The Bourne Objective

Book Two

12


IN THE ABSOLUTE stillness of inaction, the only sound was the whisper of gamblers losing money. Ottavio handed Bourne a pair of specially baffled earplugs, along with the whispered word: “Now.”
Bourne fitted the plugs into his ear canals. He saw what looked like a ball bearing palmed out of Ottavio’s pocket, held between the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand. Only its rough surface and the earplugs gave clues to what it might be: a USW, an ultrasonic weapon.
At that moment Ottavio let the USW drop to the floor, where it rolled across the slick marble squares toward the three Severus Domna agents standing between them and the green baize door. The USW activated as soon as it hit the floor, sending out an AFS, an area field of sound, that affected the inner ears of everyone in the room, causing them to collapse in waves of dizziness.
Bourne followed Ottavio past the tables, leaping over prone bodies. Donald and the other two bouncers were on the floor with the gamblers and the dealers, but as the scarred man stepped over a bouncer the man reached up and, pulling hard on the back of his jacket, toppled him backward, then struck him hard just above the right ear. Bourne sidestepped Ottavio’s falling body. As the bouncer rose, Bourne recognized him as the man patrolling the electronic gaming room; he wore earplugs to mute the rock music. They weren’t the kind Bourne and the scarred man were using, but they had dampened the field enough for him to overcome his disorientation.
Bourne slammed his fist into the bouncer’s side. The bouncer grunted, and when he turned, he held a Walther P99 in his hand. Bourne drove the edge of his hand down onto the bouncer’s wrist. He wrested the Walther away from him and swung its butt into the bouncer’s face, but he ducked away out of reach. Bourne drove him against the wall; the bouncer hit him hard on the right biceps and Bourne’s arm went numb. The bouncer, seeking to build on his advantage, drove his fist toward Bourne’s solar plexus, but Bourne deflected the blow, buying himself time to regain feeling in his right arm.
They fought savagely and silently in a room bizarrely filled with people slumped over the gaming tables or puddled on the floor like spilled Jell-O. Their soundless fury was a blur of intense motion in a room otherwise devoid of it, lending the vicious give-and-take of hand-to-hand combat an eerie quality, as if they were battling underwater.
Oxygenated blood was rushing back into Bourne’s right arm when the bouncer got himself inside Bourne’s defense and landed a powerful blow in the same spot. Bourne’s arm dropped as if it were made of stone, and he could see the grin of triumph informing the bouncer’s face. He feinted right, which didn’t fool the man, whose grin widened. Bourne’s left elbow connected with his throat, breaking the hyoid bone. The bouncer made an odd, clicking sound as he went down and stayed down.
By this time Ottavio had regained his feet and was shaking off the effects of the blow to his head. Bourne pulled open the door and, together, they went out into the casino’s main room, walking quickly but not fast enough to draw attention to themselves. The sonic field hadn’t penetrated here. Everything was moving at a normal pace, no one yet suspected what had happened in the Empire Suite, but Bourne knew it was just a matter of time before the head of security or one of the managers went looking for Donald or one of the other two bouncers.
Bourne tried to hurry them along, but the scarred man hung back.
“Wait,” he said, “wait.”
They had removed their earplugs and the scrapes and rustlings of the rarefied world around them plunged in on them like the roar of angry surf.
“We can’t afford to wait,” Bourne said. “We need to get out of here before—”
But it was already too late. A man with a ramrod-straight back and the clear no-nonsense air of authority was striding across the main room toward them. There were too many people around for a confrontation, nevertheless Bourne saw Ottavio heading toward the manager.
Bourne cut him off and, smiling broadly, said, “Are you the floor manager?”
“Yes. Andrew Steptoe.” He made an attempt to look over Bourne’s shoulder at the green baize door outside of which Donald should have been stationed. “I’m afraid I’m rather busy at the moment. I—”
“Donald said someone would call you over.” He took Steptoe’s elbow and, inclining his head toward him, said in a confidential whisper, “I’m in the middle of one of those high-stakes battles that come along once in a great while, if you understand me.”
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
Bourne turned him away from the door to the Empire Suite. “But of course you do, a mano-a-mano duel over the poker table, I know you do. It’s a matter of money, you see.”
