- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
ROBERT LUDLUM was the author of twenty-one novels, each one a New York Times bestseller. There are more than 210 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into thirty-two languages. He is the author of The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Chancellor Manuscript, and the Jason Bourne series--The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum--among others. Mr. Ludlum passed away in March, 2001.
ERIC VAN LUSTBADER is most widely known as the New York Times bestselling author of twenty international bestselling thrillers including Ninja and Black Heart. He is also the author of two successful and highly regarded series of fantasy novels, The Sunset Warrior Cycle and The Pearl Saga. His novels have been translated into over twenty languages. Lustbader was born and raised in Greenwich Village. He and his wife, Victoria, have been residents of the South Fork of Long Island for more than fifteen years.
Release date: May 20, 2009
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Print pages: 432
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
Author updates
Close
The Bourne Deception
Eric Van Lustbader
ACCLAIM FOR THE BOURNE THRILLERS
ROBERT LUDLUM’S™
“Powerful and poignant development of characters old and new, as well as a hard-hitting plot, reinvent the series and ensure
its place in contemporary political fiction… Once again, Van Lustbader has written a gripping novel that the reader can easily
imagine being developed into another blockbuster film.”
—Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star (VA)
“In the capable hands of Eric Van Lustbader, Robert Ludlum’s mega-franchise keeps on running—or sprinting.”
—Southwest Airlines Spirit
“I plowed through [this book], my heart racing at every turn of the page.”
—Wichita Falls Times Record News (TX)
“Fast-paced, intense action… a compelling read. The number of characters and their interconnections create a fascinating puzzle.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Fast-paced and very exciting… a fun tale full of action.”
—BookBargainsandPreviews.com
“Van Lustbader stepped up and filled those enormous shoes of Ludlum by continuing the Bourne series with greater intensity
of action and adventure… One of the great strengths of both Ludlum and Van Lustbader is their ability to write clearly, concisely,
and cleanly… Highly recommended.”
—ClarkIsaacs.ning.com
ROBERT LUDLUM’S™
THE BOURNE SANCTION
“Twisted, dark, and exciting.”
—Oklahoman
“A thrill-a-minute work… This is one novel that will keep you reading long into the night.”
—BookReporter.com
“Another jet-speed, action-packed episode… jam-packed with explosive action, shocking violence, and breathtaking betrayals…
Suspense builds to a crescendo of a conclusion.”
—BookLoons.com
ROBERT LUDLUM’S™
THE BOURNE BETRAYAL
“Breathless writing that makes the pages fly.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A fun thriller.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Lustbader is an excellent storyteller and is not afraid to keep the twists and turns coming in this sequel… This is an explosive
addition to a series with an unrivaled heritage and storied pedigree.”
—BookReporter.com
“A cleverly plotted, incisive thriller with a hero I’m glad is on the good guys’ side. In an amazing work of fiction, Lustbader
takes us into the minds of terrorists.”
—NightsandWeekends.com
“There is the normal excitement and explosive energy, suspense, and terror that only a Jason Bourne novel can have. The book
also presents a fascinating intellectual challenge, especially given the realism of the scenarios and the current state of
the world.”
—colpop.net
I SPEAK RUSSIAN well enough,” Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday said, “but I prefer to speak English.”
“That suits me,” the Russian colonel said with a heavy accent. “I’m always happy to speak foreign languages.”
Halliday gave the Russian a sour smile in response to his jibe. It was well told that Americans overseas only wanted to speak
English.
“Good. We’ll get this done faster.” But instead of beginning, he stared at a wall full of very bad portraits of jazz greats
like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, copied, he had no doubt, from press photos.
After seeing the colonel in the flesh he had begun to have second thoughts about this meeting. For one thing, he was younger
than Halliday had imagined. His blond hair was thick, without the slightest wave, and cut short in the style of the Russian military. For another, he looked like a man of action. Halliday could see, beneath his suit, the play of muscles as
now and again they bulged against the cheap material. He possessed a peculiar stillness that unsettled Halliday. But it was
his eyes—pale, deep-set, unblinking—that truly unnerved the secretary. It was as if he were looking at a photograph of eyes
rather than the real thing. The bulbous, veiny nose only served to intensify their implacable peculiarity: It was as if there
was no one home, as if the soul of the man did not exist, leaving nothing but a monolithic will, like something ancient and
evil Halliday had read about in an H. P. Lovecraft story when he was a teenager.
He trampled the impulse to get up, walk out, and never look back. He had come all this way for a reason, he reminded himself.
The smog that choked Munich—the same precise shade of filthy gray as Karpov’s eyes—perfectly mirrored Secretary Halliday’s
mood. If he never saw this miserable excuse for a city again it would be too soon for him. Unfortunately, here he was in this
godforsaken, smoke-clogged subterranean jazz club, having stepped out of the back of an armored Lincoln limousine onto tourist-infested
Rumfordstrasse. What was so special about the Russian to bring the American secretary of defense forty-two hundred miles to
a city he despised? Boris Karpov was a colonel in FSB-2, ostensibly the new Russian anti-drug enforcement agency. It was a
measure of the FSB-2’s meteoric rise to power that one of its officers was able to get a message to Halliday, let alone entice him out of Washington.
But Karpov had hinted that he could deliver something Halliday wanted very much. The defense secretary might have been wondering
what that might be, but he was too busy trying to figure out what the Russian would want in return. There was always a quid
pro quo to these deals, Halliday knew only too well. He was a veteran of the political infighting that perpetually surrounded
the president like a Kansas dust storm. He knew full well that quid pro quos could be painful to accept, but compromise was
the name of the political game, whether it be domestic or international.
Even so, Halliday might not have taken up Karpov’s offer had it not been for his own suddenly tenuous position with the president.
The shockingly abrupt fall from power of Luther LaValle, his handpicked intelligence czar, had shaken Halliday’s power base.
Friends and allies alike were criticizing or second-guessing him behind his back, and he had to wonder which one of them would
be the first to sink the metaphorical knife into his back.
But he’d been around long enough to understand that hope sometimes arrived in seemingly unpleasant forms, like a bed of nails.
