— She was no help.
The man nodded. -What is inside her head, only Suparwita knows.
— Do you know where he is? Bourne said. -It‘s important I find him.
— Suparwita is a healer, yes. The man studied Bourne in a kindly, even courteous, manner. -He has gone to Goa Lowah.
— Then I will go there.
— Bapak, it would not be wise to follow him.
— To be honest, Bourne said, — I don‘t always do the wise thing.
The man laughed. — Bapak, you are only human, after all. His grin showed again. -Not to worry. Suparwita forgives foolish men as well as wise ones.
The bat, one of dozens clinging to the damp walls, opened its eyes and stared at Bourne. It blinked, as if it couldn‘t believe what it was seeing, then returned to its diurnal slumber. Bourne, the lower half of his body wrapped in a traditional sarong, stood in the flowing heart of the Goa Lowah temple complex amid a welter of praying Balinese and Japanese tourists taking time out from their shopping sprees.
Goa Lowah, which was near the town of Klungkung in southeast Bali, was also known locally as the Bat Cave. Many large temple complexes were built around springs because this water, erupting from the core of the island, was deemed sacred, able to spiritually cleanse those who worshipped there and partook of the water by both drinking it and sprinkling it over their heads. The sacred water at Goa Lowah bubbled up from the earth at the rear of a cave. This cave was inhabited by hundreds of bats that by day hung from the seeping calcite walls sleeping and dreaming, and by night flew into the inky sky in search of insects to gorge on. Though the Balinese often ate bats as a matter of course, the bats of Goa Lowah were spared that fate because anything that lived within a sacred space became sacred as well.
Bourne had not found Suparwita. Instead he had come upon a small, wizened priest with splayed feet and teeth like a jackrabbit, performing a cleansing ceremony in front of a small stone shrine in which were set a number of flower offerings. About a dozen Balinese sat in a semicircle. As Bourne watched in silence, the priest took a small, plaited bowl filled with holy water and, using a palm leaf switch that he dunked into the water, sprinkled the heads of those in attendance. No one looked at Bourne or paid him the slightest attention. For them, he was part of another universe. This ability of the Balinese to compartmentalize their lives with utter and absolute authority was the reason their form of Hinduism and unique culture remained uncorrupted by outsiders even after decades of tourist invasions and pressure from the Muslims who ruled every other island in the Indonesian archipelago.
There was something here for him, Bourne knew, something that was second nature to the Balinese, something that would help him to find out who he really was. Both David Webb, the person, and the Jason Bourne identity were incomplete: the one irrevocably shattered by amnesia, the other created for him by Alex Conklin‘s Treadstone program.
Was Bourne still the conflation of Conklin‘s research, training, and psychological theories put to the ultimate test? Had he begun life as one person only to evolve into someone else? These were the questions that went to Bourne‘s very heart. His future-and the impact he had on those he cared about and those he might even love-depended on the answer.
The priest had finished and was putting away the plaited bowl in a niche in the shrine when Bourne felt an urgent need to be cleansed by that holy water.
Kneeling behind the Balinese, he closed his eyes, allowed the priest‘s words to flow over him until he was dislocated in time. He‘d never before felt free of both the Bourne identity given to him by Alex Conklin and the incomplete person he knew as David Webb. Who was Webb, after all? The fact was, he didn‘t know-or more accurately he couldn‘t remember. There were pieces of him, to be sure, stitched together by psychologists and Bourne himself, and periodically other pieces, dislodged by some stimulus or other, would breach the surface of his consciousness with the force of a torpedo explosion. Even so, the truth was he was no closer to understanding himself-
and ironically, tragically, there were times when he felt he understood Bourne far better than he did Webb. At least, he knew what motivated Bourne, whereas Webb‘s motivations were still a complete mystery. Having tried and failed to reintegrate himself into Webb‘s academic life, he‘d decided to disengage himself from Webb. With a palpable start he realized that here on Bali he‘d also begun to disengage from the Bourne identity with which he‘d come to associate so closely. He thought about the Balinese he‘d encountered here, Suparwita, the family that ran the mountain warung-even this priest whom he didn‘t know at all, but whose words seemed to cloak him in an intense white light-and then he contrasted them with the Westerners, Firth and Willard. The Balinese were in touch with the spirits of the land, they saw good and evil and acted accordingly. There was nothing between them and nature itself, whereas Firth and Willard were creatures of civilization with all its layers of deceit, envy, greed. This essential dichotomy had opened his mind as nothing before. Did he want to be like Willard or like Suparwita?
Was it a coincidence that the Balinese didn‘t allow their children‘s feet to touch the ground for three months-and that he‘d been on Bali for precisely the same amount of time?
Now, for the first time in his defective memory, unmoored from everything and everyone he knew, he felt able to look inside himself, and what he saw was someone he didn‘t recognize-not Webb, not Bourne. It was as if Webb were a dream, or another identity assigned to him just as Bourne had been.
Kneeling outside the Bat Cave with its thousands of denizens stirring restively, with the priest‘s intonations transforming the intense Southern Hemisphere sunshine into prayer, he contemplated the chimeric landscape of his own soul, a place singularly twilit, like a deserted city an hour before dawn or the desolate seashore an hour after dusk, a place that slipped away from him, shifting like sand. And as he journeyed through this unknown country he asked himself this question:
Who am I?
5
THE JOINT NSA-DHS forensics team arrived in Cairo and, to the consternation of everyone except Soraya, was met at the airport by an elite contingent of al Mokhabarat, the national secret police. Team members and their belongings were poured into military vehicles and driven through the blistering heat, blazing sun, and urban chaos of Cairo. Heading southwest out of the city, they traveled toward the desert in glum and silent single file.
— Our destination is near Wadi AlRayan, Amun Chalthoum, the head of al Mokhabarat, said to Soraya. He had spotted her immediately, culled her out of the team to sit beside him in his vehicle, which was second behind a heavily armored halftrack that Chalthoum was doubtless using to flex his muscles in the face of the Americans.
For Chalthoum time seemed to have stood still. His hair was still thick and dark, his wide copper-colored forehead still unlined. His black crow‘s eyes deeply set above the hawk-beak of his nose still smoldered with suppressed emotion. He was large and muscular with the narrow hips of a swimmer or a climber. By contrast, he had the long, tapered fingers of a pianist or a surgeon. And yet something important had changed, because there was about him the sense of a fire barely banked. The nearer one got to him, the more one felt the quivering of his leashed rage. Now that she was sitting beside him, now that she felt the once familiar stirrings inside her, she realized why she hadn‘t told Veronica Hart the whole truth: because she wasn‘t at all certain that she could handle Amun.