The Bourne Sanction

preternatural afternoon winter darkness came the snow, swirling down in ever-heavier curtains. Bourne knew he had to get out of the area as quickly as possible. He took the SIM card out of his phone, put it in Baronov’s, then threw his own cell phone down a storm drain. In his new identity as Fyodor Ilianovich Popov he couldn’t afford to be in possession of a cell with an American carrier.

He walked, leaning into the wind and snow. After six blocks, huddled in a doorway, he used Baronov’s cell phone to call his friend Boris Karpov. The voice at the end of the line grew cold.

“Colonel Karpov is no longer with FSB.”

Bourne felt a chill go through him. Russia had not changed so much that lightning-swift dismissals on trumped-up charges were a thing of the past.

“I need to contact him,” Bourne said.

“He’s now at the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency.” The voice recited a local number before abruptly hanging up.

That explained the attitude, Bourne thought. The Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency was headed up by Viktor Cherkesov. But many believed he was much more than that, a silovik running an organization so powerful that some had taken to calling it FSB-2. Recently an internal war between Cherkesov and Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, the modern-day successor to the notorious KGB, had sprung up within the government. The silovik who won that war would probably be the next president of Russia. If Karpov had gone from the FSB to FSB-2, it must be because Cherkesov had gotten the upper hand.

Bourne called the office of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, but he was told that Karpov was away and could not be reached.

For a moment he contemplated calling the man who had picked up Baronov’s Zil in the Crocus City parking lot, but he almost immediately thought better of it. He’d already gotten Baronov killed; he didn’t want any more deaths on his conscience.

He walked on until he came to a tram stop. He took the first one that appeared out of the gloom. He’d used the scarf he’d bought at the boutique in Crocus City to cover up the mark the wire had made across his throat. The small seepage of blood had dried up as soon as he’d hit the frigid air.

The tram jounced and rattled along its rails. Crammed inside with a stinking, noisy crowd, he felt thoroughly shaken. Not only had he discovered a Kazanskaya assassin waiting in Tarkanian’s apartment, but his contact had been murdered by an NSA assassin sent to kill him. His sense of apartness had never been more extreme. Babies cried, men rustled newspapers, women chatted side by side, an old man, big-knuckled hands curled over the head of his walking stick, clandestinely ogled a young girl engrossed in a manga comic. Here was life, bustling all around him, a burbling stream that parted when it came to him, an immovable rock, only to come together when it passed him, flowing on while he remained behind, still and alone.

He thought of Marie, as he always did at times like this. But Marie was gone, and her memory was of little solace to him. He missed his children, and wondered whether this was the David Webb personality bubbling up. An old, familiar despair swept through him, as it hadn’t since Alex Conklin had taken him out of the gutter, formed the Bourne identity for him to slip on like a suit of armor. He felt the crushing weight of life on him, a life lived alone, a sad and lonely life that could only end one way.

And then his thoughts turned to Moira, of how impossibly difficult that last meeting with her had been. If she had been a spy, if she had betrayed Martin and meant to do the same with him, what would he have done? Would he have turned her over to Soraya or Veronica Hart?

But she wasn’t a spy. He would never have to face that conundrum.

When it came to Moira, his personal feelings were now bound up in his professional duty, inextricably combined. He knew that she loved him and, now, in the face of his despair, he understood that he loved her, as well. When he was with her he felt whole, but in an entirely new way. She wasn’t Marie, and he didn’t want her to be Marie. She was Moira, and it was Moira he wanted.

By the time he swung off the tram in Moscow Center, the snow had abated to veils of drifting flakes whirled about by stray gusts of wind across the huge open plazas. The city’s lights were on against the long winter evening, but the clearing sky turned the temperature bitter. The streets were clogged with gypsy cabbies in their cheap cars manufactured during the Brezhnev years, trundling slowly in bumper-to-bumper lines so as to not miss a fare. They were known in local slang as bombily-those who bomb-because of the bowel-loosening speed with which they bombed around the city’s streets as soon as they had a passenger.

