Bourne 7 – The Bourne Deception

The Balinese were in touch with the spirits of the land, they saw good and evil and acted accordingly. There was nothing between them and nature itself, whereas Firth and Willard were creatures of civilization with all its layers of deceit, envy, greed. This essential dichotomy had opened his mind as nothing before. Did he want to be like Willard or like Suparwita?

Was it a coincidence that the Balinese didn‘t allow their children‘s feet to touch the ground for three months-and that he‘d been on Bali for precisely the same amount of time?

Now, for the first time in his defective memory, unmoored from everything and everyone he knew, he felt able to look inside himself, and what he saw was someone he didn‘t recognize-not Webb, not Bourne. It was as if Webb were a dream, or another identity assigned to him just as Bourne had been.

Kneeling outside the Bat Cave with its thousands of denizens stirring restively, with the priest‘s intonations transforming the intense Southern Hemisphere sunshine into prayer, he contemplated the chimeric landscape of his own soul, a place singularly twilit, like a deserted city an hour before dawn or the desolate seashore an hour after dusk, a place that slipped away from him, shifting like sand. And as he journeyed through this unknown country he asked himself this question:

Who am I?

5

THE JOINT NSA-DHS forensics team arrived in Cairo and, to the consternation of everyone except Soraya, was met at the airport by an elite contingent of al Mokhabarat, the national secret police. Team members and their belongings were poured into military vehicles and driven through the blistering heat, blazing sun, and urban chaos of Cairo. Heading southwest out of the city, they traveled toward the desert in glum and silent single file.

— Our destination is near Wadi AlRayan, Amun Chalthoum, the head of al Mokhabarat, said to Soraya. He had spotted her immediately, culled her out of the team to sit beside him in his vehicle, which was second behind a heavily armored halftrack that Chalthoum was doubtless using to flex his muscles in the face of the Americans.

For Chalthoum time seemed to have stood still. His hair was still thick and dark, his wide copper-colored forehead still unlined. His black crow‘s eyes deeply set above the hawk-beak of his nose still smoldered with suppressed emotion. He was large and muscular with the narrow hips of a swimmer or a climber. By contrast, he had the long, tapered fingers of a pianist or a surgeon. And yet something important had changed, because there was about him the sense of a fire barely banked. The nearer one got to him, the more one felt the quivering of his leashed rage. Now that she was sitting beside him, now that she felt the once familiar stirrings inside her, she realized why she hadn‘t told Veronica Hart the whole truth: because she wasn‘t at all certain that she could handle Amun.

— So quiet. Are you not stirred by being back home?

— Actually, I was thinking about the last time you took me to Wadi AlRayan.

— That was eight years ago and I was simply trying to get at the truth,

he said with a shake of his head. -Admit it, you were in my country passing secrets-

— I admit nothing.

– which by right belonged to the state. He tapped his chest. -And I am the state.

— Le Roi le Veut, she murmured.

— The king wills it. Chalthoum nodded. -Precisely. And momentarily he took his hands off the wheel and spread his arms wide to encompass the desert into which they were just now driving. -This is the land of absolutism, Umm al-Dunya, the Mother of the Universe , but I‘m not telling you anything you don‘t already know. After all, you‘re Egyptian, like me.

— Half Egyptian. She shrugged. -Anyway, it doesn‘t matter. I‘m here to help my people find out what happened to the airliner.

— Your people. Chalthoum spat out the words as if even the thought of them left a bitter taste in his mouth. -What about your father? What about his people? Has America so thoroughly destroyed the wild Arabian inside you?

Soraya put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. She knew she‘d better get her own feelings under control and soon, otherwise the entire mission could spiral out of control. Then she felt Amun‘s arm brush up against hers and the hair at the back of her neck stirred. Good God, she thought, I can’t feel this way about him. And then she broke out in a cold sweat. Was this why I withheld the truth from Veronica-because I knew that if I told her everything she’d never have allowed me to come back here? And all at once she felt herself in jeopardy, not because of Amun but because of herself, her own runaway emotions.

In an effort to regain some form of equilibrium she said, — My father never forgot he was Egyptian.

— So much so he changed his family name from Mohammed to Moore, Chalthoum said bitterly.

— He fell in love with America when he fell in love with my mother. The deep appreciation I have of it comes from him.

Chalthoum shook his head. -Why hide it? It was your mother‘s doing.

— Like all Americans, my mother took for granted everything her country had to offer. She couldn‘t have cared less about the Fourth of July; it was my father who took me to the fireworks celebrations on the Mall in Washington, DC, where he spoke to me about freedom and liberty.

Chalthoum bared his teeth. -I have to laugh at his naAvetA©-and yours. Frankly, I assumed you had a more… shall we say pragmatic outlook on America, the country that exports Mickey Mouse, war, and occupying armed forces with equal abandon.

— How convenient of you to forget that we‘re also the country that keeps you safe from extremists, Amun.

Chalthoum clenched his teeth and was about to respond when the jouncing vehicle rolled through a cordon of his men, armed with submachine guns, keeping the mass of clamoring international press at a safe remove from the crash site, and ground to a halt. Soraya was the first out, settling her sunglasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose and the lightweight hat on her head. Chalthoum had been right about one thing: The airliner had fallen out of the sky not six hundred yards from the southeastern tip of the wadi, a body of water, complete with waterfalls, all