The Bourne Objective

Book One


1


YES,” SUPARWITA SAID, “that is the ring Holly Marie Moreau’s father gave her.”
“This ring.” Jason Bourne held up the object in question, a simple gold band with engraving around the inside. “I have no memory of it.”
“You have no memory of many things in your past,” Suparwita said, “including Holly Marie Moreau.”
Bourne and Suparwita were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Balinese shaman’s house deep in the jungle of Karangasem, in southeast Bali. Bourne had returned to the island to trap Noah Perlis, the spy who had murdered Holly years ago. He had pried the ring out of Perlis’s grasp after he had killed him not five miles from this spot.
“Holly Marie’s mother and father arrived here from Morocco when she was five,” Suparwita said. “They had the look of refugees.”
“What were they fleeing from?”
“Difficult to say for certain. If the stories about them are true, they chose an excellent place to hide from religious persecution.” Suparwita was known formally as a Mangku, both a high priest and a shaman, but also something more, impossible to express in Western terms. “They wanted protection.”
“Protection?” Bourne frowned. “From what?”
Suparwita was a handsome man of indeterminate age. His skin was a deep nut brown, his smile wide and devastating, revealing two rows of white, even teeth. He was large for a Balinese, and exuded a kind of otherworldly power that fascinated Bourne. His house, an inner sanctum surrounded by a lush, sun-dappled garden and high stucco walls, lay in deepest shadow so that the interior was cool even at noontime. The floor was packed dirt covered by a sisal rug. Here and there odd items of indeterminate nature—pots of herbs, clusters of roots, bouquets of dried flowers pressed into the shape of a fan—sprouted from floor or walls as if alive. The shadows, which filled the corners to overflowing, seemed constantly in motion as if formed from liquid rather than air.
“From Holly’s uncle,” Suparwita said. “It was from him they took the ring in the first place.”
“He knew they stole it?”
“He thought it was lost.” Suparwita cocked his head. “There are men outside.”
Bourne nodded. “We’ll deal with them in a minute.”
“Aren’t you concerned they’ll burst in here, guns drawn?”
“They won’t show themselves until I’ve left here; they want me, not you.” Bourne touched the ring with his forefinger. “Go on.”
Suparwita inclined his head. “They were hiding from Holly’s uncle. He had vowed to bring her back to the family compound in the High Atlas Mountains.”
“They’re Berbers. Of course, Moreau means ‘Moor,’ ” Bourne mused. “Why did Holly’s uncle want to bring her back to Morocco?”
Suparwita looked at Bourne for a long time. “I imagine you knew, once.”
“Noah Perlis had the ring last, so he must have murdered Holly to get it.” Bourne took the ring in his hand. “Why did he want it? What’s so important about a wedding ring?”
“That,” Suparwita said, “is a part of the story you were trying to discover.”
“That was some time ago. Now I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Perlis had flats in many cities,” Suparwita said, “but he was based in London, which was where Holly went when she traveled abroad during the eighteen months before she returned to Bali. Perlis must have followed her back here to kill her and obtain the ring for himself.”
“How do you know all this?” Bourne asked.
Suparwita’s face broke into one of his thousand-watt smiles. All at once he looked like the genie conjured up by Aladdin. “I know,” he said, “because you told me.”
Soraya Moore noticed the differences between the old Central Intelligence under the late Veronica Hart and the new CI under M. Errol Danziger the moment she walked into CI headquarters in Washington, DC. For one thing, security had been beefed up to the point that getting through the various checkpoints felt like infiltrating a medieval fortress. For another, she didn’t recognize a single member of the security personnel on duty. Every face had that hard, beady look only the US military can instill in a human being. She wasn’t surprised by this. After all, before being appointed as DCI by the president, M. Errol Danziger had been the NSA’s deputy director of Signals Intelligence, with a long and distinguished career in the armed forces and then in the DoD. He also had a long and distinguished career as a brass-balled sonovabitch. No, what startled her was simply the speed with which the new DCI had installed his own people inside CI’s formerly sacrosanct walls.
From the time that it had been the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the agency had been its own domain, entirely free of interference from either the Pentagon or its intelligence arm, the NSA. Now, because of the growing power of Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday, CI was being merged with NSA, its unique DNA being diluted. M. Errol Danziger was now its director, and Danziger was Secretary Halliday’s creature.
