Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Objective

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “I’m busy.”

  “Not for this.”

  There was something in Danziger’s voice that stopped Halliday from blowing him off. Halliday called his assistant and told him to clear his calendar for the next hour. Then he grabbed his overcoat and took the stairs down. As he walked across the White House grounds, the guards and Secret Service agents nodded to him deferentially. He smiled at the ones he knew by name.

  Climbing into the back of Danziger’s car, he said, “This better be good.”

  “Trust me,” Danziger said. “It’s better than good.”

  Twenty minutes later the car pulled up at 1910 Massachusetts Avenue, SE. Danziger, who was sitting nearer the curb, stepped out and held the door open for his boss.

  “Building Twenty-seven?” Halliday said as he and Danziger trotted up the steps of one of the modern brick buildings in the General Health Campus complex. “Who died?” Building 27 housed the office of the district’s chief medical examiner.

  Danziger laughed. “A friend of yours.”

  They passed through two levels of security and took the oversize stainless-steel-clad elevator down to the basement. The elevator reeked of bleach and a sickly-sweet smell Halliday was loath to identify.

  They were expected. An assistant coroner, a slight, bespectacled man with a nose like a beak and a dour demeanor, nodded to them, guiding them through the cold room. He stopped three-quarters of the way down the bank of stainless-steel doors, opened one, and slid out a corpse on a tray. A sheet was pulled up over the face. At Danziger’s signal, the assistant coroner peeled back the sheet.

  “Mary, Mother of God,” Halliday said, “is that Frederick Willard?”

  “None other.” Danziger looked as if he was about to break into a jig of joy.

  Halliday took a step closer. He pulled out a small mirror and stuck it under Willard’s nostrils. “No breath.” He turned to the assistant coroner. “What the hell happened to him?”

  “Difficult to say at this time,” the man said. “So many things, so little time…”

  “The gist,” Halliday said shortly.

  “Torture.”

  Halliday had to laugh. He looked at Danziger. “Damn ironic, isn’t it?”

  “That’s how it struck me.”

  At that moment the secretary’s PDA buzzed. He drew it out and looked at it. He was needed at the White House.

  Rather than the Oval Office, the president was in the War Room three levels down below the West Wing. Vast computer screens ringed the room, in the center of which was an oval table outfitted with all the accoutrements of twelve virtual offices.

  When Bud Halliday arrived, the president was chairing a meeting with Hendricks, the national security adviser, and Brey and Findlay, the respective heads of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. From their grim expressions it was clear there was an emergency brewing.

  “Glad you could make it, Bud,” the president said, waving Halliday to a chair on the opposite side of the table.

  “What’s happened?” Halliday said.

  “Something’s come up,” Findlay said, “and we’d value your advice on how to proceed.”

  “A terrorist attack on one of our overseas bases?”

  “Rather closer to home.” Hendricks appeared to be taking point. Reversing a dossier in front of him, he slid it across the table to Halliday. He spread his hands. “Please.”

  Halliday opened the dossier and was confronted with a photo of Jalal Essai. He stayed very calm, was pleased to see that his hand was steady as it turned the onionskin pages of the file.

  When he was certain he had himself perfectly under control, he raised his gaze. “Why are we looking at this man?”

  “We have information linking him to the torture and murder of Frederick Willard.”

  “Evidence?”

  “As yet, no,” Findlay said.

  “But we have every indication that it will be forthcoming,” Hendricks said.

  “Do you want me to buy the bridge, too?” Halliday said caustically.

  “What’s disturbing, Mr. Secretary, is that this man Essai has flown beneath our radar, even though he represents a clear and present national security threat.” This from Findlay again.

  Halliday tapped the dossier. “There is intel here on Essai going back years. How could we not—?”

  “That’s the question we need answered, Bud,” the president said.

  Halliday cocked his head. “Well, I mean to say, where did this intel come from?”

  “Not from your farm, clearly,” Brey said.

  “Nor from yours,” Halliday shot back. He looked from one face to another. “You’re not thinking of pinning this oversight on my people.”

