The Bourne Objective

25


THE VILLAGE OF Whitney, Oxfordshire, lay twelve miles west of Oxford, on the Windrush River. All that was missing were Hobbits and Orcs. Bourne drove out from London in a rental car. The afternoon was cool and dry with peeks of sun now and again through the rolling clouds. He hadn’t lied to Peter Marks; he had every intention of going to Tineghir. But first there was something he needed to do.
Basil Bayswater lived in a thatch-roofed cottage straight out of a Tolkien novel. It had quirky round windows and flower shoots springing up in neat beds lining a white gravel walkway that led up to the front door. This door was thick and wooden, with a roaring brass lion’s-head knocker in its center. Bourne used it.
Several moments later a man quite a bit younger than he had expected opened the door.
“Yes? How may I help you?” He had long hair brushed straight back off his wide forehead, dark, watchful eyes, and a strong chin.
“I’m looking for Basil Bayswater,” Bourne said.
“You’re looking at him.”
“I don’t think so,” Bourne said.
“Ah, you must mean Professor Basil Bayswater. I’m afraid my father passed away three years ago.”
Moira screamed as blood bloomed in the water like a stranded jellyfish. Arkadin caught her as she canted over.
“My God,” Soraya cried, “what’ve you done?”
Moira continued to scream, bent double, clutching her left leg.
Arkadin, ignoring Soraya for the moment, bared his teeth at Moira. “Did you think I didn’t recognize you?”
Something icy congealed in the pit of Moira’s stomach.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw you in Bali. You were with Bourne.”
In her mind’s eye she saw the flight through the village of Tenganan, and then Bourne being shot by a sniper hidden in the forest.
Her eyes opened wide.
“Yeah, that was me.” He laughed, throwing the bloody seashell up in the air and catching it as if it were a ball. “You were with Bourne. You’re his lover. And now fate has brought you to me.”
Soraya was both outraged and terrified. “What the hell is happening here?”
“We’re about to find out.” Arkadin turned to her. “This is Jason Bourne’s lover, but perhaps the two of you know each other.”
With a force of will, Soraya kept her panic down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, I’ll spell it out for you. I never bought your story, but I wasn’t going to send you away until I found out what you really wanted. I strongly suspect Willard sent you. He tried this trick on me once before with a woman named Tracy Atherton. He sent her to keep an eye on me, to report back on all my business dealings. And it worked. She was dead by the time I figured it out. But you I fingered from the get-go, because Willard is a creature of habits, especially ones that have worked for him.”
“Let her go,” Soraya said, more agitated with each passing moment.
“I might do that,” Arkadin said. “I might even let her live. But that’s entirely up to you.”
Soraya walked over and took Moira away from him. Gently and slowly, she lowered her to the ground. Then she slid her wet shirt over her head and, winding it around Moira’s left thigh, pulled it as tight as she could and tied it. By that time Moira had passed out, from either the shock or the pain, or both.
“It’s you I want,” Arkadin continued. “You’re the one talking about Khartoum, you’re the one who wants to get me there. You tell me who you are and what you know and I’ll consider lightening Moira’s punishment.”
“We need to get her to the nearest hospital,” Soraya said. “This wound has to be cleaned out and disinfected as soon as possible.”
“Again”—Arkadin spread his hands—“up to you.”
Soraya looked down at the back of Moira’s knee. Dear God, she wondered, will she ever walk normally again? She knew the longer they waited to get Moira into the hands of a competent surgeon, the worse off she’d be. She’d seen tendons severed like this. They weren’t easy to repair, and who knew how badly the nerves were affected?
She let out a long breath. “What do you want to know?”
“For starters, who are you?”
“Soraya Moore.”
“The Soraya Moore, director of Typhon?”
“Not anymore.” She stroked Moira’s damp hair. “Willard has resurrected Treadstone.”
“No wonder he wants to keep an eye on me.
What else?”
“Plenty,” Soraya said. “I’ll tell you on the way to the hospital.”
Arkadin loomed over her. “You’ll tell me now.”
“You might as well kill us both right here.”
Arkadin cursed her, but in the end he acceded to her demand. Hefting Moira in his arms, he carried her back to the convent. While he slid her into the backseat, Soraya went to get a shirt. She was rooting through Arkadin’s desk when he found her.
“F*ck, no,” he said and, grabbing her wrist, dragged her outside.
Half throwing her into the passenger’s seat of the car, he said, “I will kill you as soon as look at you.” Then he went around the front of the car, slid behind the wheel, and fired the ignition.