Soraya, the director of Typhon, a Muslim-staffed anti-terrorist agency operating under the aegis of CI, considered the changes Danziger had instigated during the several weeks she had been away in Cairo. She felt lucky that Typhon was semi-independent. She reported directly to the DCI, bypassing the various directorate heads. She was half Arab and she knew all her people, had in most instances handpicked them. They would follow her through the gates of hell, if she asked it of them. But what about her friends and colleagues inside CI itself? Would they stay or would they go?
She got off at the DCI’s floor, drenched in the eerie green light filtered through bullet- and bombproof glass, and came up against a young man, reed-thin, steely-eyed, with a high-and-tight marine haircut. He was sitting behind a desk, riffling through a stack of papers. The nameplate on his desk read: LT. R. SIMMONS READE.
“Good afternoon, I’m Soraya Moore,” she said. “I have an appointment with the DCI.”
Lt. R. Simmons Reade glanced up and gave her a neutral look that nevertheless seemed to hold the hint of a sneer. He wore a blue suit, a starched white shirt, and a red-and-blue regimental striped tie. Without glancing at his computer terminal he said, “You had an appointment with Director Danziger. That was fifteen days ago.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I was in the field, cleaning up the loose ends of the mission in northern Iran that had to be—”
The light’s greenish tint made Reade’s face seem longer, sharper, dangerous, almost like a weapon. “You disobeyed a direct order from Director Danziger.”
“The new DCI had just been installed,” she said. “He had no way of knowing—”
“And yet Director Danziger knows all he needs to know about you, Ms. Moore.”
Soraya bristled. “What the hell does that mean? And it’s Director Moore.”
“Not surprisingly, you’re out of date, Ms. Moore,” Reade said blandly. “You’ve been terminated.”
“What? You’ve got to be joking. I can’t—” Soraya felt as if she were being sucked down a sinkhole that had just appeared beneath her feet. “I demand to see the DCI!”
Reade’s face got even harder, like a pitchman for the “Be All You Can Be” slogan. “As of this moment, your clearance has been revoked. Please surrender your ID, company credit cards, and cell phone.”
Soraya leaned forward, her fists on the sleek desktop. “Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”
“I’m the voice of Director Danziger.”
“I don’t believe a word you say.”
“Your cards won’t work. There’s nowhere to go but out.”
She stood back up. “Tell the DCI I’ll be in my office when he decides he has time to debrief me.”
R. Simmons Reade reached down beside his desk and lifted a small, topless cardboard box, which he slid across to her. Soraya looked down and almost choked on her tongue. There, neatly stacked, was every personal item she’d had in her office.
I can only repeat what you yourself told me.” Suparwita stood up and, with him, Bourne.
“So even then I was concerned with Noah Perlis.” It wasn’t a question and the Balinese shaman didn’t treat it as such. “But why? And what was his connection to Holly Marie Moreau?”
“Whatever the truth of it,” Suparwita said, “it seems likely they met in London.”
“And what of the odd lettering that runs around the inside of the ring?”
“You showed it to me once, hoping I could help. I have no idea what it means.”
“It isn’t any modern language,” Bourne said, still racking his damaged memory for details.
Suparwita took a step toward him and lowered his voice until it was just above a whisper. Nevertheless, it penetrated into Bourne’s mind like the sting of a wasp.
“As I said, you were born in December, Siwa’s month.” He pronounced the god Shiva’s name as all Balinese did. “Further, you were born on Siwa’s day: the last day of the month, which is both the ending and the beginning. Do you understand? You are destined to die and be born again.”
“I already did that eight months ago when Arkadin shot me.”
Suparwita nodded gravely. “Had I not given you a draft of the resurrection lily beforehand, it’s very likely you would have died from that wound.”
“You saved me,” Bourne said. “Why?”
Suparwita gave him another of his thousand-watt grins. “We are linked, you and I.” He shrugged. “Who can say how or why?”
Bourne, needing to turn to practical matters, said, “There are two of them outside, I checked before I came in.”
“And yet you led them here.”
Now it was Bourne’s turn to grin. He lowered his voice even further. “All part of the plan, my friend.”
Suparwita raised a hand. “Before you carry out your plan, there is something you must know and something I must teach you.”
