Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Bourne Enigma

by Eric Van Lustbader

  His fist slammed hard into Bourne’s cheek.

  —

  Svetlana, in the grip of the unknown, unseen man, had never felt so alone and helpless. Without ceremony, she was jerked away into the crowd, but not before she caught a quick glimpse of a man approaching the FSB agent from the side. Did the FSB agent crumple? The image was lost in the riotous throng. She was hustled into the back of a nondescript car. The man holding her let go and seated himself next to her. He slammed the door shut and the driver began to wend his way through the traffic-snarled exit from the airport.

  “My apologies for the roughness of your arrival,” the man said with a smile that seemed just as rough around the edges. “My name is Goga. Your husband handpicked me to head his personal mission here. You’re among friends, Svetlana.”

  Svetlana, who had been sweating profusely through her clothes, felt the perspiration congealing as she began to calm down. “How…how did you know I was coming?”

  “Jason Bourne.”

  Of course. Had she not been so freaked out she would have arrived at the same conclusion. “And that man?” She tossed her head in the direction from which they had come.

  “With the general’s death you have become a liability to some within the Kremlin.”

  “Savasin.”

  Goga nodded. “There can be little doubt.”

  She looked out the side windows, which were heavily smoked. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Somewhere safe.” Goga grunted. “All of a sudden Cairo has become a hornet’s nest of conspiring and conflicting interests.” He smiled. “Not to worry. We’ll take good care of you.”

  Then he pulled out a Makarov, said, “Greetings from First Minister Savasin,” and shot her point-blank in the side of the head.

  “Poor thing,” the driver commented, as he ducked out of traffic and pulled into the curb. Immediately, the kid who had snatched Svetlana’s suitcase with Boris’s incriminating material opened the shotgun door, tossed the suitcase in. The driver leaned over, held out a wad of bills, which the kid snatched out of his hand before running off.

  As the car returned to the endless flow of vehicles, Goga said with a shrug, “Poor thing maybe, but politics is politics. We all have to make a living.”

  40

  The first of the bombardments interrupted Borz’s history lesson. The walls shook, the floor shuddered, the windowpanes rattled, the water jug crashed to the floor, shattered.

  An active war zone, Bourne thought. That narrowed it down. He had been transshipped out of Egypt. He looked around. His viewing angle had changed dramatically. He was now strapped to a chair, which was pulled up to a trestle table that looked to have come straight of out a priory refectory—heavy, dark wood, carved apron. Where was the spot where he’d been lying? Had he blacked out again or had Borz injected him with a sedative? It must have been the latter; his head felt heavy, his thoughts muzzy.

  Borz, still looking like Bourne’s identical twin, sat at the head of the table. Bourne was at his right elbow. A meal was being served: two place settings, one in front of Borz, the other at a spot directly opposite Bourne. Dishes were brought: Moroccan pigeon-and-date bastilla, dusted with powdered sugar, a savory lamb tagine with preserved lemons, and bowls piled high with pale yellow couscous.

  Borz began to help himself as soon as the dishes were laid down. “I don’t know about you, but I’m famished. Plane rides tend to pique my hunger. You?”

  “Why did you murder Boris?”

  Borz looked up, clearly astonished. “But my dear Jason, you know why I killed General Karpov. It was the same reason why I garroted him and arranged him in that Christ-like position.” He cocked his head. “Still can’t guess? It was all because of you. I wanted to draw you to me by engaging first your need for revenge and second your insatiable curiosity. I made the murder of your friend so outré, so outrageous that you could not fail to become involved. Besides which, your friend was a fucking atheist, a godless Russian.” He spread his arms wide. “And now here we are, proving how very right I was.”

  Having delivered this pleasing oration, he returned to the study of food, which he shoveled into his mouth with evident delight.

  “The businessman, such as yourself,” Bourne said slowly and deliberately, “is without both God and conscience.”

  Borz looked up, his lips grease-rimmed, and smiled. “That’s what I like best about you, Bourne. Your quick wit.” He recommenced eating.

  “Aren’t you going to wait for your guest?” Bourne said.

