Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Objective

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Bourne and Suparwita were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Balinese shaman’s house deep in the jungle of Karangasem, in southeast Bali. Bourne had returned to the island to trap Noah Perlis, the spy who had murdered Holly years ago. He had pried the ring out of Perlis’s grasp after he had killed him not five miles from this spot.

  “Holly Marie’s mother and father arrived here from Morocco when she was five,” Suparwita said. “They had the look of refugees.”

  “What were they fleeing from?”

  “Difficult to say for certain. If the stories about them are true, they chose an excellent place to hide from religious persecution.” Suparwita was known formally as a Mangku, both a high priest and a shaman, but also something more, impossible to express in Western terms. “They wanted protection.”

  “Protection?” Bourne frowned. “From what?”

  Suparwita was a handsome man of indeterminate age. His skin was a deep nut brown, his smile wide and devastating, revealing two rows of white, even teeth. He was large for a Balinese, and exuded a kind of otherworldly power that fascinated Bourne. His house, an inner sanctum surrounded by a lush, sun-dappled garden and high stucco walls, lay in deepest shadow so that the interior was cool even at noontime. The floor was packed dirt covered by a sisal rug. Here and there odd items of indeterminate nature—pots of herbs, clusters of roots, bouquets of dried flowers pressed into the shape of a fan—sprouted from floor or walls as if alive. The shadows, which filled the corners to overflowing, seemed constantly in motion as if formed from liquid rather than air.

  “From Holly’s uncle,” Suparwita said. “It was from him they took the ring in the first place.”

  “He knew they stole it?”

  “He thought it was lost.” Suparwita cocked his head. “There are men outside.”

  Bourne nodded. “We’ll deal with them in a minute.”

  “Aren’t you concerned they’ll burst in here, guns drawn?”

  “They won’t show themselves until I’ve left here; they want me, not you.” Bourne touched the ring with his forefinger. “Go on.”

  Suparwita inclined his head. “They were hiding from Holly’s uncle. He had vowed to bring her back to the family compound in the High Atlas Mountains.”

  “They’re Berbers. Of course, Moreau means ‘Moor,’ ” Bourne mused. “Why did Holly’s uncle want to bring her back to Morocco?”

  Suparwita looked at Bourne for a long time. “I imagine you knew, once.”

  “Noah Perlis had the ring last, so he must have murdered Holly to get it.” Bourne took the ring in his hand. “Why did he want it? What’s so important about a wedding ring?”

  “That,” Suparwita said, “is a part of the story you were trying to discover.”

  “That was some time ago. Now I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Perlis had flats in many cities,” Suparwita said, “but he was based in London, which was where Holly went when she traveled abroad during the eighteen months before she returned to Bali. Perlis must have followed her back here to kill her and obtain the ring for himself.”

  “How do you know all this?” Bourne asked.

  Suparwita’s face broke into one of his thousand-watt smiles. All at once he looked like the genie conjured up by Aladdin. “I know,” he said, “because you told me.”

  Soraya Moore noticed the differences between the old Central Intelligence under the late Veronica Hart and the new CI under M. Errol Danziger the moment she walked into CI headquarters in Washington, DC. For one thing, security had been beefed up to the point that getting through the various checkpoints felt like infiltrating a medieval fortress. For another, she didn’t recognize a single member of the security personnel on duty. Every face had that hard, beady look only the US military can instill in a human being. She wasn’t surprised by this. After all, before being appointed as DCI by the president, M. Errol Danziger had been the NSA’s deputy director of Signals Intelligence, with a long and distinguished career in the armed forces and then in the DoD. He also had a long and distinguished career as a brass-balled sonovabitch. No, what startled her was simply the speed with which the new DCI had installed his own people inside CI’s formerly sacrosanct walls.

  From the time that it had been the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the agency had been its own domain, entirely free of interference from either the Pentagon or its intelligence arm, the NSA. Now, because of the growing power of Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday, CI was being merged with NSA, its unique DNA being diluted. M. Errol Danziger was now its director, and Danziger was Secretary Halliday’s creature.

