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 Ludlum’s™ The Bourne Legacy
Robert Ludlum’s™ The Bourne Betrayal
Robert Ludlum’s™ 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 author‘s 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
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Book One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Book Two
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Book Three
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Book Four
31
32
33
34
35
For Jeff,
who started it all with one simple question.
Prologue
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. ―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.