The knot of professors trotted up the steps and, in elegant fashion, poured into the university building. Bourne, debating the finer points of Old German with a white-haired professor, stepped across the threshold.
The gunman reacted as he glimpsed Bourne’s reflection in the glass pane of the open door. Taking the steps two at a time, he tried to shoulder his way through the knot of men who, though elderly, were certainly not passive, especially when it came to decorum and protocol. As one, they formed a living wall, pushing back at him in the manner of a phalanx of Roman soldiers advancing on the barbarian enemy. The gunman, taken aback, retreated.
The pause gave Bourne the time he needed to slip away from the professors, down the corridor with its sounds of well-shod feet and hushed conversations bouncing off the polished marble floor. A line of square windows, high up, bestowed sunlight on the crowns of the students’ heads like a benediction. The wooden doors blurred by as Bourne made for the rear of the Centre. Bells sounded for the beginning of the four o’clock classes.
He raced around a corner, into the short corridor leading to the rear door. But the Severus Domna gunman pushed through it. They were alone in the back corridor. The gunman had his overcoat draped over his right arm and hand, which held the silenced pistol. He aimed it at Bourne, who was still sprinting.
Bourne went down, sliding on his backside along the marble floor as a shot whizzed by overhead. He barreled into the gunman with the soles of his shoes, knocking him over. The pistol flew out of his grip. Bourne rolled over, slammed his knee into the point of the gunman’s chin. His body went slack.
Voices echoed down the corridor from just around the corner. Scrambling to his feet, Bourne scooped up the pistol, then dragged the gunman out the rear door, down the steps, and deposited him behind a thick boxwood hedge. He pocketed the pistol and continued along the university pathways at a normal pace. He passed fresh-faced students, laughing and chatting, and a dour professor, huffing as he scurried, late for his next lecture. Then Bourne was out onto St Giles’ Street. In typical English fashion, the afternoon had turned gloomy. A chill wind swept across the gutters and storefronts. Everyone was bent over, shoulders hunched, dashing like boats fleeing an oncoming storm. Bourne, blending in as he always did, hurried to his car.
* * *
Go,” Moira said, when she was out of recovery and had gained full consciousness.
Soraya shook her head. “I’m not leaving you.”
“The worst has already happened,” Moira said quite rightly. “There’s nothing left here for you to do.”
“You shouldn’t be alone,” Soraya insisted.
“Neither should you. You’re still with Arkadin.”
Soraya smiled, somewhat sadly, because everything Moira said was true. “Still and all—”
“Still and all,” Moira said, “someone’s coming to look after me, someone who loves me.”
Soraya was slightly taken aback. “Is it Jason? Is Jason coming for you?”
Moira smiled. She had already drifted off to sleep.
Soraya found Arkadin waiting for her. But first she needed to speak with the young neurosurgeon, who was, in his own way, optimistic in his prognosis.
“The main thing in instances like these where nerves and tendons are involved is how quickly the patient receives medical attention.” He spoke formally, as if he were Catalan, rather than a Mexican. “In this respect, your friend is extremely fortunate.” He tipped his hand over, palm down. “However, the wound was ragged rather than clean. Plus, whatever she was cut with wasn’t clean. As a result, the procedure took longer, and was both more delicate and more complicated than it might otherwise have been. Again, fortunate that you called me. I don’t say this out of self-aggrandizement. It’s a matter of record, a fact. No one else could have managed the procedure without botching or missing something.”
Soraya sighed with relief. “Then she’ll be fine.”
“Naturally, she’ll be fine,” the neurosurgeon said. “With a proper course of rehab and physical therapy.”
Something dark clutched at Soraya’s heart. “She’ll walk naturally, won’t she? I mean, without a limp.”
The neurosurgeon shook his head. “In a child, the tendons are elastic enough that it might be possible. But in an adult that elasticity—or rather a good part of it—is gone. No, no, she’ll have a limp. How noticeable it will be depends entirely on the outcome of her rehab. And of course, her will to adapt.”