Money was the magic word. He had Steptoe’s full attention now. Behind the manager’s back he could see the scarred man break out into a sly smile. He walked Steptoe closer and closer to the cashier, which was on the right side of the slots room, conveniently located near the entryway so that the clientele could buy chips on their way in and the occasional winners could cash out as they left—if they made it past all the other glittering lures the gambling profession threw at them.
“How much money?” Steptoe could not keep a note of greed out of his voice.
“Half a million,” Bourne said without hesitation.
Steptoe didn’t know whether to frown or lick his chops. “I’m afraid I don’t know you…”
“James. Robert James.” They were nearing the cashier’s cage and, by proximity, the front door. “I’m an associate of Diego Hererra’s.”
“Ah. I see.” Steptoe pursed his lips. “Even so, Mr. James, this establishment does not know you personally. You understand, we cannot put up such a large amount—”
“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant to imply.” Bourne feigned shock. “Rather I need your permission to leave the premises during the game in order to obtain the amount in question, so that I can remain in the game.”
Now the manager did frown. “At this time of night?”
Bourne radiated confidence. “A wire transfer can be effected. It will only take twenty minutes—thirty, at most.”
“Well, it’s highly irregular, don’t you know.”
“Half a million pounds, Mr. Steptoe, is a large amount of money, as you yourself pointed out.”
Steptoe nodded. “Quite so.” He sighed. “I suppose that under the circumstances it can be allowed.” He waggled a forefinger in Bourne’s face. “But be quick about it, sir. I can give you no more than half an hour.”
“Understood.” Bourne shook the manager’s hand. “Thank you.”
Then he and the scarred man turned, went up the steps, across the entryway, through the glass doors, and into the windswept London night.
Several blocks away, as they turned a corner, Bourne rammed the scarred man hard against the side of a parked car and said, “Now tell me who you are and why you killed Diego.”
As the scarred man reached for his knife Bourne gripped his wrist. “Let’s have none of that,” he said. “Give me answers.”
“I would never harm you, Jason, you know that.”
“Why did you kill Diego?”
“He’d been told to bring you to the club at a certain time tonight.”
Bourne remembered Diego looking down at his watch and saying, “Now’s the time to take ourselves to Knightsbridge.” An odd way to put it, except if this man was telling the truth.
“Who told Diego to bring me there?” But Bourne already knew.
“The Severus Domna got to him—I don’t know how—but they gave him precise instructions on how to betray you.”
Bourne remembered Diego picking at his food as if he had something important on his mind. Had he been anticipating the betrayal? Was Ottavio right?
The scarred man stared into Bourne’s face. “You really don’t know me, do you?”
“I told you I didn’t.”
“My name is Ottavio Moreno.” He waited a beat. “Gustavo Moreno’s brother.”
A tiny tremor of recognition raced through Bourne as the veils of his amnesia stirred and tried to part.
“We met in Morocco.” Bourne’s voice was barely a whisper.
“Yes.” A smile creased Ottavio Moreno’s face. “In Marrakech, we traveled into the High Atlas Mountains together, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good God!” Ottavio Moreno’s face registered surprise, perhaps even shock. “And the laptop? What about the laptop?”
“What laptop?”
“You don’t remember the laptop?” He grabbed Bourne by the arms. “Jason, come on. We met in Marrakech in order to get the laptop.”
“Why?”
Ottavio Moreno frowned. “You told me it was a key.”
“Key to what?”
“To the Severus Domna.”
At that moment they heard the familiar high–low wail of police sirens.
“The mess we left behind in the Empire Suite,” Moreno said. “Come on, let’s go.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Bourne said.
“But you must, you owe me,” Ottavio Moreno said. “You killed Noah Perlis.”
In other words,” Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday said as he scanned the report in front of him, “between retirements, normal attrition, and requests for transfer—all of which, I see, have been not only granted but expedited—a quarter of the Old Man’s CI has moved on.”
“And our own personnel have moved in.” DCI Danziger did not bother to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. The secretary appreciated confidence as much as he disliked indecision. Danziger took back the report and carefully folded it away. “It will be only a matter of months, I believe, before that number will increase to fully a third of the old guard.”
