The Bourne Objective

14


FREDERICK WILLARD SPENT eight straight hours connected to the Internet, trying and failing to find out who owned the Monition Club, what the organization did, where it got its money, and who its members were. During that time he took three breaks, two to use the bathroom and one to wolf down some very bad Chinese food he’d ordered online and had delivered. All around him workmen were renovating the new Treadstone offices, installing electronic equipment and specially designed soundproofed doors, and painting walls that the day before had been stripped of wallpaper.
Willard had the patience of a tortoise, but at last even he gave up. He spent the next forty minutes down on the street, walking around the block, clearing his head of paint fumes and plaster dust while he thought the situation through.
At the end of that time he returned to his office, printed out his résumé, and then went home to shower, shave, and dress in a suit and tie. He made sure his shoes were highly polished. Then, the résumé folded and tucked in his breast pocket, he drove to the Monition Club and parked in a nearby municipal underground lot.
There was a certain spring in his gait as he went up the stone steps and into the imposing lobby. The same woman manned the high desk in the center, and he went up to her and asked for the director of public relations.
“We have no director of public relations,” she said with an unsmiling face. “How may I help you?”
“I wish to see the person in charge of hiring personnel,” Willard said.
The woman looked at him dubiously for a moment, then she said, “We aren’t hiring.”
Willard put some honey into his voice and smiled. “Nevertheless, I would very much appreciate you telling whoever’s in charge that I would like to see him—or her.”
“You’d need to have a résumé with you.”
Willard produced it.
Eyeing it, the receptionist smiled and said, “Your name?”
“Frederick Willard.”
“One moment, Mr. Willard.” She dialed an internal extension and murmured into the microphone of her wireless headset. When she had disconnected she looked up at him and said, “Please have a seat, Mr. Willard. Someone will be out shortly.”
Willard thanked her, then walked back to the same bench where he and Peter Marks had waited for Oliver Liss. The receptionist went back to answering the phone and directing calls. Willard thought this system oddly antiquated. It appeared as if the personnel who worked at the Monition Club did not have direct phone lines.
This interested him, and he began to study the woman more closely. Though she was young and at first blush looked like the standard-issue receptionist, he was getting the sense that she was something altogether different. For one thing, she seemed to make the decision of whether or not he was going to get past her. For another, it looked as if she was vetting each call.
After thirty minutes or so a slim young man appeared through a door set flush with one of the wall panels. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray conservatively cut suit. His tie had what appeared to be a gold bar embroidered in its center. He went directly over to the receptionist and, bending forward slightly, spoke to her in a voice so low that even within the confines of the hushed lobby Willard could not hear what he said or what the receptionist replied.
Then he turned and, with a noncommittal smile on his face, approached Willard.
“Mr. Willard, please follow me.”
Without waiting for a reply, he turned on his heel. Willard went across the lobby. As he passed the receptionist’s desk, he saw her watching him.
The young man took him through the door and down a dimly lit, wood-paneled corridor. It was carpeted and decorated with paintings of medieval hunting scenes. They passed doors on either side. All of them were closed, and Willard could hear nothing at all inside. Either the offices were empty, which he doubted, or the doors were soundproofed—yet another anomaly for a workplace. At least, one that wasn’t part of the clandestine services.
At length, the young man stopped in front of a door on the left, knocked once, then opened the door inward.
“Mr. Frederick Willard,” the young man announced in a curiously formal manner as he stepped across the threshold.
Following him, Willard found himself not in an office but in a library, and a surprisingly large one, at that. Bookshelves lined three of the walls from floor to ceiling. The fourth wall was an immense picture window that looked out on a small but beautifully landscaped cloister garden with a central fountain in the Moorish style. It looked like something out of the sixteenth century.