He paused long enough for Bourne to wonder what was on his mind. He knew the shaman well enough to understand when something grave was about to be discussed. He’d seen that expression just before Suparwita had fed him the resurrection lily concoction in this very room some months ago.
“Listen to me.” There was no smile on the shaman’s face now. “Within the year you will die, you will need to die in order to save those around you, everyone you love or care about.”
Despite all his training, all his mental discipline, Bourne felt a wave of coldness sweep through him. It was one thing to put yourself in harm’s way, to cheat death over and over, often by a hairbreadth, but it was quite another to be told in unequivocal terms that you had less than a year to live. On the other hand, he had the choice to laugh it off—he was a Westerner, after all, and there were so many belief systems in the world that it was easy enough to dismiss 99 percent of them. And yet, looking into Suparwita’s eyes, he could see the truth. As before, the shaman’s extraordinary powers had allowed him to see the future, or at least Bourne’s future. “We are linked, you and I.” He had saved Bourne’s life before, it would be foolish to doubt him now.
“Do you know how, or when?”
Suparwita shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. My flashes of the future are like waking dreams, filled with color and portent, but there are no images, no details, no clarity.”
“You once told me that Siwa would look after me.”
“Indeed.” The smile returned to Suparwita’s face as he led Bourne into another room, filled with shadows and the scent of frangipani incense. “And the next several hours will be an example of his help.”
Valerie Zapolsky, Rory Doll’s personal assistant, brought the message to DCI M. Errol Danziger herself, because, as she said, her boss did not want to entrust the news to the computer system, even one as hackproof as CI’s.
“Why didn’t Doll bring this himself?” Danziger frowned without looking up.
“The director of operations is otherwise engaged,” Valerie said. “Temporarily.”
She was a small dark woman with hooded eyes. Danziger didn’t like that Doll had sent her.
“Jason Bourne is alive? What the f*ck—!” He leapt off his chair as if he’d been electrocuted. As his eyes scanned the report, which was brief and lacking actionable detail, his face grew red with blood. His head fairly trembled.
Then Valerie made the fatal mistake of trying to be solicitous. “Director, is there anything I can do?”
“Do, do?” He looked up as if coming out of a stupor. “Sure, here’s what, tell me this is a joke, a sick, black joke on Rory Doll’s part. Because if not, I sure as hell am going to fire your ass.”
“That will be all, Val,” Rory Doll said, appearing in the doorway behind her. “Go on back to the office.” Her expression of deliverance only partially assuaged his guilt at thrusting her into the line of fire.
“Goddammit,” Danziger said. “I swear I will fire her.”
Doll strolled into the office and stood in front of Danziger’s desk. “If you do, Stu Gold will be on you like flies on shit.”
“Gold? Who the f*ck is Stu Gold and why should I give a shit about him?”
“He’s CI’s lawyer.”
“I’ll fire his ass, too.”
“Impossible, sir. His firm has an ironclad contract with CI, and he’s the only one with clearance all the way up—”
The DCI’s hand cut across the air in a vicious gesture. “You think I can’t find just cause to can her?” He snapped his fingers. “What’s her name?”
“Zapolsky. Valerie A. Zapolsky.”
“Right, what is that, Russian? I want her re-vetted down to the brand of toenail polish she uses, understood?”
Doll nodded diplomatically. He was slender and fair-haired, which only caused his electric-blue eyes to blaze like flares. “Absolutely, sir.”
“And God help you if there’s a spot, however small, or even a question, on that report.”
Ever since Peter Marks’s recent defection the DCI had been in a foul mood. Another director of ops had not yet been named. Marks had been Doll’s boss and Doll knew that if he could prove his loyalty to Danziger, he’d have a good shot at Marks’s position. Grinding his teeth in silent fury, he changed the subject. “We need to talk about this new bit of intel.”
“This isn’t a file photo, is it? This isn’t a joke?”
“I wish it were.” Doll shook his head. “But, no, sir. Jason Bourne was photographed applying for a temporary visa at Denpasar Airport in Bali, Indonesia—”
“I know where the hell Bali is, Doll.”
“Just being complete, sir, as per your instructions to us on first-day orientation.”
The DCI, though still fuming, said nothing. He held the report, and its attendant grainy black-and-white photo of Bourne, in his fist—his mailed fist, as he liked to call it.
