The Bourne Objective

30


BOURNE ARRIVED IN Tineghir armed with the knowledge Tanirt had given him. Inevitably, he was drawn to the crowd around the bullet-riddled car. The dead man was unrecognizable. Nevertheless, because of the severely burn-scarred face he knew it must be Oserov.
There were no police around the body or, indeed, anywhere in the area. But there were plenty of Severus Domna soldiers, which in this area probably amounted to the same thing. No one had made a motion to do anything about the corpse. Flies buzzed in ever-increasing swarms, and the stench of death was beginning to spread like an airborne disease.
Bourne passed the scene by, got out of his car several blocks away, and proceeded on foot. What Tanirt had said had changed his plan, and not, he felt, for the better. But he had no choice, she had made that quite clear.
And so he looked up. The sky was the pale and abandoned color it often is at five in the morning, though it was now deep in the afternoon. Instead of heading toward the address he had been given, the Severus Domna house, he searched for a café or restaurant and, finding one, entered it. He sat down at a table facing the front and ordered a plate of couscous and whiskey berbere, which was mint tea. He waited with one leg crossed over the other, emptying his mind, thinking of Soraya and nothing else. The small glass had been placed before him, the fragrant tea poured from a height without a drop spilled when he saw the Russian glance in as he walked slowly by. It wasn’t Arkadin, but it was a Russian, Bourne could tell by his features and the way he used his eyes, which was neither Berber nor Muslim. This told him a number of things, none of them helpful.
The couscous came, but he was without an appetite. Soraya entered the café first, but Arkadin wasn’t far behind. He expected Soraya to have a haunted look, but she didn’t, and Bourne wondered whether he had underestimated her. If so, it would be the day’s first positive sign.
Soraya picked her way through the café and sat down without saying a word. For some moments Arkadin remained in the doorway, watching everything. Bourne began to eat his couscous with his right hand, which was the custom. His left hand lay in his lap.
“How are you?” he said.
“F*cked.”
He gave her a thin smile. “How many men does he have with him?”
She appeared surprised. “Three.”
Arkadin came toward them. On the way, he picked up a chair from an adjacent table and sat down on it.
“How’s the couscous?”
“Not bad,” Bourne said. He pushed the plate across the table.
Arkadin used the ends of the fingers of his right hand to taste the couscous. He nodded, licked off the oil, and wiped his fingers on the tabletop.
Arkadin hunched forward. “We’ve been chasing each other a long time.”
Bourne took the plate back. “And now here we are.”
“Cozy as three bugs in a Moroccan carpet.”
Bourne took up his fork. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to shoot with the gun you have aimed at me under the table.”
A flicker passed across Arkadin’s face. “It’s not for you to decide, is it?”
“That’s a matter of opinion. I have a Beretta 8000 loaded with .357 hollow-points aimed at your balls.”
A black expression was erased by Arkadin’s harsh laugh. It sounded to Bourne as if he had never really learned how to laugh. “Bugs in a carpet indeed,” Arkadin said.
“Besides,” Bourne said, “with me dead, you’ll never get out of that house alive.”
“I think otherwise.”
Bourne buried the tines of the fork in a mound of couscous. “Listen to me, Leonid, there are other forces at work here, forces neither you nor I can handle.”
“I can handle anything. And I brought allies.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bourne said, quoting an Arab proverb.
Arkadin’s eyes narrowed. “What are you suggesting?”
“We are the only two graduates of Treadstone. We were trained for situations like this. But the two of us are not exactly alike. Mirror images, perhaps.”
“You’ve got ten seconds. Get to the f*cking point.”
“Together we can beat Severus Domna.”
Arkadin snorted. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Think about it. Severus Domna brought us here, it has prepared the house for us, and it believes that when we come together one of us will wind up killing the other.”
“And?”
“And then everything goes according to its plan.” Bourne waited a moment. “Our only chance is to do the unexpected.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Bourne nodded.
“Until he’s not.”
Arkadin placed the Magpul he had been holding onto the table, and Bourne set down the Beretta that Tanirt had given him.
“We’re a team,” Bourne said. “The three of us.”