In front of this window was a large refectory table of a thick, dark hardwood, polished to a high gloss. Seven high-backed wooden chairs were arranged at regular intervals around the table. In one sat a man with rounded shoulders, thick hair pushed back from his wide forehead in silver wings, and skin the color of honey. A large, very thick book was open in front of him, which he was studying with great concentration. Then he looked up, and Willard was confronted by a pair of piercing blue eyes, a large, hawk-like nose, and a hard smile.
“Come in, Mr. Willard,” he said, that hard smile fixed in place. “We’ve been expecting you.”
They use pleasure craft—very expensive yachts,” Contreras said.
“To go up and down the coast,” Soraya said.
“That’s the safest way to transport goods up from central Mexico, where they’re received from the Colombian cartels.”
The desert sky was huge, so chock-full of stars that in certain places the night seemed hazed an icy blue. The barest crescent of a moon hung low in the sky, giving off precious little illumination. Contreras checked the dial of his watch; it seemed he had the schedule of the patrolling migras down to a science.
They were crouched in the deep shadow thrown by a clump of sagebrush and a giant saguaro cactus. When they spoke it was in the barest of whispers. She followed the pollero’s lead so that, like his, her voice sounded no different than the dry desert wind.
“Your man is into drugs, count on it,” Contreras said. “Why else does a man like him want to sneak into Mexico?”
It was colder here than she had expected, and she shivered a little.
“Unless someone was meeting him, he would have gone straight to Nogales, stolen a car, and then headed due west to the coast.”
Soraya was about to reply when he put a forefinger to his lips. She listened, and a moment later she heard what had alerted him: the soft crunch of boot soles across the ground not far from them. When a spotlight was switched on Contreras didn’t even twitch, which meant he had been expecting it. The light swung in an arc, not at the area where they were hidden, but ahead of them, where the invisible border stretched, desolate and windblown. She heard a grunt, then the light was switched off and the sound of the boot soles faded away.
She was about to shift position when Contreras grabbed her and held her still. Even in the starry darkness she could feel his eyes glaring at her. She held her breath. A moment later the beam of blinding light re-ignited, sweeping a larger portion of the desert ahead. Then three shots exploded into the night, sending up tiny dust devils where the bullets impacted the earth.
She heard a brief gurgle, which might have been a laugh. The light was extinguished. Then all was stillness again, and the lonesome soughing of the wind reasserted itself.
Now we go, Contreras mouthed to her.
She nodded, following him on cramped legs as they skirted the clump of sagebrush and, circling to the right, dashed across the flat ground from the United States into Mexico. There was nothing at all to mark their transition from one country to another.
In the distance she heard the howl of a coyote, but couldn’t tell from what side of the border it came. A jackrabbit, springing out of their way, startled her. She found that her heart was racing, and there was an odd sort of singing in her ears, as if her blood were rushing too quickly through her veins and arteries.
Contreras led her forward at a steady pace, never stopping, never at a loss for direction. His confidence was absolute, and she felt secure within the circumference of it. It was an odd and slightly unsettling feeling, one that made her think of Amun, of Cairo, and of their time in the Egyptian desert. Could it have been just weeks ago? It seemed like such a long time since she’d seen him, and their text messages were becoming fewer and shorter as time went on.
The night was now starless, as profoundly dark as the bottom of the ocean, as if even hours from now there would be no dawn, no sun rising in the distant eastern sky. A sudden crack of thunder came to her, but it sounded far away, streaking through the sky of another country.
They walked for a long time, through a flat, monotonous landscape that seemed scarcely alive. At last, Soraya saw the glow of lights, and shortly thereafter Contreras led her into Nogales, Sonora.
“This is as far as I go,” the pollero said. He was looking not toward the lights, but out into the blackness of the eastern outskirts of town.
Soraya handed him the balance of his fee, and he pocketed it without counting it.
“The Ochoa has clean rooms, and the management doesn’t ask questions.” Then he spat casually between his dusty cowboy boots. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said.
