The Bourne Initiative

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Orlov regarded him a moment, a small, disconcerting smile playing about his lips. “Mr. First Minister, are you by any chance referring to the following quote: ‘God moves in mysterious ways; His wonders to perform; He plants His footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm’?”

  “Indeed, I am,” Savasin said, feeling quite proud of himself.

  “The verse is quite beautiful—moving even, is it not?” He cocked his head. “No, but I suppose to a Communist ideologue such as yourself the verse, in mentioning the power of God, is anathema.”

  “I can recognize the poetry in the Christian Bible as well as anyone,” Savasin replied somewhat defensively.

  “That’s quite a statement, First Minister. Are you certain you want to stand behind it?”

  “Why, of course.”

  “Well, as it happens that quote isn’t found anywhere in the Christian Bible, whose poetry you purport to admire. It is from a nineteenth-century hymn written by the English poet and hymnodist, Richard Cowper.”

  Savasin’s hands curled into fists at his side. He dug his fingernails into his palms in order to keep himself calm, cool, and collected. Having been led like a lamb to the slaughter by this curious relic, it wasn’t an easy task.

  “I’m wondering now,” he said slowly and icily, “whether you and your daughter want my help in extricating Alyoshka from—”

  “Please don’t call her that,” Ekaterina said.

  “It’s not your place,” Dima Orlov said.

  “My place?” This was too much. “I am first minister. It’s my place to—”

  “Yes, yes, I know who you are,” the old man said testily. “However, I am now of the opinion that you are ignorant of who I am.”

  There now was a deathly silence in the atelier. Cerberus had stopped playing. Having detached himself from the piano bench, he took up a position within what Savasin considered striking distance from him. Beset on what seemed all sides, he did not like that at all.

  Already regretting his decision to come here, he said, “You appear to have me at a disadvantage, Dima Vladimirovich.”

  “Appear? Appear!” Dima exclaimed. “There are no ifs ands or buts about it. Are there, Katya?”

  “No, Papa, there aren’t.” She seemed curious and fascinated at the same time. “Your name rings no bells with the first minister.”

  “Should it?” Savasin said, equally testily. If not for the looming presence of Cerberus, he might well have stood up and made his exit. Then he thought of the dead dog in the gutter and he remained in place.

  “Well, you are the first minister, after all. You are privy to reams and reams of information about the citizens of the Russian Federation, not to mention your enemies. But not me.” Dima was grinning. “But that’s all to the good. It means my people have done their job.”

  “Your people?” What people could the old man have? Savasin wondered. In his mind, maybe. He glanced at Ekaterina, but it was like looking at a brick wall. She had nothing for him.

  Dima’s grin was widening. “Let me tell you what I believe is happening here, First Minister. You didn’t come to see Katya to help her with our beloved Alyoshka. You came here to elicit my daughter’s help in whatever scheme you have concocted to take your brother, Konstantin, down a couple of pegs.” He unwound his arms to wave one hand. “I won’t ask you whether I’m right, to give you the opportunity to continue dissembling. The three of us must now face the truth of the matter.”

  “What truth?” Savasin said, the sharp edge making his voice brittle.

  “Patience, Timur Ludmirovich,” Ekaterina advised.

  But Savasin, having endured one humiliation after another, starting with that creep Cerberus, was in no mood to be patient. He leapt up and, keeping one eye on the moving mountain, pointed at them. “I’ve had it with you two. An hour from now I’ll be back with a cadre of FSB agents. We’ll see how clever you are when I start interrogating you in the basement of the Lubyanka.”

  Ekaterina looked up at him from out of damnably serene eyes. “Calm yourself, Tamerlane.”

  At the use of the name of the great conqueror for which Timur was interchangeable, Savasin tried to bank his fury.

  “Gospodin Tamerlane,” Dima said, “I am quite certain that you are familiar with the name Ivan Volkin.”

  “Of course I am.” Savasin was confused by the sudden switch in topic. “He was an eminence grise, a kind of consigliere to a number of the grupperovka leaders.”

