Robert Ludlum - Robert Ludlums The Bourne Deception (Jason Bourne)

By Robert Ludlum

The Bancroft Strategy

The Ambler Warning

The Tristan Betrayal

The Janson Directive

The Sigma Protocol

The Prometheus Deception

The Matarese Countdown

The Cry of the Halidon

The Apocalypse Watch

The Scorpio Illusion

The Road to Omaha

The Bourne Ultimatum

Trevayne

The Icarus Agenda

The Bourne Supremacy

The Aquitaine Progression

The Road to Gandolfo

The Parsifal Mosaic

The Bourne Identity

The Matarese Circle

The Holcroft Covenant

The Chancellor Manuscript

The Gemini Contenders

The Rhinemann Exchange

The Matlock Paper

The Osterman Weekend

The Scarlatti Inheritance

Written by Eric Van Lustbader

Robert Ludlums The Bourne Legacy

Robert Ludlums The Bourne Betrayal

Robert Ludlums The Bourne Sanction

Also by Eric Van Lustbader

NICHOLAS LINNEAR NOVELS

Second Skin

Floating City

The Kaisho

White Ninja

The Miko

The Ninja

CHINA MAROC NOVELS

Shan

Jian

OTHER NOVELS

First Daughter

The Testament

Art Kills

Pale Saint

Dark Homecoming

Black Blade

Angel Eyes

French Kiss

Zero

Black Heart

Sirens

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright 2009 by Myn Pyn, LLC

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: June 2009

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ISBN: 978-0-446-55148-9

Contents

For Jeff,

who started it all with one simple question.

Munich, Germany/Bali, Indonesia

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. Im 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. Well 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 eyespale, deep-set, unblinkingthat 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 Munichthe same precise shade of filthy gray as Karpovs eyesperfectly mirrored Secretary Hallidays 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-2s 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 Karpovs 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 Hallidays 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 hed been around long enough to understand that hope sometimes arrived in seemingly unpleasant forms, like a bed of nails. He was hoping Karpovs 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 hed find some further informationanything, 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 administrations 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 secretarys 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. Im just taking in with a sightseers bliss the particular atmosphere youve 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. Well 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 hed chosen. He didnt bother to wonder whether the Russian was aware of his political position, because it didnt matter. All that concerned him was whether the deal about to be proposed would help him.