The Bourne Objective

6


I’VE LOST TOUCH with him,” Frederick Willard said.
“You’ve lost touch with him before,” Peter Marks pointed out, he thought helpfully.
“This is different,” Willard snapped. He was wearing a conservatively cut chalk-striped suit, a starched blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, and a navy-blue bow tie with white polka dots. “Unless we’re both careful and clever, this is liable to become permanent.”
Since coming aboard the resurrected Treadstone, Marks had learned quickly that it was a mortal sin to mistake Willard’s age for a loss of vigor. The man might be in his sixties but he could still outrun half the field agents at CI, and as for critical brain function—the ability to think through a problem to its best solution—Marks thought him as good as Alex Conklin, Treadstone’s founder. On top of all that, he possessed the uncanny ability to ferret out his adversary’s weak spots, finding the most novel ways of exploiting them. That Willard was something of a sadist, Marks had no doubt, but that was nothing new in their line of shadow work where sadists, masochists, and every other psychological variant congregated like flies on a rotting corpse. The trick, Marks had found, was discovering the quirk of each person’s personality before he used it to bury you.
They had arranged themselves on a sofa in the foyer of a members-only—and from the looks of things men-only—organization to which Oliver Liss belonged.
“The Monition Club,” Marks said during his hundredth glance around. “What the hell kind of place is this?”
“I don’t know,” Willard said waspishly. “I’ve been trying to find out all day without discovering a scrap of information about it.”
“There must be something. Who owns this building, for instance?”
“A holding company in Grenada.” Willard grunted. “Clearly a shell corporation, and the trail gets more convoluted after that. Whoever these people are they definitely don’t want to be known.”
“No law against that,” Marks said.
“Perhaps not, but it strikes me as both strange and suspect.”
“Maybe I should look into it further.”
The interior was as echoey as a cathedral and, with its stone-block walls, Gothic arches, and gilded crosses, resembled an ecclesiastical institution. Thick carpets and oversize furniture abetted the oppressive hush. Now and again someone strode by, spoke briefly to the uniformed woman behind the high desk in the lobby’s center, then passed into the shadows.
The atmosphere reminded Marks of the prevailing mood of the new CI. From what he’d gleaned from his former colleagues, a new set of unsmiling faces in the support staff and an almost bitter level of gloom infected the hallways. This toxic tone somewhat assuaged the guilt he’d been feeling about bailing on CI, especially because he hadn’t been there for Soraya when she’d returned from Cairo. On the other hand, Willard had assured him that he’d be of more help to her now that he’d moved on. “This way your wisdom and advice will seem more objective and therefore have more weight,” Willard had said. As it turned out, he’d been right. Marks was quite sure that he was the only one who could have persuaded her to join Treadstone.
“What are you thinking?” Willard said unexpectedly.
“Nothing.”
“Wrong answer. Our number one priority is to figure out a way to reestablish clandestine contact with Leonid Arkadin.”
“What makes Arkadin so important? Besides, of course, the fact that he’s Treadstone’s first graduate and the only one that got away.”
Willard glared. He didn’t care for his own words being thrown back in his face, especially by an inferior. That was the problem with Willard—one of his many quirks—as Marks, as quick a study as had ever entered CI’s ranks, had come to understand: Willard was convinced of his superiority, and he treated everyone accordingly. That there might be a grain or two of truth to his belief only solidified his fierce control. In fact, Marks guessed that this arrogance was what had allowed Willard to infiltrate and maintain his position as steward inside the NSA for so many years. It had to be so much easier to take orders from your masters when you knew you were in the process of f*cking them over.
“It pains me to have to spell this out for you, Marks, but inside Arkadin’s mind lie the last secrets of Treadstone. Conklin submitted him to a raft of psychological techniques that are now lost.”
“What about Jason Bourne?”
“Because of how Arkadin turned out, Conklin didn’t use that technique set on Bourne, so in that sense the two of them are different.”
“How so?”
Willard, whose attention to detail was legendary, shot his cuffs so that they were of precisely equal lengths. “Arkadin has no soul.”
“What?” Marks shook his head as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “Unless I miss my guess, there’s no known technique scientific or otherwise for destroying a soul.”
Willard rolled his eyes. “For God’s sake, Peter, I’m not talking about a machine out of a science-fiction novel.” He rose to his feet. “But ask your parish priest the next time you see him. You’ll be surprised at his answer.” He beckoned for Marks to do the same. “Here comes our new lord and master, Oliver Liss.”
