Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy (15 page)

"Once more," Hasan Arsenov said. "We need to go over again the sequence of events that will gain us our freedom."

"But I know them as well as I know your face," Zina protested.

"Well enough to negotiate the route to our final destination blindfolded?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Zina scoffed.

"In Icelandic, Zina. We speak now only in Icelandic."

In their hotel room, the schematics for the Oskjuhlid Hotel in Reykjavik were spread out across the large desk. In the inviting glow of lamplight, every layer of the hotel was laid bare, from the foundation, to the security, sewage and heating and air-conditioning systems, to the floor plans themselves. On each oversized bluesheet were neatly written a series of notes, directional arrows, markouts indicating the layers of security that had been added by each of the participating nations for the terrorism summit. Spalko's intel was impeccably detailed.

"From the time we breach the hotel's defenses," Arsenov said, "we'll have very little time to accomplish our goal. The worst part is we won't know
how
little time until we get there and make a dry run. That makes it even more imperative that there be no hesitation, no mistake—not one wrong turn!" In his ardor, his dark eyes were blazing. Taking up a sash of hers, he led her to one end of the room. He wrapped it around her head, tying it tightly enough so that he knew she couldn't see.

"We've just entered the hotel." He let go of her. "Now I want you to walk out the route for me. I'll be timing you. Now go!"

For two-thirds of the circuitous journey, she did well, but then, at the junction of what would be two branching corridors, she went left instead of right.

"You're finished," he said harshly as he whipped off the blindfold. "Even if you corrected your mistake, you wouldn't make the target on time. Security—be it American, Russian or Arab—would catch up to you and shoot you dead."

Zina was trembling, furious with herself and with him.

"I know that face, Zina. Put your anger away," Hasan said. "Emotion breaks concentration, and concentration is what you need now. When you can make the path blindfolded without making a mistake, we will be finished for this evening."

An hour later, her mission accomplished, Zina said, "Come to bed, my love." Arsenov, dressed now only in a simple muslin robe, dyed black, belted at the waist, shook his head. He was standing by the huge window, looking out at the diamond nightsparkle of Budapest reflected in the dark water of the Danube. Zina sprawled naked on the down comforter, laughed softly, deep in her throat. "Hasan, feel." She moved her palm, her long, splayed fingers over the sheets. "Pure Egyptian cotton, so luxurious."

He wheeled on her, a frown of disapproval darkening his face. "That's just it, Zina." He pointed to the half-empty bottle on the night table. "Napoleon brandy, soft sheets, a down comforter. These luxuries are not for us."

Zina's eyes opened wide, her heavy lips forming a moue. "And why not?"

"Has the lesson I've just taught you gone in one ear only to fly out the other? Because we are
warriors,
because we have renounced all worldly possessions."

"Have you renounced your weapons, Hasan?"

He shook his head, his eyes hard and cold. "Our weapons have a purpose."

"These soft things also have a purpose, Hasan. They make me happy." He made a guttural sound in the back of his throat, curt and dismissive.

"I don't want to possess these things, Hasan," Zina said huskily, "just use them for a night or two." She held out a hand to him. "Can't you relax your iron-bound rules for even that short a time? We've both worked hard today; we deserve a little relaxation."

"Speak for yourself. I won't be seduced by luxuries," he said shortly. "It disgusts me that you have been."

"I don't believe I disgust you." She had seen something in his eyes, a sort of self-denial that she naturally enough misinterpreted as the rock of his strict ascetic nature.

"All right, then," she said. "I'll break the brandy bottle, sow the bed with glass, if only you'll come join me."

"I've told you," he warned darkly. "Do not joke of these matters, Zina." She sat up, on her knees moved toward him, her breasts, sheened in golden lamplight, swaying provocatively. "I'm perfectly serious. If it's your wish to lie in a bed of pain while we make love, who am I to argue?"

He stood looking at her for a long time. It did not occur to him that she might be mocking him still. "Don't you understand." He took a step toward her. "Our path is set. We are bound to the
Tariqat,
the spiritual path to Allah."

"Don't distract me, Hasan. I'm still thinking of weapons." She grabbed a handful of muslin and pulled him toward her. Her other hand reached out, gently caressed the fabric of the bandage that wrapped the area of his thigh where he'd been shot. Then it moved higher.

