The Bourne Sanction

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Exiting the wheelhouse, she went belowdecks, looking for the engine room. Smelling food, she poked her head into the galley. A large Algerian was sitting at the stainless-steel mess table, reading a two-week-old Arabic newspaper.

  He looked up, gesturing at the paper. “It gets old the fifteenth time through, but when you’re at sea what can you do?”

  His burly arms were bare to the shoulders. They bore tattoos of a star, a crescent, and a cross, but not the Black Legion’s insignia. Following the directions he gave her, she found the infirmary three decks below. Inside, a slim Muslim was sitting at a small desk built into one of the bulkheads. In the opposite bulkhead were two berths, one of them filled with the patient who had fallen ill. The doctor murmured a traditional Muslim greeting as he turned away from his laptop computer to face her. He frowned deeply when he saw the crossbow in her hands.

  “Is that really necessary,” he said, “or even wise?”

  “I’d like to speak with your patient,” Moira said, ignoring him.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible.” The doctor smiled that smile only doctors can. “He’s been sedated.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  The doctor gestured at the laptop. “I’m still trying to find out. He’s been subject to seizures, but so far I can’t find the pathology.”

  “We’re near Long Beach, you’ll get help then,” she said. “I just need to see the insides of his elbows.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows rose. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I need to see whether he’s got a tattoo.”

  “They all have tattoos, these sailors.” The doctor shrugged. “But go ahead. You won’t disturb him.”

  Moira approached the lower berth, bending over to pull the thin blanket back from the patient’s arm. As she did so, the doctor stepped forward and struck her a blow on the back of her head. She fell forward and cracked her jaw on the metal frame of the bunk. The pain pulled her rudely back from a precipice of blackness, and, groaning, she managed to roll over. The copper-sweet taste of blood was in her mouth and she fought against wave after wave of dizziness. Dimly she saw the doctor bent over his laptop, his fingers racing over the keys, and she felt a ball of ice form in her belly.

  He’s going to kill us all. With this thought reverberating in her head, she grabbed the crossbow off the floor where she’d dropped it. She barely had time to aim, but she was close enough not to have to be accurate. She breathed a prayer as she let fly.

  The doctor arched up as the bolt pierced his spine. He staggered backward, toward where Moira sat, braced against the berth frame. His arms extended, his fingers clawing for the keyboard, and Moira rose, swung the crossbow into the back of his head. His blood spattered like rain over her face and hands, the desk, and the laptop’s keyboard.

  Bourne found her on the floor of the infirmary, cradling the computer in her lap. When he came in, she looked up at him and said, “I don’t know what he did. I’m afraid to shut it off.”

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. “The ship’s doctor was Sever’s man.”

  “So I see,” he said as he stepped over the corpse. “I didn’t believe him when he told me he had only one man on board. It would be like him to have a backup.”

  He knelt down, examined the back of her head. “It’s superficial. Did you black out?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  He took a large gauze pad from the supply cabinet, doused it with alcohol. “Ready?” He placed it against the back of her head, where her hair was plastered down with blood. She moaned a little through gritted teeth.

  “Can you hold it in place for a minute?”

  She nodded, and gently Bourne lifted the laptop into his arms. There was a software program running, that much was clear. Two radio buttons on the screen were blinking, one yellow, the other red. On the other side of the screen was a green radio button, which wasn’t blinking.

  Bourne breathed a sigh of relief. “He brought up the program, but you got to him before he could activate it.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “Where’s Arkadin?”

  “I don’t know. When the captain told me you’d gone below I took off after you.”

  “Jason, you don’t think…”

  Putting the computer aside, he helped her to her feet. “Let’s get you back up to the captain so you can give him the good news.”

  There was a fearful look on his face. “And you?”

  He handed her the laptop. “Go to the wheelhouse and stay there. And Moira, this time I really mean it.”

  With the crossbow in one hand, he stepped into the passageway, looked right and left. “All right. Go. Go!”