“Good, good.”
Halliday rubbed his large, square hands over the remnants of his Spartan lunch. The Occidental was abuzz with the jawing of politicos, reporters, flacks, power brokers, and industry influence peddlers. All of them had paid their respects to him in one circumspect manner or another, whether it was with a slightly terrified smile, an obeisant nod of the head, or, as in the case of the elderly and influential Senator Daughtry, a quick handshake and a down-home how-dee-do. Swing-state senators accumulated power even during non-election years, both parties seeking to curry favor. It was simply standard operating procedure inside the Beltway.
For some time, then, the two men sat in silence. The restaurant began to thin out as the denizens of the DC political pits straggled back to work. But soon enough their place was taken by tourists in striped shirts and baseball caps they’d bought from the vendors down by the Mall imprinted with CIA or FBI. Danziger returned to his lunch, which, as usual, was more substantial than Halliday’s unadorned strip steak. All that was left on the secretary’s plate were several pools of blood, clotted with congealed fat.
Across the table Halliday’s mind had drifted to the dream he couldn’t remember. He had read articles that dreams were a necessary part of sleep—REM sleep, the eggheads called it—without which a man would, eventually, go insane. On the other hand, it was certainly true that he couldn’t recall a single dream. His entire sleeping existence was a perfect blank wall on which nothing was ever scrawled.
He shook himself like a dog coming out of the rain. Why did he care? Well, he knew why. The Old Man had once confided in him that he suffered from the same strange illness—that’s what the Old Man called it, an illness. Strange to think that the two of them had once been friends, more than friends, come to think of it—what had they called it then? Blood brothers. As young men they had confided all their little tics and habits, the secrets that inhabited the dark corners of their souls. Where had it all gone wrong? How had they become the bitterest of enemies? It might have been the gradual divergence of their political views, but friends often dealt with disagreement. No, their separation had to do with a sense of betrayal, and in men such as they were, loyalty was the ultimate—the only—test of friendship.
The truth was they had betrayed what they had built as young men, as their idealism was burned away in the crucible of the nation’s capital, where they had both chosen to serve lifetime sentences. The Old Man had been an acolyte of John Foster Dulles while he had attached himself to Richard Helms—men with wildly divergent backgrounds, methodologies, and, most importantly, ideologies. And since they were in the business of ideology and that business was their life there was no recourse but to turn on each other, to try with every fiber of their being to prove the other wrong, to bring him down, to destroy him.
For decades the Old Man had outwitted him at every turn, but now the tables were turned, the Old Man was dead, and he had the prize he’d set his gaze on so long ago: control of CI.
Danziger clearing his throat brought Halliday back from the chasm of the past.
“Is there anything we’ve failed to cover?”
The secretary regarded him as a child studies an ant or a beetle, with the curiosity reserved for a species so far below him that it seemed inconceivably distant. Danziger was far from a stupid man, which was why Halliday had chosen him as his knight to move back and forth across the chessboard of the American clandestine services. But apart from his usefulness on the board, he viewed Danziger as entirely expendable. Halliday had closed himself off the moment he felt the Old Man’s betrayal. He had a wife and two children, of course, but he scarcely thought of them. His son was a poet—good Christ, a poet, of all things! And his daughter, well, the less said about her and her female partner the better. As for his wife, she had betrayed him as well, giving birth to two disappointments. These days, apart from formal functions where the strict code of Washington family values required her to be on his arm, they lived entirely separate lives. It had been years since they had slept in the same room, let alone the same bed. Occasionally they found themselves having breakfast together, a minor torture Halliday escaped as quickly as he could.
Danziger was leaning forward confidentially across the table. “If there’s anything I can help you with, you only have to—”
“I think you’ve confused me with a friend,” Halliday snapped. “The day I ask for your help is the day I put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”
He slid out of the booth and walked away without a backward glance, leaving Danziger to pay the check.
Alone for the moment while Boris Karpov slept inside the convent, Arkadin poured himself a mescal and took the drink out into the steamy Sonora night. Dawn would soon be scything through the stars, extinguishing them as it went. The shorebirds were already awake, flocking out of their nests to sweep along the beachfront.
