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“You mean in true Russian fashion the outcome has already been decided.”
Colonel Korsolov’s lips twitched again, giving him the aspect of a particularly evil marionette. “Her fate is in your hands, Bourne. And when she dies, I personally guarantee you’ll be watching front row, center.”
7
I will not sit here another minute,” Svetlana Karpova said. “I want to see my husband now.”
“Please, madam, I urge you to calm yourself.” Lieutenant Andrei Avilov was doing his best to soothe Karpov’s newly minted widow. Married and widowed on the same evening, he thought. If his wife had been killed on the day of their marriage no one would be able to calm him down. “I promise you will see the general in good time.”
Avilov was a thick-bodied man with the typical Russian trait of occasional melancholia. However, between those troughs he was a tough-minded, canny, politically savvy siloviki who was absolutely loyal to the deputy prime minister, also called the first minister. To the Kremlin inner circle Timur Savasin, first minister, was known as the first among equals, ironically just like the director of the Israeli Mossad. Timur Savasin was the Sovereign’s number two, in charge of all security matters, as well as much of the Federation’s economy. He wielded more power than the Federation’s actual prime minister. He was also Boris’s boss, but he was as unlike Boris as the moon was to the sun: Where Boris was a prototypical Russian bear—wide of beam and brawny—Savasin was tall, slim, an athlete of some repute in martial arts circles, and a charismatic. He was also a traditionalist, a conservative who longed for the good old Soviet days of the KGB’s iron-heeled boot. He hated Americans almost as much as he hated Ukrainians. He had only contempt for the Europeans; he loved squeezing them on the issue of natural gas. He also smoked like a chimney, a habit he claimed calmed him and cleared his head of the idle chatter of siloviki and oligarchs alike.
Avilov had made himself his boss’s shadow, and thus had ingratiated himself with the first minister. Even better, he had managed to make himself indispensable to Timur Savasin. As a corollary, he was now bent on destroying Colonel Korsolov’s career so that he could step into the vacuum created by General Karpov’s sudden demise that had so shocked the president and Timur Savasin. This, he knew, would be no easy matter, considering the muscle behind Korsolov and his family. Korsolov knew things about so many people that Avilov had plotted his best course to keep away from the FSB colonel. He had to be eliminated, just as his boss had been. How Avilov was to accomplish this exceedingly difficult goal was, at this very early stage, unknown to him. But he had faith that within the labyrinthine corridors in which he lived lay the answer. He just had to recognize it and use it.
But back to General Karpov: As far as the other guests were concerned, a story had been circulated that a minor security breach necessitated the premature end to the wedding reception in order to protect everyone’s safety. Following Timur Savasin’s express orders, Avilov had spirited Svetlana back to the suite she and Karpov had shared, where they would have spent their first night as a married couple. Now there would be nothing for her but grief and agony.
Still, Avilov observed Svetlana as through a bureaucrat’s cloudy lens, unmoved by her earthly emotions. She was half Ukrainian, after all; half a Western-loving traitor to the ideals of the Federation. Why should he have sympathy for her? She had lost her husband, true enough, but he had lost his sister to an ice fall, when they were teenagers. Nina hadn’t wanted to go climbing with him, but he had bullied her into joining him. He had been thinking about his lording it over her, grinning to himself, seeing the tears freezing on her eyelashes and cheeks, reveling in the physical torture he must be putting her through. With an ear-shattering crack, the ice fall came out of nowhere, a rush of blue-white, the mass sweeping her away. He’d almost been pulled off the mountain, too, would certainly have died with her if he hadn’t cut the line between them. He hadn’t even seen Nina fall, so swiftly and completely had she been swept under. Climbing back down the mountain on trembling legs, the frozen tracks on her face were all he could remember. Two teams of mountain rangers had spent the better part of a week trying to find her, but she was buried too deep, or had been pitched into a crevasse. Dead, with no body to mourn, his father had descended into depression, his mother almost lost her mind. The family was done. Finished. But for Avilov, freed, it was the beginning of his new life.