  Arkadin had returned to Nizhny Tagil. Down in the engine room, surrounded by steel and iron, he realized that no matter what had happened to him, no matter where he’d gone, he’d never been able to escape the prison of his youth. Part of him was still in the brothel he and Stas Kuzin had owned, part of him still stalked the nighttime streets, abducting young girls, their pale, fearful faces turned toward him as deer turn toward headlights. But what they’d needed from him he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—give them. Instead, he’d sent them to their deaths in the quicklime pit Kuzin’s regime had dug amid the firs and the weeping hemlocks. Many snows had passed since he’d dragged Yelena from the rats and the quicklime, but the pit remained in his memory, vivid as a blaze of fire. If only he could have his memory wiped clean.

  He started at the sound of Stas Kuzin screaming at him. What about all your victims?

  But it was Bourne, descending the steel companionway to the engine room. “It’s over, Arkadin. The disaster has been averted.”

  Arkadin nodded, but inside he knew better: The disaster had already occurred, and it was too late to stop its consequences. As he walked toward Bourne he tried to fix him in his mind, but he seemed to morph, like an image seen through a prism.

  When he was within arm’s length of him, he said, “Is it true what Sever told Icoupov, that you have no memory beyond a certain point in time?”

  Bourne nodded. “It’s true. I can’t remember most of my life.”

  Arkadin felt a terrible pain, as if the very fabric of his soul was being torn apart. With an inchoate cry, he flicked open his switchblade, lunged forward, aiming for Bourne’s belly.

  Turning sideways, Bourne grabbed his wrist, began to turn it in an attempt to get Arkadin to drop the weapon. Arkadin struck out with his other hand, but Bourne blocked it with his forearm. In doing so, the crossbow clattered to the deck. Arkadin kicked it into the shadows.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Bourne said. “There’s no reason for us to be enemies.”

  “There’s every reason.” Arkadin broke away, tried another attack, which Bourne countered. “Don’t you see it? We’re the same, you and me. The two of us can’t exist in the same world. One of us will kill the other.”

  Bourne stared into Arkadin’s eyes, and even though his words were those of a madmen Bourne saw no madness in them. Only a despair beyond description, and an unyielding will for revenge. In a way, Arkadin was right. Revenge was all he had now, all he lived for. With Tarkanian and Devra gone, the only meaning life had for him lay in avenging their deaths. There was nothing Bourne could say to sway him; that was a rational response to an irrational impulse. It was true, the two of them couldn’t exist in the same world.

  At that moment Arkadin feinted right with his knife, drove left with his fist, rocking Bourne back onto his heels. At once he stabbed out with the switchblade, burying it in the meat of Bourne’s left thigh. Bourne grunted, fought the buckling of his knee, and Arkadin jammed his boot into Bourne’s wounded thigh. Blood spurted, and Bourne fell. Arkadin jumped on him, using his fist to pummel Bourne’s face when Bourne blocked his knife stabs.

  Bourne knew he couldn’t take much more of this. Arkadin’s desire for revenge had filled him with an inhuman strength. Bourne, fighting for his very life, managed to counterpunc
h long enough to roll out from under Arkadin. Then he was up and running in an ungainly limp to the companionway.

  Arkadin reached up for him as he was half a dozen rungs off the engine room deck. Bourne kicked out with his bad leg, surprising Arkadin, catching him under the chin. As he fell back, Bourne scrambled up the rungs as fast as he could. His left leg was on fire, and he was trailing blood as the wounded muscle was forced to work overtime.

  Gaining the next deck, he continued up the companionway, up and up, until he came to the first level belowdecks, which according to Moira was where the galley was. Finding it, he raced in, grabbed two knives and a glass saltshaker. Stuffing the shaker into his pocket, he wielded the knives as Arkadin loomed in the doorway.

  They fought with their knives, but Bourne’s unwieldy carving knives were no match for Arkadin’s slender-bladed switchblade, and Bourne was cut again, this time in the chest. He kicked Arkadin in the face, dropped his knives in order to wrest the switchblade out of Arkadin’s hand, to no avail. Arkadin stabbed at him again and Bourne nearly suffered a punctured liver. He backed away, then ran out the doorway, up the last companionway to the open deck.

