Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Objective

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Rain drummed against the roof of the cottage, fat drops sliding down the windows. A rumble of approaching thunder. The lace curtains stirred. In the dead of night Chrissie lay fully dressed on one of the twin beds, staring at the window, speckled as a robin’s egg. Scarlett lay curled on the other bed, breathing evenly in her sleep. Chrissie knew she should be sleeping, that she needed her rest, but after the incident on the motorway her nerves would not stop singing. Several hours ago she had contemplated taking half a lorazepam to calm herself into sleep, but the thought of drifting off made her more anxious.

  The singing of her nerves had only increased when she’d picked Scarlett up from her parents. Her father, always well attuned to her moods, had suspected something was up with her the moment he opened the door to her knock, and he was not convinced when she tried to reassure him that everything was fine. She could still see his thin, oblong face as he stood looking after her while she bundled Scarlett into the Range Rover. It was the same stricken look he’d had standing over Tracy’s coffin as it was lowered into the ground. As she got in behind the wheel, Chrissie breathed a sigh of relief that she’d had the foresight to park the SUV so that he couldn’t see the scrapes along one side. She waved cheerfully to him as she drove away. He was still standing in the doorway when she went around a curve and disappeared from his view.

  Now, hours later and miles away, she lay on the bed in a house owned by a girlfriend who was away in Brussels on business. She’d been able to pick up the keys from the woman’s brother. In the dark she lay listening to all the tiny creaking and moaning, whispers and hissing of a strange house. The wind clawed at the window sashes, trying to find a way in. She shivered and pulled a blanket tighter around her, but the blanket didn’t warm her. Neither did the central heating. There was a chill in her bones, caused by her vibrating nerves, and the dread that stalked her thoughts.

  “We were being followed, possibly all the way from Tracy’s flat,” Adam had said. “There’s no point in taking a chance these people know about Scarlett—and where your parents live, for that matter.”

  The thought that these people who had wanted to shoot Adam might know about her daughter gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to feel safe here, wanted to believe that there was no danger now that she had separated herself from him, but the doubts continued to prey on her. Another roll of thunder, closer this time, and then another burst of rain rattled the windowpane. She sat up, gasping. Her heart was pounding, and she reached for the Glock that Adam had given her for protection. She had some experience with guns, though mostly rifles and shotguns. Against her mother’s objections, her father had taken her hunting on winter Sundays, when the frost was brittle and the sun was weak and drained of color. She remembered the quivering flank of a deer, and how she had flinched when her father had fired a shot into its heart. She remembered the look in its eye as her father had taken his skinning knife to its belly. Its mouth was half open as if it had been about to ask for mercy before it was shot.

  Scarlett whimpered in her sleep, and Chrissie rose and, leaning over, stroked her hair as she always did when her daughter was having a bad dream. Why were children burdened with nightmares, she wondered, when there was so much time for nightmares in adult life? Where was the carefree childhood she’d had? Was it a mirage? Had she also had nightmares, night terrors, anxieties? She could not now remember, which was a blessing.

  She knew one thing, though, Tracy would have laughed at her for even having such thoughts. “Life isn’t carefree,” she could hear her sister saying. “What are you thinking? Life is difficult, at best. At its worst, it’s a bloody nightmare.”

  What would have led her to say such a thing? Chrissie asked herself. What misfortunes had befallen her while I had my head stuck in my Oxford texts? All at once she was overcome with the conviction that she had failed Tracy, that she should have seen the signs of her stress, her difficult life. But, really, how could she have helped her? Tracy had been lost in a world so distant, so alien, Chrissie was sure she would have found it incomprehensible. Just as she could make no sense of what had happened today. Who was Adam Stone? She had no doubt that he’d been friends with Tracy, but she suspected now that he was more—a compatriot, business partner, maybe even her boss. Something he hadn’t told her, hadn’t wanted to tell her. All she knew for certain was that her sister’s life had been a secret, and so was Adam’s. They had been part of the same alien world, and now all unknowing she had been dragged into it. She gave a shiver again and, seeing that Scarlett had quieted, lay beside her so that they were back-to-back. Her daughter’s warmth seeped slowly into her, her eyelids grew heavy, and she began to drowse, sinking slowly, inexorably into the delicious cushion of sleep.

