Vanov produced the bronze coin, holding it out in the palm of his hand. “Does this knock out any cobwebs?”
—
Bourne stared at the coin for a moment before looking up to study Captain Vanov’s face with every ounce of his experience and skills. Boris had told him Vanov would be coming to see him when he had called to invite Bourne to his wedding.
“You don’t seem happy for me, my friend,” he’d said.
“Happy enough,” Bourne replied. “I’m just wondering about the rush. I’ve never heard you mention Svetlana before.”
“Love comes to all of us, my friend, if we’re lucky. Even you, Jason. Even you.”
Bourne had momentarily stiffened, wondering if Boris, with all his tentacled sources, knew about Sara. But how could he? He’d met her, of course, but that was before there had been anything between her and Bourne. Still, when it came to love Bourne found it imperative to be paranoid. He had vowed never to put Sara in more danger than she was used to, even if that meant walking away from her and his feelings for her. He’d done it before; he’d do it again. On the other hand, he was becoming aware of the increasing difficulty in cutting off his feelings at the knees, and this, a weakness for someone in his line of work, was cause for concern.
“Don’t worry,” Boris had continued, “I know you were on your way to Moscow anyway. Are you any closer to finding Ivan Borz?”
“When it comes to Borz, ‘closer’ is a relative term.”
“But you will find him.” It hadn’t been a question. Boris never questioned Bourne’s abilities.
“Yes.”
“Just make sure you kill him this time. The sonuvabitch has a knack of cheating death almost as often as you do. He’s so slippery, so full of changes in identity if I didn’t know better I’d think you’d tutored him.”
“Now that would present a problem.”
“I’m sending Vanov with something for you.” The darkening of Boris’s voice had alerted Bourne that they had entered the real reason for the call. “Keep it safe, at all costs.”
“What is it?”
“A lifeline.”
“What?”
“A lifeline for the end of the world.”
And with that cryptic comment Boris had rung off.
Now, in the hotel room in Frankfurt, Bourne took the coin at last—Boris’s lifeline. He turned it, looking at it from all angles. “Clearly, it’s ancient, from the Roman Empire. Other than that…” He glanced up at Vanov, shook his head.
Vanov looked crestfallen, an emotion that was genuine. “Ah, pity. The general instructed me to bring it to you. He said you would know what it means.”
Bourne nodded noncommittally.
—
“There was no verbal or written message with it?” Bourne asked.
“There will be many people you don’t know at the wedding. Some may know you and not be pleased to see you. I’m to set you up with someone who will be of use to you in this and other matters. She will help in whatever you may require.” Captain Vanov handed Bourne a slip of paper. “Here is her mobile number. When you land at Sheremetyevo, call her.”
Bourne frowned “Who is this wonder woman?”
“Her name is Irina. Irina Vasilýevna. She is very well connected in many of Moscow’s influential siloviki and oligarch circles. She’s also conversant with other—or, how shall I better put it—unofficial personnel.”
“She’s into Moscow’s black market?”
“Her father and brother were.”
“They’re dead?”
Vanov nodded. “Three years now.” Strange, he thought, how speaking of his own father’s and brother’s deaths meant nothing to him. It was as if he were speaking of fictional characters—or ones who had never existed. Of course, it was different for Irina. She and their father had been very close. Their father had confided everything in her, and for this he had been supremely grateful.
“I won’t need her,” Bourne said.
“The general insists his wedding run perfectly smoothly. These are his explicit orders.” With an obsequious smile, Vanov moved toward the door. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned, “Good luck, Mr. Bourne. I trust you’ve brought a heavy overcoat. In Moscow you will hear winter’s footsteps hard on your heels.”
PART ONE
Of all the aphrodisiacs in the world,
the most powerful is being a twin.
—Irina Vasilýevna
1
My bear, where have you been?” Svetlana asked.
