The Bourne Objective jb-8

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “Where’s Professor Giles?”

  “On leave,” the man said.

  “I’m looking for him.”

  “So I gather. May I ask why?”

  “Where is he?”

  The man blinked his owlish blink. “Away.”

  Bourne had looked up Giles’s official bio on the way over, which was available on the Oxford University Web site.

  “It’s about his daughter.”

  The man behind Giles’s desk blinked. “Is she ill?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say. Where can I find Professor Giles?”

  “I don’t think-”

  “It’s urgent,” Bourne said. “A matter of life or death.”

  “Are you being deliberately melodramatic, sir?”

  Bourne showed the man the EMS credentials he’d lifted after the crash. “I’m quite serious.”

  “Dear me.” The man gestured. “He’s in the loo, at the moment. Battling the eel pie he ingested last night, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  The neurosurgeon was young, dark as an Indian, with the long, delicate fingers of a classical pianist. He had very delicate features, so he wasn’t, in fact, an Indian. But he was a hard-nosed businessman who would not proceed until Soraya had pressed a roll of bills into his hand. Then he rushed away from them, consulting with the ER doctors who had done the workup on Moira while he strode toward the OR.

  Soraya drank her shitty coffee without tasting it, but ten minutes later, while she paced the hallway uselessly, it began to burn a hole in her stomach, so when Arkadin suggested they get something to eat she agreed. They found a restaurant not far away from the hospital. Soraya checked to make sure it wasn’t colonized by insects before she sat down. They ordered their food, then sat and waited, sitting across from each other but looking elsewhere, or at least Soraya was.

  “I saw you without your top,” Arkadin said, “and I liked what I saw.”

  Soraya snapped into focus. “Fuck you.”

  “She was an enemy,” he said, referring to Moira. “What law is she protected by?”

  Soraya stared out the window at a street as unfamiliar to her as the dark side of the moon.

  The food came and Arkadin began to eat. Soraya watched a couple of young women with too much makeup and too little clothing on their way to work. Latinas showing off their bodies with such casualness still astonished her. Their culture was so far from hers. And yet she felt right in tune with the aura of sorrow here. Hopelessness she could understand. It had been the cultural lot of her gender from time immemorial, and was the major reason she had chosen the clandestine services where, despite the usual gender bias, she was able to assert herself in ways that made her feel good about herself. Now, for the first time, she saw those girls in their too-tight tops and too-short skirts in a different light. Those clothes were a way-perhaps their only way-to assert themselves in a culture that continually demeaned and devalued them.

  “If Moira dies, or if she can’t walk-”

  “Spare me the toothless threats,” he said, mopping up the last of his huevos rancheros.

  That was Arkadin’s business, she thought. No matter what he might think to the contrary, he was in the business of demeaning and devaluing women. That was the subtext in everything he said and did. He had no heart, no remorse, no guilt, no soul-nothing, in short, that defined and distinguished a human being. If he isn’t a human being, she thought with a kind of irrational terror, what is he?

  The men’s loo was five doors down from Professor Giles’s office. Giles was clearly being sick behind the closed door of one of the stalls. A sour stench had pervaded the room, and Bourne strode over to the window and shoved it open as far as it would go. A sticky breeze slowly stirred the stench as a witch will her bubbling pot.

  Bourne waited until the noises had subsided. “Professor Giles.”

  For some time, there was no answer. Then the stall door was wrenched open and Professor Giles, looking distinctly green around the gills, staggered out past Bourne. He bent over the sink, turned on the cold water, and buried his head beneath the flow.

  Bourne leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. When Giles picked his head up, Bourne handed him a handful of paper towels. The professor took them without comment, wiping his face and hair. It was only as he threw the wadded towels into the trash that he appeared to recognize Bourne.

  At once his back stiffened and he stood up straight. “Ah, the prodigal returns,” he said in his most professorial tone.

  “Did you expect me?”

  “Not really. On the other hand, I’m hardly surprised to find you here.” He gave Bourne a wan smile. “Bad pennies continue to turn up.”