“Continuing, as you can see by the electronic legend in the lower right-hand corner, the photo was taken three days ago, at two twenty-nine PM local time. It took our signals department this long to ensure there was no transmission error or interception.”
Danziger took a breath. “He was dead, Bourne was supposed to be dead. I was sure we’d shut him down forever.” He crushed the photo, threw it in the hopper attached to the paper shredder. “He’s still there, I assume you know that much.”
“Yes, sir.” Doll nodded. “At this moment he’s on Bali.”
“You have him under surveillance?”
“Twenty-four hours a day. He can’t make a move without us knowing about it.”
Danziger considered for a moment, then said, “Who’s our wet-work man in Indonesia?”
Doll was ready for this question. “Coven. But, sir, if I may point out, in her last written report filed from Cairo, Soraya Moore claimed that Bourne had a major hand in preventing the disaster in northern Iran that brought down Black River.”
“Almost as dangerous as his rogue status is Bourne’s ability to—how shall I put it?—influence women unduly. Moore is certainly one of them, which is why she was fired.” The DCI nodded. “Activate Coven, Mr. Doll.”
“Can do, sir, but it will take him some time to—”
“Who’s closer?” Danziger said impatiently.
Doll checked his notes. “We have an extraction team in Jakarta. I can get them on a military copter within the hour.”
“Do it, and use Coven as backup,” the DCI ordered. “Their orders are to bring Bourne in. I want to subject him to extensive, ah, questioning. I want to pick his brains, I want to know his secrets, how he manages to keep evading us, how at every turn he cheats death.” Danziger’s eyes glittered with malice. “When we’re done with him we’ll put a bullet through his head and claim the Russians killed him.”



2


THE LONG BANGALORE night was nearly at an end. Thick with the stench of raw sewage, disease, and human sweat, dense with terror, displaced rage, thwarted desire, and despair, the ashen dawn did nothing to return color to the city.
Finding a physician’s surgery, Arkadin broke in and took what he needed: sutures, iodine, sterile cotton, bandages, and antibiotics to take the place of the ones he hadn’t been able to pick up at the hospital. Loping through the wheezing streets, he knew he needed to stop the bleeding of the wound at the back of his thigh. It wasn’t life threatening, but it was deep, and he didn’t want to lose any more blood. Even more, though, he needed a place to hide, where he could stop the clock that Oserov had set ticking, a place of respite where he could assess his situation. He cursed himself for having been caught flat-footed by the enemy. But he was also acutely aware that his next step was a crucial one, disaster could so quickly compound itself into a catastrophe of deathly proportions.
With his local security penetrated, he could no longer trust any of his usual contacts in Bangalore, which left only one option: the place where he maintained absolute leverage. On the way, entering an encrypted number that gave him access to a relay of secure signal routers, he called Stepan, Luka, Pavel, Alik, as well as Ismael Bey, the figurehead leader of the Eastern Brotherhood, which he controlled.
“We’re under attack from Maslov, Oserov, the entire Kazanskaya,” he told each one brusquely and without preamble. “As of this moment we’re in a state of war.”
He had trained them well, none of them asked superfluous questions, merely acknowledged the order with curt replies. Then they rang off in order to commence the preparations Arkadin had blueprinted for them months ago. Each captain had his specific role to play, each was activating his piece of a plan that literally stretched across the globe. Maslov wanted war, that’s precisely what he was going to get, and not merely on a single front.
Arkadin shook his head and barked a laugh. This moment was always in the wind, as inevitable as their next breath. Now that it was upon him there was a palpable sense of relief. No more grinning through gritted teeth, no more pretending a friendship where only bitter enmity existed.
You’re a dead man, Dimitri Ilyinovich, Arkadin thought. You just don’t know it yet.
A touch of watery pink had tinged the sky, and he was almost at Chaaya’s. Time to make the difficult call. He punched in an eleven-digit number. A male drone at the other end said “Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency” in Russian. The now infamous FSB-2 that, under its leader, a man named Viktor Cherkesov, had become the most powerful and feared agency within the Russian government, surpassing even the FSB, the KGB’s successor.
“Colonel Karpov, if you please,” Arkadin said.
“It’s four AM. Colonel Karpov is unavailable,” the drone said in a voice not unlike one of the undead from a George Romero film.
