Текст книги "The Bourne Sanction (Санкция Борна)"

Автор книги: Eric Van Lustbader

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She tried to draw her gun, but she was also trying to guide the bulldozer, and Bourne

easily slapped the weapon away. It fell to the foot well, where he kicked it away from

her. Then he reached over, turned off the engine. The moment he did that, the woman

covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

This is your mess,” Deron said.

Soraya nodded. “I know it is.”

“You came to us-Kiki and me.”

“I take full responsibility.”

“I think in this case,” Deron said, “we have to share the responsibility. We could’ve

said no, but we didn’t. Now all of us-not just Tyrone and Jason-are in serious jeopardy.”

They were sitting in the den of Deron’s house, a cozy room with a wraparound sofa

that faced a stone fireplace and, above it, a large plasma TV. Drinks were set out on a low wooden table, but nobody had touched them. Deron and Soraya sat facing each other.

Kiki was curled up in the corner like a cat.

“Tyrone’s already totally fucked,” Soraya said. “I saw what they’re doing to him.”

“Hold on.” Deron sat forward. “There’s a difference between perception and reality.

Don’t let them skullfuck you. They’re not going to risk damaging Tyrone; he’s their only

leverage to coerce you to bring Jason to them.”

Soraya, once again finding fear scattering her thoughts, reached over and poured

herself a scotch. Rolling it around in the glass, she inhaled its complex aroma, which

called to mind heather and butterscotch. She recalled Jason telling her how sights, scents, idioms, or tones of voice could trigger his hidden memories.

She took a sip of the scotch, felt it ignite a stream of fire down to her stomach. She

wanted to be anywhere but here now; she wanted another life; but this was the life she’d

chosen, these were the decisions she’d made. There was no help for it-she could not

abandon her friends; she had to keep them safe. How to do that was the vexing question.

Deron was right about LaValle and Kendall. Taking her back down to the interrogation

room was a psychological ploy. What they’d showed her was minimal, now that she

thought about it. They were counting on her to imagine the worst, to let those thoughts

prey on her until she gave in, called Jason so they could take him into custody and, like a show dog, present him to the president as proof that, having accomplished what

numerous CI initiatives could not, LaValle deserved to take over and run CI.

She took another sip of scotch, aware that Deron and Kiki were silent, patiently

waiting for her to work through the mistake she’d made and, coming through the other

side, put it behind her. But she had to take the initiative, to formulate a plan of

counterattack. That was what Deron meant when he said, This is your mess.

“The thing to do,” she said, slowly and carefully, “is to beat LaValle at his own game.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” Deron said.

Soraya stared down at the dregs of her scotch. That was just it, she had no idea.

The silence stretched out, growing thicker and more deadly by the second. At last, Kiki

uncurled herself, stood up, and said, “I for one have had enough of this gloom and doom.

Sitting around feeling angry and frustrated isn’t helping Tyrone and it isn’t helping us

find a solution. I’m going out to have a good time at my friend’s club.” She looked from

Soraya to Deron and back again. “So who’s going to join me?”

The high-low wail of the police sirens came to Bourne as he sat beside the museum

guard in the bulldozer. Up close, she looked younger than he had imagined. Her blond

hair, which had been pulled back in a severe bun, had come loose. It flowed down around

her pale face. Her eyes were large and liquid-red around the rims now from crying. There

was something about them that made him think she’d been born sad.

“Take off your jacket,” he said.

“What?” The guard appeared totally confused.

Without saying anything, Bourne helped her off with her jacket. Pushing up the sleeves

of her shirt, he checked the insides of her elbows, but found no Black Legion tattoo.

Naked fear had joined the sadness in her eyes.

“What’s your name?” he said softly.

“Petra-Alexandra Eichen,” she said in a quavery voice. “But everyone calls me Petra.”

She wiped at her eyes, and gave him a sideways look. “Are you going to kill me now?”

The police sirens were very loud, and Bourne had a desire to get as far away from them

as possible.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I…” Her voice faltered and she choked, it seemed, on her own words, or on

an emotion welling up. “I shot your friend.”

“Why did you do that?”

“For money,” she said. “I need money.”

Bourne believed her. She didn’t act like a professional; she didn’t talk like one, either.

“Who paid you?”

Fear distorted her expression, magnified her eyes until they seemed to goggle at him.

“I… I can’t tell you. He made me promise, he said he’d kill me if I opened my mouth.”

