The Bourne Objective

by Robert Ludlum

  Soraya, brooding, was silent for the remainder of the ride.

  In Marrakech, Arkadin took her along a warren of streets where Moroccans peered at her, licking their lips as if they were trying to measure the tenderness of her flesh. They were engulfed by the madhouse screeches of the jungle. At length, they entered a stuffy shop that stank of machine oil. A small, bald, mole-like man greeted Arkadin in the obsequious manner of an undertaker, rubbing his hands together and bowing continuously. At the rear of the shop was a small Persian carpet. Lifting this aside, he pulled on a thick metal ring, which opened a trapdoor. Switching on a small flashlight, the mole-man descended a metal spiral staircase. At the base, he flicked on a series of fluorescent coils set into a ceiling so low they were forced to stoop as they crab-walked across the polished floorboards. Unlike the shop above, dusty, packed willy-nilly with all manner of cartons, barrels, and crates, the basement was spotless. Along the walls, portable dehumidifiers hummed quietly alongside a row of air purifiers. The basement was divided into neat aisles sided by long, waist-high cabinets, each with three drawers, each one filled with every form of hand weaponry known to modern man. Every weapon was marked and tagged in meticulous fashion.

  “Well, since you know my stock,” the mole-man said, “I’ll leave you to make your choices. Bring what you want to buy upstairs, I’ll provide what ammunition you require, and we’ll settle the bill.”

  Arkadin nodded absently. He was consumed with passing from one drawer of the arsenal to another, calculating firepower, ease of use, rapidity of fire, and the practicality of weight and size of each weapon.

  When they were alone, he removed from a drawer what looked to Soraya like a searchlight with a large battery pack underneath it. Turning to her, he shook the searchlight. The battery pack opened and locked into place. The item was a folding machine gun.

  “I’ve never seen that before.” She was fascinated despite herself.

  “It’s a prototype, not on the market yet. It’s a Magpul FMG, takes standard nine-millimeter Glock ammo but spits it out a shitload faster than a pistol.” He ran his hand down the stubby barrel. “Nice, huh?”

  Soraya thought it was. She’d dearly like one for herself.

  Arkadin must have recognized the avidity of her gaze. “Here.”

  She took it from him, examined it expertly, broke it down, then put it back together.

  “Fucking ingenious.” Arkadin seemed in no hurry to take back the FMG. He seemed to be watching her, but, in fact, he was seeing something else, a scene from far away.

  In St. Petersburg he’d taken Tracy to her hotel room. She had not asked him to come up, but she hadn’t protested when he had. Inside, she put her handbag and key down on a table, walked across the carpet and into the bathroom. She closed the door but he didn’t hear the click of a lock.

  The river glittered in moonlight, black and thick and full of secrets, like an ancient serpent, always half asleep. It was stuffy in the room, so he went to the window and, unlatching it, opened it. A wind, thick as the river and smelling of it, swirled about the room. He turned, looked at the bed, and imagined Tracy there, her nakedness revealed by the moonlight.

  A tiny sound, like a sigh or a catch in the throat, caused him to turn around. The bathroom door, unlatched, had opened, and now another swirl of wind pushed it farther, so that a thin wedge of buttery light fell across the carpet. He entered the wedge of light, and his gaze penetrated into the bathroom. He saw Tracy’s back, or rather a slice of it, pale and unblemished. Lower was the swell of her buttocks and the deep crease between. The pulse of pleasure in his groin was so extreme it bordered on pain. There was that thing about her—his hatred and his dependence—that made him weak. He despised himself, but he could not help moving toward the door and pushing it farther open.

  The door, old and peeling, creaked, and Tracy peered at him over her shoulder. Her body was revealed to him in all its glory. She looked at him with a pity and loathing that brought an animal sound to his lips. Hurriedly, he pulled the door shut. When she emerged, he could not look at her. He heard her cross the room and close the window.

  “Where were you brought up?” she said.