“So am I,” Arkadin said, honing his sardonic edge, “but I’m making the time to talk to him.”
“And who might you be?” the emotionless voice said in his ear.
“My name is Arkadin, Leonid Danilovich Arkadin. Go find your boss.”
There was a quick catch of the drone’s breath, then, “Hold the line.”
“Sixty seconds,” Arkadin said, looking at his watch and starting the countdown, “no more.”
Fifty-eight seconds later a series of clicks was followed by a deep, gruff voice that said, “This is Colonel Karpov.”
“Boris Illyich, we’ve almost met so many times over the years.”
“Would that I could cross out the almost. How do I know I’m speaking to Leonid Danilovich Arkadin?”
“Dimitri Maslov is still giving you fits, isn’t he?”
When Karpov gave no response, Arkadin continued. “Colonel, who else could give you the Kazanskaya on a silver platter?”
Karpov laughed harshly. “The real Arkadin would never turn on his mentor. Whoever you are, you’re wasting my time. Good-bye.”
Arkadin gave him an address hidden in the industrial outskirts of Moscow.
Karpov was silent for a moment, but Arkadin, listening carefully, could hear the harsh soughing of his breathing. Everything depended on this conversation, on Karpov believing that he was, in fact, Leonid Danilovich Arkadin and that he was telling the truth.
“What am I to make of this address?” the colonel said after a time.
“It’s a warehouse. From the outside it looks exactly like the hundred or so on either side of it. Inside, as well.”
“You’re boring me, gospadin Whoever-You-Are.”
“The third door on the left near the back will take you into the men’s room. Go past the urinal trough to the last stall on the right, which has no toilet, only a door in the rear wall.”
There was only a moment’s hesitation before Karpov said, “And then?”
“Go in heavy,” Arkadin said. “Armed to the teeth.”
“You’re saying that I should take a squad with—”
“No! You go alone. Furthermore, you don’t sign out, you don’t tell a soul where you’re going. Tell them you’re going to the dentist or for an afternoon f*ck, whatever your comrades will believe.”
Another pause, this one dark with menace. “Who’s the mole inside my office?”
“Ah, now, Boris Illyich, don’t be so ungrateful. You don’t want to spoil my fun, not after the gift I’ve just given you.” Arkadin took a breath. Having witnessed the colonel take the bait, he judged the moment right to sink the hook all the way in. “But were I you, I wouldn’t use the singular—moles is more like it.”
“What—? Now, listen to me—!”
“You’d best get rolling, Colonel, or your targets will have packed up for the day.” He chuckled. “Here’s my number, I know it didn’t come up on your phones. Call me when you return and we’ll talk names and, quite possibly, much, much more.”
He cut the connection before Karpov could say another word.
Near the end of the workday Delia Trane was sitting at her desk looking over a three-dimensionally rendered computer model of a diabolically clever explosive device, trying to find a way to disarm it before the timer went off. A buzzer deep inside the bomb would sound the instant she failed—if she cut the wrong wire with her virtual cutter or moved it inordinately. She herself had created the software program that had rendered the virtual bomb, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t having the devil’s own time figuring out a way to disarm it.
Delia was a plain-looking woman in her midthirties with pale eyes, short-cropped hair, and skin deeply burnished by the genes from her Colombian mother. Despite her relative youth and her often ferocious temper, she was one of the ATF’s most coveted explosives experts. She was also Soraya Moore’s best friend, and when one of the guards from reception called to say Soraya was in the lobby she asked him to send her right up.
The two women had met through work, had sparked off each other’s feistiness and independence, recognizing and appreciating kindred spirits, so difficult to find in the hermetically sealed public sector inside the Beltway. Because they had met on one of Soraya’s clandestine assignments they had no need to conceal from each other their life’s work and what it meant to them, the number one relationship killer in DC. Further, both of them realized that, for better or for worse, their entire lives were bound up in their respective services, that they were unsuited for anything but work they couldn’t talk about with civilians, which in a way validated their existence, their independence as women, and their importance irrespective of the gender bias that existed here as virtually everywhere else in Washington. Together they daily took on the DC establishment like a pair of Amazons.
Delia returned to the contemplation of her model, which to her was like an entire world in miniature. Within seconds she was completely immersed in her problem, so she didn’t give a second thought to what her friend was doing here at this time of day. When a shadow fell over her work she looked up into Soraya’s face and knew something was terribly wrong.
