Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(57)
Astonished, Savasin stood transfixed as the mountain played the piece with consummate skill and a tenderness impossible to comprehend coming from such a hulking creature.
“I see you’ve met Cerberus.”
At the sound of the smoky voice, Savasin tore himself away from the transfixing scene and turned his attention to the woman who, having stepped from behind a tree, now planted herself before a large artist’s easel. She held a brush in one hand, a palette in the other. Beside her was a paint-spattered stepladder whose top was an open case filled with tubes of oil paint and a can of turpentine, the time-tested old-school thinner of oils.
Even in her mid-fifties Ekaterina Orlova was a beautiful woman—pale, oval face, eyes of a blue akin to the deepest ocean, an aggressive nose, and wide lips, which were now turned up in an ironic smile.
“Timur Ludmirovich. Shall I say it’s good to see you? Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t.” She turned to regard the half-finished painting of a swimmer half submerged in what?—a pool, the sea? It was impossible to tell. Possibly that was the point. The swimmer was in her element and yet out of sight of land.
“The painting is lovely,” Savasin said, partly because he meant it, partly because he could think of nothing else to say. He had come all this way, fended off an attack, risen through the stench of an abattoir, and now what? He had conveniently forgotten how intimidating Ekaterina Orlova was. But perhaps that had been deliberate.
The artist, putting brush to canvas, said, “Tell me, Timur Ludmirovich, why have you come?” She wore a smock that once had been light-blue but now displayed all the colors of the rainbow, and some in between.
Savasin lifted the bottle. “I brought you a present.”
She laughed, a guttural, utterly erotic sound that came from deep in her throat. She turned. “Now I know you came to ask a favor.”
“Just to talk,” Savasin said, a touch too hastily.
That laugh again, making him feel things best not spoken of in the area below his belt. She set her brush in a smeared jar of colorless liquid and set the palette on the top of the stepladder. Then she crossed to the piano, where the mountain had placed Savasin’s Makarov. Expertly, she ejected the magazine, checked the number of bullets. Then she sniffed the business end. “Whom did you shoot?”
“No one of import.”
She smiled, her bared teeth like knives. “Your situation must be very, very bad for you to brave coming here, Timur Ludmirovich.”
“Well, I suppose it is.”
“Boris is dead.”
Her voice had abruptly turned cold as ice, sending a shiver down his spine. Plus, she still held the Makarov.
“‘The center cannot hold. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’”
She was quoting Yeats, though Savasin was too ignorant to know it. Never mind, the words sent another, deeper chill through him.
“I’m afraid you’re right, Ekaterina.”
“You did nothing to save him.” Her eyes flashed like warning lights. “You who had the means to stop—”
“No one could have stopped his murder.” This he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. “Not all his bodyguards, not all the FSB in attendance. Not even his best friend, Jason Bourne.”
At Bourne’s name, Ekaterina relinquished the icy rage with which she had been temporarily gripped. Unbuttoning the smock, she set it and the Makarov aside. She was wearing a pearl-colored silk blouse and black, wide-legged trousers of the same luscious material. Ekaterina had always known how to dress well. “Let me see.”
Savasin handed over the bottle of absinthe. Ekaterina, having read the label, said, “How on earth did you get this, Timur Ludmirovich? Not at GUM, I’ll warrant.” She meant the central department store on Dzerzhinsky Square.
“The same avenue where you buy your clothes. A private source.”
She nodded in acceptance. “Come,” she said, indicating a curved sofa clad in deep-purple velvet.
As if being directed by telepathy, the mountain ceased his playing, rose, and brought to the table in front of the sofa a pair of cut-glass cordial glasses that looked very old and very expensive. Having completed this task, he returned to the baby grand, taking up the reins of another Ravel piano piece, not nearly as sad as the first.
Savasin watched Ekaterina put the bottle aside, pour out glasses of vodka. The toast and draining of the vodka having been accomplished with the minimum of pomp, Savasin set down his glass and turned to his hostess.
“Ekaterina,” he said, “I’ve come to talk to you about Alyosha, your daughter.”
21
There followed a peculiar silence, the kind found in a graveyard at night. It was broken by a laugh from Keyre, like the trumpet of an elephant. He slapped his knee in mirth; he was grinning from ear to ear.
“You see, my dear Angelmaker, I was right all along. The story put about that the Bourne Initiative is the ultimate cyber weapon is so much smoke. And here before us is the only living human being who can confirm my suspicion. Which he has done.”
He leaned forward abruptly, elbows parked on his knobby knees. “Here is my second gift to you, Bourne. I’ve cleared up—well, one essential matter, anyway—why the Americans and the Russians are hot on your trail.”