“You’re right.” Soraya kept Moira’s leg elevated as they sped through the outskirts of Puerto Pe?asco. “Willard wanted me to get close to you, to report on your whereabouts and your business dealings.”
“And? I sense there’s something more.”
“There is,” she said. She knew she had to sell this part perfectly. She no longer believed absolutely in her ability to outsmart him, but this much she needed to do. “Willard has become interested in a man I’m sure you know, because he works for Maslov: Vylacheslav Oserov.”
Arkadin’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel, but his voice betrayed nothing of what he must be feeling. “Why would Willard be interested in Oserov?”
“I have no idea,” Soraya said. This much, at least, was true. “But I do know that yesterday a Treadstone agent ID’d Oserov in Marrakech. He tracked Oserov out into the Atlas Mountains, to a village called Tineghir.”
They arrived at Santa Fe General, on Morua Avenue, but Arkadin made no move to get out of the car.
“What was Oserov doing in Tineghir?”
“Looking for a ring.”
Arkadin shook his head. “Speak plainly.”
“This particular ring somehow unlocks a hidden file on a laptop hard drive.” She looked at him. “I know, I don’t understand it, either.” All of this information had been in the last text message she had received from Peter. She opened the rear door. “Can we get Moira into the ER, please?”
Arkadin got out of the car and slammed the door she had just opened. “I want more.”
“I’ve told you all I know.”
He stared into her face. “You see what happens to people who f*ck with me.”
“I’m not f*cking with you,” Soraya said. “I’ve betrayed a trust, what more do you want from me?”
“Everything,” he said. “I want everything.”
They rushed Moira into the emergency room. While the personnel were hooking her up and taking her vitals, Soraya asked for the name of the best neurosurgeon in Sonora. She spoke idiomatic Spanish; furthermore, she looked Latina. These attributes opened doors for her. When she got the surgeon’s private number, she called him herself. His PA said he was unavailable until Soraya threatened to find the PA and wring his neck. The surgeon came on the line shortly thereafter. Soraya described Moira’s injury and told him where they were. He said considering a cash bonus of two thousand American dollars was involved, he’d be over immediately.
“Let’s go,” Arkadin said the moment she disconnected.
“I’m not leaving Moira.”
“We have further business to discuss.”
“Then we can discuss it here.”
“Back at the convent.”
“I’m not going to f*ck you,” she said.
“Thank God, f*cking you would be like f*cking a scorpion.”
The irony of his comment made her laugh despite her worry and despair. She went to look for coffee, and he followed her.
Bourne drove to Oxford as fast as he dared without attracting the attention of the police. The city was precisely as he had left it both times he had been there. The quiet streets, the quaint stores, the lifelong denizens going about their chores, the tearooms, the bookstores, all like a miniature created by an obsessive eighteenth-century academic. Driving its streets was like visiting the inside of a snow globe.
Bourne parked near where Chrissie had left her Range Rover when they had come together, and he trotted up the steps of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. Professor Liam Giles was also right where he had been when they had last been there, bent over his desk in his voluminous office. He looked up as Bourne entered, blinking owlishly, as if he didn’t recognize him. Bourne saw that it wasn’t Giles after all, but another man of Giles’s approximate build and age.
“Where’s Professor Giles?”
“On leave,” the man said.
“I’m looking for him.”
“So I gather. May I ask why?”
“Where is he?”
The man blinked his owlish blink. “Away.”
Bourne had looked up Giles’s official bio on the way over, which was available on the Oxford University Web site.
“It’s about his daughter.”
The man behind Giles’s desk blinked. “Is she ill?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. Where can I find Professor Giles?”
“I don’t think—”
“It’s urgent,” Bourne said. “A matter of life or death.”
“Are you being deliberately melodramatic, sir?”
Bourne showed the man the EMS credentials he’d lifted after the crash. “I’m quite serious.”
“Dear me.” The man gestured. “He’s in the loo, at the moment. Battling the eel pie he ingested last night, I shouldn’t wonder.”
The neurosurgeon was young, dark as an Indian, with the long, delicate fingers of a classical pianist. He had very delicate features, so he wasn’t, in fact, an Indian. But he was a hard-nosed businessman who would not proceed until Soraya had pressed a roll of bills into his hand. Then he rushed away from them, consulting with the ER doctors who had done the workup on Moira while he strode toward the OR.
