The Bourne Objective jb-8

by Eric Van Lustbader

  They were standing in the deserted lobby of the Vesper Club, which had been cordoned off by the police as a crime scene.

  Marks said: “One of the alleged perpetrators might be a person of interest to my superiors. That being the case, I’d appreciate a look-see at the relevant CCTV tape from last night.”

  Lloyd-Philips shrugged his thin shoulders. “Why not? We’re already printing up flyers with the photos of the two men’s faces to distribute to the metropolitan police and personnel at all train stations, airports, and shipping terminals.”

  The chief inspector led him through the casino proper, down a corridor, and into the back rooms, one of which was hot and smelled of electronics. A technician sat in front of a complex board filled with dials, sliders, and a computer keyboard. Just above were two lines of monitors, each showing a different part of the casino. From what Marks could see, no nook or cranny had been ignored, even the lavatories.

  Lloyd-Philips bent over the technician, murmured something, to which the man nodded and started punching keys. The chief inspector reminded Marks of a character out of any one of a hundred British spy novels. His vaguely dyspeptic expression of long-suffering boredom marked him as a career bureaucrat with one eye closed and the other on his approaching pension.

  “Here we go,” the technician intoned.

  One of the monitors went black, then an image appeared. Marks saw the bar in the high-rollers’ room. Then Bourne and another man he recognized as the now deceased Diego Hererra moved into the frame and stayed there. They were speaking, but they were partly turned away from the camera, and it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

  “Diego Hererra entered the Vesper Club at approximately nine thirty-five last night,” Lloyd-Philips said in his slightly bored donnish voice. “With him was this man.” He pointed to Bourne. “Adam Stone.”

  The video continued. Another man-presumably the killer-came into the picture. It was when he began to approach Bourne and Diego Hererra that things got interesting.

  Marks leaned forward tensely. Bourne had moved in front of Hererra, as if to block the killer’s advance. But something curious happened as they spoke to each other. Bourne’s attitude changed. It was almost as if he knew the killer, but judging by his initial expression that couldn’t be true. Yet Bourne allowed him to come over to the bar, to stand next to Hererra. And then Diego slumped over. Bourne grabbed the killer by the lapels, as he should have done in the first place. But then the second strange thing happened. Bourne didn’t beat the crap out of the killer. Marks was frankly astonished to see the two of them take on the three bouncers who appeared from the casino’s main rooms.

  “And there you have it,” Chief Inspector Lloyd-Philips said. “The perpetrator used some kind of high-frequency sound weapon to render everyone unconscious.”

  “Have you identified the killer?” Marks asked.

  “Not yet. He doesn’t appear on any of our electronic nets.”

  “This club is members-only. The manager must know who he is.”

  Lloyd-Philips looked distinctly annoyed. “According to the club’s records, the suspect’s name is Vincenzo Mancuso, but though there are actually three men with that name in England, none of them matches the man on the tape. Nevertheless, we dispatched inspectors to interview the three Vincenzo Mancusos, only one of whom resides in the London environs. All have alibis that check out.”

  “Forensics?” Marks asked.

  The chief inspector looked ready to bite Marks’s head off. “No suspicious fingerprints were found, and there was no sign of the murder weapon. On my orders the men fanned out within a mile radius of the club, pawing through dustbins, peering down storm drains, and the like. They even dredged the river, though no one had a hope of finding the knife. All searches have so far proved fruitless.”

  “And what of the other man-Adam Stone?”

  “Vanished off the face of the earth.”

  Which means the investigation is at a standstill, Marks thought. This is a high-profile murder investigation. No wonder he’s edgy.

  “Adam Stone is the person of interest to my superiors.” Marks drew the chief inspector away from the technician. “They-and I-would consider it a personal favor if you suppressed Stone’s photo from the flyers.”

  Lloyd-Philips smiled, not a pretty sight. His teeth were as nicotine-stained as his fingertips.

  “I’ve made a career of not giving personal favors. That’s how I keep my nose clean and my pension intact.”

