The Bourne Sanction

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Now, sitting behind the wheel of a rented car, he swept the street across from the Pentagon, on the lookout for General Kendall. Batt was canny enough to know better than to go after LaValle, because LaValle was too smart to make a mistake. The same, however, couldn’t be said for the general. If Batt had learned one thing from his abortive association with the two it was that Kendall was a weak link. He was too tied to LaValle, too slavish in his attitude. He needed someone to tell him what to do. The desire to please was what made followers vulnerable; they made mistakes their leaders didn’t.

  He suddenly saw life the way it must appear to Jason Bourne. He knew the work that Bourne had done for Martin Lindros in Reykjavik and knew that Bourne had put himself on the line to find Lindros and bring him home. But like most of his former co-workers, Batt had conveniently dismissed Bourne’s actions as collateral happenstance, choosing to stick to the common wisdom that Bourne was an out-of-control paranoid who needed to be stopped before he committed some heinous act that would disgrace CI. And yet, people in CI had had no compunction about using him when all else failed, coercing him into playing as their pawn. But at last he, Batt, was no one’s pawn.

  He saw General Kendall exit a side door of the building and, huddled in his trench-coat, hurry across the lot to his car. He kept the general in his sights as he put one hand on the keys he’d already inserted in the ignition. At the precise moment Kendall leaned his right shoulder forward to start his engine, Batt flipped his own ignition, so Kendall didn’t hear another car start when his did.

  As the general pulled out of the lot, Batt set aside the night glasses and put his car in gear. The night seemed quiet and still, but maybe that was simply a reflection of Batt’s mood. He was a sentinel of the night, after all. He’d been trained by the Old Man himself; he’d always been proud of that fact. After his downfall, though, he realized that it was this pride that had distorted his thinking and his decision making. It was his pride that made him rebel against Veronica Hart, not because of anything she said or did—he hadn’t even given her the chance—but because he’d been passed over. Pride was his weakness, one that LaValle had recognized and exploited. Twenty–twenty hindsight was a bitch, he thought as he followed Kendall toward the Fairfax area, but at least it provided the humility he needed to see how far he’d strayed from his sworn duties at CI.

  He kept well back of the general’s car, varying his distance and his lane the better to avoid detection. He doubted that Kendall would consider that he might be followed, but it paid to be cautious. Batt was determined to atone for the sin he’d committed against his own organization, against the memory of the Old Man.

  Kendall turned in at an anonymous modern-looking building whose entire ground floor was taken up by the In-Tune health club. Batt observed the general park, take out a small gym bag, and enter the club. Nothing useful so far, but Batt had long ago learned to be patient. On stakeouts it seemed nothing came quickly or easily.

  And then, because he had nothing better to do until Kendall reappeared, Batt stared at the IN-TUNE sign while he bit hunks off a Snickers bar. Why did that sign seem familiar? He knew he had never been inside, had never, in fact, been in this part of Fairfax. Maybe it was the name: In-Tune. Yes, he thought, it sounded maddeningly familiar, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of why.

  Fifty minutes had passed since Kendall had gone in; time to train his night glasses on the entrance. He watched people of all description and build come in and out. Most were solitary figures; occasionally two women came out talking, once a couple emerged, headed in tandem for their car.

  Another fifteen minutes passed and still no Kendall. Batt had taken the glasses away from his eyes to give them a rest when he saw the gym door swung open. Fitting the binoculars back to his eyes he saw Rodney Feir step out into the night. Are you kidding me? Batt thought.

  Feir ran his hand through his damp hair. And that’s when Batt remembered why the name In-Tune was so familiar. All CI directors were required to post their whereabouts after hours so if they were needed the duty officer could calculate how long it would take them to get back to headquarters.

  Watching Feir walk over and get into his car, Batt bit his lip. Of course it might be sheer coincidence that General Kendall used the same health club as Feir, but Batt knew that in his trade there was no such thing as coincidence.

