Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative

by Eric Van Lustbader

  The Babylonian grunted, and Bourne, repeating the devastating blow, snaked free of the hold, brought a rough stone ashtray he snatched off a table down onto the back of the Babylonian’s head. Blood gushed, and the Babylonian fell onto his back. The shard of glass half-buried there snapped off.

  Bourne, thinking him finished, began to stand up. That was when the Babylonian arched up, slamming his forehead into Bourne’s. Dazed, Bourne went to his knees, and the Babylonian hauled him bodily toward the fire. The Babylonian’s strength was incredible, even though he was bleeding profusely, even though the kidney blows would have incapacitated anyone else.

  Bourne felt the intense heat of the flames on the top of his head. The Babylonian meant to feed him into the fire. He was only inches away, sliding along the floor, ever closer. He tried several different strikes, all of which the Babylonian brushed away as ineffectual. Sparks flew before his eyes, and he knew he had no time left.

  Reaching over his head, he grasped one of the burning logs, and, unmindful of the pain, jabbed the burning end into the Babylonian’s chest. Immediately, his clothes caught fire, the stench of charring material filling his nostrils.

  Rolling away, Bourne was up and running. He saw Rebeka restraining Rowland in the kitchen. Pointing to the rear door, he ushered them through, out into the bitter nighttime cold, and into Rebeka’s boat. While Bourne scooped up handfuls of snow to soothe the blistered skin of his palms, she dragged Rowland on board, then started the engine. Bourne cast off the lines, and they raced off in a spray of icy black water, vanishing into the gathering gloom.

  I don’t work for anyone,” Peter said, lying smoothly. “At least, not permanently.”

  Brick stared at him. “You’re freelance.”

  “Precisely.”

  They were in Brick’s brand-new fire-red Audi A8. Peter was driving, taking the place of the late, unlamented Florin Popa. Brick had insisted on this arrangement so he could keep an eye on Peter, whom he still had little reason to trust. They had stopped at the pro shop so Peter could change back into his street clothes. He did this while Brick, leaning against the line of metal lockers, watched him like a pervert in a public restroom, even while he made a brief muffled call on his mobile.

  Brick, in the shotgun seat, grunted now. “How do I know you weren’t following Richards?”

  “You don’t.” Peter was thinking as fast as he could.

  “If not you, who followed Richards?” Brick asked, as Peter took back roads at his explicit direction. “Who killed my man?”

  “Peter Marks. He works for the same outfit Richards does.”

  “He suspected Richards?”

  Peter nodded, making a right, then an almost immediate left. They were heading away from Arlington, deeper into the Virginia countryside, leaving the manicured lawns and multi-million-dollar housing enclaves behind, driving into wilder terrain. Rolling hills, dense forests, damp glens stretched out before them.

  “The next step,” Peter said, “is to take revenge. Otherwise, this organization, having followed Richards to you, will never let you out of its sight.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “But I am. You want to know what I was doing at Blackfriar? Okay. I was keeping an eye on you.” Noting the tensing reaction throughout Brick’s entire body, he said, “I was keeping an eye on you because I want to work for you. I’m tired of being on my own, with no job security, nothing to fall back on.”

  “Times are tough,” Brick mused.

  “And getting tougher.”

  Brick seemed to consider this seriously. Then he said abruptly, “Pull over.”

  Peter did as he was ordered, rolling the Audi up onto the grass that edged the two-lane blacktop and putting the transmission in neutral.

  The moment the Audi came to rest, Brick snapped his fingers. “Your wallet.”

  Peter reached into an inner pocket.

  “Careful, mate.”

  Peter froze with his coat half-open. “You do it then.”

  Brick’s eyes met his in an icy glare. “Go the fuck ahead.”

  Using just his thumb and forefinger, Peter carefully extracted the second wallet that was in plain sight in front of the concealed pocket where his real one lay. He handed it over.

  Brick allowed it to sit in the open palm of his left hand. With his right, he peeled back the fold. Only then did his gaze drop to read the driver’s license revealed. “Anthony Dzundza.” The icy eyes flicked up again. “What the fuck kind of name is that, mate?”