Bourne heard raised voices, using the clipped jargon endemic to police the world over.

They’d started their dragnet. He retrieved her gun, a Walther P22, the small caliber being

the only option for a silent kill in an enclosed space, even with a suppressor.

“Where’s the suppressor?”

“I threw it down a storm drain,” she said, “as I was instructed to do.”

“Continuing to follow orders isn’t going to help. The people who hired you are going

to kill you anyway,” he said as he dragged her down from the bulldozer. “You’re in way

over your head.”

She gave a little moan and tried to break away from him.

He grabbed her. “If you want, I’ll let you go straight to the cops. They’ll be here any

minute.”

Her mouth worked, but nothing intelligible came out.

Voices came to him, more distinct now. The police were on the other side of the

corrugated wall. He pulled her in the opposite direction. “Do you know another way out

of here?”

Petra nodded, pointing. She and Bourne ran diagonally across the yard, dodging heavy

equipment as they picked their way through the rubble and around deep holes in the

earth. Without turning around, Bourne could tell that the cops had entered the far side of

the yard. He pushed Petra’s head down as he himself bent over to keep them both from

being spotted. Beyond a crane, a crew chief’s trailer was set up on concrete blocks.

Temporary electric lines were strung into it from just above the tin roof.

Petra threw herself headlong under the trailer, and Bourne followed. The blocks set the

trailer just high enough for them to worm their way on their bellies to the far side, where Bourne saw that a gap had been cut in the chain-link fence.

Crawling through the gap, they found themselves in a quiet alley filled with industrial-

size garbage bins and a Dumpster filled with broken tiles, jagged blocks of terrazzo, and

pieces of twisted metal, no doubt from whatever buildings had once stood in the now

empty space behind them.

“This way,” Petra whispered as she took them out of the alley and down a residential

street. Around the corner, she went to a car and opened it with a set of keys.

“Give me the keys,” Bourne said. “They’ll be looking for you.”

He caught them in midair, and they both got in. A block away they passed a cruising

police car. The sudden tension caused Petra’s hands to tremble in her lap.

“We’re going right past them,” Bourne said. “Don’t look at them.”

Nothing further passed between them until Bourne said, “They’ve turned around.

They’re coming after us.”

Thirty-Three

I’M GOING to drop you off somewhere,” Arkadin said. “I don’t want you in the

middle of whatever’s going to come.”

Devra, in the passenger’s seat of the rented BMW, shot him a skeptical look. “That

doesn’t sound like you at all.”

“No? Who does it sound like?”

“We still have to get Egon Kirsch.”

Arkadin turned a corner. They were in the center of the city, a place filled with old

cathedrals and palaces. The place looked like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

“There’s been a complication,” he said. “The opposition’s king has entered the chess

match. His name is Jason Bourne and he’s here in Munich.”

“All the more reason why I should stay with you.” Devra checked the action on one of

the two Lugers that Arkadin had picked up from one of Icoupov’s local agents. “A

crossfire has many benefits.”

Arkadin laughed. “There’s no lack of fire to you.”

That was another thing that drew him to her-she wasn’t afraid of the male fire burning

in her belly. But he had promised her-and himself-that he would protect her. It had been a

very long time since he’d said that to anyone, and even though he’d sworn never to make

that promise again, he’d done just that. And strange to say, he felt good about it; in fact, there was a sense now when he was around her that he’d stepped out of the shadows he’d

been born into, that had been tattooed into his flesh by so many violent incidents. For the first time in his life he felt as if he could take pleasure in the sun on his face, in the wind lifting Devra’s hair behind her like a mane, that he could walk down the street with her

and not feel as if he was living in another dimension, that he hadn’t just arrived here from another planet.

As they stopped at a red light, he glanced at her. Sunlight was streaming into the

interior, turning her face the palest shade of pink. At that precise moment he felt

something rush out of him and into her, and she turned as if she felt it, too, and she

smiled at him.

The light turned green and he accelerated through the cross street. His cell phone

buzzed. A glance down at the number of the incoming call told him that Gala was calling.

He didn’t answer; he had no wish to talk to her now, or ever, for that matter.

Three minutes later, he received a text message. It read: MISCHA DEAD. KILLED

BY JASON BOURNE.

