The Bourne Sanction

by Eric Van Lustbader

  After her talk with Rob Batt in the parking lot, Soraya had returned to her table inside and filled in Kiki and Deron on her plan. The noise from the band on stage made eavesdropping impossible, even by anyone at the next table. Because of her longtime friendship with Drew Davis, it had been up to Kiki to create the spark that would light the fuse. This she did, resulting in this impromptu meeting in Davis’s office.

  “For me to even contemplate what you’re asking, you have to guarantee blanket immunity,” Drew Davis said to Soraya. “Plus, leave our names out of it, unless you want to piss me off—which you don’t—as well as pissing off half the elected officials in the district.”

  “You have my word,” Soraya said. “We want these two people, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

  Drew Davis glanced at Kiki, who responded with an almost imperceptible nod.

  Now Davis turned to Bev.

  “Here’s what you can do and what you can’t do,” Bev said, reacting to her boss’s cue. “I won’t allow anyone on my ranch who’s not there for legitimate purposes—that is, either a patron or a working girl. So forget just barging in there. I do that and tomorrow we have no business left.”

  She wasn’t even looking at Drew Davis, but Soraya saw him nod in assent, and her heart fell. Everything depended on their gaining access to the general while he was in the midst of his frolics. Then she had a thought.

  “I’ll go in as a working girl,” she said.

  “No, you won’t,” Deron said. “You’re known to both the general and Feir. One look at you and they’ll be spooked.”

  “They don’t know me.”

  Everyone turned their heads to stare at Kiki.

  “Absolutely not,” Deron said.

  “Ease up there,” Kiki said with a laugh. “I’m not going through with anything. I just need access.” She mimed taking photos. Then she turned to Bev. “How do I get into the general’s private room?”

  “You can’t. For obvious reasons the private rooms are sacrosanct. Another rule of the house. And both the general and Feir have chosen their partners for the evening.” She drummed her fingers against Davis’s desktop. “But in the case of the general there is one way.”

  Virgil Pelz took Bourne and Petra farther into the bunker’s main tunnel, to a rough-hewn space that opened out into a circle. There were benches here, a small gas stove, a refrigerator.

  “Lucky someone forgot to turn off the electricity,” Petra said.

  “Lucky my ass.” Pelz settled himself on a bench. “My nephew pays a town official under the table to keep the lights on.” He offered them whiskey or wine, which they refused. He poured himself a shot of liquor, downed it perhaps to fortify himself or to keep himself from sinking back into the shadows. It was obvious he liked having company, that the stimulation of other humans was bringing him out of himself.

  “Most of what I’ve already told you about the Black Legion is basic history, if you know where to look, but the key to understanding their success in negotiating the dangerous postwar landscape lies in two men: Farid Icoupov and Ibrahim Sever.”

  “I assume this Icoupov you speak of is Semion Icoupov’s father,” Bourne said.

  Pelz nodded. “Just so.”

  “And did Ibrahim Sever have a son?”

  “He had two,” Pelz replied, “but I’m getting ahead of myself.” He smacked his lips, glanced at the bottle of whiskey, then decided against another shot.

  “Farid and Ibrahim were the best of friends. They grew up together, each the only sons in large families. Possibly, this is what bonded them as children. The bond was strong; it lasted for most of their lives, but Ibrahim Sever was a warrior at heart, Farid Icoupov an intellectual, and the seeds of discontent and mistrust must have been sown early. During the war their shared leadership worked out just fine. Ibrahim was in charge of the Black Legion soldiers on the Eastern Front; Farid put in place and directed the intelligence-gathering network in the Soviet Union.