  A sharp noise startled her awake. For a moment she lay completely still, listening to the rain, the wind, Scarlett breathing along with the cottage. She listened for the noise. Had she dreamed it or had she been asleep at all? After what seemed a long time, she got out of Scarlett’s bed, reached over, and slid her hand under the pillow for the Glock. Padding silently toward the half-open bedroom door, she peered out at the wedge of pale light from the lamp she’d kept on in the bedroom across the hall so she and Scarlett could find the bathroom without barking their shins.

  She moved into the hallway, listened fiercely. She became aware of sweat snaking down her sides from underneath her arms. Her breath felt hot in her throat. Every second that ticked by ratcheted up her anxiety, but also the hope that she had dreamed the noise. Gliding along the hallway, she peered down the stairs at the darkened living room. Standing at the head of the stairs, undecided, she had just about convinced herself that she’d been dreaming when she heard the small noise again.

  Slowly she put one bare foot after the other as she descended from semi-darkness into blackness. She needed to get all the way down the stairs before she could reach the switch that turned on the living room lights. The staircase loomed before her, seeming steeper, more treacherous in the dark. Briefly she thought about going back upstairs to look for a flashlight, but felt that she might lose her nerve if she turned around now. She kept descending, tread by tread. They were of wood, polished to a high gloss, without the benefit of a runner. Once, she slipped and, pitching forward, almost lost her balance. Grabbing for the railing, she held on while her pulse beat wildly in her ears.

  Calm down, she told herself. Just bloody well calm those nerves, Chrissie. There’s no one there.

  The noise came again, louder this time because she was closer to it, and she knew: Someone was inside the house.

  Just after sunset, on the day Karpov had begun his long trek back to Moscow, Arkadin and El Heraldo set off in the cigarette. Arkadin maneuvered the slender powerboat beyond the slips without running lights, which was illegal, but necessary. Besides, as he had quickly learned, in Mexico the line between legal and illegal moved more times than the front lines of a war. Not to mention the fact that what was illegal and what was enforceable were often at odds.

  The cigarette’s powerful GPS system was deeply hooded, so that no illumination leaked out into the blue velvet of dusk. Stars had gathered in the eastern sky, eager to display their splendor.

  “Time,” Arkadin said.

  “Eight minutes,” El Heraldo replied, consulting his watch.

  Arkadin altered their course by a couple of degrees. They were already past the perimeter of the policía patrols, but still he did not turn on any lights. The GPS screen told him everything he needed to know. The multi-baffled mufflers El Heraldo had installed on the exhaust were working to perfection; the cigarette made scarcely any noise as it skimmed over the water at high speed.

  “Five minutes,” El Heraldo intoned.

  “We’ll be in visual range in a moment.”

  That was El Heraldo’s cue to take the wheel while Arkadin peered through a pair of military high-power night-vision binoculars toward the south.

  “Got ’em,” he said, after a moment.
>
  At once El Heraldo cut their speed by half.

  Arkadin, peering through the binoculars at the oncoming boat—a yacht that must have cost upward of fifty million dollars—saw the infrared flashes, two long, two short, visible only to him.

  “All’s well,” he said. “Full stop.”

  El Heraldo cut the engines, and the cigarette cut through the swells on its own momentum. Dead ahead the yacht loomed up out of the darkness. It, too, had all its lights extinguished. As Arkadin prepared himself, El Heraldo put on the night goggles and manned the infrared beacon. The yacht was equipped with an identical beacon, which was how the two boats drew alongside each other without lights and without incident.

  A rope ladder was unfurled over the yacht’s port side, and El Heraldo made it fast to the cigarette. A man, dressed in black, handed down a small carton. El Heraldo received it on his shoulder, then placed it on the cigarette’s deck.