  “The guest would be you,” a tall handsome Arab, a decade younger than Borz, said as he entered the room. He spoke English like a Brit, his voice plummy with an upper-crust London accent. He nodded to Borz, an acknowledgement of some kind, before sitting down at his appointed place. “As for myself, I’m a part of the family.”

  Borz smiled, ignoring the next round of shelling, which was, in any event, detonating farther away. As the Arab began to help himself, Borz turned to Bourne and, wiping grease from his lips, said with a smile just shy of being a smirk, “Jason, meet El-Amir, Feyd’s son, Amira’s brother.”

  Bourne took a deep breath, let it out slowly as he studied El-Amir while he tried to quell the growling of his empty stomach. Keeping his expression carefully neutral, he saw some of Feyd’s features, remolded by the familial genetic stew. Feyd’s wife had been long gone by the time Bourne came on the scene, but Bourne had seen photos of her. She had been a beautiful woman—dusky, exotic, with the large, flashing eyes of a film star. Amira had inherited much of her good looks, wild and natural; she was still very much a part of the Third World. El-Amir’s, on the other hand, was altogether different: polished and manicured in the First World manner. His pitch-black hair was expertly cut, rippling back off his diamond-shaped face to cover the tops of his ears, thick at the nape of his neck. His sharp desert features combined with a highly-polished Western demeanor to give him the aspect of a Hollywood mogul.

  Why was he here? Why wasn’t he in London? “And as part of Bobby’s family, what is it you do?”

  El-Amir frowned. “Bobby?”

  “Yes. Ivan’s real name is Bobby.” Bourne saw Borz wrinkle his nose as if he’d just smelled a dead rat. He smiled. “Didn’t he tell you? Or aren’t you in the inner part of the family circle, like me?”

  El-Amir turned to Borz. “What’s he raving about?”

  Borz, in the midst of taking up some tagine in a triangle of flatbread, said, “A joke, nothing more.”

  “A family joke.” Bourne, doing his best to put aside his growing hunger, watched how El-Amir reacted to the taunt, then turned back to Borz. “I assume I’ve been out—”

  “Less than twenty-hour hours, more than eight.” Borz popped the food into his mouth, chewed slowly, relishing the tastes. “Not that it matters to you.”

  “But it matters to you, Bobby. In two days something cataclysmic is going to happen. Boris knew it and now I know it. What is it?”

  A curious expression flitted across Borz’s face before vanishing into the vault protecting his reactions. And now Bourne felt a surge of both elation and bafflement. Borz was not, as Bourne had assumed, the instigator.

  Borz wiped his right hand, with which he had been eating, Bedouin style. “The one thing I’m short of information on is just what the hell Karpov was doing behind the Sovereign’s back. He was playing a dangerous game, but then I don’t have to tell you that. There’s something afoot inside the Kremlin. Some kind of internecine warfare, is it? Whatever it is, it’s big—very big.”

  “And you want in on it.”

  “I want to be on the winning side. And it seems to me that a lot of people besides Karpov have had their flames snuffed out of late. Not the least of them being Ivan Volkin’s progeny.” Borz switched to Russian. “Irina and Aleksandr, what a pair! Poor Ivan, he never knew how to control them. Well, it couldn’t happen to a shittier zvezdá,” Zvezdá was Russian for “a celebrity,” but Borz was using the term sarcast
ically. He sniffed. “But I suppose that is the inevitable result of them working for their grandfather.”

  But that couldn’t be right, Bourne thought.

  “I suppose it was lucky for you Mik blew up his Moscow operation before I got a look at what he was doing for you.”

  “Not just me,” Borz said sourly. “Old man Volkin as well.”

  Bourne was shaken. If they had been working for their grandfather, why would Irina have led him right to Mik, Borz and Volkin’s money launderer? Why had she tried to keep Mik from blowing himself and his electronic files up? Something didn’t track, unless… Unless Irina and Aleksandr had gone into business for themselves. It was a logical assumption based on the new facts. Irina had led him to Mik as a favor to him. She had wanted to prove to him that she was a friend, one who went to extraordinary lengths to get him what he wanted most: access to Borz. And what did she and her twin want most? The coin and whatever was inside. She had hoped to trade on Bourne’s gratitude.

