resignation. Why wouldn’t she be disgusted by him? If only she knew the whole truth.

“Tell me in more detail about the accident in prison.”

Arkadin knew at once that she was trying to find inconsistencies in his story. This was

a classic interrogator’s technique. She would never know the truth.

“Let’s go swimming,” he said abruptly. He shed his shorts and T-shirt.

Marlene shook her head. “I’m not in the mood. You go if-”

“Oh, come on.”

He pushed her overboard, stood up, dived in after her. He found her under the water,

kicking her legs to bring herself to the surface. He wrapped his thighs around her neck,

locked his ankles, tightening his grip on her. He rose to the surface, held on to the boat, swung water out of his eyes as she struggled below him. Boats thrummed past. He waved

to two young girls, their long hair flying behind them like horses’ manes. He wanted to

hum a love song, but all he could think of was the theme to Bridge on the River Kwai.

After a time, Marlene stopped struggling. He felt her weight below him, swaying

gently in the swells. He didn’t want to, really he didn’t, but unbidden the image of his old apartment resurrected itself in his mind’s eye. It was a slum, the filthy crumbling Soviet-era piece of shit building teeming with vermin.

Their poverty didn’t stop the older man from banging other women. When one of them

became pregnant, she decided to have the baby. He was all for it, he told her. He’d help

her in any way he could. But what he really wanted was the child his barren wife could

never give him. When Leonid was born, he ripped the baby from the girl’s arms, brought

Leonid to his wife to raise.

“This is the child I always wanted, but you couldn’t give me,” he told her.

She raised Arkadin dutifully, without complaint, because where could a barren woman

go in Nizhny Tagil? But when her husband wasn’t home, she locked the boy in the closet

of his room for hours at a time. A blind rage gripped her and wouldn’t let her go. She

despised this result of her husband’s seed, and she felt compelled to punish Leonid

because she couldn’t punish his father.

It was during one of these long punishments that Arkadin woke to awful pain in his left

foot. He wasn’t alone in the closet. Half a dozen rats, large as his father’s shoe, scuttled back and forth, squealing, teeth gnashing. He managed to kill them, but not before they

finished what they’d started. They ate three of his toes.

Twenty-Seven

IT ALL STARTED with Pyotr Zilber,” Maslov said. “Or rather his younger brother,

Aleksei. Aleksei was a wise guy. He tried to muscle in on one of my sources for foreign

cars. A lot of people were killed, including some of my men and my source. For that, I

had him killed.”

Dimitri Maslov and Bourne were sitting in a glassed-in greenhouse built on the roof of

the warehouse where Maslov had his office. They were surrounded by a lush profusion of

tropical flowers: speckled orchids, brilliant carmine anthurium, birds-of-paradise, white

ginger, heliconia. The air was perfumed with the scents of the pink plumeria and white

jasmine. It was so warm and humid, Maslov looked right at home in his bright-hued

short-sleeved shirt. Bourne had rolled up his sleeves. There was a table with a bottle of

vodka and two glasses. They’d already had their first drink.

“Zilber pulled strings, had my man Borya Maks sent to High Security Prison Colony

13 in Nizhny Tagil. You’ve heard of it?”

Bourne nodded. Conklin had mentioned the prison several times.

“Then you know it’s no picnic in there.” Maslov leaned forward, refilled their glasses,

handed one to Bourne, took the other himself. “Despite that, Zilber wasn’t satisfied. He

hired someone very, very good to infiltrate the prison and kill Maks.” Drinking vodka,

surrounded by a riot of color, he appeared totally at his ease. “Only one person could

accomplish that and get out alive: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”

The vodka had done Bourne a world of good, returning both warmth and strength to

his overtaxed body. There was still a smear of blood on the point of one cheek, dried

now, but Maslov had neither looked at it nor commented on it. “Tell me about Arkadin.”

Maslov made an animal sound in the back of his throat. “All you need to know is that

the sonovabitch killed Pyotr Zilber. God knows why. Then he disappeared off the face of

the earth. I had Evsei stake out Mischa Tarkanian’s apartment. I was hoping Arkadin

would come back there. Instead, you showed up.”

“What’s Zilber’s death to you?” Bourne said. “From what you’ve told me, there was

no love lost between the two of you.”

“Hey, I don’t have to like a person to do business with him.”

“If you wanted to do business with Zilber you shouldn’t have had his brother

murdered.”

“I have my reputation to uphold.” Maslov sipped his vodka. “Pyotr knew what kinds of

shit his brother was into, but did he stop him? Anyway, the hit was strictly business.

Pyotr took it far too personally. Turns out he was almost as reckless as his brother.”

There it was again, Bourne thought, the slurs against Pyotr Zilber. What, then, was he

doing running a secret network? “What was your business with him?”

“I coveted Pyotr’s network. Because of the war with the Azeri, I’ve been looking for a

new, more secure method to move our drugs. Zilber’s network was the perfect solution.”

Bourne put aside his vodka. “Why would Zilber want anything to do with the

Kazanskaya?”

“There you’ve given away the extent of your ignorance.” Maslov eyed him curiously.

“Zilber would have wanted money to fund his organization.”

“You mean his network.”

“I mean precisely what I say.” Maslov looked hard and long at Bourne. “Pyotr Zilber

was a member of the Black Legion.”

Like a sailor who senses an onrushing storm, Devra stopped herself from asking

Arkadin again about his maimed foot. There was about him at this moment the same

slight tremor of intent of a bowstring pulled back to its maximum. She transferred her

gaze from his left foot to the corpse of Heinrich, taking in sunlight that would no longer

do him any good. She felt the danger beside her, and she thought of her dream: her

pursuit of the unknown creature, her sense of utter desolation, the building of her fear to an unbearable level.

“You’ve got the package now,” she said. “Is it over?”

For a moment, Arkadin said nothing, and she wondered whether she’d left her

deflecting question too late, whether he would now turn on her because she had asked

about what had happened to that damn foot.

The red rage had gripped Arkadin, shaking him until his teeth rattled in his skull. It

would have been so easy to turn to her, smile, and break her neck. So little effort; nothing to it. But something stopped him, something cooled him. It was his own will. He-did-not-want-to-kill-her. Not yet, at least. He liked sitting here on the beach with her, and there were so few things he liked.

“I still have to shut down the rest of the network,” he said, at length. “Not that I think it actually matters at this point. Christ, it was put together by an out-of-control commander

too young to have learned caution, peopled by drug addicts, inveterate gamblers,

weaklings, and those of no faith. It’s a wonder the network functioned at all. Surely it

would have imploded on its own sooner or later.” But what did he know? He was simply

a soldier engaged in an invisible war. His was not to reason why.

Pulling out his cell phone, he dialed Icoupov’s number.