The Bourne Sanction Part 27

Heinrich was stretched out on his back as if he were a sunbather who'd fallen asleep. The water had washed away all the blood.

After a time, Arkadin moved back, first onto the dark sand, then up behind the waterline to where Devra sat, her legs drawn up, chin on her knees. That was when she noticed that his left foot was missing three toes.

"My G.o.d," she said, "what happened to your foot?"

It was the foot that had undone Marlene. The three missing toes on Arkadin's left foot. Marlene made the mistake of asking what had happened.

"An accident," Arkadin said with a practiced smoothness. "During my first term in prison. A stamping machine came apart, and the main cylinder fell on my foot. The toes were crushed, nothing more than pulp. They had to be amputated."

It was a lie, this story, a fanciful tale Arkadin appropriated from a real incident that took place during his first stint in prison. That much, at least, was the truth. A man stole a pack of cigarettes from under Arkadin's bunk. This man worked the stamping machine. Arkadin tampered with the machine so that when the man started it up the next morning the main cylinder dropped on him. The result wasn't pretty; you could hear his screams clear across the compound. In the end, they'd had to take his right leg off at the knee.

From that day forward he was on his guard with Marlene. She was attracted to him, of this he was quite certain. She'd slipped from her objective pedestal, from the job Icoupov had given her. He didn't blame Icoupov. He wanted to tell Icoupov again that he wouldn't harm him, but he knew Icoupov wouldn't believe him. Why should he? He had enough evidence to the contrary to make him suitably nervous. And yet, Arkadin sensed that Icoupov would never turn his back on him. Icoupov would never renege on his pledge to take Arkadin in.

Nevertheless, something had to be done about Marlene. It wasn't simply that she'd seen his left foot; Icoupov had seen it as well. Arkadin knew she suspected the maimed foot was connected with his horrendous nightmares, that it was part of something he couldn't tell her. Even the story Arkadin told her did not fully satisfy her. It might have with someone else, but not Marlene. She hadn't exaggerated when she'd told him that she possessed an uncanny ability to sense what her clients were feeling, and to find a way to help them.

The problem was that she couldn't help Arkadin. No one could. No one was allowed to know what he'd experienced. It was unthinkable.

"Tell me about your mother and father," Marlene said. "And don't repeat the pabulum you fed the shrink who was here before me."

They were out on Lake Lugano. It was a mild summer's day, Marlene was in a two-piece bathing suit, red with large pink polka dots. She wore pink rubber slippers; a visor shaded her face from the sun. Their small motorboat lay to, its anchor dropped. Small swells rocked them now and again as pleasure boats went to and fro across the crystal blue water. The small village of Campione d'Italia rose up the hillside like the frosted tiers of a wedding cake.

Arkadin looked hard at her. It annoyed him that he didn't intimidate her. He intimidated most people; it was how he got along after his parents were gone.

"What, you don't think my mother died badly?"

"I'm interested in your mother before she died," Marlene said airily. "What was she like?"

"Actually, she was just like you."

Marlene gave him a basilisk stare.

"Seriously," he said. "My mother was tough as a fistful of nails. She knew how to stand up to my father."

Marlene seized on this opening. "Why did she have to do that? Was your father abusive?"

Arkadin shrugged. "No more than any other father, I suppose. When he was frustrated at work he took it out on her."

"And you find that normal."

"I don't know what the word normal normal means." means."

"But you're used to abuse, aren't you?"

"Isn't that called leading the witness, Counselor?"

"What did your father do?"

"He was consiglieri consiglieri-the counselor-to the Kazanskaya, the family of the Moscow grupperovka grupperovka that controls drug trafficking and the sale of foreign cars in the city and surrounding areas." He'd been nothing of the sort. Arkadin's father had been an ironworker, dirt-poor, desperate, and drunk as s.h.i.t twenty hours a day, just like everyone else in Nizhny Tagil. that controls drug trafficking and the sale of foreign cars in the city and surrounding areas." He'd been nothing of the sort. Arkadin's father had been an ironworker, dirt-poor, desperate, and drunk as s.h.i.t twenty hours a day, just like everyone else in Nizhny Tagil.

"So abuse and violence came naturally to him."

"He wasn't on the streets," Arkadin said, continuing his lie.

She gave him a thin smile. "All right, where do you you think your bouts of violence come from?" think your bouts of violence come from?"

"If I told you I'd have to kill you."

Marlene laughed. "Come on, Leonid Danilovich. Don't you want to be of use to Mr. Icoupov?"

"Of course I do. I want him to trust me."

"Then tell me."