  Dima nodded. “That’s right. Last year, Volkin was killed in Moscow by Jason Bourne.”

  “That is known to me,” Savasin said in a calmer voice. “The American agent provocateur did us all a favor.”

  “He did what the FSB—even the Sovereign—could not do.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Dima lifted a hand. “Please sit down.”

  Savasin waited the requisite amount of time so as not to give the impression that he was following an order. When he was seated, Dima said, “As it happens, Bourne did me a favor, as well.”

  Savasin frowned. “How, precisely?”

  “Ivan Volkin was a fucking pain in my side.”

  The curse coming out of the old man’s mouth was initially startling, but then it got the first minister to thinking that he had sized up the situation all wrong. Sitting before him wasn’t any old dotty man, indulged and put to use by his daughter as a gardener. Dima was the power here, not Ekaterina. Savasin almost slapped himself. Egged on by his superior position, he had been blinded by his hubris.

  “Then we have something in common,” he said in his most accommodating voice.

  “That we do, Tamerlane,” Dima said. “More than you know.”

  22

  The late hour was growing even later. The low lamplight was even lower. Harry Hornden had not returned. Fulmer sat very still, stewing in his own juices. On the one hand, he wanted to get out of here, find Max, and turn him over to Department of Homeland Security. On the other hand, and to his complete surprise, he felt a keen desire to stay here with Gwyneth. It had been a long time since Fulmer had found himself smitten the way he was with this woman. He was floored. How could his wife and children have so quickly come to seem part of another universe, existing as no more than photos in a drawer in a desk in an office belonging to someone he once might have known?

  Gwyneth had her back to him. She was pouring herself another drink. His gaze was fixed on the taut globes of her buttocks, as visible as the arcing crease between them.

  “Marshall,” she said, “may I ask why you’re still here?” She turned around. “After all, you have what you came for.”

  “What is that you’re drinking?” Fulmer said, levering himself off the sofa.

  “Absinthe.” Gwyneth held up her stemmed cordial glass. The drink was emerald green. “The real thing.”

  Fulmer had heard vague stories about absinthe but he had felt no particular reason to give them his attention. He watched, fascinated, as Gwen placed a cube of sugar in a slotted spoon, placed the spoon over the glass, and slowly poured a thin stream of water from a chilled carafe over the sugar cube. The result was startling; the drink clouded up, turning a pale, icy green.

  “It’s a liqueur. French,” she said, putting the paraphernalia down. “It was brought back here by the black expats who spent time in Paris.”

  “Well, then I definitely have no interest.”

  Gwyneth pursed her lips. “Who is it you don’t care for? The French or blacks?”

  “The French are idiots. The French love themselves. The French think they know everything about everything, and yet they can’t even run their own country. I hate the French.”

  “And blacks?”

  “The French took them in, didn’t they? Accepted them as equals. I told you they were idiots.”

  “Here, try this.” Gwyneth held out the glass. “Maybe this will assuage some of your hatred.”

  “Nothing’s going to do that.”

  That smile again
, the slight curving of those luscious lips. “As long as you’re here.”

  She came and stood in front of him, so close he could feel the heat emanating from her. He had no choice but to inhale her scent.

  “What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I do.”

  She smiled. “I’m not wearing perfume.”

  If Fulmer were capable of blushing, which he was not, his neck and cheeks would be aflame. To take his mind off his reaction to her, he took the proffered glass.

  “You know, absinthe was made for late-night drinking.”

  He took a sip, experienced many flavors at once: licorice, a very distinct herbal undertone, and a certain bitterness, as if he had been gnawing on a root.

  “What do you think?”

  “It isn’t terrible.” He took another sip.

  Gwyneth laughed. “It contains thujone, an essential component of wormwood, as well as a combination of powerful herbs. The mind is cleared, energizing the body, while the alcohol serves as a relaxant. Really, there’s nothing else like it.”

  She regarded him from beneath long lashes. “And as for the French, they know how to have sex.”

