— Isn‘t that too much of a coincidence?
— It would be, he said, — if I wasn‘t being set up for a trap.
She seemed to digest this news for a moment. -Then the man who tried to kill you wants you to come to Seven Seventy-nine El Gamhuria Avenue.
— I believe so. He turned to her. -Which is why I‘m not going to be with you when you knock on the front door tomorrow morning.
Now she appeared alarmed. -I don‘t know whether I want to face Noah alone. Where are you going to be?
— My presence will only make things dangerous for you, believe me. He smiled. -Besides, I‘ll be there, I just won‘t go in through the front door.
— You mean you‘ll use me as a distraction.
She was not only uncommonly smart, Bourne thought, but quick as well. -I hope you don‘t mind.
— Not at all. And you‘re right, I will be safer if I go in alone. She frowned. -Why is it, I wonder, that people feel the need to lie altogether?
Her eyes found his. She seemed to be comparing him with someone else, or perhaps only with herself. -Would it be so terrible if everyone just told each other the truth?
— People prefer to remain hidden, he said, — so they won‘t get hurt.
— But they get hurt just the same, don‘t they? She shook her head. -I think people lie to themselves as easily as-if not more easily than-they do to others. Sometimes they don‘t even know they‘re doing it. She cocked her head to one side. -It‘s a matter of identity, isn‘t it? I mean, in your mind you can be anyone, do anything. Everything is malleable, whereas in the real world, effecting change-any change-is so bloody difficult, the effort is wearying, you get beaten down by all the outside forces you can‘t control.
— You could adopt an entirely new identity, Bourne said, — one where effecting change is less difficult because now you re-create your own history.
She nodded. -Yes, but that has it own pitfalls. No family, no friends-
unless, of course, you don‘t mind being absolutely isolated.
— Some people don‘t. Bourne looked beyond her, as if the wall with its cheap print of an Islamic scene was a window into his thoughts. Once again, he wondered who he was-David Webb, Jason Bourne, or Adam Stone. His life was a fiction, no matter in which direction he looked. He‘d already determined that he couldn‘t live as David Webb, and as for Jason Bourne, there was always someone, somewhere in the world, hidden in the shadows of his forgotten former life, who wished him ill or wanted him dead. And Adam Stone?
He might be called a blank slate, but that would be, in practice, untrue because the people who encountered this identity reacted to him-reacted to whoever the real Bourne was. The more he was with people like Tracy, the more he learned about himself.
— What about you? she said now as she joined him at the window. -Do you mind being alone?
— I‘m not alone, he replied. -I‘m with you.
She laughed softly and shook her head. -Listen to you, you‘ve perfected the art of answering personal questions without revealing one iota of yourself.
— That‘s because I never know who I‘m talking with.
She watched him for a moment out of the corner of her eyes as if trying to figure out the real meaning of what he‘d just said, then she stared out the window at the two Niles winding their way through North Africa, like a story you read while falling asleep.
— At night, everything becomes transparent, or insubstantial. Reaching out, she touched their reflections in the window. -And yet our thoughts-and why is it especially our fears? — are somehow magnified, taking on the proportions of titans, or gods. She stood very close to him, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. -Are we good or evil? What‘s really in our hearts? It‘s dispiriting when we don‘t know, or can‘t decide.
— Perhaps we‘re both good and evil, Bourne said, wondering about himself, about all his identities, and where the truth lay, — depending on the time and the circumstance.
Arkadin was lost in the star-dazzled Azerbaijani night. Starting promptly at five in the morning, he and his one-hundred-strong cadre of hardened soldiers had hiked into the mountains. Their mission, he‘d told them, was to find the snipers hiding along their route and shoot them with the long-range paintball guns that looked and felt exactly like AK-47s that had been shipped at his request to Nagorno-Karabakh. Twenty members of the indigenous tribe, equipped with paintball sniper rifles, had secreted themselves along the route. When Arkadin had handed them out, he‘d had to explain their use to men who thought them both amusing and idiotic. Still, within half an hour the tribesmen had become proficient with the pseudo-weapons.
His men had missed the first two snipers completely, so two of the hundred had been — killed before they hunkered down and learned from their inattention and lapses in judgment.
This exercise had lasted all day and into the swiftly falling dusk, but Arkadin drove them on, deeper and deeper into the mountains. They stopped once for fifteen minutes, to eat their rations, then it was on again, climbing ever upward toward the clear, shining vault of heaven.
Toward midnight, he called a completion to the exercise, graded each man as to performance, stamina, and ability to adapt to a changing situation, then allowed them to make camp. As usual, he ate little and slept not at all. He could feel his body‘s aches and strains, but they were small and, it seemed to him, very far away, as if they belonged to someone else, or to a different Arkadin he knew only in passing.
Dawn had arrived before he stilled his feverishly working mind and, marshaling his energies, pulled out his satellite phone and punched in a specific set of numbers, connecting him to an automated — zombie line that switched his call several times. With each switch, he was required to punch in a different code, which allowed him to continue the call. At length, after the last code was digested by the closed system at the other end of the line, he heard a human voice.
— I didn‘t expect to hear from you. There was no rebuke in Nikolai Yevsen‘s voice, only a faint curiosity.
— Frankly, Arkadin said, — I didn‘t expect to call. His head tilted up, he was staring at the last stars as they were banished by the pink and blue light. -Something has come to my attention I thought you should know.
— As always, I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Yevsen‘s voice was as harsh as a saw cutting through metal. There was about it something feral, a fearsome kind of power that was his alone.
— It has come to my attention that the woman, Tracy Atherton, is not alone.
— How is this information of interest to me?
Only Yevsen, Arkadin thought, could convey a lethal stillness with the mere tone of his voice. In the course of his freelance career with the Moscow grupperovka he had gotten to know the arms dealer well enough to be exceedingly wary of him.
— She‘s with a man named Jason Bourne, he said now, — who is out for revenge.
— We all are, in one way or another. Why would he seek it here?
— Bourne thinks you hired the Torturer to kill him.
— Where would he get that idea?