The Bourne Sanction Part 34

Ever since he had suggested to Soraya that he might be useful to her he'd been reading up on how to handle himself in the worst situations. There was a trick he'd come across that was useful to him now-he needed to find a place in his mind where he could withdraw when the going got really rough, a place that was inviolable, where he knew he'd be safe no matter what was done to him.

He had that place now, he'd been there several times when the pain of kneeling with his arms locked high behind him became too much even for him. But there was one thing that frightened him: that d.a.m.n trough on the other side of the room. If they decided to waterboard him he was done. For as far back as he could remember he'd been terrified of drowning. He couldn't swim, couldn't even float. Every time he'd tried to do either he'd choked, had to be hauled from the water like a three-year-old. He'd soon given up, figuring it didn't matter. When was he going to go sailing or even lie on a beach? Never.

But now the water had come to him. That d.a.m.n trough was waiting, grinning like a whale about to swallow him whole. He was no Jonah, he knew that. That f.u.c.king thing wasn't going to spit him out alive.

He looked down, saw that the hand he held out in front of him was trembling. Turning away, he pressed it against the wall, as if the cinder block could absorb his unreasoning terror.

He started as the sound of the door being unlocked ricocheted around the small s.p.a.ce. In came one of the NSA zombies, with dead eyes and dead breath. He put down the tray of food and left without even glancing at Tyrone, all part of the second phase of the plan to break him down: make him think he didn't exist.

He went over to the tray. As usual, his food consisted of cold oatmeal. It didn't matter; he was hungry. Taking up the plastic spoon, he took a bite of the cereal. It was gummy, had no taste whatsoever. He almost gagged on the second bite because he was chewing on something other than oatmeal. Aware that his every move was monitored, he bent over, spit out the mouthful. Then he used the fork to paw open a folded piece of paper. There was something written on it. He bent over further to make out the letters.

DON'T GIVE UP, it read.

At first, Tyrone couldn't believe his eyes. Then he read it again. After reading it a third time, he scooped the message up with another bite of oatmeal, chewed it all slowly and methodically, and swallowed.

Then he went over to the stainless-steel toilet, sat down on the edge, and wondered who had written that note and how he could communicate with him. It wasn't until some time later that he realized this one brief message from outside his tiny cell had managed to restore the balance he'd lost. Inside his head, time resolved itself into normal seconds and minutes, and the blood began once again to circulate through his veins.

Arkadin allowed Devra to drag him out of the bar before he could demolish it completely. Not that he cared about the thuggish patrons who sat in stupefied silence, watching the mayhem he wreaked as if it were a TV show, but he was mindful of the cops who had a significant presence in this trashy neighborhood. During the time they'd been in the bar he'd noticed three police cruisers pa.s.s slowly by on the street.

They drove through the suns.h.i.+ne down littered streets. He heard dogs barking, voices shouting. He was grateful for the heat of her hip and shoulder against him. Her presence grounded him, wrestled his rage back down to a manageable level. He hugged her more tightly to him, his mind returning with feverish intensity to his past.

For Arkadin, the ninth level of h.e.l.l began innocently enough with Stas Kuzin's confirmation that his business came from prost.i.tution and drugs. Easy money, Arkadin thought, immediately lulled into a false sense of security.

At first, his role was as simple as it was clearly defined: He'd provide the s.p.a.ce in his buildings to expand Kuzin's brothel empire. This Arkadin did with his usual efficiency. Nothing could have been simpler, and for several months as the rubles rolled in he congratulated himself on making a lucrative business deal. Plus, his a.s.sociation with Kuzin brought him a boatload of perks, from free drinks at the local pubs to free sessions with Kuzin's ever-expanding ring of teenage girls.

But it was this very thing-the young prost.i.tutes-that became Arkadin's slippery slope into h.e.l.l's lowest level. When he stayed away from the brothels, or made his cursory weekly checkups to ensure the apartments weren't being trashed, it was easy to turn a blind eye on what was really going on. He was mostly too busy counting his money. However, on those occasions when he availed himself of a freebie or two, it was impossible not to notice how young the girls were, how afraid they were, how bruised their thin arms were, how hollow their eyes, and, all too often, how drugged up most of them were. It was like Zombie Nation in there.

All of this might have pa.s.sed Arkadin by with a minimum of speculation had he not developed a liking for one of them. Yelena was a girl with wide lips, skin as pale as snow, and eyes that burned like a coal fire. She had a quick smile and, unlike some of the other girls, she wasn't p.r.o.ne to bursting into tears for no apparent reason. She laughed at his jokes, she lay with him afterward, her face buried in his chest. He liked the feel of her in his arms. Her warmth seeped into him like fine vodka, and he grew used to how she found just the right position so that the curves of her body meshed perfectly with his. He could fall asleep in her arms, which for him was something of a miracle. He couldn't remember when he'd last slept through the night.