“Working, my pet,” General Boris Karpov said as he came out of the enormous bathroom of their palatial Moscow hotel suite.
“Working?” Svetlana evinced an exaggerated pout. “On this day of all days?”
Karpov sighed as he plucked his freshly pressed dress uniform jacket off the wooden caddy. “Unfortunately, the world doesn’t stop to celebrate our wedding.”
Svetlana Novachenko had a face like a porcelain doll—a porcelain doll with killer cheekbones, emerald eyes, and hair the color of champagne. That she was half Ukrainian, rather than full Russian, was no impediment to Boris Karpov marrying her. He was the head of the combined FSB and FSB-2, the inheritors of the KGB, the president’s infamous alma mater. As such, he was in a highly privileged position in the Russian Federation, medaled, feted at the Kremlin, invited to every glittering political affair, surrounded by the czars’ jewel box interiors. He’d even had dinner once or twice with the president himself. All this was to say that Boris Karpov could marry whomever he wanted, so long as she wasn’t a Jew.
Svetlana Novachenko wasn’t a Jew. She was a member of a wealthy and powerful mixed Russian and Ukrainian industrial family that traced its lineage back to Czar Nicholas I.
“What were you really doing, Boris?”
She was stretched out now on a velvet chaise longue, her slim, magnificent body naked and glistening. Her arms were raised over her head in a provocative pose deliberately mimicking Francisco Goya’s La Maja Desnuda.
“If you must know,” Boris said, fastening the brass buttons of his jacket with its six rows of medals emblazoned across its left breast, “Cairo Station was in a bit of a muddle, having discovered the Israelis had been spying on them electronically.”
“Cairo, is it? So far from where we are here in the bosom of Mother Russia.”
He gave her a sideways glance. “I rarely know when you’re being facetious.”
“Oh, yes you do, darling.” Svetlana smiled with her small white teeth. “You simply won’t admit it.” She extended her arms over her head even farther, throwing her breasts into high relief. “You’re sure you’re not carrying out yet another stage in the Sovereign’s pernicious campaign against Ukraine?”
Boris frowned, trying his best to ignore her attempt at seduction. “You don’t believe me?”
“The Sovereign seems to have bent all his energies on reclaiming what Russia has lost over the years. Aren’t you part of that?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Do you not credit what he just stated publicly?”
“He makes many statements, Lana.”
“This one is more despicable than the others. Last night he defended the treaty the Soviet Union signed with Nazi Germany on the eve of the World War Two, under which they secretly carved up Poland and other countries like the butchers they were. The Sovereign is no better than Molotov and Ribbentrop, proof positive he’s a madman.”
Boris said nothing. He was irrationally resentful that she had exponentially expanded the knot of anxiety in his stomach that for weeks he had been trying to control. And on their wedding night!
“And what has this war stance gotten him? Privation here at home for the populace as Western embargos cut deep, the ruble is at an all-time low, and the stock market is in free fall. Even the billionaires’ concerns grow daily as they see their money hordes receding like the tide. Face it, the Sovereign is in trouble. He’s shoved the entire Federation onto a slippery slope.”
r /> “What slippery slope are you referring to?” Though Boris knew all too well to what she was referring.
Svetlana sighed, which only served to thrust her breasts out even more. “Vankor,” she said with that canny look in her eye that had made Boris fall in love with her.
“What about it?” He felt a stab of fear rush through him. Her combination of intelligence and uncanny intuition was bringing her far too close to the nub of the matter.
“My bear, do you think I don’t know how the Sovereign has severely altered the Federation energy strategy? Russia owns the oil-rich Vankor fields free and clear; through Vankorneft it has the expertise and the infrastructure to run it, and yet the Sovereign has just struck a secret deal with the Chinese, allowing them to buy ten percent of Vankorneft.” She eyed Boris. “Why on earth would the Sovereign chip off a piece of one of the Federation’s crown jewels?”
Boris said nothing, knowing she liked to answer her own questions.