  All the while they spoke, El-Amir remained in Bourne’s field of vision. He was eating his meal, observing but not interjecting, not wanting to interfere with the flow of the dialogue. Amira was right about him: he was both smart and clever. Observing was learning, in whatever field you were in, especially the shadow world of spies and terrorists, oligarchs and siloviki.

  “Bourne, what was your friend, Boris, up to? What did he find so fascinating in Cairo?”

  “You, Bobby. He wanted to nail you as badly as I do.”

  “Again with the Bobby,” El-Amir murmured as if to himself.

  Borz pointedly ignored him, his basilisk gaze fixed on Bourne. “What a fucked-up life you must lead, Jason.” His head waggled from side to side. “You’re like a man with one leg and no crutch. How do you manage?”

  “I’ve developed a highly refined knack for adaptation.”

  Borz made a sound in the back of his throat. “I’ll just bet you have.”

  “We met in a city. You were saying…”

  Borz stared at him for a long time without so much as a blink of his eyes. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? For men like us information is everything; without it we wither and die.” He pushed his plate away. “Hungry?”

  Bourne tried to move his arms. “I couldn’t eat even if I was.”

  The shelling had ceased for the moment, replaced by a deathly silence that reverberated like a bell with a phantom clapper.

  “Maybe there’s a way out of this,” Bourne said after a time.

  “Oh, there is,” Borz said cheerfully. “And I’m about to show it to you.”

  “A compromise. We both get what we want.”

  He cocked his head. “Sounds so good, the way you put it.” He produced a rueful smile from his deep bag of tricks. “You see, Jason, the trouble is we’re both scorpions. We’ll sting each other as soon as we get close enough.”

  Borz’s sigh was strictly for the invisible balcony. “The truth is, trust has no provenance here.” He stood. “Which is why I have devised a plan to compel you to tell me what I want to know.”

  “If you intend to have me interrogated, you’ll be sadly disappointed,” Bourne said. “There’s nothing you can do to me.” His face darkened. “You’ve already tried everything, including kidnapping friends of mine and holding them hostage. How did that work out for you?”

  Borz’s face turned stormy. “Don’t take me for a fool, Jason,” he snapped. He gripped the back of his chair, as if seeking to regain his emotional equilibrium. “But all men can be persuaded. The craft lies in determining the nature of the inducement.” He paused for a moment, another smile played cruelly around lips that were not quite Bourne’s. “Another lesson you taught me.”

  He gestured toward El-Amir, who stood also despite not having finished his meal. He looked like the type who had become used to snapping to. “I assume Amira told you what El-Amir does.”

  “He works for CloudNet TV,” Bourne said.

  Borz’s grin went coast-to-coast. “Oh, she’s been a naughty girl.”

  El-Amir, frowning, said, “Maybe she doesn’t know.”

  Borz snorted. “As you would say, Don’t be daft, old man. Your father found out you’re working for me; a smart girl like your sister, it’s altogether likely that she knows. The interesting thing is that she didn’t tell Jason.”

  “She’s ashamed of me,” El-Amir said.

  “Maybe,” Borz allowed.

  “Trust me. I know her.”

  Borz tossed his head like a wild horse. “Be that as it may, I think it’s time we showed Jason what’s in store for him.” He nodded, and a man who Bourne hadn’t seen before stepped up and cut his bonds, stuck the point of the knife into the flesh just above his kidney, and frog-marched him briefly outside and into the building next door that Bourne had glimpsed through the window.

  Inside was a different world altogether. Camera, snaking cables, boom mikes, a massive array of lights high up, follow-spots, key lights, even a teleprompter. A thick pane of clear plastic had been jury-rigged to wall off the banks of monitors. He might have been on a Hollywood soundstage.

  Bourne saw the green screen first. “What’s being projected onto that?” he asked.

  “Check the monitor,” Borz said as he came up beside Bourne. The man holding Bourne jerked him around to the left, behind the plastic wall, sat him down in a director’s chair in front of the monitors, to which he then bound him hand and foot. Nearby, El-Amir, bent over, spoke in low tones to one of the seated engineers. A moment later, a desert scene bloomed on the monitors.