  “Nevertheless, in this instance my superiors at DoD would be grateful if you made an exception.”

  “Listen, laddo, I brought you in here as a courtesy.” The chief inspector’s eyes were suddenly as flinty as his voice. “I don’t care if your superiors are five-bloody-star generals, London’s my bailiwick. My superiors-Her Majesty’s Government-don’t appreciate you lot coming over here and leaning on us like we’re a bunch of colonial yobs. An’ I don’t like it one ickle bit, either.” He lifted a warning finger. “A word in your shell-like: Naff off before I get really hacked and decide to detain you as a material witness.”

  “Thanks for your hospitality, Chief Inspector,” Marks said drily. “Before I go, I’d like a copy of the photos of Stone and the un-ID’d man.”

  “Anything to get you out of my bloody hair.” Lloyd-Philips tapped the tech on the shoulder, the tech asked for the number of Marks’s cell, then pressed a button; a moment later a digital still from the security tape of the two men side by side appeared on Marks’s phone.

  “All right, then.” The chief inspector turned to Marks. “Don’t make me regret what I’ve done. Stay well away from me and my case and you’ll get on well.”

  Back out on the street, the sun was struggling to be seen through masses of streaming cloud. The city roared all around Marks. He checked the photo on his PDA. Then he punched in Willard’s private line and got right to his voice mail. Willard’s phone was off, which, calculating the hour back in Washington, Marks thought odd. He left a detailed message, asking Willard to run the photo of the man who had knifed Diego Hererra through the Treadstone data banks, which had been amassed from those of the usual alphabet soup of CI, NSA, FBI, DoD, plus some others to which Willard had gained access.

  From a detective-inspector outside the club to whom he showed his ID, Marks obtained Diego Hererra’s home address. Forty minutes later he arrived just as a silver Bentley limousine turned the corner and pulled up outside Hererra’s house. The liveried driver emerged, walked smartly around the gleaming grille to open the rear door. A tall, distinguished man who looked like an older version of Diego emerged. With a somber expression and a heavy tread the man climbed the steps to Diego’s front door and inserted a key in the door.

  Before he could disappear inside, Marks strode up and said, “Mr. Hererra, I’m Peter Marks.” When the older man turned around to peer at him, Marks added, “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

  The elder Hererra paused for a moment. He was a handsome man, with a leonine shock of white hair, worn long over his collar in the current Catalan style, but he appeared ashen beneath his deep outdoorsman’s tan. “Did you know my son, Señor Marks?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t have that pleasure, sir.”

  Hererra nodded somewhat absently. “It seemed Diego had very few male friends.” His mouth twitched in a parody of a smile. “His preference was for women.”

  Marks took a step forward and held his creds up for the other to see. “Sir, I know this is a difficult time, and I apologize in advance if I’m intruding, but I need to talk to you.”

  Hererra continued to look through Marks as if he hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Then he seemed to focus. “Do you know something about his death?”

  “This isn’t a conversation for the street, is it, Señor Hererra.”

  “No, of course not.” Hererra’s head twitched. “Please forgive my lack of manners, Señor Marks.” Then he gestured. He had very large, square hands, the capabl
e hands of a skilled laborer. “Come inside and we’ll talk.”

  Marks went up the steps, across the threshold, and into the late Diego Hererra’s house. He heard the older man coming in after him, the door close behind him, and then there was a knife blade across his throat, and Diego Hererra’s father was close behind him, holding him in an astonishingly powerful grip.

  “Now, you sonovabitch,” Hererra said, “you’ll tell me everything you know about my son’s murder, or by Christ’s tears I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear.”

  [17]

  BUD HALLIDAY SAT in a semicircular banquette at the White Knights Lounge, a bar in an out-of-the-way area of suburban Maryland where he often came to unwind. He nursed a bourbon-and-water while he tried to clear his mind of the clutter that had built up over the long day.

