“What happened to him?” Moira said with a gasp. “Is he alive or dead?”
Bourne knelt beside his old mentor. “He’s still breathing.” As he began to rip off the professor’s shirt, he said to Moira. “Get us moving, okay? We need to get out of here now.”
Moira nodded. As she went up the aisle, she spoke to one of the flight attendants, who ran for the first-aid kit. The door to the cockpit was still open, and she gave the order for takeoff to the captain and the co-pilot.
Within five minutes the rolling stairs had been removed and the 747 was taxiing to the head of the runway. A moment later the control tower cleared it for takeoff. The brakes were let out, the engines revved up, and, with increasing velocity, the jet hurtled down the runway. Then it lifted off, its wheel retracted, flaps were adjusted, and it soared into a sky filled with the crimson and gold of the setting sun.
Forty-Three
IS HE DEAD?” Sever stared up at Bourne, who was cleaning his chest wound.
“You mean Semion?”
“Yes. Semion. Is he dead?”
“Icoupov and the driver, both.”
Bourne held Sever down while the alcohol burned off everything that could cause the wound to suppurate. No organs had been struck, but the injury must be extremely painful.
Bourne applied an antiseptic cream from a tube in the first-aid kit. “Who shot you?”
“Arkadin.” Tears of pain rolled down Sever’s cheeks. “For some reason, he’s gone completely insane. Maybe he was always insane. I thought so anyway. Allah, that hurts!” He took several shallow breaths before he went on. “He came out of nowhere. The driver said, ‘A police car has pulled up behind us.’ The next thing I know he’s rolling down the window and a gun is fired point-blank in his face. Neither Semion nor I had time to think. There was Arkadin inside the car. He shot me, but I’m certain it was Semion he’d come for.”
Intuiting what must have happened in Kirsch’s apartment, Bourne said, “Icoupov killed his woman, Devra.”
Sever squeezed his eyes shut. He was having trouble breathing normally. “So what? Arkadin never cared what happened to his women.”
“He cared about this one,” Bourne said, applying a bandage.
Sever stared up at Bourne with an expression of disbelief. “The odd thing was, I think I heard him call Semion ‘Father.’ Semion didn’t understand.”
“And now he never will.”
“Stop your fussing; let me die, dammit!” Sever said crossly. “It doesn’t matter now whether I live or die.”
Bourne finished up.
“What’s done is done. Fate has been sealed; there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to change it.”
Bourne sat on a seat opposite Sever. He was aware of Moira standing to one side, watching and listening. The professor’s betrayal only went to prove that you were never safe when you let personal feelings into your life.
“Jason.” Sever’s voice was weaker. “I never meant to deceive you.”
“Yes, you did, Professor, that’s all you know how to do.”
“I came to look upon you as a son.”
“Like Icoupov looked upon Arkadin.”
With an effort, Sever shook his head. “Arkadin is insane. Perhaps they both were, perhaps their shared insanity is what drew them together.”
Bourne sat forward, “Let me ask you a question, Professor. Do you think you’re sane?”
“Of course I’m sane.”
Sever’s eyes held steady on Bourne’s, a challenge still, at this late stage.
For a moment, Bourne did nothing, then he rose and, together with Moira, walked forward toward the cockpit.
“It’s a long flight,” she said softly, “and you need your rest.”
“We both do.”
They sat next to each other, silent for a long time. Occasionally, they heard Sever utter a soft moan. Otherwise, the drone of the engines conspired to lull them to sleep.
It was freezing in the baggage hold, but Arkadin didn’t mind. The Nizhny Tagil winters had been brutal. It was during one of those winters that Mischa Tarkanian had found him, hiding out from the remnants of Stas Kuzin’s regime. Mischa, hard as a knife blade, had the heart of a poet. He told stories that were beautiful enough to be poems. Arkadin had been enchanted, if such a word could be ascribed to him. Mischa’s talent for storytelling had the power to take Arkadin far away from Nizhny Tagil, and when Mischa smuggled him out past the inner ring of smokestacks, past the outer ring of high-security prisons, his stories took Arkadin to places beyond Moscow, to lands beyond Russia. The stories gave Arkadin his first inkling of the world at large.
As he sat now, his back against a crate, knees drawn up to his chest in order to conserve warmth, he had good cause to think of Mischa. Icoupov had paid for killing Devra, now Bourne must pay for killing Mischa. But not just yet, Arkadin brooded, though his blood called out for revenge. If he killed Bourne now, Icoupov’s plan would succeed, and he couldn’t allow that, otherwise his revenge against him would be incomplete.
Arkadin put his head back against the edge of the crate and closed his eyes. Revenge had become like one of Mischa’s poems, its meaning flowering open to surround him with a kind of ethereal beauty, the only form of beauty that registered on him, the only beauty that lasted. It was the glimpse of that promised beauty, the very prospect of it, that allowed him to sit patiently, curled between crates, waiting for his moment of revenge, his moment of inestimable beauty.
Bourne dreamed of the hell known as Nizhny Tagil as if he’d been born there, and when he awoke he knew Arkadin was near. Opening his eyes, he saw Moira staring at him.
“What do you feel about the professor?” she said, by which he suspected she meant,
“I think the years of obsession have driven him insane. I don’t think he knows good from evil, right from wrong.”
“Is that why you didn’t ask him why he embarked on this path to destruction?”
“In a way,” Bourne said. “Whatever his answer would have been it wouldn’t have made sense to us.”
“Fanatics never make sense,” she said. “That’s why they’re so difficult to counteract. A rational response, which is always our choice, is rarely effective.” She cocked her head. “He betrayed you, Jason. He nurtured your belief in him, and played on it.”
“If you climb on a scorpion’s back you’ve got to expect to get stung.”
“Don’t you have a desire for revenge?”
“Maybe I should I smother him in his sleep, or shoot him to death as Arkadin did to Semion Icoupov. Do you really expect that to make me feel better? I’ll exact my revenge by stopping the Black Legion’s attack.”
“You sound so rational.”
“I don’t feel rational, Moira.”
She took his meaning, and blood rushed to her cheeks. “I may have lied to you, Jason, but I didn’t betray you. I could never do that.” She engaged his eyes. “There were so many times in the last week when I ached to tell you, but I had a duty to Black River.”
“Duty is something I understand, Moira.”
“Understanding is one thing, but will you forgive me?”
He put out his hand. “You aren’t a scorpion,” he said. “It’s not in your nature.”
She took his hand in hers, brought it up to her mouth, and pressed it to her cheek.
At that moment they heard Sever cry out, and they rose, went down the aisle to where he lay curled on his side like a small child afraid of the dark. Bourne knelt down, drew Sever gently onto his back to keep pressure off the wound.
The professor stared at Bourne, then, as Moira spoke to him, at her.
“Why did you do it?” Moira said. “Why attack the country you’d adopted as your own.”
