Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Objective

by Eric Van Lustbader

  For a frozen instant he stared into Soraya’s eyes. A secret, silent communication passed between them and then, in a flash, vanished, never to be spoken of or referred to aloud. Arkadin, his heart seething with a rage that had been building for years, slammed the heel of his hand against the side of Oserov’s head. The head jerked hard to the right, against the wall of Arkadin’s encircling arm. The vertebrae cracked, Oserov spasmed like an insane marionette. His fingernails clawed at Arkadin’s forearm, drawing rivulets of blood. He bellowed like a buffalo, and for an instant his strength was so great that he almost broke away.

  Then Arkadin cracked his neck again, harder this time, and whatever burst of energy was left in Oserov drained into the gutter. Oserov gave a terrible, soft cry. He tried to say something that seemed vitally important to him, but all that escaped his mouth was his tongue and a gout of blood.

  Still, Arkadin would not let him go. He continued to slam the side of his head as if the neck had not already sustained multiple fractures.

  “Arkadin,” Soraya said softly, “he’s dead.”

  He stared at her, the light of madness in his eyes. Her hands were on him, trying to pry Oserov away from him, but he could feel nothing. It was as if his nerve endings were locked within the last moments of the struggle, as if his will to destroy Oserov would not terminate, would not allow him to let go. And he thought: If I keep hold of him I’ll be able to kill him again and again.

  Gradually, however, the hurricane of emotion began to ebb. He felt Soraya’s hands on him. Then he heard her voice, repeating, “He’s dead,” and at last he unwound his arm. The corpse collapsed into a grotesque heap.

  He looked down at Oserov’s ruined face and felt neither triumph nor satisfaction. He felt nothing at all. Empty. There was nothing inside him, just the abyss growing darker and deeper.

  Punching a code on his cell phone, he walked to the rear of the car. He unlocked the trunk and took out the laptop in its protective case.

  Looking around, Soraya could see a number of men in their Berber robes. They had been watching from the shadows. The moment Oserov slid to the ground, they began to converge on the car.

  “It’s Severus Domna,” Soraya said. “They’re coming for us.”

  At that moment a car screeched to a halt beside them. Arkadin opened the rear door.

  “Get in,” he commanded, and she obeyed.

  Arkadin slid in beside her and the car took off. There were three men inside, all heavily armed. Arkadin spoke to them in rapid, idiomatic Russian, and Soraya remembered their exchange in Puerto Peñasco.

  “What do you want from me now?” she had asked Arkadin.

  And he had answered: “The same thing you want from me. Destruction.”

  Then she heard the words scorched earth and knew that he had come to Tineghir prepared to wage war.

  30

  BOURNE ARRIVED IN Tineghir armed with the knowledge Tanirt had given him. Inevitably, he was drawn to the crowd around the bullet-riddled car. The dead man was unrecognizable. Nevertheless, because of the severely burn-scarred face he knew it must be Oserov.

  There were no police around the body or, indeed, anywhere in the area. But there were plenty of Severus Domna soldiers, which in this area probably amounted to the same thing. No one had made a motion to do anything about the corpse. Flies buzzed in ever-increasing swarms, and the stench of death was beginning to spread like an airborne disease.

  Bourne passed the scene by, got out of his car several blocks away, and proceeded on foot. What Tanirt had said had changed his plan, and not, he felt, for the better. But he had no choice, she had made that quite clear.

  And so he looked up. The sky was the pale and abandoned color it often is at five in the morning, though it was now deep in the afternoon. Instead of heading toward the address he had been given, the Severus Domna house, he searched for a café or restaurant and, finding one, entered it. He sat down at a table facing the front and ordered a plate of couscous and whiskey berbere, which was mint tea. He waited with one leg crossed over the other, emptying his mind, thinking of Soraya and nothing else. The small glass had been placed before him, the fragrant tea poured from a height without a drop spilled when he saw the Russian glance in as he walked slowly by. It wasn’t Arkadin, but it was a Russian, Bourne could tell by his features and the way he used his eyes, which was neither Berber nor Muslim. This told him a number of things, none of them helpful.