  Using a pocketknife, Arkadin slit the carton open. Inside were cans of prepackaged organic corn tortillas. Arkadin opened one, pulled out the roll of tortillas. Inside the roll were stacked four plastic-wrapped packages of a white powder. He stuck the blade of his knife into a packet and tasted its contents. Satisfied, he waved a prearranged signal to the crew member on the yacht. Inserting the bag of cocaine back into the can, he returned it to the carton, and El Heraldo lifted it up to the crewman.

  A short whistle came from the yacht as the crewman vanished up the ladder, and Arkadin waited. Moments later two rather large bundles were lowered via a portable winch. The bundles, lying horizontal, were each perhaps six feet in length. They were cradled in a net as if they were a pair of tuna.

  When the bundles reached the cigarette’s deck, El Heraldo rolled them off the net, which was immediately winched back up to the yacht. Then El Heraldo detached the rope ladder, which was also withdrawn.

  Another whistle, longer this time, came from the yacht. Behind the wheel, El Heraldo started the engines, put the cigarette into reverse, and began to back away from the yacht. When they had reached an adequate distance, the yacht began to move forward, continuing its journey northward, up the coast of Sonora.

  As El Heraldo turned the cigarette around, heading them east, back toward shore, Arkadin took up a flashlight and, squatting down, slashed the coverings at one end of the bundles. Then he shone the flashlight on what was inside.

  The faces of the two men appeared pale in the light, except where their beards had started to grow. They were still groggy with the anesthetic they had been given when they had been abducted in Moscow. Nevertheless their eyes, which hadn’t seen light for some days, screwed up, watering unstoppably.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” Arkadin said, invisible behind the dazzle of the beam of light. “At last you have reached the end of your journey. For one of you, at least. Stepan, Pavel, you were two of my captains, two of my most trusted men. And yet one of you has betrayed me.”

  He showed them how the light turned the blade of his knife into a white streak. “In the next hour or so one of you will confess and will tell me everything he knows about his betrayal. A quick, painless death will be his reward. If not… has either of you ever known anyone who has died of thirst? No? God help you, that’s not the way any human being should die.”

  For an instant Chrissie froze, unsure what to do as her fight and flight responses warred with each other. Then she took a deep breath and thought about the situation rationally. Retreating wouldn’t help; she’d be trapped on the second floor, and whoever had invaded the cottage would be that much closer to Scarlett. Her only thought now was for her daughter. Whatever happened, she knew she had to keep her safe.

  She took a tentative step down, then another. Five treads to go before she could flick the lights on. With her back to the wall, she slowly descended. The noise came again and she froze. It sounded as if someone had come in through the kitchen door and now moved into the living room. She raised the Glock, swinging it in a slow arc as she squinted into the gloom. But apart from the partial outline of the sofa and one wing of an armchair opposite the fireplace, she could make out nothing, certainly no movement, no matter how furtive.

  Another step down, another step closer to the light switch. She was only one tread away from it now, her torso leaning forward, free hand outstretched when, with an indrawn gasp, she started back. Someone was close to her, at the bottom of the stairs. In a confused swirl she felt movement on the other side of the newel post, and she raised the Glock, aiming it.

  “Who’s there?” Her voice startled her, as if it belonged to a dream or to someone else. “Stay where you are, I’ve got a gun.”

  “Cookie, where in the bloody hell did you get a handgun?” her father said from out of the darkness. “I knew something was wrong. What’s going on?”

  She flipped on the light and saw him standing there, his face pale and pinched with concern.

  “Dad?” She blinked, as if she couldn’t believe it was really him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Cookie, where’s Scarlett?”

  “Upstairs. She’s sleeping.”

  He nodded. “Good, let’s keep it that way.”

  He gripped the barrel of the Glock and pushed it down to her side. “Now come on over here. I’ll light a fire, and you’ll tell me what sort of trouble you’re in.”