  “It was after the war when the problems began. Stripped of his duties as commandant of the military end, Ibrahim began to fret that his power was eroding.” Pelz clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Listen, American, if you’re a student of history you know how the two longtime allies and friends Gaius Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus became enemies infected by the ambitions, fears, deceptions, and power struggles of those under their respective commands. So it was with these two. In time, Ibrahim convinced himself—no doubt abetted by some of his more militant advisers—that his longtime friend was planning a power grab. Unlike Caesar, who was off in Gaul when Pompey declared war on him, Farid lived in the next house. Ibrahim Sever and his men came in the night and assassinated Farid Icoupov. Three days later Farid’s son, Semion, shot Ibrahim to death as he was driving to work. In retaliation, Ibrahim’s son, Asher, went after Semion in a Munich nightclub. Asher managed to escape, but in the ensuing hail of gunfire Asher’s younger brother was killed.”

  Pelz scrubbed his face with his hand. “You see how it goes, American? Like an ancient Roman vendetta, an orgy of blood of biblical proportions.”

  “I know about Semion Icoupov, but not about Sever,” Bourne said. “Where’s Asher Sever now?”

  The old man shrugged his thin shoulders. “Who knows? If Icoupov did, Sever would surely be dead by now.”

  For a time, Bourne sat silent, thinking about the Black Legion’s attack on the professor, thinking about all the little anomalies that had been piling up in his mind: the oddity of Pyotr’s network of decadents and incompetents, the professor saying it was his idea to have the stolen plans delivered to him via the network, and the question of whether Mischa Tarkanian—and Arkadin himself—was Black Legion. At last, he said, “Virgil, I need to ask you several questions.”

  “Yes, American.” Pelz’s eyes looked as bright and eager as a robin’s.

  Still, Bourne hesitated. Revealing anything of his mission or its background to a stranger violated every instinct, every lesson he’d been taught, and yet he could see no other alternative. “I came to Munich because a friend of mine—a mentor, really—asked me to go after the Black Legion, first because they’re planning an attack against my country, and second because their leader, Semion Icoupov, ordered his son, Pyotr, killed.”

  Pelz looked up, a curious expression on his face. “Asher Sever gathered his power base, which he’d inherited from his father—a powerful intelligence-gathering network strewn across Asia and Europe—and ousted Semion. Icoupov hasn’t been running the Black Legion for decades. If he had, I doubt whether I’d still be down here. Unlike Asher Sever, Icoupov was a man you could reason with.”

  “Are you saying that you’ve met both Semion Icoupov and Asher Sever?” Bourne said.

  “That’s right,” Pelz said, nodding. “Why?”

  Bourne had gone cold as he contemplated the unthinkable. Could the professor have been lying to him all the time? But if so—if he was in fact a member of the Black Legion—why in the world would he entrust the delivery of the attack plans to Pyotr’s shaky network? Surely he would have known how unreliable its members were. Nothing seemed to make sense.

  Knowing he had to solve this problem one step at a time, he took out his cell phone, scrolled through the photos, brought up the one the professor had sent of Egon Kirsch. He looked at the two men in the photo, then handed the phone to Pelz.

  “Virgil, do you recognize either of these men?”

  Pelz squinted, then stood and walked nearer to one of the bare lightbulbs. “No.” He shook his head, then, after a moment’s further scrutiny, his forefinger jabbed at the photo. “I don’t know, because he looks so different…” He returned to where Bourne sat, turned the phone so they could both see the photo, and tapped the figure of Professor Specter. “… but, damn, I’d swear this one is Asher Sever.”

  Thirty-Six

  PETER MARKS, chief of operations, was with Veronica Hart in her office, poring over reams of personnel data sheets, when they c
ame for her. Luther LaValle, accompanied by a pair of federal marshals, had swept through CI security, armed with their warrant. Hart had only the briefest of warnings—a phone call from the first set of security guards downstairs—that her professional world was imploding. No time to get out of the way of the falling debris.

  She barely had time to tell Marks, then stand up to face her accusers before the three men entered her office and presented her with the federal warrant.

  “Veronica Rose Hart,” the senior of the stone-faced federal marshals intoned, “you are hereby placed under arrest for conspiring with one Jason Bourne, a rogue agent, for purposes that violate the regulations of Central Intelligence.”