  “Professor, I’d like you to once again get in touch with your chess-playing colleague.”

  Giles frowned. “That may not be so easy. He’s reclusive and he doesn’t like answering questions.”

  I can imagine, Bourne thought. “Nevertheless, I’d like you to try.”

  “All right,” Giles said.

  “By the way, what’s his name?”

  Giles hesitated. “James.”

  “James what?”

  Another hesitation. “Weatherley.”

  “Not Basil Bayswater?”

  The professor turned away, facing the door.

  “What question do you want to put to him?”

  “I’d like him to describe the afterlife.”

  Giles, who had been headed for the door, paused, turning slowly back to Bourne. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Since Basil Bayswater’s son buried him three years ago,” Bourne said, “I would think he’d be in a perfect position to tell me what it’s like to be dead.”

  “I told you,” Giles said, somewhat sullenly, “his name is James Weatherley.”

  Bourne took him by the elbow. “Professor, no one believes that, not even you.” He moved Giles away from the door to the far end of the loo. “Now you’ll tell me why you lied to me.” When the professor remained silent, Bourne went on. “You never needed to call Bayswater for the translation of the engraving inside the ring, you already knew it.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did. Neither of us was truthful with the other.” He shrugged. “Well, what can you expect from life? Nothing is ever what it seems.”

  “You’re Severus Domna.”

  Giles’s smile had gained a bit more traction. “There’s no point denying it, now that you’re about to hand over the ring.”

  At that moment, as if he’d had his ear to the door, the man who had been behind the professor’s desk entered the loo. With the SIG Sauer in his hand he looked quite a bit less owlish. Immediately two more men, larger, muscular, armed with silenced pistols, came in just behind him. They fanned out, their weapons trained on Bourne.

  “As you can see,” Professor Giles said, “I haven’t given you a choice.”

  [26]

  VYLACHESLAV OSEROV WAS nursing not only his facial wounds but also a planet-size grudge against Arkadin, the man who had tormented him for years, and who was the cause of his hideous disfigurement in Bangalore. The chemical fire had eaten through layers of skin and into the flesh itself, which made recovery difficult and a return to normalcy impossible.

  For days after he returned to Moscow, he had been swathed in thick bandages through which seeped not only blood but a thick yellow fluid whose stench made him gag. He had refused all painkillers and when the physician, on Maslov’s orders, tried to inject him with a sedative, he broke the man’s arm and very nearly his neck.

  Every day, Oserov’s howls of pain could be heard all over the offices, even in the toilets, where the other men congregated for a brief respite. His cries of agony were so dreadful, like an animal being dismembered, they frightened and demoralized even Maslov’s hardened criminals. Maslov himself was forced to tie him to a column, like Odysseus to the mast, and tape his mouth shut in order to give him and his people some respite. By this time, Oserov had deep gouges on his temples, bloody like tribal scars,
where in his agony he had dug his nails through the skin that had not been burned away.

  In a way, he had become an infant. Maslov couldn’t send him to a hospital or a clinic without awkward questions being asked, an FSB-2 investigation being initiated. So Maslov had tried to set him up at Oserov’s apartment, which was in a dreadful condition of disrepair, having been reclaimed, like an abandoned jungle temple, by insects and rodents alike. No one could be induced to stay there with Oserov, and Oserov could not be expected to survive there on his own. The office was the only option.

  Oserov could no longer look at himself. No vampire avoided mirrors more assiduously than he did. Also, he hated being seen in sunlight, any strong light, for that matter, behavior that gave rise to his new moniker among the Kazanskaya, Die Vampyr.

  He sat now brooding in Maslov’s offices, which by necessity were moved every week. In this room, which Maslov had designated his, the lights were out and the shades drawn against the daylight. One lamp across the room from where he slumped down cast a small circle of illumination across the scarred floorboards.

