The Bourne Objective

by Robert Ludlum

  After a brief meal, which he wolfed down without tasting, he wasted no time renting a car and planning out his route. Then he set out for Tineghir.

  Idir Syphax went slowly and methodically through the house in central Tineghir. He moved from shadow to shadow like a wraith or a dream, soundlessly, light as air. Idir had been born and raised in the High Atlas region of Ouarzazate. He was used to winter’s cold and snow. He was known as the man who brings ice to the desert, which meant that he was special. Like Tanirt, the local Berbers were afraid of him.

  Idir was slim and well muscled, with a wide mouth of large white teeth and a nose like the prow of a ship. His head and neck were swathed in the traditional blue Berber scarf. He wore robes of a blue-and-white check.

  On the outside the house was identical to its neighbors. Inside, however, it was built like a fortress, the rooms a set of nesting boxes protecting, at its heart, the keep. The walls were constructed of solid concrete reinforced with steel rods; the heartwood doors had two-inch-thick metal cores, rendering them impervious to even semi-automatic fire. There were two separate electronic security systems to get through: motion detectors in the outer rooms and infrared heat detectors in the inner ones.

  Idir’s family had deep ties with the Etanas reaching back centuries. The Etanas had founded the Monition Club as a way for the Severus Domna to come together in various cities across the globe without attracting attention or using the group’s real name. To the outside world, the Monition Club was a philanthropic organization involved in the advancement of anthropology and ancient philosophies. It was a hermetically sealed world in which the sub-rosa members of the group could move, meet, compare work, and plan initiatives.

  Idir had had his own ideas about power and succession, but before he could act Benjamin El-Arian had moved into the power vacuum created when Jalal Essai’s brother had decamped. Now that Jalal Essai had shown his true colors, the Essai family was dead and buried as far as Severus Domna was concerned. His defection had occurred on El-Arian’s watch. Idir had already had several conversations with Marlon Etana, the organization’s top-ranking member in Europe. Together, he had told Etana, they were more than a match for Benjamin El-Arian. Etana wasn’t so sure, but then years in the West had made Etana cautious, timid, even, in Idir’s opinion. Not desirable traits in a leader. He had plans for Severus Domna—big plans—beyond the scope of anything El-Arian or Etana could conceive of. He had tried negotiations, reason, and, finally, appealing to the vanity and ego of the leaders. All to no avail. That left only the path of violence.

  Satisfied with his final inspection, he locked up the house and walked away. But not too far. The show was about to begin, and he had reserved for himself a front-row seat.

  The moment Arkadin had acted on his suspicions, the moment he had sliced through the tendons at the back of Moira’s knee, the idyll of his sojourn in Sonora was shattered. He saw it for the illusion it was. Not for him the slow pace and hot sun, the slinky dancers and the sad rancheras. His life led elsewhere. From that time forward he couldn’t wait to leave Mexico. He had been bitterly betrayed. Sonora had held up to him the mirror of his life, the life to which he was bound no matter how much he might long to leave it.

  In Morocco he was back in his element, a shark moving through deep and dangerous waters. But for thousands of years sharks have been bred to survive dark and dangerous waters. So, too, Leonid Arkadin.

  Armed and never more dangerous, he drove out of Marrakech with Soraya, a woman he found perplexingly complicated. Until he had been gulled by Tracy, he had been used to dominating women in every sense imaginable. Conveniently forgotten was his own mother, who had controlled him completely by keeping him locked in a closet where rats had eaten three of his toes before he fought back, first by ragefully biting off their heads, then by killing his mother. He despised her so thoroughly that he had expunged her from both his consciousness and his memory. What glimpses remained were scenes from a cheap and grainy film he had seen when young.

  And yet it had been his mother who had led him to view women through a particular lens. He flirted relentlessly. He felt only contempt for those who succumbed to his masculine charms. These he chewed up and threw away the moment he became bored with them. On those rare occasions when he encountered resistance—Tracy, Devra, the DJ he had met in Sevastopol, and now Soraya—he reacted differently, less surely, and doubt in himself had crept in like a fog, resulting in failure. He had failed to see through Tracy’s facade; he had failed to protect Devra. And with Soraya? He didn’t yet know, but he could not stop thinking about what she had said about his life being a struggle to be a man, not an animal. There was a time when he would have laughed at anyone who made such an accusation, but something had changed in him. For better or for worse he had become self-aware, and this self-awareness lent him the certainty that what she said wasn’t an accusation at all, but a statement of fact.