  Soraya, the director of Typhon, a Muslim-staffed anti-terrorist agency operating under the aegis of CI, considered the changes Danziger had instigated during the several weeks she had been away in Cairo. She felt lucky that Typhon was semi-independent. She reported directly to the DCI, bypassing the various directorate heads. She was half Arab and she knew all her people, had in most instances handpicked them. They would follow her through the gates of hell, if she asked it of them. But what about her friends and colleagues inside CI itself? Would they stay or would they go?

  She got off at the DCI’s floor, drenched in the eerie green light filtered through bullet- and bombproof glass, and came up against a young man, reed-thin, steely-eyed, with a high-and-tight marine haircut. He was sitting behind a desk, riffling through a stack of papers. The nameplate on his desk read: LT. R. SIMMONS READE.

  “Good afternoon, I’m Soraya Moore,” she said. “I have an appointment with the DCI.”

  Lt. R. Simmons Reade glanced up and gave her a neutral look that nevertheless seemed to hold the hint of a sneer. He wore a blue suit, a starched white shirt, and a red-and-blue regimental striped tie. Without glancing at his computer terminal he said, “You had an appointment with Director Danziger. That was fifteen days ago.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “I was in the field, cleaning up the loose ends of the mission in northern Iran that had to be—”

  The light’s greenish tint made Reade’s face seem longer, sharper, dangerous, almost like a weapon. “You disobeyed a direct order from Director Danziger.”

  “The new DCI had just been installed,” she said. “He had no way of knowing—”

  “And yet Director Danziger knows all he needs to know about you, Ms. Moore.”

  Soraya bristled. “What the hell does that mean? And it’s Director Moore.”

  “Not surprisingly, you’re out of date, Ms. Moore,” Reade said blandly. “You’ve been terminated.”

  “What? You’ve got to be joking. I can’t—” Soraya felt as if she were being sucked down a sinkhole that had just appeared beneath her feet. “I demand to see the DCI!”

  Reade’s face got even harder, like a pitchman for the “Be All You Can Be” slogan. “As of this moment, your clearance has been revoked. Please surrender your ID, company credit cards, and cell phone.”

  Soraya leaned forward, her fists on the sleek desktop. “Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”

  “I’m the voice of Director Danziger.”

  “I don’t believe a word you say.”

  “Your cards won’t work. There’s nowhere to go but out.”

  She stood back up. “Tell the DCI I’ll be in my office when he decides he has time to debrief me.”

  R. Simmons Reade reached down beside his desk and lifted a small, topless cardboard box, which he slid across to her. Soraya looked down and almost choked on her tongue. There, neatly stacked, was every personal item she’d had in her office.

  I can only repeat what you yourself told me.” Suparwita stood up and, with him, Bourne.

  “So even then I was concerned with Noah Perlis.” It wasn’t a question and the Balinese shaman didn’t treat it as such. “But why? And what was his connection to Holly Marie Moreau?”

  “Whatever the truth of it,” Suparwita said, “it seems likely they met in London.”

  “And what of the odd lettering t
hat runs around the inside of the ring?”

  “You showed it to me once, hoping I could help. I have no idea what it means.”

  “It isn’t any modern language,” Bourne said, still racking his damaged memory for details.

  Suparwita took a step toward him and lowered his voice until it was just above a whisper. Nevertheless, it penetrated into Bourne’s mind like the sting of a wasp.

  “As I said, you were born in December, Siwa’s month.” He pronounced the god Shiva’s name as all Balinese did. “Further, 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.”

  “I already did that eight months ago when Arkadin shot me.”

  Suparwita nodded gravely. “Had I not given you a draft of the resurrection lily beforehand, it’s very likely you would have died from that wound.”

  “You saved me,” Bourne said. “Why?”

  Suparwita gave him another of his thousand-watt grins. “We are linked, you and I.” He shrugged. “Who can say how or why?”

  Bourne, needing to turn to practical matters, said, “There are two of them outside, I checked before I came in.”

  “And yet you led them here.”