  “I’m not in any trouble, Dad. Does Mum know you’re here?”

  “Your mum is as worried about you as I am. Her way of dealing with things is to cook, which she’s doing right now. I’m meant to bring you and Scarlett back home with me.”

  Like a sleepwalker, she came down off the stairs and into the living room. Her father was turning on lamps. “I can’t do that, Dad.”

  “Why not?” He waved a hand. “Never mind, I didn’t think you would.” He stooped, putting some logs into the grate. Then he checked around. “Where are the matches?”

  He padded into the kitchen. She could hear him pulling out drawers and rummaging through them.

  “It’s not that I’m not grateful, Dad. But really, you’re an idiot for coming out here in the middle of the night. What did you do, follow me? And how did you get in here?” She followed him into the kitchen.

  A callused hand came over her mouth and, at the same time, the Glock was wrenched out of her grip. A deep swirl of masculine scent. Then she saw her father lying unconscious on the floor and she began to struggle.

  “Stay still,” a voice whispered in her ear. “If you don’t, I’ll take you upstairs and blow your daughter’s face off while you watch.”

  13

  WHEN SORAYA ARRIVED at the Tucson airport, she went straight to the line of rental-car booths and showed the photo of “Stanley Kowalski” around to all the personnel without getting a hit. That name was not on their books—not that she had expected it to come up. A professional of Arkadin’s skill level wouldn’t be careless enough to rent a car under the same false name he’d used at Immigration. Undaunted, she sought out the managers of each company. Because she had the date and the time that Arkadin passed through the airport, she had arranged to arrive at more or less the same hour. She asked the managers who had been on duty nine days ago. The same personnel were on duty save one, a woman with the unlikely name of Biffy Flisser, who had quit to take a hospitality position at the Best Western airport hotel. None of the salespeople recognized Arkadin.

  The manager was gracious enough to call the Best Western, and Biffy Flisser was waiting for Soraya when she walked into the cool, airy lobby. They sat in the lounge and had drinks while they spoke. Biffy had a pleasant nature and readily agreed to help Soraya with her search.

  “Yeah, I know him,” she said, tapping the surveillance photo on Soraya’s phone. “I mean, I don’t really know him, but yeah, he rented a car on that date.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Positive.” Biffy nodded. “He wanted a long-term lease. A month or six weeks, he said. I told him in that case we could give him a special rate and he
seemed pleased.”

  Soraya waited a moment. “Do you recall his name?” she asked casually.

  “This is important, isn’t it?”

  “It would certainly help me out.”

  “Let me see.” She drummed her lacquered fingernails against the tabletop. “Frank, I think, Frank something…” She concentrated all the harder, then brightened. “That’s it! Frank Stein. Frank Norman Stein, actually.”

  Frank N. Stein. Soraya burst out into laughter.

  “What?” Biffy seemed confused. “What’s so funny?”

  This Arkadin was a real card, Soraya thought on her way back to the airport. Then she was brought up short. Or was he? Why would he deliberately use a name that might stick out? Possibly he planned to ditch the car somewhere across the border.

  She felt suddenly deflated. Even so, she continued her investigation. Seeking out the rental-car manager, she gave him the fake name Arkadin had used. “What car did he rent?”

  “Just a moment.” The manager turned to his computer terminal, input the name and the date. “A black Chevy, an old one, an ’87. A heap, really, but apparently that satisfied him.”

  “You keep cars that long?”

  The manager nodded. “For one thing, here in the desert they don’t rust. For another, since so many of our cars are stolen, it pays to rent out the old ones. Besides, customers like the gentle prices.”

  Soraya copied down the information, including the license plate tag, but without much hope that if she even found the car it would lead to Arkadin. Then she rented a car of her own, thanked the manager, and walked into a café, where she sat down and ordered an iced coffee. She’d learned the hard way not to order iced tea outside New York, Washington, or LA. Americans liked their iced tea achingly sweet.