The Bourne Objective

by Robert Ludlum

He’d read enough for the moment. Closing the lid on the safe-deposit box, he pocketed the book and rang the bell to indicate that he was finished. While on the surface it seemed odd that Perlis would use such an old-fashioned method to record what he obviously considered vital intelligence, on further consideration it made perfect sense. Electronic media were all too prone to hacking in so many forms that a handwritten copy was the answer. Kept in a vault, it was perfectly secure, and if the need arose it could be irrevocably destroyed with nothing but a match. These days going low-tech was often the best defense against computer hackers, who could infiltrate the most sophisticated electronic networks and retrieve even supposedly deleted files.

  Diego Hererra pulled aside the curtain, took the metal box, returned it to its numbered niche, closed the door behind it, and the two men secured the box with their respective keys.

  As they walked out of the vault Bourne said, “I need a favor.”

  Diego glanced at him expectantly, but noncommittally.

  “There is a man who has been following me. He’s in the bank, waiting for me to return.”

  Now Diego smiled. “But of course. I can show you to the door used by customers who require, shall we say, a higher degree of discretion than is the norm.” They were almost at his office when a ripple of concern crossed his face. “Why is this man following you, may I ask?”

  “I don’t know,” Bourne said, “though I seem to collect people like him like flies.”

  Diego gave a low laugh. “Noah often said more or less the same thing.”

  Bourne realized that this was as close as Diego Hererra was going to get to asking him if he worked for Perlis’s outfit. He was beginning to like Diego as much as he liked his father, however, that was no reason to tell him the truth. He nodded as if in tacit answer to Diego’s unspoken question.

  “I don’t know who he is, either, but it’s important I find out,” Bourne said.

  Diego spread his hands. “I am at your service, Señor Stone,” he said in true Catalan style.

  Diego may be living in London, Bourne thought, but his heart is still in Seville.

  “I need to get this man out of your bank and onto the street before I leave. A fire alarm would do nicely.”

  Diego nodded. “Consider it done.” He lifted a finger. “On the condition that you come to my house tomorrow evening.” He gave Bourne an address in Belgravia. “We have friends in common, it would be rude of me not to offer my hospitality.” Then he grinned, showing even, white teeth. “We’ll have a bite to eat, then, if you fancy a flutter, we’ll go out to the Vesper Club on the Fulham Road.”

  Diego had a take-charge attitude that was more no-nonsense than egotistical, again very much like his father. This was in line with the profile he’d gleaned from his Web search some weeks ago, but the Vesper Club, a members-only casino strictly for high-rollers, was not. Bourne stuck the anomaly in the back of his mind and prepared to go into action.

  The fire alarm went off in Aguardiente Bancorp. Bourne and Diego Hererra watched as the guards swiftly and methodically herded everyone out the front door, Bourne’s tracker among them.

  Bourne emerged from the side entrance of the bank, and as the clients milled around the sidewalk, unsure what to do next, he located his tail, keeping the crowd between them. The man was watching the front entrance for Bourne, all the while in a position to check out the bank’s side entrance.

  Slipping through the crowd, which had now doubled in size due to curious pedestrians and drivers gawking from their stopped cars, Bourne came up behind the tracker and said: “Walk straight ahead, up the road toward Fleet Street.” He dug his knuckle into the small of the man’s back. “Everyone will think a silenced pistol shot is a lorry backfiring.” He slammed the heel of his hand against the back of the man’s head. “Did I tell you to turn around? Now start walking.”

  The man did as Bourne ordered him, snaking into the fringes of the crowd and picking his way, more quickly now, up Middle Temple Lane. He was broad-shouldered with a dirty-blond crew cut, a face empty as an abandoned lot, with rough skin as if he had an allergy or had been in the wind for too many years. Bourne knew he’d try something, and sooner rather than later. A businessman, lost on his cell phone, hurried toward them, and Bourne felt Crew-Cut leaning toward him. Crew-Cut deliberately bumped against the businessman, allowed himself to be jostled sideways by the collision, and was in the process of turning back on Bourne, his right arm bent, his fingers coming together to form a cement block, when Bourne slammed him behind the knee with the sole of his shoe. At almost the same instant Bourne caught his right arm in a vise created by his elbow and forearm, and cracked the bone.

  The man buckled over, groaning. When Bourne bent to lift him to his feet, he would have driven his knee into Bourne’s groin, but Bourne sidestepped and the knee struck him painfully, if harmlessly, on the thigh instead.

  At that point Bourne became aware of a car racing the wrong way down the street, too fast in fact to slow down, let alone stop before it hit them. He threw the man’s body into the path of the oncoming vehicle and, using the man’s shoulders as a base, vaulted over the hood. With a screech of brakes, the car tried valiantly to decelerate. The moment his shoes hit the top of the car bullets pierced it from the interior, trying to find him, but he was already sliding down the trunk.

  Behind him he heard the liquid thunk! as the car slammed into the body, then the stink of burning rubber flayed off the tires. Risking a glance over his shoulder he saw two men emerge, armed with Glocks—the driver and the shooter. As they turned toward him, the huge knot of patrons and staff that had been standing outside Aguardiente Bancorp came streaming up the street, voices raised, cell phone cameras clicking like a forest of cicadas, trapping the two men, pinning them in place. Now curious pedestrians appeared from Fleet Street. Within moments the familiar high–low clamor of police klaxons filled the air, and Bourne, worming into the midst of the throng, slipped quietly away, turned the corner onto Fleet Street, and melted into the city.

  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 again
st 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 fucking 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.
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br />   “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.