Having followed Rodney Feir and General Kendall over the Key Bridge into

Washington proper, Rob Batt made sure his long-lens SLR Nikon was fully loaded with

fast film. He shot a series of digital photos with a compact camera, but these were only

for reference, because they could be Photoshopped in a heartbeat. To forestall any

suspicion that the images might be manipulated, he’d present the undeveloped roll of film

to… well, this was his real problem. For a legitimate reason he was persona non grata at

CI. It was astonishing how quickly years-long associations vanished. But now he realized

he’d mistaken the camaraderie he’d developed with what had been his fellow directors

for friendship. As far as they were concerned he no longer existed, so going to them with

any alleged evidence that the NSA had turned yet another CI officer would be either

ignored or laughed at. Trying to approach Veronica Hart was similarly out of the

question. Assuming he could ever get to her-which he doubted-speaking to her now

would be like groveling. Batt had never groveled in his life, and he wasn’t going to now.

Then he laughed out loud at how easy it was to become self-deluded. Why should any

of his former colleagues want anything to do with him? He’d betrayed them, abandoned

them for the enemy. If he were in their shoes-and how he wished he were!-he’d feel the

same venomous animosity toward someone who’d sold him out, which was why he’d

embarked on this mission to destroy LaValle and Kendall. They’d sold him out-hung him

out to dry as soon as it suited their purposes. The moment he came on board, they’d taken

control of Typhon away from him.

Venomous animosity. That was an excellent phrase, he thought, one that precisely

defined his feelings toward LaValle and Kendall. He knew, deep down, that hating them

was the same as hating himself. But he couldn’t hate himself; that was self-defeating. At

this very moment he couldn’t believe he’d sunk so low as to defect to the NSA. He’d

gone through his line of thinking over and over, and now it seemed to him as if someone

else, some stranger, had made that decision. It hadn’t been him, it couldn’t have been

him, ergo, LaValle and Kendall had made him do it. For that they had to pay the ultimate

price.

The two men were on the move again, and Batt headed out after them. After a ten-

minute drive, the two cars ahead of him pulled into the crowded parking lot of The Glass

Slipper. As Batt passed by, Feir and Kendall got out of their respective cars and went

inside. Batt drove around the block, parked on a side street. Reaching into the glove

compartment, he took out a tiny Leica camera, the kind used by the Old Man in his

youthful days of surveillance. It was the old spy standby, as dependable as it was easy to

conceal. Batt loaded it with fast film, put it in the breast pocket of his shirt along with the digital camera, and got out of the car.

The night was filled with a gritty wind. Refuse spiraled up from the gutter, only to

come to rest in a different place. Jamming his hands in his coat pockets, Batt hurried

down the block and into The Glass Slipper. A slide guitarist was up on stage, wailing the

blues, warming up for the feature act, a high-powered band with several hit CDs under its

belt.

He’d heard about the club by reputation only. He knew, for instance, that it was owned

by Drew Davis, primarily because Davis was a larger-than-life character who continually

inserted himself into the political and economic affairs of African Americans in the

district. Thanks to his influence, homeless shelters had become safer places for their

residents, halfway houses had been built; he made it a point to hire ex-cons. He was so

cannily public about these hirings that the ex-cons had no choice but to make the most of

their second chances.

What Batt didn’t know about was the Slipper’s back room, so he was puzzled when,

after a full circuit of the space, plus an expedition to the men’s room, he could find no

trace of either Feir or the general.

Fearing that they’d slipped out the back, he returned to the parking lot, only to find

their cars where they’d left them. Back in the Slipper, he took another trip through the

crowd, figuring he must have missed them somehow. Still, there was no sign, but as he

neared the rear of the space he spotted someone talking to a muscled black man the

approximate size of a refrigerator. After a small bout of jawing, Mr. Muscle opened a

door Batt hadn’t noticed before, and the man slipped through. Guessing this was where

Feir and Kendall must have gone, Batt edged his way toward Mr. Muscle and the door.

It was then that he saw Soraya walk through the front door.

Bourne almost stripped the car’s gears trying to outrun the police car on their tail.

“Take it easy,” Petra said, “or you’ll tear my poor car apart.”

He wished he’d taken a longer look at the map of the city. A street blocked off with

wooden sawhorses flashed by on their left. The paving had been torn up, leaving the

heavily pitted and cracked underlayer, the worst parts of which were in the process of

being excavated.

“Hold on tight,” Bourne said as he reversed, then turned into the street and drove the

car through the sawhorses, cracking one and scattering the others. The car hit the

underlayer, jounced down the street at what seemed a reckless speed. It felt as if the

vehicle were being machine-gunned by a pile driver. Bourne’s teeth rattled in his head,

and Petra struggled to keep from crying out.