  “Ukrainian.” Legends always felt it was more realistic to use a name that required an explanation. They were right.

  Brick’s eyes turned to slits. “You don’t look Ukrainian, old son.”

  “My mother’s a beauty from Amsterdam.”

  Brick grunted again. “Don’t fucking flatter yourself. You’re not that pretty.” Reassured, he pawed through the rest of the docs in the wallet—credit cards, a bank debit card, museum membership cards, even, amusingly, an unpaid speeding ticket. Then he handed it back.

  “You prefer Anthony or Tony?”

  Peter shrugged. “Depends on friend or foe.”

  Brick laughed. “Okay, Tony, get out. I’ll drop you off. You meet me at the club tomorrow at one.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then,” Brick said, his face dead serious, “we’ll see what you’re all about.”

  After Thorne apologized to the man known to the world as Maceo Encarnación, hurrying out of the Politics As Usual offices, Encarnación gathered up his greatcoat, and strolled to the bank of elevators.

  While he waited, he allowed his practiced eye to observe the orderly pace of the workplace, the concentrated faces, the purposeful strides, the pride puffing out chests. Above all, the sense of superiority and security that, he knew full well, would shatter into ten thousand pieces in the face of the chaos that was about to hurl itself full-tilt at everyone employed here.

  The sense of chaos put him in mind of Moscow—the end of the story he had begun before the interview with Charles Thorne was aborted, the end Thorne would never know. Using the algorithms he and his crew had so cleverly and painstakingly devised, he had tracked down the criminals who had hacked his online account and sucked his money into the scarifying Russian underworld. After having thoroughly prepared himself, he had spent precisely three days in Moscow. By the time he had flown out, two corpses, weighed down with their own weaponry, were lying at the bottom of the Moskva River, eyes wide and staring in disbelief. As for the money, Encarnación had repatriated his and retrieved theirs the same way they had robbed him.

  When the gleaming chrome elevator doors opened, he stepped in, placing himself next to a blonde with long legs and impressive hips. He’d always been a sucker for impressive hips and butt.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, basking in the incandescent glow of her wide smile.

  There was frantic movement in the fisherman’s cottage in Sadelöga as the Babylonian fought to strip off his clothes and minimize the damage the flames were wreaking on him.

  Stumbling and grimacing, he made his way to the single bathroom, turned on the shower’s cold water tap, and hurled himself beneath the spray. At once, he was engulfed in a cloud of smoke, making him choke. Better than having his skin flayed off. Soon enough the smoke turned to steam.

  The flames extinguished, he stripped off the remnants of charred underwear, and stepped out of the shower. His body was as lean and long-armed as that of a long-distance swimmer, all rippling muscle, hard and compact beneath taut, sun-burnished skin.

  He dared not use a towel on the burns that covered much of his chest, neck, and hands. He used the mirror over the sink to check out the glass shard in his back. It took him a moment because his eyes were watering so profusely. He thought his body would retain scars, especially his neck, but he was too well trained to dwell on that. Instead, he got down to the business at hand, scrutinizing his wound with a surgical precision and thoroughness.

  Ev
en though the end of the shard had broken off when he fell on it, there was enough still visible for him to pull it out. Bracing himself against the edge of the sink and looking over his shoulder into his image in the mirror, he grasped the shard just beneath the jagged edge. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and completely. At that instant, he pulled hard, and the shard slid free. The wound began to drool blood, but it was clean and he knew it would soon stop.

  Dripping water, still pink with his blood, he returned to the kitchen, opened the back door, and, naked, threw himself facedown into the snow. The cold, he knew, would help minimize the swelling as well as numb the pain. When he’d had enough, he turned on his back, numbing the wound there.

  After a few more minutes, he picked himself up and, returning inside, rummaged in the kitchen cupboards until he found a package of baking soda. Shaking out the powder into a bowl he took down from a shelf, he mixed it with water, stirring it into the consistency of a thick paste. Then, breath hissing through clenched teeth, he began to daub this poultice on his burns until they were completely covered in a thick salve that would both protect and begin to heal his wounds.