Arkadin glanced briefly at Soraya. “Spit it out then.”
“First and foremost,” Bourne said, “is a man named Idir Syphax.”
The house crouched in the middle of the block, its flanks rubbing up against those of its neighbors. Night had fallen, swift and complete, like a hood thrown over a head. All around the valley the mountains were pitch black. A bitter wind, knifing through the town, hurried snow crystals or grains of sand across streets and down alleys. The light from the stars was hallucinatory.
Idir Syphax was crouched on a rooftop across the street from the rear of the house. Flanking him were two Severus Domna sharpshooters, their Sako TRG-22 rifles aimed and ready. Idir watched the house as if waiting for his daughter to come home, as if feeling the danger of unknown places spreading its wings, as if the house itself were his child. And, in a way, it was. He had designed the house with advice from Tanirt. “I want to build a fortress,” he had told her. And she had said: “You cannot do better than to follow the plan of the Great Temple of Baal. It was the greatest fortress known to man.” After scrutinizing what she had drawn for him, he had agreed, and he himself had helped to build it. Every board, every nail, every length of rebar, every form of concrete bore the tattoo of his sweat. The house was invented not for people, but for a thing, an idea, an ideal, even; anyway, something intangible. In that sense it was a sacred place, as sacred as any mosque. It was the beginning of all things, and the end. Alpha and omega, a cosmos unto itself.
Idir understood this but others in Severus Domna did not. For Benjamin El-Arian, the house was a Venus flytrap. For Marlon Etana, it was a means to an end. In any event, for them both, the house was a dead thing, a pack animal at best. It was not holy, it was not a gateway to the divine. They did not understand that Tanirt had chosen the spot, using the ancient incantation she possessed and he coveted. He had once asked her what language she was chanting. It was Ugaritic. She said it was spoken by the alchemists of King Solomon’s court, in what is now Syria. That was why she had placed the statue in the very center of the house, the space from which its holiness emanated. He’d had to have it smuggled in because any statues of this sort were strictly forbidden by sharia. And of course, neither Benjamin El-Arian nor Marlon Etana knew of its existence. They’d have had him burned alive as a heretic. But if Tanirt had taught him anything, it was that there were ancient forces—perhaps mysteries was a better term—that had preceded religion, any religion, even Judaism, which were all the inventions of mankind in attempts to come to terms with the terror of death. The origins of the mysteries, Tanirt had told him, were divine, which according to her had nothing to do with man’s conception of God. “Did Baal exist?” she had asked rhetorically. “I doubt it. But something did.”
Save for the wind, the night was still. He knew they were coming, but he didn’t know from where. All attempts to follow them had ended in failure—a failure, he told himself, that was not unexpected. On the other hand, there had been attraction. Arkadin’s three men had been neutralized at the sacrifice of four of his own. These Russians were fierce warriors. Not that it mattered; Arkadin would not gain entrance no matter what he tried. All houses had vulnerabilities that could serve as points of entrance—sewers, for instance, or drains, or the place where the electrical lines came in. Because this house was not designed for people there were no sewers. Because there was no heating or cooling, no refrigerators or ovens to drain electricity, all the electrical systems ran off a giant generator in a shielded room within the house. There was, literally, no way into the house that wouldn’t set off the various alarms, which would in turn trip other security measures.
His son, Badis, had wanted to come, but of course Idir wouldn’t hear of it. Badis still asked about Tanirt even though at eleven he was old enough to know better. Badis remembered only when Tanirt loved his father, or at least said she loved him. Now she engendered in Idir a bone-deep terror that invaded his nights, his very sleep, shattering it with unspeakable nightmares.
It had all gone wrong when he had asked her to marry him and she had denied him.
“Is it because you don’t believe I love you?” he had said.
“I know you love me.”
“It’s because of my son. You think that because I love Badis more than anything I can’t make you happy.”
“It isn’t your son.”
“Then what?”
“If you have to ask,” she had said, “then you will never understand.”
That’s when he had made his fatal mistake. He had confused her with other women. He had tried to coerce her, but the more he threatened her, the larger her stature seemed to grow, until she filled his entire living room, asphyxiating him with her presence. And, gasping, he had fled his own home.