  The tanker was at a near stop. The captain was busy coordinating the hookups with the tugboats that would bring it the final distance to the LNG terminal. Bourne couldn’t see Moira, which was a blessing. He didn’t want her anywhere near Arkadin.

  Bourne, heading for the sanctuary of the container city, was bowled over as Arkadin leapt on him. Locked together, they rolled over and over until they fetched up against the port railing. The sea was far below them, churning against the tanker’s hull. One of the tugs signaled with its horn as it came alongside, and Arkadin stiffened. To him it was the siren sounding an escape from one of Nizhny Tagil’s prisons. He saw the black skies, tasted the sulfur smoke in his lungs. He saw Stas Kuzin’s monstrous face, felt Marlene’s head between his ankles beneath the water, heard the terrible reports when Semion Icoupov shot Devra.

  He screamed like a tiger, pulling Bourne to his feet, pummeling him over and over until he was bent back over the railing. In that moment, Bourne knew that he was going to die as he had been born, falling over the side of a ship, lost in the depth of the sea, and only by the grace of God being brought in to a fishing boat with their catch. His face was bloody and swollen, his arms felt like lead weights, he was going over.

  Then, at the last instant, he pulled the shaker from his pocket, broke it against the rail, and threw the salt in Arkadin’s eyes. Arkadin bellowed in shock and pain, his hand flew up reflexively, and Bourne snatched the switchblade from him. Blinded, Arkadin still fought on, and he grasped the blade. With a superhuman effort, not caring that the edges cut into his fingers, he wrested the switchblade away from Bourne. Bourne heaved him backward. But Arkadin had control of the knife now, he had partial vision back through his tearing eyes, and he ran at Bourne with his head tucked into his shoulders, all his weight and determination behind the charge.

  Bourne had one chance. Stepping into the charge, he ignored the knife, grabbed Arkadin by his uniform jacket and, using his own momentum against him, pivoted from the hip as he swung him around and up. Arkadin’s thighs struck the railing, his upper body continuing its flight, so that he toppled head-over-heels over the side.

  Falling, falling, falling… the equivalent of twelve stories, before plunging beneath the waves.

  Forty-Five

  I NEED A VACATION,” Moira said. “I’m thinking Bali would do me quite well.”

  She and Bourne were in the NextGen clinic in one of the campus buildings that overlooked the Pacific. The Moon of Hormuz had successfully docked at the LNG terminal and the cargo of the highly compressed liquid was being piped from the tanker to onshore containers where it would be slowly warmed, expanding to six hundred times its present volume so it could be used by individual consumers and utility and business power plants. The laptop had been turned over to the NextGen IT department, so the software could be parsed and permanently shut down. The grateful CEO of NextGen had just left the clinic, after promoting Moira to president of the security division and offering Bourne a highly lucrative consulting position with the firm. Bourne had phoned Soraya, each of them bringing the other up to date. He’d given her the address of Sever’s house, detailing the clandestine operation it housed.

  “I wish I knew what a vacation felt like,” Bourne said when he’d finished the call.

  “Well…” Moira smiled at him. “You’ve only to ask.”

  Bourne considered for a long time. Vacations were something he’d never contemplated, but if ever there was a time to take one, he thought, this was it. He looked back at her and nodded.

  Her smile broadened. “I’ll have NextGen make all the arrangements. How long do you want to go for?”

  “How long?” Bourne said. “Right now, I’ll take forever.”

  On his way to the airport, Bourne stopped at the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where Professor Sever had been admitted. Moira, who had declined to come up with him, was waiting for him in the chauffeured car NextGen had hired for them. They’d put Sever in a private room on the fifth floor. The room was deathly still, except for the respirator. The professor had sunk deeper into a coma and was now unable to breathe on his own. A thick tube emerged from his throat, snaking to the respirator that wheezed like an asthmatic. Other, smaller tubes were needled into Sever’s arms. A catheter attached to a plastic bladder hooked to the side of the bed caught his urine. His bluish eyelids were so thin Bourne thought he could see his pupils beneath them.