Soraya thought for a moment. “She knows all this?”
“She asked and I told her. It’s better that way, believe me. The mind needs more time to adapt than the body does.”
“Can we get out of here now?” Arkadin said, after the neurosurgeon had vanished down the corridor.
Shooting him a murderous look, Soraya brushed past him, striding through the bustling lobby and out onto the street. Puerto Peñasco looked as strange as a dream, as unfamiliar as if it were located in a Bhutanese valley. She looked at the people passing by as slowly as sleepwalkers. She saw their Aztec or Mixtec or Olmec features and thought of beating hearts carved from the chests of living sacrifices. She felt as if she were covered in congealed blood. She wanted to run, but felt paralyzed, rooted to the spot as if by the hands of all the sacrificial dead buried beneath the ground.
Then she felt Arkadin close beside her and shuddered as if waking from one nightmare into another. She wondered how she could stand to be near him, to talk to him after what he’d done to Moira. If he had exhibited even an iota of remorse, she might have felt differently. But all he had said was, “She’s the enemy.” Which meant, of course, that she herself was also the enemy, that the same thing, or worse, could happen to her.
Without a word being exchanged between them, he herded her back to his car, and soon enough they set off back to the convent.
“What do you want from me now?” she asked him in a dull voice.
“The same thing you want from me,” he said. “Destruction.”
* * *
The moment they entered the convent, Arkadin began to pack. “While you were going through your hand-wringing, I made reservations for us.”
“For us?”
“Yes,” he said without missing a beat. “You and I are going to Tineghir.”
“If I go anywhere with you I’ll be sick to my stomach.”
He paused and turned to face her. “I think you’ll be useful to me when I get to Morocco, so I don’t want to kill you. But I will if you give me no other choice.” He went back to his methodical packing. “Unlike you, I know when to cut my losses.”
It was at that moment that Soraya caught sight of the laptop, which, for her, had taken on a mythical significance. He was right, in his own way, she thought. As right as Moira had been. It was time to get past her personal abhorrence at his actions. It was time to return to acting like a professional. Time to cut her losses.
“I’ve always wanted to see the High Atlas Mountains,” she said.
“You see?” He tucked away the laptop. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
Jalal Essai, sitting in an anonymous car he had boosted early this morning, watched Willard emerge from the Monition Club. As Essai observed, he did not move as if he had been defeated by the receptionist, or had waited in vain to be seen by a member of the club. Rather, he descended the stairs as Fred Astaire might, lightly and trippingly, as if to music playing in his head. This jaunty attitude disturbed Essai. It also raised the hackles on the back of his neck, which was far worse.
Essai, whose life was in constant jeopardy ever since his home had been invaded by Severus Domna, knew from being on the other side that a passive response, such as flight, would only result in his eventual death. The organization would come after him again and again, until someway, somehow, somewhere it succeeded in terminating his life. Under these extreme circumstances, there was only one way to stay alive.
Willard turned a corner and stopped, looking to flag down a taxi. Essai
pulled over to the curb and rolled down the passenger’s-side window.
“Need a lift?” he said.
Willard, startled, drew back as if affronted. “No, thank you,” he said, and returned to scanning the traffic for an empty cab.
“Mr. Willard, please get into the car.”
When Willard looked back, he saw the man holding a wicked-looking EAA 10mm Hunter Witness pistol, aimed at his face.
“Come, come,” Essai said, “let’s not make a scene.”
Willard opened the door and slid into the passenger’s seat without a word.
“How, may I ask, are you going to drive this vehicle and at the same time keep me under control?”
In answer, Essai slammed the barrel of the Hunter Witness against the side of Willard’s head just above his left ear. Willard sighed as his eyes rolled up. Essai leaned the unconscious body against the window and returned the pistol to its shoulder holster. Then he put the car in gear, waited for a gap, and slid out into traffic.