The sounds of the bolt-action Sakos brought his mind back into focus. He peered through the darkness. Was that a shadow flitting across the rooftop of the house? His sharpshooters thought so. In the hallucinatory moonlight there was a blur, then nothing. Utter stillness. And then, out of the corner of his eye, the shadow moved again. His heart leapt. His order for them to fire was already on his lips when from behind him he heard his name being called.
He whirled to see Leonid Arkadin standing spread-legged, an odd-looking boxy weapon in his hand.
“Surprise,” Arkadin said and promptly shot off two sharp bursts from the Magpul that took off the heads of the sharpshooters. They folded like marionettes.
“You do not frighten me,” Idir said. His face and robes were soaked with the blood and brains of his men. “I have no fear of death.”
“For yourself, perhaps.”
Arkadin motioned with his head and the woman, Soraya Moore, appeared out of the shadows. Idir gasped. She herded Badis in front of her.
“Papa!” Badis made a lunge toward his father, but Soraya caught him by the material at the back of his neck and jerked him back to her. “Papa! Papa!”
A look of terrible despair crossed Idir’s dark face.
“Idir,” Arkadin commanded, “throw your men over the parapet.”
Idir looked at him for a moment, dumbstruck. “Why?”
“So your men will know what happened up here, so they will fear the consequences of their actions.”
Idir shook his head.
Arkadin strode over to Badis and stuck the blunt barrel of the Magpul into his mouth. “I pull the trigger and even his own mother won’t recognize him.”
Idir blanched, then glowered impotently. He bent and picked up one of the sharpshooters, but there was so much blood the corpse slipped out of his hands.
Badis stared, wide-eyed and shivering.
Gathering the corpse to him, Idir rolled it onto the parapet. When he dropped it over the edge, they heard the sound it made smacking against the street. Badis shuddered. Quickly now Idir dumped the second corpse down onto the street. Again that thick, almost viscous sound made Badis jump.
Arkadin gestured. Soraya dragged the struggling boy to the edge of the roof and pushed his head over the side.
Idir made a move toward his son, but Arkadin waggled the Magpul, shaking his head.
“So you see death has many aspects,” Arkadin said, “and eventually fear comes to us all.”
And so at last the knives came fully out of their sheaths. Bourne came down off the roof when he heard the two shots. And now, as he saw Arkadin push Idir Syphax along in front of him, he came to meet them. Bourne and Arkadin stared at each other as if they were opposing agents about to exchange prisoners at the edge of no-man’s-land.
“Soraya?” Bourne said.
“On the rooftop with the boy,” Arkadin said.
“You didn’t hurt him?”
Arkadin glanced at Idir, then shot Bourne a disgusted look. “If I’d had to, I would have.”
“That wasn’t our deal.”
“Our deal,” Arkadin said tersely, “was to get this job done.”
Idir fidgeted in the tense silence, his eyes darting from one man to the other. “You two need to get your priorities straight.”
Arkadin struck him across the face. “Shut the f*ck up.”
At length, Bourne handed Arkadin the laptop in its protective case. Then he took hold of Idir and said, “You’ll lead us inside. You’ll be the first through every barrier, electronic or otherwise.” He produced his cell phone. “I’m in constant touch with Soraya. Anything goes wrong…” He waggled the cell.
“I understand.” Idir’s voice was dull, but his eyes burned with hatred and rage.
He led them around to the front door, which he unlocked with a pair of keys. The moment they entered, he punched a code into a keypad set into the wall to the left of the door.
Silence.
A dog barked, unnaturally loud in the night, and in that highly charged atmosphere moonlight seemed to strike the house with the sound of sleet.
Idir coughed and turned on the lights. “Motion detectors come first, then the infrareds.” He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small remote control. “I can turn them both off from here.”
“Without the generator everything goes down,” Bourne said. “Take us to it.”
But when Idir started in one direction, Bourne said, “Not that way.”
A look of terror crossed Idir’s face. “You’ve been talking to Tanirt.” Breathing her name, he shuddered.