  His suspicion was borne out when Feir did not fire up his car, but sat silent and still behind the wheel. He was waiting for something, but what? Maybe, Batt thought, it was someone.

  Ten minutes later, General Kendall emerged from the club. He looked neither to the right nor to the left, but went immediately to his car, started it up, and began to back out of his space. Before he’d exited the lot, Feir started his car. Kendall turned right out of the lot and Feir followed.

  Excitement flared in Batt’s chest. Game on! he thought.

  After the first two shots struck Jens, Bourne turned back toward him, but the third shot fired into Jens’s head made him change his mind. He ran down the street, knowing the other man was dead, there was nothing he could do for him. He had to assume that Arkadin had followed Jens to the museum and had been lying in wait.

  Turning the same corner as the museum guard, Bourne saw that she had hesitated, half turned to the sound of the shots. Then, seeing Bourne coming after her, she took off. She darted into an alley. Bourne, following, saw her vault up a corrugated steel fence, beyond which was a cleared building site bristling with heavy machinery. She grabbed hold of the top of the fence, levered herself up and over.

  Bourne scaled the fence after her, jumping down onto the packed earth and concrete rubble on the other side. He saw her duck behind the mud-spattered flank of a bulldozer, and ran toward her. She swung up into the cab, slid behind the wheel, and fumbled with the ignition.

  Bourne was quite close when the engine rumbled to life. Throwing the bulldozer into reverse, she backed up directly at him. She’d chosen a clumsy vehicle, and he leapt to one side, reached for a handhold, and swung up. The bulldozer lurched, the gears grinding as she struggled to shove it into first, but Bourne was already inside the cab.

  She tried to draw her gun, but she was also trying to guide the bulldozer, and Bourne easily slapped the weapon away. It fell to the foot well, where he kicked it away from her. Then he reached over, turned off the engine. The moment he did that, the woman covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

  This is your mess,” Deron said.

  Soraya nodded. “I know it is.”

  “You came to us—Kiki and me.”

  “I take full responsibility.”

  “I think in this case,” Deron said, “we have to share the responsibility. We could’ve said no, but we didn’t. Now all of us—not just Tyrone and Jason—are in serious jeopardy.”

  They were sitting in the den of Deron’s house, a cozy room with a wraparound sofa that faced a stone fireplace and, above it, a large plasma TV. Drinks were set out on a low wooden table, but nobody had touched them. Deron and Soraya sat facing each other. Kiki was curled up in the corner like a cat.

  “Tyrone’s already totally fucked,” Soraya said. “I saw what they’re doing to him.”

  “Hold on.” Deron sat forward. “There’s a difference between perception and reality. Don’t let them skullfuck you. They’re not going to risk damaging Tyrone; he’s their only leverage to coerce you to bring Jason to them.”

  Soraya, once again finding fear scattering her thoughts, reached over and poured herself a scotch. Rolling it around in the glass, she inhaled its complex aroma, which called to mind heather and butterscotch. She recalled Jason telling her how sights, scents, idioms, or tones of voice could trigger his hidden memories.

  She took a sip of the scotch, felt it ignite a stream of fire down to her stomach. She wanted to be anywhere but here now; she wanted another life; but this was the life she’d chosen, these were the decisions she’d made. There was no help for it—she could not aba
ndon her friends; she had to keep them safe. How to do that was the vexing question.

  Deron was right about LaValle and Kendall. Taking her back down to the interrogation room was a psychological ploy. What they’d showed her was minimal, now that she thought about it. They were counting on her to imagine the worst, to let those thoughts prey on her until she gave in, called Jason so they could take him into custody and, like a show dog, present him to the president as proof that, having accomplished what numerous CI initiatives could not, LaValle deserved to take over and run CI.

  She took another sip of scotch, aware that Deron and Kiki were silent, patiently waiting for her to work through the mistake she’d made and, coming through the other side, put it behind her. But she had to take the initiative, to formulate a plan of counterattack. That was what Deron meant when he said, This is your mess.