Arkadin, breathing deeply of the salt and the phosphorus, punched in a number on his cell. The phone rang for a very long time. Knowing there would be no voice mail, he was about to hang up when a raspy voice sounded in his ear.
“Who in the unholy name of Saint Stephen is this?”
Arkadin laughed. “It’s me, Ivan.”
“Why, hello, Leonid Danilovich,” Ivan Volkin said.
Volkin had once been the most powerful man in the grupperovka. Unaffiliated with any family, he had for many years been a negotiator, both between families and between the bosses of certain families and the most corrupt businessmen and politicians. He was a man, in sum, to whom practically anyone in power owed favors. And though long retired, he had defied convention by becoming even more powerful as his age advanced. He was also particularly fond of Arkadin, whose strange ascent in the underworld he’d followed since the day Maslov had him brought to Moscow from his hometown of Nizhny Tagil.
“I thought you might be the president,” Ivan Volkin said. “I told him I couldn’t help him this time.”
The thought of the president of the Russian Federation calling Ivan Volkin for a favor caused Arkadin to chuckle all the more. “Pity for him,” he said.
“I did some digging regarding your problem as you outlined it to me. You do indeed have a mole, my friend. I was able to narrow the candidates down to two, but that’s as far as I was able to get.”
“That’s more than enough, Ivan Ivanovich. You have my undying gratitude.”
Volkin laughed. “You know, my friend, you’re just about the only person on earth I don’t want anything from.”
“I could give you virtually anything you want.”
“As I well know, but to tell you the truth it’s a relief to have someone in my life who owes me nothing and to whom I owe the same. Nothing changes between us, eh, Leonid Danilovich.”
“No, Ivan Ivanovich, it doesn’t.”
After Volkin had given Arkadin the names of the two suspects, he said, “I have one more bit of information that will be of interest to you. I find it curious that I cannot tie either of these suspects to the FSB or, for that matter, any Russian secret service whatsoever.”
“Then who is running the spy in my organization?”
“Your mole has been extremely careful to keep his identity a secret—he wears dark glasses and a sweatshirt with a hood over his head, so there’s no good photo of him. However, the man he’s been meeting has been identified as Marlon Etana.”
“Odd name.” It rang a bell deep inside Arkadin’s mind, but he was unable to access it.
“Odder still is that I cannot find a single scrap of information on Marlon Etana.”
“Ah, a pseudonym, surely.”
“One would have expected that, yes,” Volkin said. “However, that would mean a legend to give the pseudonym reality. I have found nothing, except that Marlon Etana is a founding member of the Monition Club, which has many branches throughout the world, but whose headquarters seems to be in Washington, DC.”
“A deep-cover arm of CI or one of the many Hydra heads of the American Department of Defense.”
Ivan Volkin made an animal sound deep in his throat. “When you find out, Leonid Danilovich, be sure to let me know.”
Be sure to let me know,” Arkadin had said to Tracy some months ago. “Anything and everything you find out about Don Fernando Hererra, even the most minute, seemingly irrelevant bit of information.”
“Including the regularity of his bowel movements?”
He sat watching her, his feral eyes glittering, not moving, not blinking. They were seated at a café in Campione d’Italia, the picturesque Italian tax haven tucked away in the Swiss Alps. The tiny municipality rose steeply off the glassy ultramarine-blue surface of a clear mountain lake, studded with vessels of all sizes from rowboats to multimillion-dollar yachts, complete with the helipads, the copters, and, on the largest of these, the females to go with them.
For the five minutes before she had arrived, Arkadin had been watching an obscenely large yacht on which two long-stemmed models preened as if for paparazzi. They had the kind of perfectly bronzed skin only the kept woman knows how to acquire. As he sipped a small cup of espresso, which was all but lost in his large, square hand, he thought, It’s good to be the king. Then he saw the naked hairy back of this particular king and turned away in disgust. You can take the man out of hell but you can’t take hell out of the man. This was the operative phrase for Arkadin.