Now as he stared implacably at Svetlana’s tear-streaked face, he tried to recall those last moments with Nina, but could not. Even her face seemed clouded over, as if he were peering at her as the ice fall took her from him.
“My husband!” Svetlana screamed now. “Where is he? Why am I cooped up here like a prisoner? You must tell me!”
“Madam, please. Calm yourself. The general is in protective custody. He is safe and sound, I assure you.” Why Savasin had ordered him to take this line with the widow was unknown, but he trusted his boss and so did not ask questions or overthink the matter. “Overthinking,” Savasin was fond of saying, “can only end in tears.”
On the other hand, the cruelty of the order was not lost on Avilov. But again he viewed it through his highly evolved lens, not allowing it to affect him in the least. He was watching a specimen react, and whether it was in a vented cage or a kill jar was yet to be determined, and not by him. He was merely following the orders of a man he loved and revered, a master chess player from whom he would continue learning the nastiest tricks of the trade as he climbed to the loftiest reaches of the siloviki ladder on his mentor’s coattails.
“But why isn’t he here?” Svetlana insisted. “If you’re protecting me, surely you can protect him.”
“That’s not how the system works.”
Svetlana’s eyes flashed. “The system, the system, it’s always the system with you siloviki. You are slaves to it.”
“The system is what makes the Federation work, madam.”
Svetlana’s laugh was harsh, almost, Avilov would say, cruel. “Idiot! The Federation isn’t working. That’s why we’re at war with Ukraine, why there are terrorist bombings in the south, why the Chechens have sworn vengeance, why we are at odds with the West.”
“We’ve always been at odds with the West.”
“Glasnost—”
“—was a failed experiment by a deluded bureaucrat.”
She came toward him, with a kind of determination he wasn’t fully prepared for. “You’re all deluded, Avilov—siloviki and oligarch alike. It’s every man for himself and damn the public.” She was so worked up spittle flew from her lips to the lapel of his uniform. “All you old-line reactionary Soviets are so proud of your Revolution. What Revolution? You’re no different than the czars. In fact, you’re worse—greedier, more arrogant, and so very bloodthirsty.” She was closer still, backing Avilov toward the door to the hallway. “You suckle at the teat of disinformation. Lies are all you know—and that makes you, what? You’re not human, Avilov. You’re not even alive. You’re an automaton of the Federation, a toy soldier with a gun too big for you to handle.”
Avilov hit her. He had meant it only as a slap, but somehow, some way, her words had slid between the plates of his armadillo armor, and it was his balled fist that slammed into her cheek. He saw the blood fly, heard the crack of bone fracturing as she fell—almost flew—sideways beneath the force of the blow.
The next second she was on the carpet, bleeding, her hand tenderly cupping her cheek as he stood over her, splay-legged and panting like a cheetah at the end of its food run. If he had indeed been everything she said he was, he would have knelt beside her, sunk his teeth into her flesh, and ripped out her throat. Wouldn’t he?
But the fact was, deep down, where he feared to look, Avilov recognized himself in the dark mirror she had held up to him. He saw it in the moment he had cut himself free of his sister, he saw it as he had climbed down the mountain, avoiding the ice fall. And he saw it in his elation at severing himself from his family. Timur Savasin was his father now;
the Federation was his family. Without both, he was nothing, lost on a sea without sight of land or even a horizon to guide his direction.
Hearing Svetlana’s whimpers, Avilov came back to himself, squatted down, intending to investigate the severity of the damage he had inflicted on her. Instead, her long nails rushed at his face, digging in, flaying skin and flesh from just under his left eye socket to the corner of his mouth.
He was so shocked he punched her again, connecting with her jaw this time, so hard her head spun from side to side. A cut beneath her left eye leaked blood. She winced as she smiled up at him.
“Go ahead, Avilov, kill me. See what happens to you then.”
Avilov felt himself losing control. “I’m not afraid of you.” He didn’t care. “I’m not afraid of your husband.” Fuck her. Fuck Boris Karpov and his damned FSB minions. “You know why? Because your husband is dead.”
