The Bourne Sanction (38 page)

A professional killer for hire, Bourne thought. “Thank you, Professor, but no.”

“This isn’t a request, Jason.” Specter’s voice held a stern warning not to cross him.

“Jens is my condition for you taking Kirsch’s place. I won’t allow you to walk into this bear trap on your own. My decision is final.”

Dimitri Maslov and Boris Karpov embraced like old friends while Bourne stood on, silent. When it came to Russian politics nothing should surprise him, but it was nevertheless astonishing to see a high-ranking colonel in the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency cordially greeting the kingpin of the Kazanskaya, one of the two most notorious narcotics grupperovka.

This bizarre reunion took place in Bar-Dak, near the Leninsky Prospekt. The club had opened for Maslov; hardly surprising, since he owned it. Bar-Dak meant both “brothel”

and “chaos” in current Russian slang. Bar-Dak was neither, though it did sport a prominent strippers’ stage complete with poles and a rather unusual leather swing that looked like a horse’s harness.

An open audition for pole dancers was in full swing. The lineup of eye-poppingly-built young blond women snaked around the four walls of the club, which was painted in glossy black enamel. Massive sound speakers, lines of vodka bottles on mirrored shelves, and vintage mirror balls were the major accoutrements.

After the two men were finished slapping each other on the back, Maslov led them across the cavernous room, through a door, and down a wood-paneled hallway. Mixed in with the scent of the cedar was the unmistakable waft of chlorine. It smelled like a health club, and with good reason. They went through a translucent pebbled glass door into a locker room.

“The sauna’s just over there,” Maslov pointed. “We meet inside in five minutes.”

Before Maslov would continue the conversation with Bourne, he insisted on meeting with Boris Karpov. Bourne had thought such a conference unlikely, but when he called Boris, his friend readily agreed. Maslov had given Bourne the name of Bar-Dak, nothing more. Karpov had said only, “I know it. I’ll be there in ninety minutes.”

Now, stripped down to the buff, white Turkish towels around their loins, the three men reconvened in the steamy confines of the sauna. The small room was lined, like the hallway, in cedar paneling. Slatted wooden benches ran around three walls. In one corner was a heap of heated stones, above which hung a cord.

When Maslov entered, he pulled the cord, showering the rocks with water, which produced clouds of steam that swirled up to the ceiling and down again, engulfing the men as they sat on the benches.

“The colonel has assured me that he will take care of my situation if I take care of his,”

Maslov said. “Perhaps I should say that I will take care of Cherkesov’s problem.”

There was a twinkle in his eye as he said this. Stripped of his outsize Hawaiian shirt, he was a small, wiry man with ropy muscles and not an ounce of fat on him. He wore no gold chains around his neck or diamond rings on his fingers. His tattoos were his jewelry; they covered his entire torso. But these were not the crude and often blurred prison tattoos found on so many of his kind. They were among the most elaborate designs Bourne had ever seen: Asian dragons breathing fire, coiling their tails, spreading their wings, grasping with claws outstretched.

“Four years ago I spent six months in Tokyo,” Maslov said. “It’s the only place to get tattoos. But that’s just my opinion.”

Boris rocked with laughter. “So that’s where you were, you bastard! I scoured all of Russia for your skinny butt.”

“In the Ginza,” Maslov said, “I hoisted quite a few saki martinis to you and your law enforcement minions. I knew you’d never find me.” He made a sweeping gesture. “But that bit of unpleasantness is behind us; the real perpetrator confessed to the murders I was suspected of committing. Now we find ourselves in our own private glasnost.”

“I want to know more about Leonid Danilovich Arkadin,” Bourne said. Maslov spread his hands. “Once he was one of us. Then something happened to him, I don’t know what. He broke away from the grupperovka. People don’t do that and survive for long, but Arkadin is in a class by himself. No one dares to touch him. He wraps himself in his reputation for murder and ruthlessness. This is a man-let me tell you-who has no heart. Yes, Dimitri, you might say to me, but isn’t that true of most of your kind?

To this I answer, Yes. But Arkadin is also without a soul. This is where he parts company with the others. There is no one else like him, the colonel can back me up on this.”