  “It wasn’t an oversight,” Findlay said. “At least, not an oversight on our part.”

  There was a strained silence in the room, which was finally broken by the president. “Bud, we thought you’d be more forthcoming.”

  “Shit, I didn’t,” Brey said.

  “When confronted by the evidence,” Hendricks added.

  “Evidence of what?” Halliday said. “There’s nothing I have to explain or apologize for.”

  “You all owe me a hundred dollars apiece,” Brey said with a smirk.

  Halliday glared at him with naked rage.

  Hendricks picked up the phone, spoke a few words into the receiver, then set it down.

  “For God’s sake, Bud,” the president said, “you’re making this damnably difficult.”

  “What is this?” Halliday stood up. “An inquisition?”

  “Well, you haven’t helped yourself.” There was deep sadness in the president’s voice. “Last chance.”

  Halliday, standing as rigid as a war veteran’s statue, ground his teeth in fury.

  Then the door to the War Room opened and in walked the twins, Michelle and Mandy. Their eyes were laughing. At him.

  Christ, he thought. Jesus Christ.

  “Be seated, Mr. Secretary.”

  The president’s voice had turned so full of suppressed anger and a sense of personal betrayal, it sent a shiver down Halliday’s spine. With a sinking heart, he did as he was ordered.

  Ahead of him stretched the long, humiliating road to disgrace and ruin. Listening to the tapes the twins had made of his conversations with Jalal Essai in the hideaway apartment, he wondered whether he had the courage to retreat to a quiet, private place and blow his brains out.

  Oserov arrived in Morocco with his face swathed in bandages. In Marrakech he found a shop where they made a wax impression and, from this template, a latex mask, white as starlight, that fit over his ruined face. Its terrible, cold stoicism belied the raging torment beneath, but he was grateful for the anonymity it afforded him. He bought a heavy black-and-brown-striped hooded thobe to conceal his head and the top part of his face. With it on, the hood cast the rest of his face in deep shadow.

  After a brief meal, which he wolfed down without tasting, he wasted no time renting a car and planning out his route. Then he set out for Tineghir.

  Idir Syphax went slowly and methodically through the house in central Tineghir. He moved from shadow to shadow like a wraith or a dream, soundlessly, light as air. Idir had been born and raised in the High Atlas region of Ouarzazate. He was used to winter’s cold and snow. He was known as the man who brings ice to the desert, which meant that he was special. Like Tanirt, the local Berbers were afraid of him.

  Idir was slim and well muscled, with a wide mouth of large white teeth and a nose like the prow of a ship. His head and neck were swathed in the traditional blue Berber scarf. He wore robes of a blue-and-white check.

  On the outside the house was identical to its neighbors. Inside, however, it was built like a fortress, the rooms a set of nesting boxes protecting, at its heart, the keep. The walls were constructed of solid concrete reinforced with steel rods; the heartwood doors had two-inch-thick metal cores, rendering them impervious to even semi-automatic fire. There were two separate
electronic security systems to get through: motion detectors in the outer rooms and infrared heat detectors in the inner ones.

  Idir’s family had deep ties with the Etanas reaching back centuries. The Etanas had founded the Monition Club as a way for the Severus Domna to come together in various cities across the globe without attracting attention or using the group’s real name. To the outside world, the Monition Club was a philanthropic organization involved in the advancement of anthropology and ancient philosophies. It was a hermetically sealed world in which the sub-rosa members of the group could move, meet, compare work, and plan initiatives.

  Idir had had his own ideas about power and succession, but before he could act Benjamin El-Arian had moved into the power vacuum created when Jalal Essai’s brother had decamped. Now that Jalal Essai had shown his true colors, the Essai family was dead and buried as far as Severus Domna was concerned. His defection had occurred on El-Arian’s watch. Idir had already had several conversations with Marlon Etana, the organization’s top-ranking member in Europe. Together, he had told Etana, they were more than a match for Benjamin El-Arian. Etana wasn’t so sure, but then years in the West had made Etana cautious, timid, even, in Idir’s opinion. Not desirable traits in a leader. He had plans for Severus Domna—big plans—beyond the scope of anything El-Arian or Etana could conceive of. He had tried negotiations, reason, and, finally, appealing to the vanity and ego of the leaders. All to no avail. That left only the path of violence.