“What?” Svetlana’s bloodshot eyes opened wide. “What are you saying?”
“General Karpov was garroted.” His voice was a cruel drawl, as cruel as her laugh had been. “That’s what this emergency is all about, not the crap we handed out to you and your guests.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re lying.” Svetlana’s voice was a deep gurgle as she worked her words around the shards of pain in her jaw.
“Why do you think he isn’t here with you? Because he’s lying in the loggia, in a pool of his own blood.”
“Fucker! I’ll see you fry in hell for this.”
And then, all control lost, his body did what his brain bade it to do. Jamming a knee between her legs he pried her thighs open, pushed up the layers of her wedding dress, the shiny white satin and lace splattered with their mingled blood. If he expected Svetlana to put up a fight he was disappointed. She now lay quiescent, her limbs pliable as rubber, staring up at him with tears streaming down the sides of her face, while he reared up over her, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers, and shoved them down to his knees. His erection made a tent of his undershorts. He grabbed them by the elastic, fumbled them off. He was in a frenzy of lust that went far beyond the physical. He was not only possessing her, he was taking something precious from Boris Karpov, never mind that the General was dead.
He thrust into her with such swift rage he didn’t care that she was dry and unwelcoming, that the back-and-forth friction was painful. If it was painful for him, it was painful for her. But she was no longer staring up at him. She had turned her head to one side, her eyes lost within themselves, looking at nothing in her surroundings. She might have been a million miles away, and this disassociation angered him all the more. He slammed into her over and over until he felt the warm gush of her blood, and this proof of his mastery over her sent him over the edge. His eyes squeezed shut as he shivered, the muscles of his buttocks and thighs clenching over and over.
He stayed in place even after he felt himself deflating. He wanted to keep the feeling of pressing her down into the carpet, of knowing he was where Boris Karpov had wanted to be, but would never be again. He had taken his pound of flesh, but, Avilov being Avilov, he needed more.
“Now my blood’s on you,” he whispered into her ear, “you’ll never be able to wash it off.”
As he lay atop her, as she lay weeping uncontrollably, he began to figure out how to turn that need into reality.
8
No fingerprints, no footprints, but the murder weapon had been left behind. Deliberately. Why? Bourne pondered this question as he studied the forensic photos of Boris’s corpse. He had spent an hour inspecting the entire loggia with Korsolov as his uncomfortably close shadow. He had found nothing. And why, he thought now as he sat in a salon of the hotel hastily converted to an FSB processing post, had his friend been arranged in a Christ-like pose postmortem? There were professional killers and then there were psychopaths, some of whom were obsessed with rituals. But inevitably psychopaths made mistakes—sometimes glaring ones—simply because of their pathology and their unshakable confidence that they were smarter than everyone else. In this, as in so many things, they were mistaken, but self-delusion was also part of their pathology.
The conundrum was this: On first blush, Boris’s killer seemed to be both a careful professional and a psychopath fixated on ritual. Bourne knew better than to assume the two were mutually exclusive, but he had never run across a single person who might fit the bill, had never read or heard about one, either.
“Bourne, what are your thoughts?” Korsolov said as he stood beside him. He grinned like a bear with a fresh-caught fish in its paw. “Found the murderer yet?”
Bourne stared down at a photo of the gaping wound across Boris’s throat. “You’ll be the first to know, believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you. I just don’t believe you’ll find the killer.”
“Opinions are like assholes, Colonel,” Bourne said. “Everyone has one.”
Korsolov bent down, almost breathing down Bourne’s neck. “You think this is a joke, American?”
“You must if you’re going to show-trial Irina for Boris’s murder.”
Korsolov’s smile broke open his face again; it wasn’t a pretty sight. “You love her, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“I just met her yesterday. You really are an idiot.” Bourne looked up at him as he said this, noting with a flicker of pleasure the scowl that replaced the colonel’s grin. It was a petty victory, he knew, just as he knew that he could only push Korsolov so far. And yet during the course of the next forty-seven hours he intended to find out just how far this imperious siloviki could be pushed. For Boris he would do this, and much more. But for now it was back to the nuts and bolts of the grisly business at hand.