He was hoping Karpov’s deal would provide the political capital that would at once restore his prestige with the president
and his power base within the multinational military-industrial complex.
As the trio on stage opened a box full of noise Halliday once again mentally reread the file on Boris Karpov, as if this time he’d find some further information—anything,
including a surveillance photo, no matter how grainy or out of focus, of the colonel. No such photo existed, of course, no
more intel than the four threadbare paragraphs on the single sheet of paper watermarked top secret. Because of the administration’s
dismissive relationship with Russia, the NSA had limited knowledge of the workings inside the Russian political system, not
to mention FSB-2, whose actual mission was highly covert, far more so than the FSB, the political inheritor of what had once
been the KGB.
“Mr. Smith, you appear distracted,” the Russian said. They had agreed on using the pseudonyms Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones in public.
The secretary’s head swung around. He was profoundly uncomfortable underground, unlike Karpov who more and more seemed to
him like a creature of the dark. Raising his voice to be heard over the rhythmic clangor, he said, “Nothing could be farther
from the truth, Mr. Jones. I’m just taking in with a sightseer’s bliss the particular atmosphere you’ve chosen.”
The colonel chuckled deep in his throat. “You have a droll sense of humor, yes?”
“You have me entirely.”
The colonel laughed out loud. “We’ll see about that, Mr. Smith. Since we do not even know our wives, it seems unlikely we
should know our… counterparts.”
The small hesitation had Halliday wondering whether Karpov was going to say adversaries instead of the neutral word he’d chosen. He didn’t bother to wonder whether the Russian was aware of his political position,
because it didn’t matter. All that concerned him was whether the deal about to be proposed would help him.
The trio lurched into another tempo, the secretary’s only clue that they’d segued into another selection, and he hunched forward
over the too-bitter beer he’d hardly touched. No Coors in this joint. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
“Without delay.” Colonel Karpov placed his hands on his golden forearms. The knuckles were scarred and yellow with calluses,
which made them look as ridged as the Rockies. “I know, Mr. Smith, that I don’t have to explain who Jason Bourne is, yes?”
At the name Halliday’s expression hardened. He felt as if the Russian had sprayed him with Freon. “Your point?” he said woodenly.
“My point, Mr. Smith, is this: I will kill Jason Bourne for you.”
Halliday didn’t waste time in asking how Karpov knew he wanted Bourne dead—there had been enough NSA activity in Moscow the
last month when Bourne was there to make it abundantly clear to a deaf, dumb, and blind man that he was targeted for termination.
“Very magnanimous of you, Mr. Jones.”
“No, sir, not magnanimous. I have my own reasons for wanting him dead.”
At this admission the secretary relaxed slightly. “All right, let’s say you do kill Bourne. What do you want in return?”
There was in what anyone else might be termed a twinkle in the colonel’s eye, but to Halliday, who was still trying to get
the measure of him, it seemed as if someone had walked over Bourne’s grave. Death had winked at him.
“I know that look, Mr. Smith. I know you’re expecting the worst—a high payment. But in exchange for you giving me license
to take Bourne out with full immunity against the consequences of collateral disturbance or damage, I want you to eliminate
a vexing thorn in my side.”
“Whom you can’t terminate yourself.”
Karpov nodded. “You have me entirely, Mr. Smith.”
The two men laughed at the same time, but their tones were absolutely different.
“So.” Halliday made a tent of his fingers. “Who is the target?”
“Abdulla Khoury.”
The secretary’s heart sank. “The head of the Eastern Brotherhood? Christ on a crutch, you might as well ask me to assassinate
the pope.”
“Assassinating the pope would do neither of us any good. But killing Abdulla Khoury, well, that’s another matter entirely,
yes?”
“Of course, yes. The man’s a radical Islamic maniac as well as a menace. Right now he’s holding hands with the president of
Iran. But the Eastern Brotherhood is a worldwide organization. Khoury has many friends in very high places.” The secretary
shook his head with a good deal of vehemence. “Attempting to terminate him would be political suicide.”
Karpov nodded. “All this is unquestionably true. But what about the Eastern Brotherhood’s terrorist activities?”
Halliday snorted. “A pipe dream; rumors, at best. No one in our secret services has ever found a scrap of reliable evidence
that it has ties to any terrorist organization. And believe me, we’ve tried.”
“Of this I have no doubt, which means that you didn’t find any evidence of terrorist activity in Professor Specter’s residence.”
“There’s no doubt the good professor was a terrorist hunter, but as for allegations he was anything more…” Halliday shrugged.
A sudden smile wreathed the colonel’s face, and all at once an unmarked manila envelope was on the table between them. “Then
you’ll find this of particular value.” As if maneuvering his queen into checkmate position, Karpov slid the envelope over
to Halliday.
As the secretary slit open the envelope and scanned the contents, Karpov continued. “As you know, FSB-2 is primarily concerned
with international drug trafficking.”
“So I’ve heard,” Halliday said drily, because he knew damn well that FSB-2’s purview was much wider than that.
“Ten days ago,” Karpov went on, “we initiated the final phase of a drug bust in Mexico, one we’d been working on for more
than two years because one of our Moscow grupperovka, the Kazanskaya, has been searching for a secure pipeline as it moved into the drug trade.”
Halliday nodded. He knew a bit about the Kazanskaya, one of Moscow’s most notorious criminal families, and its head, Dimitri
Maslov.
“We were entirely successful, I’m pleased to say,” the colonel continued. “In the final sweep of the dead drug lord Gustavo
Moreno’s house we confiscated a notebook computer before it could be destroyed. The information you’re reading now was printed
out from the hard drive.”
The tips of Halliday’s fingers had gone cold. The printout was dense with figures, cross-references, annotations. “This is
a money trail. The Mexican drug ring was financed by the Eastern Brotherhood. Fifty percent of the profits went to buying
weapons, which were transshipped to various ports in the Middle East by Air Afrika Airways.”
“Which is wholly owned by Nikolai Yevsen, the world’s largest arms dealer.” The colonel cleared his throat. “You see, Mr.
Smith, there are powerful elements in my government aligned with Iran because we want their oil and they want our uranium.