  Satisfied with his final inspection, he locked up the house and walked away. But not too far. The show was about to begin, and he had reserved for himself a front-row seat.

  The moment Arkadin had acted on his suspicions, the moment he had sliced through the tendons at the back of Moira’s knee, the idyll of his sojourn in Sonora was shattered. He saw it for the illusion it was. Not for him the slow pace and hot sun, the slinky dancers and the sad rancheras. His life led elsewhere. From that time forward he couldn’t wait to leave Mexico. He had been bitterly betrayed. Sonora had held up to him the mirror of his life, the life to which he was bound no matter how much he might long to leave it.

  In Morocco he was back in his element, a shark moving through deep and dangerous waters. But for thousands of years sharks have been bred to survive dark and dangerous waters. So, too, Leonid Arkadin.

  Armed and never more dangerous, he drove out of Marrakech with Soraya, a woman he found perplexingly complicated. Until he had been gulled by Tracy, he had been used to dominating women in every sense imaginable. Conveniently forgotten was his own mother, who had controlled him completely by keeping him locked in a closet where rats had eaten three of his toes before he fought back, first by ragefully biting off their heads, then by killing his mother. He despised her so thoroughly that he had expunged her from both his consciousness and his memory. What glimpses remained were scenes from a cheap and grainy film he had seen when young.

  And yet it had been his mother who had led him to view women through a particular lens. He flirted relentlessly. He felt only contempt for those who succumbed to his masculine charms. These he chewed up and threw away the moment he became bored with them. On those rare occasions when he encountered resistance—Tracy, Devra, the DJ he had met in Sevastopol, and now Soraya—he reacted differently, less surely, and doubt in himself had crept in like a fog, resulting in failure. He had failed to see through Tracy’s facade; he had failed to protect Devra. And with Soraya? He didn’t yet know, but he could not stop thinking about what she had said about his life being a struggle to be a man, not an animal. There was a time when he would have laughed at anyone who made such an accusation, but something had changed in him. For better or for worse he had become self-aware, and this self-awareness lent him the certainty that what she said wasn’t an accusation at all, but a statement of fact.

  All this went through his mind as he and Soraya drove to Tineghir. It had been chilly enough in Marrakech, but here in the snowbound High Atlas an icy wind knifed through the canyons, flooding the wadi with frozen air.

  “We’re coming to the end of the road,” he said.

  Soraya did not reply; she hadn’t said a word for the entire car ride.

  “Have you nothing more to say?”

  His tone was deliberately mocking, but she just smiled at him and looked out the window. This abrupt change in her demeanor disturbed him, but he was unsure what to do about it. He couldn’t seduce her and he couldn’t browbeat her. What was left?

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tall figure—too tall to be Berber—in a black-and-brown-striped thobe. The hood shadowed his face, but as the car moved past, he could see that there was no disfigurement. The figure moved with Oserov’s gait, but how could it be him?

  “Soraya, do you see that man in the black-and-brown thobe?”

  She nodded.

  He stopped the car. “Get out here and approach him. Do whatever you have to do. I want you to find out if he’s Russian, and if he is, whether his name is Oserov. Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll be sitting right here, watching. If it’s Oserov, give me a signal,” he said, “so I can kill him.”

  She gave him an enigmatic smile. “I was wondering when I’d see it again.”

  “What?”

  “Your rage.”

  “You don’t know what Oserov has done; you don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She opened the car door and climbed out. “I’ve seen what you’re capable of.”

  Soraya carefully picked her way through the teeming street toward the tall man in the black-and-brown thobe. The key for her, she knew, was to remain calm and to keep her wits about her. Arkadin had outmaneuvered her once; she wasn’t going to get caught out like that again. There were a number of times during the drive to Tineghir when she had calculated she had a chance of escaping, but for two reasons she never made the move. The first was that she had no real confidence that she could elude Arkadin. The second, and more important, was that she had vowed to herself that she would not abandon Jason. He had saved her life more than once. No matter what malicious stories recirculated within CI about him, she knew she could count on him for anything and everything. Now that his life was in imminent danger, she would not run away and hide. More to the point, she had to do something to change Arkadin’s immediate trajectory.

