Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Objective

by Eric Van Lustbader

  While she waited, she opened a detailed map of Arizona and northern Mexico. Mexico was a big country, but she guessed Arkadin might be somewhere within a hundred-mile radius of the airport. Otherwise, why specifically choose Tucson when he could have flown into Mexico City or Acapulco? No, she decided, his destination had to be northwestern Mexico, possibly even just across the border.

  Her iced coffee came, and she drank it black and unsugared, savoring the acidic bite that chased its way down her throat and into her stomach. She drew a circle around the airport that encompassed one hundred miles. That was her search area.

  The moment Soraya left his office, the manager took out a small key from his trouser pocket and unlocked the lowest drawer on the right side of his desk. Inside were files, a handgun registered in his name, and a head shot photo. He brought the photo into the light, staring at it for several moments. Then, pursing his lips, he turned the photo over, read the local number off to himself, and dialed it on his office phone.

  When the male voice answered, he said, “Someone came looking for your man—the man in the photo you gave me… She said her name was Soraya Moore, she gave me no reason to disbelieve her… No official ID, no… I did just as you said… No sweat on that score… No, of course you don’t understand. What I mean is that it’ll be easy, I rented her a car…”

  “… a Toyota Corolla, silver-blue, license tag… D as in David, V as in Victor, N as in Nancy, three-three-seven-eight.”

  There was a bit more, but it was of no interest to Soraya. The tiny electronic bug she had affixed to the underside of the manager’s desk was working perfectly, the manager’s voice came through with crystal clarity. Pity she couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line. However, she now knew that someone had staked out the Tucson airport, possibly others near the border with Mexico. She also knew that whoever these people were they were going to follow her into Mexico. One thing stood out: The person the manager had called didn’t understand American jargon. That left out Mexicans, who this close to the border made an almost fetishistic habit of learning every possible English colloquialism and street phrasing. The person had to be a foreigner, possibly Russian. And if, as she suspected, he was one of Arkadin’s people put in place to look out for Dimitri Maslov’s hit squad, this just might be her lucky day.

  The first thing Peter Marks did on disembarking at London’s Heathrow Airport was call Willard.

  “Where are you?” Marks said.

  “The less you know the better.”

  Marks bridled at that. “The last thing anyone needs in the field is to fly blind,” he snapped.

  “I’m trying to protect you from Liss. When he calls you—and believe me he will—you’ll tell him truthfully that you don’t know where I am, and for you that will be the end of it.”

  Peter showed his official government ID to Immigration, and they stamped his passport and waved him through. “But not for you.”

  “Let me worry about that, Peter. You have enough on your plate getting the ring from Bourne.”

  “I have to find him first,” Marks said, approaching the baggage carousel.

  “You’ve had dealings with Bourne,” Willard said. “I trust you’ll find him.”

  Marks was outside now, in a typically dreary London morning. He glanced at his watch. It was appallingly early and already the sky was spitting rain in fitful bursts.

  “No one really knows Bourne,” he said, “not even Soraya.”

  “That’s because nothing about him makes sense,” Willard pointed out. “He’s completely unpredictable.”

  “Well, you can hardly complain. I mean Treadstone made him this way.”

  “It absolutely did not,” Willard said hotly. “Whatever happened to him, the form of amnesia he’s suffered has changed him irrevocably. Speaking of which, I want you to see a Chief Inspector Lloyd-Philips. Bourne may have been involved in a murder at the Vesper Club in the West End last night. Start looking for him there.”

  Marks made several quick notes on the palm of his hand. “You’re the one who isn’t understandable.” He was standing in line for a taxi, periodically shuffling forward. Speaking in a low voice, he covered his mouth with his hand. “You went out of your way to help him in Bali, now you seem to want to examine him like a circus freak.”