“If you know the way,” Arkadin said irritably, “what the f*ck do we need him for?”
“He knows how to shut down the generator without it blowing the building to bits.”
That sobering news shut Arkadin up for the moment. Idir reversed directions, taking them on a route that skirted the outer rooms. They came to the first motion detector, its red eye blank and dark.
They passed it, Idir going first, as usual. They reached a door and Idir unlocked it. Another corridor unfolded like a fan, turning first this way, then that. Bourne was put in mind of the chambers of the great pyramids in Giza. Another door loomed before them. This, too, Idir unlocked. Another corridor, shorter this time and perfectly straight. They passed no doors. The walls were unadorned, stuccoed a neutral color that looked like flesh. The corridor ended at a third door, this one made of steel. They went through this. Ahead could be dimly seen a spiral staircase descending into darkness.
“Turn on the lights,” Arkadin ordered.
“There is no electricity down there,” Idir said. “Only torches.”
Arkadin lunged at him but Bourne blocked his path.
“Keep him away from me,” Idir said. “He’s a lunatic.”
They started down the staircase, unwinding into the darkness. At the bottom Idir lit a reed torch. He handed this to Bourne and reached into a niche in the wall where a wrought-iron basket contained a clutch of torches. He lit a second one.
“Where are the alarm systems?” Bourne asked.
“Too many animals down here,” Idir said.
Arkadin glanced around at the bare poured-concrete floor, which smelled of dust and dried droppings. “What kind of animals?”
Idir pushed forward. In the flickering torchlight the lower level seemed immense. There was nothing to see but flames crackling in the darkness. The smoke thickened the airless atmosphere. All at once they found themselves in a narrow passage. Within forty paces it began to curve, and they followed it around to the right. Once again the walls were doorless, completely blank. The passage kept curving. It seemed to Bourne that they were in a spiral, moving in ever-narrowing concentric circles, and he guessed they were approaching the heart of the building. An unseen weight seemed to press down on them, making breathing difficult, as if they had plunged under a deep subterranean lake.
At last, the corridor ended, opening out into a room roughly in the shape of a pentangle, inasmuch as it had five sides. There was a deep pulsing, like the thrum of a gigantic heart. It filled the room, the vibration stirring the thick air.
“There it is.” Idir nodded toward what seemed like a chunky plinth in the center of the room. On it stood a black basalt statue of the ancient god Baal.
Arkadin whirled on Idir. “What kind of crap is this?”
Idir took a step toward Bourne. “The generator is under the statue.”
Arkadin sneered. “All this idiotic mumbo-jumbo—”
“The missing set of instructions is hidden inside the statue.”
“Ah, that’s more like it.” As Arkadin picked his way toward the statue, Idir moved closer to Bourne.
“It’s clear enough you hate each other,” he whispered. “He moves the statue and a fail-safe packet of C-Four affixed to the side of the generator is activated on a three-minute delay. Even I can’t stop it, but I can lead you out of here in plenty of time. Kill this animal so he won’t harm my son.”
Arkadin was reaching out for the statue. Bourne could sense Idir holding his breath; he was ready to run. Bourne saw this moment clearly: It was the point in time that both Suparwita and Tanirt had somehow foreseen. It was the moment when his rage to revenge Tracy’s death could be sated. The moment when his two warring personalities would finally tear him apart from the inside out, the moment of his own death. Did he believe them? Was there no clear-cut moment in his life? Was everything infused with the unknown of the life he could not remember? He could turn away from the dangers to him, or he could master them. The choice he made now would stay with him, would change him forever. Would he betray Arkadin or Idir? And then he realized that there was no choice at all, his path lay clearly before him as if illuminated by the light of the full moon.
Idir’s plea was clever, but it was irrelevant.
“Leonid, stop!” Bourne called out. “Moving the statue will set off an explosion.”
Arkadin’s outstretched arm froze, his fingertips inches from the statue. He turned his head. “That’s what this sonovabitch told you behind my back?”
“Why did you do that?” Idir’s voice was full of despair.
“Because you didn’t tell me how to turn off the generator.”
Arkadin’s gaze shifted to Bourne. “Why is that so f*cking important?”