“For God’s sake, sit down,” she said, pulling over a spare chair, “before you fall down. What the hell happened, did someone die?”
“Only my job.”
Delia looked at her quizzically. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve been canned, fired, sent to the showers,” Soraya said. “Terminated without extreme prejudice—but certainly with prejudice,” she added with grim humor.
“What the hell happened?”
“I’m Egyptian, Muslim, a woman. Our new DCI doesn’t need any other reasons.”
“Not to worry, I know a good lawyer who—”
“Forget it.”
Delia frowned. “You’re not going to let them get away with this. I mean, it’s discrimination, Raya.”
Soraya waved a hand. “I’m not spending the next two years of my life going up against CI and Secretary Halliday.”
Delia leaned back. “It goes that high up, huh?”
“How could they do this to me?” Soraya said.
Delia rose and went around her desk to hug her friend. “I know, it’s like being jilted by a lover, someone you thought you knew but who turned out to be using you and, worse, was betraying you all the while.”
“Now I know how Jason felt,” Soraya said morosely. “All the times he’s pulled CI’s hand out of the fire and what did he get for it? He was hunted down like a dog.”
“Good riddance to CI, I say!” Delia kissed the top of her friend’s head. “Time to start over.”
Soraya looked up at her. “Really? Doing what, exactly? This shadow world is all I know, all I want to do. And Danziger’s so pissed off I didn’t come back to CI when he ordered me to that he’s put me on a clandestine service blacklist, making it impossible for me to work in the governmental intelligence community.”
Delia looked thoughtful for a moment. “Tell you what, I need to do some things down the hall, make a call, and we’ll go for some drinks and dinner. Then I have someplace special to take you. How’s that sound?”
“Better than going home, stuffing my face with ice cream, and staring at TV.”
Delia laughed. “That’s my girl.” She waved a finger in the air. “Don’t you worry, we’ll have so much fun tonight you won’t remember to be sad.”
Soraya gave her a rueful smile. “What about bitter?”
“Yeah, we can take care of that, too.”
Bourne sprinted out of Suparwita’s house without looking to either the left or the right. To the people watching he would appear to be a man on an urgent mission. He suspected that they would want to follow him to his next destination.
He could hear them trailing him through the forest, drawn in closer by his focused behavior. He hurried through the underbrush, wanting them close to him so that his agitation would become their agitation. His life wasn’t in danger, he knew, until they had interrogated him. They wanted to know what he knew about the ring. No doubt they felt they were being discreet, but nothing was a secret in Bali. Bourne had heard that they had been asking about it in Manggis, the local village. Once he’d learned they were Russians, he had little doubt that they worked for Leonid Arkadin. He had last seen his enemy, the first graduate of Treadstone’s ultimate soldier program, in the battle-torn area of northern Iran.
Now, in the midst of the emerald-and-umber Balinese jungle, Bourne made a hard right, heading for an enormous berigin—what Westerners called a banyan—the Balinese symbol of immortality. He leapt into the berigin’s many arms, working his way up through the labyrinth of branches until he was high enough to get a panoramic view of the area. Birds called to one another and insects droned. Here and there spears of sunlight pierced the many-layered canopy, turning the soft ground the color of chocolate.
A moment later he spied one of the Russians, stalking cautiously through the dense undergrowth, making his way around stands of thickly foliaged trees. He cradled the barrel of an AK-47 in the crook of his left arm, the forefinger of his right hand lay against the trigger, ready to spray bullets at the slightest noise or disturbance. He advanced slowly toward Bourne’s berigin. Every so often he glanced up into the trees, his scowling eyes dark and searching.
Bourne moved silently through the branches, positioning himself. He waited until the Russian was directly beneath him before he fell like one of the spears of sunlight. His heels struck the Russian’s shoulders, dislocating one, throwing him off his feet. Rolling himself into a ball, Bourne took the brunt of the fall on one shoulder blade, tumbling harmlessly head-over-heels. He was up and at the Russian before the stalker could regain his breath. Nevertheless the Russian’s training asserted itself, his leg flicking out and catching Bourne in the sternum.