  It was not a question, but a slap in the face. He could not answer her, and for that—for many things—he burned to kill her, to feel the cartilage in her throat rupture beneath the pressure of his fingers, to feel her blood running hotly in his hands. Yet he was bound to her, as she was bound to him. They were locked in hateful orbit, with no possibility of escape.

  But Tracy did escape, he thought now, into death. He missed her, hated himself for missing her. She was the only woman who had refused him. Up until now, that is. As his eyes refocused on Soraya folding up the FMG, he felt a premonitory shiver run through him. For a moment, he saw her skull, and she looked like death. Then everything snapped back into focus and he could breathe again.

  Unlike Tracy, her skin was burnished a golden bronze. Like Tracy, she had revealed herself to him when she stripped off the T-shirt he had loaned her to use as a tourniquet for Moira’s thigh. She had heavy breasts, the nipples dark and erect. He could see them now, beneath her top, see them as clearly as if she were still half naked.

  “It’s because you can’t have me,” Soraya said as if reading his mind.

  “On the contrary, I could have you right now.”

  “Rape me, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you were going to,” she said, turning her back on him, “you would have already.”

  He came up behind her and said, “Don’t tempt me.”

  She whirled around. “Your rage is toward men, not women.”

  He glared at her, unmoving.

  “You get off on killing men and seducing women. But rape? You’d no more consider raping a woman than I would.”

  His mind raced back to his hometown of Nizhny Tagil, where he had briefly become a member of Stas Kuzin’s gang, rounding up girls off the streets to stock Kuzin’s savage brothel. Night after night he’d heard the girls’ screams and cries as they were raped and beaten. In the end, he’d killed Kuzin and half his gang.

  “Rape is for animals,” he said in a thick voice. “I’m not an animal.”

  “That’s your life: the struggle to be a man, not an animal.”

  He looked away.

  “Did Treadstone do this to you?”

  He laughed. “Treadstone was the least of it. It was everything that happened before, everything I try to forget.”

  “Curious. For Bourne it’s just the opposite. His struggle is to remember.”

  “He’s lucky, then,” Arkadin snarled.

  “It’s a great pity you’re enemies.”

  “God made us enemies.” Arkadin took the weapon from her. “A god named Alexander Conklin.”

  Do you know how to die, Bourne?” Tanirt whispered.

  “You were born on Siwa’s day: the last day of the month, which is both the ending and the beginning. Do you understand? You are destined to die and be born again.” This was what Suparwita had told him only days ago in Bali.

  “I’ve died once,” he said, “and was reborn.”

  “Flesh, flesh, only flesh,” she muttered. And then: “This is different.”

  Tanirt said this with a force he felt through every fiber of his being. He leaned toward her, the promise of her thighs and her breasts drawing him into her orbit.

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Her hands gripped him, pulling him even closer. “There is only one way to explain.” She turned and led him back into the sweets shop. In the far corner she pushed several fragrant bales out of the way, revealing a wooden staircase, full of dust and crystals of palm sugar. They ascended to an upper floor that was, or until recently had been, someone’s living quarters. The owner’s daughter, judging by the posters of film and rock stars on the walls. It was brighter up here, the windows bringing in blinding sunlight. But it was also as hot as a fever. Tanirt appeared unaffecte
d.

  In the center of the floor she turned to him. “Tell me, Bourne, what do you believe in?”

  He did not answer.

  “The hand of God, fate, destiny? Any of those things?”

  “I believe in free will,” he said at last, “in the ability to make one’s own choices without interference, either by organizations or by fate, whatever you want to call it.”

  “In other words, you believe in chaos, because man doesn’t control anything in this universe.”

  “That would mean I’m helpless. I’m not.”

  “So neither Law nor Chaos.” She smiled. “Yours is a special path, the path between, where no one before you has gone.”

  “I’m not sure I’d put it that way.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t. You’re not a philosopher. How would you put it?”

  “Where is this going?” he said.

  “Always the soldier, the impatient soldier,” Tanirt said. “Death. It’s going toward the nature of your death.”