“Because, my bear, the Sovereign is frantic for money. The economy is deteriorating at an alarming rate. It takes billions to keep an army on the ground away from home. Mother Russia has to feed all those breakaway rebels in Eastern Ukraine, not to mention subsidize all of Crimea now. And with the ruble in free fall, the stock market so depressed that yesterday Apple’s net worth exceeded that of our entire market, where is the money coming from? Desperate times call for desperate measures—and you caught in the middle. This is what worries me the most.”
Svetlana misinterpreted his pained expression. “My bear, you are programmed to lie—even to me. I might say, especially to me.”
He turned to face her. “And why would that be?”
“Your ‘important business’ on your wedding day wouldn’t happen to be maskirovka?”
Karpov laughed. There were times, like now, when her intelligence and intuition truly frightened him. “My entire adult life I’ve been spinning webs of concealment, plausible deniability, and carefully leaked dezinformatsiya designed to confuse, befuddle, and lead astray our enemies so that they cannot predict what we will do next, let alone be able to respond to it.”
Svetlana’s arms came down as she sat up straighter. “You know, there are some who claim your wanting to marry me is nothing more than maskirovka.”
“What?”
“Because of my family.”
He stared at her as if he’d suddenly found a viper in his room.
“That you don’t really love me. That you have agreed to enter into a marriage of convenience.”
“Hey.” Boris laughed again, but it was all sharp edges, nothing amused about it. “I have the ear of the president. I don’t need your family.” But seeing the serious look on her face, he sobered quickly. His face clouded over. “Who?” he said. “Who would be passing such disgusting dezinformatsiya?”
“If you knew would you cut out his tongue?”
Boris grunted. “I’m not medieval; I’m not Ivan the Terrible.”
“Also up for debate.”
Boris’s heavy eyebrows lifted. “Who is feeding you such nonsense?”
“You know perfectly well who: First Minister Timur Savasin. But don’t worry, my love. If I believed a word of it do you think I’d be marrying you?”
But now Boris looked truly unhappy.
“It’s true you have the ear of the Sovereign. But if his right-hand man is passing lies, I can’t believe the Sovereign isn’t aware of it. You have to admit the Sovereign is a piece of work, adoring his Hemingway, going hunting, riding around half-naked on a horse.”
“He longs only to repair what was sundered decades ago. He wants the repatriation of the countries that were part of the Soviet Union.”
“Countries whose faltering economies put such a strain on Moscow it was forced to let them go. Good riddance, I say!”
“The Russian Federation is too small for this new world order, Svetlana. We need to spread our wings once more.”
“Now you sound like Hitler.”
“Bite your tongue! The president wants only what was once his. And so do all Russians. His popularity is soaring.”
“‘What was once his.’ Do you even hear yourself? Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and all the rest were occupied by Russian troops at the end of World War Two. They never belonged to Moscow, and they sure as hell don’t belong to the Sovereign, the Czar-Batyushka.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”
“Why not? I’m not the one who traffics in lies and deceit.”
“If I thought you had a Ukrainian heart…”
Svetlana’s flush had crept from her cheeks to her throat and the tops of her shoulders. “You’d do what? Dispatch one of your hooded terrorists to kill me? Order one of your tanks idling at the border to run me over? Or arrange this very marriage? After all, takeover by proxy is the Sovereign’s latest methodology for waging war.”
He rolled his eyes. “There’s no use talking to you when—”
“I hate it when you treat me like a child, Boris Illyich.”
He knew she was really angry. She almost never called him by his patronymic. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help himself: “If you act like a child you’ll be treated as such. You’re jumping at phantoms, letting your imagination run away with you. That’s the Russian definition of paranoia, you know.” His voice turned abruptly conciliatory, all self-defensive barbs retracted. “My field of expertise is the Middle East, as you very well know. As for Ukraine and the other countries of the former Soviet Bloc—”
“And yet you question my loyalty.”