About this time, Kuzin called him into a meeting, told him he was doing so well he wanted to increase his partners.h.i.+p stake with Arkadin.

"Of course, I'll need you to play a more active role," Kuzin said in his semi-intelligible voice. "Business is so good that what I need most now is more girls. That's where you come in."

Kuzin made Arkadin the head of a crew whose sole purpose was to solicit teenage girls from the populace of Nizhny Tagil. This Arkadin did with his usual frightening efficiency. His visits to Yelena's bed were as plentiful but not as idyllic. She had grown afraid, she told him, of the disappearances of some of the girls. One day she saw them; the next they had vanished as if they'd never existed. No one spoke of them, no one answered her questions when she asked where they'd gone. In the main, Arkadin dismissed her fears-after all, the girls were young, weren't they leaving all the time? But Yelena was certain the girls' disappearances had nothing to do with them and everything to do with Stas Kuzin. No matter what he said, her fears did not subside until he promised to protect her, to make sure nothing happened to her.

After six months Kuzin took him aside.

"You're doing a great job." A mixture of vodka and cocaine slurred Kuzin's voice even further. "But I need more."

They were in one of the brothels, which to Arkadin's practiced eye looked oddly underpopulated. "Where are all the girls?" he asked.

Kuzin waved an arm. "Gone, run away, who the f.u.c.k knows where? These b.i.t.c.hes get a bit of money in their pocket, they're off like rabbits."

Ever the pragmatist, Arkadin said, "I'll take my crew and go find them."

"A waste of time." Kuzin's little head bobbled on his shoulders. "Just find me more."

"It's getting difficult," Arkadin pointed out. "Some of the girls are scared; they don't want to come with us."

"Take them anyway."

Arkadin frowned. "I don't follow you."

"Okay, moron, I'll lay it out for you. Take your f.u.c.king crew in the f.u.c.king van and s.n.a.t.c.h the b.i.t.c.hes off the street."

"You're talking about kidnapping."

Kuzin laughed. "f.u.c.k me, he gets it!"

"What about the cops."

Kuzin laughed even harder. "The cops are in my pocket. And even if they weren't, d'you think they get paid to work? They don't give a rat's a.s.s."

For the next three weeks Arkadin and his crew worked the night s.h.i.+ft, delivering girls to the brothel, whether or not they wanted to come. These girls were sullen, often belligerent, until Kuzin took them into a back room, where none of them ever wanted to go a second time. Kuzin didn't mess with their faces, as that would be bad for business; only their arms and legs were bruised.

Arkadin watched this controlled violence as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He knew it was happening, but he pretended it had nothing to do with him. He continued to count his money, which was now piling up at a more rapid clip. It was his money and Yelena that kept him warm at night. Each time he was with her, he checked her arms and legs for bruises. When he made her promise not to take drugs, she laughed, "Leonid Danilovich, who has money for drugs?"

He smiled at this, knowing what she meant. In fact, she had more money than all the other girls in the brothel combined. He knew this because he was the one who gave it to her.

"Get yourself a new dress, a new pair of shoes," he'd tell her, but frugal girl that she was, she'd merely smile and kiss him on the cheek with great affection. She was right, he realized, not to do anything to call attention to herself.

One night, not long after, Kuzin accosted him as he was leaving Yelena's room.

"I have an urgent problem and I need your help," the freak said.

Arkadin went with him out of the apartment building. A large van was waiting on the street, its engine running. Kuzin climbed into the back, and Arkadin followed. Two of the brothel girls were being guarded by Kuzin's pair of personal ghouls.

"They tried to escape," Kuzin said. "We just caught them."

"They need to be taught a lesson," Arkadin said, because he a.s.sumed that was what his partner wanted him to say.

"Too f.u.c.king late for that." Kuzin signaled to the driver, and the van took off.

Arkadin settled back on the seat, wondering where they were going. He kept his mouth shut, knowing that if he asked questions now he'd look like a fool. Thirty minutes later the van slowed, turned off onto an unpaved road. For the next several minutes they jounced along a rutted track that must have been very narrow because branches kept sc.r.a.ping against the sides of the van.

At length, they stopped, the doors opened, and everyone clambered out. The night was very dark, illuminated only by the headlights of the van, but in the distance the fire of the smelters was like blood in the sky or, rather, on the undersides of the belching miasma churned out by hundreds of smokestacks. No one saw the sky in Nizhny Tagil, and when it snowed the flakes turned gray or even sometimes black as they pa.s.sed through the industrial murk.

Arkadin followed along with Kuzin as the two ghouls pushed the girls through the thick, weedy underbrush. The resiny scent of pine perfumed the air so strongly, it almost masked the appalling stench of decomposition.