  “Righto, we’re all set with lights and sound,” El-Amir said, taking a seat. And turning to Borz, “Are you ready for your close-up?”

  Bourne watched himself climb onto the soundstage. On the monitors, he was in the desert, not in an ad-hoc video studio.

  “Places, everyone!” El-Amir said into the mic built into the console in front of him. He sat. He lifted an arm, then let it fall like an ax blade. “And, we’re rolling!”

  That was when two hooded men brought out a prisoner. He looked like he’d been through the seven levels of hell. They brought him in front of Bourne/Borz, pushed him to his knees. One of the men handed Bourne/Borz a knife with a long, scimitar-shaped blade. Bourne/Borz grabbed a handful of hair, yanked the prisoner’s head back, exposing his throat. He laid the blade against it, grinned at the camera as a thin line of blood oozed out, dripped onto the boards of the stage.

  El-Amir scooted over to where Bourne sat. “Here’s where it really gets good,” he whispered in Bourne’s ear. He gestured toward the bank of monitors, where the engineer had put up Bourne’s name, the name and rank of the prisoner, and a brief exhortation to jihad. The words scrolled across the bottom screen, in an endless loop, American TV style.

  “Don’t look so glum, chum. You’re about to be reborn as an international star.” El-Amir gave the back of Bourne’s head an affectionate pat. “The entire world is going to watch as Jason Bourne beheads a British liaison officer.”

  41

  When he was a fresh-faced young man, Roy Michael Tambourine couldn’t wait to get to Cairo. After all, Cairo was the epicenter of the great Egyptian Pharaonic Empire that had fascinated him all his life. He had studied its mysteries in college, had learned to speak the guttural Egyptian Arabic, and, when, at length, he had first arrived he could scarcely contain his excitement.

  That was almost forty years ago. He had for decades been teaching at Cairo University as a more or less permanent visiting professor. He had borne witness to regimes coming and going, to revolutions, counterrevolutions, the so-called Arab Spring, which was nothing more than a catchy tagline for Western mass media outlets. It astonished him that in the end, the more things changed the more they stayed the same. Egypt was embedded in amber, ossified as expertly as the mummies and artifacts in the Archeological Museum, in whose dusty recesses he still spent the bulk of his free time.

  Today was just like every other day in the last forty year
s: Professor Tambourine awoke in his small apartment, showered, shaved, pomaded his hair, dressed in one of his three tropic-weight suits. In his tiny kitchen he ate two pieces of toast—just this side of burned—with butter and marmalade, drank a cup of Earl Grey tea with a spot of milk, and, after cleaning up, braved the chaos of crosstown traffic to his dimly lit office at the university.

  For the first forty minutes of the morning, he sat at his wide desk, a remnant of Britain’s Colonial hold on the country, grading papers. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that his mind was wandering. He looked up, peering over his spectacles at the portrait of Zahl Hawass, the most famous Egyptian archeologist. The young man stared back at Tambourine, completely unaware of the ignominious downfall in his future, exiled for agreeing to concession contracts at the Egyptian Museum. In fact, Dr. Zahl’s real crime was vigorously backing Hosni Mubarak, even during the mass protests of the Arab Spring.

  Tambourine had hung the portrait not because he venerated Dr. Zahl, but as an object lesson in the consequences of becoming embroiled in the treacherously shifting sands of Egyptian politics—even for visiting professors.

  Dr. Zahl’s familiar face blurred before Tambourine’s eyes, as his mind continued to wander. He realized, somewhat belatedly, that he was bored, that he’d been bored for years. The tedium of academic life had seeped into his pores like desert sand, graying him out. He was old, and what had he done with his life? All the secrets of ancient Egypt had either been found or were missing, never to return. His field of expertise had turned into a dead end.

  He sighed deeply, saddened in the way only the British can get when they’ve been away from home for too long. He was just about to make himself a cup of tea, when his private mobile buzzed. At once, his heart-rate began to gallop. He fumbled for his phone, almost dropped it in his haste and excitement, flipped it open.