  His parents were Mainline Philadelphians who could trace their respective families back to Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, respectively. They had been childhood sweethearts who, with the predictability of their ilk, were divorced. His mother, a society doyenne, now lived in Newport, Rhode Island. His father, plagued with emphysema from years of inveterate smoking, rattled around the family mansion, trailed by oxygen tanks and a pair of full-time Haitian nurses. Halliday saw neither of them. He’d turned his back on the hermetically sealed golden glow of their society world when, to their horror and mortification, he had gleefully enlisted in the marines at the age of eighteen. While at boot camp he had imagined his mother fainting at the news, which gave him a great measure of satisfaction. As for his father, he’d probably chewed off the end of his cigar, blamed his wife for his disappointment, and gone off to the insurance company he owned, and which he ran with ruthless and appalling success.

  Finding that he’d finished his bourbon, Halliday flagged down the waiter and ordered another.

  The twins arrived at the same time as his drink, and he ordered them chocolate martinis. They sat down on either side of him. One was dressed in green, the other in blue. The one in green was a redhead, the other blond. Today, at least. They were like that, Michelle and Mandy. They liked to play off their eerie echoes of each other, but at the same time asserting their differences. They were tall, almost six feet, with figures as lush and luscious as their lips. They could have been models, or possibly even actresses, given the expert way they played roles, but were neither vain nor empty-headed. Michelle was a theoretical mathematician, and Mandy was a microbiologist at the CDC. Michelle, who could have had her pick of chairs at any of the top universities in the country, instead worked for DARPA-the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-cooking up new cryptographic algorithms that could foil even the fastest computer, even used in tandem. Her latest used heuristic techniques, meaning it learned from every attempt to break it, as if it were a self-educating entity, changing on the fly. It required a physical key to unlock it.

  Never had two more fertile minds been wrapped in such delectable and erotic packages, Halliday thought as the waiter set their chocolate martinis in front of them. They all raised their glasses in a silent toast to another night together. When they were off duty, the girls loved sex, chocolate, and sex, in that order. But they weren’t off duty yet.

  “What’s your assessment of the ring?” Halliday asked Michelle.

  “It would help,” she said, “if you had given me the real thing instead of a set of photos.”

  “Given that I didn’t, what’s your best guess?”

  Michelle took a sip of her drink as if needing time to set her thoughts in order or to figure out how to express them to Halliday, a mental midget compared with her and her twin.

  “It seems likely to me that the ring is a physical key.”

  Halliday got interested in a hurry. He was keeping a sharp lookout. “Meaning?”

  “Just what I said. It may be the algorithm I’m working on, but the odd inscription on the inside of the ring appears to me to be like the ridges of a key.” Responding to Halliday’s quizzical look, she changed tack. Taking out a felt-tip pen, she drew on Halliday’s napkin.

  “Here we have a common key to a lock. It has ridges cut into it that are unique to it. Most common locks have twelve pins inside the lock cylinder, six upper and six lower. When the key is inserted in the cylinder, the ridges raise the upper pins above the shear line, allowing the shaft inside the cylinder to turn and the lock to open.

  “So now consider each ideogram of the engraving inside the ring as a notch. Slip the ring into the right lock and presto, Open Sesame.”

  “Is this possible?” he asked.

  “Anything’s possible, Bud. You know that.”

  Halliday stared at her drawing, suddenly galvanized. Her theory took a big leap of faith to believe, but the woman was a stone-cold genius. He couldn’t afford to dismiss any theory she put forward no matter how loopy it might sound on first blush.

  “What’s in store for us tonight?” Mandy asked, clearly bored with this topic.

  “I’m hungry.” Michelle pocketed her pen. “I haven’t eaten a thing all day, except for a Snickers I found in my drawer, and that was so stale the chocolate had turned white.”

  “Finish your drink,” Halliday said.

  She feigned a pout. “You know how I get when I drink on an empty stomach.”

  Halliday chuckled. “So I’ve been told.”

  “Well, it’s true and then some,” Mandy said. And in another voice entirely, deeper, with plenty of vibrato, a singer’s voice: “Dat li’l girl, she get freak-eee!”

