The Bourne Objective

by Robert Ludlum

  Antonio, relishing his role, grinned at her and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Then Arkadin was on board and between them.

  “Maricón, what are you doing here? Get out of my face,” Antonio said.

  Arkadin straight-armed him off the boat and into the water. The Mexican on the cigarette laughed uproariously.

  “That wasn’t a good idea,” Soraya said coldly.

  “He was hurting you.” Arkadin said it as a clear statement of fact.

  “You have no idea what he was doing.” Soraya kept up her frozen exterior.

  “He’s a man, you’re a woman,” Arkadin said. “I know exactly what he was doing.”

  “Maybe I liked it.”

  Arkadin laughed. “Maybe you did. Should I help the sonovabitch back onto the dock?”

  Soraya looked down at Antonio snorting water out of his nose. “I could have done that.” Then she looked back at Arkadin. “Leave the sonovabitch where he is.”

  Arkadin laughed again and offered her his arm. “Maybe you need a change of scene.”

  “Maybe I do. But it won’t be with you.”

  Then she pushed past him, climbed off the boat, and walked slowly and provocatively back up the dock.

  Bourne felt his lungs burning. There were black spots in his vision. Soon enough the bar across his throat would crack his hyoid bone, and it would be all over for him. Reaching out, he grabbed Coven’s fractured ankle and squeezed as hard as he could. Coven shouted in surprise and pain, the pressure came off Bourne’s throat as Coven reared back, and, shoving the bar upward, Bourne rolled out from under it.

  Coven, a murderous look in his eye, found the Glock and aimed it at Bourne. At that moment the ticking of the generator ceased and the house was plunged into darkness. Coven squeezed off a shot, narrowly missing Bourne, and Bourne rolled away into deepest shadow. He held still for the space of ten long breaths, then rolled again. Coven fired another shot, but this struck well wide of the mark. It was clear he had no idea where Bourne was located.

  Bourne could hear Coven moving around. Now that the lights had been extinguished, Coven had lost the advantage of being on his territory. Coven would have to think of another way to reestablish his dominant position.

  If Bourne were in his shoes, he’d try to get to Chrissie and Scarlett, use them as leverage to flush him out. He stayed very still, listening intently to the direction in which Coven was moving. It was from left to right. He was passing the fireplace. Where was he headed? Where was he keeping his captives?

  Bourne pictured as much of the ground-floor interior as had registered after Coven had dragged him inside. He could see the fireplace, the two upholstered armchairs, the side table and lamp, the sofa, and the stairs leading up to the second story.

  The creak of a step tread betrayed Coven, and without a second thought Bourne sprang from his hiding place, scooped up the lamp, and jerked its cord out of the electrical socket. He threw it hard against the wall to his left as he leapt up onto the cushion of the armchair. Coven fired two shots in the direction of the crash as Bourne launched himself over the railing of the staircase.

  He slammed into Coven, hurling him against the back wall before landing atop him. Coven, shaken, nevertheless squeezed off two more shots. He missed, but the flashes burned Bourne’s cheek. Coven lunged for Bourne, trying to swat him with the barrel of the Glock. Bourne kicked out, splintering one of the railing balusters. Wrenching it out of its socket, he swung it against the side of Coven’s face. Coven grunted as his own blood spattered the wall and he rolled away from another blow. He lashed out with his foot, slamming the sole of his shoe into Bourne’s face. Tumbling backward, Bourne fell away from him, and, bracing himself against the wall, Coven fired twice more into the confined space of the staircase.

  Either of the shots would have hit Bourne had he not already vaulted over the banister. He hung there in darkness. When he heard Coven scrambling up the stairs, he flexed his arms and, rising up, rolled his body back over the banister. Taking the treads three at a time, he raced up to the second floor. He knew two things now: Coven was going for his hostages, and the Glock had run through its magazine. Coven needed time to reload and was at his most vulnerable.