  Now it was Bourne’s turn to grin. He lowered his voice even further. “All part of the plan, my friend.”

  Suparwita raised a hand. “Before you carry out your plan, there is something you must know and something I must teach you.”

  He paused long enough for Bourne to wonder what was on his mind. He knew the shaman well enough to understand when something grave was about to be discussed. He’d seen that expression just before Suparwita had fed him the resurrection lily concoction in this very room some months ago.

  “Listen to me.” There was no smile on the shaman’s face now. “Within the year you will die, you will need to die in order to save those around you, everyone you love or care about.”

  Despite all his training, all his mental discipline, Bourne felt a wave of coldness sweep through him. It was one thing to put yourself in harm’s way, to cheat death over and over, often by a hairbreadth, but it was quite another to be told in unequivocal terms that you had less than a year to live. On the other hand, he had the choice to laugh it off—he was a Westerner, after all, and there were so many belief systems in the world that it was easy enough to dismiss 99 percent of them. And yet, looking into Suparwita’s eyes, he could see the truth. As before, the shaman’s extraordinary powers had allowed him to see the future, or at least Bourne’s future. “We are linked, you and I.” He had saved Bourne’s life before, it would be foolish to doubt him now.

  “Do you know how, or when?”

  Suparwita shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. My flashes of the future are like waking dreams, filled with color and portent, but there are no images, no details, no clarity.”

  “You once told me that Siwa would look after me.”

  “Indeed.” The smile returned to Suparwita’s face as he led Bourne into another room, filled with shadows and the scent of frangipani incense. “And the next several hours will be an example of his help.”

  Valerie Zapolsky, Rory Doll’s personal assistant, brought the message to DCI M. Errol Danziger herself, because, as she said, her boss did not want to entrust the news to the computer system, even one as hackproof as CI’s.

  “Why didn’t Doll bring this himself?” Danziger frowned without looking up.

  “The director of operations is otherwise engaged,” Valerie said. “Temporarily.”

  She was a small dark woman with hooded eyes. Danziger didn’t like that Doll had sent her.

  “Jason Bourne is alive? What the fuck—!” He leapt off his chair as if he’d been electrocuted. As his eyes scanned the report, which was brief and lacking actionable detail, his face grew red with blood. His head fairly trembled.

  Then Valerie made the fatal mistake of trying to be solicitous. “Director, is there anything I can do?”

  “Do, do?” He looked up as if coming out of a stupor. “Sure, here’s what, tell me this is a joke, a sick, black joke on Rory Doll’s part. Because if not, I sure as hell am going to fire your ass.”

  “That will be all, Val,” Rory Doll said, appearing in the doorway behind her. “Go on back to the office.” Her expression of deliverance only partially assuaged his guilt at thrusting her into the line of fire.

  “Goddammit,” Danziger said. “I swear I will fire her.”

  Doll strolled into the office and stood in front of Danziger’s desk. “If you do, Stu Gold will be on you like flies on shit.”

  “Gold? Who the fuck is Stu Gold and why should I give a shit about him?”

  “He’s CI’s lawyer.”

  “I’ll fire his ass, too.”

  “Impossible, sir. His firm has an ironclad contract with CI, and he’s the only one with clearance all the way up—”

  The DCI’s hand cut across the air in a vicious gesture. “You think I can’t find just cause to can her?” He snapped his fingers. “What’s her name?”

  “Zapolsky. Valerie A. Zapolsky.”

  “Right, what is that, Russian? I want her re-vetted down to the brand of toenail polish she uses, understood?”

  Doll nodded diplomatically. He was slender and fair-haired, which only caused his electric-blue eyes to blaze like flares. “Absolutely, sir.”

  “And God help you if there’s a spot, however small, or even a question, on that report.”

  Ever since Peter Marks’s recent defection the DCI had been in a foul mood. Another director of ops had not yet been named. Marks had been Doll’s boss and Doll knew that if he could prove his loyalty to Danziger, he’d have a good shot at Marks’s position. Grinding his teeth in silent fury, he changed the subject. “We need to talk about this new bit of intel.”