Energy trumps everything else these days, yes? And so, vis-à-vis Abdulla Khoury, I find myself in the awkward position of
possessing evidence implicating him in terrorist activities, yet unable to act on that evidence.” He cocked his head. “Possibly
you can help me out.”
Calming the thundering of his heart, Halliday said, “Why do you want Khoury out of the picture?”
“I could tell you,” Karpov said, “but then, regrettably, I’d have to kill you.”
It was an old joke, and a stale one, but there was again in the colonel’s pale, implacable eyes the eerie twinkle that chilled
the secretary to the bone, and absurdly it occurred to him that Karpov might not be joking. This was not a theory he was eager
to pursue, so he made his decision quickly.
“Terminate Jason Bourne and I will use the full might of the American government to put Abdulla Khoury where he belongs.”
But the colonel was already shaking his head. “Not good enough, Mr. Smith. An eye for an eye, this is the true meaning of
quid pro quo, yes?”
“We don’t assassinate people, Colonel Karpov,” Halliday said stiffly.
The Russian snickered unkindly. “Of course not,” he said drily, then shrugged. “No matter, Secretary Halliday. I have no such compunctions.”
Halliday hesitated but a moment. “Yes, of course, in the heat of the moment I forgot our protocols, Mr. Jones. Send me the
entire contents of the hard drive and it will be done.” Bracing himself, he stared into those pale eyes. “Agreed?”
Boris Karpov gave a sharp military nod. “Agreed.”
When the colonel exited the jazz club, he located Halliday’s Lincoln and Secret Service bodyguards arrayed along this block
of Rumfordstrasse like tin soldiers. Walking in the opposite direction, he turned a corner, fished inside his mouth, and removed the plastic prosthetics that had changed the shape of his jawline. He grabbed the veiny bulb of his
latex nose and pulled it and the actor’s putty off, removed the gray-colored contact lenses, stowing them in a plastic case.
Himself again, he laughed. There was a colonel in FSB-2 by the name of Boris Karpov; in fact, Karpov and Jason Bourne were
friends, which was why Leonid Danilovich Arkadin had chosen Karpov to impersonate. The irony appealed to him: Bourne’s friend
proposing to terminate him. Plus, Karpov was a strand in the web he was spinning.
There was no danger from the American politician. Arkadin knew full well that Halliday’s people had no idea what Karpov looked
like. Nevertheless, even if his Treadstone training had taught him never to leave anything to chance, there was a very good
reason why he had become the visual approximation of Karpov.
Anonymous within the swirl of passengers, he boarded the U-bahn at Marienplatz. Three stops and four blocks later, at the
specified location, he found a perfectly nondescript car waiting for him. As soon as he climbed in, it took off, heading toward
Franz Josef Strauss International Airport. He was booked on the 1:20 am Lufthansa flight to Singapore, where he’d catch the
9:35 am flight to Denpasar in Bali. It had been far easier to trace Bourne’s whereabouts—the people at NextGen Energy Solutions
where Moira Trevor worked knew where the two of them had gone—than to steal Gustavo Moreno’s laptop. But he had a number of men inside the Kazanskaya. One of them had been fortunate enough to be in
Gustavo Moreno’s house an hour before the FSB-2 bust went down. He absconded with the incriminating evidence that would now
plant Abdulla Khoury six feet under. As soon as Arkadin shot Bourne dead.
Jason Bourne was at peace. At long last his grieving for Marie was over, the guilt lifted from his heart. He lay side by side
with Moira, on a bale, a huge Balinese daybed with a thatched roof, supported by four carved wooden posts. The bale was set into a low stone wall to one side of a three-tiered infinity pool that overlooked the Lombok Strait in southeast
Bali. Because the Balinese were aware of everything and forgot nothing, after the first day their bale was set up for them each morning when they arrived for their pre-breakfast swim, and their waitress would bring without being
asked the drink that Moira loved most: a Bali Sunrise, consisting of chilled sour orange, mango, and passion fruit juices.
“There is no time but time,” Moira said dreamily.
Bourne stirred. “Translation.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“I don’t care.”
“My point,” she said. “We’ve been here ten days; it feels like ten months.” She laughed. “I mean that in the best way possible.”
Swifts darted like bats from tree to tree, or skimmed the surface of the highest pool. The muted crash of the surf lulled
them from below. Moments ago two small Balinese girls had presented them with a handful of fresh blossoms in a bowl of palm
leaves they had woven by hand. Now the air was perfumed with the exotic scents of frangipani and tuberose.
Moira turned to him. “It’s as they say: On Bali time stands still, and in that stillness lie many lifetimes.”
Bourne, his eyes half closed, was dreaming of another life—his life—but the images were dark and murky, as if seen through
a projector with a faulty bulb. He’d been here before, he knew it. There was a vibration from the wind, the restful sea, the
smiling people, the island itself to which something inside him resonated. It was déjà vu, yes, but it was also more. Something
had called him back here, had drawn him like a magnet to true north, and now that he was here he could almost reach out and
touch it. Yet still its secret eluded him.
What had happened here? Something important, something he needed to remember. He sank deeper into his dream of a life lived
on the edge of yesterday. In the dream he roamed across Bali until he came to the Indian Ocean. There, rising out of the creaming
surf, was a pillar of fire. It rose up into the clear blue sky until its tip touched the sun. As a shadow he went across the
sand, soft as talcum, to embrace the flames.
He awoke, wanting to tell Moira about his dream, but for some reason he didn’t.
That evening, on the way down to the beach club at the foot of the cliff on which the hotel was perched, Moira stopped at one
of the many shrines strewn around the property. It was made of stone, its haunches draped with a checkered black-and-white
cloth. A small yellow umbrella shaded the upper part; onto it had been laid a number of offerings of brightly colored flowers
in woven palm leaf cups. The cloth and the umbrella were signs that the local spirit was in residence. The cloth’s pattern
had a meaning also: White and black represented the Balinese duality of gods and demons, good and evil.
Kicking off her sandals, Moira stepped onto the square stone in front of the shrine, put her palms together at forehead height,
and bowed her head.
