The Bourne Objective

20


PETER MARKS RECEIVED the call from Bourne, brief and succinct, and with mixed feelings agreed to come to the address Bourne gave him. In a way, he was surprised that Bourne had called him back. On the other hand, Bourne didn’t sound like himself, which caused Marks to wonder what sort of situation he was heading into. His relationship with Bourne was all one-way: through Soraya. He knew something of her history with Bourne, and he’d always wondered whether she had allowed her personal feelings to color her opinion of him.
The official CI line was, and had been for some time, that Bourne’s amnesia had made him unpredictable, and therefore dangerous. He was a rogue agent, loyal to no one and nothing, least of all CI. Though CI had been forced to use him in the past, it was always through deception or coercion, because there seemed no other way to control him. And not even those methods had proved to be a sure thing. Though Marks was personally aware of Bourne’s recent work bringing down Black River and stopping an incipient war with Iran, he knew next to nothing about the man. He was a complete enigma. It was futile to predict his responses in any given situation. And then there was the fact that many people who had tried to get close to him had died sudden and violent deaths. Happily, Soraya wasn’t one of them, but Marks worried that it might be just a matter of time.
“Bad news?” Don Fernando Hererra said.
“Just more of the same,” Marks said. “I’ve a meeting to go to.”
They were seated in the living room of Diego Hererra’s home, surrounded by photos of him. Marks wondered whether being here was painful or comforting for the father.
“Se?or Hererra, before I go, is there anything more you can tell me about your godson? Do you know why he was at the Vesper Club last night, or why he might have stabbed Diego? What sort of relationship did they have?”
“None, to answer your last question first.”
Hererra took out a cigarette and lit up but didn’t seem interested in smoking it. His eyes roved the room, as if afraid to alight on any one thing for long. Marks suspected that he was nervous. About what?
Hererra contemplated Marks for some moments. The ash from his unsmoked cigarette toppled soundlessly to the carpet, where it lay between his feet. “Diego did not know of Ottavio’s existence, at least so far as his relationship to me was concerned.”
“Then why would Ottavio kill Diego?”
“He wouldn’t, therefore I refuse to believe that he did.”
Hererra told his driver to take Marks to the nearest rental-car office. He insisted that he and Marks exchange phone numbers. Those words of disbelief resounded in Marks’s head as he punched the address Bourne had given him into the GPS program on his PDA.
“I want to stay abreast of your investigation,” Hererra said. “You promised me that you would find my son’s killer. You should know that I take all promises made to me extremely seriously.”
Marks saw no reason to doubt him.
Fifteen minutes after he drove out of the rental-car lot, his PDA buzzed and he read a text message from Soraya. Within minutes Willard called him.
“Progress.”
“I’ve made contact,” Marks said, meaning Bourne.
“You know where he is?” A slight quickening of Willard’s voice.
“Not yet,” Marks lied. “But I will soon.”
“Good, I’m in time.”
“Time for what?” Marks asked.
“The mission has changed somewhat. I need you to facilitate a meeting between Bourne and Arkadin.”
Marks searched for hidden meaning in Willard’s voice. Something back home had changed. He hated being out of the loop and felt at an immediate disadvantage. “What about the ring?”
“Are you listening to me?” Willard snapped. “Just do as you’re ordered.”
Now Marks was certain that he was being denied access to a major development. He felt the old anger against the machinations of his superiors rising up in his throat like bile.
“Has Soraya Moore made contact?” Willard continued.
“Yes. I just received the rearranged text message from her.”
“Contact her,” Willard said. “Coordinate your efforts. You need to get the two men to the following place.” He gave Marks an address. “How you do it is up to you, but I do have some information Arkadin should find interesting.” He told Marks what El-Arian had told him about the missing piece of information without which the file on the laptop’s hard drive was useless. “You have seventy-two hours.”
“Seventy-two—?” But he was talking to dead air. The conversation was over.
At the next intersection, Marks checked the GPS map on his PDA to make sure that he hadn’t missed a turn while talking with Willard. The morning had started out sunny, but clouds had rolled in, turning everything to shades of gray. Now a light drizzle blurred the edges of even the sharpest angles on buildings and signs.
The light turned green and, as he left the intersection behind, he noticed a white Ford moving into his lane right behind him. He knew a tail when he saw one. He’d seen the white Ford before, several vehicles behind him, though now and again he’d lost sight of it behind a large produce truck. The Ford was occupied by only the driver, who wore dark glasses. Stepping on the accelerator, he sent his rental car lurching forward as he ground the gearshift up from first to third more quickly than the transmission could easily handle. There was a moment between second and third when the car hesitated, and he was afraid he’d stripped the gears. Then it leapt forward so fast he almost slammed into the rear end of the truck in front of him. He swerved to the right-hand lane, accelerating further as the white Ford slid in behind him.