Boris nodded sagely. “Even Cherkesov fears him, our president as well. I personally don’t know anyone in either FSB-1 or FSB-2 who’d be willing to take him on, let alone survive. He’s like a great white shark, the murderer of killers.”

“Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”

Maslov sat forward, elbows in knees. “Listen, my friend, whatever the hell your real name is, this man Arkadin was born in Nizhny Tagil. Do you know it? No? Let me tell you. This fucking excuse of a city east of here in the southern Ural Mountains is hell on earth. It’s filled with smokestacks belching sulfurous fumes from its ironworks. Poor is not even a word you can apply to the residents, who swill homemade vodka that’s almost pure alcohol and pass out wherever they happen to land. The police, such as they are, are as brutal and sadistic as the citizens. As a gulag is ringed by guard towers, Nizhny Tagil is surrounded by high-security prisons. Since the prison inmates are released without even train fare they settle in the town. You, an American, cannot imagine the brutality, the callousness of the residents of this human sewer. No one but the worst of the crims-as the criminals are called-dares be on the streets after 10 PM.”

Maslov wiped the sweat off his cheeks with the back of his hand. “This is the place where Arkadin was born and raised. It was from this cesspit that he made a name for himself by kicking people out of their apartments in old Soviet-era projects and selling them to criminals with a bit of money stolen from regular citizens.

“But whatever happened to Arkadin in Nizhny Tagil in his youth-and I don’t profess to know what that might be-has followed him like a ghoul. Believe me when I tell you that you’ve never met a man like him. You’re better off not.”

“I know where he is,” Bourne said. “I’m going after him.”

“Christ.” Maslov shook his head. “You must have a mighty fucking large death wish.”

“You don’t know my friend here,” Boris said.

Maslov eyed Bourne. “I know him as much as I want to, I think.” He stood up. “The stench of death is already on him.”

THE
MAN
who stepped off the plane in Munich airport, who dutifully went through Customs and Immigration with all the other passengers from the many flights arriving at more or less the same time, looked nothing like Semion Icoupov. His name was Franz Richter, his passport proclaimed him as a German national, but underneath all the makeup and prosthetics he was Semion Icoupov just the same.

Nevertheless, Icoupov felt naked, exposed to the prying eyes of his enemies, whom he knew were everywhere. They waited patiently for him, like his own death. Ever since boarding the plane he’d been haunted by a sense of impending doom. He hadn’t been able to shake it on the flight, he couldn’t shake it now. He felt as if he’d come to Munich to stare his own death in the face.

His driver was waiting for him at baggage claim. The man, heavily armed, took the one piece of luggage Icoupov pointed out to him off the chrome carousel, carried it as he led Icoupov through the crowded concourse and out into the dull Munich evening, gray as morning. It wasn’t as cold as it had been in Switzerland, but it was wetter, the chill as penetrating as Icoupov’s foreboding.

It wasn’t fear he felt so much as sorrow. Sorrow that he might not see this battle finished, that his hated nemesis would win, that old grudges would not be settled, that his father’s memory would remain sullied, that his murder would remain unavenged. To be sure, there had been attrition on both sides, he thought as he settled into the backseat of the dove-gray Mercedes. The endgame had begun and already he sensed the checkmate waiting for him not far off. It was difficult but necessary for him to admit that he had been outmaneuvered at every turn. Perhaps he wasn’t up to carrying the vision his father had for the Eastern Brotherhood; perhaps the corruption and inversion of ideals had gone too far. Whatever the case, he had lost a great deal of ground to his enemy, and Icoupov had come to the bleak conclusion that he had only one chance to win. His chance rested with Arkadin, the plans for the Black Legion’s attack on New York City’s Empire State Building, and Jason Bourne. For he realized now that his nemesis was too strong. Without the American’s help, he feared his cause was lost.

He stared out the smoked-glass window at the looming skyline of Munich. It gave him a shiver to be back here, where it all began, where the Eastern Brotherhood was saved from Allied war trials following the collapse of the Third Reich. At that time his father-Farid Icoupov-and Ibrahim Sever were jointly in charge of what was left of the Eastern Legions. Up until the Nazi surrender, Farid, the intellectual, ran the intelligence network that infiltrated the Soviet Union, while Ibrahim, the warrior, commanded the legions that fought on the Eastern Front.

