The Bourne Sanction

Filya Petrovich, Pyotr’s Sevastopol courier, lived in an anonymous block of crumbling housing left over from the days the Soviets had reshaped the city into a vast barracks housing its largest naval contingent. The apartment, frozen in time since the 1970s, had all the charm of a meat locker.

Arkadin opened the door with the key he’d found on Filya. He pushed Devra over the threshold, stepped in. Turning on the lights, he closed the door behind him. She hadn’t wanted to come, but she had no say in the matter, just as she’d had no say in helping him drag Filya’s corpse out the nightclub’s back door. They set him down at the end of the filthy alley, propped up against a wall damp with unknown fluids. Arkadin poured the contents of a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka over him, then pressed the man’s fingers around the bottle’s neck. Filya became one drunk among many other drunks in the city. His death would be swept away on an inefficient and overworked bureaucratic tide.

“What’re you looking for?” Devra stood in the middle of the living room, watching Arkadin’s methodical search. “What d’you think you’ll find? The document?” Her laugh was a kind of shrill catcall. “It’s gone.”

Arkadin glanced up from the mess his switchblade had made of the sofa cushions. “Where?”

“Far out of your reach, that’s for sure.”

Closing his knife, Arkadin crossed the space between the two of them in one long stride. “Do you think this is a joke, or a game we’re playing here?”

Devra’s upper lip curled. “Are you going to hurt me now? Believe me, nothing you could do would be worse than what’s already been done to me.”

Arkadin, the blood pounding in his veins, held himself in check to consider her words. What she said was probably the truth. Under the Soviet boot, God had forsaken many Ukrainians, especially the young attractive females. He needed to take another tack entirely.

“I’m not going to hurt you, even though you’re with the wrong people.” He turned on his heel, sat down on a wood-framed chair. Leaning back, he ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve seen a lot of shit-I’ve done two stints in prison. I can imagine the systematic brutalization you’ve been through.”

“Me and my mother, God rest her soul.”

The headlights of passing cars shone briefly through the windows, then dwindled away. A dog barked in an alleyway, its melancholy voice echoing. A couple passing by outside argued vehemently. Inside the shabby apartment the patchy light cast by the lamps, their shades either torn or askew, caused Devra to look terribly vulnerable, like a wisp of a child. Arkadin rose, stretched mightily, strolled over to the window, looked out onto the street. His eyes picked out every bit of shadow, every flare of light no matter how brief or tiny. Sooner or later Pyotr’s people were going to come after him; it was an inevitability that he and Icoupov had discussed before he left the villa. Icoupov had offered to send a couple of hard men to lie low in Sevastopol in the event they were needed, but Arkadin refused, saying he preferred to work alone.

Having assured himself that the street was for the moment clear, he turned away from the window, back to the room. “My mother died badly,” he said. “She was murdered, brutally beaten, left in a closet for the rats to gnaw on. At least that’s what the coroner told me.”

“Where was your father?”

Arkadin shrugged. “Who knows? By that time, the sonovabitch could’ve been in Shanghai, or he could’ve been dead. My mother told me he was a merchant marine, but I seriously doubt it. She was ashamed of having been knocked up by a perfect stranger.”

Devra, who had sat down on the ripped-apart arm of the sofa during this recitation, said, “It sucks not knowing where you came from, doesn’t it? Like always being adrift at sea. You’ll never recognize home even if you come upon it.”

“Home,” Arkadin said heavily. “I never think of it.”

Devra caught something in his tone. “But you’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

His expression went sour. He checked the street again with his usual thoroughness. “What would be the point?”

“Because knowing where we come from allows us know who we are.” She beat softly at her chest with a fist. “Our past is part of us.”

Arkadin felt as if she’d pricked him with a needle. Venom squirted through his veins. “My past is an island I’ve sailed away from long ago.”

“Nevertheless, it’s still with you, even if you’re not aware of it,” she said with the force of having mulled the question over and over in her own mind. “We can’t outrun our past, no matter how hard we try.”

Unlike him, she seemed eager to talk about her past. He found this curious. Did she think this subject was common ground? If so, he needed to stay with it, to keep the co

“What about your father?”

“I was born here, grew up here.” She stared down at her hands. “My father was a naval engineer. He was thrown out of the shipyards when the Russians took it over. Then one night they came for him, said he was spying on them, delivering technical information on their ships to the Americans. I never saw him again. But the Russian security officer in charge took a liking to my mother. When he’d used her up, he started on me.”

Arkadin could just imagine. “How did it end?”

“An American killed him.” She looked up at him. “Fucking ironic, because this American was a spy sent to photograph the Russian fleet. When the American had completed his assignment he should’ve gone back home. Instead he stayed. He took care of me, nursed me back to health.”

“Naturally you fell in love with him.”

She laughed. “If I was a character in a novel, sure. But he was so kind to me; I was like a daughter to him. I cried when he left.”

Arkadin found that he was embarrassed by her confession. To distract himself, he looked around the ruined apartment one more time.

Devra watched him warily. “Hey. I’m dying for something to eat.”

Arkadin laughed. “Aren’t we all?”

His hawk-like gaze took in the street once more. This time the hairs on the back of his neck stirred as he stepped to the side of the window. A car he’d heard approaching had pulled up in front of the building. Devra, alerted by the sudden tension in his body, moved to the window behind him. What caught his attention was that though its engine was still ru

He turned away from the window. “We’re going. Now.”

“Pyotr’s people. It was inevitable they’d find us.”

Much to Arkadin’s surprise she made no protest when he hustled her out of the apartment. The hallway was already reverberating with the tribal beat of heavy shoes on the concrete floor.

Bourne found walking unpleasant but hardly intolerable. He’d put up with a lot worse than a flayed heel in his time. As he followed the professor down a metal staircase into the basement, he reflected that this was proof again that there were no absolutes when it came to people. He had assumed that Specter’s life was neat, tidy, dull, and quiet, restricted by the dimensions of the university campus. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Halfway down, the staircase changed to stone treads, worn by decades of use. Their way was guided by plenty of light from below. They entered a finished basement made up of movable walls that separated what looked like office cubicles outfitted with laptop computers attached to high-speed modems. All of them were staffed.

Specter stopped at the last cubicle, where a young man appeared to be decoding text that scrolled across his computer screen. The young man, becoming aware of Specter, pulled a sheet of paper out of the printer hopper, handed it to him. As soon as the professor read it a change came over his demeanor. Though he kept his expression neutral, a certain tension stiffened his frame.