Washington, DC, area going through a unique experimental program devised and run by
a friend of Icoupov’s. Arkadin had emerged changed in many ways, though his past-his
shadows, his demons-remained intact. How he wished the program had erased all
memory of it! But that wasn’t the nature of the program. Icoupov no longer cared about
Arkadin’s past, what concerned him was his future, and for that the program was ideal.
He fell asleep thinking about the program, but he dreamed he was back in Nizhny
Tagil. He never dreamed about the program; in the program he felt safe. His dreams
weren’t about safety; they were about being pushed from great heights.
Late at night, a subterranean bar called Crespi was the only option when he wanted to
get a drink in Nizhny Tagil. It was a reeking place, filled with tattooed men in tracksuits, gold chains around their necks, short-skirted women so heavily made up they looked like
store mannequins. Behind their raccoon eyes were vacant pits where their souls had been.
It was in Crespi where Arkadin at age thirteen was first beaten to a pulp by four burly
men with pig eyes and Neanderthal brows. And it was to Crespi that Arkadin, after
nursing his wounds, returned three months later and blew the men’s brains all over the
walls. When another crim tried to snatch his gun away, Arkadin shot him point-blank in
the face. That sight stopped anyone else in the bar from approaching him. It also gained
him a reputation, which helped him to amass a mini real estate empire.
But in that city of smelted iron and hissing slag success had its own particular
consequences. For Arkadin, it was coming to the attention of Stas Kuzin, one of the local
crime bosses. Kuzin found Arkadin one night, four years later, having a bare-knuckle
brawl with a giant lout whom Arkadin called out on a bet, for the prize of one beer.
Having demolished the giant, Arkadin grabbed his free beer, swigged half of it down,
and, turning, confronted Stas Kuzin. Arkadin knew him immediately; everyone in Nizhny
Tagil did. He had a thick black pelt of hair that came down in a horizontal slash to within an inch of his eyebrows. His head sat on his shoulders like a marble on a stone wall. His
jaw had been broken and reconstructed so badly-probably in prison-that he spoke with a
peculiar hissing sound, like a serpent. Sometimes what he said was all but unintelligible.
On either side of Kuzin were two ghoulish-looking men with sunken eyes and crude
tattoos of dogs on the backs of their hands, which marked them as forever bound to their
master.
“Let’s talk,” this monstrosity said to Arkadin, jerking his tiny head toward a table.
The men who’d been occupying the table rose as one when Kuzin approached, fleeing
to the other side of the bar. Kuzin hooked his shoe around a chair leg, dragged it around,
and sat down. Disconcertingly, he kept his hands in his lap, as if at any moment he’d
draw down on Arkadin and shoot him dead.
He began talking, but it took the seventeen-year-old Arkadin some minutes before he
could make heads or tails of what Kuzin was saying. It was like listening to a drowning
man going under for the third time. At length, he realized that Kuzin was proposing a
merger of sorts: half Arkadin’s stake in real estate for 10 percent of Kuzin’s operation.
And just what was Stas Kuzin’s operation? No one would speak about it openly, but
there was no lack of rumors on the subject. Everything from running spent nuclear fuel
rods for the big boys over in Moscow to white slave trading, drug trafficking, and
prostitution was laid at Kuzin’s doorstep. For his own part, Arkadin tended to dismiss the
more outlandish speculation in favor of what he very well knew would make Kuzin
money in Nizhny Tagil, namely, prostitution and drugs. Every man in the city had to get
laid, and if they had any money at all, drugs were far preferable to beer and bathtub
vodka.
Once again, want never appeared on Arkadin’s horizon, only need. He needed to do
more than survive in this city of permasoot, violence, and black lung disease. He had
come as far as he could on his own. He made enough to sustain himself here, but not
enough to break away to Moscow where he needed to go to grab life’s richest
opportunities. Outside, the rings of hell rose up: brick smokestacks, vigorously belching
particle-laden smoke, iron guard towers of the brutal prison zonas, bristling with assault
rifles, powerful spotlights, and bellowing sirens.
In here he was locked inside his own brutal zona with Stas Kuzin. Arkadin gave the
only sensible answer. He said yes, and so entered the ninth level of hell.
Thirty-One
WHILE ON LINE for passport control in Munich, Bourne phoned Specter, who
assured him everything was in readiness. Moments later he came in range of the first set
of the airport’s CCTV cameras. Instantly his image was picked up by the software
employed at Semion Icoupov’s headquarters, and before he’d finished his call to the
professor he’d been identified.
At once Icoupov was called, who ordered his people stationed in Munich to move from
standby to action, thus alerting both the airport personnel and the Immigration people
under Icoupov’s control. The man directing the incoming passengers to the different
cordoned-off lanes leading to the Immigration booths received a photo of Bourne on his
computer screen just in time to indicate Bourne should go to booth 3.
The Immigration officer manning booth 3 listened to the voice coming through the
electronic device in his ear. When the man identified to him as Jason Bourne handed over
his passport the officer asked him the usual questions-“How long do you intend to remain
in Germany? Is your visit business or pleasure?”-while paging through the passport. He
moved it away from the window, passed the photo under a humming purple light. As he
did so, he pressed a small metallic disk the thickness of a human nail into the inside back cover of the passport. Then he closed the booklet, smoothed its front and back covers,
and handed it back to Bourne.
“Have a pleasant stay in Munich,” he said without a trace of emotion or interest. He
was already looking beyond Bourne to the next passenger in line.
As in Sheremetyevo, Bourne had the sense that he was under physical surveillance. He
changed taxis twice when he arrived at the seething center of the city. In Marienplatz, a
large open square from which the historic Marian column ascended, he walked past
medieval cathedrals, through flocks of pigeons, lost himself within the crowds of guided
tours, gawping at the sugar-icing architecture and the looming twin domes of the
Frauenkirche, cathedral of the archbishop of Munich-Freising, the symbol of the city.
He inserted himself in a tour group gathered around a government building in which
was inset the city’s official shield, depicting a monk with hands spread wide. The tour
leader was telling her charges that the German name, Mьnchen, stemmed from an Old
High German word meaning “monks.” In 1158 or thereabouts, the current duke of
Saxony and Bavaria built a bridge over the Isar River, connecting the saltworks, for
which the growing city would soon become famous, with a settlement of Benedictine
monks. He installed a tollbooth on the bridge, which became a vital link in the Salt Route
in and out of the high Bavarian plains on which Munich was built, and a mint in which to
house his profits. The modern-day mercantile city was not so far removed from its
medieval beginnings.
When Bourne was certain he wasn’t being shadowed, he slipped away from the group
and boarded a taxi, which dropped him off six blocks from the Wittelsbach Palace.