Page 32 of The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne 7)

  “You could adopt an entirely new identity,” Bourne said, “one where effecting change is less difficult because now you re-create your own history.”

  She nodded. “Yes, but that has its own pitfalls. No family, no friends—unless, of course, you don’t mind being absolutely isolated.”

  “Some people don’t.” Bourne looked beyond her, as if the wall with its cheap print of an Islamic scene was a window into his thoughts. Once again, he wondered who he was—David Webb, Jason Bourne, or Adam Stone. His life was a fiction, no matter in which direction he looked. He’d already determined that he couldn’t live as David Webb, and as for Jason Bourne, there was always someone, somewhere in the world, hidden in the shadows of his forgotten former life, who wished him ill or wanted him dead. And Adam Stone? He might be called a blank slate, but that would be, in practice, untrue because the people who encountered this identity reacted to him—reacted to whoever the real Bourne was. The more he was with people like Tracy, the more he learned about himself.

  “What about you?” she said now as she joined him at the window. “Do you mind being alone?”

  “I’m not alone,” he replied. “I’m with you.”

  She laughed softly and shook her head. “Listen to you, you’ve perfected the art of answering personal questions without revealing one iota of yourself.”

  “That’s because I never know who I’m talking with.”

  She watched him for a moment out of the corner of her eyes as if trying to figure out the real meaning of what he’d just said, then she stared out the window at the two Niles winding their way through North Africa, like a story you read while falling asleep.

  “At night, everything becomes transparent, or insubstantial.” Reaching out, she touched their reflections in the window. “And yet our thoughts—and why is it especially our fears?—are somehow magnified, taking on the proportions of titans, or gods.” She stood very close to him, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. “Are we good or evil? What’s really in our hearts? It’s dispiriting when we don’t know, or can’t decide.”

  “Perhaps we’re both good and evil,” Bourne said, wondering about himself, about all his identities, and where the truth lay, “depending on the time and the circumstance.”

  Arkadin was lost in the star-dazzled Azerbaijani night. Starting promptly at five in the morning, he and his one-hundred-strong cadre of hardened soldiers had hiked into the mountains. Their mission, he’d told them, was to find the snipers hiding along their route and shoot them with the long-range paintball guns that looked and felt exactly like AK-47s that had been shipped at his request to Nagorno-Karabakh. Twenty members of the indigenous tribe, equipped with paintball sniper rifles, had secreted themselves along the route. When Arkadin had handed them out, he’d had to explain their use to men who thought them both amusing and idiotic. Still, within half an hour the tribesmen had become proficient with the pseudo-weapons.

  His men had missed the first two snipers completely, so two of the hundred had been “killed” before they hunkered down and learned from their inattention and lapses in judgment.

  This exercise had lasted all day and into the swiftly falling dusk, but Arkadin drove them on, deeper and deeper into the mountains. They stopped once for fifteen minutes, to eat their rations, then it was on again, climbing ever upward toward the clear, shining vault of heaven.

  Toward midnight, he called a completion to the exercise, graded each man as to performance, stamina, and ability to adapt to a changing situation, then allowed them to make camp. As usual, he ate little and slept not at all. He could feel his body’s aches and strains, but they were small and, it seemed to him, very far away, as if they belonged to someone else, or to a different Arkadin he knew only in passing.

  Dawn had arrived before he stilled his feverishly working mind and, marshaling his energies, pulled out his satellite phone and punched in a specific set of numbers, connecting him to an automated “zombie” line that switched his call several times. With each switch, he was required to punch in a different code, which allowed him to continue the call. At length, after the last code was digested by the closed system at the other end of the line, he heard a human voice.

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you.” There was no rebuke in Nikolai Yevsen’s voice, only a faint curiosity.

  “Frankly,” Arkadin said, “I didn’t expect to call.” His head tilted up, he was staring at the last stars as they were banished by the pink and blue light. “Something has come to my attention I thought you should know.”

  “As always, I appreciate your thoughtfulness.” Yevsen’s voice was as harsh as a saw cutting through metal. There was about it something feral, a fearsome kind of power that was his alone.

  “It has come to my attention that the woman, Tracy Atherton, is not alone.”

  “How is this information of interest to me?”

  Only Yevsen, Arkadin thought, could convey a lethal stillness with the mere tone of his voice. In the course of his freelance career with the Moscow grupperovka he had gotten to know the arms dealer well enough to be exceedingly wary of him.

  “She’s with a man named Jason Bourne,” he said now, “who is out for revenge.”

  “We all are, in one way or another. Why would he seek it here?”

  “Bourne thinks you hired the Torturer to kill him.”