  But when Bourne reached the second-floor landing there was no discernible movement. He crouched and, listening, waited. More windows meant light, but it was faint and inconstant, as the overgrown tree branches outside scraped against the house. He could see four doors: four rooms, two on either side. He opened the door into the first room on the left, which was empty, put his ear against the inside wall that abutted the next room. He heard nothing. He went back to the doorway. Coven fired at him as Bourne raced across the hallway and into the first room on the right. Bourne had given him time to reload.

  Wasting no time, Bourne crossed to the window, unlatched it, and, opening it wide, climbed through. He was faced with a thick tangle of oak branches into which he climbed. Moving through the oak, he made his way to the window of the second room on the right. A shadow moved in there, and he went very still. Dimly, he could make out a pair of twin beds. He thought he saw figures lying on them: Chrissie and Scarlett?

  Reaching up to the branch lying more or less horizontally over his head, he swung himself back and forth to gain the required momentum, then launched himself feet-first through the window. The old glass shattered into a thousand crystalline fragments, causing Coven to instinctively cover his face with his forearm.

  Landing, Bourne flew across the room, striking Coven shoulder-first. The two men slammed against the far wall and went down in a heap. Bourne punched him three times, then lunged for the Glock. But Coven was ready, and when Bourne’s defense opened up, he struck a hammer blow on his burned and bleeding cheekbone, Bourne went down, and Coven raised the Glock, not at Bourne, but at Scarlett, who lay bound and spread-eagled on the nearest bed. His angle was such that he had no clear shot at Chrissie, who lay on the bed nearer the window.

  Coven was breathing heavily but still managed to say, “All right, get up. You have five seconds to put your hands behind your head. Then I shoot the girl.”

  “Please, Jason, please. Do what he says.” Chrissie’s voice was high, tight with a mortal terror that bordered on hysteria. “Don’t let him hurt Scarlett.”

  Bourne looked at Chrissie, then delivered a scissors kick that jerked Coven’s extended gun arm down and away from Scarlett.

  Coven cursed under his breath as he struggled to regain control of the Glock. That was his mistake. Keeping the scissors grip on Coven’s arm, Bourne jackknifed his body. He head-butted Coven in his already broken and bloody nose. Coven howled in pain but still tried extricating his arm. Bourne smashed the sole of his shoe into Coven’s kneecap, shattering it. Coven collapsed, and Bourne stepped on the knee. Coven’s eyes watered and his jowls shook so hard, shivers went down his body.

  Wrenching the Glock away from him, Bourne pressed its muzzle into Coven’s right eye.

  When Coven tried to make a countermove, Bourne said, “If you do that, you’ll never walk out of the room. Who will take care of your wife and children then?”

  Coven, his visible eye bloodshot and staring, subsided. But as Bourne removed the muzzle, he exploded upward, using his shoulder and hip. Bourne bore the attack with equanimity, allowed Coven to drive him backward, to expend whatever reserve of energy he had left, then brought the butt of the Glock down on Coven’s skull, shattering the orbital bone. Coven tried to scream, but no sound emerged from his mouth. His eyes rolled up into his head as he fell at Bourne’s feet.

  19

  BORIS KARPOV WALKED through a windblown Red Square, breathing deeply while he thought of how to proceed against Bukin and, by association, the very dangerous Cherkesov. President Imov had given him everything he asked for, including absolute secrecy until he could ferret out all the moles in FSB-2. The place to start was Bukin. He knew he could break Bukin. Once he did, the other moles would come to light without difficulty.

&
nbsp; A light snow was falling, the flakes, small and dry, swirling in the wind. Lights twinkled off the golden and striped onion domes, and tourists took flash photos of one another against the ornate architecture. He took a moment to drink in the peaceful scene, all too rare in Moscow these days.

  Retracing his steps, he plodded back to his limo. The driver, seeing him returning, fired the ignition. He got out from behind the wheel and opened the rear door for his boss. A tall blonde in a ruddy fox coat and knee-high boots strode past. The driver’s eyes lingered on her as Karpov ducked and climbed in. The door slammed shut behind him.

  He said, “HQ,” when the driver slid behind the wheel. The driver nodded wordlessly, put the limo in gear, and they drove out of the Kremlin.