Behind them, the police car was having even more difficulty keeping to a straight path.

It jerked back and forth to avoid the deepest of the holes gouged in the roadbed. Putting

on another burst of speed, Bourne was able to lengthen the distance between them. But

then he glanced ahead. A cement truck was parked crosswise at the other end of the

street. If they kept going there was no way to avoid crashing into it.

Bourne kept the speed on as the cement truck loomed larger and larger. The police car

was coming up fast behind them.

“What are you doing?” Petra screamed. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

At that moment, Bourne threw the car into neutral, stepped on the brake. He

immediately changed into reverse, took his foot off the brake, and pressed the gas pedal

to the floor. The car shuddered, its engine screaming. Then the transmission locked into

place, and the car flew backward. The police car came on, its driver frozen in shock.

Bourne swerved around it as the vehicle raced forward into the side of the cement truck.

Bourne wasn’t even looking. He was busy steering the car back down the street in

reverse. Blasting past the shattered sawhorses, he turned, braked, put the car into first,

and drove off.

What the hell are you doing here?” Noah said. “You should be on your way to

Damascus.”

“I’m due to take off in four hours.” Moira put her hands in her pockets so he wouldn’t

see that they were curled into fists. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Noah sighed. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

Her laugh had a bitter taste to it. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Because,” Noah said, “you’ve been with Black River long enough to know how we

operate.”

They were walking down Kaufingerstrasse in the center of Munich, a heavily

trafficked area just off the Marienplatz. Turning in at the sign for the Augustiner

Bierkeller, they entered a long, dim cathedral-like space that smelled powerfully of beer

and boiled wurst. The hubbub of noise was just right for masking a private conversation.

Crossing the red flagstone floor, they chose a table in one of the rooms, sat on wooden

benches. The person closest to them was an old man sucking on a pipe while he leisurely

read the paper.

Moira and Noah both ordered a Hefeweizen, a wheat beer still clouded with unfiltered

yeast, from a waitress dressed in the regional Dirndlkleid, a long, wide skirt and low-cut

blouse. She had an apron around her waist, along with a decorative purse.

“Noah,” Moira said when the beers had been served, “I don’t hold any illusions about

why we do what we do, but how do you expect me to ignore this intel I got right from the

source?”

Noah took a long draw of his Hefeweizen, fastidiously wiped his lips before

answering. Then he began to tick off points on his fingers. “First, this man Hauser told

you that the flaw in the software is virtually undetectable. Second, what he told you isn’t verifiable. He might simply be a disgruntled employee trying to get revenge on Kaller

Steelworks. Have you considered that possibility?”

“We could run our own tests on the software.”

“No time. There’s less than two days before the LNG tanker is scheduled to dock at the

terminal.” He continued ticking off points. “Third, we couldn’t do anything without

alerting NextGen, who would then turn around and confront Kaller Steelworks, which

would put us in the middle of a nasty situation. And, fourth and finally, what part of the

sentence We’ve officially notified NextGen that we’ve withdrawn from the project do you

not understand?”

Moira sat back for a moment and took a deep breath. “This is solid intel, Noah. It could

lead to the situation we were most worried about: a terrorist attack. How can you-”

“You’ve already taken several steps over the line, Moira,” Noah said sharply. “Get

your tail on that plane and your head into your new assignment, or you’re through at

Black River.”

It’s better for the moment that we don’t meet,” Icoupov said.

Arkadin was seething, barely holding down his rage, and only then because Devra,

canny witch that she was, dug her fingernails into the palm of his hand. She understood

him; no questions, no probing, no trying to pick over his past like a vulture.

“What about the plans?” He and Devra were sitting in a miserable, smoke-filled bar, in

a run-down part of the city.

“I’ll pick them up from you now.” Icoupov’s voice sounded thin and far away over the

cell phone, even though there could be only a mile or two separating them. “I’m

following Bourne. I’m going after him myself.”

Arkadin didn’t want to hear it. “I thought that was my job.”

“Your job is essentially over. You have the plans and you’ve terminated Pyotr’s

network.”

“All except Egon Kirsch.”

“Kirsch has already been disposed of,” Icoupov said.

“I’m the one who terminates the targets. I’ll give you the plans and then take care of

Bourne.”

“I told you, Leonid Danilovich, I don’t want Bourne terminated.”