She nodded, watching him head east toward an unknown destination. When the night had swallowed him up, she turned and walked until the dust turned to packed earth and then to streets and sidewalks. She found the Ochoa without difficulty. There was some kind of all-night festival going on. The central square was lit up; at one end a mariachi band played something fast and cacophonous, at the other booths were set up selling freshly made tacos and quesadillas. In between, crowds drifted or danced or staggered, drunk, yelling friendly curses at the musicians or anyone who would listen. Here and there a fight broke out, blood chants rose up. A horse whinnied and, snorting, stamped its hooves.
The lobby of the Ochoa was all but deserted. The night clerk, a small man with a wiry body and the face of a prairie dog, was watching a Mexican telenovela on a small portable TV with bad reception. He sat rapt in his airless cubicle, seeming not to notice. He scarcely glanced at Soraya, handing her a key when she paid the one-night price of the room, posted on a rate card above his head. He did not ask for her passport or any other form of identification. She could have been a mass murderer for all he cared.
Her room was on the second floor and, since she’d asked for quiet, in the back. There was, however, no air-conditioning. She opened the window wide and looked out. The room overlooked a dingy alleyway and a blank brick wall, the rear of another building, possibly a restaurant, judging by the long row of garbage cans lined up on one side of a doorway, closed off by only a screen door. A bare fluorescent bulb threw a sickly blue light over the garbage cans. The shadows were as purple as bruises. As she watched, a man in a heavily stained apron pushed open the screen and sat on one of the garbage can lids. He rolled a joint, stuck it in his mouth, and lit up. As he drew in the smoke, his eyes closed. She heard some noises. At one end of the alley a couple was having sex up against the wall. The cook, lost in his pot-induced reverie, ignored them. Maybe he didn’t even hear them.
She turned away from the window and checked out the room. As Contreras had told her, it was clean and neat, even the bathroom, thank God. Disrobing, she turned on the shower, waited for the water to turn hot, then stepped in, luxuriating in the heat, the grime and sweat sluicing off her. Slowly, her muscles lost their tension and she began to relax. All at once a wave of tiredness swept over her and she realized that she was exhausted. Stepping out of the shower, she gave her body a vigorous toweling off. The thin, rough terry turned her skin red beneath its dusky hue.
The shower had left the room stifling. With the towel held against her, she crossed to the window to catch the benefits of whatever fitful breeze was blowing. That’s when she saw the two men leaning against the wall of the restaurant. In the illumination cast by the fluorescent bulb she saw that one of them was checking something on his PDA. She ducked back behind the faded curtain an instant before the second man glanced up at her window. She could see his face, dark and closed as a fist. He said something to his companion, which made him look up at her window as well.
The Ochoa was no longer safe. She backed up, put on her dirty clothes, and went to the door. When she pulled it open, two men rushed in. One held her hands behind her back while the other put a cloth over her mouth and nose. She tried to hold her breath, tried to work herself free of the iron grip holding her fast. She could make no headway. This silent, futile fight went on for some minutes, her thrashing only depleting her lungs’ store of oxygen. Then, despite her willpower, her autonomic system took control and she took a breath, then another. A terrible smell invaded her, she tried to cry out. Tears came to her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. She tried to take a gulp of fresh air. Then the blackness rushed in and her body collapsed into her captors’ arms.
Arkadin saw the dorsal fin cutting through the water. Judging by its size, the shark was a large one, ten or twelve feet long. It was coming straight at the stern of the cigarette. Not surprising, considering the amount of blood in the water.
Arkadin had worked on Stepan for three hours and the man was a bloody wreck, curled on his side in a fetal position, weeping uncontrollably, blood from a thousand cuts dripping in pink rivulets as it mingled with the seawater on the deck.
Pavel had witnessed this interrogation—the bloodletting and, eventually, Stepan’s screams of innocence—and then it had been his turn. He had expected Arkadin to use his gutting knife on him, as he had on Stepan, but a key part of interrogation was surprise, the terror of the unexpected.