  “The thing to do,” she said, slowly and carefully, “is to beat LaValle at his own game.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” Deron said.

  Soraya stared down at the dregs of her scotch. That was just it, she had no idea.

  The silence stretched out, growing thicker and more deadly by the second. At last, Kiki uncurled herself, stood up, and said, “I for one have had enough of this gloom and doom. Sitting around feeling angry and frustrated isn’t helping Tyrone and it isn’t helping us find a solution. I’m going out to have a good time at my friend’s club.” She looked from Soraya to Deron and back again. “So who’s going to join me?”

  The high–low wail of the police sirens came to Bourne as he sat beside the museum guard in the bulldozer. Up close, she looked younger than he had imagined. Her blond hair, which had been pulled back in a severe bun, had come loose. It flowed down around her pale face. Her eyes were large and liquid—red around the rims now from crying. There was something about them that made him think she’d been born sad.

  “Take off your jacket,” he said.

  “What?” The guard appeared totally confused.

  Without saying anything, Bourne helped her off with her jacket. Pushing up the sleeves of her shirt, he checked the insides of her elbows, but found no Black Legion tattoo. Naked fear had joined the sadness in her eyes.

  “What’s your name?” he said softly.

  “Petra-Alexandra Eichen,” she said in a quavery voice. “But everyone calls me Petra.” She wiped at her eyes, and gave him a sideways look. “Are you going to kill me now?”

  The police sirens were very loud, and Bourne had a desire to get as far away from them as possible.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I…” Her voice faltered and she choked, it seemed, on her own words, or on an emotion welling up. “I shot your friend.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “For money,” she said. “I need money.”

  Bourne believed her. She didn’t act like a professional; she didn’t talk like one, either. “Who paid you?”

  Fear distorted her expression, magnified her eyes until they seemed to goggle at him. “I… I can’t tell you. He made me promise, he said he’d kill me if I opened my mouth.”

  Bourne heard raised voices, using the clipped jargon endemic to police the world over. They’d started their dragnet. He retrieved her gun, a Walther P22, the small caliber being the only option for a silent kill in an enclosed space, even with a suppressor.

  “Where’s the suppressor?”

  “I threw it down a storm drain,” she said, “as I was instructed to do.”

  “Continuing to follow orders isn’t going to help. The people who hired you are going to kill you anyway,” he said as he dragged her down from the bulldozer. “You’re in way over your head.”

  She gave a little moan and tried to break away from him.

  He grabbed her. “If you want, I’ll let you go straight to the cops. They’ll be here any minute.”

  Her mouth worked, but nothing intelligible came out.

  Voices came to him, more distinct now. The police were on the other side of the corrugated wall. He pulled her in the opposite direction. “Do you know another way out of here?”

  Petra nodded, pointing. She and Bourne ran diagonally across the yard, dodging heavy equipment as they picked their way through the rubble and around deep holes in the earth. Without turning around, Bourne could tell that the cops had entered the far side of the yard. He pushed Petra’s head down as he himself bent over to keep them both from being spotted. Beyond a crane, a crew chief’s trailer was set up on concrete blocks. Temporary electric lines were strung into it from just above the tin roof.

  Petra threw herself headlong under the trailer, and Bourne followed. The blocks set the trailer just high enough for them to worm their way on their bellies to the far side, where Bourne saw that a gap had been cut in the chain-link fence.

  Crawling through the gap, they found themselves in a quiet alley filled with industrial-size garbage bins and a Dumpster filled with broken tiles, jagged blocks of terrazzo, and pieces of twisted metal, no doubt from whatever buildings had once stood in the now empty space behind them.

  “This way,” Petra whispered as she took them out of the alley and down a residential street. Around the corner, she went to a car and opened it with a set of keys.

  “Give me the keys,” Bourne said. “They’ll be looking for you.”

  He caught them in midair, and they both got in. A block away they passed a cruising police car. The sudden tension caused Petra’s hands to tremble in her lap.

  “We’re going right past them,” Bourne said. “Don’t look at them.”