He was in a section of London dense with traffic, boutiques, and larger stores. A sign for an underground garage came up so fast he had to swerve into its entrance at the last possible instant. He scraped the front left fender on the concrete wall, then corrected and hurtled down the ramp into the neon-lit concrete cavern.
He pulled into a parking spot that was so tight, he had to roll down the window to slide out. By that time, he heard the squeal of tires and figured the white Ford was still hot on his trail. He saw the open stairwell next to the elevator, ducked into it just as a white car flashed by. The stairwell smelled of grease and urine. As he rushed up the stairs two and three at a time, he heard a car door slam and the fast slap of shoe soles against concrete, and then someone was running up the stairs behind him.
As he was about to whip around a corner, he came upon a homeless man, so drunk he had passed out. Bending over, Marks held his breath as he dragged the drunk up the stairs, placing him across the tread just around the corner. Retreating into shadow on the stairs above, Marks waited, breathing deeply and easily.
The sounds of pounding footsteps came closer, and Marks tensed himself into a half crouch. His tail raced around the corner and, as Marks had planned, didn’t see the drunk until it was too late. As he stumbled, pitching forward, Marks leapt down the stairs, driving his knee into the top of the man’s head. The tail lurched backward, stumbling again over the drunk and sprawling onto his back.
Marks saw him pulling a Browning M1900 from beneath his jacket. Marks kicked it upward just before he fired a shot. The noise held and echoed so deafeningly in the confined space, the drunk opened his eyes and sat bolt upright. The man with the Browning grabbed the drunk by the collar and pressed the gun’s muzzle into the side of his head.
“You’ll come with me now.” He had a heavy accent, Middle Eastern perhaps. “Or I shoot his brains out.” He jerked the drunk so hard, spittle flew from his slack lips.
“Oi, yer wanker!” the drunk shouted, completely confused. “Piss off!”
The gunman, as contemptuous as he was incensed, slammed the side of the drunk’s head with the barrel of the Browning. Marks launched himself across the gap. The heel of his hand made contact with the gunman’s chin, shoved it hard upward, exposing his neck. While he wrestled with the gun hand, he drove his fist into the gunman’s throat. The cartilage gave way and the gunman collapsed, gasping without getting oxygen into his system. His eyes were wide and rolling. He could only make animal gruntings, but soon enough even that ceased.
The drunk whirled with astonishing agility and kicked the gunman in the crotch. “ ’Ow ’bout that now, yer bleedin’ pisspot!” Then, muttering to himself, he stumbled down the stairs without a backward glance.
Quickly now Marks went through the gunman’s pockets, but all he found was keys to the white Ford and a wad of money. No passport, no identification of any kind. He had dark skin, black curling hair, and a full beard. One thing for sure, Marks thought, he’s not CI. So who was he working for and why the hell was he following me? He wondered who could know he was here except for Willard and Oliver Liss.
Then he heard the whistle raised by foot police and knew he had to get out of there. Once more, he studied the dead man, wishing there was some identifier, like a tattoo or…
That’s when he saw the gold ring on the third finger of his right hand and, stooping, worked it off. He hoped there might be a commemorative engraving on the inside.
There wasn’t. There was something far more interesting.
* * *
Soraya saw Leonid Arkadin again in the lone marina restaurant. Or, rather, he must have been searching for her, because engrossed in her fiery shrimp and yellow rice she didn’t see him enter. Her waiter brought her a drink—a tequini, he said—from the man at the bar. Soraya glanced up, and of course it was Arkadin. She looked into his eyes as she picked up the martini glass. She smiled. That was all the encouragement he needed.
“You’re persistent, I’ll give you that,” she said when he’d sauntered over.
“If I were your lover, I wouldn’t let you eat dinner alone.”
“My ex pool boy? I sent him packing.”
He laughed and gestured to the booth in which she sat. “May I?”
“I’d prefer you didn’t.”
He sat down anyway and put his drink on the table, as if marking out his territory. “If you let me order, I’ll pay for your dinner.”
“I don’t need you to pay for my dinner,” she said flatly.
“Need has nothing to do with it.” He lifted his hand and the waiter glided over. “I’ll have steak, bloody, and an order of tomatillos.” The waiter nodded and left.
Arkadin smiled, and Soraya was astonished at how genuine it seemed. There was a deep warmth to it that frightened her.