  The couscous came, but he was without an appetite. Soraya entered the café first, but Arkadin wasn’t far behind. He expected Soraya to have a haunted look, but she didn’t, and Bourne wondered whether he had underestimated her. If so, it would be the day’s first positive sign.

  Soraya picked her way through the café and sat down without saying a word. For some moments Arkadin remained in the doorway, watching everything. Bourne began to eat his couscous with his right hand, which was the custom. His left hand lay in his lap.

  “How are you?” he said.

  “Fucked.”

  He gave her a thin smile. “How many men does he have with him?”

  She appeared surprised. “Three.”

  Arkadin came toward them. On the way, he picked up a chair from an adjacent table and sat down on it.

  “How’s the couscous?”

  “Not bad,” Bourne said. He pushed the plate across the table.

  Arkadin used the ends of the fingers of his right hand to taste the couscous. He nodded, licked off the oil, and wiped his fingers on the tabletop.

  Arkadin hunched forward. “We’ve been chasing each other a long time.”

  Bourne took the plate back. “And now here we are.”

  “Cozy as three bugs in a Moroccan carpet.”

  Bourne took up his fork. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to shoot with the gun you have aimed at me under the table.”

  A flicker passed across Arkadin’s face. “It’s not for you to decide, is it?”

  “That’s a matter of opinion. I have a Beretta 8000 loaded with .357 hollow-points aimed at your balls.”

  A black expression was erased by Arkadin’s harsh laugh. It sounded to Bourne as if he had never really learned how to laugh. “Bugs in a carpet indeed,” Arkadin said.

  “Besides,” Bourne said, “with me dead, you’ll never get out of that house alive.”

  “I think otherwise.”

  Bourne buried the tines of the fork in a mound of couscous. “Listen to me, Leonid, there are other forces at work here, forces neither you nor I can handle.”

  “I can handle anything. And I brought allies.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bourne said, quoting an Arab proverb.

  Arkadin’s eyes narrowed. “What are you suggesting?”

  “We are the only two graduates of Treadstone. We were trained for situations like this. But the two of us are not exactly alike. Mirror images, perhaps.”

  “You’ve got ten seconds. Get to the fucking point.”

  “Together we can beat Severus Domna.”

  Arkadin snorted. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Think about it. Severus Domna brought us here, it has prepared the house for us, and it believes that when we come together one of us will wind up killing the other.”

  “And?”

  “And then everything goes according to its plan.” Bourne waited a moment. “Our only chance is to do the unexpected.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  Bourne nodded.

  “Until he’s not.”

  Arkadin placed the Magpul he had been holding onto the table, and Bourne set down the Beretta that Tanirt had given him.

  “We’re a team,” Bourne said. “The three of us.”

  Arkadin glanced briefly at Soraya. “Spit it out then.”

  “First and foremost,” Bourne said, “is a man named Idir Syphax.”

  The house crouched in the middle of the block, its flanks rubbing up against those of its neighbors. Night had fallen, s
wift and complete, like a hood thrown over a head. All around the valley the mountains were pitch black. A bitter wind, knifing through the town, hurried snow crystals or grains of sand across streets and down alleys. The light from the stars was hallucinatory.

  Idir Syphax was crouched on a rooftop across the street from the rear of the house. Flanking him were two Severus Domna sharpshooters, their Sako TRG-22 rifles aimed and ready. Idir watched the house as if waiting for his daughter to come home, as if feeling the danger of unknown places spreading its wings, as if the house itself were his child. And, in a way, it was. He had designed the house with advice from Tanirt. “I want to build a fortress,” he had told her. And she had said: “You cannot do better than to follow the plan of the Great Temple of Baal. It was the greatest fortress known to man.” After scrutinizing what she had drawn for him, he had agreed, and he himself had helped to build it. Every board, every nail, every length of rebar, every form of concrete bore the tattoo of his sweat. The house was invented not for people, but for a thing, an idea, an ideal, even; anyway, something intangible. In that sense it was a sacred place, as sacred as any mosque. It was the beginning of all things, and the end. Alpha and omega, a cosmos unto itself.

