he was a small, wiry man with ropy muscles and not an ounce of fat on him. He wore no
gold chains around his neck or diamond rings on his fingers. His tattoos were his jewelry;
they covered his entire torso. But these were not the crude and often blurred prison
tattoos found on so many of his kind. They were among the most elaborate designs
Bourne had ever seen: Asian dragons breathing fire, coiling their tails, spreading their
wings, grasping with claws outstretched.
“Four years ago I spent six months in Tokyo,” Maslov said. “It’s the only place to get
tattoos. But that’s just my opinion.”
Boris rocked with laughter. “So that’s where you were, you bastard! I scoured all of
Russia for your skinny butt.”
“In the Ginza,” Maslov said, “I hoisted quite a few saki martinis to you and your law
enforcement minions. I knew you’d never find me.” He made a sweeping gesture. “But
that bit of unpleasantness is behind us; the real perpetrator confessed to the murders I was suspected of committing. Now we find ourselves in our own private glasnost.”
“I want to know more about Leonid Danilovich Arkadin,” Bourne said.
Maslov spread his hands. “Once he was one of us. Then something happened to him, I
don’t know what. He broke away from the grupperovka. People don’t do that and survive
for long, but Arkadin is in a class by himself. No one dares to touch him. He wraps
himself in his reputation for murder and ruthlessness. This is a man-let me tell you-who
has no heart. Yes, Dimitri, you might say to me, but isn’t that true of most of your kind?
To this I answer, Yes. But Arkadin is also without a soul. This is where he parts company
with the others. There is no one else like him, the colonel can back me up on this.”
Boris nodded sagely. “Even Cherkesov fears him, our president as well. I personally
don’t know anyone in either FSB-1 or FSB-2 who’d be willing to take him on, let alone
survive. He’s like a great white shark, the murderer of killers.”
“Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”
Maslov sat forward, elbows in knees. “Listen, my friend, whatever the hell your real
name is, this man Arkadin was born in Nizhny Tagil. Do you know it? No? Let me tell
you. This fucking excuse of a city east of here in the southern Ural Mountains is hell on
earth. It’s filled with smokestacks belching sulfurous fumes from its ironworks. Poor is
not even a word you can apply to the residents, who swill homemade vodka that’s almost
pure alcohol and pass out wherever they happen to land. The police, such as they are, are
as brutal and sadistic as the citizens. As a gulag is ringed by guard towers, Nizhny Tagil
is surrounded by high-security prisons. Since the prison inmates are released without
even train fare they settle in the town. You, an American, cannot imagine the brutality,
the callousness of the residents of this human sewer. No one but the worst of the crims-as
the criminals are called-dares be on the streets after 10 PM.”
Maslov wiped the sweat off his cheeks with the back of his hand. “This is the place
where Arkadin was born and raised. It was from this cesspit that he made a name for
himself by kicking people out of their apartments in old Soviet-era projects and selling
them to criminals with a bit of money stolen from regular citizens.
“But whatever happened to Arkadin in Nizhny Tagil in his youth-and I don’t profess to
know what that might be-has followed him like a ghoul. Believe me when I tell you that
you’ve never met a man like him. You’re better off not.”
“I know where he is,” Bourne said. “I’m going after him.”
“Christ.” Maslov shook his head. “You must have a mighty fucking large death wish.”
“You don’t know my friend here,” Boris said.
Maslov eyed Bourne. “I know him as much as I want to, I think.” He stood up. “The
stench of death is already on him.”
Twenty-Nine
THE MAN who stepped off the plane in Munich airport, who dutifully went through
Customs and Immigration with all the other passengers from the many flights arriving at
more or less the same time, looked nothing like Semion Icoupov. His name was Franz
Richter, his passport proclaimed him as a German national, but underneath all the
makeup and prosthetics he was Semion Icoupov just the same.
Nevertheless, Icoupov felt naked, exposed to the prying eyes of his enemies, whom he
knew were everywhere. They waited patiently for him, like his own death. Ever since
boarding the plane he’d been haunted by a sense of impending doom. He hadn’t been
able to shake it on the flight, he couldn’t shake it now. He felt as if he’d come to Munich to stare his own death in the face.
His driver was waiting for him at baggage claim. The man, heavily armed, took the one
piece of luggage Icoupov pointed out to him off the chrome carousel, carried it as he led
Icoupov through the crowded concourse and out into the dull Munich evening, gray as
morning. It wasn’t as cold as it had been in Switzerland, but it was wetter, the chill as
penetrating as Icoupov’s foreboding.
It wasn’t fear he felt so much as sorrow. Sorrow that he might not see this battle
finished, that his hated nemesis would win, that old grudges would not be settled, that his father’s memory would remain sullied, that his murder would remain unavenged.
To be sure, there had been attrition on both sides, he thought as he settled into the
backseat of the dove-gray Mercedes. The endgame had begun and already he sensed the
checkmate waiting for him not far off. It was difficult but necessary for him to admit that he had been outmaneuvered at every turn. Perhaps he wasn’t up to carrying the vision his
father had for the Eastern Brotherhood; perhaps the corruption and inversion of ideals
had gone too far. Whatever the case, he had lost a great deal of ground to his enemy, and
Icoupov had come to the bleak conclusion that he had only one chance to win. His chance
rested with Arkadin, the plans for the Black Legion’s attack on New York City’s Empire
State Building, and Jason Bourne. For he realized now that his nemesis was too strong.
Without the American’s help, he feared his cause was lost.
He stared out the smoked-glass window at the looming skyline of Munich. It gave him
a shiver to be back here, where it all began, where the Eastern Brotherhood was saved
from Allied war trials following the collapse of the Third Reich.
At that time his father-Farid Icoupov-and Ibrahim Sever were jointly in charge of what
was left of the Eastern Legions. Up until the Nazi surrender, Farid, the intellectual, ran
the intelligence network that infiltrated the Soviet Union, while Ibrahim, the warrior,
commanded the legions that fought on the Eastern Front.
Six months before the Reich’s capitulation, the two men met outside Berlin. They saw
the end, even if the lunatic Nazi hierarchy was oblivious. So they laid plans for how to
ensure their people would survive the war’s aftermath. The first thing Ibrahim did was to
move his soldiers out of harm’s way. By that juncture the Nazi bureaucratic infrastructure
had been decimated by Allied bombing, so it was not difficult to redeploy his people into
Belgium, Denmark, Greece, and Italy, where they were safe from the reflexive violence
of the first wave of invading Allies.
Because Farid and Ibrahim despised Stalin, because they were witness to the massive
scale of the atrocities ordered by him, they were in a unique position to understand the
Allied fear of communism. Farid argued persuasively that soldiers would be of no use to