vodka.

Once again, want never appeared on Arkadin’s horizon, only need. He needed to do

more than survive in this city of permasoot, violence, and black lung disease. He had

come as far as he could on his own. He made enough to sustain himself here, but not

enough to break away to Moscow where he needed to go to grab life’s richest

opportunities. Outside, the rings of hell rose up: brick smokestacks, vigorously belching

particle-laden smoke, iron guard towers of the brutal prison zonas, bristling with assault

rifles, powerful spotlights, and bellowing sirens.

In here he was locked inside his own brutal zona with Stas Kuzin. Arkadin gave the

only sensible answer. He said yes, and so entered the ninth level of hell.

Thirty-One

WHILE ON LINE for passport control in Munich, Bourne phoned Specter, who

assured him everything was in readiness. Moments later he came in range of the first set

of the airport’s CCTV cameras. Instantly his image was picked up by the software

employed at Semion Icoupov’s headquarters, and before he’d finished his call to the

professor he’d been identified.

At once Icoupov was called, who ordered his people stationed in Munich to move from

standby to action, thus alerting both the airport personnel and the Immigration people

under Icoupov’s control. The man directing the incoming passengers to the different

cordoned-off lanes leading to the Immigration booths received a photo of Bourne on his

computer screen just in time to indicate Bourne should go to booth 3.

The Immigration officer manning booth 3 listened to the voice coming through the

electronic device in his ear. When the man identified to him as Jason Bourne handed over

his passport the officer asked him the usual questions-“How long do you intend to remain

in Germany? Is your visit business or pleasure?”-while paging through the passport. He

moved it away from the window, passed the photo under a humming purple light. As he

did so, he pressed a small metallic disk the thickness of a human nail into the inside back cover of the passport. Then he closed the booklet, smoothed its front and back covers,

and handed it back to Bourne.

“Have a pleasant stay in Munich,” he said without a trace of emotion or interest. He

was already looking beyond Bourne to the next passenger in line.

As in Sheremetyevo, Bourne had the sense that he was under physical surveillance. He

changed taxis twice when he arrived at the seething center of the city. In Marienplatz, a

large open square from which the historic Marian column ascended, he walked past

medieval cathedrals, through flocks of pigeons, lost himself within the crowds of guided

tours, gawping at the sugar-icing architecture and the looming twin domes of the

Frauenkirche, cathedral of the archbishop of Munich-Freising, the symbol of the city.

He inserted himself in a tour group gathered around a government building in which

was inset the city’s official shield, depicting a monk with hands spread wide. The tour

leader was telling her charges that the German name, Mьnchen, stemmed from an Old

High German word meaning “monks.” In 1158 or thereabouts, the current duke of

Saxony and Bavaria built a bridge over the Isar River, connecting the saltworks, for

which the growing city would soon become famous, with a settlement of Benedictine

monks. He installed a tollbooth on the bridge, which became a vital link in the Salt Route

in and out of the high Bavarian plains on which Munich was built, and a mint in which to

house his profits. The modern-day mercantile city was not so far removed from its

medieval beginnings.

When Bourne was certain he wasn’t being shadowed, he slipped away from the group

and boarded a taxi, which dropped him off six blocks from the Wittelsbach Palace.

According to the professor, Kirsch said he’d rather meet Bourne in a public setting. He

chose the State Museum for Egyptian Art on Hofgartenstrasse, which was housed within

the massive rococo facade of the Wittelsbach Palace. Bourne took a full circuit of the

streets around the palace, checking once more for tags, but he couldn’t recall being in

Munich before. He didn’t have that eerie sense of dйjа vu that meant he had returned to a

place he couldn’t remember. Therefore, he knew local tags would have the advantage of

terrain. There might be a dozen places to hide around the palace that he didn’t know

about.

Shrugging, he entered the museum. The metal detector was staffed by a pair of armed

security guards, who were also setting aside backpacks and picking through handbags.

On either side of the vestibule was a pair of basalt statues of the Egyptian god Horus-a

falcon with a disk of the sun on his forehead-and his mother, Isis. Instead of walking

directly to the exhibits, Bourne turned, stood behind the statue of Horus, watching for ten minutes as people came and went. He noted everyone between twenty-five and fifty,

memorizing their faces. There were seventeen in all.

He then made his way past a female armed guard, into the exhibition halls, where he

found Kirsch precisely where he told Specter he’d be, scrutinizing an ancient carving of a

lion’s head. He recognized Kirsch from the photo Specter had sent him, a snapshot of the

two men standing together on the university campus. The professor’s courier was a wiry

little man with a shiny bald skull and black eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. He had pale blue eyes that darted this way and that as if on gimbals.

Bourne went past him, ostensibly looking at several sarcophagi while using his

peripheral vision to check for any of the seventeen people who’d entered the museum

after him. When no one presented themselves, he retraced his steps.

Kirsch did not turn as Bourne came up beside him, but said, “I know it sounds

ridiculous, but doesn’t this sculpture remind you of something?”

“The Pink Panther,” Bourne said, both because it was the proper code response, and

because the sculpture did look astonishingly like the modern-day cartoon icon.

Kirsch nodded. “Glad you made it without incident.” He handed over the keys to his

apartment, the code for the front door, and detailed directions to it from the museum. He

looked relieved, as if he were handing over his burdensome life rather than his home.

“There are some features of my apartment I want to talk to you about.”

As Kirsch spoke they moved on to a granite sculpture of the kneeling Senenmut, from

the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

“The ancient Egyptians knew how to live,” Kirsch observed. “They weren’t afraid of

death. To them, it was just another journey, not to be undertaken lightly, but still they

knew there was something waiting for them after life.” He put his hand out, as if to touch

the statue or perhaps to absorb some of its potency. “Look at this statue. Life still glows within it, thousands of years later. For centuries the Egyptians had no equal.”

“Until they were conquered by the Romans.”

“And yet,” Kirsch said, “it was the Romans who were changed by the Egyptians. A

century after the Ptolemys and Julius Caesar ruled from Alexandria, it was Isis, the

Egyptian goddess of revenge and rebellion, who was worshipped throughout the Roman

Empire. In fact, it’s all too likely that the early Christian Church founders, unable to do away with her or her followers, transmogrified her, stripped her of her war-like nature,

and made from her the perfectly peaceful Virgin Mary.”

“Leonid Arkadin could use a little less Isis and a lot more Virgin Mary,” Bourne