Marks glanced at his watch. “Forty minutes late. Right on time.”
* * *
Oliver Liss lived on the wrong coast. He looked, acted, and possibly even thought of himself as if he were a movie star. He was handsome in that way the Hollywood elite cultivated, except that he didn’t seem to work at it. Maybe it was simply superb genes. In any event, when he entered a room he required no other entourage than his own personal sun burning at his back. He was tall, lean, and athletic, engendering bitter envy in those men he met. He liked his drinks strong, his meat red, and his women young, blond, and buxom. He was, in short, precisely the sort of man Hugh Hefner had envisioned when he created Playboy.
Cranking up a mechanical smile without breaking stride, Liss gestured for them to follow him past Cerberus’s gates and into the Monition Club proper. It was breakfast time. Apparently, following Monition Club tradition, that meal was taken on an enclosed brick terrace, which overlooked a cloistered atrium whose center was as neatly laid out as an herb garden, though this time of the year there was scarcely anything to see but fallow ground and a geometry of low cast-iron fences, presumably to keep the mint out of the sage.
Liss led them to a spacious table of inlaid stone. He exuded the scents of beeswax and expensive cologne. Today he was dressed like a country gentleman in flannel trousers, tweed jacket, and a tie with a print of hungry-looking foxes. His expensive ox-blood loafers shone like mirrors.
After they ordered, drank their fresh-squeezed juice, and sipped their bracing French-press coffee, he came right to the point. “I know you have been busy moving into our new offices, taking possession of the electronics and so forth, but I want you to set all that aside. I’m hiring an office manager for that, anyway, you’re both far too valuable to waste.” His voice was as rich and lustrous as his shoes. He rubbed his hands together, a beloved uncle delighted at the latest family reunion. “I want you both concentrated on one matter and one matter only. It seems that with his untimely demise Noah Perlis left some loose ends.”
Willard was taken slightly aback. “You’re not asking us to swim in Black River’s toxic waste, are you?”
“Not in the least. I spent six months untangling myself from the organization I helped found because I could see the train wreck coming. Imagine how that feels, gentlemen.” He raised a finger. “Oh, yes, Frederick, in your case you have a glimmering of what I’ve been going through.” He shook his head. “No, Noah was handling this particular bit of business for me personally, no one else in Black River had a clue.” He sat back as their breakfasts were served, then, over his perfectly cooked eggs Benedict, he continued. “Noah had a ring. He obtained this ring at great cost and, I believe, personal tragedy. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a singular ring. Though on the outside it looks like a simple gold wedding band, it is something far different. Here, take a look at these.” He passed around several color photos of the item in question.
“As you can see, there are a series of symbols—graphemes, if you want to be technical—engraved around the inside.”
“What is a grapheme?” Marks asked.
“The basic unit of language, any language, really.”
Willard squinted. “Yes, but what the devil language is it?”
“Its own, manufactured out of ancient Sumerian, Latin, and God alone knows what other dead language, possibly one that’s been lost to the modern world.”
“You want us to drop everything for this?” Marks looked incredulous. “Who do you think we are, Indiana Jones?”
Liss, who had been in the process of chewing a bite of food, smirked. “This is not so old as that, my smart-aleck friend. In fact, it probably hasn’t been in existence more than a decade or two.”
“A ring?” Willard shook his head. “What do you want with it?”
“Eyes Only.” Liss winked and tapped the side of his nose. “In any event, Noah had the ring when he was killed by Jason Bourne. It’s clear that Bourne killed him in order to get the ring.”
Marks shook his head. His lack of antipathy toward Bourne was well known. “Why would he do that? He must have had a good reason.”
“What you need to keep in mind is that Bourne has murdered again, without provocation.” Liss looked hard at him. “Find Bourne and you’ll find the ring.” He carefully broke a yolk and dipped a triangle of toast into it. “I got a tip that Bourne was seen in the Heathrow arrivals terminal, so it’s a good bet he’s gone to Noah’s apartment in Belgravia. Start there. I’ve sent all the particulars to your cells and booked you on an evening flight to Heathrow so you’ll be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to hit the tarmac at a full sprint when you arrive tomorrow morning.”
Willard put aside the photos and made a face that sent warning bells ringing in Marks’s head.
“When you agreed to fund Treadstone,” Willard said in a quietly ominous voice, “you agreed that I would be in charge of operations.”