“My name is Leonardo,” he said.
She snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. No one in Puerto Pe?asco is named Leonardo.”
He seemed crestfallen, like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and now she was beginning to make sense of his approach to women. She could see how magnetic he was, how compelling an impression he made, exuding the security of a powerful man with a softer core of vulnerability. What woman could resist that? She laughed silently to herself and felt better, as if at last she was standing on solid ground, in a place where she could confidently move forward with her assignment.
“You’re right, of course,” Arkadin said. “It’s actually Leonard, just plain Leonard.”
“Penny.” She held out a hand, which he held briefly. “What are you doing in Puerto Pe?asco, Leonard?”
“Fishing, sport racing.”
“In your cigarette.”
“Yes.”
Soraya finished up her shrimp just as his steak and tomatillos arrived. The steak, bloody as ordered, was smothered in chilies. Arkadin dug in. He must have a cast-iron stomach, she thought.
“And you?” he said around bites.
“I came for the weather.” She pushed the tequini away from her.
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t drink alcohol.”
“Alcoholic?”
She laughed. “Muslim. I’m Egyptian.”
“I apologize for sending you an inappropriate gift.”
“No need.” She waved away his words. “You couldn’t have known.” Then she smiled. “But you’re sweet.”
“Ha! Sweet is one thing I’m not.”
“No?” She cocked her head. “What are you, then?”
He wiped the blood off his lips and sat back for a moment. “Well, to tell you the truth I’m something of a hard-ass. My partners thought so, especially when I bought them out. So did my wife, for that matter.”
“She’s also in the past?”
He nodded as he dug into his food again. “Nearly a year now.”
“Children?”
“Are you kidding?”
Arkadin certainly had a gift for spinning yarns, she thought appreciatively. “I’m not much of a nurturer, either,” she said, somewhat truthfully. “I’m entirely focused on my business.”
He asked her what that might be without looking up from his steak.
“Import-export,” she said. “To and from North Africa.”
His head came up slowly, but very deliberately. She felt her heart beating against her rib cage. It was, she thought, like coaxing a shark onto the hook. She didn’t want to make the slightest mistake now, and felt a little thrill pass through her. She was very close to the precipice, to the moment when her fictional self would fuse with her real self. This moment was why she chose to do what she did. It was why she hadn’t walked away from Peter when he’d recruited her for the assignment, why she had set aside the demeaning aspect of what she was expected to do. None of that mattered. What mattered was standing a hairbreadth from the precipice. This precise moment was what she lived for, and Peter had known this long before she did.
Arkadin wiped his mouth again. “North Africa. Interesting. My former partners did a fair amount of business in North Africa. I didn’t like their methods—or, to be honest, the people they were dealing with. That was one of the reasons I decided to buy them out.”
He was quick on his feet, Soraya thought, improvising like crazy. She was liking this conversation more and more.
“What line are you in?” she asked.
“Computers, peripherals, computer services, that sort of thing.”
Right, she thought, amused. She put a thoughtful expression on her face. “Well, I could connect you with some reliable people, if you like.”
“Maybe you and I could do business.”
Bite! she thought with some elation. Time to reel in the shark, but very slowly and very carefully.
“Hm. I don’t know, I’m already near capacity.”
“Then you need to expand.”
“Sure. With what capital?”
“I have capital.”
She eyed him warily. “I don’t think so. We know nothing about each other.”
He set his knife and fork down, and smiled. “Then let’s make getting to know each other our first order of business.” He lifted a finger. “In fact, I have something to show you that just might entice you into doing business with me.”
“And what might that be?”
“Ah-ah-ah, it’s a surprise.”
Calling the waiter over, he ordered two espressos without asking her if she wanted one. As it happened, she did. She wanted her senses to be on full alert because she had no doubt that at some point tonight she would have to fend off his amorous advances in a way that would lead him on, not turn him off.
They chatted amiably while drinking the espressos, finding their way toward feeling comfortable with each other. Soraya, seeing how relaxed he was, allowed herself to relax, as well, at least as far as she was able. Beneath, however, she felt the tension of steel cables singing through her body. This was a man of enormous charm, as well as charisma. She could see how so many women were magnetically drawn into his orbit. But at the same time the part of her that had pulled back, observing at an objective distance, recognized the show he was putting on, and that she was not seeing the real Arkadin. After a time, she wondered whether anyone had. He had so successfully walled himself off from other human beings that she suspected he was no longer accessible even to himself. And at that moment, he seemed to her a lost little boy, long exiled, who could no longer find his way home.