  In the bathroom, he found a full tube of antibacterial cream, plus the remnants of the powerful prescription antibiotics Rebeka had left behind. On the tube’s label were typed both her name and an address in Stockholm. The pain was already fading, the baking soda drawing it out of him. In a while, he’d throw himself into the snow again.

  He guzzled down two antibiotic tablets with a beer he found in the refrigerator. Pulling his knife from between the floorboards, he paced back and forth with the silent, ferocious, cruel mind-set of a tiger until he felt his full strength flooding back.

  Looking again at the label on the vial of antibiotics, he could not help but smile. Her address in Stockholm. He’d be on them again, and this time, he vowed, they’d all die.

  10

  DO YOU LIKE films?” Don Fernando asked over breakfast coffee and croissants at Le Fleur en Ile.

  “Of course I like films,” Martha Christiana replied. “Who doesn’t?”

  After dinner the night before they had agreed to meet again this morning. He had not invited her back to his apartment after dinner. He wondered whether she had been disappointed.

  “I mean old films. Classics.”

  “Even better.” She sipped her coffee, served in a huge, thick cup. Outside the plate-glass windows, the magnificent rounded rear of Notre Dame rose, majestic and delicate, flying buttresses spreading like multiple wings. “But many old films aren’t the classics they’re reported to be. Have you seen Don’t Look Now? When it isn’t being preposterous, it’s incomprehensible.”

  “I was thinking of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.”

  She shook her head. Her eyes were bright in the spark of morning light. “Never saw it.”

  When he’d told her the synopsis, she said, “So everyone in this house is trapped, just as we ourselves are by our lives. They argue, fight, make love, grow weary and bored. Some die.” She snorted. “That isn’t art, it’s existence!”

  “True enough.”

  “I thought Buñuel was a surrealist.”

  “Actually, he was a satirist.”

  “Frankly, I don’t see anything in the least bit amusing in the film.”

  Don Fernando didn’t either, but that was beside the point. He had thought of the film because Martha Christiana was an exterminating angel. He knew who and what she was. He had been in the company of women of her ilk. More than likely, he would be again. If he survived her.

  He knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was a sinister emissary. Nicodemo had commissioned her. This fact heartened him. He was getting close. It meant he had stirred this particular level of hell sufficiently that she had been dispatched to usher him to his death.

  Smiling at his exterminating angel, he said, “The first time I saw the film I was sitting next to Salvador Dalí.”

  “Really?” She cocked her head. She wore a Chanel rayon suit the color of breaking dawn over a butter-yellow shantung-silk blouse, open at the throat. “What was that like?”

  “All I could see were his damnable mustaches.”

  Her laugh was as soft and buttery as her blouse. “Did he say anything at all?”

  “Dalí never said anything that wasn’t for shock effect. Not in public, anyway.”

  Her hand crossed an invisible barrier, her fingers taking his. “You’ve led such a fascinating life.”

  He shrugged. “More than some, I suppose. Less than others.”

  The slanted sunlight, caught in her eyes, made them glitter like hand-cut gems. “I’d like to know you better, Don Fernando. Much better.”

  He allowed his smile to widen. She was good, he thought. Better than most. But he would scarcely expect anything less from Nicodemo.

  “I’d like that,” he replied. “More than you know.”

  Delia was waiting for Charles Thorne at Admitting.

  She had been watching people come and go through the imposing front entrance of the Virginia Hospital Center for ten minutes. She was sipping very bad coffee she had unadvisedly purchased from a vending machine on the same floor where Soraya was still in surgery.

  Delia had met Soraya nine years ago, when Soraya was still working for the late Martin Lindros at CI. At that time, Delia was alone, unsure of who she was, let alone what her sexual orientation might be, which was the one area of life that frightened her. For a time, she had thought she was asexual. Soraya had changed all that.