“Because,” Bourne said, “the generator controls a series of security measures that will stop us from ever leaving here.”
Arkadin stalked over to Idir and backhanded the barrel of his Magpul across the Berber’s face. Idir spat out a tooth along with a thick gout of blood.
“I’m done with you,” he said. “I’m now going to take you apart piece by piece. You’ll tell us what we want to know whether or not you want to. You aren’t afraid of death, but you have already shown me your fear. When I get out of here I’m going to throw Badis off that roof myself.”
“No, no!” Idir cried, scuttling around to the side of the generator housing. “Here, here,” he muttered to himself. At the base of the plinth he depressed a stone, which slid out of the way. He threw a switch, and the throb of the generator ceased. “See? It’s off.” He stood up. “I’ve done what you asked. My life is nothing, but I beg you to spare my son’s life.”
Arkadin, grinning, set the case on top of the plinth, unlocked it, and took out the laptop. “Now,” he said, as he fired up the computer, “the ring.”
Idir crept closer to the plinth. He managed to tap his fingernail along the top of the computer before Arkadin delivered a heavy backhand blow that swatted him back on his heels.
As Bourne was taking out the ring, Idir said, “It won’t do any good.”
“Shut the f*ck up,” Arkadin snapped.
“Let him speak,” Bourne said. “Idir, what do you mean?”
“That isn’t the right laptop.”
“He’s a liar,” Arkadin said. “Look here—” He took the ring from Bourne and inserted it. “—it has the slot for the ring.”
Idir’s laughter was tinged with hysteria, or with madness.
As Arkadin slid the ring through the slot again and again, he tried in vain to bring up the ghost file on the partitioned hard drive.
“You fools!” Idir could not stop laughing. “Someone has been f*cking with you. I’m telling you it’s the wrong laptop.”
With an inarticulate cry, Arkadin swung around.
“Leonid, no!”
Bourne leapt at him, too late to keep him from firing, but he ran full-tilt into Arkadin’s right shoulder. The spray of bullets went wide, but two bullets struck Idir’s chest and shoulder.
Both torches were on the floor, crackling as they burned down. They were more than half finished. Bourne and Arkadin attacked each other with hands, feet, and knees. Arkadin, the Magpul in his right hand, hammered at Bourne, who was forced to raise his hands in front of his face in order to deflect the blows. Deep contusions, then ragged cuts broke out on his wrists from the force of the Magpul’s heavy barrel pounding him. He brought his knee up into Arkadin’s stomach, but it seemed to have little or no effect. At the next blow Bourne grabbed the barrel, but it raked down his palm, slicing it open. Arkadin turned the muzzle on Bourne, and Bourne slammed the heel of his bleeding hand into Arkadin’s nose. Blood flew as Arkadin’s head snapped back, the back of it banging off the floor. He squeezed off a short burst, the noise deafening in the space. Bourne struck him again, slamming his head to the right, where a blur of movement shot toward him.
A large rat, terrified by the noise, leapt blindly at Arkadin’s face. Arkadin swung at it and missed. He rolled away, grabbed one of the torches, and thrust it out wildly. The rat leapt away, scrambling across Idir’s slumped body. The flames caught its tail, the rat screamed, and so did Idir, whose robes were now alight and burning with an acrid stench. Staggering to his feet, he slapped wildly at the flames with his good arm, but staggered, off balance, and fell against the plinth. His head struck the statue of Baal, knocking it off the generator housing. It shattered against the floor.
Rising, Bourne ran toward Idir, but the greedy flames had already engulfed him, making it impossible to get close. The sickening stench of roasting meat, the bright burst of flames, and then an ominous ticking counting down the three minutes of life they had left.
Arkadin swung his arm around and fired, but Bourne had moved behind Idir, and the burst of gunfire went wide. The flaming torch was fast guttering. Scooping up one of the torches, Bourne ran back into the doorway to the corridor. Under cover, he drew the Beretta. He was about to fire back when he glimpsed Arkadin on his hands and knees, scrabbling about in the rubble of the shattered statue. He picked out an SDS memory card, brushed it off, and, rising, stuck it into the appropriate slot of the laptop.