  “He is a freak, Peter. A very dangerous freak—he’s already murdered Noah Perlis and now he may be implicated in another death. How much more proof do you need that he’s out of control? I don’t want you to forget that fact or lose sight of our goal. The Treadstone training made him into an ultimate warrior, but then something unforeseen—a freak of fate or nature, whatever you choose to call it—altered him further. He became something unknown, something more. Which is why I’ve pitted him against Arkadin. As I’ve already explained to you, Arkadin, being the first of Treadstone’s graduates, was subjected to a form of extreme training that—well, after he escaped and disappeared, Conklin decided to modify the training, to scale it back, make it less… extreme.”

  Having reached the head of the line, Marks slid into the backseat of the taxi and gave the address of a small hotel he liked in the West End.

  “If Treadstone is to go forward, if it’s to be successful, if it’s to fulfill its promise, we must find out who will prevail.” Willard’s voice buzzed in Marks’s ear like a wasp beating against a windowpane. “Depending on who is left alive, we’ll know how to proceed.”

  Marks stared out the window, seeing nothing. “I want to get this straight. If Arkadin prevails, you’ll go back to the initial training methodology.”

  “With several minor tweaks I’ve got in mind.”

  “But what if Bourne kills Arkadin? You don’t know—”

  “That’s right, Peter, we’ll be faced with an X-factor. The process will, therefore, take longer. We’ll have to study Bourne in a controlled environment. We’ll—”

  “Wait a minute. Are you talking about imprisoning him?”

  “Subjecting him to repeated batteries of psychological tests, yes, yes.” Willard sounded impatient, as if he’d made his point but Marks was too stupid to get it. “This is the essence of Treadstone, Peter. This is what Alex Conklin devoted his life to.”

  “But why? I just don’t get it.”

  “The Old Man didn’t either, not really.” Willard sighed. “Sometimes I think Alex was the only American to learn from the tragic mistakes of the war in Vietnam. It was his special genius, you see, to anticipate Iraq and Afghanistan. He saw the new world coming. He knew that the old methods of waging war were as antiquated, as certain to fail as the Napoleonic code.

  “While the Pentagon was spending billions on stockpiling smart bombs, nuclear submarines, stealth bombers, supersonic jet fighters, Alex was concentrated on building the one weapon of war he knew would be effective: human beings. Treadstone’s mission from the very first day of its inception was to build the perfect human weapon: fearless, merciless, skilled at infiltration, subterfuge, misdirection, mimicry. A weapon of a thousand faces who could be anyone, go anywhere, kill any target without remorse, and return to take on the next mission.

  “And now you see what a visionary Alex was. What he saw has, indeed, come to pass. What we create in the Treadstone program will become America’s most potent weapon against its enemies, no matter how clever they are, no matter how remote their location. Do you think I’m going to bury something invaluable? I made a deal with the devil so that Treadstone would be resurrected.”

  “And what,” Marks said, “if the devil has other ideas for Treadstone?”

  “Then,” Willard replied, “the devil will have to be dealt with in some manner.” There was a slight pause. “Arkadin or Bourne, it makes no difference to me. Only the outcome of their struggle for survival interests me. And either way, I will have them—one or the other—as the prototype for the graduates Treadstone will produce.”

  Start at the beginning,” Bourne said. “This has all the earmarks of a nightmare.”


  “The long and the short of it,” Ottavio Moreno said with a sigh, “is that you had no right to kill Noah Perlis.”

  The two men were in a safe house in Thamesmead, a small developed area directly across the river from the London City Airport. It was one of those modern crackerjack boxes being thrown up all over the sprawling suburbs that were as flimsy as they looked. They had driven there in Moreno’s gray Opel, as anonymous a car as you were likely to find in London. They’d eaten some cold chicken and pasta out of the fridge, washed it down with a bottle of decent South African wine, and then had retired to the living room where they literally threw themselves onto the sofas.

  “Perlis killed Holly Moreau.”

  “Perlis was business,” Ottavio Moreno pointed out.

  “So, I think, was Holly.”

  Ottavio Moreno nodded. “But then it became personal, didn’t it?”