  “Death is the end of life,” Bourne said. “What else is there to know about its nature?”

  She went to one of the windows and opened it. “Tell me, please, how many of the enemy can you see?”

  Bourne stood beside her, feeling her intense warmth as if she were an engine that had been running at speed for a long time. From this lofty vantage point, he could see a fair number of streets and observe their occupants.

  “Somewhere between three and nine. It’s difficult to be precise,” he said after several minutes. “Which one will kill me?”

  “None of them.”

  “Then it will be Arkadin.”

  Tanirt cocked her head. “This man Arkadin will be the herald, but he won’t be the one who kills you.”

  Bourne turned to her. “Then who?”

  “Bourne, do you know who you are?”

  He had been with her long enough to know that he wasn’t expected to answer.

  “Something happened to you,” Tanirt said. “You were one person, now you’re two.”

  She put the flat of her hand on his chest and his heart seemed to skip a beat—or, more accurately, to race past it. He gave a little gasp.

  “These two people are incompatible—in every way incompatible. Therefore, there is a war inside you, a war that will lead to your death.”

  “Tanirt—”

  She raised the hand that had been on his chest, and he felt as if he had sunk into a bog.

  “The herald—this man Arkadin—will arrive in Tineghir with the one who will kill you. It is someone you know, perhaps very well. It is a woman.”

  “Moira? Is her name Moira?”

  Tanirt shook her head. “An Egyptian.”

  Soraya!

  “That… that doesn’t seem possible.”

  Tanirt smiled her enigmatic smile. “This is the conundrum, Bourne. One of you can’t believe it is possible. But the other one knows that it is possible.”

  For the first time in Bourne’s memory he felt truly helpless. “What am I to do?”

  Tanirt took his hand in hers. “How you react, what you do, will determine whether you live or die.”

  29

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” M. Errol Danziger said when he reached Bud Halliday by phone.

  “My birthday was months ago,” the secretary of defense said. “What do you want?”

  “I’m waiting in my car downstairs.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Not for this.”

  There was something in Danziger’s voice that stopped Halliday from blowing him off. Halliday called his assistant and told him to clear his calendar for the next hour. Then he grabbed his overcoat and took the stairs down. As he walked across the White House grounds, the guards and Secret Service agents nodded to him deferentially. He smiled at the ones he knew by name.

  Climbing into the back of Danziger’s car, he said, “This better be good.”

  “Trust me,” Danziger said. “It’s better than good.”

  Twenty minutes later the car pulled up at 1910 Massachusetts Avenue, SE. Danziger, who was sitting nearer the curb, stepped out and held the door open for his boss.

  “Building Twenty-seven?” Halliday said as he and Danziger trotted up the steps of one of the modern brick buildings in the General Health Campus complex. “Who died?” Building 27 housed the office of the district’s chief medical examiner.

  Danziger laughed. “A friend of yours.”

  They passed through two levels of security and took the oversize stainless-steel-clad elevator down to the basement. The elevator reeked of bleach and a sickly-sweet smell Halliday was loath to identify.

  They were expected. An assistant coroner, a slight, bespectacled man with a nose like a beak and a dour demeanor, nodded to them, guiding them through the cold room. He stopped three-quarters of the way down the bank of stainless-steel doors, opened one, and slid out a corpse on a tray. A sheet was pulled up over the face. At Danziger’s signal, the assistant coroner peeled back the sheet.

  “Mary, Mother of God,” Halliday said, “is that Frederick Willard?”

  “None other.” Danziger looked as if he was about to break into a jig of joy.

  Halliday took a step closer. He pulled out a small mirror and stuck it under Willard’s nostrils. “No breath.” He turned to the assistant coroner. “What the hell happened to him?”

  “Difficult to say at this time,” the man said. “So many things, so little time…”

  “The gist,” Halliday said shortly.

  “Torture.”

  Halliday had to laugh. He looked at Danziger. “Damn ironic, isn’t it?”

  “That’s how it struck me.”