“Leonid, leave it,” Bourne shouted. “The laptop is a fake.”
When there was no response, Bourne called Arkadin’s name again, this time more urgently. “We have just over two minutes to find our way out of here.”
“So Idir would have us believe.” Arkadin sounded distracted. “Why would he tell us the truth?”
“He was terrified for the life of his son.”
“In the land of the blind,” Arkadin shot back, “there is no incentive to tell the truth.”
“Leonid, come on! Let it go! You’re wasting time.”
There was no response. The moment Bourne showed his face in the pentangle, Arkadin fired at him. His torch sparking and sputtering near its end, Bourne sprinted back up the corridor the way they had come. Halfway along, the torch guttered and died. He threw it aside and kept on, his eidetic memory guiding him unerringly to the base of the spiral staircase.
Now it was a matter of outrunning the clock. By his estimation, he had less than two minutes to get out of the house before the C-4 exploded. He reached the top of the staircase, but there was no light. The door was closed.
Returning to the bottom of the stairs, he grabbed another torch, lit it, and sprinted back up to the top. Twenty seconds wasted. A minute and a half remaining. At the top of the staircase, he held the torch up to the door. It had no handle on this side. Not even a lock marred its smooth surface. But there must be a way out. Leaning in, he ran his fingertips around the edge where the door met the jamb. Nothing. On all fours he probed the lintel, found a small square that gave to the pressure of his fingertip. He jumped away as the door opened. Just over a minute left to find his way through the maze of concentric circles and out the front door.
Along the curving corridor he went, fast as he could, holding the torch high. The electric lights had been extinguished when Idir had thrown the switch turning off the generator. Once he paused and thought he could hear footsteps echoing behind him, but he couldn’t be certain, and he pressed on, spiraling outward, ever outward toward the skin of the house.
He went through the two open doors and was in what he was sure must be the last of the corridors. Thirty seconds to go. And then the front door was ahead of him. Reaching it, he hauled on the handle. The door wouldn’t budge. He battered on it, to no avail. Cursing under his breath, he turned back, staring down the windowless, doorless corridor. “Everything in the house is an illusion,” Tanirt had told him. “This is the most important advice I can give you.”
Twenty seconds.
As he passed close to the outer wall, air stirred at the side of his head. There were no vents, so where was it coming from? He ran his hand over the wall, which, he surmised, must be the outside wall of the house itself. Using his knuckles, he rapped on the wall, listening for an anomalous sound. Solid, solid. He moved farther back down the corridor.
Fifteen seconds.
And then the sound changed. Hollow. Standing back, he slammed the heel of his shoe into the wall. It went through. Again. Ten seconds. Not enough time. Thrusting the torch into the ragged hole, he set it afire. The flames ate up the paint and the board behind it. Dropping the torch, he covered his head with his arms and dived through.
Glass shattered outward, and then he was rolling in the street, picking himself up and running, running. Behind him, the night seemed to catch fire. The house ballooned outward, the shock wave of the explosion lifting him off his feet, hurling him against the wall of the building across the street.
At first he was struck deaf. He picked himself up, staggered against the wall, and shook his head. He heard screaming. Someone was screaming his name. He recognized Soraya’s voice, then saw her running toward him. Badis was nowhere to be seen.
“Jason! Jason!” She ran up to him. “Are you all right?”
He nodded but, examining him, she was already shrugging off her coat. Ripping off a sleeve of her shirt, she bound his bleeding hands.
“Badis?”
“I let him go when the house blew.” She looked up at him. “The father?”
Bourne shook his head.
“And Arkadin? I made a circuit of the building and didn’t see him.”
Bourne looked back at the fierce blaze. “He refused to leave the notebook and the ring.”
Soraya finished bandaging his hands, then they both watched what was left of the house being consumed by the fire. The street was deserted. There must have been hundreds of eyes watching the scene, but none of them was visible. No Severus Domna soldier appeared. Bourne saw why. Tanirt was standing at the other end of the street, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips.
Soraya nodded. “I guess Arkadin finally got what he wanted.”
Bourne thought that must, after all, be true.