“I didn’t know you were a practicing Hindu,” Bourne said when she was finished.
Moira picked her sandals up, swung them at her side. “I was thanking the spirit for our time here, for all the gifts Bali
has to offer.” She gave him a wry smile. “And I was thanking the spirit of the suckling pig we ate yesterday for sacrificing
himself for us.”
They had booked the evening alone at the beach club. Towels were waiting for them, as well as frosty glasses of mango lassi, and pitchers of tropical juices and ice water. The attendants had discreetly tucked themselves away in the windowless auxiliary kitchen.
They spent an hour in the ocean, swimming back and forth just beyond the curling surf line. The water was warm, as soft on
the skin as velvet. Across the dark beach, hermit crabs went about their sideways business, and here and there bats could
be seen winging in and out of a cave at the other end of the beach, just beyond a finger of rocks, part of the western half
of the crescent cove.
Afterward they drank their mango lassis in the pool, guarded by a huge grinning wooden pig with a medallioned collar and a crown behind its ears.
“He’s smiling,” Moira said, “because I paid homage to our suckling pig.”
They swam laps, then came together at the end of the pool overhung by a magnificent frangipani tree with its buttery white
and yellow blossoms. Beneath its leafy branches, they held each other, watching the moon move in and out of gathering clouds.
A gust of wind clattered the fronds of the thirty-foot palms that lined the beach side of the pool deck, and their legs went
from pale to dark.
“It’s almost over, Jason.”
“What is?”
“This.” Moira wriggled her hand under the water like a fish. “All of this. In a few days we’ll be gone.”
He watched the moon wink out, felt the first fat drops on his face. A moment later, rain goose-fleshed the skin of the pool.
She put her head back against his shoulder, deeper into the shadow of the frangipani. “And what will become of us?”
He knew she didn’t want an answer, wanted only to taste the thought on her tongue. He could feel the weight of her, her warmth
through the water, against his heart. It was a good weight; it made him drowsy.
“Jason, what will you do when we get back?”
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I haven’t thought about it.” But he wondered now whether he would leave with her. How
could he when something from his past was waiting for him here, so close he could feel its breath on the back of his neck?
He said nothing of this, however, because it would require an explanation, and he had none. Just a feeling. And how many times
had this feeling saved his life?
“I’m not going back to NextGen,” she said.
His attention returned fully to her. “When did you come to that decision?”
“While we were here.” She smiled. “Bali has a way of opening the path to decisions. I came here just before I joined Black
River. It seems to be an island of transformations, at least for me.”
“What will you do?”
“I want to start my own risk management firm.”
“Nice.” He smiled. “In direct competition with Black River.”
“If you want to look at it that way.”
“Other people will.”
It was raining harder now; the palm fronds clashed against one another, and it was impossible to see the sky.
“That could be dangerous,” he added.
“Life is dangerous, Jason, like anything governed by chaos.”
“I can’t argue with that. But there’s your old boss, Noah Petersen.”
“That’s his ops name. His real name is Perlis.”
Bourne glanced up at the white flowers, which now began to fall all around them like snow. The sweet scent of frangipani mingled
with the fresh smell of the rain.
“Perlis was none too happy with you when we ran into him in Munich two weeks ago.”
“Noah’s never happy.” Moira snuggled deeper into his arms. “I gave up trying to please him six months before I quit Black
River. It was a fool’s game.”
“The fact remains that we were right about the terrorist attack on the liquid natural gas tanker and he was wrong. I’m willing
to bet he hasn’t forgotten. Now that you’re encroaching on his territory you’ll have made an enemy.”
She laughed softly. “You should talk.”
“Arkadin’s dead,” Bourne said soberly. “He took a header off the LNG tanker into the Pacific off Long Beach. He didn’t survive;
no one could.”
“He was a product of Treadstone, isn’t that what Willard told you?”
“According to Willard, who was there, Arkadin was Alex Conklin’s first success—and his first failure. He was sent to Conklin by Semion Icoupov, the co-head of the Black Legion and the Eastern Brotherhood until
Arkadin killed him for shooting his girlfriend.”
“And his secret partner, Asher Sever, your former mentor, is in a permanent coma.”
“We all get what we deserve, in the end,” Bourne said bitterly.
Moira returned to the subject of Treadstone. “According to Willard, Conklin’s aim was to create a superior warrior—a fighting
machine.”
“That was Arkadin,” Bourne said, “but he escaped the Treadstone program back to Russia, where he got up to all sorts of mayhem,
hiring himself out to the heads of various Moscow grupperovka.”
“And you became his successor—Conklin’s success story.”
“Not if you poll CI’s directorate chiefs,” Bourne said. “They would shoot me dead as soon as look at me.”
“That hasn’t stopped them from coercing you into working for them when they needed you.”
“That’s all over with,” Bourne said.
Moira had just decided to change the subject when the power failed. The lights in the pool and within the open-air beach club
itself winked out. The wind and the rain remained swirling in the darkness. Bourne tensed, tried to move her away so he could
get up. She could sense him questing in the darkness for the source of the outage.
“Jason,” she whispered, “it’s all right. We’re safe here.”
He moved them through the water from where they had been sitting to the other side of the pool. She could feel his accelerated
heartbeat, his heightened sense of awareness, of waiting for something terrible to happen, and in that instant she was given
an insight into his life she’d never had before.
She wanted to tell him again not to worry, that power outages happened all the time on Bali, but now she knew it would be
useless. He was hardwired for this kind of reaction; nothing she could say or do would change that.
She listened to the wind and the rain, wondering if he heard anything that she didn’t. For an instant she felt a stab of anxiety:
What if this wasn’t a simple power outage? What if they were being stalked by one of Jason’s enemies?
All at once, power was restored, causing her to laugh at her foolishness. “I told you,” she said, pointing to the smiling
carved pig spirit. “He’s protecting us.”
Bourne lay back in the water. “There’s no escape,” he said. “Even here.”
“You don’t believe in spirits, good or evil, do you, Jason?”
“I can’t afford to,” he said. “I come across enough evil as it is.”
