this time Pyotr’s shivering had subsided.
“Feeling better?”
“I’ll feel better,” Pyotr said, “when I get out of here.”
“Ah, well, I’m afraid that won’t be for some time,” Icoupov said. “If ever. Unless you
tell me what I want to know.”
He hitched his chair closer; the benign uncle’s expression was now nowhere to be
found. “You stole something that belongs to me,” he said. “I want it back.”
“It never belonged to you; you stole it first.”
Pyotr replied with such venom that Icoupov said, “You hate me as much as you love
your father, this is your basic problem, Pyotr. You never learned that hate and love are
essentially the same in that the person who loves is as easily manipulated as the person
who hates.”
Pyotr screwed up his mouth, as if Icoupov’s words left a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Anyway, it’s too late. The document is already on its way.”
Instantly, there was a change in Icoupov’s demeanor. His face became as closed as a
fist. A certain tension lent his entire small body the aspect of a weapon about to be
launched. “Where did you send it?”
Pyotr shrugged, but said nothing more.
Icoupov’s face turned dark with momentary rage. “Do you think I know nothing about
the information and matйriel pipeline you have been refining for the past three years? It’s how you send information you stole from me back to your father, wherever he is.”
For the first time since he’d regained consciousness, Pyotr smiled. “If you knew
anything important about the pipeline, you’d have rolled it up by now.”
At this Icoupov regained the icy control over his emotions.
“I told you talking to him would be useless,” Arkadin said from his position directly
behind Pyotr’s chair.
“Nevertheless,” Icoupov said, “there are certain protocols that must be acknowledged.
I’m not an animal.”
Pyotr snorted.
Icoupov eyed his prisoner. Sitting back, he fastidiously pulled up his trouser leg,
crossed one leg over the other, laced his stubby fingers on his lower belly.
“I give you one last chance to continue this conversation.”
It was not until the silence was drawn out into an almost intolerable length that
Icoupov raised his gaze to Arkadin.
“Pyotr, why are you doing this to me?” he said with a resigned tone. And then to
Arkadin, “Begin.”
Though it cost him in pain and breath, Pyotr twisted as far as he was able, but he
couldn’t see what Arkadin was doing. He heard the sound of implements on a metal cart
being rolled across the carpet.
Pyotr turned back. “You don’t frighten me.”
“I don’t mean to frighten you, Pyotr,” Icoupov said. “I mean to hurt you, very, very
badly.”
With a painful convulsion, Pyotr’s world contracted to the pinpoint of a star in the
night sky. He was locked within the confines of his mind, but despite all his training, all his courage, he could not compartmentalize the pain. There was a hood over his head,
drawn tight around his neck. This confinement magnified the pain a hundredfold because,
despite his fearlessness, Pyotr was subject to claustrophobia. For someone who never
went into caves, small spaces, or even underwater, the hood was the worst of all possible
worlds. His senses could tell him that, in fact, he wasn’t confined at all, but his mind
wouldn’t accept that input-it was in the full flight of panic. The pain Arkadin was
inflicting on him was one thing, its magnification was quite another. Pyotr’s mind was
spinning out of control. He felt a wildness enter him-the wolf caught in a trap that begins to frantically gnaw its leg off. But the mind was not a limb; he couldn’t gnaw it off.
Dimly, he heard someone asking him a question to which he knew the answer. He
didn’t want to give the answer, but he knew he would because the voice told him the
hood would come off if he answered. His crazed mind only knew it needed the hood off;
it could no longer distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, lies from truth. It reacted to only one imperative: the need to survive. He tried to move his fingers, but in bending
over him his interrogator must have been pressing down on them with the heels of his
hands.
Pyotr couldn’t hang on any longer. He answered the question.
The hood didn’t come off. He howled in indignation and terror. Of course it didn’t
come off, he thought in a tiny instant of lucidity. If it did, he’d have no incentive to
answer the next question and the next and the next.
And he would answer them-all of them. He knew this with a bone-chilling certainty.
Even though part of him suspected that the hood might never come off, his trapped mind
would take the chance. It had no other choice.
But now that he could move his fingers, there was another choice. Just before the
whirlwind of panicked madness overtook him again, Pyotr made that choice. There was
one way out and, saying a silent prayer to Allah, he took it.
Icoupov and Arkadin stood over Pyotr’s body. Pyotr’s head lay on one side; his lips
were very blue, and a faint but distinct foam emanated from his half-open mouth.
Icoupov bent down, sniffed the scent of bitter almonds.
“I didn’t want him dead, Leonid, I was very clear on the point.” Icoupov was vexed.
“How did he get hold of cyanide?”
“They used a variation I’ve never encountered.” Arkadin did not look happy himself.
“He was fitted with a false fingernail.”
“He would have talked.”
“Of course he would have talked,” Arkadin said. “He’d already begun.”
“So he took it upon himself to shut his own mouth, forever.” Icoupov shook his head in
distaste. “This will have significant fallout. He’s got dangerous friends.”
“I’ll find them,” Arkadin said. “I’ll kill them.”
Icoupov shook his head. “Even you can’t kill them all in time.”
“I can contact Mischa.”
“And risk losing everything? No. I understand your connection with him-closest
friend, mentor. I understand the urge to talk to him, to see him. But you can’t, not until
this is finished and Mischa comes home. That’s final.”
“I understand.”
Icoupov walked over the window, stood with his hand behind his back contemplating
the fall of darkness. Lights sparkled along the edges of the lake, up the hillside of
Campione d’Italia. There ensued a long silence while he contemplated the face of the
altered landscape. “We’ll have to move up the timetable, that’s all there is to it. And
you’ll take Sevastopol as a starting point. Use the one name you got out of Pyotr before
he committed suicide.”
He turned around to face Arkadin. “Everything now rides on you, Leonid. This attack
has been in the planning stages for three years. It has been designed to cripple the
American economy. Now there are barely two weeks left before it becomes a reality.” He
walked noiselessly across the carpet. “Philippe will provide you with money, documents,
weaponry that will escape electronic detection, anything you need. Find this man in
Sevastopol. Retrieve the document, and when you do, follow the pipeline back and shut it
down so that it will never again be used to threaten our plans.”
Book One
One
WHO IS DAVID Webb?”
Moira Trevor, standing in front of his desk at Georgetown University, asked the
question so seriously that Jason Bourne felt obliged to answer.
“Strange,” he said, “no one’s ever asked me that before. David Webb is a linguistics
expert, a man with two children who are living happily with their grandparents”-Marie’s