Arkadin had tied Pavel’s feet to the winch and had lowered him headfirst over the stern of the boat. He lengthened the time underwater with each plunge, so that by the end of the sixth or seventh Pavel was certain he was going to drown. Then Arkadin had cut him, slashing him under each eye. As the blood ran, he plunged Pavel back underwater. This had continued for perhaps forty minutes. Then the shark showed up. Pavel must have seen the shark. When El Heraldo hauled him up he looked mortally terrified.
Taking advantage of the weakness, Arkadin punched Pavel three times in rapid succession as hard as he could, breaking two or three of Pavel’s ribs. Pavel began to gasp, his breathing became painfully difficult. Responding to his boss’s signal, El Heraldo lowered Pavel back into the water. The shark nosed in, curious and interested.
Pavel began a panicked thrashing in the water. The thrashing only made the shark more interested. Sharks had poor eyesight, relying on scent and motion. This one scented fresh blood, and the thrashing led it to believe that its prey was injured. Putting on speed, it headed directly for the injured creature.
Arkadin saw the sudden acceleration of the dorsal fin and lifted his arm, a signal to El Heraldo, who cranked the winch. Just before his head and shoulders cleared the water, Pavel’s body shuddered and swung wildly as the shark struck. When El Heraldo had Pavel dangling in the air, he gave a strangled cry and, drawing his handgun, leaned over the stern of the cigarette and pumped the magazine empty, firing shot after shot into the creature’s immense bulk.
As the water churned wildly, turning black with the shark’s blood, Arkadin crossed to the winch, swung it, and lowered a screaming, weeping Pavel to the deck. Arkadin let El Heraldo have his fun. Ever since his younger brother had lost a leg to a tiger shark three years ago, El Heraldo got a murderous look in his eye whenever he saw a dorsal fin. El Heraldo had revealed this grisly piece of family history one night when he was very drunk and very sad.
Arkadin turned his attention to Pavel. What the repeated near drownings had started, the shark had finished. Pavel was in very bad shape. The shark had taken a chunk of his left shoulder and cheek. He was bleeding profusely, it was the least of his problems. He’d been traumatized by the shark attack. His eyes were wide and staring, darting from place to place but not focusing. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably, and there was the stink of excrement coming off him.
Ignoring all that, Arkadin squatted down beside his captain and, putting a hand on his head, said, “Pavel Mikhailovich, my very good friend, we have a serious problem to resolve. And only you can resolve it. Either Stepan or you has been passing information to someone outside our organization. Stepan swears it’s not him, which, I’m afraid, leaves you as the guilty party.”
Pavel, weeping and howling in pain and terror, was unresponsive, until Arkadin bounced the back of his head off the deck.
“Pull yourself together, Pavel Mikhailovich! Focus! Your life hangs in the balance.” When Pavel’s gaze alighted on him and stayed there, Arkadin smiled and stroked his hair. “I know you’re in pain, my friend, and good God, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig! But that will all be over soon. El Heraldo will patch you up in no time, he’s a master, believe me.
“Look, Pavel Mikhailovich, here’s the deal. Tell me who you’re working for, what you’ve passed on, tell me everything and we’ll patch you up. You’ll be as good as new. What’s more, I’ll let it be known that Stepan was the mole. Your employer will relax, you’ll continue as before, passing on information, except you’ll be passing on only the information I feed you. How does this sound? Agreed?”
Pavel moaned and nodded, clearly not trusting himself yet to speak.
“Good.” Arkadin looked up at El Heraldo. “Have you finished with your fun?”
“The sonovabitch’s dead.” El Heraldo spat in the water with some satisfaction. “And now its friends have come to feast on it.”
Arkadin looked back down to Pavel and thought, It’s the same with this sonovabitch.
The man with the piercing blue eyes gestured. “Please sit down, Mr. Willard, would you like something to drink?”
“I could do with a whiskey,” Willard said.
