The Bourne Dominion Read Free Page A

jealousies. Anyone holding back intelligence or personnel from Samaritan will be severely disciplined. Consider yourselves warned. Now go forth and multiply.”
    B oris Illyich Karpov broke the arm of one man and jammed his elbow into the eye socket of the second. Blood spurted and heads hung. Thestink of sweat and animal fear rose heavily from the two prisoners. They were bound to metal chairs bolted to the rough concrete floor. Between them was a drain, ominous in its circumference.
    “Repeat your stories,” Karpov said. “Now.”
    As newly appointed head of FSB-2, the Russian secret police arm built by Viktor Cherkesov from an anti-narcotics squad into a rival of Russia’s FSB, inheritor of the KGB’s mantle, Karpov was cleaning house. This was something he had longed to do for many years. Now, through a deal made in strictest confidence, Cherkesov had given him the chance.
    Karpov, leaning forward, slapped them both. The normal procedure was to isolate suspects in order to ferret out discrepancies in their answers, but this was different. Karpov already knew the answers; Cherkesov had told him all he needed to know about not only the bad apples in FSB-2—those on the take from certain
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families or what business oligarchs remained after the Kremlin crackdown of the last several years—but also the officers who would seek to undermine Karpov’s authority.
    No one was speaking, so Karpov stood up and exited the prison cell. He stood alone in the sub-basement of the yellow-brick building just down the road from Lubyanka Square, where the rival FSB was still headquartered, just as it had been since the time when it was overseen by the terrifying Lavrentiy Beria.
    Karpov shook out a cigarette and lit it. Leaning against a dank wall, he smoked, a silent, solitary figure, locked within thoughts of how he would redirect FSB-2’s energies, how he could build it into a force that would find permanent favor with President Imov.
    When his fingers began to burn he dropped the butt, ground it beneath his heel, and strode into the neighboring cell, where a rotten officer of FSB-2 sat, broken. Karpov hauled him up and dragged him into the cell with the two officers. The scuffling commotion caused them to lift their heads and stare at the new prisoner.
    Without a word, Karpov drew his Makarov and shot the man he was holding in the back of the head. The percussion was such that the bullet exited the brain through the forehead in a spray of blood and brainsthat spattered the two men bound to their chairs. The corpse pitched forward, sprawled between them.
    Karpov called out and two guards appeared. One carried a large reinforced black plastic lawn bag, the other a chain saw, which, at Karpov’s direction, he started up. A puff of oily blue smoke rose from the machine, and then the two men went to work on the corpse, beheading then dismembering it. On either side, the two officers looked down, unable to tear their eyes away from the grisly sight. When Karpov’s men were finished, they gathered up the pieces and dropped them into the lawn bag. Then they left.
    “He didn’t answer questions.” Karpov looked hard from one officer to the other. “His fate is your fate, most certainly, unless…” He allowed his voice to die off like smoke rising from a fire that was only just starting.
    “Unless what?” Anton, one of the officers, said.
    “Shut the fuck up!” Georgy, the other, snapped.
    “Unless you accept the inevitable.” Karpov stood in front of them, but he addressed Anton. “This agency is going to change—with you or without you. Think of it this way. You have been granted a singular opportunity to become part of my inner circle, to give me both your faith and your fealty. In return, you live and, quite possibly, you prosper. But only if your allegiance is to me and me alone. If it wavers so much as a little, your family will never know what happened to you. There won’t even be a body left to bury, to