Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Sanction

Arkadin awoke grimy and stiff. His shirt was still damp with sweat from his nightmare. Gray light sifted in through the skewed blinds on the window. Stretching his neck by rolling his head in a circle, he thought what he needed most was a good long soak, but the hotel had only a shower in the hallway bathroom.

He rolled over to find that he was alone in the room; Devra had gone. Sitting up, he slid out of the damp, rumpled bed, scrubbed his rough face with the heels of his hands. His shoulder throbbed. It was swollen and hot.

He was reaching for the doorknob when the door opened. Devra stood on the threshold, a paper bag in one hand.

“Did you miss me?” she said with a sardonic smile. “I can see it in your face. You thought I’d skipped out.”

She came inside, kicked the door shut. Her eyes, unblinking, met his. She put her free arm up. Her hand squeezed his left shoulder, gently but firmly enough to cause him pain.

“I brought us coffee and fresh rolls,” she said evenly. “Don’t manhandle me.”

Arkadin glared at her for a moment. The pain meant nothing to him, but her defiance did. He was right. There was much more to her than what she presented on the surface.

He let go and so did she.

“I know who you are,” he said. “Filya wasn’t Pyotr’s courier. You are.”

That sardonic smile returned. “I was wondering how long it would take you to figure it out.” She crossed to the dresser, lined up the paper cups of coffee, set the rolls on the flattened bag. She took out a small bag of ice and tossed it to him.

“They’re still warm.” She bit into one, chewed thoughtfully.

Arkadin placed the ice on his left shoulder, sighed inwardly at the relief. He wolfed down his roll in three bites. Then he poured the scalding coffee down his throat.

“Next I suppose you’re going to hold your palm over an open flame.” Devra shook her head. “Men.”

“Why are you still here?” Arkadin said. “You could’ve just run off.”

“And go where? I shot one of Pyotr’s own men.”

“You must have friends.”

“None I can trust.”

Which implied she trusted him. He had an instinct she wasn’t lying about this. She’d washed off the heavy mascara that had run and smudged last night. Oddly, this made her eyes seem even larger. And her cheeks held a blush now that she’d scrubbed off what had to be white theatrical makeup.

“I’ll take you to Turkey,” she said. “A small town called Eskisёehir. That’s where I sent the document.”

Given what he knew, Turkey-the ancient gateway between East and West-made perfect sense.

The bag of ice slipped off as Arkadin grabbed the front of her shirt, crossed to the window, threw it wide open. Though the action cost him in pain to his shoulder, he hardly cared. The early-morning sounds of the street rose up to him like the smell of baking bread. He bent her backward so her head and torso were out the window. “What did I tell you about lying to me?”

“You might as well kill me now,” she said in her little-girl voice. “I won’t tolerate your abuse anymore.”

Arkadin pulled her back inside the room, let go of her. “What are you going to do,” he said with a smirk, “jump out the window?”

No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than she walked calmly to the window and sat on the sash, staring at him all the time. Then she tipped herself backward, through the open window. Arkadin grabbed her around the legs and hauled her up from the brink.

They stood glaring at each other, breathing fast, hearts pumping with excess adrenaline.

“Yesterday, while we were on the ladder, told me that you had nothing much to live for,” Devra said. “That pretty much goes for me, too. So here we both are, brothers under the skin, with nothing but each other.”

“How do I know the next link in the network is Turkey?”

She drew her hair back from her face. “I’m tired of lying to you,” she said. “It’s like lying to myself. What’s the point?”

“Talk is cheap,” he said.

“Then I’ll prove it to you. When we get to Turkey I’ll take you to the document.”

Arkadin, trying not to think too much about what she said, nodded his acknowledgment of their uneasy truce. “I won’t lay a hand on you again.”

Except to kill you , he thought.

THE FREER GALLERY of Art stood on the south side of the Mall, bounded on the west by the Washington Monument and on the east by the Reflecting Pool, gateway to the immense Capitol building. It was situated on the corner of Jefferson Drive and 12th Street, SW, near the western edge of the Mall.

The building, a Florentine Renaissance palazzo faced with Stony Creek granite imported from Connecticut, had been commissioned by Charles Freer to house his enormous collection of Near East and East Asian art. The main entrance on the north side of the building where the meet was to take place consisted of three arches accented by Doric pilasters surrounding a central loggia. Because its architecture looked inward, many critics felt it was a rather forbidding facade, especially when compared with the nearby exuberance of the National Gallery of Art.

Nevertheless, the Freer was the preeminent museum of its kind in the country, and Soraya loved it not only for the depth of art it housed but also for the elegant lines of the palazzo itself. She especially loved the contained open space at its entrance, and the fact that even, as now, when the Mall was agitated with hordes of tourists heading to and from the Smithsonian Metro rail stop on 12th Street, the Freer itself was an oasis of calm and tranquility. When things boiled over in the office during the day, it was to the Freer she came to decompress. Ten minutes with Sung dynasty jades and lacquers acted like a soothing balm to her soul.

Approaching the north side of the Mall, she searched past the crowds outside the entrance to the Freer and thought she saw-among the sturdy men with their hard, clipped Midwestern accents, the scampering children and their laughing mothers, the vacant-eyed teenagers plugged into their iPods-Veronica Hart’s long, elegant figure walking past the entrance, then doubling back.

She stepped off the curb, but the blare of a horn from an oncoming car startled her back onto the sidewalk. It was at that moment that her cell phone buzzed.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Bourne said in her ear.

“Jason?”

“Why are you coming to this meet?”

Foolishly, she looked around; she’d never be able to spot him, and she knew it.

“Hart invited me. I need to talk to you. The DCI and I both do.”

“About what?”

Soraya took a deep breath. “Typhon’s listening posts have picked up a series of disturbing communications pointing to an imminent terrorist attack on an East Coast city. The trouble is, that’s all we have. Worse, the communications are between two cadres of a group about which we have no intel whatsoever. It was my idea to recruit you to find them and stop the attack.”

“Not much to go on,” Bourne said. “Doesn’t matter. The group’s name is the Black Legion.”

“In grad school I studied the link between a branch of Muslim extremism and the Third Reich. But this can’t be the same Black Legion. They were either killed or disbanded when Nazi Germany fell.”

“It can and it is,” Bourne said. “I don’t know how it managed to survive, but it did. Three of their members tried to kidnap Professor Specter this morning. I saw their device tattooed on the gunman’s arm.”

“The three horses’ heads joined by the death’s head?”

“Yes.” Bourne described the incident in detail. “Check the body at the morgue.”