“Did I?” Liss rolled his eyes as if trying to recall. Then he shook his head. “No. No, I didn’t.”
“Is this… What is this, some kind of joke?”
“I don’t think so, no.” Liss popped the toast triangle into his mouth and chewed luxuriously.
“I have a very specific agenda.” Willard carefully enunciated each word with a cutting edge. “A particular reason for jump-starting Treadstone.”
“I’m well aware of your obsession with this Russian Leonid Arkadin, but the fact is, Frederick, you didn’t jump-start Treadstone. I did. Treadstone is mine, I fund it lock, stock, and ammunition. You work for me, to think otherwise is to gravely misjudge the parameters of your singular employment.”
Marks suspected that it had dawned on Willard that by switching from CI to Oliver Liss, he’d merely exchanged one hated taskmaster for another. And as he himself had said when he’d recruited Marks, there was no turning back from a deal with the devil. They were both in this to the bitter end, into whatever circle of hell that might lead them.
Liss was also watching Willard. He smiled benignly and pointed with the eggy tines of his fork. “You’d better eat up, your breakfast is getting cold.”
* * *
After catching a bite to eat, during which time he read more of Perlis’s account of the blood feud between Arkadin and Oserov, Bourne returned to Belgravia, this time to the street where Tracy Atherton had lived. It was green and cool through the mist that swirled in the gutters and entwined around the chimneys of the row houses. Her house was neat and trim, identical to its neighbors. A steep flight of steps ran up to the front door where, he observed, there was a brass plate with the names of the people inhabiting the six flats.
He pressed the bell for T. ATHERTON, as if she were still alive and he was arriving to spend the afternoon with her in cozy repose, drinking, eating, making love, and talking about art and its long, complex history. He was surprised, then, when the buzzer sounded, unlatching the front door. Pushing his way inside, he found himself in a narrow vestibule, dim and damply chilly in the way only London indoor spaces can be in winter or spring.
Tracy’s flat was on the third floor, up flights of narrow, very steep stairs, the treads of which creaked beneath his weight now and again. He found it all the way in the rear and he recalled her saying, “There’s a mews out back with a flowering pear tree that a pair of house martins nest in come spring.” He imagined the house martins would be nesting there right about now. It was a bittersweet thought.
The door opened a crack as he was warily approaching. The figure that revealed itself was backlit and for a moment he stood stock-still, his heart racing, because he was quite certain he was looking at Tracy. Tall, willowy, blond hair.
“Yes? May I help you?”
Her eyes broke the spell; they were brown, not blue, and they weren’t as large as Tracy’s. He felt himself breathe again. “My name is Adam Stone. I was a friend of Tracy’s.”
“Oh, yes, Trace told me about you.” She did not offer her hand. Her expression was carefully neutral. “I’m Chrissie Lincoln, Tracy’s sister.”
Still, she did not move out of the doorway. “She met you on a flight to Madrid.”
“Actually, the flight was from Madrid to Seville.”
“That’s right.” Chrissie watched him warily. “Trace traveled so much, it was a good thing she liked flying.”
Bourne could see that he was being tested. “She hated flying. She got sick on the flight five minutes after she introduced herself.” He waited for her to say something, then: “May I come in? I’d like to speak to you about Tracy.”
“I suppose.” She stood back, almost reluctantly.
He walked in and she closed the door behind him. Tracy had been right, the flat was tiny, but as beautiful as she had been. Furniture in butter yellows and deep oranges, crisp cream curtains framed each window, throw pillows here and there in polka dots, animal prints, and stripes added bright bits of color. He walked across the living room and into her bedroom.
“Are you looking for something in particular, Mr. Stone?”
“Call me Adam.” Somehow he knew there would be French doors out onto the back, and there was the pear tree in the mews. “I’m looking for the house martins.”
“I beg your pardon?” Her voice was pitched a bit higher, thinner, and her speech was more rapid than her sister’s had been.
“Tracy said that come spring a pair of house martins nested in that pear tree.”
She was at his shoulder. Her hair smelled of lemon. She wore an inexpensive cotton man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing sun-browned arms, jeans, not the fashionable low-riding ones, but sturdy Levi’s with the cuffs rolled up, cheap flats, scuffed and worn at the heels, and was in a light sweat as if she had been cleaning or rooting around for some time. She wore no jewelry, not even a wedding band. And yet her last name was Lincoln, not Atherton.
“Do you see a sign of them?” she asked in a brittle voice.