  “On what evidence?” Hart said.

  “NSA surveillance photos of you in the courtyard of the Freer handing a packet to Jason Bourne,” the marshal said in the same zombie voice.

  Marks, who was also on his feet, said, “This is insane. You can’t really believe—”

  “Shut it, Mr. Marks,” Luther LaValle said with no fear of contradiction. “One more word out of you and I’ll have you put under formal investigation.”

  Marks was about to reply when a sharp look from the DCI forced him to bite back his words. His jaws clamped shut, but the fury in his eyes was unmistakable.

  Hart came around the desk, and the junior marshal cuffed her hands behind her back.

  “Is that really necessary?” Marks said.

  LaValle pointed at him wordlessly. As they marched Hart from her office, she said, “Take over, Peter. You’re acting DCI now.”

  LaValle grinned. “Not for long, if I have anything to say about it.”

  After they’d gone, Marks collapsed into his chair. Finding that his hands were trembling, he clasped them together, as if in prayer. His heart was pounding so hard he found it difficult to think. He jumped up, walked over to the window behind the DCI’s desk, stood staring out at the Washington night. All the monuments were lit up, all the streets and avenues were filled with traffic. Everything was as it should be, and yet nothing looked familiar. He felt as if he’d entered an alternate universe. He couldn’t have been witness to what just happened, NSA couldn’t be about to absorb CI into its gigantic corpus. But then he turned around to find the office empty and the full horror of seeing the DCI frog-marched out in handcuffs swept over him, made his legs weak, so that he sought out the big chair behind the desk and sat in it.

  Then the implications of where he sat, and why, sank in. He picked up the phone and dialed Stu Gold, CI’s lead counsel.

  “Sit tight. I’ll be right over,” Gold told him in his usual no-nonsense voice. Did nothing faze him?

  Then Marks began to make a series of calls. It was going to be a long and harrowing night.

  Rodney Feir was having the time of his life. As he accompanied Afrique into one of the rooms in the back of The Glass Slipper, he felt as if he were on top of the world. In fact, popping a Viagra, he decided to ask her to do a number of things he’d never tried before. Why the hell not? he asked himself.

  While he was undressing he thought of the information on Typhon’s field agents Peter Marks had sent him via interoffice mail. Feir had deliberately told Marks he didn’t want it sent electronically because it was too insecure. The info was folded into the inside pocket of his coat, ready to give to General Kendall before they left The Glass Slipper tonight. He could have handed it over while they were at dinner, but he’d felt, all things considered, that a champagne toast after all their treats had been consumed was the proper way to cap off the night.

  Afrique was already on the bed, spread languidly, her large eyes half closed, but she got right down to business as soon as Feir joined her. He tried to keep his mind on the proceedings, but seeing as how his body was totally in it, there wasn’t much point. He preferred dwelling on the things that made him truly happy, like getting the better of Peter Marks. When he was growing up it was people like Marks—and, for that matter, Batt—who’d had it all over him, brainiacs with brawn, in other words, who’d made his life miserable. They were the ones who had the cool circle of friends, who got all the great-looking girls, who rode in cars while he was still tooling around on a scooter. He was the nerd, the chubby—fat, really—kid who was made the butt of all their jokes, who was pushed around and ostracized, who, despite his high IQ, was so tongue-tied he could never stick up for himself.

  He’d joined CI as a glorified pencil pusher, and, yes, he’d worked his way up the professional ladder, but not into fieldwork or counterintelligence. No, he was chief of field support, which meant that he was in charge of gathering and distributing the paperwork generated by the very CI personnel he longed to be like. His office was the central hub of supply and demand, and there were days when he could convince himself that it was the nerve center of CI. But most of the time he saw himself for what he really was—someone who kept pushing electronic lists, data entry forms, directorate requests, allocation tables, budget spreadsheets, personnel assignment profiles, matériel lading bills, a veritable landslide of paperwork whizzing through the CI intranet. A monitor of information, in other words, a master of nothing.