  All this went through his mind as he and Soraya drove to Tineghir. It had been chilly enough in Marrakech, but here in the snowbound High Atlas an icy wind knifed through the canyons, flooding the wadi with frozen air.

  “We’re coming to the end of the road,” he said.

  Soraya did not reply; she hadn’t said a word for the entire car ride.

  “Have you nothing more to say?”

  His tone was deliberately mocking, but she just smiled at him and looked out the window. This abrupt change in her demeanor disturbed him, but he was unsure what to do about it. He couldn’t seduce her and he couldn’t browbeat her. What was left?

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tall figure—too tall to be Berber—in a black-and-brown-striped thobe. The hood shadowed his face, but as the car moved past, he could see that there was no disfigurement. The figure moved with Oserov’s gait, but how could it be him?

  “Soraya, do you see that man in the black-and-brown thobe?”

  She nodded.

  He stopped the car. “Get out here and approach him. Do whatever you have to do. I want you to find out if he’s Russian, and if he is, whether his name is Oserov. Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll be sitting right here, watching. If it’s Oserov, give me a signal,” he said, “so I can kill him.”

  She gave him an enigmatic smile. “I was wondering when I’d see it again.”

  “What?”

  “Your rage.”

  “You don’t know what Oserov has done; you don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She opened the car door and climbed out. “I’ve seen what you’re capable of.”

  Soraya carefully picked her way through the teeming street toward the tall man in the black-and-brown thobe. The key for her, she knew, was to remain calm and to keep her wits about her. Arkadin had outmaneuvered her once; she wasn’t going to get caught out like that again. There were a number of times during the drive to Tineghir when she had calculated she had a chance of escaping, but for two reasons she never made the move. The first was that she had no real confidence that she could elude Arkadin. The second, and more important, was that she had vowed to herself that she would not abandon Jason. He had saved her life more than once. No matter what malicious stories recirculated within CI about him, she knew she could count on him for anything and everything. Now that his life was in imminent danger, she would not run away and hide. More to the point, she had to do something to change Arkadin’s immediate trajectory.

  Approaching the man, she began to speak to him in Egyptian-inflected Arabic. At first, he ignored her. It was possible that in the street hubbub he did not hear her, or thought she was speaking to someone else. She moved around so that she stood squarely in front of him. She spoke to him again. He kept his head slightly lowered and did not respond.

  “I need some help. Do you understand English?” she said.

  When he shook his head, she shrugged, turned, and made to walk away. She whirled around and said in Russian, �
�I recognize you, Vylacheslav Germanovich.” His head came up. “Aren’t you a colleague of Leonid’s?”

  “You’re a friend of Arkadin’s?” His voice was thick and clotted, as if there were something in his throat he hadn’t completely swallowed. “Where is he?”

  “Right over there.” She pointed to the car. “Sitting behind the wheel.”

  Everything happened at once. Soraya backpedaled, Oserov swung around in a semi-crouch. Beneath the thobe he had concealed an AK-47 assault rifle. In one fluid motion he raised the AK-47, aimed it, and fired at the car. People, screaming, scattered in every direction. Oserov kept firing as he advanced across the street, drawing closer and closer to the car, shuddering on its shocks as it was sprayed with bullets.

  When he came abreast of the car, he stopped. He tried to open the driver’s door, but it was so distorted it would not budge. Cursing, he reversed the AK-47, using the butt to knock out what was left of the window. He peered inside. It was empty.

  Whirling, he leveled the AK-47 at Soraya. “Where is he? Where is Arkadin?”

  Soraya saw Arkadin slither out from beneath the car, rise up, and wrap his arm around Oserov’s neck. He pulled backward with such force that Oserov’s feet left the ground. Oserov tried to slam the rifle’s butt into Arkadin’s rib cage, but Arkadin eluded each attack. Oserov whipped his head back and forth in an attempt to keep Arkadin from gaining a stranglehold. As he did so, his mask began to slip; becoming aware of this, Arkadin ripped it off, revealing the swollen, hideously disfigured face beneath.

