mild summer’s day; Marlene was in a two-piece bathing suit, red with large pink polka dots. She wore pink rubber slippers; a visor shaded her face from the sun. Their small motorboat lay to, its anchor dropped. Small swells rocked them now and again as pleasure boats went to and fro across the crystal blue water. The small village of Campione d’Italia rose up the hillside like the frosted tiers of a wedding cake.

  Arkadin looked hard at her. It annoyed him that he didn’t intimidate her. He intimidated most people; it was how he got along after his parents were gone.

  “What, you don’t think my mother died badly?”

  “I’m interested in your mother before she died,” Marlene said airily. “What was she like?”

  “Actually, she was just like you.”

  Marlene gave him a basilisk stare.

  “Seriously,” he said. “My mother was tough as a fistful of nails. She knew how to stand up to my father.”

  Marlene seized on this opening. “Why did she have to do that? Was your father abusive?”

  Arkadin shrugged. “No more than any other father, I suppose. When he was frustrated at work he took it out on her.”

  “And you find that normal.”

  “I don’t know what the word normal means.”

  “But you’re used to abuse, aren’t you?”

  “Isn’t that called leading the witness, Counselor?”

  “What did your father do?”

  “He was consiglieri—the counselor—to the Kazanskaya, the family of the Moscow grupperovka that controls drug trafficking and the sale of foreign cars in the city and surrounding areas.” He’d been nothing of the sort. Arkadin’s father had been an ironworker, dirt-poor, desperate, and drunk as shit twenty hours a day, just like everyone else in Nizhny Tagil.

  “So abuse and violence came naturally to him.”

  “He wasn’t on the streets,” Arkadin said, continuing his lie.

  She gave him a thin smile. “All right, where do you think your bouts of violence come from?”

  “If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

  Marlene laughed. “Come on, Leonid Danilovich. Don’t you want to be of use to Mr. Icoupov?”

  “Of course I do. I want him to trust me.”

  “Then tell me.”

  Arkadin sat for a time. The sun felt good on his forearms. The heat seemed to draw his skin tight over his muscles, making them bulge. He felt the beating of his heart as if it were music. For just a moment, he felt free of his burden, as if it belonged to someone else, a tormented character in a Russian novel, perhaps. Then his past came rushing back like a fist in his gut and he almost vomited.

  Very slowly, very deliberately he unlaced his sneakers, took them off. He peeled off his white athletic socks, and there was his left foot with its two toes and three miniature stumps, knotty, as pink as the polka dots on Marlene’s bathing suit.

  “Here’s what happened,” he said. “When I was fourteen years old, my mother took a frying pan to the back of my father’s head. He’d just come home stone drunk, reeking of another woman. He was sprawled facedown on their bed, snoring peacefully, when whack!, she took a heavy cast-iron skillet from its peg on the kitchen wall and, without a word, hit him ten times in the same spot. You can imagine what his skull looked like when she was done.”

  Marlene sat back. She seemed to have trouble breathing. At length, she said, “This isn’t another one of your bullshit stories, is it?”

  “No,” Arkadin said, “it’s not.”

  “And where were you?”

  “Where d’you think I was? Home. I saw the whole thing.”

  Marlene put a hand to her mouth. “My God.”

  Having expelled this ball of poison, Arkadin felt an exhilarating sense of freedom, but he knew what had to come next.

  “Then what happened?” she said when she had recovered her equilibrium.

  Arkadin let out a long breath. “I gagged her, tied her hands behind her, and threw her into the closet in my room.”

  “And?”

  “I walked out of the apartment and never went back.”

  “How?” There was a look of genuine horror on her face. “How could you do such a thing?”

  “I disgust you now, don’t I?” He said this not with anger, but with a certain resignation. Why wouldn’t she be disgusted by him? If only she knew the whole truth.

  “Tell me in more detail about the accident in prison.”

  Arkadin knew at once that she was trying to find inconsistencies in his story. This was a classic interrogator’s technique. She would never know the truth.

  “Let’s go swimming,” he said abruptly. He shed his shorts and T-shirt.

  Marlene shook her head. “I’m not in the mood. You go if—”

  “Oh, come on.”

  He pushed her overboard, stood up, dived in after her. He found her under the water, kicking her legs to bring herself to the surface. He wrapped his thighs around her neck, locked his ankles, tightening his grip on her. He rose to the surface, held on to the boat, swung water out of his eyes as she struggled below him. Boats thrummed past. He waved to two young girls, their long hair flying behind them like horses’ manes. He wanted to hum a love song, but all he could think of was the theme to The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  After a time, Marlene stopped struggling. He felt her weight below him, swaying gently in the swells. He didn’t want to, really he didn’t, but unbidden the image of his old apartment resurrected itself in his mind’s eye. It was a slum, the filthy crumbling Soviet-era piece of shit building teeming with vermin.

  Their poverty didn’t stop the older man from banging other women. When one of them became pregnant, she decided to have the baby. He was all for it, he told her. He’d help her in any way he could. But what he really wanted was the child his barren wife could never give him. When Leonid was born, he ripped the baby from the girl’s arms, brought Leonid to his wife to raise.

  “This is the child I always wanted, but you couldn’t give me,” he told her.

  She raised Arkadin dutifully, without complaint, because where could a barren woman go in Nizhny Tagil? But when her husband wasn’t home, she locked the boy in the closet of his room for hours at a time. A blind rage gripped her and wouldn’t let her go. She despised this result of her husband’s seed, and she felt compelled to punish Leonid because she couldn’t punish his father.

  It was during one of these long punishments that Arkadin woke to awful pain in his left foot. He wasn

’t alone in the closet. Half a dozen rats, large as his father’s shoe, scuttled back and forth, squealing, teeth gnashing. He managed to kill them, but not before they finished what they’d started. They ate three of his toes.

  Twenty-Seven

  IT ALL STARTED with Pyotr Zilber,” Maslov said. “Or rather his younger brother, Aleksei. Aleksei was a wise guy. He tried to muscle in on one of my sources for foreign cars. A lot of people were killed, including some of my men and my source. For that, I had him killed.”

  Dimitri Maslov and Bourne were sitting in a glassed-in greenhouse built on the roof of the warehouse where Maslov had his office. They were surrounded by a lush profusion of tropical flowers: speckled orchids, brilliant carmine anthurium, birds-of-paradise, white ginger, heliconia. The air was perfumed with the scents of the pink plumeria and white jasmine. It was so warm and humid, Maslov looked right at home in his bright-hued short-sleeved shirt. Bourne had rolled up his sleeves. There was a table with a bottle of vodka and two glasses. They’d already had their first drink.

  “Zilber pulled strings, had my man Borya Maks sent to High Security Prison Colony 13 in Nizhny Tagil. You’ve heard of it?”

  Bourne nodded. Conklin had mentioned the prison several times.

  “Then you know it’s no picnic in there.” Maslov leaned forward, refilled their glasses, handed one to Bourne, took the other himself. “Despite that, Zilber wasn’t satisfied. He hired someone very, very good to infiltrate the prison and kill Maks.” Drinking vodka, surrounded by a riot of color, he appeared totally at his ease. “Only one person could accomplish that and get out alive: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”

  The vodka had done Bourne a world of good, returning both warmth and strength to his overtaxed body. There was still a smear of blood on the point of one cheek, dried now, but Maslov had neither looked at it nor commented on it. “Tell me about Arkadin.”