  “Where would he get that idea?”

  “A rival, possibly. I could find out for you,” Arkadin said helpfully.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Yevsen said. “This Jason Bourne is already a dead man.”

  Exactly what I wanted to hear, Arkadin thought as he could not stop his mind from turning toward the past.

  Approximately five hundred miles from Nizhny Tagil, when daylight had bled into dusk and dusk fell victim to night, Tarkanian drove toward the village of Yaransk to look for a doctor. He had stopped three times on the way, so everyone could relieve themselves and get a bite to eat. At those times, he checked on Oserov. The third stop, near sunset, he’d found that Oserov had peed himself. He was feverish and looked like death.

  During the long drive at high speed over incomplete highways, rough detours, and suspect roads, the children had been remarkably quiet, listening with rapt attention to their mother spin tales—fabulous adventures and magnificent exploits of the god of fire, the god of wind, and especially the warrior-god, Chumbulat.

  Arkadin had never heard of these gods and wondered whether JoÅ¡kar had made them up for her daughters’ benefit. In any event, it wasn’t just the three girls who were held rapt by the stories. Arkadin listened to them as if they were news reports from a distant country to which he longed to travel. In this way, for him, if not for Tarkanian, the long day’s journey into night passed with the swiftness of sleep.

  They arrived in Yaransk too late to find a doctor’s office open, so Tarkanian, asking several pedestrians, followed their directions to the local hospital. Arkadin was left with JoÅ¡kar in the car. They both climbed out to stretch their legs, leaving the girls in the backseat, playing with the sets of painted wooden nesting dolls Arkadin had bought them during one of the rest stops.

  Her head was partly turned away from him as she glanced back at her children. Shadows hid most of the damage done to her face, while the sodium lights drew out the exoticism of her features, which seemed to him a curious mixture of Asian and Finnish. Her eyes were large and slightly uptilted, her mouth was generous and full-lipped. Unlike her nose, which seemed formed to protect her face from life’s tougher blows, her mouth exuded a sensuality bordering on the erotic. That she seemed quite unaware of this quality in herself made it all the more magnetic.

  “Did you make up the stories you were telling your children?” he asked.

  JoÅ¡kar shook her head. “I was told them when I was a little girl, looking out at the Volga. My mother was told them by her mother, and so on back in time.” She turned to him. “They’re tales of our religion. I’m Mari, you see.”

  “Mari

? I don’t know it.”

  “My people are what researchers call Finno-Ugrik. We’re what you Christians call pagans. We believe in many gods, the gods of the stories I tell, and the demi-gods who walk among us, disguised as humans.” When she turned her gaze on her girls something inexplicable happened to her face, as if she had become one of them, one of her own daughters. “Once upon a time, we were eastern Finns, who over the years intermarried with wanderers from the south and east. Gradually, this mixture of Germanic and Asian cultures moved to the Volga, where our land was eventually incorporated into Russia. But we were never accepted by the Russians, who hate learning new languages and fear customs and traditions other than their own. We Mari have a saying: ‘The worst your enemies can do is kill you. The worst your friends can do is betray you. Fear only the indifferent, because at their silent consent, treachery and death flourish!’ ”

  “That’s a bleak credo, even for this country.”

  “Not if you know our history here.”

  “I never knew you weren’t ethnic Russian.”

  “No one did. My husband was deeply ashamed of my ethnic background, just as he was ashamed of himself for marrying me. Of course, he told no one.”

  Looking at her, he could see why Lev Antonin had fallen in love with her. “Why did you marry him?” he said.

  JoÅ¡kar gave an ironic laugh. “Why do you think? He’s ethnic Russian; moreover, he’s a powerful man. He protects me and my children.”

  Arkadin took her chin, moving her face fully into the light. “But who protects you from him?”

  She snatched her face away as if his fingers had burned her. “I made certain he never touched my children. That was all that mattered.”

  “Doesn’t it matter that they should have a father who, unlike Antonin, genuinely loves them?” Arkadin was thinking of his own father, either falling-down drunk or absent altogether.

  JoÅ¡kar sighed. “Life is full of compromises, Leonid, especially for the Mari. I was alive, he’d given me children whom I adore, and he swore to keep them from harm. That was my life, how could I complain when my parents were murdered by the Russians, when my sister disappeared when I was thirteen, probably abducted and tortured because my father was a journalist who repeatedly spoke out against the repression of the Mari? That was when my aunt sent me away from the Volga, to ensure I stayed alive.”

  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, JoÅ¡kar 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 JoÅ¡kar 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, JoÅ¡kar. 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, JoÅ¡kar 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.

  27

  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.