The Bourne Sanction

On either side of Kuzin were two ghoulish-looking men with sunken eyes and crude tattoos of dogs on the backs of their hands, which marked them as forever bound to their master.

“Let’s talk,” this monstrosity said to Arkadin, jerking his tiny head toward a table.

The men who’d been occupying the table rose as one when Kuzin approached, fleeing to the other side of the bar. Kuzin hooked his shoe around a chair leg, dragged it around, and sat down. Disconcertingly, he kept his hands in his lap, as if at any moment he’d draw down on Arkadin and shoot him dead.

He began talking, but it took the seventeen-year-old Arkadin some minutes before he could make heads or tails of what Kuzin was saying. It was like listening to a drowning man going under for the third time. At length, he realized that Kuzin was proposing a merger of sorts: half Arkadin’s stake in real estate for 10 percent of Kuzin’s operation.

And just what was Stas Kuzin’s operation? No one would speak about it openly, but there was no lack of rumors on the subject. Everything from ru

Once again, want never appeared on Arkadin’s horizon, only need. He needed to do more than survive in this city of permasoot, violence, and black lung disease. He had come as far as he could on his own. He made enough to sustain himself here, but not enough to break away to Moscow where he needed to go to grab life’s richest opportunities. Outside, the rings of hell rose up: brick smokestacks, vigorously belching particle-laden smoke, iron guard towers of the brutal prison zonas, bristling with assault rifles, powerful spotlights, and bellowing sirens.

In here he was locked inside his own brutal zona with Stas Kuzin. Arkadin gave the only sensible answer. He said yes, and so entered the ninth level of hell.

Thirty-One

WHILE ON LINE for passport control in Munich, Bourne phoned Specter, who assured him everything was in readiness. Moments later he came in range of the first set of the airport’s CCTV cameras. Instantly his image was picked up by the software employed at Semion Icoupov’s headquarters, and before he’d finished his call to the professor he’d been identified.

At once Icoupov was called, who ordered his people stationed in Munich to move from standby to action, thus alerting both the airport perso

The Immigration officer ma

“Have a pleasant stay in Munich,” he said without a trace of emotion or interest. He was already looking beyond Bourne to the next passenger in line.

As in Sheremetyevo, Bourne had the sense that he was under physical surveillance. He changed taxis twice when he arrived at the seething center of the city. In Marienplatz, a large open square from which the historic Marian column ascended, he walked past medieval cathedrals, through flocks of pigeons, lost himself within the crowds of guided tours, gawping at the sugar-icing architecture and the looming twin domes of the Frauenkirche, cathedral of the archbishop of Munich-Freising, the symbol of the city.

He inserted himself in a tour group gathered around a government building in which was inset the city’s official shield, depicting a monk with hands spread wide. The tour leader was telling her charges that the German name, Mьnchen, stemmed from an Old High German word meaning “monks.” In 1158 or thereabouts, the current duke of Saxony and Bavaria built a bridge over the Isar River, co

When Bourne was certain he wasn’t being shadowed, he slipped away from the group and boarded a taxi, which dropped him off six blocks from the Wittelsbach Palace.

According to the professor, Kirsch said he’d rather meet Bourne in a public setting. He chose the State Museum for Egyptian Art on Hofgartenstrasse, which was housed within the massive rococo facade of the Wittelsbach Palace. Bourne took a full circuit of the streets around the palace, checking once more for tags, but he couldn’t recall being in Munich before. He didn’t have that eerie sense of dйjа vu that meant he had returned to a place he couldn’t remember. Therefore, he knew local tags would have the advantage of terrain. There might be a dozen places to hide around the palace that he didn’t know about.

Shrugging, he entered the museum. The metal detector was staffed by a pair of armed security guards, who were also setting aside backpacks and picking through handbags. On either side of the vestibule was a pair of basalt statues of the Egyptian god Horus-a falcon with a disk of the sun on his forehead-and his mother, Isis. Instead of walking directly to the exhibits, Bourne turned, stood behind the statue of Horus, watching for ten minutes as people came and went. He noted everyone between twenty-five and fifty, memorizing their faces. There were seventeen in all.

He then made his way past a female armed guard, into the exhibition halls, where he found Kirsch precisely where he told Specter he’d be, scrutinizing an ancient carving of a lion’s head. He recognized Kirsch from the photo Specter had sent him, a snapshot of the two men standing together on the university campus. The professor’s courier was a wiry little man with a shiny bald skull and black eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. He had pale blue eyes that darted this way and that as if on gimbals.

Bourne went past him, ostensibly looking at several sarcophagi while using his peripheral vision to check for any of the seventeen people who’d entered the museum after him. When no one presented themselves, he retraced his steps.

Kirsch did not turn as Bourne came up beside him, but said, “I know it sounds ridiculous, but doesn’t this sculpture remind you of something?”

“The Pink Panther,” Bourne said, both because it was the proper code response, and because the sculpture did look astonishingly like the modern-day cartoon icon.

Kirsch nodded. “Glad you made it without incident.” He handed over the keys to his apartment, the code for the front door, and detailed directions to it from the museum. He looked relieved, as if he were handing over his burdensome life rather than his home.

“There are some features of my apartment I want to talk to you about.”