Arkadin sat for a time. The sun felt good on his forearms. The heat seemed to draw his skin tight over his muscles, making them bulge. He felt the beating of his heart as if it were music. For just a moment, he felt free of his burden, as if it belonged to someone else, a tormented character in a Russian novel, perhaps. Then his past came rushing back like a fist in his gut and he almost vomited.

Very slowly, very deliberately he unlaced his sneakers, took them off. He peeled off his white athletic socks, and there was his left foot with its two toes and three miniature stumps, knotty, as pink as the polka dots on Marlene's bathing suit.

"Here's what happened," he said. "When I was fourteen years old, my mother took a frying pan to the back of my father's head. He'd just come home stone drunk, reeking of another woman. He was sprawled facedown on their bed, snoring peacefully, when whack! whack!, she took a heavy cast-iron skillet from its peg on the kitchen wall and, without a word, hit him ten times in the same spot. You can imagine what his skull looked like when she was done."

Marlene sat back. She seemed to have trouble breathing. At length, she said, "This isn't another one of your bulls.h.i.t stories, is it?"

"No," Arkadin said, "it's not."

"And where were you?"

"Where d'you think I was? Home. I saw the whole thing."

Marlene put a hand to her mouth. "My G.o.d."

Having expelled this ball of poison, Arkadin felt an exhilarating sense of freedom, but he knew what had to come next.

"Then what happened?" she said when she had recovered her equilibrium.

Arkadin let out a long breath. "I gagged her, tied her hands behind her, and threw her into the closet in my room."

"And?"

"I walked out of the apartment and never went back."

"How?" There was a look of genuine horror on her face. "How could you do such a thing?"

"I disgust you now, don't I?" He said this not with anger, but with a certain resignation. Why wouldn't she be disgusted by him? If only she knew the whole truth.

"Tell me in more detail about the accident in prison."

Arkadin knew at once that she was trying to find inconsistencies in his story. This was a cla.s.sic interrogator's technique. She would never know the truth.

"Let's go swimming," he said abruptly. He shed his shorts and T-shirt.

Marlene shook her head. "I'm not in the mood. You go if-"

"Oh, come on."

He pushed her overboard, stood up, dived in after her. He found her under the water, kicking her legs to bring herself to the surface. He wrapped his thighs around her neck, locked his ankles, tightening his grip on her. He rose to the surface, held on to the boat, swung water out of his eyes as she struggled below him. Boats thrummed past. He waved to two young girls, their long hair flying behind them like horses' manes. He wanted to hum a love song, but all he could think of was the theme to Bridge on the River Kwai Bridge on the River Kwai.

After a time, Marlene stopped struggling. He felt her weight below him, swaying gently in the swells. He didn't want to, really he didn't, but unbidden the image of his old apartment resurrected itself in his mind's eye. It was a slum, the filthy crumbling Soviet-era piece of s.h.i.t building teeming with vermin.

Their poverty didn't stop the older man from banging other women. When one of them became pregnant, she decided to have the baby. He was all for it, he told her. He'd help her in any way he could. But what he really wanted was the child his barren wife could never give him. When Leonid was born, he ripped the baby from the girl's arms, brought Leonid to his wife to raise.

"This is the child I always wanted, but you couldn't give me," he told her.

She raised Arkadin dutifully, without complaint, because where could a barren woman go in Nizhny Tagil? But when her husband wasn't home, she locked the boy in the closet of his room for hours at a time. A blind rage gripped her and wouldn't let her go. She despised this result of her husband's seed, and she felt compelled to punish Leonid because she couldn't punish his father.

It was during one of these long punishments that Arkadin woke to awful pain in his left foot. He wasn't alone in the closet. Half a dozen rats, large as his father's shoe, scuttled back and forth, squealing, teeth gnashing. He managed to kill them, but not before they finished what they'd started. They ate three of his toes.

Twenty-Seven.

IT ALL STARTED with Pyotr Zilber," Maslov said. "Or rather his younger brother, Aleksei. Aleksei was a wise guy. He tried to muscle in on one of my sources for foreign cars. A lot of people were killed, including some of my men and my source. For that, I had him killed."

Dimitri Maslov and Bourne were sitting in a gla.s.sed-in greenhouse built on the roof of the warehouse where Maslov had his office. They were surrounded by a lush profusion of tropical flowers: speckled orchids, brilliant carmine anthurium, birds-of-paradise, white ginger, heliconia. The air was perfumed with the scents of the pink plumeria and white jasmine. It was so warm and humid, Maslov looked right at home in his bright-hued short-sleeved shirt. Bourne had rolled up his sleeves. There was a table with a bottle of vodka and two gla.s.ses. They'd already had their first drink.

"Zilber pulled strings, had my man Borya Maks sent to High Security Prison Colony 13 in Nizhny Tagil. You've heard of it?"