  The fiasco in Bangalore, his failure to kill Arkadin or, at least, gain the laptop for Maslov, had scarred him in more ways than one. His physical appearance had been compromised. Worse, he had lost the confidence of his boss. Without the Kazanskaya, Oserov was nothing. Without Maslov’s confidence, he was nothing within the Kazanskaya. For days now he had been racking his brains as to how to get back in Maslov’s good graces, how to restore the majesty of his position as field commander.

  No plan, however, had presented itself. It meant nothing to him that his mind, torn apart by the agony of his wounds, was scarcely able to put two coherent thoughts together. His only thought was of revenge against Arkadin, and to get for Maslov what he wanted most: that accursed laptop. Oserov didn’t know why his boss wanted it, and he didn’t care. His lot was to do or die, that’s how it had been ever since he had joined the Kazanskaya and that was how it would remain.

  But life was strange. For Oserov salvation came from an unexpected quarter. A call came through. So sunk in black thoughts was he that at first he refused to take it. Then his assistant told him that it had come in on a scrambled cell line, and he knew who it must be. Still, he resisted, thinking that at the moment he had neither the interest nor the patience for anything Yasha Dakaev had to report.

  Oserov’s assistant poked his head in the door, which he had strict orders never to do.

  “What?” Oserov barked.

  “He says it’s urgent,” his assistant told him, and quickly withdrew.

  “Goddammit,” Oserov muttered, and picked up the phone. “Yasha, this better be fucking good.”

  “It is.” Dakaev’s voice sounded flat and faraway, but then he was always having to find out-of-the-way nooks and crannies in the FSB-2’s offices to make his calls. “I have a line on Arkadin’s movements.”

  “At last!” Oserov sat up straight. He heart seemed to pump at full speed again.

  “According to the report that just came across my desk, he’s on his way to Morocco,” Dakaev said. “Ouarzazate, a village in the High Atlas Mountains called Tineghir, to be precise.”

  “What the fuck is he going to do in Buttfuck, Morocco?”

  “That I don’t know,” Dakaev said. “But our intel says he’s on his way.”

  This is my chance, Oserov thought, jumping up. If I don’t take it, I might as well eat my Tokarev. For the first time since that last night in Bangalore, he felt galvanized. His failure had paralyzed him, he had been gnawing at himself from the inside out. He’d become disoriented with shame and rage.

  He called his assistant in and gave him the particulars.

  “Get me the fuck out of here,” he ordered. “Book me on the first flight out of Moscow that’s heading in the right direction.”

  “Does Maslov know you’re off again?”

  “Does your wife know that your mistress’s name is Ivana Istvanskaya?”

  His assistant beat a hasty retreat.

  He turned away and started formulating a plan. Now that he’d been given a second chance, he vowed he would make the most of it.

  Bourne raised his hands. At the same time, he kicked Professor Giles in the small of the back. As Giles, arms flailing, stumbled toward the three gunmen, Bourne whirled, took a long stride toward the open window, and dived through it.

  He hit the ground running at full speed, but soon enough, as the adjoining university building loomed up, he was required to slow his pace to match that of Oxford’s denizens. Pulling off his black overcoat, he stuffed it in a trash bin. He looked for and found a knot of adults, professors most likely, walking from one building to the next, and slipped into their midst.

  Moments later he saw the two Severus Domna gunmen as they raced from the Centre. They immediately split up in a military-like formation.

  One of the men came toward him, but he hadn’t yet seen Bourne, who eeled his way to the opposite side of the knot. The professors were debating the merits of the right-wing German philosophers and, inevitably, the effect Nietzsche had on the Nazis, Hitler in particular.

  Unless he had a chance to get to Professor Giles alone, which he doubted, Bourne had no desire for another physical encounter with Severus Domna. The organization was like a Hydra: Lop off one head and two took its place.

  The gunman, who had hidden his weapon beneath his overcoat, approached the knot of professors, oblivious as they were locked in their philosophical ivory tower. Bourne presented the gunman with his anonymous back. The gunman would be looking for a man in a black overcoat. Bourne was happy to take any edge he could.

