Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Sanction

“I don’t believe that.” Moira leaned forward until their knees touched. “Surely you see you’re more than that, Jason. You loved your wife; you love your children.”

“What kind of a father can I be to them? I’m a memory. And I’m a danger to them. Soon enough I’ll be a ghost.”

“You can do something about that. And what kind of friend were you to Martin? The best kind. The only kind that matters.” She tried to get him to turn back to her. “Sometimes I’m convinced you’re looking for answers to questions that have none.”

“What does that mean?”

“That no matter what you’ve done in the past, no matter what you’ll do in the future, you’ll never lose your humanity.” She watched his eyes engage hers slowly, enigmatically. “That’s the one thing that frightens you, isn’t it?”

What’s the matter with you?” Devra asked.

Arkadin, behind the wheel of a rental car they had picked up in Istanbul, grunted irritably. “What’re you talking about?”

“How long is it going to take you to fuck me?”

There being no flights from Sevastopol to Turkey, they’d spent a long night in a cramped cabin of the Heroes of Sevastopol, being transported southwest across the Black Sea from Ukraine to Turkey.

“Why would I want to do that?” Arkadin said as he headed off a lumbering truck on the highway.

“Every man I meet wants to fuck me. Why should you be any different?” Devra ran her hands through her hair. Her raised arms lifted her small breasts invitingly. “Like I said. What’s the matter with you?” A smirk played at the corners of her mouth. “Maybe you’re not a real man. Is that it?”

Arkadin laughed. “You’re so transparent.” He glanced at her briefly. “What’s your game? Why are you trying to provoke me?”

“I like to extract reactions in my men. How else will I get to know them?”

“I’m not your man,” he growled.

Now Devra laughed. She wrapped slender fingers around his arm, rubbing back and forth. “If your shoulder’s bothering you I’ll drive.”

He saw the familiar symbol on the inside of her wrist, all the more fearsome for being tattooed on the porcelain skin. “When did you get that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really. What matters is why you got it.” Faced with open highway, he put on speed. “How else will I get to know you?”

She scratched the tattoo as if it had moved beneath her skin. “Pyotr made me get it. He said it was part of the initiation. He said he wouldn’t go to bed with me until I got it.”

“And you wanted to go to bed with him.”

“Not as much as I want to go to bed with you.”

She turned away then, stared out the side window, as if she was suddenly embarrassed by her confession. Perhaps she actually was, Arkadin thought as he signaled, moving right through two lanes as a sign for a rest stop appeared. He turned off the highway, parked at the far end of the rest stop, away from the two vehicles that occupied parking slots. He got out, walked to the edge, and, with his back to her, took a long satisfying pee.

The day was bright and warmer than it had been in Sevastopol. The breeze coming off the water was laden with moisture that lay on his skin like sweat. On the way back to the car he rolled up his sleeves. His coat was slung with hers across the car’s backseat.

“We’d better enjoy this warmth while we can,” Devra said. “Once we get onto the Anatolian Plateau, the mountains will block this temperate weather. It’ll be colder than a witch’s teat.”

It was as if she’d never made the intimate statement. But she’d caught his attention, all right. It seemed to him now that he understood something important about her-or, more accurately, about himself. It went through Gala, as well, now that he thought of it. He seemed to have a certain power over women. He knew Gala loved him with every fiber of her being, and she wasn’t the first one. Now this slim tomboyish dyevochka , hard-bitten, downright nasty when she needed to be, had fallen under his spell. Which meant he had the handle on her he was searching for.

“How many times have you been to Eskisёehir?” he asked.

“Enough to know what to expect.”

He sat back. “Where did you learn to answer questions without revealing a thing?”

“If I’m bad, I learned it at my mother’s breast.”

Arkadin looked away. He seemed to have trouble breathing. Without a word, he opened the door, bolted outside, stalking in small circles like a lion in the zoo.

I cannot be alone,” Arkadin had said to Semion Icoupov, and Icoupov had taken him at his word. At Icoupov’s villa where Arkadin was installed, his host provided a young man. But when, a week later, Arkadin had beaten his companion nearly into a coma, Icoupov switched tactics. He spent hours with Arkadin, trying to determine the root of his outbursts of fury. This failed utterly, as Arkadin seemed at a loss to remember, let alone explain these frightening episodes.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” Icoupov said. “I don’t want to incarcerate you, but I need to protect myself.”

“I would never harm you,” Arkadin said.

“Not knowingly, perhaps,” the older man said ruminatively.

The following week a stoop-shouldered man with a formal goatee and colorless lips spent every afternoon with Arkadin. He sat in a plush upholstered chair, one leg crossed over the other, writing in a neat, crabbed hand in a tablet notebook he protected as if it were his child. For his part, Arkadin lay on his host’s favorite chaise longue, a roll pillow behind his head. He answered questions. He spoke at length about many things, but the things that shadowed his mind he kept tucked away in a black corner of the deepest depths of his mind, never to be spoken of. That door was closed forever.

At the end of three weeks, the psychiatrist handed in his report to Icoupov and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. No matter. Arkadin’s nightmares continued to haunt him in the dead of night when, upon awakening with a gasp and a start, he was convinced he heard rats scuttling, red eyes burning in the darkness. At those moments, the fact that Icoupov’s villa was completely vermin-free was of no solace to him. The rats lived inside him squirming, shrieking, feeding.

The next person Icoupov employed to burrow into Arkadin’s past in an attempt to cure him of his fits of rage was a woman whose sensuality and lush figure he felt would keep her safe from Arkadin’s outbursts of fury. Marlene was adept at handling men of all kinds and kinks. She possessed an uncanny ability to sense the specific thing a man desired from her, and provide it.

At first Arkadin didn’t trust Marlene. Why should he? He couldn’t trust the psychiatrist. Wasn’t she just another form of analyst sent to coax out the secrets of his past? Marlene of course noted this aversion in him and set about countering it. The way she saw it, Arkadin was living under a spell, self-induced or otherwise. It was up to her to concoct an antidote.

“This won’t be a short process,” she told Icoupov at the end of her first week with Arkadin, and he believed her.

Arkadin observed Marlene walking on little cat feet. He suspected she was smart enough to know that even the slightest misstep on her part might strike him as a seismic shift, and then all the progress she’d made in gaining his trust would evaporate like alcohol over a flame. She seemed to him wary, acutely aware that at any moment he could turn on her. She acted as if she were in a cage with a bear. Day by day you could track the training of it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t unexpectedly rip your face off.

Arkadin had to laugh at that, the care with which she was treating every aspect of him. But gradually something else began to creep into his consciousness. He suspected that she was coming to feel something genuine for him.