Six months before the Reich’s capitulation, the two men met outside Berlin. They saw the end, even if the lunatic Nazi hierarchy was oblivious. So they laid plans for how to ensure their people would survive the war’s aftermath. The first thing Ibrahim did was to move his soldiers out of harm’s way. By that juncture the Nazi bureaucratic infrastructure had been decimated by Allied bombing, so it was not difficult to redeploy his people into Belgium, Denmark, Greece, and Italy, where they were safe from the reflexive violence of the first wave of invading Allies.

Because Farid and Ibrahim despised Stalin, because they were witness to the massive scale of the atrocities ordered by him, they were in a unique position to understand the Allied fear of communism. Farid argued persuasively that soldiers would be of no use to the Allies, but an intelligence network already inside the Soviet Union would be invaluable. He keenly understood how antithetical communism was to capitalism, that the Americans and the Soviets were allies out of necessity. He felt it inevitable that after the war was over these uncomfortable allies would become bitter enemies. Ibrahim had no recourse but to agree with his friend’s thesis, and indeed this was how it turned out. At every step, Farid and Ibrahim brilliantly outmaneuvered the postwar German agencies in keeping control of their people. As a result, the Eastern Legions not only survived but in fact prospered in postwar Germany.

Farid, however, fairly quickly uncovered a pattern of violence that made him suspicious. German officials who disagreed with his eloquent arguments for continued control were replaced by ones who did. That was odd enough, but then he discovered that those original officials no longer existed. To a one, they had dropped out of sight, never to be seen or heard from again.

Farid bypassed the weakling German bureaucracy and went straight to the Americans with his concerns, but he was unprepared for their response, which was one big shrug. No one, it seemed, cared the least bit about disappeared Germans. They were all too busy defending their slice of Berlin to be bothered.

It was about this time that Ibrahim came to him with the idea of moving the Eastern Legions’ headquarters to Munich, out of the way of the increasing antagonism between the Americans and the Soviets. Fed up with the American’s disinterest, Farid readily agreed.

They found postwar Munich a bombed-out wreck, seething with immigrant Muslims. Ibrahim wasted no time in recruiting these people into the organization, which by this time had changed its name to the Eastern Brotherhood. For his part, Farid found the American intelligence community in Munich far more receptive to his arguments. Indeed, they were desperate for him and his network. Emboldened, he told them that if they wanted to make a formal arrangement with the Eastern Brotherhood for intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain, they had to look into the disappearances of the list of former German officials he handed them.

It took three months, but at the end of that time he was asked to appear before a man named Brian Folks, whose official title was American attachй of something-or-other. In fact, he was
OSS
chief of station in Munich, the man who received the intel Farid’s network provided him from inside the Soviet Union.

Folks told him that the unofficial investigation Farid asked him to undertake had now been completed. Without another word, he handed over a slim file, sat without comment as Farid read it. The folder contained the photos of each of the German officials on the list Farid had provided. Following each photo was a sheet detailing the findings. All the men were dead. All had been shot in the back of the head. Farid read through this meager material with an increasing sense of frustration. Then he looked up at Folks and said, “Is this it? Is this all there is?”

Folks watched Farid from behind steel-rimmed glasses. “It’s all that appears in the report,” he said. “But those aren’t all the findings.” He held out his hand, took the file back. Then he turned, put the sheets one by one through a shredder. When he was finished, he threw the empty folder into the wastebasket, the contents of which were burned every evening at precisely 5 PM.

Following this solemn ritual, he placed his hands on his desk, said to Farid, “The finding of most interest to you is this: Evidence collected indicates conclusively that the murders of these men were committed by Ibrahim Sever.”

Tyrone shifted on the bare concrete floor. It was so slippery with his own fluids that one knee went out from under him, splaying him so painfully that he cried out. Of course, no one came to help him; he was alone in the interrogation cell in the basement of the
NSA
safe house deep in the Virginia countryside. He had to quite literally locate himself in his mind, had to trace the route he and Soraya had taken when they’d driven to the safe house. When? Three days ago? Ten hours? What? The rendition he’d been subjected to had erased any sense of time. The hood over his head threatened to erase his sense of place, so that periodically he had to say to himself: “I’m in an interrogation cell in the basement of the
NSA
safe house in”-and here he would recite the name of the last town he and Soraya had passed… when?