  Idir understood this but others in Severus Domna did not. For Benjamin El-Arian, the house was a Venus flytrap. For Marlon Etana, it was a means to an end. In any event, for them both, the house was a dead thing, a pack animal at best. It was not holy, it was not a gateway to the divine. They did not understand that Tanirt had chosen the spot, using the ancient incantation she possessed and he coveted. He had once asked her what language she was chanting. It was Ugaritic. She said it was spoken by the alchemists of King Solomon’s court, in what is now Syria. That was why she had placed the statue in the very center of the house, the space from which its holiness emanated. He’d had to have it smuggled in because any statues of this sort were strictly forbidden by sharia. And of course, neither Benjamin El-Arian nor Marlon Etana knew of its existence. They’d have had him burned alive as a heretic. But if Tanirt had taught him anything, it was that there were ancient forces—perhaps mysteries was a better term—that had preceded religion, any religion, even Judaism, which were all the inventions of mankind in attempts to come to terms with the terror of death. The origins of the mysteries, Tanirt had told him, were divine, which according to her had nothing to do with man’s conception of God. “Did Baal exist?” she had asked rhetorically. “I doubt it. But something did.”

  Save for the wind, the night was still. He knew they were coming, but he didn’t know from where. All attempts to follow them had ended in failure—a failure, he told himself, that was not unexpected. On the other hand, there had been attraction. Arkadin’s three men had been neutralized at the sacrifice of four of his own. These Russians were fierce warriors. Not that it mattered; Arkadin would not gain entrance no matter what he tried. All houses had vulnerabilities that could serve as points of entrance—sewers, for instance, or drains, or the place where the electrical lines came in. Because this house was not designed for people there were no sewers. Because there was no heating or cooling, no refrigerators or ovens to drain electricity, all the electrical systems ran off a giant generator in a shielded room within the house. There was, literally, no way into the house that wouldn’t set off the various alarms, which would in turn trip other security measures.

  His son, Badis, had wanted to come, but of course Idir wouldn’t hear of it. Badis still asked about Tanirt even though at eleven he was old enough to know better. Badis remembered only when Tanirt loved his father, or at least said she loved him. Now she engendered in Idir a bone-deep terror that invaded his nights, his very sleep, shattering it with unspeakable nightmares.

  It had all gone wrong when he had asked her to marry him and she had denied him.

  “Is it because you don’t believe I love you?” he had said.

  “I know you love me.”

  “It’s because of my son. You think that because I love Badis more than anything I can’t make you happy.”

  “It isn’t your son.”

  “Then what?”

  “If you have to ask,” she had said, “then you will never understand.”

  That’s when he had made his fatal mistake. He had confused her with other women. He had tried to coerce her, but the more he threatened her, the larger her stature seemed to grow, until she filled his entire living room, asphyxiating him with her presence. And, gasping, he had fled his own home.

  The sounds of the bolt-action Sakos brought his mind back into focus. He peered through the darkness. Was that a shadow flitting across the rooftop of the house? His sharpshooters thought so. In the hallucinatory moonlight there was a blur, then nothing. Utter stillness. And then, out of the corner of his eye, the shadow moved again. His heart leapt. His order for them to fire was already on his lips when from behind him he heard his name being called.

  He whirled to see Leonid Arkadin standing spread-legged, an odd-looking boxy weapon in his hand.

  “Surprise,” Arkadin said and promptly shot off two sharp bursts from the Magpul that took off the heads of the sharpshooters. They folded like marionettes.

  “You do not frighten me,” Idir said. His face and robes were soaked with the blood and brains of his men. “I have no fear of death.”

  “For yourself, perhaps.”

  Arkadin motioned with his head and the woman, Soraya Moore, appeared out of the shadows. Idir gasped. She herded Badis in front of her.