  Fulmer engaged her eyes with his own. “I don’t like that Max put his hands on you.”

  She sipped the absinthe while the glass was still in his hand. “Max paid for that privilege, Marshall. You, on the other hand—”

  As he grabbed her around her narrow waist, the cordial glass fell to the carpet, spilling what was left of the absinthe on his shoes. Too wrapped up in closing with her, he scarcely gave it a thought.

  As he felt her breasts and the heat between her thighs press against him, something was unlocked inside him, some bestial thing that had long been lurking, pacing back and forth in the deepest shadows of his soul, waiting for its chance to be turned loose.

  Now was its time, and it reveled in it.

  —

  Gwyneth’s office might have looked like a salon to Fulmer, but in fact it was kitted out with enough bleeding-edge eavesdropping gear, all cleverly hidden from view, to make it the envy of even TMZ.

  And so while Fulmer’s interview with Gwyneth morphed from friendly banter to a bit of business, to bantering flirtation, to full-on sex of a massive hard-core variety heretofore hidden deeply inside Fulmer’s firmly buttoned-down psyche, all of it, from his foul-mouthed imprecations to his all-too-willing submission to the mistress side of his hostess, was duly recorded in high-fidelity and in living color, as was said by both Gwyneth and Harry Hornden.

  Later, Harry would deem it “a sight to behold,” and toast Gwyneth for peeling away the layers of tough skin that shielded Fulmer from his inner demon, which now belonged, lock, stock, and barrel, to them. At the time, however, Gwyneth was far too busy goading the Fulmerial demon into more and more outré forms of behavior that were nothing she hadn’t experienced before, but would be “Holy shit!” unacceptable to the general public.

  —

  Within eighteen hours Bourne was airborne, in the belly of one of Keyre’s transports. He studied the surprisingly deep dossier on General Arthur MacQuerrie the Somalian’s network had assembled. When he had committed it to memory, he set it aside, put his head back, and fell into a deep and restorative slumber in which he dreamed of Sara. They were running along the sand on Beit Yannai Beach, and the sun was in their eyes. Sara took an abrupt right turn, crashing into the Mediterranean surf. He was right on her tail.

  Diving through a wave, he found her on the other side and kissed her with a fierceness that drove itself all the way through his bones.

  —

  The Angelmaker was similarly in the air, heading for the same destination. As she stared out the Perspex window, she reviewed the final conversation she had had with Keyre before heading to his airfield.

  “There’s good reason why he likes to work alone,” she had told Keyre.

  His eyes narrowed, and he gave her the look she knew so well, the one that passed through skin and flesh and bone to lodge in her brain. “I’m not going to have a problem with you, am I?”

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “A Bourne problem.” Keyre scrutinized every facet of her face with the exquisite attention of a jeweler about to cut a precious stone. “It has not escaped my notice that you have formed an unhealthy attachment to him.”

  “You know where my loyalty lies.”

  “Yes, Angelmaker,” he said, putting heavy emphasis on each word. “I do.” He had rubbed his hands together. “So. To the matter of Bourne’s preference to work alone.”

  “I will shadow him,” she responded firmly. Then her face clouded over. “Even into the NSA dark site?”

  Keyre smirked. “What d’you think?”

  The Angelmaker—or was it Mala?—did not sleep a wink on the flights’ long legs to America. Instead, she watched the visions unspool behind her eyes. She saw herself as she might have been had her father not sold her and her sister into slavery. As she might have been had she not been taken into custody by Keyre, and he not initiated her into the exquisite horrors of Yibir, had he not incised his magic formulae upon her back, had he not bled her day after day, working on her to morph the pain he inflicted into a pleasure that ensnared her in its insidious web. Always pulled in two directions, she was on the verge of losing her self in the cauldron of Yibir when Bourne had arrived to extricate both her and Liis. What would she have become? A prima ballerina like Liis? She didn’t think so. But something. Something other than what she was now: a puppet of man and magic. She no longer knew what was real, what was Yibir magic, and what was her own fantasy.