  Approaching the man, she began to speak to him in Egyptian-inflected Arabic. At first, he ignored her. It was possible that in the street hubbub he did not hear her, or thought she was speaking to someone else. She moved around so that she stood squarely in front of him. She spoke to him again. He kept his head slightly lowered and did not respond.

  “I need some help. Do you understand English?” she said.

  When he shook his head, she shrugged, turned, and made to walk away. She whirled around and said in Russian, “I recognize you, Vylacheslav Germanovich.” His head came up. “Aren’t you a colleague of Leonid’s?”

  “You’re a friend of Arkadin’s?” His voice was thick and clotted, as if there were something in his throat he hadn’t completely swallowed. “Where is he?”

  “Right over there.” She pointed to the car. “Sitting behind the wheel.”

  Everything happened at once. Soraya backpedaled, Oserov swung around in a semi-crouch. Beneath the thobe he had concealed an AK-47 assault rifle. In one fluid motion he raised the AK-47, aimed it, and fired at the car. People, screaming, scattered in every direction. Oserov kept firing as he advanced across the street, drawing closer and closer to the car, shuddering on its shocks as it was sprayed with bullets.

  When he came abreast of the car, he stopped. He tried to open the driver’s door, but it was so distorted it would not budge. Cursing, he reversed the AK-47, using the butt to knock out what was left of the window. He peered inside. It was empty.

  Whirling, he leveled the AK-47 at Soraya. “Where is he? Where is Arkadin?”

  Soraya saw Arkadin
slither out from beneath the car, rise up, and wrap his arm around Oserov’s neck. He pulled backward with such force that Oserov’s feet left the ground. Oserov tried to slam the rifle’s butt into Arkadin’s rib cage, but Arkadin eluded each attack. Oserov whipped his head back and forth in an attempt to keep Arkadin from gaining a stranglehold. As he did so, his mask began to slip; becoming aware of this, Arkadin ripped it off, revealing the swollen, hideously disfigured face beneath.

  Soraya crossed the now empty street, approaching the two antagonists with slow, deliberate steps. Oserov dropped the AK-47 and drew out a wicked-looking dirk. Soraya could see that it was out of Arkadin’s line of sight, he was unaware that Oserov was about to plunge it into his side.

  Arkadin, absorbed in his life-or-death struggle with his hated enemy, breathed in the stench of an open sewer and realized that it was coming from Oserov, as if the people he had murdered had clawed their way out of the ground, twining about him like deeply rooted vines. Oserov seemed to be rotting from the inside out. Arkadin pulled him tighter as Oserov continued to struggle, continued to try to find a way out of the vise he was in. But once engaged, neither of them would let go or relinquish a hold on the other, as if their epic struggle was of one person becoming two. Two people fighting for dominion, battling in the abyss of unthinking and unreasoning rage. The conflict was not only against Oserov’s crimes, but against Arkadin’s own inhuman past, a past he daily tried to shove out of his mind, to bury as deeply as he could. And yet, zombified, it kept rising from its grave.

  “That’s your life,” Soraya had said, “the struggle to be a man, not an animal.”

  Figures in his past had conspired to break him down, to reduce him to an animal. His one chance at being something more had arrived in the guise of Tracy Atherton. Tracy had taught him many things, but in the end she had betrayed him. He had wished her dead and now she was dead. Oserov, his enemy, embodied everyone and everything that had ever conspired against him, and now he had him, now he was slowly, inexorably squeezing the life out of him.

  His attention was suddenly drawn to a movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye. Soraya was sprinting the last fifteen feet that separated them. She struck Oserov a blow on his left wrist that paralyzed his hand. Arkadin saw the dirk as it fell at Oserov’s feet.