The Bourne Imperative

by Eric Van Lustbader

  He sighed deeply, and his legs relaxed, his arms came down to his sides and were released. He stared up into the face swimming above him, shuddering at the recurring thought of the water closing over him. He’d never go out on a boat again or even plunge through breakers as he used to do when he was a child. He frowned. Had he really done that? With an enormous effort to focus himself, he realized that he couldn’t remember his childhood. His frown deepened. How was that possible?

  He was distracted by the face above him speaking to him. “My name is Christien. What is yours?” Christien repeated the question in a number of languages, all of which he understood, though he had no idea how he understood them. He had no memory of learning any language.

  After Christien had finished, he said automatically, “My name is—” and then stopped.

  “What is it?” Christien said. “What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked around the room, almost in panic. “I can’t remember my name.”

  Christien, who had been leaning over, now stood up and, turning, said something he couldn’t make out to a shadowy figure behind and just to the right of him. He strained to make out the face, but then the figure stepped into the light.

  “You can’t remember your name?” the second man said.

  He shook his head, but that caused a fierce throbbing.

  “What do you remember?”

  He took a moment, but this only made him break out into a cold sweat as, his brow deeply furrowed, he strained to recall anything—even a single memory.

  “Relax,” the second man said. He seemed to have taken over from Christien.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “My name is Jason. You’re in a private clinic in Stockholm. Christien and I were out fishing when you surfaced. We pulled you into our boat and flew you here. You were suffering from hypoxia and hypothermia.”

  He thought, I should ask Jason what those words mean, but to his shock, he already knew. He licked his lips and Christien, leaning over, poured water from a carafe into a plastic cup and stuck a bendy straw in it. Christien stepped on a pedal, and his head and torso were raised to a modified sitting position. He took the cup gratefully and sipped the water. He felt parched, as if his thirst would never be slaked.

  “What…what happened to me?”

  “You were shot,” Jason said. “A bullet grazed the left side of your head.”

  Automatically his left hand went to the side of his head, felt the thick layers of bandages. He had identified the source of his headache.

  “Do you know who shot you? Why you were shot?”

  “No,” he said. He drained the cup, held it out for more.

  While Christien refilled it, Jason said, “Do you know where you were shot, where you went into the water?”

  At the mention of going into the water he shuddered. “No.”

  Christien handed him the cup. “It was Sadelöga.”

  “Do you remember Sadelöga?” Jason said. “Does the name sound familiar?”

  “Not in the least.” He was about to shake his head again, but stopped himself in time. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I remember.”

  This seemed to interest Jason. “Nothing at all?” he said.

  He stopped sipping his water. “Not where I was born, who my parents are, who I am, what I was doing in—where did you say?”

  “Sadelöga,” Christien said.

  “Maybe I was fishing there,” he said hopefully, “like you.”

  “I very much doubt that fishing involves being shot, and there’s no hunting to speak of there,” Jason said. “No, you were in Sadelöga for another reason entirely.”

  “I wish I knew what it was,” he said sincerely.

  “There’s another thing,” Jason said. “You had no identification on you—no wallet, passport, keys, money.”

  He thought a moment. “I threw them all away, along with my shoes, to lighten myself. I was desperate to get back to the surface. They must all be at the bottom of the sea now.”

  “You remember getting rid of these things,” Jason said.

  “I…Yes, I do.”

  “You said that you remembered nothing.”

  “That I remember. Nothing else.” He looked at Jason. “I don’t recall you pulling me out of the water, or the trip here. Only those first panic-stricken moments after I went under, not going under itself. Nothing of that.”

  Jason seemed lost in thought. “Maybe when you’re sufficiently recovered we should take you back to Sadelöga.”

  “Would you agree to that?” Christien asked.

  He thought about that for a moment. On the one hand, the idea of returning to the spot where he went into the water terrified him; on the other, he felt an overwhelming, desperate desire to know who he was.

  “When can we leave?” he said at last.

  What do you think?”

  Bourne looked at Christien. They were downstairs in the lounge of the private clinic owned by Christien’s company. Outside, the traffic along Staligatan was fierce, but the clinic’s thick windows muffled all noise. Clouds were gathering as if for a battle. Once again, it looked like snow. They sat on low Swedish-modern furniture, stylish as well as practical: a sofa in a sturdy print, its colors suitably muted, that was the focal point of one of several conversation areas.

  “He reminds me of me,” Bourne said.

  Christien nodded. “I had the same thought, though this man’s amnesia appears virtually complete.”

  “If he’s telling us the truth.”

  “Jason, he was quite clearly in serious distress. Is there any reason to doubt him?”

  “The bullet that grazed the side of his head,” Bourne said. “He isn’t a tourist. Also, he quite clearly, as you would say, understood all five languages you spoke to him in.”

  “So he’s a linguist. So what?”

  “So am I.”

  “You’re also a professor of comparative linguistics.”

  “Used to be.”

  “He could be one, too.”

  “What’s he doing out here with a bullet crease in the side of his head?”

  “Noted.”

  “I want to find out whether he’s in our business.”