  It was an eleven-minute drive to FSB-2 headquarters on ulitsa Znamenka, depending on traffic—which, at this hour, wasn’t as bad as it could be. Karpov was lost in thought. He was figuring out a way to get Bukin alone, to cut him off from his contacts. He decided to invite him to dinner. On the way, he would instruct his driver to divert their car to the vast construction site on ulitsa Varvarka, a dead zone for cell phone traffic, so he and Bukin could “discuss” his treachery undisturbed.

  The driver stopped at a red light, but when it turned green he did not put the car in gear. Now, through his smoked-glass window, Karpov saw that a Mercedes limo had drawn up beside them. As he watched, the rear door opened and a figure emerged. It was too dark to see who it was, but a moment later the door to his car was wrenched open—odd since his driver always auto-locked all doors—and the figure, ducking its head, slid onto the seat beside him.

  “Boris Illyich, always a pleasure to see you,” Viktor Cherkesov said.

  He had a smile like a hyena, and he smelled like one, too, Karpov observed.

  Cherkesov, whose yellow eyes made him look ravenous, even bloodthirsty, leaned forward slightly to speak to the driver. “The ulitsa Varvarka, I think. The construction site.” Then he sat back, his repellent smile glimmering in the semi-darkness of the limo’s interior. “We don’t want to be disturbed, do we, Boris Illyich.”

  It was not a question.

  Mandy and Michelle were asleep, entwined around each other, which was how they always slept after a long erotic workout. In contrast, Bud Halliday and Jalal Essai had retired to the living room of the apartment they jointly owned under a pseudonym so well documented that the ownership could never be traced back to them.

  Out of courtesy rather than choice, Halliday was sipping a glass of sweet mint tea as he sat opposite Essai.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Halliday said in his most casual voice. “Oliver Liss is in federal custody.”

  Essai sat up. “What? Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

  Halliday gestured toward the bedroom, where the twins were sound asleep.

  “But… what happened? It seemed he was safe.”

  “These days, it seems, no one is safe.” Halliday was searching for the humidor. “Quite without warning, the Justice Department has opened a new investigation into his associations when he was running Black River.” He looked up suddenly, impaling Essai with his gaze. “Will the investigation ripple out to you?”

  “I’m completely insulated,” Jalal Essai said. “I made certain of this from the beginning.”

  “Okay then. Fuck Liss. We move on.”

  Jalal Essai seemed nonplussed. “You’re not surprised?”

  “I think Oliver Liss has been skating on thin ice for some time.”

  “I need him,” Jalal Essai said.

  “Correction: You needed him. When I said move on, I meant it.”

  Halliday found the leather-bound humidor and extracted a cigar. He offered it to Essai, who declined. Then he nipped off the end, stuck it in his mouth, and lit up. He rolled the cigar through the flame as he puffed away.

  Essai said, “I suppose Liss had outlived his usefulness.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Halliday felt calmer now that he had the smoke inside him. Sex with Michelle always got his heart hammering to the point of pain. The woman was a fucking gymnast.

  Essai helped himself to more tea. “With Liss, I was just following orders from an organization I’ve left behind.”

  “Now the two of us are in business,” Halliday observed.

  Essai nodded. “The business of a hundred billion in gold.”

  Halliday frowned as he stared at the glowing end of his cigar. “You feel no remorse at betraying the Severus Domna? After all, they’re your own kind.”

  Essai ignored the racist remark. He’d become inured to Halliday the way one comes to ignore the ache of a cyst. “My kind are no different from your kind, inasmuch as there are those who are good, those who are bad, and those who are ugly.”

  Halliday guffawed so hard he almost choked on the smoke. He sat forward laughing and coughing. His eyes watered.

  “I must say, Essai, for an Arab you’re quite all right.”

  “I’m Berber—Amazigh.” Essai stated this as fact, without a trace of rancor.

  Halliday eyed him through the smoke. “You speak Arabic, don’t you?”

  “Among other languages, including Berber.”

