Bourne pulled his hand away and held him back against the seat while taking
possession of the handgun. He pointed it at Yakov. “Who do you report to?”
Yakov said in a whiny voice, “I challenge you to sit in my seat night after night,
driving around the Garden Ring, crawling endlessly down Tverskaya, being cut out of
fares by kamikaze bombily and make enough to live on.”
“I don’t care why you pimp yourself out to the NSA,” Bourne told him. “I want to
know who you report to.”
Yakov held up his hand. “Listen, listen, I’m from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. It’s not so
nice there, who can make a living? So I pack my family and we travel to Russia, the
beating heart of the new federation, where the streets are paved with rubles. But when I
arrive here I am treated like dirt. People in the street spit on my wife. My children are
beaten and called terrible names. And I can’t get a job anywhere in this city. ‘Moscow for
Muscovites,’ that is the refrain I hear over and over. So I take to the bombily because I
have no other choice. But this life, sir, you have no idea how difficult it is. Sometimes
after twelve hours I come home with a hundred rubles, sometimes with nothing. I cannot
be faulted for taking money the Americans offer.
“Russia is corrupt, but Moscow, it’s more than corrupt. There isn’t a word for how bad
things are here. The government is made up of thugs and criminals. The criminals
plunder the natural resources of Russia-oil, natural gas, uranium. Everyone takes, takes,
takes so they can have big foreign cars, a different dyev for every day of the week, a
dacha in Miami Beach. And what’s left for us? Potatoes and beets, if we work eighteen
hours a day and if we’re lucky.”
“I have no animosity toward you,” Bourne said. “You have a right to earn a living.” He
handed Yakov a fistful of dollars.
“I see no one, sir. I swear. Just voices on my cell phone. All moneys come to a post
office box in-”
Bourne carefully placed the muzzle of the Makarov in Yakov’s ear. The cabbie
cringed, turned mournful eyes on Bourne.
“Please, please, sir, what have I done?”
“I saw you outside the Metropolya with the man who tried to kill me.”
Yakov squealed like a skewered rat. “Kill you? I’m employed merely to watch and
report. I have no knowledge about-”
Bourne hit the cabbie. “Stop lying and tell me what I want to know.”
“All right, all right.” Yakov was shaking with fear. “The American who pays me, his
name is Low. Harris Low.”
Bourne made him give a detailed description of Low, then he took Yakov’s cell phone.
“Get out of the car,” he said.
“But sir, I answered all your questions,” Yakov protested. “You’ve taken everything of
mine. What more do you want?”
Bourne leaned across him, opened the door, then shoved him out. “This is a popular
place. Plenty of bombily come and go. You’re a rich man now. Use some of the money I
gave you to get a ride home.”
Sliding behind the wheel he put the Zhig in gear, drove back into the heart of the city.
Harris Low was a dapper man with a pencil mustache. He had the prematurely white
hair and ruddy complexion of many blue-blooded families in the American Northeast.
That he had spent the last eleven years in Moscow, working for NSA, was a testament to
his father, who had trod the same perilous path. Low had idolized his father, had wanted
to be like him for as long as he could remember. Like his father, he had the Stars and
Stripes tattooed on his soul. He’d been a running back in college, gone through the
rigorous physical training to be an NSA field agent, had tracked down terrorists in
Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. He wasn’t afraid to engage in hand-to-hand combat
or to kill a target. He did it for God and country.
During his eleven years in the capital of Russia, Low had made many friends, some of
whom were the sons of his father’s friends. Suffice to say he had developed a network of
apparatchiks and siloviks for whom a quid pro quo was the order of the day. Harris held
no illusions. To further his country’s cause he would scratch anyone’s back-if they, in
turn, scratched his.
He heard about the murders at the Metropolya Hotel from a friend of his in the General
Prosecutor’s Office, who’d caught the police squeal. Harris met this individual at the
hotel and was consequently one of the first people on the scene.
He had no interest in the corpse in the utility closet, but he immediately recognized
Anthony Prowess. Excusing himself from the crime scene, he went into the stairwell off
the seventeenth-floor hallway, punched in an overseas number on his cell. A moment
later Luther LaValle answered.
“We have a problem,” Low said. “Prowess has been rendered inoperative with extreme
prejudice.”
“That’s very disturbing,” LaValle said. “We have a rogue operative loose in Moscow
who has now murdered one of our own. I think you know what to do.”
Low understood. There was no time to bring in another of NSA’s wet-work specialists,
which meant terminating Bourne was up to him.
“Now that he’s killed an American citizen,” LaValle said, “I’ll bring the Moscow
police and the General Prosecutor’s Office into the picture. They’ll have the same photo
of him I’m sending to your cell within the hour.”
Low thought a moment. “The question is tracking him. Moscow is way behind the
curve in closed-circuit TVs.”
“Bourne is going to need money,” LaValle said. “He couldn’t take enough through
Customs when he landed, which means he wouldn’t try. He’ll have set up a local account
at a Moscow bank. Get the locals to help with surveillance pronto.”
“Consider it done,” Low said.
“And Harris. Don’t make the same mistake with Bourne that Prowess did.”
Bourne took Gala to her friend’s apartment, which was lavish even by American
standards. Her friend, Lorraine, was an American of Armenian extraction. Her dark eyes
and hair, her olive complexion, all served to increase her exoticism. She hugged and
kissed Gala, greeted Bourne warmly, and invited him to stay for a drink or tea.
As he took a tour through the rooms, Gala said, “He’s worried about my safety.”
“What’s happened?” Lorraine asked. “Are you all right?”
“She’ll be fine,” Bourne said, coming back into the living room. “This’ll all blow over
in a couple of days.” Having satisfied himself of the security of the apartment, he left
them with the warning not to open the door for anyone they didn’t know.
Ivan Volkin had directed Bourne to go to Novoslobodskaya 20, where the meet with
Dimitri Maslov would take place. At first Bourne thought it lucky that the bombila he
flagged down knew how to find the address, but when he was dropped off he understood.
Novoslobodskaya 20 was the address of Motorhome, a new club jammed with young
partying Muscovites. Gigantic flat-panel screens above the center island bar showed
telecasts of American baseball, basketball, football, English rugby, and World Cup
soccer. The floor of the main room was dominated by tables for Russian billiards and
American pool. Following Volkin’s direction, Bourne headed for the back room, which
was fitted out as an Arabian Nights hookah room complete with overlapping carpets,
jewel-toned cushions, and, of course, gaily colored brass hookahs being smoked by
lounging men and women.
Bourne, stopped at the doorway by two overdeveloped members of club security, told
them he was here to see Dimitri Maslov. One of them pointed to a man lounging and