Arkadin made an anguished animal sound under his breath. But Bourne has to be

terminated, he thought. Devra dug her claws deeper into his flesh, so that he could smell

the sweet, coppery scent of his own blood. And I have to do it. He murdered Mischa.

“Are you listening to me?” Icoupov said sharply.

Arkadin stirred within his web of rage. “Yes, sir, always. However, I must insist that

you tell me where you’ll be when you accost Bourne. This is security, for your own

safety. I won’t stand helplessly by while something unforseen happens to you.”

“Agreed,” Icoupov said after a moment’s hesitation. “At the moment, he’s on the

move, so I have time to get the plans from you.” He gave Arkadin an address. “I’ll be

there in fifteen minutes.”

“It’ll take me a bit longer,” Arkadin said.

“Within the half hour then. The moment I know where I’ll be intercepting Bourne,

you’ll know. Does that satisfy you, Leonid Danilovich?”

“Completely.”

Arkadin folded away his phone, disentangled himself from Devra, and went up to the

bar. “A double Oban on rocks.”

The bartender, a huge man with tattooed arms, squinted at him. “What’s an Oban?”

“It’s a single-malt scotch, you moron.”

The bartender, polishing an old-fashioned glass, grunted. “What does this look like, the

prince’s palace? We don’t have single-malt anything.”

Arkadin reached over, snatched the glass out of the bartender’s hands, and smashed it

bottom-first into his nose. Then, as blood started to gush, he hauled the dazed man over

the bar top and proceeded to beat him to a pulp.

I can’t go back to Munich,” Petra said. “Not for a while, anyway. That’s what he told

me.”

“Why would you jeopardize your job to kill someone?” Bourne said.

“Please!” She glanced at him. “A hamster couldn’t live on what they paid me in that

shithole.”

She was behind the wheel, driving on the autobahn. They had already passed the

outskirts of the city. Bourne didn’t mind; he needed to stay out of Munich himself until

the furor over Egon Kirsch’s death died down. The authorities would find someone else’s

ID on Kirsch, and though Bourne had no doubt they’d eventually find out his real

identity, he hoped by that time to have retrieved the plans from Arkadin and be flying

back to Washington. In the meantime the police would be searching for him as a witness

to the murders of both Kirsch and Jens.

“Sooner or later,” Bourne said, “you’re going to have to tell me who hired you.”

Petra said nothing, but her hands trembled on the wheel, an aftermath of their

harrowing chase.

“Where are we going?” Bourne said. He wanted to keep her engaged in conversation.

He felt that she needed to connect with him on some personal level in order to open up.

He had to get her to tell him who had ordered her to kill Egon Kirsch. That might answer

the question of whether he was connected to the man who’d gunned down Jens.

“Home,” she said. “A place I never wanted to go back to.”

“Why is that?”

“I was born in Munich because my mother traveled there to give birth to me, but I’m

from Dachau.” She meant the town, of course, after which the adjacent Nazi

concentration camp had been named. “No parent wants Dachau to appear on their child’s

birth certificate, so when their time comes the women check into a Munich hospital.”

Hardly surprising: Almost two hundred thousand people were exterminated during the

camp’s life, the longest of the war, since it was the first built, becoming the prototype for all the other KZ camps.

The town itself, situated along the Amper River, lay some twelve miles northwest of

Munich. It was unexpectedly bucolic, with its narrow cobbled streets, old-fashioned street

lamps, and quiet tree-lined lanes.

When Bourne observed that most of the people they passed looked contented enough,

Petra laughed unpleasantly. “They go around in a permanent fog, hating that their little

town has such a murderous burden to carry.”

She drove through the center of Dachau, then turned north until they reached what

once had been the village of Etzenhausen. There, on a desolate hill known at the

Leitenberg, was a graveyard, lonely and utterly deserted. They got out of the car, walked

past the stone stela with the sculpted Star of David. The stone was scarred, furry with

blue lichen; the overhanging firs and hemlocks blocked out the sky even on such a bright

midwinter afternoon.

As they walked slowly among the gravestones, she said, “This is the KZ-Friedhof, the

concentration camp cemetery. Through most of Dachau’s life, the corpses of the Jews

were piled up and burned in ovens, but toward the end when the camp ran out of coal, the

Nazis had to do something with the corpses, so they brought them up here.” She spread

her arms wide. “This is all the memorial the Jewish victims got.”

Bourne had been in many cemeteries before, and had found them peculiarly peaceful.