“Well,” he said as he set down his empty cup, “shall we move on?” He threw some bills onto the table and, without waiting for a reply, slid out of the booth. He held out his hand and, after a moment’s deliberate hesitation, she took it, allowing him to swing her out of her seat.
The night was mild, without a breath of a breeze, heavy as velvet drapes. The sky was moonless, but the stars blazed in the blackness. They strolled away from the water, and then north, paralleling the beach. To their right, the light-smear of Puerto Pe?asco seemed part of a painting, a world apart.
Streetlights gave way to starlit darkness and then, abruptly, the lights of a large stone structure that looked vaguely religious in nature. She saw the cross set into the stone above the wood-and-iron door.
“It used to be a convent.” Arkadin unlocked the door and stood aside for her to enter. “My home away from home.”
The interior was sparsely furnished, but aromatic with incense and candle wax. She saw a desk, several armchairs, a refectory table and eight chairs, a pew-like sofa festooned with ill-matched pillows. All of it was heavy, dark wood. None of it looked comfortable.
As they walked through the living room, Arkadin lit thick cream-colored candles in iron stands of varying heights. The effect in the convent’s immense stone interior was increasingly medieval, and she smiled to herself, suspecting that he was setting the scene for romance or, in this case, seduction.
He opened a bottle of red wine and poured it into an oversize Mexican goblet, then he filled another with guara juice. Handing her the juice, he said, “Come. This way.”
He led her farther into the gloom, pausing to light candles along the way. The far wall was almost all brick fireplace, as enormous as any in an English baronial hall. She could smell the old ash and creosote coating the firebrick after decades of use and, judging by what she saw, years of neglect.
Now Arkadin lit a particularly large candle and, holding it high as one would a torch, walked toward the shadows of the fireplace. The impenetrable darkness began to give grudging way to the inconstant illumination of the flame.
As the shadows retreated, a shape took form in the fireplace, a chair. And on the chair sat a figure. The figure was bound to the chair by its ankles. Its arms, presumably bound at the wrists, were behind it.
As Arkadin brought the candle still closer, the light from the flame rose up from the figure’s ankles to legs, torso, finally revealing its face, bloody and swollen so badly that one eye had closed.
“How do you like your surprise?” Arkadin said.
The goblet of juice shattered on the floor tiles as it slipped from Soraya’s grip.
The man bound to the chair was Antonio.
It was like a chess match, Bourne staring at the old man, trying to place him as the director of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents when he had been in Oxford as David Webb, the old man staring at him more certain with every passing second of Bourne’s identity.
Chrissie was staring at them both, as if trying to figure out which would checkmate the other. “Adam, is my father right? Is your name really David Webb?”
Bourne saw a way out—the only way—but he didn’t like it. “Yes,” he said, “and no.”
“Either way, your name isn’t Adam Stone.” Chrissie’s voice held a metallic edge. “Which means you lied to Trace. She knew you as Adam Stone, and that’s how I know you.”
Bourne turned to look at her. “Adam Stone is as much my name as David Webb used to be. I’ve been known by different names at different times. But they’re only names.”
“Damn you!” Chrissie got up, turned her back, and stalked into the kitchen.
“She’s pretty angry,” Scarlett said, watching him with her eleven-year-old face, beautiful yet not fully formed.
“Are you angry?” Bourne asked.
“You’re not a professor?”
“In fact, I am,” Bourne said. “A professor of linguistics.”
“Then I think it’s cool. D’you have a whole bunch of secret identities?”
Bourne laughed. He liked this child. “When the need arises.”
“Bat-Signal!” She cocked her head, and in the straightforward manner of children, said, “Why did you lie to Mum and Aunt Tracy?”
Bourne was about to say something about Tracy, but just in time reminded himself that as far as Scarlett was concerned her aunt was still alive. “I was in one of my secret identities when I met your aunt. Then Tracy told your mum about me. It was the best way I could get her to listen to me quickly.”
“If you’re not Professor David Webb who the hell are you?” Chrissie’s father said, visibly gathering himself.
“I was Webb when I knew you,” Bourne said. “I didn’t come to Oxford, to you, under false pretenses.”
“What are you doing here with my daughter and granddaughter?”
“It’s a long story,” Bourne said.
A spark of cunning came into the old man’s face. “I’ll bet it has something to do with my older daughter.”
“In a way.”
The old man clenched a fist. “That damn engraving.”
A little chill traveled down Bourne’s spine. “What engraving?”
The old man peered at him curiously. “Do you not remember? I’m Dr. Bishop Atherton. You brought me a drawing of a phrase you said was an engraving.”
And then Bourne remembered. He remembered everything.