A hundred yards in the ghouls pulled back on the collars of the girls's coats, reining them in. Kuzin took out his gun and shot one of the girls in the back of the head. She pitched forward into a bed of dead leaves. The other girl screamed, squirming within the ghoul's grasp, desperate to run.

Then Kuzin turned to Arkadin, placed the gun in his hand. "When you pull the trigger," he said, "we become equal partners."

There was something in Kuzin's eyes that at this close range gave Arkadin the s.h.i.+vers. It seemed to him that Kuzin's eyes were smiling in the way the devil smiled, without warmth, without humanity, because the pleasure that animated the smile was of an evil and perverted nature. It was at this precise moment that Arkadin thought of the prisons ringing Nizhny Tagil, because he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was locked within his own private prison, with no idea if there was a key, let alone how to use it.

The gun-an old Luger with the n.a.z.i swastika imprinted on it-was greasy with Kuzin's excitement. Arkadin raised it to the height of the girl's head. She was whimpering and crying. Arkadin had done many things in his young life, some of them unforgivable, but he'd never shot a girl in cold blood. And yet now, in order to prosper, in order to survive the prison of Nizhny Tagil, this was what he had to do.

He was aware of Kuzin's avid eyes boring into him, red as the fire of Nizhny Tagil's foundries themselves, and then he felt the muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and knew that the driver was standing behind him, no doubt on Kuzin's orders.

"Do it," Kuzin said softly, "because one way or another in the next ten seconds someone's going to fire his gun."

Arkadin aimed the Luger. The shout of the report echoed on and on through the deep and forbidding forest, and the girl slid along the leaves, into the pit with her friend.

Thirty-Five.

THE SOUND of the bolt being thrown on the 8mm Mauser K98 rifle echoed through the Dachau air raid bunker. That was the end of it, however.

"d.a.m.n!" Old Pelz groaned. "I forgot to load the thing!"

Petra took out her handgun, pointed it in the air, and squeezed the trigger. Because the result was the same as what had happened to him, Old Pelz threw down the K98.

"Scheisse!" he said, clearly disgusted.

She approached him then. "Herr Pelz," she said gently, "as I said, my name is Petra. Do you remember me?"

The old man stopped muttering, peered at her carefully. "You do look an awful lot like a Petra-Alexandra I once knew."

"Petra-Alexandra." She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. "Yes, yes, that's me!"

He recoiled a little, put a hand on his cheek where she'd planted her lips. Then, skeptical to the end, he looked past her at Bourne. "Who's this n.a.z.i b.a.s.t.a.r.d? Did he force you to come here?" His hands curled into fists. "I'll box his ears for him!"

"No, Herr Pelz, this is a friend of mine. He's Russian." She used the name Bourne had given her, which was on the pa.s.sport Boris Karpov had provided.

"Russians're no better than n.a.z.is in my book," the old man said sourly.

"Actually, I'm an American traveling under a Russian pa.s.sport." Bourne said this first in English and then in German.

"You speak English very well, for a Russian," Old Pelz said in excellent English. Then he laughed, showing teeth yellowed by time and tobacco. At the sight of an American, he seemed to perk up, as if coming out of a decades-long drowse. This was the way he was, a rabbit being drawn out of a hat, only to withdraw again into the shadows. He wasn't mad, just living both in the drab present and in the vivid past. "I embraced the Americans when they liberated us from tyranny," he continued proudly. "In my time I helped them root out the n.a.z.is and the n.a.z.i sympathizers pretending to be good Germans." He spat out the last words, as if he couldn't stand to have them in his mouth.

"Then what are you doing here?" Bourne said. "Don't you have a home to go to?"

"Sure I do." Old Pelz smacked his lips, as if he could taste the life of his younger self. "In fact, I have a very nice house in Dachau. It's blue and white, with flowers all around a picket fence. A cherry tree stands in back, spreading its wings in summer. The house is rented out to a fine young couple with two strapping children, who send their rent check like clockwork to my nephew in Leipzig. He's a big-shot lawyer, you know."

"Herr Pelz, I don't understand," Petra said. "Why not stay in your own home? This is no place to live."

"The bunker is my health insurance." The old man c.o.c.ked a canny eye her way. "Do you have any idea what would happen to me if I went back to my house? They'd spirit me away in the night, and that's the last anyone would ever see of me."

"Who would do that to you?" Bourne said.

Pelz seemed to consider his answer, as if he needed to remember the text of a book he'd read in high school. "I told you I was a n.a.z.i hunter, a d.a.m.n fine one, too. In those days I lived like a king-or, if I'm honest, a duke. Anyway, that's before I got c.o.c.ky and made my mistake. I decided to go after the Black Legion, and that one intemperate decision was my downfall. Because of them I lost everything, even the trust of the Americans, who at that time needed those d.a.m.n people more than they needed me.