Picking up on his tone, Moira at last broached the subject closest to her heart. “I’m going to have to do some heavy recruiting
right off the bat. It’s certain we’ll see a lot less of each other, at least until I set up my new shop.”
“Is that a warning or a promise?”
He couldn’t help noting that her laughter had a brittle edge to it. “Okay, I was nervous about bringing it up.”
“Why?”
“You know how it is.”
“Tell me.”
She turned in his arms, sat straddling him in the dimpled water. The rush of the rain through
ROBERT LUDLUM’S™
“Powerful and poignant development of characters old and new, as well as a hard-hitting plot, reinvent the series and ensure
its place in contemporary political fiction… Once again, Van Lustbader has written a gripping novel that the reader can easily
imagine being developed into another blockbuster film.”
—Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star (VA)
“In the capable hands of Eric Van Lustbader, Robert Ludlum’s mega-franchise keeps on running—or sprinting.”
—Southwest Airlines Spirit
“I plowed through [this book], my heart racing at every turn of the page.”
—Wichita Falls Times Record News (TX)
“Fast-paced, intense action… a compelling read. The number of characters and their interconnections create a fascinating puzzle.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Fast-paced and very exciting… a fun tale full of action.”
—BookBargainsandPreviews.com
“Van Lustbader stepped up and filled those enormous shoes of Ludlum by continuing the Bourne series with greater intensity
of action and adventure… One of the great strengths of both Ludlum and Van Lustbader is their ability to write clearly, concisely,
and cleanly… Highly recommended.”
—ClarkIsaacs.ning.com
ROBERT LUDLUM’S™
THE BOURNE SANCTION
“Twisted, dark, and exciting.”
—Oklahoman
“A thrill-a-minute work… This is one novel that will keep you reading long into the night.”
—BookReporter.com
“Another jet-speed, action-packed episode… jam-packed with explosive action, shocking violence, and breathtaking betrayals…
Suspense builds to a crescendo of a conclusion.”
—BookLoons.com
ROBERT LUDLUM’S™
THE BOURNE BETRAYAL
“Breathless writing that makes the pages fly.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A fun thriller.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Lustbader is an excellent storyteller and is not afraid to keep the twists and turns coming in this sequel… This is an explosive
addition to a series with an unrivaled heritage and storied pedigree.”
—BookReporter.com
“A cleverly plotted, incisive thriller with a hero I’m glad is on the good guys’ side. In an amazing work of fiction, Lustbader
takes us into the minds of terrorists.”
—NightsandWeekends.com
“There is the normal excitement and explosive energy, suspense, and terror that only a Jason Bourne novel can have. The book
also presents a fascinating intellectual challenge, especially given the realism of the scenarios and the current state of
the world.”
—colpop.net
I SPEAK RUSSIAN well enough,” Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday said, “but I prefer to speak English.”
“That suits me,” the Russian colonel said with a heavy accent. “I’m always happy to speak foreign languages.”
Halliday gave the Russian a sour smile in response to his jibe. It was well told that Americans overseas only wanted to speak
English.
“Good. We’ll get this done faster.” But instead of beginning, he stared at a wall full of very bad portraits of jazz greats
like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, copied, he had no doubt, from press photos.
After seeing the colonel in the flesh he had begun to have second thoughts about this meeting. For one thing, he was younger
than Halliday had imagined. His blond hair was thick, without the slightest wave, and cut short in the style of the Russian military. For another, he looked like a man of action. Halliday could see, beneath his suit, the play of muscles as
now and again they bulged against the cheap material. He possessed a peculiar stillness that unsettled Halliday. But it was
his eyes—pale, deep-set, unblinking—that truly unnerved the secretary. It was as if he were looking at a photograph of eyes
rather than the real thing. The bulbous, veiny nose only served to intensify their implacable peculiarity: It was as if there
was no one home, as if the soul of the man did not exist, leaving nothing but a monolithic will, like something ancient and
evil Halliday had read about in an H. P. Lovecraft story when he was a teenager.
He trampled the impulse to get up, walk out, and never look back. He had come all this way for a reason, he reminded himself.
The smog that choked Munich—the same precise shade of filthy gray as Karpov’s eyes—perfectly mirrored Secretary Halliday’s
mood. If he never saw this miserable excuse for a city again it would be too soon for him. Unfortunately, here he was in this
godforsaken, smoke-clogged subterranean jazz club, having stepped out of the back of an armored Lincoln limousine onto tourist-infested
Rumfordstrasse. What was so special about the Russian to bring the American secretary of defense forty-two hundred miles to
a city he despised? Boris Karpov was a colonel in FSB-2, ostensibly the new Russian anti-drug enforcement agency. It was a
measure of the FSB-2’s meteoric rise to power that one of its officers was able to get a message to Halliday, let alone entice him out of Washington.
But Karpov had hinted that he could deliver something Halliday wanted very much. The defense secretary might have been wondering
what that might be, but he was too busy trying to figure out what the Russian would want in return. There was always a quid
pro quo to these deals, Halliday knew only too well. He was a veteran of the political infighting that perpetually surrounded
the president like a Kansas dust storm. He knew full well that quid pro quos could be painful to accept, but compromise was
the name of the political game, whether it be domestic or international.
Even so, Halliday might not have taken up Karpov’s offer had it not been for his own suddenly tenuous position with the president.
The shockingly abrupt fall from power of Luther LaValle, his handpicked intelligence czar, had shaken Halliday’s power base.
Friends and allies alike were criticizing or second-guessing him behind his back, and he had to wonder which one of them would
be the first to sink the metaphorical knife into his back.
But he’d been around long enough to understand that hope sometimes arrived in seemingly unpleasant forms, like a bed of nails.
He was hoping Karpov’s deal would provide the political capital that would at once restore his prestige with the president
and his power base within the multinational military-industrial complex.
As the trio on stage opened a box full of noise Halliday once again mentally reread the file on Boris Karpov, as if this time he’d find some further information—anything,
including a surveillance photo, no matter how grainy or out of focus, of the colonel. No such photo existed, of course, no
more intel than the four threadbare paragraphs on the single sheet of paper watermarked top secret. Because of the administration’s
dismissive relationship with Russia, the NSA had limited knowledge of the workings inside the Russian political system, not
to mention FSB-2, whose actual mission was highly covert, far more so than the FSB, the political inheritor of what had once
been the KGB.