  Bourne had no good reply to that, since the answer was obvious to both of them.

  “Water under the bridge,” Moreno said, taking Bourne’s silence as acquiescence. “The point that you’ve forgotten is that I hired Perlis to find the laptop.”

  “He had no laptop; he had the ring.”

  Moreno shook his head. “Forget the ring and try to remember the laptop.”

  Bourne felt as if he were sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand. “You mentioned the laptop before, but I have no memory of it.”

  “In that event I imagine you have no memory of how you stole it from Jalal Essai’s home.”

  Bourne shook his head helplessly.

  Moreno dug his thumbs into his eyes for a moment. “I see what you meant when you said start at the beginning.”

  Bourne, saying nothing, watched him carefully. The constant problem with people arising out of his past was this: Who were they really and were they telling him the truth? A man with no memory isn’t difficult to lie to. In fact, Bourne reflected, it was probably fun to lie to an amnesiac and watch his reactions.

  “You were given an assignment to get the laptop computer.”

  “By whom?”

  Moreno shrugged. “Alex Conklin, I imagine. Anyway, we made contact in Marrakech.”

  Morocco again. Bourne sat forward. “Why would I contact you?”

  “I was Alex Conklin’s contact there.” When Bourne gave him a skeptical look, he added, “I’m a half brother. My mother is a Berber, from the High Atlas Mountains.”

  “Your father got around.”

  “Make a joke, okay, it’s all right, I won’t gut you.” Ottavio Moreno laughed. “Christ, this is a fucked-up world.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Okay, look, my friend. My father had his thumb in a shitload of pies, most of them illegal, yes, I freely admit it. So what? So his business ventures took him to many places around the world, some of them strange.”

  “Business wasn’t the only thing he had a healthy appetite for,” Bourne said.

  Ottavio Moreno nodded. “Too true. He had an eye for exotic women.”

  “Are there any other little half Morenos running around?”

  Moreno laughed. “There very well might be, knowing my father. But if there are, I don’t know about them.”

  Bourne decided there was nothing more to be gained by taking the subject of the elder Moreno’s love life any farther. “Okay, you say that you were Conklin’s contact in Marrakech.”

  “I don’t say it,” Ottavio Moreno said with a slight frown, “I was that man.”

  “I suppose you can’t produce any canceled checks from the Treadstone account.”

  “Ha, ha,” Moreno said, but it wasn’t a laugh. He took out a pack of Gauloises Blondes, shook one out, and lit up. He stared at Bourne while he blew smoke at the ceiling. At length, he said, “Am I wrong in thinking we’re on the same page?”

  “I don’t know. Are we?”

  Bourne got up and went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of cold water. He was angry at himself, not Moreno. He knew he was at his most vulnerable at this juncture. He didn’t like being vulnerable. More to the point, in his line of work he couldn’t afford to be.

  Returning to the living room, he sat down on an armchair facing the sofa where Ottavio Moreno still sat smoking slowly, as if in meditation. In Bourne’s absence he’d turned on the TV to the BBC news. The sound was off, but the images of the Vesper Club were all too familiar. Lights were flashing off the tops of emergency vehicles and police cars. Personnel emerged from the club’s front door carrying a stretcher. The body on it was draped in a cloth that covered its face. Then the scene switched to a newsreader in the BBC studios, mouthing whatever had been written for him moments before. Bourne gestured and Moreno turned up the volume, but there was nothing for them in the story, and Moreno muted the sound again.

  “It will be harder than ever to get out of London now,” Bourne said shortly.

  “I know more ways to get out of London than they do.” He gestured at the cop being interviewed on the screen.

  “So do I,” Bourne said. “That isn’t the issue.”

  Moreno leaned forward, stubbed out the butt in an ugly free-form ashtray, and lit another. “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “Too late for apologies,” Bourne said. “What’s so important about the laptop?”

  Moreno shrugged.

  “Perlis had the ring,” Bourne said. “He killed Holly to get it.”