“What have your forensic experts found under Boris’s nails?”
“No fibers,” Korsolov said, clearly pleased to have intel Bourne didn’t. “The killer wore latex gloves, we know that much.”
“So. A professional,” Bourne said flatly. He was studying a pair of close-ups of Boris’s palms. “DNA?”
“Not a trace. The general’s nails weren’t able to dig in that deep.”
There was something on one of them. Looking closer without Korsolov asking what he’d seen wasn’t easy. “Two pairs.”
Korsolov bent down far enough for Bourne to smell the shreds of rotting meat between his teeth. “What?”
“The killer must have worn multiple layers of gloves, which meant he anticipated Boris’s strength and determination.” Bourne thought he recognized what was on Boris’s right palm, but a crease—his heart line—was partially obscuring it. “This killer was a professional. He was meticulous in his planning.”
“Which also tells us nothing.” Korsolov’s tone was as sour as his breath.
“On the contrary, it tells us a great deal. There are very few people capable of this obsessive level of planning.”
Korsolov’s eyebrows lifted. “You know their names?”
“I need to see Boris’s body,” Bourne said, rising so abruptly that Korsolov almost lost his balance. “Now.”
—
They had temporarily stored Boris’s body in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer. It wasn’t the morgue, but it was the best they could do until everyone in the hotel had been completely cleared and they could safely transport the body to the morgue without attracting any attention. The space was huge, filled with sides of beef, racks of chops, and armies of aging steaks. To one side were shelves housing bins of ice cubes and sealed plastic bags filled with chopped liver, ground sausage meat, and pirogi filling.
Boris was laid out in the center, his thick brows rimed with frost. His lips were purple-blue, as if he had stayed in the Black Sea for too long. His eyes were staring up at the ceiling. The congealed blood, oil-black in the freezer’s harsh fluorescent light, was like dried paint on an unfinished canvas. But there was no transmuting the dreadful blood-grin across the width of his throat, an appalling reminder of his violent death.
As Bourne stared into his friend’s face he rec
alled their time in Reykjavík, the grave danger they had faced, and their private celebration afterward. Boris had poured them glasses of chilled vodka, but before Bourne could take his up Boris had shaken pepper into both glasses.
“In the old days,” Boris had said in all seriousness, “you had to be careful with your vodka. Some of it was made with fusel oil, which is poisonous. The pepper, you see, drew the fusel oil out of the vodka, making it safe to drink.” Boris was always full of useful warnings concerning life’s little dangers.
Bourne missed him already. Boris had always been more than a vital resource; he’d been a true friend, despite being Russian down to the marrow of his bones. Like all the best people working in espionage, he was a master at compartmentalizing the different areas of his life. Without that ability you’d go mad, which was why often enough spies put their own guns into their mouths and pulled the trigger.
Bourne had fully expected his shadow to be right over his shoulder, but at the last moment Korsolov had received a mobile phone call and had stepped back out of the freezer, walking far enough away so that Bourne couldn’t hear his end of the conversation.
Silently thanking his good fortune, Bourne took Boris’s right hand in his, brought it up for closer inspection. Rigor mortis had not yet begun to set in so he was able to bend the wrist to bring the palm into the best light. He stretched the skin on either side of the heart line, did the same for the left hand, but found nothing.
It seemed barbaric to have his friend staring sightlessly, so he bent over to close his eyes for the final time. But as he did so, he noticed something shining deep in the slash across Boris’s throat, a tiny golden bit, twinkling like a far-off star. Using a thin-bladed boning knife he found in a wooden rack of butcher’s tools, he quickly dug out the star—for star it was: a Star of David. And not just any Star of David, he saw, as he wiped off the blood and gore clinging gooily to it. Sara’s star, the one that was usually around her neck, the one she was, in any case, never without. He knew it was hers, because one of the six points was damaged, where it had scraped the orbital bone of the man trying to kill her in Doha last year, before she jammed the star through his eye, pushing it with her fingertip into his brain.
