Robert Ludlum: Bourne 7 – The Bourne Deception

Perlis suddenly experienced a flicker of anger. -Are you a policeman now as well as a holy man or whatever it is you call yourself?

Suparwita produced the ghost of a smile that held nothing for Perlis to cling to. -I think it‘s fair to say that what Holly took from you, you yourself stole.

Perlis went white. -How could you possibly… how could you possibly know that? he whispered.

— Holly told me. How else?

— Holly didn‘t know that, only I knew it. He tossed his head contemptuously. -Anyway, I didn‘t come here to be interrogated.

— Do you know now why you came? Suparwita‘s eyes burned so brightly their fire was scarcely dimmed by the sun.

— No.

— But you do. Suparwita raised an arm, pointing to the bulk of Mount Agung rising in the stone archway.

Perlis turned to look, shading his eyes from the glare, but when he turned back Suparwita had vanished. The people were still at their endless praying, the priest was absorbed in God alone knew what, and the man beside him was counting his money in a mesmerizingly slow, even rhythm.

Then, as if without his own volition, Perlis found himself walking toward Mount Agung, the carved stone gate, and the top of the stairs where, years before, Holly Marie Moreau had been sent to her death.

Perlis awoke with a shout of false denial trapped in his throat. Despite the air-conditioning of his room, he was sweating. He had bolted to a sitting position from a deep sleep or, more accurately, from the deep dream of Suparwita and Pura Lempuyang. He felt the pain around his pumping heart that always accompanied the aftermath of these dreams.

For a moment, he couldn‘t recall where he was. He‘d been on the run ever since he‘d ordered the Iranian oil fields set on fire. What had gone wrong?

He‘d asked himself that painful question a thousand times and finally, he was left with one answer: Bardem had failed to predict this outcome because of the introduction of two almost identical variables outside the million parameters with which it had been programmed-Bourne and Arkadin. In the world of finance, the appearance of a game-changing event that no one was anticipating was called a Black Swan. In the hermetic world of esoteric software programmers, a circumstance outside the parameters that crashed the program was called Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. For one Shiva to appear was rare enough, but two was unthinkable.

Days and nights had passed as if in one of Perlis‘s dreams; often now he was unsure as to which was a dream and which waking life. In any event, nothing seemed real anymore, not the food he ate, the places in which he stayed, the shallow sleep he managed to snatch. Then yesterday he‘d arrived in Bali, and for the first time since the Black Hawk lifted off from the ruins of Pinprick, something changed inside him. His work at Black River had been his family, his comrades-he was able to see nothing beyond its parameters. Now, without it, he had ceased to exist. But no, it was far worse than that, because come to think of it, for all the time he‘d worked at Black River, he‘d made himself cease to exist. He‘d reveled in all the roles he‘d had to play because they took him further and further away from himself, a person he‘d never liked or had much use for. It was the real Noah Perlis-pathetic weakling that he was, not heard from since his childhood-who had fallen in love with Moira. Joining Black River was like donning armor, a protection against the weakling full of feelings that lurked like a spineless wretch inside him. Now that he no longer had Black River, he‘d been stripped of that armor, and his little pink mewling self was exposed. A switch had been thrown, from positive to negative, and all the energy that used to come to him was flowing out of him.

He swung his legs out of bed and walked to the window. What was it about this place? He‘d been to many paradisiacal islands in his time-spots strewn all across the globe in diamond-like glitter. But Bali seemed to throb against his eyes with an ethereal presence. He was a man who did not believe in the ethereal. Even as a child, he‘d been pragmatic. He had spent virtually his entire adult life isolated, without family or friends; a situation entirely of his own making, since both friends and family had the habit of betraying you without even knowing it. Early on in his life, he‘d discovered that if you felt nothing you couldn‘t get hurt. Nevertheless, he had been hurt, not only by Moira.

He showered and dressed, then went out into the moist heat and the glare. The sky was precisely as cloudless as it had been in his dream. In the far distance, he could see the blue bulk of Mount Agung, a place of eternal mystery to him, and of fear, because it seemed to him that something he didn‘t want to know about himself dwelled on that mountain. This thing-

whatever it was-drew him as powerfully as it repelled him. He tried to regain some semblance of equilibrium, to push down the emotions that had erupted inside him, but he couldn‘t. The fucking horses had bolted from the stable and without the iron discipline of Black River, without his armor, there was no getting them back in. He stared down at his hands, which shook as violently as if he had the DTs.

What’s happening to me? he thought. But he knew that wasn‘t the right question to ask.

“Why did you come?” That was the right question, the one Suparwita had asked him in his dream. From what he‘d read on the subject all the people in your dreams were aspects of yourself. This being so, he had been asking himself the question. Why had he returned to Bali? When he‘d left after Holly Marie‘s death he was certain that he‘d never return. And yet, here he was. Moira had hurt him, it was true, but what had happened with Holly had hurt him most of all.

He ate a meal without tasting it, and by the time he had reached his destination, he could not have said what it was. His stomach felt neither full nor empty. Like the rest of him, it seemed to have ceased to exist.

Holly Marie Moreau was buried in a small sema -cemetery-southwest of the village where she‘d been raised. As a rule, modern-day Balinese cremated their dead, but there were pockets of people-original Balinese like those in Tenganan, those who weren‘t Hindu-who did not. Balinese believed that seaward-west was the direction of hell, so sema were always built-when they were built at all-to the seaward-west of the village. Here, in the south of Bali, that was southwest. The Balinese were terrified of cemeteries, certain that the uncremated bodies were the undead, wandering around at night, being raised from their graves by evil spirits, led by Rudra, the god of evil. Consequently, the place was utterly abandoned-even, it appeared, by birds and wildlife.

Thick stands of trees were everywhere, casting the sema in deepest shadow, so that it seemed lost in the inky blues and greens of a perpetual twilight. Apart from one grave site, the place had a distinctly unkempt aspect that bordered on the disreputable. This particular grave site bore the headstone of Holly Marie Moreau.

For what seemed an eternity, Perlis stood staring at the slab of marble engraved with her name and dates of birth and death. Beneath the impersonal information was one word: BELOVED.

As with whatever was waiting for him on Mount Agung, he felt an inexorable pull and repulsion toward her grave. He walked slowly and deliberately, his pace seemingly dictated by the beat of his heart. All at once, he stopped, having glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a shadow darker than the others flit from tree to tree. Was it something or nothing, a trick of the crepuscular light? He thought of the gods and demons said to inhabit semas and laughed to himself. Then he saw the shadow, more clearly this time. He could not make out the face but saw the long, streaming hair of a young woman or a girl. The undead, he told himself, as a continuation of the joke. He was quite close to Holly‘s grave, practically standing on top of it, and he looked around, concerned enough to draw his gun, wondering if the sema was as deserted as it appeared.