Then Tracy had shown up and he forgot the hell of Nizhny Tagil that plagued him like a recurring nightmare. Nizhny Tagil was where he had been born and raised, where he’d lost three toes to rats when his mother had locked him in a closet, where he had killed and was almost killed so many times he’d lost count. Nizhny Tagil was where he had lost everything, where, one could say, he had died.
He had ordered Tracy an espresso with sambuca, which was what she liked. As he stared into her beautiful face, he continued to be confounded by his conflicting feelings. He was drawn to her, intensely, but he also hated her. He hated her erudition, her vast knowledge. Every time she opened her mouth she reminded him of how little formal education he’d had. And to make matters much worse, he learned something valuable every time he was with her. How often do we despise our teachers, who lord it over us with their superior knowledge, who throw that knowledge and their experience in our faces. Every time he learned something, he was reminded of how inexorably tied to her he was, how much he needed her. Which was why he treated her as a bipolar might. He loved her, rewarded her with more and more money at the completion of each assignment, showered her with gifts between assignments.
She had never slept with him. He hadn’t tried to seduce her, fearing that in the throes of passion his iron control might weaken, that he would grab her by the throat and throttle her until her tongue poked out and her eyes rolled up in her head. He would regret her death. Over the years she had proved indispensable. With the inside knowledge she had given him, he’d been able to blackmail her wealthy art clients, and those he chose not to suborn he used as patsies, delivering drugs all over the world secreted in the crates that held their precious artwork.
Tracy ran the crescent of lemon rind around the rim of her cup. “What’s so special about Don Fernando?”
“Drink your espresso.”
She stared down at her cup but didn’t touch it.
“What’s the matter?” he said at last.
“Let’s skip him, shall we?”
He waited a moment, quietly. Then, suddenly leaning forward, he grasped her knee beneath the table in an agonizing grip. Her head snapped up, her eyes engaged with his.
“You know the rules,” he said with soft menace. “You don’t question assignments, you take them.”
“Not this one.”
“All of them.”
“I like this man.”
“All. Of. Them.”
She stared at him, unblinking.
He despised most of all when she got like this, that enigmatic mask that came down over her face, making him feel like a dim-witted child who had failed to learn how to read properly. “Have you forgotten the damaging evidence I have on you? Do you want me to go to your client and tell him how you accommodated your brother when he stole your client’s painting to cover his debts? Do you really want to spend the next twenty years of your life in prison? It’s more terrible than you can imagine, believe me.”
“I want out,” she said in a strangled voice.
He had laughed. “God, you’re a stupid cow.” Once, just once, he thought, I’d like to make you cry. “There is no out. You signed on, a contract in blood, metaphorically speaking.”
“I want out.”
He sat back, releasing her knee. “Besides, Don Fernando Hererra is only a secondary target—at least, for now.”
She had begun to shake, very slightly, and there was a tic under her left eye. She took up her espresso and drained the cup. There was a slight clatter when she set it down.
“Who are you after?”
Close, this time, he thought. Very close. “Someone special,” he had said. “A man who calls himself Adam Stone. And this assignment is a bit different.” His hands had spread wide apart. “Adam Stone is not his real name, of course.”
“What is it?”
Arkadin’s smile held real malice. He turned his head and ordered them two more espressos.
Dawn was spreading its wings over Puerto Pe?asco as Arkadin’s brief flare of memory subsided into darkness. A freshening breeze off the water brought the scent of a new day. There had been women in his life—Yelena, Marlene, Devra, others, surely, though their names now escaped him—but no one like Tracy. Those three—Yelena, Marlene, and Devra—had meant something to him, though he’d be hard put to say precisely what. Each in her own way had changed the course of his life. Yet none had enriched it. Only Tracy, his Tracy. He clenched his fist. But she hadn’t been his Tracy, had she? No, no, no. Good Christ, no.
Rain drummed against the roof of the cottage, fat drops sliding down the windows. A rumble of approaching thunder. The lace curtains stirred. In the dead of night Chrissie lay fully dressed on one of the twin beds, staring at the window, speckled as a robin’s egg. Scarlett lay curled on the other bed, breathing evenly in her sleep. Chrissie knew she should be sleeping, that she needed her rest, but after the incident on the motorway her nerves would not stop singing. Several hours ago she had contemplated taking half a lorazepam to calm herself into sleep, but the thought of drifting off made her more anxious.