The young man whom Willard had followed vanished, only to reappear moments later with a tray on which sat an old-fashioned glass with whiskey, a tumbler of water, and another of ice.
Someone else seemed to be walking on Willard’s legs, pulling out a chair, and sitting down at the refectory table. The young man set the three glasses in front of Willard, then went out the library door and closed it silently behind him.
“I don’t understand how you could be expecting me,” Willard said. Then he remembered his eight hours of scouring the Internet in search of information on the Monition Club. “My computer’s ISP number is protected.”
“Nothing is protected.” The man took hold of the book and, turning it around, pushed it over to Willard. “Tell me what you make of this.”
Willard looked down at an illustration of a series of letters and odd symbols. He recognized the Latin letters, but the others were unknown to him. Then a little thrill rippled down his spine. Unless he was mistaken, this series was the same as the engraving in the photos Oliver Liss had showed him and Peter Marks.
He looked up into those electric-blue eyes and said: “I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Tell me, Mr. Willard, are you a student of history?”
“I like to think so.”
“Then you know about King Solomon.”
Willard shrugged. “More than most, I imagine.”
The man across from him sat back and laced his fingers over his lean stomach. “Solomon’s life and times are steeped in myth and legend. As in the Bible, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to discern truth from fiction. Why? Because his disciples had a vested interest in obscuring the truth. By far the most outrageous stories arose concerning the hoard of Solomon’s gold. Vast amounts that supposedly staggered the imagination. Historians and archaeologists now routinely ignore these stories as distorted or patently false. For one thing, where did all this gold come from? Solomon’s legendary mines? Even if the king had harnessed ten thousand slaves, he could not have amassed such a legendary hoard in his brief lifetime. So now it’s taken for gospel that there was no such thing as King Solomon’s gold.”
He leaned forward and tapped the book illustration with his crooked forefinger. “This string of letters and symbols tells a different story. It is a clue—but, oh, more than a clue, much more. It is a key telling those who would listen that King Solomon’s gold does, indeed, exist.”
Willard gave an involuntary chuckle.
“Has something struck you as amusing?”
“Forgive me, but I find this melodramatic gibberish hard to take seriously.”
“Well, you’re free to leave whenever you want. Now, if you wish.”
As the man was turning the open book back toward himself, Willard reached out and stopped him.
“I’d really rather not.” Willard cleared his throat. “You were speaking of truth versus fiction.” He paused only a moment. “Perhaps it would help if you told me your name.”
“Benjamin El-Arian. I’m one of a handful of resident scholars the Monition Club employs to deal with matters of ancient history and how it impacts the present.”
“Again, you’ll forgive me, but I don’t for a moment believe that I was suddenly and out of the blue granted an interview with a simple scholar after trolling through the Internet for eight hours trying to find source material on the Monition Club. No, Mr. El-Arian, though you may well be a scholar, that can hardly be all you are.”
El-Arian contemplated him for some time. “It seems to me, Mr. Willard, that you’re far too thoughtful and perceptive to find anything I say amusing.” He took the book and turned the page. “And please let us not forget that it was you who came here, seeking knowledge, presumably.” His eyes lit up in what might have been an instant of merriment. “Or were you thinking of seeking employment in order to infiltrate us as you did with the NSA?”
“I’m surprised you’re aware of that, it was hardly common knowledge.”
“Mr. Willard,” El-Arian said, “there isn’t anything about you we don’t know. Including your role in Treadstone.”
Ah, at last we come to the crux of the matter, Willard thought. He waited, his expression perfectly neutral, but watching Benjamin El-Arian as if El-Arian were a spider sitting in the center of his web.