  Nothing further passed between them until Bourne said, “They’ve turned around. They’re coming after us.”

  Thirty-Three

  I’M GOING to drop you off somewhere,” Arkadin said. “I don’t want you in the middle of whatever’s going to come.”

  Devra, in the passenger’s seat of the rented BMW, shot him a skeptical look. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”

  “No? Who does it sound like?”

  “We still have to get Egon Kirsch.”

  Arkadin turned a corner. They were in the center of the city, a place filled with old cathedrals and palaces. The place looked like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  “There’s been a complication,” he said. “The opposition’s king has entered the chess match. His name is Jason Bourne and he’s here in Munich.”

  “All the more reason why I should stay with you.” Devra checked the action on one of the two Lugers that Arkadin had picked up from one of Icoupov’s local agents. “A crossfire has many benefits.”

  Arkadin laughed. “There’s no lack of fire to you.”

  That was another thing that drew him to her—she wasn’t afraid of the male fire burning in her belly. But he had promised her—and himself—that he would protect her. It had been a very long time since he’d said that to anyone, and even though he’d sworn never to make that promise again, he’d done just that. And strange to say, he felt good about it; in fact, there was a sense now when he was around her that he’d stepped out of the shadows he’d been born into, that had been tattooed into his flesh by so many violent incidents. For the first time in his life he felt as if he could take pleasure in the sun on his face, in the wind lifting Devra’s hair behind her like a mane, that he could walk down the street with her and not feel as if he was living in another dimension, that he hadn’t just arrived here from another planet.

  As they stopped at a red light, he glanced at her. Sunlight was streaming into the interior, turning her face the palest shade of pink. At that precise moment he felt something rush out of him and into her, and she turned as if she felt it, too, and she smiled at him.

  The light turned green and he accelerated through the cross street. His cell phone buzzed. A glance down at the number of the incoming call told him that Gala was calling. He didn’t answer; he had no wish to talk to her now, or ever, for that matter.

  Three minutes later, he
received a text message. It read: MISCHA DEAD. KILLED BY JASON BOURNE.

  Having followed Rodney Feir and General Kendall over the Key Bridge into Washington proper, Rob Batt made sure his long-lens SLR Nikon was fully loaded with fast film. He shot a series of digital photos with a compact camera, but these were only for reference, because they could be Photoshopped in a heartbeat. To forestall any suspicion that the images might be manipulated, he’d present the undeveloped roll of film to… well, this was his real problem. For a legitimate reason he was persona non grata at CI. It was astonishing how quickly years-long associations vanished. But now he realized he’d mistaken the camaraderie he’d developed with what had been his fellow directors for friendship. As far as they were concerned he no longer existed, so going to them with any alleged evidence that the NSA had turned yet another CI officer would be either ignored or laughed at. Trying to approach Veronica Hart was similarly out of the question. Assuming he could ever get to her—which he doubted—speaking to her now would be like groveling. Batt had never groveled in his life, and he wasn’t going to now.

  Then he laughed out loud at how easy it was to become self-deluded. Why should any of his former colleagues want anything to do with him? He’d betrayed them, abandoned them for the enemy. If he were in their shoes—and how he wished he were!—he’d feel the same venomous animosity toward someone who’d sold him out, which was why he’d embarked on this mission to destroy LaValle and Kendall. They’d sold him out—hung him out to dry as soon as it suited their purposes. The moment he came on board, they’d taken control of Typhon away from him.

  Venomous animosity. That was an excellent phrase, he thought, one that precisely defined his feelings toward LaValle and Kendall. He knew, deep down, that hating them was the same as hating himself. But he couldn’t hate himself; that was self-defeating. At this very moment he couldn’t believe he’d sunk so low as to defect to the NSA. He’d gone through his line of thinking over and over, and now it seemed to him as if someone else, some stranger, had made that decision. It hadn’t been him, it couldn’t have been him, ergo, LaValle and Kendall had made him do it. For that they had to pay the ultimate price.