  23

  Crowcroft, twenty-one acres lying ninety-five miles southeast of the Leesburg Pike, had a long and storied history stretching back hundreds of years. Originally bought by an English shipping magnate to house his son, who had impregnated a woman far below his station, it was turned into a tobacco farm by the wayward son, who, as it turned out, had a better head for business than he did for women. Or for politics, for that matter. Having sided with the South in the Civil War and having agreed to house Johnny Reb during those bloody years, he was, in his elder years, thrown out on his wide bottom. For some years afterward, Crowcroft was kept afloat by remnants of the son’s ragtag progeny, but time after time it went bankrupt, preyed upon by northern carpetbaggers out to line their pockets as quickly and as unscrupulously as possible. Near the end of the twentieth century it went into foreclosure for the last time. For some years after that, it sat fallow and forlorn on the books of the local bank that had lent money to the unfortunate owners, who, as it happened, were thrown in prison for drug trafficking. The same isolated location, which was perfect for illegal activities at Crowcroft, served as a detriment to selling it to legitimate businesses. Until the U.S. government came along and took it off the bank’s hands for ten cents on the dollar.

  For the next eighteen months, Crowcroft remained uninhabited while contractors for the NSA made the required repairs and modifications. These modifications spiraled out from the huge Tara-like great house itself to the various barns, which were remade as barracks for the rotating contingent of federal agents trained to guard the property, and the sheds, which now housed multiple banks of electronic equipment, generators, and back-up generators. The old stone walls that demarked the limits of Crowcroft’s fiefdom were reinforced on the inside by concrete muscle over a steel skeleton. A network of CCTV cameras was installed to complement the motion and heat detectors. Bomb-sniffing dogs on chain leashes patrolled the grounds day and night.

  Arthur Lee, Crowcroft’s manager, was the one holdover from the previous regimes, absent the drug pushers, who had summarily kicked him out. He had been vouched for by the bank and vetted by NSA nerds. For the current regime, he was a necessary but invisible member of the Crowcroft estate. He was a descendant of the shipping magnate’s son and the African slave he fell in love with and elevated to live by his side in the great house
. Many generations had come and gone since her only son was born. Though she subsequently gave birth to four daughters, only the son survived the war.

  Arthur Lee was that man’s great-great-grandson. He had been born and raised on Crowcroft, had been witness to the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly, all of which had rolled in, done its damage to the acreage, and then ebbed away. Through it all, Arthur Lee, part English, part Angolan, part Powhatan, and who knew what else thrown into the hopper, abided, standing tall. He thought of himself as a mongrel, half jokingly, half bitter. He was decidedly antisocial, suspicious of everyone, but when it came to the crunch, it was Arthur Lee who set the broken leg of Jimmy Lang after he took a header off his tractor one autumn afternoon.

  Bourne had met Jimmy Lang through Lang’s ties to the NSA, which were tenuous at best. Lang had a fifty-acre farm that abutted one side of Crowcroft. With his wife ill, his children off in college with no interest in the farming life, and no buyer for his acreage, Lang had had to use his brains to figure out how to make ends meet. What he hit upon was the flock of strangers who had taken possession of Crowcroft. God alone knew what they were doing there, but when Arthur needed his help to keep up Crowcroft’s appearance as a working farm, he called on his friend; Lang was only too happy to take the extra money. Whoever these strangers were, they paid damn well.

  Bourne had come upon Jimmy when, after he had successfully fulfilled the assignment for which the Bourne identity had been created, he was tasked with figuring out what the NSA was doing with that property so far from their HQ. The Treadstone powers-that-were harbored a pathological hatred of the NSA, and were delighted to take every opportunity to undermine the agency, which was why Bourne was given this particular brief. The Treadstone people were ruthless spyocrats. They were aware of his extraordinary prowess, and they were determined to ride him as hard as they could for as long as they could. But none of them was smart enough or prescient enough to figure he’d find a way to break his psychological shackles and drop off their radar screens.