Soraya drank her shitty coffee without tasting it, but ten minutes later, while she paced the hallway uselessly, it began to burn a hole in her stomach, so when Arkadin suggested they get something to eat she agreed. They found a restaurant not far away from the hospital. Soraya checked to make sure it wasn’t colonized by insects before she sat down. They ordered their food, then sat and waited, sitting across from each other but looking elsewhere, or at least Soraya was.
“I saw you without your top,” Arkadin said, “and I liked what I saw.”
Soraya snapped into focus. “F*ck you.”
“She was an enemy,” he said, referring to Moira. “What law is she protected by?”
Soraya stared out the window at a street as unfamiliar to her as the dark side of the moon.
The food came and Arkadin began to eat. Soraya watched a couple of young women with too much makeup and too little clothing on their way to work. Latinas showing off their bodies with such casualness still astonished her. Their culture was so far from hers. And yet she felt right in tune with the aura of sorrow here. Hopelessness she could understand. It had been the cultural lot of her gender from time immemorial, and was the major reason she had chosen the clandestine services where, despite the usual gender bias, she was able to assert herself in ways that made her feel good about herself. Now, for the first time, she saw those girls in their too-tight tops and too-short skirts in a different light. Those clothes were a way—perhaps their only way—to assert themselves in a culture that continually demeaned and devalued them.
“If Moira dies, or if she can’t walk—”
“Spare me the toothless threats,” he said, mopping up the last of his huevos rancheros.
That was Arkadin’s business, she thought. No matter what he might think to the contrary, he was in the business of demeaning and devaluing women. That was the subtext in everything he said and did. He had no heart, no remorse, no guilt, no soul—nothing, in short, that defined and distinguished a human being. If he isn’t a human being, she thought with a kind of irrational terror, what is he?
The men’s loo was five doors down from Professor Giles’s office. Giles was clearly being sick behind the closed door of one of the stalls. A sour stench had pervaded the room, and Bourne strode over to the window and shoved it open as far as it would go. A sticky breeze slowly stirred the stench as a witch will her bubbling pot.
Bourne waited until the noises had subsided. “Professor Giles.”
For some time, there was no answer. Then the stall door was wrenched open and Professor Giles, looking distinctly green around the gills, staggered out past Bourne. He bent over the sink, turned on the cold water, and buried his head beneath the flow.
Bourne leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. When Giles picked his head up, Bourne handed him a handful of paper towels. The professor took them without comment, wiping his face and hair. It was only as he threw the wadded towels into the trash that he appeared to recognize Bourne.
At once his back stiffened and he stood up straight. “Ah, the prodigal returns,” he said in his most professorial tone.
“Did you expect me?”
“Not really. On the other hand, I’m hardly surprised to find you here.” He gave Bourne a wan smile. “Bad pennies continue to turn up.”
“Professor, I’d like you to once again get in touch with your chess-playing colleague.”
Giles frowned. “That may not be so easy. He’s reclusive and he doesn’t like answering questions.”
I can imagine, Bourne thought. “Nevertheless, I’d like you to try.”
“All right,” Giles said.
“By the way, what’s his name?”
Giles hesitated. “James.”
“James what?”
Another hesitation. “Weatherley.”
“Not Basil Bayswater?”
The professor turned away, facing the door.
“What question do you want to put to him?”
“I’d like him to describe the afterlife.”
Giles, who had been headed for the door, paused, turning slowly back to Bourne. “I beg your pardon?”
“Since Basil Bayswater’s son buried him three years ago,” Bourne said, “I would think he’d be in a perfect position to tell me what it’s like to be dead.”
“I told you,” Giles said, somewhat sullenly, “his name is James Weatherley.”
Bourne took him by the elbow. “Professor, no one believes that, not even you.” He moved Giles away from the door to the far end of the loo. “Now you’ll tell me why you lied to me.” When the professor remained silent, Bourne went on. “You never needed to call Bayswater for the translation of the engraving inside the ring, you already knew it.”
“Yes, I suppose I did. Neither of us was truthful with the other.” He shrugged. “Well, what can you expect from life? Nothing is ever what it seems.”
“You’re Severus Domna.”
Giles’s smile had gained a bit more traction. “There’s no point denying it, now that you’re about to hand over the ring.”
At that moment, as if he’d had his ear to the door, the man who had been behind the professor’s desk entered the loo. With the SIG Sauer in his hand he looked quite a bit less owlish. Immediately two more men, larger, muscular, armed with silenced pistols, came in just behind him. They fanned out, their weapons trained on Bourne.
“As you can see,” Professor Giles said, “I haven’t given you a choice.”