Robert Ludlum: Bourne 7 – The Bourne Deception

— Jason, she whispered, — it‘s all right. We‘re safe here.

He moved them through the water from where they had been sitting to the other side of the pool. She could feel his accelerated heartbeat, his heightened sense of awareness, of waiting for something terrible to happen, and in that instant she was given an insight into his life she‘d never had before.

She wanted to tell him again not to worry, that power outages happened all the time on Bali, but now she knew it would be useless. He was hardwired for this kind of reaction; nothing she could say or do would change that.

She listened to the wind and the rain, wondering if he heard anything that she didn‘t. For an instant she felt a stab of anxiety: What if this wasn‘t a simple power outage? What if they were being stalked by one of Jason‘s enemies?

All at once, power was restored, causing her to laugh at her foolishness.

— I told you, she said, pointing to the smiling carved pig spirit. -He‘s protecting us.

Bourne lay back in the water. -There‘s no escape, he said. -Even here.

— You don‘t believe in spirits, good or evil, do you, Jason?

— I can‘t afford to, he said. -I come across enough evil as it is.

Picking up on his tone, Moira at last broached the subject closest to her heart. -I‘m going to have to do some heavy recruiting right off the bat. It‘s certain we‘ll see a lot less of each other, at least until I set up my new shop.

— Is that a warning or a promise?

He couldn‘t help noting that her laughter had a brittle edge to it.

— Okay, I was nervous about bringing it up.

— Why?

— You know how it is.

— Tell me.

She turned in his arms, sat straddling him in the dimpled water. The rush of the rain through the leaves was all they could hear.

— Jason, neither of us are the kind of people… I mean, we both live the kind of life that makes it difficult to hold on to a steady anything, especially relationships, so-

He cut her off by kissing her. When they came up for air, he said in her ear, — It‘s okay. We have this now. If we need more, we‘ll come back.

Her heart was gripped by joy. She hugged him tight. -It‘s a deal. Oh, yes, it is.

Leonid Arkadin‘s flight from Singapore arrived on time. At customs, he paid for his entry visa, then walked quickly through the terminal until he found a men‘s room. Inside, he went into a stall, shut the door, and latched it. From a shoulder pack he took out the bulbous latex nose, three pots of makeup, soft plastic cheek inserts, and gray contact lenses he‘d used in Munich. Not more than eight minutes later, exiting the stall, he went to the line of sinks and stared at his altered appearance, which was once again the very image of Bourne‘s friend, the FSB-2 colonel Boris Karpov.

Packing up the case, he crossed the terminal, out into the heat and the dense texture of humanity. Climbing into the air-conditioned car he‘d hired was a blessed relief. As the taxi exited Ngurah Rai International Airport, he leaned forward, said — Badung Market to the driver. The young man nodded, grinned, and, along with an armada of kids on motor scooters, promptly got stuck behind an enormous truck lumbering toward the Lombok ferry.

After a harrowing twenty-minute ride during which they overtook the truck by dodging oncoming traffic, played chicken with a pair of teenagers on motorbikes, and almost ran over one of the thousands of feral dogs on the island, they arrived on Jl. Gajah Mada, just across the Badung River. The taxi slowed to a crawl until the seething crowds made further forward progress impossible. Arkadin paid for the driver to hang around until he was ready to be picked up, exited, and went into the tented market.

He was immediately seized by a score of pungent odors-black shrimp paste, chilies, garlic, karupuk , cinnamon, lemongrass, pandan leaf, galangal, kencur , Salam leaf-and raised voices selling everything from fighting cocks, their plumage dyed pink and orange, to live piglets trussed and tied to bamboo poles for easy transport.

As he passed a stall filled with widemouthed baskets of spices, the proprietor, an old woman with no upper lip, dug her claw-like hand into a vat of roots, held a palmful out to him.

— Kencur , she said. — Kencur very good today.

The kencur , Arkadin saw, looked something like ginger, only smaller. Repelled by both the root and its hideous seller, he waved away the kencur and pressed on.

It was to one of the pig stalls he headed. Halfway there, he was stopped by an insistent tapping on his arm, like the dry scratch of a chicken‘s foot. He turned to see a young woman holding a baby in her arms, her eyes beseeching while her brown fingers continued to tap his arm as if it was all they were good for. Ignoring her, he pushed on through the crowd. Aware that if he gave her anything, he‘d be immediately besieged by a multitude of others.

The middle pig dealer was a wide man, squat as a frog, with glittering black eyes, a moon face, and a pronounced limp. After Arkadin spoke the specified phrase in Indonesian, the man led him back through the ranks of trussed piglets, their bodies quivering, their terrified eyes staring straight ahead. In the shadows at the rear of the tent were two stacks of hogs, gutted, skinned, ready for the spit. From the belly cavity of one the man drew out a Remington 700P, which he tried to palm off on Arkadin, until Arkadin refused enough times for him to go on to Plan B, which turned out to be precisely what Arkadin wanted: a Parker Hale M85, a super-accurate boltaction, heavy-barreled rifle. It had a guaranteed first-round-hit capability up to seventy-eight yards. To this, the vendor added a Schmidt amp; Bender Police Marksman II 4-16x50 rifle scope. The price for both seemed a bit high even after some vigorous bargaining took it down from the stratosphere, but this close to his prey he wasn‘t in any mood to nitpick. Besides, he was getting top-of-the-line product all the way. He got the pig man to throw in a box of full-metal-jacket.30-caliber M118 cartridges and called it a success. He paid and the dealer broke down the rifle, boxed it and the scope into a hard-sided case.

On the way out, he bought himself a bunch of milk bananas, and ate them slowly and methodically as the taxi made its painfully slow way out of Denpasar. Once on the highway, their speed increased dramatically. The lack of heavy traffic made it easier to get around the trucks that clogged the road.

In Gianyar he saw an open-air market on his left and told the driver to pull over. Despite the bananas-or perhaps because of them-his stomach was growling for some real food. At the market, he ordered a plate of babi guling, roast suckling pig, and, served on a broad vivid green banana leaf, lawar, coconut and strips of spiced turtle. Its sauce of un-cooked blood appealed to him particularly. He rent the succulent meat of the piglet between his teeth, swallowing quickly to take another bite.

Because of the clamor of the market, he periodically checked his cell phone. The longer he waited, the greater his tension, but he needed to be patient because it would take some days for his man to be sure of Bourne‘s comings and goings. Still, he was uncharacteristically on edge. He put it down to being this close to Bourne, but that only caused him more discomfort. There was something about Bourne that had gotten under his skin, that had become an itch he couldn‘t scratch.

In an effort to control himself, he turned his thoughts to the recent events that had led him here. Two weeks ago Bourne had thrown him off the side of the LNG tanker. It was a long way down into the Pacific, and he had prepared himself by turning his body into a spear, keeping it perfectly vertical so that when he hit the water he wouldn‘t break his back or his neck. He went in feetfirst, the force of the fall pushing him so deep the world fell into twilight and he was gripped by a terrible chill that worked its way into his bones before he‘d even begun his double-kick upward.