“Mr. Smith, you appear distracted,” the Russian said. They had agreed on using the pseudonyms Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones in public.
The secretary’s head swung around. He was profoundly uncomfortable underground, unlike Karpov who more and more seemed to
him like a creature of the dark. Raising his voice to be heard over the rhythmic clangor, he said, “Nothing could be farther
from the truth, Mr. Jones. I’m just taking in with a sightseer’s bliss the particular atmosphere you’ve chosen.”
The colonel chuckled deep in his throat. “You have a droll sense of humor, yes?”
“You have me entirely.”
The colonel laughed out loud. “We’ll see about that, Mr. Smith. Since we do not even know our wives, it seems unlikely we
should know our… counterparts.”
The small hesitation had Halliday wondering whether Karpov was going to say adversaries instead of the neutral word he’d chosen. He didn’t bother to wonder whether the Russian was aware of his political position,
because it didn’t matter. All that concerned him was whether the deal about to be proposed would help him.
The trio lurched into another tempo, the secretary’s only clue that they’d segued into another selection, and he hunched forward
over the too-bitter beer he’d hardly touched. No Coors in this joint. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
“Without delay.” Colonel Karpov placed his hands on his golden forearms. The knuckles were scarred and yellow with calluses,
which made them look as ridged as the Rockies. “I know, Mr. Smith, that I don’t have to explain who Jason Bourne is, yes?”
At the name Halliday’s expression hardened. He felt as if the Russian had sprayed him with Freon. “Your point?” he said woodenly.
“My point, Mr. Smith, is this: I will kill Jason Bourne for you.”
Halliday didn’t waste time in asking how Karpov knew he wanted Bourne dead—there had been enough NSA activity in Moscow the
last month when Bourne was there to make it abundantly clear to a deaf, dumb, and blind man that he was targeted for termination.
“Very magnanimous of you, Mr. Jones.”
“No, sir, not magnanimous. I have my own reasons for wanting him dead.”
At this admission the secretary relaxed slightly. “All right, let’s say you do kill Bourne. What do you want in return?”
There was in what anyone else might be termed a twinkle in the colonel’s eye, but to Halliday, who was still trying to get
the measure of him, it seemed as if someone had walked over Bourne’s grave. Death had winked at him.
“I know that look, Mr. Smith. I know you’re expecting the worst—a high payment. But in exchange for you giving me license
to take Bourne out with full immunity against the consequences of collateral disturbance or damage, I want you to eliminate
a vexing thorn in my side.”
“Whom you can’t terminate yourself.”
Karpov nodded. “You have me entirely, Mr. Smith.”
The two men laughed at the same time, but their tones were absolutely different.
“So.” Halliday made a tent of his fingers. “Who is the target?”
“Abdulla Khoury.”
The secretary’s heart sank. “The head of the Eastern Brotherhood? Christ on a crutch, you might as well ask me to assassinate
the pope.”
“Assassinating the pope would do neither of us any good. But killing Abdulla Khoury, well, that’s another matter entirely,
yes?”
“Of course, yes. The man’s a radical Islamic maniac as well as a menace. Right now he’s holding hands with the president of
Iran. But the Eastern Brotherhood is a worldwide organization. Khoury has many friends in very high places.” The secretary
shook his head with a good deal of vehemence. “Attempting to terminate him would be political suicide.”
Karpov nodded. “All this is unquestionably true. But what about the Eastern Brotherhood’s terrorist activities?”
Halliday snorted. “A pipe dream; rumors, at best. No one in our secret services has ever found a scrap of reliable evidence
that it has ties to any terrorist organization. And believe me, we’ve tried.”
“Of this I have no doubt, which means that you didn’t find any evidence of terrorist activity in Professor Specter’s residence.”
“There’s no doubt the good professor was a terrorist hunter, but as for allegations he was anything more…” Halliday shrugged.
A sudden smile wreathed the colonel’s face, and all at once an unmarked manila envelope was on the table between them. “Then
you’ll find this of particular value.” As if maneuvering his queen into checkmate position, Karpov slid the envelope over
to Halliday.
As the secretary slit open the envelope and scanned the contents, Karpov continued. “As you know, FSB-2 is primarily concerned
with international drug trafficking.”
“So I’ve heard,” Halliday said drily, because he knew damn well that FSB-2’s purview was much wider than that.
“Ten days ago,” Karpov went on, “we initiated the final phase of a drug bust in Mexico, one we’d been working on for more
than two years because one of our Moscow grupperovka, the Kazanskaya, has been searching for a secure pipeline as it moved into the drug trade.”
Halliday nodded. He knew a bit about the Kazanskaya, one of Moscow’s most notorious criminal families, and its head, Dimitri
Maslov.
“We were entirely successful, I’m pleased to say,” the colonel continued. “In the final sweep of the dead drug lord Gustavo
Moreno’s house we confiscated a notebook computer before it could be destroyed. The information you’re reading now was printed
out from the hard drive.”
The tips of Halliday’s fingers had gone cold. The printout was dense with figures, cross-references, annotations. “This is
a money trail. The Mexican drug ring was financed by the Eastern Brotherhood. Fifty percent of the profits went to buying
weapons, which were transshipped to various ports in the Middle East by Air Afrika Airways.”
“Which is wholly owned by Nikolai Yevsen, the world’s largest arms dealer.” The colonel cleared his throat. “You see, Mr.
Smith, there are powerful elements in my government aligned with Iran because we want their oil and they want our uranium.
Energy trumps everything else these days, yes? And so, vis-à-vis Abdulla Khoury, I find myself in the awkward position of
possessing evidence implicating him in terrorist activities, yet unable to act on that evidence.” He cocked his head. “Possibly
you can help me out.”
Calming the thundering of his heart, Halliday said, “Why do you want Khoury out of the picture?”
“I could tell you,” Karpov said, “but then, regrettably, I’d have to kill you.”
