When it came to Noah Perlis, no job was straightforward. Bourne had learned that from Moira. But he felt nothing would be served in continuing this topic with Tracy. If Noah was playing her, he‘d find out soon enough. He was disturbed by the insertion of Noah Perlis‘s name in the mix. Nikolai Yevsen was a top arms dealer, Dimitri Maslov, the head of the Kazanskaya mob; he could explain away even Boris‘s tangential involvement. But what was Noah Perlis, a high-level operative of Black River, doing with these unsavory Russian criminals?
— What is it, Adam, you look perplexed?
— I had no idea, Bourne said, — that Noah Perlis was an art collector.
Tracy frowned. -Do you think I‘m lying?
— Not necessarily, he said. -But I‘m willing to bet someone is.
Arkadin received the call from Triton right on schedule. The pestilential Noah might be arrogant, patronizing, disrespectful, possessive of his power and his influence, but at least he was punctual. A sad victory, really, because it was so minuscule to everyone but himself. He was a man for whom mystery was important enough that it had taken on mythic proportions. In the way Arkadin was a physical chameleon, having learned to remake his face, his gait, his very mien, depending on the role he was playing, so Noah was a vocal chameleon. He could be social and hearty, convincing and ingratiating, anything and everything in between, depending on the role he was playing. It took an actor, Arkadin thought, to mark another actor.
— The president‘s UN address had the desired effect, Noah told Arkadin. Rather than listening, he was always telling Arkadin something. -Not only are the American allies on board, but most of the neutrals and even a couple of the normally antagonistic nations. You have eight hours to finalize the squad‘s training. By then the plane will be on the landing strip, ready to take you to your drop point in the red zone. Are we clear?
— Never clearer, Arkadin said automatically.
He was no longer interested in the drivel Noah was spouting. He had his own plans to go over for the ten thousandth time, the crucial alteration to the joint American-Russian foray into Iran. He knew he‘d only have one shot at victory, only one brief window while the chaos was at its height to implement his plan. Failure never entered his mind, because it would spell certain death for him and for every one of his men.
He was fully prepared, unlike Mischa and Oserov when, on the fly, they‘d created their straw man in an attempt to spring him from his basement prison in Nizhny Tagil.
Word of the increasingly grisly and bizarre murders of Stas‘s men had raced around Nizhny Tagil with such unstoppable virulence that it even filtered down to Arkadin, securely hidden like a rat in the basement of the gang‘s headquarters. The news was disturbing to him, so much so, in fact, that it was the one thing that pried him from his dank and dreary haven. Who could be poaching on his territory? It was his job to make life for Stas‘s gang a living hell; no one else had the right.
So up he went into the thickly hellish atmosphere of Nizhny Tagil. Night shrouded him, along with a noxious ashy drizzle that did little to obscure the skyline‘s fiery beacons: smokestacks belching ferrous sulfur into the air. Like church bells in some other, more salubrious town, the blinding searchlight beams emanating atop the walls of the high-security prisons that ringed the benighted city marked off time at regular, soul-destroying intervals.
Arkadin still thought of it as the late Stas Kuzin‘s gang, even though a moron named Lev Antonin had taken over by dint of brute force. Three men had died violently in his ascent to power-needlessly, as Arkadin well knew, because if you had a brain that worked it wasn‘t difficult to figure out how to finesse your way to being Stas‘s successor. Lev Antonin wasn‘t one of those men, so in some sense he was the right man to lead Kuzin‘s band of cutthroats, sadists, and homicidal dimwits.
It was the death of the gang‘s head enforcer, along with his family, that galvanized Arkadin: You didn‘t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that Lev Antonin was going to be the unknown killer‘s next target. Whoever he was, he was going about his business in methodical fashion. With each victim he was moving up the ladder of the gang‘s hierarchy, the surest way to instill fear even in those who considered themselves inured to fear.
In the dead of night Arkadin approached Lev Antonin‘s house, a large, unspeakably ugly two-story affair that equated brutal modern architecture with style. He spent a good forty minutes reconnoitering the block, checking out the house from all angles, calculating the risk factors involved in every vector of approach. All the security lights had been switched on; the stucco looked flat and two-dimensional in the blue-white glare.
As it happened, there was a half-dead cherry tree on one side of the house. It was an elderly, twisted specimen, as if it were a proud but exhausted veteran of many wars. Halfway up its height, its intertwined branches made a Gordian knot sturdy enough to support several men. They were thick enough that the night caught in its web, repulsing in its sphere even the man-made glare.
As a boy, whenever he managed to escape the prison-like confines of his parents‘ home, Arkadin would climb trees, rocks, hills, and mountains, the steeper the better. The more death defying the more he loved it and the higher he was prodded to climb. If he died in the attempt at least he‘d die on his own terms, doing what he loved, not beaten to death by his mother.
Without hesitation, he mounted the nether side of the tree, where its thick trunk afforded him deep shadow. Climbing hand over hand, he felt once again the old exhilaration he‘d experienced when he was nine and ten, before his mother, discovering him slipping out of the house yet again, had broken his leg.
Once inside the Gordian knot, he paused to survey the scene. He was more or less at the level of the second-story windows, which were, of course, all shut tight against both intruders and the city‘s toxic ash. Not that a closed window was much of a problem for Arkadin; what mattered far more was choosing one that fronted an empty room.
He moved closer, looking through the glass from one darkened room to another. There were four windows, two and two, in line with the second story-
which he guessed meant two rooms, doubtless bedrooms. Lights out didn‘t necessarily guarantee an empty room. Peeling off a bit of bark from the branch nearest his right shoulder, he tossed it against the glass of the second window of the first pair. When nothing happened, he peeled off another piece, larger this time, and threw it harder. It hit the pane with a clearly discernible smack. He waited. Nothing.
Now he made his way through the front half of the Gordian knot until he was almost up against the window pane. Here the knotty branches had been sawed or clipped back, presenting their sheared side to the house. There was a gap of perhaps eighteen inches between the lopped-off stumps and the lightmottled wall of the house into which the windows were set like the dull eyes of a cuboid doll.
As Arkadin set himself in a convenient crotch, he saw his reflection staring back at him as if from out of some mythic, sentient forest. The paleness of his face startled him. It was as if he were looking at a future version of himself who was already dead, a version from whom the fire of life had been suddenly and cruelly drained, not by time but by circumstance. In that face he recognized not himself, but some stranger who had stepped into his life and, like a puppet master, had directed his hands and feet onto a ruinous path. A moment later the image or illusion vanished and, leaning across the gap, he jimmied open the window, slid it up, and clambered silently inside.