Bourne grunted. The Russian, teeth gritted against the pain, sought to gain his feet, and time seemed to stand still, as if the primordial forest around them were holding its breath. Bourne’s right arm lashed out, the edge of his hand breaking the bones in the Russian’s dislocated shoulder. The Russian moaned, but at the same time he drove the butt of the assault rifle into Bourne’s side.
Leaning heavily on the AK-47, the Russian rose to his feet, stumbled over to where Bourne lay tangled in vines. He pointed the muzzle of the rifle but, as he did so, Bourne aimed a scissors kick at his adversary’s knee, bringing the Russian down to his level. A short burst from the rifle scythed upward, raining bits of leaves, bark, and branches onto both of them. The Russian swung the AK-47, trying to use it as a battering ram, but Bourne was already inside the arc of his swing. A swift strike with the edge of his hand broke the Russian’s collarbone, and the heel of Bourne’s other hand slammed into his nose with such force, it drove cartilage and bone into the Russian’s brain. As he keeled over, dead, Bourne snatched the assault rifle out of his bloody grip. He could see the crude tattoo of a serpent wrapped around a dagger that the Russian had gotten in prison, proof positive that he was a member of the grupperovka.
Bourne was unwrapping the vines around him when he heard a guttural voice from behind.
“Drop your weapon,” it said in Moscow-accented Russian.
Bourne turned slowly and saw the second Russian stalker. He must have followed the sound of the gunfire.
“I said drop it,” the Russian growled. He, too, held an AK-47, which was aimed at Bourne’s midsection.
“What do you want?” Bourne said.
“You know very well what I want,” the Russian said. “Now drop your weapon and hand it over.”
“Hand what over? Just tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”
“I’ll take the ring now. Right after you drop my partner’s rifle.” He made a beckoning motion. “Come on, f*cker. Otherwise I’m going to shoot one leg off, then the other, and if that fails—well, you know how painful a gut wound can be, how long you’ll linger in agony before you bleed to death.”
“Your partner. Too bad about him,” Bourne said, at the same time letting the AK-47 slip out of his grip.
It was pure instinct, the Russian couldn’t help glancing over at his fallen companion. As he did so the motion of the AK-47 made him look down. That was when Bourne whipped the vine up and out. It caught the Russian around the neck, and with a powerful pull Bourne jerked him forward, right into his fist. The Russian doubled over. Bourne, dropping the vine, drove both fists down on the back of his neck.
The Russian crumpled, and Bourne, crouched over him, rolled him onto his back. The man was still dazed, gasping and flopping like a fish on the bottom of a boat. Bourne slapped him into full consciousness, then pressed a knee into his sternum, using his full weight.
The man stared up at him out of blue eyes. His face was unnaturally ruddy, and he could not hold back a dribble of blood from the corner of his mouth.
“Why did Leonid send you?” Bourne said in Russian.
The man blinked. “Who?”
“Don’t do that.” Bourne pressed down and the man groaned. “You know perfectly well who I mean. Leonid Arkadin.”
For a moment the Russian stared up at him, mute. Then, despite his dire circumstances, he laughed. “Is that what you think?” Tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. “That I work for that shitbag?”
The Russian’s response was too spontaneous, too unexpected to be false. Besides, why would he lie? Bourne paused for a moment, reassessing the situation. “If not Arkadin,” he said slowly and carefully, “then who?”
“I’m a member of the Kazanskaya.” There was no mistaking the pride in his voice; this, too, was genuine.
“So Dimitri Maslov sent you.” Not long ago Bourne had met the head of the Kazanskaya in Moscow under unpleasant circumstances.
“In a manner of speaking,” the Russian said. “I report to Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov.”
“Oserov?” Bourne had never heard of him. “Who is he?”
“Director of operations. Vylacheslav Germanovich plans every phase of the Kazanskaya action while Maslov handles the increasingly annoying government.”
Bourne considered for a moment. “Okay, so you report to this Oserov. Why was it funny that I thought Arkadin had sent you?”
The Russian’s eyes blazed. “You’re as ignorant as a head of cabbage. Oserov and Arkadin hate each other’s guts.”
“Why?”
“Their feud goes back a long way.” He spat out some blood. “Interrogation finished?”
“What’s the nature of their enmity?”
The Russian grinned up at him through bloody teeth. “Get the f*ck off my chest.”
“Sure thing.” Bourne stood up, grabbed the Russian’s AK-47, and slammed the butt into the side of his head.