  At that moment the secretary’s PDA buzzed. He drew it out and looked at it. He was needed at the White House.

  Rather than the Oval Office, the president was in the War Room three levels down below the West Wing. Vast computer screens ringed the room, in the center of which was an oval table outfitted with all the accoutrements of twelve virtual offices.

  When Bud Halliday arrived, the president was chairing a meeting with Hendricks, the national security adviser, and Brey and Findlay, the respective heads of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. From their grim expressions it was clear there was an emergency brewing.

  “Glad you could make it, Bud,” the president said, waving Halliday to a chair on the opposite side of the table.

  “What’s happened?” Halliday said.

  “Something’s come up,” Findlay said, “and we’d value your advice on how to proceed.”

  “A terrorist attack on one of our overseas bases?”

  “Rather closer to home.” Hendricks appeared to be taking point. Reversing a dossier in front of him, he slid it across the table to Halliday. He spread his hands. “Please.”

  Halliday opened the dossier and was confronted with a photo of Jalal Essai. He stayed very calm, was pleased to see that his hand was steady as it turned the onionskin pages of the file.

  When he was certain he had himself perfectly under control, he raised his gaze. “Why are we looking at this man?”

  “We have information linking him to the torture and murder of Frederick Willard.”

  “Evidence?”

  “As yet, no,” Findlay said.

  “But we have every indication that it will be forthcoming,” Hendricks said.

  “Do you want me to buy the bridge, too?” Halliday said caustically.

  “What’s disturbing, Mr. Secretary, is that this man Essai has flown beneath our radar, even though he represents a clear and present national security threat.” This from Findlay again.

  Halliday tapped the dossier. “There is intel here on Essai going back years. How could we not—?”

  “That’s the question we need answered, Bud,” the president said.

  Halliday cocked his head. “Well, I mean to say, where did this intel come from?”

  “Not from your farm, clearly,” Brey said.

  �
��Nor from yours,” Halliday shot back. He looked from one face to another. “You’re not thinking of pinning this oversight on my people.”

  “It wasn’t an oversight,” Findlay said. “At least, not an oversight on our part.”

  There was a strained silence in the room, which was finally broken by the president. “Bud, we thought you’d be more forthcoming.”

  “Shit, I didn’t,” Brey said.

  “When confronted by the evidence,” Hendricks added.

  “Evidence of what?” Halliday said. “There’s nothing I have to explain or apologize for.”

  “You all owe me a hundred dollars apiece,” Brey said with a smirk.

  Halliday glared at him with naked rage.

  Hendricks picked up the phone, spoke a few words into the receiver, then set it down.

  “For God’s sake, Bud,” the president said, “you’re making this damnably difficult.”

  “What is this?” Halliday stood up. “An inquisition?”

  “Well, you haven’t helped yourself.” There was deep sadness in the president’s voice. “Last chance.”

  Halliday, standing as rigid as a war veteran’s statue, ground his teeth in fury.

  Then the door to the War Room opened and in walked the twins, Michelle and Mandy. Their eyes were laughing. At him.

  Christ, he thought. Jesus Christ.

  “Be seated, Mr. Secretary.”

  The president’s voice had turned so full of suppressed anger and a sense of personal betrayal, it sent a shiver down Halliday’s spine. With a sinking heart, he did as he was ordered.

  Ahead of him stretched the long, humiliating road to disgrace and ruin. Listening to the tapes the twins had made of his conversations with Jalal Essai in the hideaway apartment, he wondered whether he had the courage to retreat to a quiet, private place and blow his brains out.

  Oserov arrived in Morocco with his face swathed in bandages. In Marrakech he found a shop where they made a wax impression and, from this template, a latex mask, white as starlight, that fit over his ruined face. Its terrible, cold stoicism belied the raging torment beneath, but he was grateful for the anonymity it afforded him. He bought a heavy black-and-brown-striped hooded thobe to conceal his head and the top part of his face. With it on, the hood cast the rest of his face in deep shadow.