"The Black Legion kicked me into the gutter like a piece of garbage or a mangy dog. From there it was only a short crawl down here into the bowels of the earth."

"It's the Black Legion I came here to talk to you about," Bourne said. "I'm a hunter, too. The Black Legion isn't a n.a.z.i organization anymore. They've turned into a Muslim terrorist network."

Old Pelz rubbed his grizzled jaw. "I'd say I'm surprised, but I'm not. Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds knew how to play all the cards in all the hands-the Germans, the Brits, and, most importantly, the Americans. They toyed with all of 'em after the war. Every Western intelligence service was throwing money at them. The thought of having built-in spies behind the Iron Curtain had them all salivating.

"It didn't take the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds long to figure out it was the Americans who had the upper hand. Why? 'Cause they had all the money and, unlike the Brits, weren't being tight-fisted with it." He cackled. "But that's the American way, isn't it?"

Not waiting for an answer to a question that was self-evident, he plowed on. "So the Black Legion took up with the American intelligence machine. First off, it wasn't difficult to convince the Yanks that they'd never been n.a.z.is, that their only goal was to fight Stalin. And that was true, as far as it went, but after the war they had other goals in mind. They're Muslims, after all; they never felt comfortable in Western society. They wanted to build for the future, and like a lot of other insurgents they created their power base with American dollars."

He squinted up at Bourne. "You're American, poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. None of these modern-day terrorist networks would've existed without your country's backing. f.u.c.king ironic, that is."

For a time he lapsed into muttering, broke into a song whose lyrics were so melancholy tears welled up in his rheumy eyes.

"Herr Pelz," Bourne said, trying to get the old man to focus. "You were talking about the Black Legion."

"Call me Virgil," Pelz said, nodding as he came out of his fugue state. "That's right, my Christian name is Virgil, and for you, American, I will hold my lamp high enough to throw light on those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who ruined my life. Why not? I'm at a stage in my life when I should tell someone, and it might as well be you."

They're in the back," Bev said to Drew Davis. "Both of them." A woman in her midfifties with a thick frame and a quick wit, she was The Gla.s.s Slipper's girl wrangler, as she wryly called herself-part disciplinarian, part den mother.

"The main interest is in the general," Davis said, "isn't that right, Kiki?"

Kiki nodded. She was closely flanked by Soraya and Deron, and all of them were cl.u.s.tered in Davis's cramped office up a short flight of stairs from the main room. The pounding of the ba.s.s and drums thumped against the walls like the fists of angry giants. The room had the appearance of an attic or a garret, windowless, its walls like a time machine, plastered with photos of Drew Davis with Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, four different American presidents, a host of Hollywood stars, and various UN dignitaries and amba.s.sadors from virtually every country in Africa. There was also a series of informal snapshots of him with his arm around a younger Kiki in the Masai Mara, totally unself-conscious, looking like a queen-in-training.

After her talk with Rob Batt in the parking lot, Soraya had returned to her table inside and filled in Kiki and Deron on her plan. The noise from the band on stage made eavesdropping impossible, even by anyone at the next table. Because of her longtime friends.h.i.+p with Drew Davis, it had been up to Kiki to create the spark that would light the fuse. This she did, resulting in this impromptu meeting in Davis's office.

"For me to even contemplate what you're asking, you have to guarantee blanket immunity," Drew Davis said to Soraya. "Plus, leave our names out of it, unless you want to p.i.s.s me off-which you don't-as well as p.i.s.sing off half the elected officials in the district."

"You have my word," Soraya said. "We want these two people, that's the beginning and the end of it."

Drew Davis glanced at Kiki, who responded with an almost imperceptible nod.

Now Davis turned to Bev.

"Here's what you can do and what you can't do," Bev said, reacting to her boss's cue. "I won't allow anyone on my ranch who's not there for legitimate purposes-that is, either a patron or a working girl. So forget just barging in there. I do that and tomorrow we have no business left."

She wasn't even looking at Drew Davis, but Soraya saw him nod in a.s.sent, and her heart fell. Everything depended on their gaining access to the general while he was in the midst of his frolics. Then she had a thought.

"I'll go in as a working girl," she said.

"No, you won't," Deron said. "You're known to both the general and Feir. One look at you and they'll be spooked."

"They don't know me."

Everyone turned their heads to stare at Kiki.

"Absolutely not," Deron said.

"Ease up there," Kiki said with a laugh. "I'm not going through with anything. I just need access." She mimed taking photos. Then she turned to Bev. "How do I get into the general's private room?"

"You can't. For obvious reasons the private rooms are sacrosanct. Another rule of the house. And both the general and Feir have chosen their partners for the evening." She drummed her fingers against Davis's desktop. "But in the case of the general there is is one way." one way."