“No,” he said, turning away.
She frowned momentarily and remained silent for a long time.
“Chrissie?”
When she didn’t answer he went and got her a glass of cold water from the kitchen. She took it without comment and drank it slowly and methodically, as if it were medicine.
When she put the glass down, she said to him, “I’m afraid this was a mistake letting you in. I’d prefer if you left.”
Bourne nodded. He’d seen the flat; he didn’t know what he’d expected to find, maybe it was nothing at all, save the scent of her, lingering long after she had left. The night they had shared in Khartoum was far more intimate than if they had made love, an act that despite its name could seem impersonal, even detached. The revelation that came later, that Tracy had been working for Leonid Arkadin, had come like a cold slap across the face. But in the weeks after her death he’d been haunted by the notion that something was wrong with that equation. Not that he doubted she’d been in Arkadin’s employ, but deep down he couldn’t escape the notion that the story wasn’t that simple. It was altogether possible that he’d come here looking for some form of proof, a confirmation of his suspicion.
They had moved back to the front door now, and now Chrissie opened it for him. As he was about to step out, she said, “Mr. Stone—”
“Adam.”
She tried to smile and failed, her face seemed tight and pained. “Do you know what happened in Khartoum?”
Bourne hesitated. He stared out into the hallway, but what he was seeing was Tracy’s face, spattered with blood, as he cradled it in his lap.
“Please. I know I’ve been less than hospitable. I—I’m not thinking straight, you see.” She stood back for him to reenter.
Bourne turned back one hand on the partially open door. “Her death was an accident.”
Chrissie looked at him fearfully, expectantly. “You know this?”
“I was there.”
He saw the blood leave her face. She was staring at him fixedly, as if she couldn’t look away, as if with a terrible clarity she saw an accident about to happen.
“Will you tell me how she died?”
“I don’t think you want to hear the details.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. I—I need to know. She was my only sibling.” She shut the door and locked it and went over to an armchair, but she did not sit down. Rather, she stood behind it, staring into the middle distance. “I’ve been in a kind of personal hell since I got the news. A sister’s death, it’s—well, it’s not like any other death. I—I can’t explain it.”
Bourne watched her as she stood, her fingers dug into the high, arched back of the chair.
“She was struck by shards of glass, one went through her. She bled out in minutes; there was nothing anyone could do.”
“Poor Trace.” She was gripping the chair back so hard, her knuckles had turned white. “I begged her not to go, just as I begged her not to take that cursed assignment.”
“What assignment?”
“That bloody Goya.”
“Why did she tell you about the Goya?”
“It wasn’t the painting, but the assignment. She said it was going to be her last. She wanted me to know that. Because she knew I disapproved of what she did, I suppose.”
She shuddered. “Evil thing, that Black Painting.”
“You say that as if it were alive.”
She turned back to him. “In a sense it was, because it was connected with that man.”
“Arkadin.”
“She never told me his name. From what I could gather he gave her extremely dangerous assignments, but he paid her so well she accepted them all, at least that’s what she told me.”
“You didn’t believe her?”
“Oh, I believed her, all right, when we were young we made a pact never to lie to each other.” Her hair was a shade darker than her sister’s, and thicker, lush even, and her face was a bit less angular, softer, more open. It was also more careworn. She moved more quickly than Tracy, or perhaps it was that she moved in nervous bursts as if set off by a series of tiny interior explosions. “The problem arose when we grew up. I’m positive there were a great many things about her private life she refused to share.”
“You didn’t push it.”
“Secrecy was her choice,” she said defensively. “I honored her wishes.”
He followed her back into the bedroom. She stood looking around as if dazed, as if she’d lost her sister and now inexplicably couldn’t find her. Light slanting in through the window was splintered in lozenges and rectangles by the pear tree. It was mellow, toned, like the surface of a sepia print. She moved into one of those luminous geometric shapes now.
Her arms wound around her waist as if she were trying to hold in her emotions. “But of one thing I’m quite certain. That man’s a monster, she’d never have worked for him voluntarily. I’m sure he must have had something on her.”
An echo of his own suspicions. Maybe she had something to tell him after all. “Can you think of what it might be?”
“I already told you, Trace was the most secretive person on earth.”
“So there was nothing, no odd response to your questions, nothing of that nature.”
“No.” Chrissie drew the word out into two syllables. “I mean there was one thing, but, well, it’s kind of ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? How so?”