  Christien gave him a skeptical look. “Just because he’s a linguist?”

  Bourne gestured. “Look, if he’s not a spy we have nothing to worry about. But given what you’ve told me…”

  Christien spread his hands. “All right, what do you suggest?”

  “We have some time before we can take him back to Sadelöga.”

  “What does it matter? We won’t get anything out of him in his current state.”

  “Untrue. We can subject him to a series of tests.”

  Christien shook his head. “Tests? What do you mean?”

  Bourne sat forward, perched on the edge of the sofa. “You discovered that this man speaks at least five languages when he himself didn’t know that. Let’s find out what else he doesn’t know he knows.”

  Soraya and Peter left the briefing with Hendricks filled with mixed feelings.

  “This so-called Nicodemo sounds like a ghost,” Soraya said. “I don’t like chasing ghosts.”

  “For some reason, Hendricks is obsessed with finding and eliminating Nicodemo,” Peter said. “He gave it his highest priority. And yet, he had no specific intel, no chatter as to a clear and present attack that Nicodemo might be planning against American personnel or citizens abroad or here at home. I smell a political hot potato.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  Peter laughed. “That’s because you still have one foot in Paris.”

  She turned to him. “Is that what you think?”

  He shrugged. “Can you blame me?”

  The hallway was quiet, save for the hum of the HVAC vents high up in the walls. Far away at one end, she thought she saw Dick Richards coming toward them, and she groaned inwardly. The guy was like a leech.

  She gestured with her head
toward Richards. “If we can’t trust each other, we’re fucked.”

  “My thought exactly.”

  “About your leaving…”

  “Let’s not talk about that now, Peter.” She sighed. It was definitely Richards coming toward them. “So how important to us is finding Nicodemo?”

  “If, as you surmise, the issue is political, not very. I didn’t take this job to carry Hendricks’s water.”

  “I think I know just what to tell Mary’s little lamb.”

  She smiled broadly as they met Dick Richards halfway along the hall.

  Richards handed a dossier to Peter. “I have some intel briefs I thought you’d want to see,” he said helpfully.

  “Thanks.” Peter, opening the file, glanced through the pages with no real interest.

  Soraya shoved the fuzzy intel on Nicodemo that Hendricks had given them in the briefing at Richards.

  “Peter and I would like you to run this person of interest down,” she said, “see if there’s anything substantive to him, see what level of danger he represents to US interests abroad.”

  Peter looked up as Richards nodded. He gave her a sharp glance to which she responded with her sweetest smile.

  “We’d appreciate your dropping whatever it is you’re working on now,” she continued, “and concentrating on this until you can give us a yea or a nay. If you need any help, ask Tricia.” She pointed in the general direction of the chubby blonde.

  “Great.” Richards, having no interest in assistance of any kind, slapped the back of his hand against the thin file Soraya had given him. “I’ll get on it ASAP.”

  “Atta boy,” she said. “Make it so, Number One.”

  “Star Trek TNG, right?” He gave her a lopsided grin. “I won’t let you down, Captain.” Turning on his heel, he retreated down the hallway to his cubicle to begin his data search.

  Peter frowned. “That was wicked cold.”

  She shrugged. “It saves us some busywork and it keeps him off our streets. Where’s the harm?”

  When Dick Richards heard their muffled laughter behind him, he began to change his mind about at last feeling included. Or perhaps he only imagined their laughter. What he knew was real, however, was their contempt. Director Marks had been okay—cool, but helpful—when he had arrived at the president’s beckoning. The atmosphere started to deteriorate, however, the moment Director Moore returned from her medical leave in Paris. Regarding the co-​directors of Treadstone, Richards had no more to go on than hearsay, office scuttlebutt, and, least reliable of all, the inter-agency mythos that always arose like smoke obscuring the true contours of the land.

  The president’s orders had been most specific. He had come to the great man’s attention through his job at the NSA, cracking the core code to the horrific Stuxnet worm, the most advanced malicious software worm to date, the first to be called a cyberweapon, that had baffled the best cyber security analysts for months. Variations on the Stuxnet worm had sucked up information on US advanced weapons systems, clandestine asset locations, forward initiatives by the military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and drone strike targets in western Pakistan. He had also been the one to realize that the SecurID tokens the federal clandestine operatives used had been hacked. He identified the security flaw that had allowed the breach and sealed it.

  He was like Einstein formulating the equation for the speed of light. At least that was how he had been described to the president by Mike Holmes, his former boss at NSA. Now he worked strictly for the president, reported to him directly. Their relationship was unprecedented, and quite naturally caused no end of jealousy among the members of the president’s cabinet, who resented his presence, let alone his cyber triumphs. What it boiled down to, Richards thought now, as he climbed into his chair and faced his computer screen, was that they didn’t understand him. Human beings, he had discovered, hated and feared anyone or anything they couldn’t understand.

  Now his new directors were firmly in that restive camp. Pity. He had begun to like Director Marks, and he might have felt the same way about Director Moore had either of them given him a chance. Someone else might have been angry at them for this gross disservice, but Richards’s mind didn’t work that way. He knew, also from experience, that the best way for him to not only survive at Treadstone, but to flourish, serving the president as he was expected to do, was to change the co-directors’ opinion of him.