  He was enveloped in pleasure, a warm, viscous friction spreading outward from his groin into his torso and limbs. He closed his eyes and sighed.

  At first, being an anonymous cog in the CI machine suited him, but as the years passed, as he rose in the hierarchy, only the Old Man understood his worth, for it was the Old Man who promoted him, time after time. But no one else—certainly none of the other directors—said a word to him until they needed something. Then a request came flying through CI cyberspace as quick as you could say, I need it yesterday. If he got them what they wanted yesterday, he heard nothing, not even a nod of thanks in the hallway, but should there be any delay at all, no matter the reason, they’d land on him like woodpeckers on a tree full of insects. He’d never hear the end of their pestering until they got what they wanted, and then silence again. It seemed sadly ironic to him that even in an insider’s paradise like CI he was on the outside.

  It was humiliating to be one of those stereotypical Americans who time and again got sand kicked in his face. How he hated himself for being a living, breathing cliché. It was these evenings spent with General Kendall that gave his life color and meaning, the clandestine meetings in the health club sauna, the dinners at local barbecue joints in SE, and then the delicious chocolate nightcaps at The Glass Slipper, where he was for once the insider instead of having his nose pressed to someone else’s window. Knowing that he couldn’t be transformed he had to settle for losing himself in Afrique’s bed at The Glass Slipper.

  General Kendall, smoking a cigar in the corral, the colloquial name for the parlor room where the girls were paraded for the benefit of the patrons, was enjoying himself immensely. If he was thinking of his boss at all, it was of the heart attack this scene he was enacting would cause LaValle. As for his family, they were the farthest thing from his mind. Unlike Feir, who always went for the same girl, Kendall was a man of diverse tastes when it came to the women of The Glass Slipper, and why not? He had virtually no choice in any other areas of his life. If not here, where?

  He sat on the purple velvet sofa, one arm thrown along the back, watching through slitted eyes the slow parade of flesh. He had already made his choice; the girl was in her room, undressing, but when Bev had come to him, suggesting that he might want something a bit more special—another girl to create a threesome—he hadn’t hesitated. He’d been just about to make his choice when he saw someone. She was impossibly tall, with skin like the darkest cocoa, and was so regal in her beauty that he broke out into a sweat.

  He caught Bev’s eye and she came over. Bev was attuned to his desires. “I want her,” he said to Bev, pointing at the regal beauty.

  “I’m afraid Kiki’s not available,” she said.

  This answer made Kendall want her all the more. Venal witch; she knew him too well. He produced five hundred-dollar bills. “How about
now?” he said.

  Bev, true to form, pocketed the money. “Leave it to me,” she said.

  The general watched her pick her way through the girls to where Kiki was standing, somewhat apart from the others. While he observed the conversation his heart began to beat in his chest like a war drum. He was sweating so much he was obliged to wipe his palms on the purple velvet of the sofa arm. If she said no, what would he do? But she wasn’t saying no, she was looking across the corral at him, with a smile that raised his temperature a couple of degrees. Jesus, he wanted her!

  As if in a trance, he saw her coming across the room toward him, her hips swaying, that maddening half smile on her face. He stood up, with some difficulty, he noted. He felt like a seventeen-year-old virgin. Kiki held out her hand and he took it, terrified that she’d be repulsed if it was damp, but nothing interfered with that half smile.

  There was something intensely pleasurable about allowing her to lead him past all the other girls, enjoying the looks of envy on their faces.

  “Which room are you in?” Kiki murmured in a voice like honey.

  Kendall, inhaling her spicy, musky scent, could not find his voice. He pointed, and again she led him as if he were on a leash until they were standing in front of the door.

  “Are you sure you want two girls tonight?” She brushed her hip against his. “I’m more than enough for any man I’ve been with.”