  “Papa!” Badis made a lunge toward his father, but Soraya caught him by the material at the back of his neck and jerked him back to her. “Papa! Papa!”

  A look of terrible despair crossed Idir’s dark face.

  “Idir,” Arkadin commanded, “throw your men over the parapet.”

  Idir looked at him for a moment, dumbstruck. “Why?”

  “So your men will know what happened up here, so they will fear the consequences of their actions.”

  Idir shook his head.

  Arkadin strode over to Badis and stuck the blunt barrel of the Magpul into his mouth. “I pull the trigger and even his own mother won’t recognize him.”

  Idir blanched, then glowered impotently. He bent and picked up one of the sharpshooters, but there was so much blood the corpse slipped out of his hands.

  Badis stared, wide-eyed and shivering.

  Gathering the corpse to him, Idir rolled it onto the parapet. When he dropped it over the edge, they heard the sound it made smacking against the street. Badis shuddered. Quickly now Idir dumped the second corpse down onto the street. Again that thick, almost viscous sound made Badis jump.

  Arkadin gestured. Soraya dragged the struggling boy to the edge of the roof and pushed his head over the side.

  Idir made a move toward his son, but Arkadin waggled the Magpul, shaking his head.

  “So you see death has many aspects,” Arkadin said, “and eventually fear comes to us all.”

  And so at last the knives came fully out of their sheaths. Bourne came down off the roof when he heard the two shots. And now, as he saw Arkadin push Idir Syphax along in front of him, he came to meet them. Bourne and Arkadin stared at each other as if they were opposing agents about to exchange prisoners at the edge of no-man’s-land.

  “Soraya?” Bourne said.

  “On the rooftop with the boy,” Arkadin said.

  “You didn’t hurt him?”

  Arkadin glanced at Idir, then shot Bourne a disgusted look. “If I’d had to, I would have.”

  “That wasn’t our deal.”

  “Our deal,” Arkadin said tersely, “was to get this job done.”

  Idir fidgeted in the tense silence, his eyes darting from one man to the other. “You two need to get your priorities straight.”

  Arkadin struck him across the face. “Shut the fuck up.”

  At length, Bourne handed Arkadin the laptop in its protective case. Then he took hold of Idir and said, “You’ll lead us inside. You’ll be the first
through every barrier, electronic or otherwise.” He produced his cell phone. “I’m in constant touch with Soraya. Anything goes wrong…” He waggled the cell.

  “I understand.” Idir’s voice was dull, but his eyes burned with hatred and rage.

  He led them around to the front door, which he unlocked with a pair of keys. The moment they entered, he punched a code into a keypad set into the wall to the left of the door.

  Silence.

  A dog barked, unnaturally loud in the night, and in that highly charged atmosphere moonlight seemed to strike the house with the sound of sleet.

  Idir coughed and turned on the lights. “Motion detectors come first, then the infrareds.” He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small remote control. “I can turn them both off from here.”

  “Without the generator everything goes down,” Bourne said. “Take us to it.”

  But when Idir started in one direction, Bourne said, “Not that way.”

  A look of terror crossed Idir’s face. “You’ve been talking to Tanirt.” Breathing her name, he shuddered.

  “If you know the way,” Arkadin said irritably, “what the fuck do we need him for?”

  “He knows how to shut down the generator without it blowing the building to bits.”

  That sobering news shut Arkadin up for the moment. Idir reversed directions, taking them on a route that skirted the outer rooms. They came to the first motion detector, its red eye blank and dark.

  They passed it, Idir going first, as usual. They reached a door and Idir unlocked it. Another corridor unfolded like a fan, turning first this way, then that. Bourne was put in mind of the chambers of the great pyramids in Giza. Another door loomed before them. This, too, Idir unlocked. Another corridor, shorter this time and perfectly straight. They passed no doors. The walls were unadorned, stuccoed a neutral color that looked like flesh. The corridor ended at a third door, this one made of steel. They went through this. Ahead could be dimly seen a spiral staircase descending into darkness.