  “This isn’t a file photo, is it? This isn’t a joke?”

  “I wish it were.” Doll shook his head. “But, no, sir. Jason Bourne was photographed applying for a temporary visa at Denpasar Airport in Bali, Indonesia—”

  “I know where the hell Bali is, Doll.”

  “Just being complete, sir, as per your instructions to us on first-day orientation.”

  The DCI, though still fuming, said nothing. He held the report, and its attendant grainy black-and-white photo of Bourne, in his fist—his mailed fist, as he liked to call it.

  “Continuing, as you can see by the electronic legend in the lower right-hand corner, the photo was taken three days ago, at two twenty-nine PM local time. It took our signals department this long to ensure there was no transmission error or interception.”

  Danziger took a breath. “He was dead, Bourne was supposed to be dead. I was sure we’d shut him down forever.” He crushed the photo, threw it in the hopper attached to the paper shredder. “He’s still there, I assume you know that much.”

  “Yes, sir.” Doll nodded. “At this moment he’s on Bali.”

  “You have him under surveillance?”

  “Twenty-four hours a day. He can’t make a move without us knowing about it.”

  Danziger considered for a moment, then said, “Who’s our wet-work man in Indonesia?”

  Doll was ready for this question. “Coven. But, sir, if I may point out, in her last written report filed from Cairo, Soraya Moore claimed that Bourne had a major hand in preventing the disaster in northern Iran that brought down Black River.”

  “Almost as dangerous as his rogue status is Bourne’s ability to—how shall I put it?—influence women unduly. Moore is certainly one of them, which is why she was fired.” The DCI nodded. “Activate Coven, Mr. Doll.”

  “Can do, sir, but it will take him some time to—”

  “Who’s closer?” Danziger said impatiently.

  Doll checked his notes. “We have an extraction team in Jakarta. I can get them on a military copter within the hour.”

  “Do it, and use Coven as backup,” the DCI ordered. “T
heir orders are to bring Bourne in. I want to subject him to extensive, ah, questioning. I want to pick his brains, I want to know his secrets, how he manages to keep evading us, how at every turn he cheats death.” Danziger’s eyes glittered with malice. “When we’re done with him we’ll put a bullet through his head and claim the Russians killed him.”

  2

  THE LONG BANGALORE night was nearly at an end. Thick with the stench of raw sewage, disease, and human sweat, dense with terror, displaced rage, thwarted desire, and despair, the ashen dawn did nothing to return color to the city.

  Finding a physician’s surgery, Arkadin broke in and took what he needed: sutures, iodine, sterile cotton, bandages, and antibiotics to take the place of the ones he hadn’t been able to pick up at the hospital. Loping through the wheezing streets, he knew he needed to stop the bleeding of the wound at the back of his thigh. It wasn’t life threatening, but it was deep, and he didn’t want to lose any more blood. Even more, though, he needed a place to hide, where he could stop the clock that Oserov had set ticking, a place of respite where he could assess his situation. He cursed himself for having been caught flat-footed by the enemy. But he was also acutely aware that his next step was a crucial one, disaster could so quickly compound itself into a catastrophe of deathly proportions.

  With his local security penetrated, he could no longer trust any of his usual contacts in Bangalore, which left only one option: the place where he maintained absolute leverage. On the way, entering an encrypted number that gave him access to a relay of secure signal routers, he called Stepan, Luka, Pavel, Alik, as well as Ismael Bey, the figurehead leader of the Eastern Brotherhood, which he controlled.

  “We’re under attack from Maslov, Oserov, the entire Kazanskaya,” he told each one brusquely and without preamble. “As of this moment we’re in a state of war.”

  He had trained them well, none of them asked superfluous questions, merely acknowledged the order with curt replies. Then they rang off in order to commence the preparations Arkadin had blueprinted for them months ago. Each captain had his specific role to play, each was activating his piece of a plan that literally stretched across the globe. Maslov wanted war, that’s precisely what he was going to get, and not merely on a single front.