The Bourne Sanction

At the end of three weeks, the psychiatrist handed in his report to Icoupov and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. No matter. Arkadin’s nightmares continued to haunt him in the dead of night when, upon awakening with a gasp and a start, he was convinced he heard rats scuttling, red eyes burning in the darkness. At those moments, the fact that Icoupov’s villa was completely vermin-free was of no solace to him. The rats lived inside him squirming, shrieking, feeding.

The next person Icoupov employed to burrow into Arkadin’s past in an attempt to cure him of his fits of rage was a woman whose sensuality and lush figure he felt would keep her safe from Arkadin’s outbursts of fury. Marlene was adept at handling men of all kinds and kinks. She possessed an unca

At first Arkadin didn’t trust Marlene. Why should he? He couldn’t trust the psychiatrist. Wasn’t she just another form of analyst sent to coax out the secrets of his past? Marlene of course noted this aversion in him and set about countering it. The way she saw it, Arkadin was living under a spell, self-induced or otherwise. It was up to her to concoct an antidote.

“This won’t be a short process,” she told Icoupov at the end of her first week with Arkadin, and he believed her.

Arkadin observed Marlene walking on little cat feet. He suspected she was smart enough to know that even the slightest misstep on her part might strike him as a seismic shift, and then all the progress she’d made in gaining his trust would evaporate like alcohol over a flame. She seemed to him wary, acutely aware that at any moment he could turn on her. She acted as if she were in a cage with a bear. Day by day you could track the training of it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t unexpectedly rip your face off.

Arkadin had to laugh at that, the care with which she was treating every aspect of him. But gradually something else began to creep into his consciousness. He suspected that she was coming to feel something genuine for him.

Devra watched Arkadin through the windshield. Then she kicked open her door, went after him. She shaded her eyes against a white sun plastered to a high, pale sky.

“What is it?” she said when she’d caught up to him. “What did I say?”

Arkadin turned a murderous look her way. He appeared to be in a towering rage, just barely holding himself together. Devra found herself wondering what would happen if he let himself go, but she also didn’t want to be in his way when it happened.

She felt an urge to touch him, to speak soothingly until he returned to a calmer state of mind, but she sensed that would only inflame him further. So she went back to the car to wait patiently for him to return.

Eventually he did, sitting sideways on the seat, his shoes on the ground as if he might bolt again.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”

She felt he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t, that whatever it was was too bound up in what had happened to him a long time ago.

“It was a joke,” she said softly. “I was making a stupid joke.”

“There was a time when I would’ve thought nothing of it,” he said, as if talking to himself. “Sex is unimportant.”

She sensed that he was speaking about something else, something only he knew, and she glimpsed just how alone he was. She suspected that even in a crowd, even with friends-if he had any-he’d feel alone. It seemed to her that he’d walled himself off from sexual melding because it would underscore the depth of his apartness. He seemed to her to be a moonless planet with no sun to revolve around. Just emptiness everywhere as far as he could see. In that moment she realized that she loved him.

How long has he been in there?” Luther LaValle asked.

“Six days,” General Kendall replied. He was in his shirtsleeves, which were turned up. That precaution hadn’t been enough to protect them from spatters of blood. “But I guarantee that to him it feels like six months. He’s as disoriented as it’s possible for a human being to be.”

LaValle grunted, peering at the bearded Arab through the one-way mirror. The man looked like a raw piece of meat. LaValle didn’t know or care whether he was Su

“What’s he given up?”

“Enough that we know the copies of the Typhon intercepts Batt has given us are disinformation.”

“Still,” LaValle said, “it comes straight from Typhon.”

“This man’s very highly placed, there’s no question whatsoever of his identity, and he knows of no plans moving into their final stages to hit a major New York building.”

“That in itself could be disinformation,” LaValle said. “These bastards are masters of that kind of shit.”

“Right.” Kendall wiped his hands on a towel he’d thrown over his shoulder like a chef at the stove. “They love nothing better than to see us ru

LaValle nodded, as if to himself. “I want our best people to follow up on it. Confirm the Typhon intercepts.”

“We’ll do our best, but I feel it my duty to report that the prisoner laughed in my face when I asked him about this terrorist group.”

LaValle snapped his fingers several times. “What are they called again?”

“The Black Lesion, the Black Legion, something like that.”

“Nothing in our database about this group?”

“No, or at any of our sister agencies, either.” Kendall threw the soiled towel into a basket whose contents were incinerated every twelve hours. “It doesn’t exist.”

“I tend to agree,” LaValle said, “but I’d like to be certain.”

He turned from the window, and the two men went out of the viewing room. They walked down a rough concrete corridor painted an institutional green, the buzzing fluorescent tubes that hurled purple shadows on the linoleum floor as they passed. He waited patiently outside the locker room for Kendall to change his clothes; then they proceeded down the corridor. At the end of it they climbed a flight of stairs to a reinforced metal door.

LaValle pressed his forefinger onto a fingerprint reader. He was rewarded by the clicking of bolts being shot, not unlike a bank vault opening.

They found themselves in another corridor, the polar opposite of the one they were leaving. This one was paneled in polished mahogany; wall sconces produced a soft, buttery glow between paintings of historical naval engagements, phalanxes of Roman legions, Prussian Hussars, and English light cavalry.

The first door on the left brought them into a room straight out of a high-toned men’s club, replete with hunter-green walls, cream moldings, leather furniture, antique breakfronts, and a wooden bar from an old English pub. The sofas and chairs were well spaced, the better to allow occupants to speak of private matters. Flames cracked and sparked comfortingly in a large fireplace.

A liveried butler met them before they’d taken three steps on the thick, sound-deadening carpet. He guided them to their accustomed spot, in a discreet corner where two high-backed leather chairs were arranged on either side of a mahogany pedestal card table. They were near a tall, mullioned window flanked by thick drapes, which overlooked the Virginia countryside. This club-like room, known as the Library, was in an enormous stone house that the NSA had taken over decades ago. It was used as a retreat as well as for formal di

When they had ordered drinks and light refreshments, and were alone again, LaValle said, “Do we have a line on Bourne yet?”

“Yes and no.” Kendall crossed one leg over the other, arranging the crease in his trousers. “As per our previous briefing, he came onto the grid at six thirty-seven last night, passing through Immigration at Dulles. He was booked on a Lufthansa flight to Moscow. Had he showed we could’ve put McNally onto the flight.”