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 personnel and the Immigration people under Icoupov’s control. The man directing the incoming passengers to the different cordoned-off lanes leading to the Immigration booths received a photo of Bourne on his computer screen just in time to indicate Bourne should go to booth 3.
The Immigration officer manning booth 3 listened to the voice coming through the electronic device in his ear. When the man identified to him as Jason Bourne handed over his passport the officer asked him the usual questions-“How long do you intend to remain in Germany? Is your visit business or pleasure?”-while paging through the passport. He moved it away from the window, passed the photo under a humming purple light. As he did so, he pressed a small metallic disk the thickness of a human nail into the inside back cover of the passport. Then he closed the booklet, smoothed its front and back covers, and handed it back to Bourne.
“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,
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.”
As Kirsch spoke they moved on to a granite sculpture of the kneeling Senenmut, from the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
“The ancient Egyptians knew how to live,” Kirsch observed. “They weren’t afraid of death. To them, it was just another journey, not to be undertaken lightly, but still they knew there was something waiting for them after life.” He put his hand out, as if to touch the statue or perhaps to absorb some of its potency. “Look at this statue. Life still glows within it, thousands of years later. For centuries the Egyptians had no equal.”
“Until they were conquered by the Romans.”
“And yet,” Kirsch said, “it was the Romans who were changed by the Egyptians. A century after the Ptolemys and Julius Caesar ruled from Alexandria, it was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of revenge and rebellion, who was worshipped throughout the Roman Empire. In fact, it’s all too likely that the early Christian Church founders, unable to do away with her or her followers, transmogrified her, stripped her of her war-like nature, and made from her the perfectly peaceful Virgin Mary.”
“Leonid Arkadin could use a little less Isis and a lot more Virgin Mary,” Bourne mused.
Kirsch raised his eyebrows. “What do you know of this man?”
“I know a lot of dangerous people are terrified of him.”
“With good reason,” Kirsch said. “The man’s a homicidal maniac. He was born and raised in Nizhny Tagil, a hotbed of homicidal maniacs.”
“So I’ve heard,” Bourne nodded.
“And there he would have stayed had it not been for Tarkanian.”
Bourne’s ears pricked up. He’d assumed that Maslov had put his man in Tarkanian’s apartment because that’s where Gala was living. “Wait a minute, what does Tarkanian have to do with Arkadin?”
“Everything. Without Mischa Tarkanian, Arkadin would never have escaped Nizhny Tagil. It was Tarkanian who brought him to Moscow.”
“Are they both members of the Black Legion?”
“So I’ve been given to understand,” Kirsch said. “But I’m only an artist; the clandestine life has given me an ulcer. If I didn’t need the money-I’m a singularly unsuccessful artist, I’m afraid-I never would have stayed in this long. This was to be my last favor for Specter.” His eyes continued to dart to the left and right. “Now that Arkadin has murdered Dieter Heinrich,
Bourne was now on full alert. Specter had assumed that Tarkanian was Black Legion, and Kirsch just confirmed it. But Maslov had denied Tarkanian’s affiliation with the terrorist group. Someone was lying.
Bourne was about to ask Kirsch about the discrepancy when out of the corner of his eye he spotted one of the men who’d come into the museum just after he had. The man had paused for a moment in the vestibule, as if orienting himself, then strode purposefully off into the exhibition hall.
Because the man was close enough to overhear them in the museum’s hushed atmosphere, Bourne took Kirsch’s arm. “Come this way,” he said, leading the German contact into another room, which was dominated by a calcite statue of twins from the Eighth Dynasty. It was chipped, time-worn, dating from 2390 BC.
Pushing Kirsch behind the statue, Bourne stood like a sentinel, watching the other man’s movements. The man glanced up, saw that Bourne and Kirsch were no longer at the statue of Senenmut, and looked casually