He drove south through the district. At some invisible demarcation, the massive government buildings vanished, replaced by local businesses, cheap retail outlets, fast-food chains, storefront missions, and corner bars. Outside the bars, young men in hoodies loitered, exchanging small packets of dope for wads of bills. Old men sat on stoops, head in hands or leaning back against the gray stone steps, eyes half closed, heads nodding. Caucasians grew rare as hen’s teeth, then disappeared altogether. This was a different Washington, one tourists never saw. Congressmen, either. Patrol cars were few and far between. When one did appear, it rolled at speed, as if its occupants couldn’t wait to be elsewhere, anywhere but here.
Essai pulled the car over in front of something that passed for a hotel. Its rooms went by the hour, and when he dragged Willard inside, supporting him, the whores assumed Willard was a drunk, passed out on his feet. They showed Essai their flyblown wares. He ignored them.
He placed a doctor’s black bag on the scarred counter of the attendant’s foul-smelling cubbyhole and slid a twenty across. The attendant was whey-faced, slim as a twig, neither young nor old. He was watching porn on a portable TV.
“What,” Essai said, “no concierge?”
The attendant laughed but didn’t turn his glassy eyes from the TV screen. Without looking he unhooked a key from a pegboard and dropped it on the counter.
“I don’t want to be disturbed,” Essai said.
“Everyone wants the same thing.”
He slid across another twenty, the attendant snapped it up, selected a different key, and said, “Second floor in the back. You could die in there and no one would know.”
Essai took the key and the black bag.
There was no elevator. Getting Willard up the stairs proved something of a chore, but Essai managed. A grime-laden window at the far end of the narrow hallway let in light that seemed both leaden and exhausted. A bare bulb burned halfway down, highlighting the constellations of obscene graffiti scrawled on the walls.
The room looked like a jail cell. The bare-bones furnishings—a bed, a dresser with a drawer missing, a rocking chair—were either gray or colorless. The window looked out on an air shaft, where it was always nighttime. The room smelled strongly of carbolic and bleach. Essai did not want to think of what had gone on there in the past.
Dumping Willard on the bed, he set down the doctor’s bag, opened it, and placed a number of items in a neat line on the stained coverlet. This bag and its contents were always with him, a habit that had been ingrained in him at an early age, when he had been in training to move to America, to insinuate himself into the lives of the people Severus Domna selected. He had no idea how the group came up with Bud Halliday’s name or how it suspected that he would rise so quickly into the firmament of American politics, but then he was used to Severus Domna’s uncanny prescience.
Using a box cutter, he stripped off Willard’s clothes, then unwrapped a Depends and fitted it around his loins. He slapped Willard’s cheeks lightly enough to rouse him slowly out of his unconscious state. Before Willard was fully conscious, he elevated his head and shoulders, and tipped a bottle of castor oil down his throat. At first, Willard choked and gagged. Essai eased off, then fed the viscous liquid to him more slowly. Willard swallowed it all.
Disposing of the bottle, Essai slapped Willard hard on one cheek, then the other, sending blood rushing into his head. Willard started awake, his eyes blinking rapidly. Then he looked around.
“Where am I?” His voice was thick and furred.
When his tongue ran around his lips, Essai reached for the roll of duct tape.
“What’s this taste?”
As Willard started to retch, Essai slapped a length of tape across his mouth.
“If you vomit, you’ll suffocate. I advise you to clamp down on your gag reflex.”
He sat on the chair, rocking slowly as Willard struggled to regain his equilibrium. When he saw his prisoner winning that battle, he said, “My name is Jalal Essai.” His eyes opened wide at Willard’s response. “Ah, I see you’ve heard of me. Good. That makes my job easier. You’ve just come from seeing Benjamin El-Arian. It was El-Arian, I warrant, who told you about me. He painted me as the villain, I have no doubt. Well, heroes and villains—it’s all in your point of view. El-Arian would deny this, but then he’s proved himself to be irresolute, like a reed blown first this way then that by shifting winds.”
Essai rose, crossed to the bed, and ripped the tape off Willard’s mouth.