  Halliday spread his hands, as if the other’s answer proved his point. He and Jalal Essai had met in college, where Essai spent two years as an exchange student. In fact, it was because of Essai that Halliday became interested in what he perceived as the growing Arab threat to the Western world. Essai was Muslim, but strictly speaking an outsider in the highly splintered and religicized Arab world. Through the lens of Essai’s worldview, Halliday recognized that it was only a matter of time before the Arab world’s sectarian battles spilled over their boundaries and became a series of wars. For that very reason he cultivated Essai as a friend and adviser, realizing only much later, when Essai was becoming disinterested in Severus Domna’s objectives, that Essai had been dispatched to the States, to his college specifically, to cultivate him as a friend and ally.

  When greed got the best of Essai, when he confessed what his original motivation had been, all of Halliday’s worst prejudices against Arabs were confirmed. He hated Essai, then. He’d even plotted to kill him. But in the end, he had abandoned his revenge fantasies, seduced, as Essai had been, by King Solomon’s gold. Who could resist such a glittering prize? He and Essai, as Halliday came to realize in a repellent moment of understanding, had more in common than seemed possible, given their disparate backgrounds. Then again they were both soldiers of the night, inhabiting the world of shadows that existed on the edges of civilized society, protecting it from destructive elements both without and within.

  “The Severus Domna is no different from any tyrant—fascist, communist, or socialist,” Jalal Essai said. “It lives to accumulate power, to allow its members to influence world events for the sole purpose of amassing more power. In the face of such power, mere human politics becomes irrelevant, as does religion.”

  Essai sat back, crossing one leg over the other. “In the beginning Severus Domna was motivated by the desire for change, a meeting of the minds between East and West, among Islam and Christianity and Judaism. A noble goal, I admit, and for a time they succeeded, if only in small ways. But then, like all altruistic endeavors, this one fell afoul of human nature.”

  He suddenly sat forward, on the edge of the sofa. “And I tell you this, there is no stronger motivation in human beings than greed, even fear. Greed, like sex, makes men stupid, blind to fear, or to the need for anything else. Greed distorted the goals of Severus Domna to such an extent that they became virtually irrelevant. The members continued to pay lip service to the original mission, but by then Severus Domna was rotten to the core.”

  “What does that make us?” Halliday continued to puff on his cigar. “We’re as greedy as the Severus Domna, perhaps more.”

  “But we’re aware of what drives us,” Jalal Essai said with a glint in his eyes. “We’re both clear-eyed and clearheaded.”

  Scarle
tt stared up at Bourne while he untied her. Her cheeks were tear-streaked. She wasn’t crying now, but she was trembling uncontrollably and her teeth were chattering.

  “Is Mum okay?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Who are you?” Tears were coming, more fitfully this time. “Who was that man?”

  “My name is Adam, and I’m a friend of your mum’s,” Bourne said. “I asked her to help me and she took me to Oxford to see Professor Giles. You remember him?”

  Scarlett nodded, sniffling. “I like Professor Giles.”

  “He likes you, too. Very much.”

  His voice was soothing, and she seemed to be calming down. “You flew into the room like Batman.”

  “I’m not Batman.”

  “I know that,” she said somewhat indignantly, “but you’ve got blood all over you and you’re not hurt.”

  He plucked at his damp shirt. “It’s not real blood. I needed to fool the man who kidnapped you and your mother.”

  She regarded him appraisingly. “Are you a secret agent like Aunt Tracy?”

  Bourne laughed. “Aunt Tracy wasn’t a secret agent.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  That indignant note in her voice warned Bourne not to treat her like a child.

  “What makes you think that?”

  Scarlett shrugged. “You couldn’t talk to her without her holding something back. I think secrets were all she had. And she was always sad.”

  “Are secret agents sad?”

  Scarlett nodded. “That’s why they become secret agents.”

  There was something pure and profound in that statement, but for the moment Bourne was content to let it go. “Professor Giles and your mum helped me with a problem. Unfortunately, this man wanted something of mine.”

  “He must’ve wanted it badly.”

  “Yes, he did.” Bourne smiled. “I’m very sorry I led you and your mother into danger, Scarlett.”

  “I want to see her.”

  Bourne lifted her into his arms. She seemed cold as ice. He carried her over to the bed by the window. Chrissie was covered in shards of glass. She was unconscious.