  “Whereas dis one,” Michelle said in precisely the same voice, “she already got her freak on!”

  Both of them threw their heads back and laughed for precisely the same amount of time. Halliday, watching them, turning his head from side to side, felt a throbbing in his forehead, as if he were observing a tennis match from too close.

  “Ah, there you are!” Mandy said as their foursome was about to be completed.

  “We thought you might not be coming,” Michelle said.

  Halliday palmed his diagram-covered napkin and hid it in his lap. Both the girls noticed but said nothing, simply smiling into the face of the newcomer.

  “There is no power on earth.” Jalal Essai slid into the banquette and kissed Mandy in the place on her neck she liked best. “That could possibly have kept me away.”

  Peter Marks stood very still. The man behind him smelled of tobacco and anger. The knife he held to Marks’s throat was razor-sharp, and Marks, who certainly had enough experience in these matters, had no doubt that Hererra would slit his throat.

  “Señor Hererra, there’s no need for these melodramatics,” he said. “I’ll gladly share with you everything I know. Let’s just keep calm and not lose our heads here.”

  “I’m perfectly calm,” Hererra said grimly.

  “All right.” Marks tried to swallow. His throat had dried up. “I’ll admit up front that what I know isn’t very much.”

  “It’s got to be more than that bastard Lloyd-Shithead was willing to share. He told me to concentrate on making arrangements to bring my son back to Spain, which he said wouldn’t be possible until the medical examiner was through with him.”

  Now Marks understood why Hererra was in a fury. “I agree, the chief inspector is something of a dick.” He swallowed. “But he’s of no consequence now. I want to know why Diego was murdered almost as much as you do. Believe me, I’m determined to find out.” This was true. Marks would never find Bourne without discovering what had happened last night in the Vesper Club, and why Bourne would leave with the murderer as if they were friends. Something wasn’t adding up.

  He felt Hererra breathing behind him. It was deep and even, which to Marks was very frightening indeed, because it meant that despite his grief this man was in full possession of all his faculties. This spoke of a powerful personality; it would be suicidal to fuck with him.

  “In fact,” Marks continued, “I can show you a photo of the man who murdered your son.”

  The knife blad
e trembled a moment in Hererra’s huge fist, then it was withdrawn, and Marks stepped away. He turned to face the older man.

  “Please, Señor Hererra, I understand the depth of your sorrow.”

  “Do you have a son, Señor Marks?”

  “I don’t, sir. I’m not married.”

  “Then you can’t know.”

  “I lost a sister when I was twelve. She was only ten. I was so angry I wanted to destroy everything in sight.”

  Hererra contemplated him for a moment, then said, “So you know.”

  He took Marks into the living room. Marks sat down on a sofa, but Hererra remained standing, looking at the photos of his son and, presumably, his many girlfriends that lined the mantel. For a long time, the two men remained like that, Hererra silent, Marks unwilling to disturb the older man’s grief.

  At length, Hererra turned and, crossing to where Marks sat, said, “I’ll see that photo now.”

  Marks dug out his PDA, scrolled to the media section, and brought up the photo he’d gotten from Lloyd-Philips’s IT tech.

  “He’s on the left,” Marks said, pointing to the as-yet-unidentified man.

  Hererra took the PDA and stared down at the screen for so long that Marks thought he had turned to stone.

  “And the other man?”

  Marks shrugged. “An innocent bystander.”

  “Tell me about him, he looks familiar to me.”

  “Lloyd-Shithead told me his name is Adam Stone.”

  “Is that so.” Something slithered across Hererra’s face.

  Marks impatiently pointed again. “Señor, this is important. Do you know the man on the left?”

  Hererra thrust the PDA back into Marks’s hand, then went to the bar setup and poured himself a brandy. He drank half straight off, then, in an effort to compose himself, set the glass carefully down. “Christ almighty,” he murmured under his breath.

  Marks rose and came over to where he was standing. “Señor, I can help you if you’ll let me.”