“I know you’re wondering about that taste in your mouth.” He smiled. “You swallowed a bottle of castor oil.” He pointed. “Hence the diaper. Not long from now some very nasty stuff is going to be coming out of you. The diaper will help contain it, or at least some of it. I’m afraid there will be too much for it to absorb, and then…” He shrugged.
“Whatever you want from me you won’t get.”
“Bravo! That’s the spirit! But sadly for you, I’ve already gotten what I want. Like others El-Arian has dealt with or sent after me, you’ll be dumped on his doorstep. This procedure will continue until he ceases his actions and forgets about me.”
“He’s not about to do that.”
“Then he and I have a long road to travel.” Essai wadded up the tape and threw it away. He stuffed the roll back into the black bag. “You, however, have a significantly shorter road to travel.”
“I don’t feel well.” Willard said this in a curious voice, as if he were a querulous child talking to himself.
“No,” Essai said, stepping back from the bed, “I don’t suppose you do.”
27
NIGHT STILL LAY along the macadam roads and concrete sidewalks the following morning when Bourne arrived at Heathrow Airport. It was drizzling and chilly, and he was happy to get out of London. His flight left at seven twenty-five and arrived in Marrakech at one fifteen, with a brief stopover in Madrid. There were no direct commercial flights.
He was sitting in the only coffee shop open at that hour, its plastic chairs and tables wan in the fluorescent lights, sipping over-roasted coffee that tasted like ashes when Don Fernando Hererra appeared, walked over, and sat down without either invitation or greeting.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bourne said.
Don Fernando said nothing. Lost within his beautiful suit, he seemed to have aged since the last time Bourne had seen him, though only a week or so had passed. He was staring absently at a display of luggage in the window of a store across the concourse.
“How did you find me?” Bourne said.
“I suspected you were going to Marrakech.” Abruptly he turned to Bourne and said, “Why did you kill my son? He was only trying to help you as I asked him to do.”
“I didn’t kill him, Don Fernando.” It was then Bourne felt the nick of the knife point on the inside of his thigh. “Do you think that’s wise?”
“I have traveled far beyond wise, young man.” His eyes were pale, liquid, filled with anguish. “Now I am a father gri
eving for his dead son. That’s all I am, that’s all the life this old frame can muster.”
“I would never harm Diego,” Bourne said. “I think you know that.”
“There is no one else but you.” Don Hernando’s voice, though soft, was like a cry full of pain and suffering. “Betrayal, betrayal!” He shook his head. “The only other possibility is Ottavio Moreno. He’s my godson. He would never lay a hand on Diego.”
Bourne sat very still, feeling a trickle of blood down his leg. He could end this at any moment, but he chose to let the situation play out because a violent end wouldn’t help him. He was extremely fond of Don Hererra; he couldn’t lift a finger against him. “And yet, it was Ottavio who knifed Diego,” he said.
“Lies!” The old man was quivering. “What possible reason—?”
“Severus Domna.”
At once Don Hererra blinked. A tic started in his right cheek. “What’s that you say?”
“You’ve heard of Severus Domna, I take it.”
The old man nodded. “I’ve crossed swords with a few members over the years.”
This interested Bourne greatly. Now he was doubly glad he had chosen not to act. “I have something Severus Domna wants,” Bourne said. “Its emissaries have followed me in London, Oxford—elsewhere here. Somehow one of them got to Diego. His assignment was to bring me to the Vesper Club, where they were waiting for me. Ottavio found out. He might have acted too hastily, but he was protecting me, I assure you.”
“You and he know each other?”
“We did,” Bourne said. “He died yesterday.”
The old man’s face grew hard. “How?”
“He was shot by a man employed by Jalal Essai.”
Don Hererra’s head swung around. Life was beginning to bloom on his cheeks. “Essai?”
“He wants the same thing Severus Domna wants.”
“He’s no longer with the group?”
“No.” Slowly Bourne became aware of the knife point being withdrawn.
“My sincere apologies,” the old man said.
The Bourne Objective (2010) Page 37