It was an old joke, and a stale one, but there was again in the colonel’s pale, implacable eyes the eerie twinkle that chilled
the secretary to the bone, and absurdly it occurred to him that Karpov might not be joking. This was not a theory he was eager
to pursue, so he made his decision quickly.
“Terminate Jason Bourne and I will use the full might of the American government to put Abdulla Khoury where he belongs.”
But the colonel was already shaking his head. “Not good enough, Mr. Smith. An eye for an eye, this is the true meaning of
quid pro quo, yes?”
“We don’t assassinate people, Colonel Karpov,” Halliday said stiffly.
The Russian snickered unkindly. “Of course not,” he said drily, then shrugged. “No matter, Secretary Halliday. I have no such compunctions.”
Halliday hesitated but a moment. “Yes, of course, in the heat of the moment I forgot our protocols, Mr. Jones. Send me the
entire contents of the hard drive and it will be done.” Bracing himself, he stared into those pale eyes. “Agreed?”
Boris Karpov gave a sharp military nod. “Agreed.”
When the colonel exited the jazz club, he located Halliday’s Lincoln and Secret Service bodyguards arrayed along this block
of Rumfordstrasse like tin soldiers. Walking in the opposite direction, he turned a corner, fished inside his mouth, and removed the plastic prosthetics that had changed the shape of his jawline. He grabbed the veiny bulb of his
latex nose and pulled it and the actor’s putty off, removed the gray-colored contact lenses, stowing them in a plastic case.
Himself again, he laughed. There was a colonel in FSB-2 by the name of Boris Karpov; in fact, Karpov and Jason Bourne were
friends, which was why Leonid Danilovich Arkadin had chosen Karpov to impersonate. The irony appealed to him: Bourne’s friend
proposing to terminate him. Plus, Karpov was a strand in the web he was spinning.
There was no danger from the American politician. Arkadin knew full well that Halliday’s people had no idea what Karpov looked
like. Nevertheless, even if his Treadstone training had taught him never to leave anything to chance, there was a very good
reason why he had become the visual approximation of Karpov.
Anonymous within the swirl of passengers, he boarded the U-bahn at Marienplatz. Three stops and four blocks later, at the
specified location, he found a perfectly nondescript car waiting for him. As soon as he climbed in, it took off, heading toward
Franz Josef Strauss International Airport. He was booked on the 1:20 am Lufthansa flight to Singapore, where he’d catch the
9:35 am flight to Denpasar in Bali. It had been far easier to trace Bourne’s whereabouts—the people at NextGen Energy Solutions
where Moira Trevor worked knew where the two of them had gone—than to steal Gustavo Moreno’s laptop. But he had a number of men inside the Kazanskaya. One of them had been fortunate enough to be in
Gustavo Moreno’s house an hour before the FSB-2 bust went down. He absconded with the incriminating evidence that would now
plant Abdulla Khoury six feet under. As soon as Arkadin shot Bourne dead.
Jason Bourne was at peace. At long last his grieving for Marie was over, the guilt lifted from his heart. He lay side by side
with Moira, on a bale, a huge Balinese daybed with a thatched roof, supported by four carved wooden posts. The bale was set into a low stone wall to one side of a three-tiered infinity pool that overlooked the Lombok Strait in southeast
Bali. Because the Balinese were aware of everything and forgot nothing, after the first day their bale was set up for them each morning when they arrived for their pre-breakfast swim, and their waitress would bring without being
asked the drink that Moira loved most: a Bali Sunrise, consisting of chilled sour orange, mango, and passion fruit juices.
“There is no time but time,” Moira said dreamily.
Bourne stirred. “Translation.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“I don’t care.”
“My point,” she said. “We’ve been here ten days; it feels like ten months.” She laughed. “I mean that in the best way possible.”
Swifts darted like bats from tree to tree, or skimmed the surface of the highest pool. The muted crash of the surf lulled
them from below. Moments ago two small Balinese girls had presented them with a handful of fresh blossoms in a bowl of palm
leaves they had woven by hand. Now the air was perfumed with the exotic scents of frangipani and tuberose.
Moira turned to him. “It’s as they say: On Bali time stands still, and in that stillness lie many lifetimes.”
Bourne, his eyes half closed, was dreaming of another life—his life—but the images were dark and murky, as if seen through
a projector with a faulty bulb. He’d been here before, he knew it. There was a vibration from the wind, the restful sea, the
smiling people, the island itself to which something inside him resonated. It was déjà vu, yes, but it was also more. Something
had called him back here, had drawn him like a magnet to true north, and now that he was here he could almost reach out and
touch it. Yet still its secret eluded him.
What had happened here? Something important, something he needed to remember. He sank deeper into his dream of a life lived
on the edge of yesterday. In the dream he roamed across Bali until he came to the Indian Ocean. There, rising out of the creaming
surf, was a pillar of fire. It rose up into the clear blue sky until its tip touched the sun. As a shadow he went across the
sand, soft as talcum, to embrace the flames.
He awoke, wanting to tell Moira about his dream, but for some reason he didn’t.
That evening, on the way down to the beach club at the foot of the cliff on which the hotel was perched, Moira stopped at one
of the many shrines strewn around the property. It was made of stone, its haunches draped with a checkered black-and-white
cloth. A small yellow umbrella shaded the upper part; onto it had been laid a number of offerings of brightly colored flowers
in woven palm leaf cups. The cloth and the umbrella were signs that the local spirit was in residence. The cloth’s pattern
had a meaning also: White and black represented the Balinese duality of gods and demons, good and evil.
Kicking off her sandals, Moira stepped onto the square stone in front of the shrine, put her palms together at forehead height,
and bowed her head.
“I didn’t know you were a practicing Hindu,” Bourne said when she was finished.
Moira picked her sandals up, swung them at her side. “I was thanking the spirit for our time here, for all the gifts Bali
has to offer.” She gave him a wry smile. “And I was thanking the spirit of the suckling pig we ate yesterday for sacrificing
himself for us.”
They had booked the evening alone at the beach club. Towels were waiting for them, as well as frosty glasses of mango lassi, and pitchers of tropical juices and ice water. The attendants had discreetly tucked themselves away in the windowless auxiliary kitchen.