  Standing beside his former mentor he found that he had nothing to say. He wondered why he’d felt compelled to come here. Maybe it was simply to look once more on the face of evil. Arkadin was a killer, pure and simple, but this man had made himself brick by brick into a liar and a deceiver. And yet he looked so frail, so helpless now, it was difficult to believe he was the mastermind of the monstrous plan to incinerate much of Long Beach. Because, as he’d said, his sect couldn’t live in the modern world, it was bound to destroy it. Was that the real reason, or had Sever once again lied to him? He’d never know now.

  He was abruptly nauseated by being in Sever’s presence, but as he turned away a small dapper man came in, allowing the door to close at his back.

  “Jason Bourne?” When Bourne nodded, the man said, “My name is Frederick Willard.”

  “Soraya told me about you,” Bourne said. “Well done, Willard.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Please don’t call me sir.”

  Willard gave a small, deprecating smile. “Pardon me, my training is so ingrained in me that’s all I am now.” He glanced over at Sever. “Do you think he’ll live?”

  “He’s alive now,” Bourne said, “but I wouldn’t call it living.”

  Willard nodded, though he seemed not at all interested in the disposition of the figure lying in the bed.

  “I have a car waiting downstairs,” Bourne said.

  “As it happens, so do I.” Willard smiled, but there was something sad about it. “I know that you worked for Treadstone.”

  “Not Treadstone,” Bourne said, “Alex Conklin.”

  “I worked for Conklin, too, many years ago. It’s one and the same, Mr. Bourne.”

  Bourne felt impatience now. He was eager to join Moira, to see the sherbet skies of Bali.

  “You see, I know all of Treadstone’s secrets—all of them. This is something only you and I know, Mr. Bourne.”

  A nurse came in on her silent white shoes, checked all of Sever’s feeds, scribbled on his chart, then left them alone again.

  “Mr. Bourne, I thought long and hard about whether I should come here, to tell you…” He cleared his throat. “You see, the man you fought on the tanker, the Russian who went overboard.”

  “Arkadin.”

  “Leonid Danilovich Arkadin, yes.” Willard’s eyes met Bourne’s, and something inside him winced away. “He was Treadstone.”

  “What?
” Bourne couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Arkadin was Treadstone?”

  Willard nodded. “Before you—in fact, he was Conklin’s pupil just before you.”

  “But what happened to him? How did he wind up working for Semion Icoupov?”

  “It was Icoupov who sent him to Conklin. They were friends, once upon a time,” Willard said. “Conklin was intrigued when Icoupov told him about Arkadin. Treadstone was moving into a new phase by then; Conklin believed Arkadin was perfect for what he had in mind. But Arkadin rebelled. He went rogue, almost killed Conklin before he escaped to Russia.”

  Bourne was desperately trying to process all this information. At last, he said, “Willard, do you know what Alex had in mind when he created Treadstone?”

  “Oh, yes. I told you I know all of Treadstone’s secrets. Your mentor, Alex Conklin, was attempting to build the perfect beast.”

  “The perfect beast? What do you mean?” But Bourne already knew, because he’d seen it when he’d looked into Arkadin’s eyes, when he understood that what he was seeing reflected there was himself.

  “The ultimate warrior.” Willard, one hand on the door handle, smiled now. “That’s what you are, Mr. Bourne. That’s what Leonid Danilovich Arkadin was—until, that is, he came up against you.” He scrutinized Bourne’s face, as if searching for a trace of the man who’d trained him to be a consummate covert operative. “In the end, Conklin succeeded, didn’t he?”

  Bourne felt a chill go through him. “What do you mean?”

  “You against Arkadin, it was always meant to be that way.” Willard opened the door. “The pity of it is Conklin never lived to see who won. But it’s you, Mr. Bourne. It’s you.”

  Enjoy a sneak peek at Jason Bourne’s new thrilling adventure!