The singing of her nerves had only increased when she’d picked Scarlett up from her parents. Her father, always well attuned to her moods, had suspected something was up with her the moment he opened the door to her knock, and he was not convinced when she tried to reassure him that everything was fine. She could still see his thin, oblong face as he stood looking after her while she bundled Scarlett into the Range Rover. It was the same stricken look he’d had standing over Tracy’s coffin as it was lowered into the ground. As she got in behind the wheel, Chrissie breathed a sigh of relief that she’d had the foresight to park the SUV so that he couldn’t see the scrapes along one side. She waved cheerfully to him as she drove away. He was still standing in the doorway when she went around a curve and disappeared from his view.
Now, hours later and miles away, she lay on the bed in a house owned by a girlfriend who was away in Brussels on business. She’d been able to pick up the keys from the woman’s brother. In the dark she lay listening to all the tiny creaking and moaning, whispers and hissing of a strange house. The wind clawed at the window sashes, trying to find a way in. She shivered and pulled a blanket tighter around her, but the blanket didn’t warm her. Neither did the central heating. There was a chill in her bones, caused by her vibrating nerves, and the dread that stalked her thoughts.
“We were being followed, possibly all the way from Tracy’s flat,” Adam had said. “There’s no point in taking a chance these people know about Scarlett—and where your parents live, for that matter.”
The thought that these people who had wanted to shoot Adam might know about her daughter gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to feel safe here, wanted to believe that there was no danger now that she had separated herself from him, but the doubts continued to prey on her. Another roll of thunder, closer this time, and then another burst of rain rattled the windowpane. She sat up, gasping. Her heart was pounding, and she reached for the Glock that Adam had given her for protection. She had some experience with guns, though mostly rifles and shotguns. Against her mother’s objections, her father had taken her hunting on winter Sundays, when the frost was brittle and the sun was weak and drained of color. She remembered the quivering flank of a deer, and how she had flinched when her father had fired a shot into its heart. She remembered the look in its eye as her father had taken his skinning knife to its belly. Its mouth was half open as if it had been about to ask for mercy before it was shot.
Scarlett whimpered in her sleep, and Chrissie rose and, leaning over, stroked her hair as she always did when her daughter was having a bad dream. Why were children burdened with nightmares, she wondered, when there was so much time for nightmares in adult life? Where was the carefree childhood she’d had? Was it a mirage? Had she also had nightmares, night terrors, anxieties? She could not now remember, which was a blessing.
She knew one thing, though, Tracy would have laughed at her for even having such thoughts. “Life isn’t carefree,” she could hear her sister saying. “What are you thinking? Life is difficult, at best. At its worst, it’s a bloody nightmare.”
What would have led her to say such a thing? Chrissie asked herself. What misfortunes had befallen her while I had my head stuck in my Oxford texts? All at once she was overcome with the conviction that she had failed Tracy, that she should have seen the signs of her stress, her difficult life. But, really, how could she have helped her? Tracy had been lost in a world so distant, so alien, Chrissie was sure she would have found it incomprehensible. Just as she could make no sense of what had happened today. Who was Adam Stone? She had no doubt that he’d been friends with Tracy, but she suspected now that he was more—a compatriot, business partner, maybe even her boss. Something he hadn’t told her, hadn’t wanted to tell her. All she knew for certain was that her sister’s life had been a secret, and so was Adam’s. They had been part of the same alien world, and now all unknowing she had been dragged into it. She gave a shiver again and, seeing that Scarlett had quieted, lay beside her so that they were back-to-back. Her daughter’s warmth seeped slowly into her, her eyelids grew heavy, and she began to drowse, sinking slowly, inexorably into the delicious cushion of sleep.
A sharp noise startled her awake. For a moment she lay completely still, listening to the rain, the wind, Scarlett breathing along with the cottage. She listened for the noise. Had she dreamed it or had she been asleep at all? After what seemed a long time, she got out of Scarlett’s bed, reached over, and slid her hand under the pillow for the Glock. Padding silently toward the half-open bedroom door, she peered out at the wedge of pale light from the lamp she’d kept on in the bedroom across the hall so she and Scarlett could find the bathroom without barking their shins.