  The knot of professors trotted up the steps and, in elegant fashion, poured into the university building. Bourne, debating the finer points of Old German with a white-haired professor, stepped across the threshold.

  The gunman reacted as he glimpsed Bourne’s reflection in the glass pane of the open door. Taking the steps two at a time, he tried to shoulder his way through the knot of men who, though elderly, were certainly not passive, especially when it came to decorum and protocol. As one, they formed a living wall, pushing back at him in the manner of a phalanx of Roman soldiers advancing on the barbarian enemy. The gunman, taken aback, retreated.

  The pause gave Bourne the time he needed to slip away from the professors, down the corridor with its sounds of well-shod feet and hushed conversations bouncing off the polished marble floor. A line of square windows, high up, bestowed sunlight on the crowns of the students’ heads like a benediction. The wooden doors blurred by as Bourne made for the rear of the Centre. Bells sounded for the beginning of the four o’clock classes.

  He raced around a corner, into the short corridor leading to the rear door. But the Severus Domna gunman pushed through it. They were alone in the back corridor. The gunman had his overcoat draped over his right arm and hand, which held the silenced pistol. He aimed it at Bourne, who was still sprinting.

  Bourne went down, sliding on his backside along the marble floor as a shot whizzed by overhead. He barreled into the gunman with the soles of his shoes, knocking him over. The pistol flew out of his grip. Bourne rolled over, slammed his knee into the point of the gunman’s chin. His body went slack.

  Voices echoed down the corridor from just around the corner. Scrambling to his feet, Bourne scooped up the pistol, then dragged the gunman out the rear door, down the steps, and deposited him behind a thick boxwood hedge. He pocketed the pistol and continued along the university pathways at a normal pace. He passed fresh-faced students, laughing and chatting, and a dour professor, huffing as he scurried, late for his next lecture. Then Bourne was out onto St Giles’ Street. In typical English fashion, the afternoon had turned gloomy. A chill wind swept across the gutters and storefronts. Everyone was bent over, shoulders hunched, dashing like boats fleeing an oncoming storm. Bourne, blending in as he always did, hurried to his car.

  * * *

  Go,” Moira said, when she was out of recovery and h
ad gained full consciousness.

  Soraya shook her head. “I’m not leaving you.”

  “The worst has already happened,” Moira said quite rightly. “There’s nothing left here for you to do.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone,” Soraya insisted.

  “Neither should you. You’re still with Arkadin.”

  Soraya smiled, somewhat sadly, because everything Moira said was true. “Still and all-”

  “Still and all,” Moira said, “someone’s coming to look after me, someone who loves me.”

  Soraya was slightly taken aback. “Is it Jason? Is Jason coming for you?”

  Moira smiled. She had already drifted off to sleep.

  Soraya found Arkadin waiting for her. But first she needed to speak with the young neurosurgeon, who was, in his own way, optimistic in his prognosis.

  “The main thing in instances like these where nerves and tendons are involved is how quickly the patient receives medical attention.” He spoke formally, as if he were Catalan, rather than a Mexican. “In this respect, your friend is extremely fortunate.” He tipped his hand over, palm down. “However, the wound was ragged rather than clean. Plus, whatever she was cut with wasn’t clean. As a result, the procedure took longer, and was both more delicate and more complicated than it might otherwise have been. Again, fortunate that you called me. I don’t say this out of self-aggrandizement. It’s a matter of record, a fact. No one else could have managed the procedure without botching or missing something.”

  Soraya sighed with relief. “Then she’ll be fine.”

  “Naturally, she’ll be fine,” the neurosurgeon said. “With a proper course of rehab and physical therapy.”

  Something dark clutched at Soraya’s heart. “She’ll walk naturally, won’t she? I mean, without a limp.”

  The neurosurgeon shook his head. “In a child, the tendons are elastic enough that it might be possible. But in an adult that elasticity-or rather a good part of it-is gone. No, no, she’ll have a limp. How noticeable it will be depends entirely on the outcome of her rehab. And of course, her will to adapt.”