Not KZ-Friedhof, where a sensation of constant movement, ceaseless murmuring made

his skin crawl. The place was alive, howling in its restless silence. He paused, squatted

down, and ran his fingertips over the words engraved on a headstone. They were so

eroded it was impossible to read them.

“Did you ever think that the man you shot today might have been a Jew?” he said.

She turned on him sharply. “I told you I needed the money. I did it out of necessity.”

Bourne looked around them. “That’s what the Nazis said when they buried their last

victims here.”

A flash of anger momentarily burned away the sadness in her eyes. “I hate you.”

“Not nearly as much as you hate yourself.” He rose, handed her back her gun. “Here,

why don’t you shoot yourself and end it all?”

She took the gun, aimed it at him. “Why don’t I just shoot you?”

“Killing me will only make matters worse for you. Besides…” Bourne opened up one

palm to show her the bullets he’d taken out of her weapon.

With a disgusted sound, Petra holstered her gun. Her face and hands looked greenish in

what light filtered through the evergreens.

“You can make amends for what you did today,” Bourne said. “Tell me who hired

you.”

Petra eyed him skeptically. “I won’t give you the money, if that’s what you’re angling

for.”

“I have no interest in your money,” Bourne said. “But I think the man you shot was

going to tell me something I needed to know. I suspect that’s why you were hired to kill

him.”

Some of the skepticism leached out of her face. “Really?”

Bourne nodded.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said. “You understand that.”

“You walked up to him, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.”

Petra looked away, at nothing in particular. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“Then you’re no better than anyone else in Dachau.”

Tears spilled over, she covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. The

sounds she made were like those Bourne had heard on Leitenberg.

At length, Petra’s crying jag was spent. Wiping her reddened eyes with the backs of

her hands, she said, “I wanted to be a poet, you know? I always equated being a poet with

being a revolutionary. I, a German, wanted to change the world or, at least, do something

to change the way the world saw us, to do something to scoop that core of guilt out of

us.”

“You should have become an exorcist.”

It was a joke, but such was her mood that she found nothing funny in it. “That would

be perfect, wouldn’t it?” She looked at him with eyes still filled with tears. “Is it so naive to want to change the world?”

“Impractical might be a better word.”

She cocked her head. “You’re a cynic, aren’t you?” When he didn’t answer, she went

on. “I don’t think it’s naive to believe that words-that what you write-can change things.”

“Why aren’t you writing then,” he said, “instead of shooting people for money? That’s

no way to earn a living.”

She was silent for so long, he wondered whether she’d heard him.

At last, she said, “Fuck it, I was hired by a man named Spangler Wald-he’s just past

being a boy, really, no more than twenty-one or two. I’d seen him around the pubs; we

had coffee together once or twice. He said he was attending the university, majoring in

entropic economics, whatever that is.”

“I don’t think anyone can major in entropic economics,” Bourne said.

“Figures.” Petra was still sniffling. “I have to get my bullshit meter recalibrated.” She

shrugged. “I never was good with people; I’m better off communing with the dead.”

Bourne said, “You can’t take on the grief and rage of so many people without being

buried alive.”

She looked off at the rows of crumbling headstones. “What else can I do? They’re

forgotten now. Here’s where the truth lies. If you omit the truth, isn’t that worse than a

lie?”

When he didn’t answer, she gave a quick twitch of her shoulders and turned around.

“Now that you’ve been here, I want to show you what the tourists see.”

She led him back to her car, drove down the deserted hill to the official Dachau

memorial.

There was a pall over what was left of the camp buildings, as if the noxious emissions

of the coal-fired incinerators still rose and fell on the thermals, like carrion birds still searching for the dead. An ironwork sculpture, a harrowing interpretation of skeletal

prisoners made to resemble the barbed wire that had imprisoned them, greeted them as

they drove in. Inside what had once been the main administrative building was a mock-up

of the cells, display cases of shoes and other inexpressibly sad items, all that was left of the inmates.

“These signs,” Petra said. “Do you see any mention of how many Jews were tortured

and lost their lives there? ‘One hundred and ninety-three thousand people lost their lives

here,’ the signs say. There’s no expiation in this. We’re still hiding from ourselves; we’re still a land of Jew-haters, no matter how often we try to stifle the impulse with righteous anger, as if we have a right to be the aggrieved ones.”

Bourne might have told her that nothing in life is as simple as that, except he deemed it

better to let her fury burn itself out. Clearly, she couldn’t vent these views to anyone else.