She moved into the hallway, listened fiercely. She became aware of sweat snaking down her sides from underneath her arms. Her breath felt hot in her throat. Every second that ticked by ratcheted up her anxiety, but also the hope that she had dreamed the noise. Gliding along the hallway, she peered down the stairs at the darkened living room. Standing at the head of the stairs, undecided, she had just about convinced herself that she’d been dreaming when she heard the small noise again.
Slowly she put one bare foot after the other as she descended from semi-darkness into blackness. She needed to get all the way down the stairs before she could reach the switch that turned on the living room lights. The staircase loomed before her, seeming steeper, more treacherous in the dark. Briefly she thought about going back upstairs to look for a flashlight, but felt that she might lose her nerve if she turned around now. She kept descending, tread by tread. They were of wood, polished to a high gloss, without the benefit of a runner. Once, she slipped and, pitching forward, almost lost her balance. Grabbing for the railing, she held on while her pulse beat wildly in her ears.
Calm down, she told herself. Just bloody well calm those nerves, Chrissie. There’s no one there.
The noise came again, louder this time because she was closer to it, and she knew: Someone was inside the house.
Just after sunset, on the day Karpov had begun his long trek back to Moscow, Arkadin and El Heraldo set off in the cigarette. Arkadin maneuvered the slender powerboat beyond the slips without running lights, which was illegal, but necessary. Besides, as he had quickly learned, in Mexico the line between legal and illegal moved more times than the front lines of a war. Not to mention the fact that what was illegal and what was enforceable were often at odds.
The cigarette’s powerful GPS system was deeply hooded, so that no illumination leaked out into the blue velvet of dusk. Stars had gathered in the eastern sky, eager to display their splendor.
“Time,” Arkadin said.
“Eight minutes,” El Heraldo replied, consulting his watch.
Arkadin altered their course by a couple of degrees. They were already past the perimeter of the policía patrols, but still he did not turn on any lights. The GPS screen told him everything he needed to know. The multi-baffled mufflers El Heraldo had installed on the exhaust were working to perfection; the cigarette made scarcely any noise as it skimmed over the water at high speed.
“Five minutes,” El Heraldo intoned.
“We’ll be in visual range in a moment.”
That was El Heraldo’s cue to take the wheel while Arkadin peered through a pair of military high-power night-vision binoculars toward the south.
“Got ’em,” he said, after a moment.
At once El Heraldo cut their speed by half.
Arkadin, peering through the binoculars at the oncoming boat—a yacht that must have cost upward of fifty million dollars—saw the infrared flashes, two long, two short, visible only to him.
“All’s well,” he said. “Full stop.”
El Heraldo cut the engines, and the cigarette cut through the swells on its own momentum. Dead ahead the yacht loomed up out of the darkness. It, too, had all its lights extinguished. As Arkadin prepared himself, El Heraldo put on the night goggles and manned the infrared beacon. The yacht was equipped with an identical beacon, which was how the two boats drew alongside each other without lights and without incident.
A rope ladder was unfurled over the yacht’s port side, and El Heraldo made it fast to the cigarette. A man, dressed in black, handed down a small carton. El Heraldo received it on his shoulder, then placed it on the cigarette’s deck.
Using a pocketknife, Arkadin slit the carton open. Inside were cans of prepackaged organic corn tortillas. Arkadin opened one, pulled out the roll of tortillas. Inside the roll were stacked four plastic-wrapped packages of a white powder. He stuck the blade of his knife into a packet and tasted its contents. Satisfied, he waved a prearranged signal to the crew member on the yacht. Inserting the bag of cocaine back into the can, he returned it to the carton, and El Heraldo lifted it up to the crewman.
A short whistle came from the yacht as the crewman vanished up the ladder, and Arkadin waited. Moments later two rather large bundles were lowered via a portable winch. The bundles, lying horizontal, were each perhaps six feet in length. They were cradled in a net as if they were a pair of tuna.