“I remember one time we were together and, for once, there didn’t seem to be anything to talk about after I’d exhausted the news about me. I was bored with all that, anyway, it was old news to me. I guess I got a bit frustrated, because I said, laughing, you know, something about was she hiding someone up her sleeve.”
Bourne cocked his head. “And?”
“Well, I mean she didn’t think it was funny, did she? She didn’t laugh, that’s for sure. I’d meant a boyfriend or a husband but she said, quite fiercely, that I was the only family she had.”
“You don’t think—”
“No, I don’t,” Chrissie said emphatically. “That wouldn’t be like her at all. She didn’t get on well with Mum and Dad, she was offended by everything about them. And they were deeply offended by her rebelliousness. I was the good daughter. I became a professor at Oxford, following in my father’s footsteps. But Trace… God only knows what they thought she was up to. Anyway, from the time she was thirteen or so they would fight like cats and dogs, until one day she stormed out of the house and never went back. No, I can tell you that she didn’t want a family of her own.”
“And you find that sad.”
“No,” Chrissie said, rather defiant. “I find it admirable.”
Well, at least we get to go after Bourne,” Marks said. “That’s some consolation, he’s one half of the Treadstone equation, isn’t he?”
“Don’t be dense,” Willard snapped. “Liss didn’t even bother to mention it as a peace offering because he knew I’d laugh in his face. He knows I’m the only person on earth—at least one under his control—who can get to Bourne without having his neck or back broken. No, he planned this out from the beginning, it was his whole reason for agreeing to back Treadstone in the first place, and I played right into his hand.”
“That’s a pretty damn high price to pay for a ring,” Marks said. “It must be very rare, costly, or important.”
“I’d like to have another look at that photo of the engraving,” Willard mused. “That’s our best chance of finding out something about the ring, since Liss won’t tell us.”
They had been walking across the Mall, from the Washington Monument toward the Lincoln Memorial, hands in overcoat pockets, backs bowed against the wind, but at the last instant they had decided to make a detour to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Along the way they had, each in his own way, checked for tags and tails. They didn’t trust anyone, least of all Oliver Liss.
They stopped, and Willard stared at the wall, somber in its eternal shadows, sighed deeply, and closed his eyes. A small, secret smile crept across his lips with the stealth of a cat. “He thinks he’s checkmated me, but I’ve got a queen he can’t control.”
Marks shook his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Willard’s eyes popped open. “Soraya Moore.”
Marks looked at him, alarmed. “Oh, no.”
“I told you to try to recruit her and you did.”
A pair of vets in uniform, one pushing the other, who was in a wheelchair, came down the long, graceful ramp into the full majesty of the wall and stopped in front of the names. The vet in the wheelchair was without legs. He handed his friend a small bouquet and a miniature American flag on a wooden stand. His friend laid them at the foot of the wall where their compatriots’ names were engraved for all time.
There was a glitter in Willard’s eyes as he turned away from the scene. “I have her first assignment: Find Leonid Arkadin.”
“You said you’d lost him,” Marks pointed out. “Where is she going to start looking?”
“That’s her problem,” Willard said. “She’s a smart girl, I’ve been following her career since she came to prominence at Typhon.” He smiled. “Have a little faith, Peter. She’s first-rate material, plus, she’s got a built-in advantage over you or me. She’s a very good-looking female—highly desirable—which means Arkadin will have her scent before she comes within a block of him.”
His brain was traveling at speed in its own peculiar orbit. “I want her with him, Peter. I want her attached to Arkadin, she’s going to tell me what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.”
The two vets’ heads were bowed, locked within their private memories as tourists and relatives of other fallen filed by, some touching names here and there. A Japanese tour leader, yellow pennant held high, gathered her photo-clicking flock to her.
Marks ran a hand through his hair. “You can’t expect me—What? Jesus, you want me to pimp her out?”
Willard looked like he was sucking on a lemon. “Since when did you become a Boy Scout? Not in CI, surely. The Old Man would’ve had your heart for lunch.”
“She’s a friend of mine, Fred. Longtime.”
“There are no friends in this business, Peter, just the bitterly oppressed. I am Liss’s slave and you are mine and she is yours. That’s how it works.”
Marks looked as glum as Willard had at the end of their breakfast with Liss.
“You will give her her assignment before we leave for the airport—” Willard glanced at his watch. “—which gives you less than six hours to prep for London and do the deed.” His smile was all teeth. “More than enough time for a clever fellow like you, wouldn’t you say?”