He went into a cybercafй, paid for fifteen minutes at a computer terminal, typed in Kitaysky Lyotchik. Kitaysky Lyotchik Zhao-Da, the full name-or The Chinese Pilot in its English translation-turned out to be a throbbing elitny club at proyezd Lubyansky 25. The Kitai-Gorod metro stop let Bourne out at the end of the block. On one side was a canal, frozen solid; on the other, a row of mixed-use buildings. The Chinese Pilot was easy enough to spot, what with the BMWs, Mercedeses, and Porsche SUVs, as well as the ubiquitous gaggle of bombily Zhigs clustered on the street. The crowd behind a velvet rope was being held in check by fierce-looking face-control bullies, so that waiting partygoers spilled drunkenly off the pavement. Bourne went up to the red Cayenne, rapped on the window. When the driver scrolled the window down, Bourne held out three hundred dollars.

“When I come out that door, this is my car, right?”

The driver eyed the money hungrily. “Right you are, sir.”

In Moscow, especially, American dollars talked louder than words.

“And if your client comes out in the meantime?”

“He won’t,” the driver assured Bourne. “He’s in the champagne room till four at the earliest.”

Another hundred dollars got Bourne past the shouting, unruly mob. Inside, he ate an indifferent meal of an Oriental salad and almond-crusted chicken breast. From his perch along the glowing bar, he watched the Russian siloviki come and go with their diamond-studded, mini-skirted, fur-wrapped dyevochkas-strictly speaking, young women who had not yet borne a child. This was the new order in Russia. Except Bourne knew that many of the same people were still in power-either ex-KGB siloviki or their progeny lined up against the boys from Sokolniki, who came from nothing into sudden wealth. The siloviki, derived from the Russian word for “power,” were men from the so-called power ministries, including the security services and the military, who had risen during the Putin era. They were the new guard, having overthrown the Yeltsin-period oligarchs. No matter. Siloviki or mobster, they were criminals, they’d killed, extorted, maimed, blackmailed; they all had blood on their hands, they were all strangers to remorse.

Bourne scanned the tables for Gala Nematova, was surprised to find half a dozen dyevs who might have fit the bill, especially in this low light. It was astonishing to observe firsthand this wheat field of tall, willowy young women, one more striking than the next. There was a prevalent theory, a kind of skewed Darwinism-survival of the prettiest-that explained why there were so many startlingly handsome dyevochkas in Russia and Ukraine. If you were a man in his twenties in these countries in 1947 it meant that you’d survived one of the greatest male bloodbaths in human history. These men, being in the vast minority, had their pick of women. Who had they chosen to marry and impregnate? The answer was obvious, hence the acres of dyevs partying here and in every other nightclub in Russia.

Out on the dance floor, a crush of gyrating bodies made identification of individuals impossible. Spotting a redheaded dyev on her own, Bourne walked over to her, gestured if she wanted to dance. The earsplitting house music pumped out of a dozen massive speakers made small talk impossible. She nodded, took his hand, and they shoved, elbowed, and squeezed their way into a cramped space on the dance floor. The next twenty minutes could have substituted for a vigorous workout. The dancing was nonstop, as were the colored flashing lights and the chest-vibrating drumming of the high-octane music spewed out by a local band called Tequilajazz.

Over the top of the redhead Bourne caught a glimpse of yet another blond dyev. Only this one was different. Grabbing the redhead’s hand, Bourne eeled deeper into the gyrating pack of dancers. Perfume, cologne, and sour sweat mixed with the raw tang of hot metal and blazing monster amplifiers.

Still dancing, Bourne maneuvered around until he was certain. The blonde dyev dancing with the broad-shouldered mobster was, indeed, Gala Nematova.

It’ll never be the same,” Dr. Mitten said.