When the bundles reached the cigarette’s deck, El Heraldo rolled them off the net, which was immediately winched back up to the yacht. Then El Heraldo detached the rope ladder, which was also withdrawn.
Another whistle, longer this time, came from the yacht. Behind the wheel, El Heraldo started the engines, put the cigarette into reverse, and began to back away from the yacht. When they had reached an adequate distance, the yacht began to move forward, continuing its journey northward, up the coast of Sonora.
As El Heraldo turned the cigarette around, heading them east, back toward shore, Arkadin took up a flashlight and, squatting down, slashed the coverings at one end of the bundles. Then he shone the flashlight on what was inside.
The faces of the two men appeared pale in the light, except where their beards had started to grow. They were still groggy with the anesthetic they had been given when they had been abducted in Moscow. Nevertheless their eyes, which hadn’t seen light for some days, screwed up, watering unstoppably.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” Arkadin said, invisible behind the dazzle of the beam of light. “At last you have reached the end of your journey. For one of you, at least. Stepan, Pavel, you were two of my captains, two of my most trusted men. And yet one of you has betrayed me.”
He showed them how the light turned the blade of his knife into a white streak. “In the next hour or so one of you will confess and will tell me everything he knows about his betrayal. A quick, painless death will be his reward. If not… has either of you ever known anyone who has died of thirst? No? God help you, that’s not the way any human being should die.”
For an instant Chrissie froze, unsure what to do as her fight and flight responses warred with each other. Then she took a deep breath and thought about the situation rationally. Retreating wouldn’t help; she’d be trapped on the second floor, and whoever had invaded the cottage would be that much closer to Scarlett. Her only thought now was for her daughter. Whatever happened, she knew she had to keep her safe.
She took a tentative step down, then another. Five treads to go before she could flick the lights on. With her back to the wall, she slowly descended. The noise came again and she froze. It sounded as if someone had come in through the kitchen door and now moved into the living room. She raised the Glock, swinging it in a slow arc as she squinted into the gloom. But apart from the partial outline of the sofa and one wing of an armchair opposite the fireplace, she could make out nothing, certainly no movement, no matter how furtive.
Another step down, another step closer to the light switch. She was only one tread away from it now, her torso leaning forward, free hand outstretched when, with an indrawn gasp, she started back. Someone was close to her, at the bottom of the stairs. In a confused swirl she felt movement on the other side of the newel post, and she raised the Glock, aiming it.
“Who’s there?” Her voice startled her, as if it belonged to a dream or to someone else. “Stay where you are, I’ve got a gun.”
“Cookie, where in the bloody hell did you get a handgun?” her father said from out of the darkness. “I knew something was wrong. What’s going on?”
She flipped on the light and saw him standing there, his face pale and pinched with concern.
“Dad?” She blinked, as if she couldn’t believe it was really him. “What are you doing here?”
“Cookie, where’s Scarlett?”
“Upstairs. She’s sleeping.”
He nodded. “Good, let’s keep it that way.”
He gripped the barrel of the Glock and pushed it down to her side. “Now come on over here. I’ll light a fire, and you’ll tell me what sort of trouble you’re in.”
“I’m not in any trouble, Dad. Does Mum know you’re here?”
“Your mum is as worried about you as I am. Her way of dealing with things is to cook, which she’s doing right now. I’m meant to bring you and Scarlett back home with me.”
Like a sleepwalker, she came down off the stairs and into the living room. Her father was turning on lamps. “I can’t do that, Dad.”
“Why not?” He waved a hand. “Never mind, I didn’t think you would.” He stooped, putting some logs into the grate. Then he checked around. “Where are the matches?”
He padded into the kitchen. She could hear him pulling out drawers and rummaging through them.
“It’s not that I’m not grateful, Dad. But really, you’re an idiot for coming out here in the middle of the night. What did you do, follow me? And how did you get in here?” She followed him into the kitchen.
A callused hand came over her mouth and, at the same time, the Glock was wrenched out of her grip. A deep swirl of masculine scent. Then she saw her father lying unconscious on the floor and she began to struggle.
“Stay still,” a voice whispered in her ear. “If you don’t, I’ll take you upstairs and blow your daughter’s face off while you watch.”