Their lovemaking was as fierce as any hand-to-hand combat. It arose as much out of wanting to hurt the other as it did from physical need. In their jackhammer thrashing, moaning and release, it was doubtful that love played any role. For his part, Arsenov longed to be ground into the bed of glass shards that Zina had joked about, so that when her nails gripped him, he resisted her, obliging her to hold on tighter, to score his skin. He was rough enough to bait her, so that she bared her teeth, used them on the powerful muscles of his shoulders, his chest, his arms. It was only with the rising tide of pain threatening to overpower the pleasure that the strange hallucinatory sensation in which he was lost receded somewhat.

Punishment was required for what he had done to Khalid Murat, his compatriot, his friend. Never mind that he had done what was needed in order for his people to survive and flourish. How many times had he told himself that Khalid Murat had been sacrificed on the altar of Chechnya's future? And yet, like a sinner, an outcast, he was hounded by doubt and fear, in need of cruel punishment. Though truly, he thought now in the little death that comes in sexual release, was it not always thus with prophets?

Was not this torture further proof that the road he had embarked upon was the righteous one?

Beside him, Zina lay in his arms. She might have been miles away, though in a manner of speaking her mind was also filled with thoughts of prophets. Or, more accurately, one prophet. This latter-day prophet had dominated her mind ever since she had drawn Hasan to the bed. She hated that Hasan could not let himself take pleasure in the luxuries around him, and so, when he grasped her, it was not him she was thinking of, when he entered her, in her mind it was not him at all, but Stepan Spalko to whom she crooned. And when, nearing her end, she bit her lip it was not out of passion, as Hasan believed, but out of a fear that she would shout Spalko's name. She so much wanted to, if only to hurt Hasan in a manner that would cut him to the quick, for she had no doubt of his love for her. This love she found dumb and unknowing, an infantile thing like a baby reaching for its mother's breast. What he craved from her was warmth and shelter, the quick thrust back into the womb. It was a love that made her skin crawl.

But what
she
craved ...

Her thoughts froze in their tracks as he moved against her, sighing. She had supposed that he was asleep, but he was not, or else something had roused him. Now, attendant on his desires, she had no time for her own thoughts. She smelled his manly scent, rising like a pre-dawn mist, and his breathing quickened just a little.

"I was thinking," he whispered, "about what it means to be a prophet, whether one day I will be called that among our people."

Zina said nothing, knowing that he wished her to be silent now, to listen only, as he reassured himself of his chosen path. This was Arsenov's weakness, the one unknown to anyone else, the one he showed only to her. She wondered if Khalid Murat had been clever enough to have suspected this weakness. She was almost certain Stepan Spalko was.

"The Qur'an tells us that each of our prophets is the incarnation of a divine attribute," Arsenov said. "Moses is the manifestation of the transcendent aspect of reality, because of his ability to speak with God without an intermediary. In the Qur'an, the Lord said to Moses, 'Fear not, you are transcendent.' Jesus is the manifestation of prophethood. As an infant, he cried, 'God gave me the book and placed me as a prophet.'

"But Mohammad is the spiritual incarnation and manifestation of all of God's names. Mohammad himself said, 'What God first created was my light. I was a prophet while Adam was still between water and earth.'"

Zina waited the space of several heartbeats to be certain that he had finished pontificating. Then, with a hand placed on his slowly rising and falling chest, she asked as she knew he wanted her to ask, "And what is
your
divine attribute, my prophet?" Arsenov turned his head on the pillow so that he could see her fully. The lamplight behind her cast most of her face in shadow, just a fiery line along her cheek and jawbone was limned in a long painterly stroke, and he was caught out in a thought he most often kept hidden, even from himself. He did not know what he would do without her strength and vitality. For him, her womb represented immortality, the sacred place from which his sons would issue, his line continuing through all eternity. But he knew this dream could not happen without Spalko's help. "Ah, Zina, if you only knew what the Shaykh will do for us, what he will help us become."

She rested her cheek against her folded arm. "Tell me." But he shook his head, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "That would be a mistake."

"Why?"

"Because you must see for yourself without any foreknowledge the devastation caused by the weapon."

Now, peering into Arsenov's eyes, she experienced a chill deep in the core of her, where she rarely dared to look. Possibly she felt an intimation of the terrible power that would be unleashed in Nairobi in three days' time. But with the clairvoyance sometimes granted lovers, she understood that what interested Hasan most was the fear this form of death—whatever it would turn out to be—would engender. It was fear he meant to wield, that was clear enough. Fear to use as a righteous sword to regain all that had been lost to the Chechens over centuries of abuse, displacement and bloodshed. From an early age, Zina had been on intimate terms with fear. Her father, weak and dying of the disease of despair that ran like a plague through Chechnya, who had once provided for his family as all Chechen men must but could not now even show his face on the street for fear of being picked up by the Russians. Her mother, once a beautiful young woman, in her last years a sunken-chested crone with thinning hair, bad eyesight and faulty memory.