  Opening the slim file Director Moore had handed him, he read through the close-set typescript, which, he saw immediately, was little more than unreliable bits and pieces—ephemera from the field. Still, there remained the possibility, slim though it might be, that at the heart of this smoke-and-mirrors show there lay an actual piece of uncharted topography. And he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he could reveal this topography for the directors, they would begin to see him in a new light. This, more than anything else, was what he desired. It was what needed to happen. His master’s command.

  He opened his Iron Key browser to the Internet and, fingers flying over the keyboard, began his search for a myth.

  Rebeka stared out at the beautiful, bleak expanse of Hemviken Bay. Sitting at a waterside table at Utö Wärdshus, the only restaurant in this area of the southern Swedish archipelago, she nursed a coffee and her sore right shoulder. She’d received no more than a flesh wound from her quarry’s sudden attack. Anyone else would have berated herself for failing to deflect the attack, but not Rebeka. She had trained herself to let go, not to feel remorse or, worse, to castigate herself. She lived in the present, thinking only of the perilous future, and how to get there successfully while absorbing the minimum of damage.

  Upon entering the restaurant, her practiced eye had noted all sixteen tables, only three of which were inhabited, one by a pair of old men, one of them in a wheelchair, slowly and deliberately playing chess, another by an ancient mariner with rough hands the color of a boiled lobster claw, reading a local paper while smoking a small-bowled pipe, and the third by a pregnant woman and her daughter, who Rebeka judged to be five or six. Her professional assessment was that none of them posed a threat, and she promptly forgot about them.

  After her target had gone into the water, Rebeka, completely ignoring her knife wound, had spent the better part of an hour wading in looking for him. For all her efforts, standing firm against being pulled out with the tide, for the almost-frostbite in her toes, she had failed to find him. This was both unfortunate and frightening. She was fairly certain her shot had done nothing more than crease her target’s head. If she hadn’t killed him, she wanted to make certain the frigid water didn’t. She needed what was in his brain, and she cursed herself for shooting at him at all. She should have simply jumped in after him. Overpowering him in the water, she felt certain, would have been no difficult matter. Instead he was gone and, with him, the intel he carried that would save her.

  Absentmindedly, she stirred more sugar into her coffee, then took a sip. Her own people were now after her. No one knew better than she how ruthless and relentless the Mossad could be when they believed one of their own had betrayed them. She fervently wished there had been another way to tackle the problem, but she knew Colonel Ari Ben David better than to think he would believe her wild tale, and there was simply no one else to go to. Well, there was one person, but her training made her reluctant to involve anyone outside Mossad.

  She heard the waitress’s voice, and turning, winced. The knife wound she had received in Damascus was not yet fully healed, and certain sharp movements of her upper torso reminded her it was still there.

  “Would you care for more coffee?”

  The waitress smiled at her. She looked like a Valkyrie. Rebeka could imagine her, armored, riding to Ragnarök, or, more realistically, out on a fishing boat, hauling in the morning’s catch. She nodded, returning the smile.

  Turning back to the bay, she saw that a storm was coming in. Fine. The increasing bleakness matched her mood. She drank her coffee, added more sugar, and reflected
on her life since she had met Jason Bourne on her regularly scheduled flight to Damascus. Though it was only six weeks ago, her former cover as a flight attendant seemed like a hundred years ago. How her life had changed since then! She and Bourne had both been after the same terrorist target, Semid Abdul-Qahhar. During their showdown with him, they had both been wounded. Though he had been shot in the shoulder, Bourne had flown her in a stolen helicopter across the southern border into Lebanon and, at her whispered instructions, had set down inside the Mossad encampment in Dahr El Ahmar.

  Now she had no idea where he was or whether he would even talk to her. After all, it was she who had directed him to the encampment commanded by Ben David. For all she knew, he blamed her for what had happened.

  No, even if she had been able to find him, she couldn’t go to Bourne with her suspicions, in spite of the fact that they had arisen during her convalescence in Dahr El Ahmar. As far as he was concerned, she was the enemy. She had betrayed him. After what had happened, how could he think otherwise?

  And, of course, she herself had come under suspicion from having brought Bourne into the encampment. Colonel Ben David was not a forgiving man—in truth, he could not afford to be—but the change in how he viewed her shocked, then saddened, her. She was inured to the byzantine ways of her world, but nothing she had experienced before could have prepared her for how quickly and thoroughly he had turned on her. In fact, he had acted more like a jilted lover than her commanding officer. It was only later, after she had left, after she had decided to act on the intel she had overheard while convalescing, after she had been in full pursuit of her target, that the nature of Ben David’s true feelings had dawned on her. In hindsight, she realized that she had never been just an agent to him. Now, of course, it was too late to do anything about that, even had she wished to.

  The stormfront hurled the first fistfuls of snow against the window with a force that startled her. The glass shivered and creaked in the wind. It was then that she turned around and saw the man, thin as a blade, sitting at a table near the door farthest from her, and knew that all was lost.