  Delia had been sent into the field to disarm a bomb that had been found in the vicinity of the Supreme Court building. Soraya was there along with several FBI agents in an attempt to determine who had set the device and whether he was a foreign or homegrown terrorist. Either possibility was frightening.

  The bomb’s mechanism proved to be difficult to neutralize, which pointed to a professional terrorist. Everyone, save Soraya, had backed away to a safe distance while Delia worked on defusing it.

  “You ought to get clear of here,” Delia remembered saying. “No one ought to be alone,” Soraya answered her.

  “If I fail, if this thing goes off—”

  Soraya had engaged her eyes for the briefest moment. “Especially at the end.” Then she had produced the most disarming grin. “But you won’t fail.”

  Thorne, striding into Admitting, rudely shattered her reverie. Recognizing the anxious expression on his face as he came up to her, she said, “She had the procedure and passed a quiet night. That’s all I know.”

  As he followed her down a linoleum-floored corridor to the bank of oversized elevators, he said, “What you told me over the phone.”

  “All true,” she said, intuiting his meaning.

  “There can be no doubt?”

  His eyes were clouded, with what emotions she could not yet say.

  “How many men d’you think she was sleeping with, Charles?” She shot him an angry look. “But, really, your attention should be focused on her.”

  “Yes, of course. I know that,” he said distractedly.

  The elevator doors opened, allowing people to exit. They stepped in, and Delia pressed the button for the third floor. They rode up in silence. The elevator car smelled of disinfectant, sickly-sweet disease, and the slow secretions of the aged.

  As they stepped out onto the third floor, Delia said, “I have to warn you that Secretary Hendricks is here.”

  “Shit. How am I going to explain my presence?”

  “I’ve thought of that,” Delia said. “Leave it to me.”

  She led him down the hushed corridor, at the end of which was the metal door that opened onto the operating wing.

  Thorne inclined his head. “That’s where it happened?”

  Delia nodded.

  Thorne licked his lips, his anxiety living on his face. “And she’s not awake yet? That can’t be good.”

  “Don’t be negative,” Delia said, clearly annoyed. “The procedure’s
delicate. She’s being carefully monitored.”

  “But what if she—?”

  “Keep quiet!” she said, as they passed the secretary’s bodyguard and entered the recovery waiting room.

  Hendricks was in the corner farthest from the flat-screen TV, on which CNN was streaming soundlessly. He was on his mobile, scribbling notes on a small pad perched on one knee. He scarcely looked up when they came in. Delia stared at the oily film that had developed on her coffee and, disgusted, threw it into the trash can.

  Before either of them could sit down, Hendricks finished his call and, looking up, recognized Thorne and did a classic double take.

  As he rose and came over to them, Delia said, “Anything?”

  He shook his head. Then he turned his attention to the man beside her.

  “Charles Thorne?”

  “Guilty,” Thorne acknowledged, before realizing what, in the coming days and weeks, that could mean.

  The two men pumped hands briefly.

  “I must admit,” Hendricks said, “to a certain amount of confusion regarding your presence here.”

  Delia kept a smile on her face. “The three of us are friends. I ran into him this morning and he insisted on coming with me.”

  “That’s good of you,” Hendricks said distractedly. “She can use the support.”

  “I don’t want Soraya to be alone when she wakes up,” Delia said.

  And right on cue, one of her surgical team appeared in the waiting room. Looking from one to the other, he said, “I have news.”

  Tom Brick, with Peter beside him, drove the red Audi south, deeper into the Virginia countryside.

  The sky was filled with troubling clouds; yesterday’s sun was only a memory. At length, Brick turned onto Ridgeway Drive, a bent finger that passed through dense copses of trees through which, now and again, could be seen the rooflines of large houses. Around one last bend to the left, Ridgeway came to an end at a circle off which were four houses separated by deep woods.

  Brick took the right-hand driveway, graveled and well-kept. Stands of evergreens rose up on either side, so that at the dogleg left, the road vanished as if it had never existed. They were in a world of their own, cut off from everyone and everything.