After she came home from the long day's scavenging, she was obliged to walk three kilometers to the nearest public water pump, stand in the queue for an hour or two, only to walk back, lug the full bucket up the five flights to their filthy room. That water! Sometimes, even now, Zina would awake, gagging, with its foul turpentine taste in her mouth.

One night her mother sat down and did not get up. She was twenty-eight but looked more than twice that age. From the constantly burning oil fires, her lungs were full of tar. When Zina's younger brother had complained of thirst, the old woman had looked at Zina and said, "I can't get up. Even for our water. I can't go on.. .." Zina rolled and, twisting her torso, turned off the lamp. The moon, previously unseen, filled the casement of the window. At the point where her upper torso dipped down to her narrow waist, a small pool of its cool light fell upon the bed, illuminating the tip of her breast, below which, under the deep curve, lay Hasan's hand. Outside that pool there was only darkness.

For a long time she lay with her eyes open, listening to Hasan's regular breathing, waiting for sleep to claim her. Who knew the meaning of fear better than Chechens? she wondered. In Hasan's face was written the lamentable history of their people. Never mind death, never mind ruin, there was only one outcome that he could see: vindication for Chechnya. And with a heart made heavy by despair, Zina knew that the attention of the world needed to be snapped into focus. These days, there was only one way to do that. She knew Hasan was right: Death had to come in a manner heretofore unthinkable, but what price they might all pay she could not begin to imagine.

Jacques Robbinet liked to spend mornings with his wife, drinking cafe au lait, reading the papers and talking with her about the economy, their children and the state of their friends' lives. They never spoke about his work.

He made it a strict rule never to come into the office before noon. Once there, he spent an hour or so scanning documents, interdepartmental memos and the like, writing e-mail responses when necessary. His phone was answered by his assistant, who logged calls and brought him messages deemed urgent by her. In this, as in all things she did for Robbinet, she was exemplary. She had been trained by him and her instincts were unerring.

Best of all, she was utterly discreet. This meant that Robbinet could tell her where he was lunching each day with his mistress—be it a quiet bistro or the mistress's apartment in the fourth arrondissement. This was crucial, since Robbinet took long lunches, even by French standards. He rarely returned to the office before four, but he was often at his desk until well past midnight, in signals with his counterparts in America. Robbinet's official title might be Minister of Culture, but in fact he was a spy at such a high level that he reported directly to the French president.

On this particular evening, however, he was out to dinner, the afternoon having proved so tiresomely hectic he'd had to postpone his daily tryst until late in the evening. There was a flap that concerned him greatly. A worldwide sanction had been routed to him by his American friends, and as he read it, his blood had run cold, for the target for termination was Jason Bourne.

Some years ago Robbinet had met Bourne at, of all places, a spa. Robbinet had booked a weekend at the spa just outside Paris so that he could be with his then-mistress, a tiny thing with enormous appetites. She had been a ballet dancer; Robbinet still recalled with great fondness the marvelous suppleness of her body. In any event, they had met in the steam room and they had gotten to talking. Eventually, in a most unsettling manner, he was to discover that Bourne had been there looking for a certain double agent. Having ferreted her out, he had killed her while Robbinet was getting a treatment—green mud, if memory served. Good thing, too, since the double agent was posing as Robbinet's therapist in order to assassinate him. Is there any place where one is more vulnerable than on a therapist's table? Robbinet wondered. What could he do after that, except take Bourne out to a lavish dinner. That night, over foie gras, veal kidneys in mustard-spiked
jus
and
tarte Tatin,
all washed down with three magnificent bottles of the finest ruby Bordeaux, having uncovered each other's secrets, they became fast friends. It was through Bourne that Robbinet had met Alexander Conklin and had become Conklin's conduit to the operations of the Quai d'Orsay and Interpol. In the end, Robbinet's trust in his assistant was Jason Bourne's good fortune, for it was over cafe and thoroughly decadent
millefeuille
at Chez Georges with Delphine that he received the call from her. He loved the restaurant for both its food and its location. Because it was across the street from the Bourse—the French equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange— it was frequented by brokers and businessmen, people far more discreet than the gossiping politicians with whom Robbinet was, from time to time, obliged to rub elbows.