  Soraya crossed the now empty street, approaching the two antagonists with slow, deliberate steps. Oserov dropped the AK-47 and drew out a wicked-looking dirk. Soraya could see that it was out of Arkadin’s line of sight, he was unaware that Oserov was about to plunge it into his side.

  Arkadin, absorbed in his life-or-death struggle with his hated enemy, breathed in the stench of an open sewer and realized that it was coming from Oserov, as if the people he had murdered had clawed their way out of the ground, twining about him like deeply rooted vines. Oserov seemed to be rotting from the inside out. Arkadin pulled him tighter as Oserov continued to struggle, continued to try to find a way out of the vise he was in. But once engaged, neither of them would let go or relinquish a hold on the other, as if their epic struggle was of one person becoming two. Two people fighting for dominion, battling in the abyss of unthinking and unreasoning rage. The conflict was not only against Oserov’s crimes, but against Arkadin’s own inhuman past, a past he daily tried to shove out of his mind, to bury as deeply as he could. And yet, zombified, it kept rising from its grave.

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

  Figures in his past had conspired to break him down, to reduce him to an animal. His one chance at being something more had arrived in the guise of Tracy Atherton. Tracy had taught him many things, but in the end she had betrayed him. He had wished her dead and now she was dead. Oserov, his enemy, embodied everyone and everything that had ever conspired against him, and now he had him, now he was slowly, inexorably squeezing the life out of him.

  His attention was suddenly drawn to a movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye. Soraya was sprinting the last fifteen feet that separated them. She struck Oserov a blow on his left wrist that paralyzed his hand. Arkadin saw the dirk as it fell at Oserov’s feet.

  For a frozen instant he stared into Soraya’s eyes. A secret, silent communication passed between them and then, in a flash, vanished, never to be spoken of or referred to aloud. Arkadin, his heart seething with a rage that had been building for years, slammed the heel of his hand against the side of Oserov’s head. The head jerked hard to the right, against the wall of Arkadin’s encircling arm. The vertebrae cracked, Oserov spasmed like an insane marionette. His fingernails clawed at Arkadin’s forearm, drawing rivulets of blood. He bellowed like a buffalo, and for an instant his strength was so great that he almost broke away.

  Then Arkadin cracked his neck again, harder this time, and whatever burst of energy was left in Oserov drained into the gutter. Oserov gave a terrible, soft cry. He tried to say something that seemed vitally important to him, but all that escaped his mouth was his tongue and a gout of blood.

  Still, Arkadin would not let him go. He continued to slam the side of his head as if the neck had not already sustained multiple fractures.

  “Arkadin,” Soraya said softly, “he’s dead.”

  He stared at her, the light of madness in his eyes. Her hands were on him, trying to pry Oserov away from him, but he could feel nothing. It was as if his nerve endings were locked within the last moments of the struggle, as if his will to destroy Oserov would not terminate, would not allow him to let go. And he thought: If I keep hold of him I’ll be able to kill him again and again.

  Gradually, however, the hurricane of emotion began to ebb. He felt Soraya’s hands on him. Then he heard her voice, repeating, “He’s dead,” and at last he unwound his arm. The corpse collapsed into a grotesque heap.

  He looked down at Oserov’s ruined face and felt neither triumph nor satisfaction. He felt nothing at all. Empty. There was nothing inside him, just the abyss growing darker and deeper.

  Punching a code on his cell phone, he walked to the rear of the car. He unlocked the trunk and took out the laptop in its protective case.

  Looking around, Soraya could see a number of men in their Berber robes. They had been watching from the shadows. The moment Oserov slid to the ground, they began to converge on the car.

  “It’s Severus Domna,” Soraya said. “They’re coming for us.”

  At that moment a car screeched to a halt beside them. Arkadin opened the rear door.

  “Get in,” he commanded, and she obeyed.

  Arkadin slid in beside her and the car took off. There were three men inside, all heavily armed. Arkadin spoke to them in rapid, idiomatic Russian, and Soraya remembered their exchange in Puerto Peñasco.

  “What do you want from me now?” she had asked Arkadin.

  And he had answered: “The same thing you want from me. Destruction.”

  Then she heard the words scorched earth and knew that he had come to Tineghir prepared to wage war.

  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.

  “Fucked.”

  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.”