  “The ring is a symbol of the Severus Domna, all members wear it or carry it unobtrusively.”

  “That’s it? If there’s nothing else important about it, why did Perlis murder Holly for it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thought it would somehow lead him to the laptop.” Again Moreno stubbed out his cigarette. “Look, is all this distrust because Gustavo was my half brother?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” Bourne said.

  “Yeah, well, my big brother was a fucking thorn in my side ever since I can remember.”

  “Then it’s a good thing for you he’s dead,” Bourne said drily.

  Moreno eyed Bourne for a moment. “Jesus Christ, you think I’ve taken over his drug business.”

  “I’d be a fool if the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  Moreno nodded morosely. “Fair enough.” He sat back and spread his hands wide. “Okay, then, how can I prove myself?”

  “Up to you.”

  Moreno crossed his arms over his chest and thought a moment. “What do you remember about the four of them: Perlis, Holly, Tracy, and Diego Hererra?”

  “Virtually nothing,” Bourne said.

  “I imagine you asked Diego about them. What did he tell you?”

  “I know about their friendship, their romantic entanglements.”

  Moreno frowned. “What romantic entanglements?”

  When Bourne told him, he laughed. “Mano, your boy Diego dropped one steaming pile of shit on your doorstep. There was no romance among the four of them. There was only friendship—until, that is, Holly started wearing the ring. One of them, maybe Tracy, I don’t know, became interested in the engraving on the inside. The more interested she became in it, the more Perlis’s curiosity was piqued. He took a photo of the engraving and brought it to Oliver Liss, his boss at the time. This led directly to the tragedy of Holly’s death.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I worked for Black River until Alex Conklin recruited me as a Treadstone agent in place. That gave the old boy a good deal of satisfaction—he despised Liss, as corrupt and exploitative an individual as you’re likely to meet in this business. He feasted off other people’s misery, hosed the government mercilessly, and directed his operatives to commit crimes and atrocities the government dared not do itself. Until you helped sink Black River, Liss was about the most successful modern-day agent of chaos, and believe me that’s saying a lot.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how—”

  “Back in the day, Perlis reported to me, before Liss took charge of him dire
ctly and used him to carry out private missions.”

  Bourne nodded. “The ring was one of those private missions.”

  “It became one. Perlis needed help, so he came to me. I was the only one he trusted. He told me that the moment Liss saw the ring he flipped out. That was when he ordered Perlis to find the laptop.”

  “The one you helped me steal from Jalal Essai.”

  “That’s right.”

  Bourne frowned. “But what happened to it?”

  “You were supposed to deliver it to Conklin personally, but you didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You discovered something about the laptop—something, you told me, that it was probable Conklin didn’t want you to know. You took it upon yourself to change the mission on the fly.”

  “What did I discover?”

  Moreno shrugged. “You never told me, and I was too well trained to ask.”

  Bourne was sunk deep in thought. The enigma of the ring was growing with every moment. Considering Liss’s reaction when he saw the ring, it seemed likely that it was in some way connected to the laptop. That was if Moreno was telling him the truth. He felt as if he were in a hall of mirrors, each reflection distorted in a different way so that it was no longer possible to discern reality from carefully constructed fantasy, truth from cleverly worded fiction.

  On the TV screen the newsreader had gone on to other stories, in other lands, but the images of Diego Hererra’s corpse being taken out of the Vesper Club continued to flicker through Bourne’s mind. Had it been necessary to kill him, as Moreno had said, or did Moreno have another, darker motive he was keeping from Bourne? The only way to find out the truth was to keep Moreno close to him, and to continue questioning him as subtly as possible until a chink in his armor appeared—or until he proved himself truthful.

  “What do you know about Essai?” Bourne asked.

  “Besides being a member of the Severus Domna ruling council, not much. He comes from an illustrious family, which dates back all the way to the eleven hundreds, if I’m not mistaken. His ancestors took part in the Moorish invasion of Andalusia. One of them ruled there for a number of years.”