here, but not enough to break away to Moscow where he needed to go to grab life's richest opportunities. Outside, the rings of hell rose up: brick smokestacks, vigorously belching particle-laden smoke, iron guard towers of the brutal prison zonas, bristling with assault rifles, powerful spotlights, and bellowing sirens.
In here he was locked inside his own brutal zona with Stas Kuzin. Arkadin gave the only sensible answer. He said yes, and so entered the ninth level of hell.
Chapter Thirty-One
WHILE ON LINE for passport control in Munich, Bourne phoned Specter, who assured him everything was in readiness. Moments later he came in range of the first set of the airport's CCTV cameras. Instantly his image was picked up by the software employed at Semion Icoupov's headquarters, and before he'd finished his call to the professor he'd been identified.
At once Icoupov was called, who ordered his people stationed in Munich to move from standby to action, thus alerting both the airport personnel and the Immigration people under Icoupov's control. The man directing the incoming passengers to the different cordoned-off lanes leading to the Immigration booths received a photo of Bourne on his computer screen just in time to indicate Bourne should go to booth 3.
The Immigration officer manning booth 3 listened to the voice coming through the electronic device in his ear. When the man identified to him as Jason Bourne handed over his passport the officer asked him the usual questions-"How long do you intend to remain in Germany? Is your visit business or pleasure?"-while paging through the passport. He moved it away from the window, passed the photo under a humming purple light. As he did so, he pressed a small metallic disk the thickness of a human nail into the inside back cover of the passport. Then he closed the booklet, smoothed its front and back covers, and handed it back to Bourne.
"Have a pleasant stay in Munich," he said without a trace of emotion or interest. He was already looking beyond Bourne to the next passenger in line.
As in Sheremetyevo, Bourne had the sense that he was under physical surveillance. He changed taxis twice when he arrived at the seething center of the city. In Marienplatz, a large open square from which the historic Marian column ascended, he walked past medieval cathedrals, through flocks of pigeons, lost himself within the crowds of guided tours, gawping at the sugar-icing architecture and the looming twin domes of the Frauenkirche, cathedral of the archbishop of Munich-Freising, the symbol of the city.
He inserted himself in a tour group gathered around a government building in which was inset the city's official shield, depicting a monk with hands spread wide. The tour leader was telling her charges that the German name, M?nchen, stemmed from an Old High German word meaning "monks." In 1158 or thereabouts, the current duke of Saxony and Bavaria built a bridge over the Isar River, connecting the saltworks, for which the growing city would soon become famous, with a settlement of Benedictine monks. He installed a tollbooth on the bridge, which became a vital link in the Salt Route in and out of the high Bavarian plains on which Munich was built, and a mint in which to house his profits. The modern-day mercantile city was not so far removed from its medieval beginnings.
When Bourne was certain he wasn't being shadowed, he slipped away from the group and boarded a taxi, which dropped him off six blocks from the Wittelsbach Palace.
According to the professor, Kirsch said he'd rather meet Bourne in a public setting. He chose the State Museum for Egyptian Art on Hofgartenstrasse, which was housed within the massive rococo facade of the Wittelsbach Palace. Bourne took a full circuit of the streets around the palace, checking once more for tags, but he couldn't recall being in Munich before. He didn't have that eerie sense of d泄j邪 vu that meant he had returned to a place he couldn't remember. Therefore, he knew local tags would have the advantage of terrain. There might be a dozen places to hide around the palace that he didn't know about.
Shrugging, he entered the museum. The metal detector was staffed by a pair of armed security guards, who were also setting aside backpacks and picking through handbags. On either side of the vestibule was a pair of basalt statues of the Egyptian god Horus-a falcon with a disk of the sun on his forehead-and his mother, Isis. Instead of walking directly to the exhibits,