The Bourne Sanction

Crossing to LaValle’s desk, he opened the drawers one by one, checking for false backs or bottoms. Finding none, he moved on to the bookcase, the sideboard with its hanging files and liquor bottles side by side. He lifted the prints off the walls, searching behind them for a hidden cache, but there was nothing.

He sat on a corner of the desk, contemplated the room, unconsciously swinging his leg back and forth while he tried to work out where LaValle had hidden the camera. All at once he heard the sound the heel of his shoe made against the skirt of the desk. Hopping off, he went around, crawled into the kneehole, and rapped on the skirt until he replicated the sound his heel had made. Yes, he was certain now: This part of the skirt was hollow.

Feeling around with his fingertips, he discovered the tiny latch, pushed it aside, and swung open the door. There was Tyrone’s camera. He was reaching for it when he heard the scratch of metal on metal.

LaValle was at the door.

Tell me you love me, Leonid Danilovich.” Devra smiled up at him as he knelt over her.

“What happened, Devra? What happened?” was all he could say.

He’d extricated himself at last from the sculpture, and would have gone after Bourne-but he’d heard the shots coming from Kirsch’s apartment, then the sound of ru

“Leonid Danilovich.” She’d called his name when he appeared in her limited field of vision. “I waited for you.”

She started to tell him what had happened, but blood bubbles formed at the corners of her mouth and she started to gurgle horribly. Arkadin lifted her head off the floor, cradled it on his thighs. He pushed matted hair off her forehead and cheeks, leaving red streaks like war paint.

She tried to continue, stopped. Her eyes went out of focus and he thought he’d lost her. Then they cleared, her smile returned, and she said, “Do you love me, Leonid?”

He bent down and whispered her in ear. Was it I love you? There was so much static in his head, he couldn’t hear himself. Did he love her, and, if he did, what would it mean? Did it even matter? He’d promised to protect her and failed. He stared down into her eyes, into her smile, but all he saw was his own past rising up to engulf him once again.

I need more money,” Yelena said one night as she lay entangled with him.

“What for? I give you enough as it is.”

“I hate it here, it’s like a prison, girls are crying all the time, they’re beaten, and then they disappear. I used to make friends just to pass the time, to have something to do during the day, but now I don’t bother. What’s the point? They’re gone within a week.”

Arkadin had become aware of Kuzin’s seemingly insatiable need for more girls. “I don’t see how any of this has to do with you needing more money.”

“If I can’t have friends,” Yelena said, “I want drugs.”

“I told you, no drugs,” Arkadin said as he rolled away from her and sat up.

“If you love me, you’ll get me out of here.”

“Love?” He turned to stare at her. “Who said anything about love?”

She started to cry. “I want to live with you, Leonid. I want to be with you always.”

Feeling something unknown close around his throat, Arkadin stood up, backed away. “Jesus,” he said, gathering up his clothes, “where do you get such ideas?”

Leaving her to her pitiful weeping, he went out to procure more girls. Before he reached the front door of the brothel Stas Kuzin intercepted him.

“Yelena’s wailing is disturbing the other girls,” he said in his hissing way. “It’s bad for business.”

“She wants to live with me,” Arkadin said. “Can you imagine?”

Kuzin laughed, the sound like nails screeching against a blackboard. “I’m wondering what would be worse, the nagging wife wanting to know where you were all night or the caterwauling brats making it impossible to sleep.”

They both laughed at the comment, and Arkadin thought nothing more about it. For the next three days he worked steadily, methodically combing Nizhny Tagil for more girls to restock the brothel. At the end of that time he slept for twenty hours, then went straight to Yelena’s room. He found another girl, one he’d recently hijacked off the streets, sleeping in Yelena’s bed.

“Where’s Yelena?” he said, throwing off the covers.

She looked up at him, blinking like a bat in sunlight. “Who’s Yelena?” she said in a voice husky with sleep.

Arkadin strode out of the room and into Stas Kuzin’s office. The big man sat behind a gray metal desk, talking on the phone, but he beckoned Arkadin to take a seat while he finished his call. Arkadin, preferring to stand, gripped the back of a wooden chair, leaning forward over its ladder back.

At length, Kuzin put down the receiver, said, “What can I do for you, my friend?”

“Where’s Yelena?”

“Who?” Kuzin’s frown knit his brows together, making him look something like a cyclops. “Oh, yes, the wailer.” He smiled. “There’s no chance of her bothering you again.”

“What does that mean?”

“Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?” Kuzin’s phone rang and he answered it. “Hold the fuck on,” he said into it. Then he looked up at his partner. “Tonight we’ll go to di

Then he returned to his call.

Arkadin felt frozen in time, as if he was now doomed to relive this moment for the rest of his life. Mute, he walked like an automaton out of the office, out of the brothel, out of the building he owned with Kuzin. Without even thinking, he got into his car, drove north into the forest of dripping firs and weeping hemlocks. There was no sun in the sky, the horizon was rimmed with smokestacks. The air was hazed with carbon and sulfur particles, tinged a lurid orange-red, as if everything were on fire.

Arkadin pulled off the road and walked down the rutted track, following the route the van had taken previously. Somewhere along the line he found that he was ru

He brought himself up abruptly at the edge of the pit. In places, sacks of quicklime had been shaken out in order to aid the decomposition; nevertheless it was impossible to mistake the content. His eyes roved over the bodies until he found her. Yelena was lying in a tangle where she’d landed after being kicked over the side. Several very large rats were picking their way toward her.

Arkadin, staring into the mouth of hell, gave a little cry, the sound a puppy might make if you mistakenly stepped on its paw. Scrambling down the side, he ignored the appalling stench and, through watering eyes, dragged her up the slope, laid her out on the forest floor, the bed of brown needles, soft as her own. Then he trudged back to the car, opened the trunk, and took out a shovel.

He buried her half a mile away from the pit, in a small clearing that was private and peaceful. He carried her over his shoulder the whole way, and by the time he was finished he smelled like death. At that moment, crouched on his hamstrings, his face streaked with sweat and dirt, he doubted whether he’d ever be able to scrub off the stench. If he knew a prayer, he would have said it then, but he knew only obscenities, which he uttered with the fervor of the righteous. But he wasn’t righteous; he was damned.

For a businessman there was a decision to be made. Arkadin was no businessman, though, so from that day forward his fate was sealed. He returned to Nizhny Tagil with his two Stechkin handguns fully loaded and extra rounds of ammunition in his breast pockets. Entering the brothel, he shot the two ghouls dead as they stood at guard. Neither had a chance to draw his weapon.