They spent an hour in the ocean, swimming back and forth just beyond the curling surf line. The water was warm, as soft on
the skin as velvet. Across the dark beach, hermit crabs went about their sideways business, and here and there bats could
be seen winging in and out of a cave at the other end of the beach, just beyond a finger of rocks, part of the western half
of the crescent cove.
Afterward they drank their mango lassis in the pool, guarded by a huge grinning wooden pig with a medallioned collar and a crown behind its ears.
“He’s smiling,” Moira said, “because I paid homage to our suckling pig.”
They swam laps, then came together at the end of the pool overhung by a magnificent frangipani tree with its buttery white
and yellow blossoms. Beneath its leafy branches, they held each other, watching the moon move in and out of gathering clouds.
A gust of wind clattered the fronds of the thirty-foot palms that lined the beach side of the pool deck, and their legs went
from pale to dark.
“It’s almost over, Jason.”
“What is?”
“This.” Moira wriggled her hand under the water like a fish. “All of this. In a few days we’ll be gone.”
He watched the moon wink out, felt the first fat drops on his face. A moment later, rain goose-fleshed the skin of the pool.
She put her head back against his shoulder, deeper into the shadow of the frangipani. “And what will become of us?”
He knew she didn’t want an answer, wanted only to taste the thought on her tongue. He could feel the weight of her, her warmth
through the water, against his heart. It was a good weight; it made him drowsy.
“Jason, what will you do when we get back?”
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I haven’t thought about it.” But he wondered now whether he would leave with her. How
could he when something from his past was waiting for him here, so close he could feel its breath on the back of his neck?
He said nothing of this, however, because it would require an explanation, and he had none. Just a feeling. And how many times
had this feeling saved his life?
“I’m not going back to NextGen,” she said.
His attention returned fully to her. “When did you come to that decision?”
“While we were here.” She smiled. “Bali has a way of opening the path to decisions. I came here just before I joined Black
River. It seems to be an island of transformations, at least for me.”
“What will you do?”
“I want to start my own risk management firm.”
“Nice.” He smiled. “In direct competition with Black River.”
“If you want to look at it that way.”
“Other people will.”
It was raining harder now; the palm fronds clashed against one another, and it was impossible to see the sky.
“That could be dangerous,” he added.
“Life is dangerous, Jason, like anything governed by chaos.”
“I can’t argue with that. But there’s your old boss, Noah Petersen.”
“That’s his ops name. His real name is Perlis.”
Bourne glanced up at the white flowers, which now began to fall all around them like snow. The sweet scent of frangipani mingled
with the fresh smell of the rain.
“Perlis was none too happy with you when we ran into him in Munich two weeks ago.”
“Noah’s never happy.” Moira snuggled deeper into his arms. “I gave up trying to please him six months before I quit Black
River. It was a fool’s game.”
“The fact remains that we were right about the terrorist attack on the liquid natural gas tanker and he was wrong. I’m willing
to bet he hasn’t forgotten. Now that you’re encroaching on his territory you’ll have made an enemy.”
She laughed softly. “You should talk.”
“Arkadin’s dead,” Bourne said soberly. “He took a header off the LNG tanker into the Pacific off Long Beach. He didn’t survive;
no one could.”
“He was a product of Treadstone, isn’t that what Willard told you?”
“According to Willard, who was there, Arkadin was Alex Conklin’s first success—and his first failure. He was sent to Conklin by Semion Icoupov, the co-head of the Black Legion and the Eastern Brotherhood until
Arkadin killed him for shooting his girlfriend.”
“And his secret partner, Asher Sever, your former mentor, is in a permanent coma.”
“We all get what we deserve, in the end,” Bourne said bitterly.
Moira returned to the subject of Treadstone. “According to Willard, Conklin’s aim was to create a superior warrior—a fighting
machine.”
“That was Arkadin,” Bourne said, “but he escaped the Treadstone program back to Russia, where he got up to all sorts of mayhem,
hiring himself out to the heads of various Moscow grupperovka.”
“And you became his successor—Conklin’s success story.”
“Not if you poll CI’s directorate chiefs,” Bourne said. “They would shoot me dead as soon as look at me.”
“That hasn’t stopped them from coercing you into working for them when they needed you.”
“That’s all over with,” Bourne said.
Moira had just decided to change the subject when the power failed. The lights in the pool and within the open-air beach club
itself winked out. The wind and the rain remained swirling in the darkness. Bourne tensed, tried to move her away so he could
get up. She could sense him questing in the darkness for the source of the outage.
“Jason,” she whispered, “it’s all right. We’re safe here.”
He moved them through the water from where they had been sitting to the other side of the pool. She could feel his accelerated
heartbeat, his heightened sense of awareness, of waiting for something terrible to happen, and in that instant she was given
an insight into his life she’d never had before.
She wanted to tell him again not to worry, that power outages happened all the time on Bali, but now she knew it would be
useless. He was hardwired for this kind of reaction; nothing she could say or do would change that.
She listened to the wind and the rain, wondering if he heard anything that she didn’t. For an instant she felt a stab of anxiety:
What if this wasn’t a simple power outage? What if they were being stalked by one of Jason’s enemies?
All at once, power was restored, causing her to laugh at her foolishness. “I told you,” she said, pointing to the smiling
carved pig spirit. “He’s protecting us.”
Bourne lay back in the water. “There’s no escape,” he said. “Even here.”
“You don’t believe in spirits, good or evil, do you, Jason?”
“I can’t afford to,” he said. “I come across enough evil as it is.”
Picking up on his tone, Moira at last broached the subject closest to her heart. “I’m going to have to do some heavy recruiting
right off the bat. It’s certain we’ll see a lot less of each other, at least until I set up my new shop.”
“Is that a warning or a promise?”
He couldn’t help noting that her laughter had a brittle edge to it. “Okay, I was nervous about bringing it up.”
“Why?”
“You know how it is.”
“Tell me.”
She turned in his arms, sat straddling him in the dimpled water. The rush of the rain through
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
The Bourne Deception
Eric Van Lustbader
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