“I know Treadstone is something of a hot-button issue with you,” El-Arian said, “so I’ll tell you what I know. Please don’t hesitate to correct me if I have any facts wrong. Treadstone was started by Alexander Conklin, inside Central Intelligence. His brainchild gave birth to only two graduates: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin and Jason Bourne. Now you have resurrected Treadstone, under the aegis of Oliver Liss, but almost immediately Liss is dictating to you even more than CI did to your predecessor.” He paused to give Willard time to correct him or make objections. When his guest remained silent, he nodded. “All this is prologue, however.” He tapped the open book again. “Since Liss has given you orders to find the gold ring with this engraving, it might interest you to know that he is not operating as an independent entity.”
Willard tensed. “So who am I actually working for?”
El-Arian’s smile held a sardonic edge. “Well, like all things in the matter, it’s complicated. The man who has been providing his funding and intel is Jalal Essai.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Nor should you have. Jalal Essai does not move in your circles. In fact, like me, Essai makes it his business to remain unknown to people like you. He’s a member of the Monition Club—or, rather, he was. You see, for some years this particular ring was presumed lost. It’s the only one of its kind, for reasons that will become clear to you momentarily.”
El-Arian rose and, crossing to a section of the bookcases, pressed a hidden stud. The section swung outward, revealing a tea service consisting of a chased brass pot, a plate with an array of tiny powdered cakes, and six glasses, each narrow as a shot glass but perhaps three times its height. He loaded them onto a tray and brought them back to the table.
In a ceremonial manner, he poured tea for them both, then gestured toward the plate of cakes for Willard to help himself. He settled himself, sipping and savoring his drink, which, Willard discovered, was sweet mint tea, a Moroccan staple.
“Back to the matter at hand.” El-Arian took a sweet and popped it in his mouth. “What the ring’s engraving told us was this: King Solomon’s gold is fact, not fiction. The engraving contains specific Ugaritic symbols. Solomon employed a platoon of seers. These seers, or some of them at any rate, were versed in alchemy. They had discovered that intoning certain Ugaritic words and phrases in conjunction with scientific procedures they developed could turn lead into gold.”
Willard sat stunned for a moment. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Lead into gold?” he said finally. “Literally?”
“Literally.” El-Arian popped another sweet into his mouth. “This is the answer to the seemingly unsolvable mystery I proposed before, namely, how Solomon amassed such a hoard of gold in his short lifetime.”
Willard shifted in his seat. “Is that what you people do here? Chase fairy tales?”
El-Arian produced one of his enigmatic smiles. “As I said, you’re free to leave anytime you wish. And yet you won’t.”
Out of sheer spite, Willard got to his feet. “How do you know that?”
“Simply because, even if you aren’t yet convinced, the idea is too compelling.”
Willard produced his own enigmatic smile. “Even if it is a fairy tale.”
El-Arian pushed his chair back and crossed to the part of the bookcases where he had gotten the tea and cakes. Reaching into the shadows, he pulled something out, brought it back, and placed it on the table in front of Willard.
Willard held El-Arian’s eyes for a moment, then dropped his gaze. He picked up a gold coin. It appeared ancient. On it was imprinted a pentagram star, along with the inscription GRAM, MA, TUM, TL, TRA in the spaces between the points. In the center of the star was a symbol so worn away as to be incomprehensible.
“That pentagrammic star is the symbol of King Solomon, though various sources depict it as a six-pointed star, a cross engraved with Hebrew letters, even a Celtic knot. But it was the pentagrammic star that was engraved on the ring he always wore, which was said to have magic properties. Among them, it allowed him to trap demons and speak to animals.”
Willard laughed. “You don’t believe such claptrap.”
“Certainly not,” El-Arian said. “On the other hand, that gold coin is without doubt part of Solomon’s hoard.”
“I don’t see how you could be certain,” Willard said. “No expert exists who could verify such a thing.”
El-Arian’s curious smile returned. “For one thing we have verified its age. But more importantly we discovered something else,” he said. “Turn the coin over please.”
To Willard’s surprise and bewilderment, the obverse of the coin was totally different.
“You see, this side isn’t made of gold,” El-Arian said. “It’s made of lead, the original metal before it was transformed into gold.”