“I did no such thing. Our discussion—”
“Is that what this is?”
Once again, he stood watching her. “Our discussion was purely hypothetical.”
“This is all about economics, isn’t it?” she continued, off on another tack now that she had made her point. “The economics of greed. The Sovereign and his siloviki made billions of dollars on Russia’s oil. But now that’s all coming to an end. From where will the money come to keep the Federation going? That uncertainty—that fear—has given birth to all this talk of repatriation. Russia now needs the former Soviet countries in order to remain—?”
“Strong.”
“But in the past they brought Mother Russia to the brink of insolvency.”
Boris once again marveled at this woman’s grasp of the tangled threads of economics and geopolitics. It was one of the reasons he fell in love with her, though her prowess in bed was indescribable. She was right, all the way down the line. Privately, he thought the president’s goal was one that would certainly bankrupt Russia. The satellites had to be let go; they had been dragging Moscow into insolvency. The USSR had been too vast, too unwieldy, and now with Chechen and other Muslim ethnics feeling they were owed the world, this was not the time to try to corral them back into the pen. Those horses had left forever.
“But you see how wrong you are, Lana. The president has already announced a pact with Ukraine to keep the natural gas spigot open through the long, cold winter that will be upon us in months.”
She shook her head. “You think I don’t know what the sovereign is planning, Boris, but I do. Russians don’t want war; they don’t want him. Already the Western sanctions are strangling us—and it’s the men and women in the streets who are suffering.
“That so-called pact with Ukraine will fall apart before it is even signed. The Sovereign will blame NATO for tampering with Ukraine. The temperature has already plummeted. As the winter arrives, he will turn off the natural gas spigot, not only to Ukraine but to all of Western Europe, triggering a recession that will race around the world.”
Boris barked a mirthless laugh, his expression darkening. “What an imagination you have, my pet. The president won’t risk starting World War Three. He may be crazy, but he’s not insane.”
She laughed. “Of course you’re right. I got carried away. Oh, come on, darling, don’t pout. It makes you look like a willful child.” Even at low w
attage her smile was irresistible. “Besides, you’d never have fallen for someone who wasn’t this spirited.” Her smile widened as she beckoned him with her crooked forefinger, its tip lacquered bloodred. “Come here, my bear. You look so handsome in your dress grays.”
Boris shook his head. He still appeared put out by their friendly argument, even though verbal sparring was a staple of their relationship. “No fucking until after the ceremony.”
“Who said anything about fucking?” Svetlana said with a seductive smirk.
“Later.” Staring into her eyes, he straightened his jacket by pulling down on the hem with both hands. “As much as we both want, but later.”
“Boris, you’re so bourgeois.”
“No, my love, merely practical.” He came and bent over, kissed her lightly on the lips. “Now it’s time for you to bathe or apply makeup or do whatever it is you females do to get ready.”
“Idiot!” But her smile was warm as she kissed him back, more passionately, her soft lips opening as her hand went behind his head. “Now go,” she said, releasing him, in her mock-command voice. “Mingle with our guests.” And as he crossed the room, “And be nice!”
“I’m always nice,” Boris said.
Her throaty laughter followed him out the door.
—
The moment the door closed, Svetlana wrapped herself in a royal-looking floor-length silk robe. Veniamin Belov entered from a narrow door that connected to the next room. He was a small man with pale skin, thick black hair, and round-lensed glasses behind which were dark, restless eyes that seemed to constantly be looking for a safe exit. He held a small device in front of him, waving it back and forth, searching for electronic bugs.
When he was satisfied there were none, he came toward Svetlana. “So,” he said, “has he declared himself one way or another?”
Svetlana’s mouth twitched. “Veniamin Nazarovich, you mean you didn’t have a stethoscope pressed to the door?”
Belov’s tense lips twitched in reply. “This isn’t a game, Lana. How many times must I tell you?”