Bourne nodded. Conklin had mentioned the prison several times.

"Then you know it's no picnic in there." Maslov leaned forward, refilled their gla.s.ses, handed one to Bourne, took the other himself. "Despite that, Zilber wasn't satisfied. He hired someone very, very good to infiltrate the prison and kill Maks." Drinking vodka, surrounded by a riot of color, he appeared totally at his ease. "Only one person could accomplish that and get out alive: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin."

The vodka had done Bourne a world of good, returning both warmth and strength to his overtaxed body. There was still a smear of blood on the point of one cheek, dried now, but Maslov had neither looked at it nor commented on it. "Tell me about Arkadin."

Maslov made an animal sound in the back of his throat. "All you need to know is that the sonovab.i.t.c.h killed Pyotr Zilber. G.o.d knows why. Then he disappeared off the face of the earth. I had Evsei stake out Mischa Tarkanian's apartment. I was hoping Arkadin would come back there. Instead, you showed up."

"What's Zilber's death to you?" Bourne said. "From what you've told me, there was no love lost between the two of you."

"Hey, I don't have to like a person to do business with him."

"If you wanted to do business with Zilber you shouldn't have had his brother murdered."

"I have my reputation to uphold." Maslov sipped his vodka. "Pyotr knew what kinds of s.h.i.t his brother was into, but did he stop him? Anyway, the hit was strictly business. Pyotr took it far too personally. Turns out he was almost as reckless as his brother."

There it was again, Bourne thought, the slurs against Pyotr Zilber. What, then, was he doing running a secret network? "What was your business with him?"

"I coveted Pyotr's network. Because of the war with the Azeri, I've been looking for a new, more secure method to move our drugs. Zilber's network was the perfect solution."

Bourne put aside his vodka. "Why would Zilber want anything to do with the Kazanskaya?"

"There you've given away the extent of your ignorance." Maslov eyed him curiously. "Zilber would have wanted money to fund his organization."

"You mean his network."

"I mean precisely what I say." Maslov looked hard and long at Bourne. "Pyotr Zilber was a member of the Black Legion."

Like a sailor who senses an onrushing storm, Devra stopped herself from asking Arkadin again about his maimed foot. There was about him at this moment the same slight tremor of intent of a bowstring pulled back to its maximum. She transferred her gaze from his left foot to the corpse of Heinrich, taking in sunlight that would no longer do him any good. She felt the danger beside her, and she thought of her dream: her pursuit of the unknown creature, her sense of utter desolation, the building of her fear to an unbearable level.

"You've got the package now," she said. "Is it over?"

For a moment, Arkadin said nothing, and she wondered whether she'd left her deflecting question too late, whether he would now turn on her because she had asked about what had happened to that d.a.m.n foot.

The red rage had gripped Arkadin, shaking him until his teeth rattled in his skull. It would have been so easy to turn to her, smile, and break her neck. So little effort; nothing to it. But something stopped him, something cooled him. It was his own will. He-did-not-want-to-kill-her. Not yet, at least. He liked sitting here on the beach with her, and there were so few things he liked.

"I still have to shut down the rest of the network," he said, at length. "Not that I think it actually matters at this point. Christ, it was put together by an out-of-control commander too young to have learned caution, peopled by drug addicts, inveterate gamblers, weaklings, and those of no faith. It's a wonder the network functioned at all. Surely it would have imploded on its own sooner or later." But what did he know? He was simply a soldier engaged in an invisible war. His was not to reason why.

Pulling out his cell phone, he dialed Icoupov's number.

"Where are you?" his boss said. "There's a lot of background noise."

"I'm at the beach," Arkadin said.

"What? The beach?"

"Kilyos. It's a suburb of Istanbul," Arkadin said.

"I hope you're having a good time while we're in a semi-panic."

Arkadin's demeanor changed instantly. "What happened?"

"The b.a.s.t.a.r.d had Harun killed, that's what happened."

He knew how much Harun Iliev meant to Icoupov. Like Mischa meant to him. A rock, someone to keep him from drifting into the abyss of his imagination. "On a happier note," he said, "I have the package."

Icoupov gave a short intake of breath. "Finally! Open it," he commanded. "Tell me if the doc.u.ment is inside."

Arkadin did as he was told, breaking the wax seal, prying open the plastic disk that capped off the cylinder. Inside, tightly rolled sheets of pale blue architectural paper unfurled like sails. There were four in all. Quickly, he scanned them.

Sweat broke out at his hairline. "I'm looking at a set of architectural plans."

"It's the target of the attack."

"The plans," Arkadin said, "are for the Empire State Building in New York City."