The Bourne Objective (11 page)

Not many people would have dared interrupt Oserov, but Tracy did. Entering the café, she spotted Arkadin, strode confidently up to their table, and said, “Why, hello, fancy meeting you here,” in her soft British accent.

Oserov, pausing in mid-rant, looked up at her with a glare that would turn most people to stone. Tracy merely widened her smile and, pulling up a chair from a nearby table, said, “You don’t mind if I join you, do you?” She sat down and ordered a coffee before either of them uttered a word.

The moment the waiter left, Oserov’s face darkened ominously. “Listen, I don’t know who you are or why you’re here, but we’re in the middle of important business.”

“I saw that,” Tracy said blandly, waving a hand. “Go ahead, don’t mind me.”

Oserov pushed his chair back with a teeth-grinding scrape. “Hey, fuck off, lady.”

“Calm down,” Arkadin began.

“And you, shut the fuck up.” Oserov stood, leaning over the table. “If you don’t leave now—right this fucking second—I’m going to throw you out on your pretty little ass.”

Tracy stared up at him without blinking. “There’s no need for that kind of language.”

“She’s right, Oserov. I’ll escort her—”

But just at that moment Tracy took hold of the end of Oserov’s tie, which was threatening to dip into her coffee, and Oserov lunged at her, grabbing at the collar of her coat and hauling her to her feet. Her silk shirt ripped, the violent action bringing them unwanted attention from the café’s patrons and staff. Their mission was supposed to be under the radar, and Oserov was ruining that.

Arkadin, on his feet, said softly, “Let her go.” When Oserov maintained his grip, he added, even more quietly, “Let her go, or I’ll knife you right here.”

Oserov looked down at the point of a switchblade that Arkadin had aimed at his liver. His face darkened further, and something malefic bloomed in his hard, glinting eyes.

“I won’t forget this,” he said in an eerie tone as he released her.

Since he was still staring into Tracy’s face it was unclear to whom Oserov was speaking, but Arkadin suspected he was addressing both of them. Before anything worse happened Arkadin came around the table and, taking Tracy by the elbow, walked her out of the café.

The snow was swirling down with singular intent, and almost immediately their hair and shoulders were coated with it.

“Well, that was interesting,” she said.

Arkadin, searching her face, could find no fear in it. “You’ve made a very bad enemy, I’m afraid.”

“Go back inside,” Tracy said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Without your coat you’re liable to freeze to death.”

“I don’t think you understand—”

“Do you know Doma?”

He blinked. Did she never listen to what anyone said to her? But the tide she rode was taking him farther and farther from the known shore. “The restaurant on the Hermitage embankment? Everyone knows Doma.”

“Eight o’clock tonight.” She gave him one of her patented smiles and left him there in the snow, observed by the glowering Oserov.

T
he girl whom he’d mistaken for Tracy was long gone, but Arkadin could still make out the damp traces of her narrow footprints in the sand beyond the high-tide line. There were jellyfish in the water now, opalescent and glowing. In the distance a Mexican woman sang a sad ranchera from the speakers of a radio. The jellyfish seemed to be swaying to the music. Night was falling, a black sky studded with stars heading his way. Arkadin returned to the convent to light candles instead of switching on the electric lights, listen to sad rancheras instead of turning on the TV. Seemingly overnight Mexico had seeped into his blood.

I
‘m beginning to understand why Arkadin and Oserov are mortal enemies,
Bourne thought as he looked up from Perlis’s notebook.
Hate is a powerful emotion, hate makes normally smart people stupid, or at least makes them less vigilant. Perhaps I’ve finally found Arkadin’s Achilles’ heel.

He’d read enough for the moment. Closing the lid on the safe-deposit box, he pocketed the book and rang the bell to indicate that he was finished. While on the surface it seemed odd that Perlis would use such an old-fashioned method to record what he obviously considered vital intelligence, on further consideration it made perfect sense. Electronic media were all too prone to hacking in so many forms that a handwritten copy was the answer. Kept in a vault, it was perfectly secure, and if the need arose it could be irrevocably destroyed with nothing but a match. These days going low-tech was often the best defense against computer hackers, who could infiltrate the most sophisticated electronic networks and retrieve even supposedly deleted files.

Diego Hererra pulled aside the curtain, took the metal box, returned it to its numbered niche, closed the door behind it, and the two men secured the box with their respective keys.

As they walked out of the vault Bourne said, “I need a favor.”

Diego glanced at him expectantly, but noncommittally.

“There is a man who has been following me. He’s in the bank, waiting for me to return.”

Now Diego smiled. “But of course. I can show you to the door used by customers who require, shall we say, a higher degree of discretion than is the norm.” They were almost at his office when a ripple of concern crossed his face. “Why is this man following you, may I ask?”

“I don’t know,” Bourne said, “though I seem to collect people like him like flies.”

Diego gave a low laugh. “Noah often said more or less the same thing.”

Bourne realized that this was as close as Diego Hererra was going to get to asking him if he worked for Perlis’s outfit. He was beginning to like Diego as much as he liked his father, however, that was no reason to tell him the truth. He nodded as if in tacit answer to Diego’s unspoken question.

“I don’t know who he is, either, but it’s important I find out,” Bourne said.

Diego spread his hands. “I am at your service, Señor Stone,” he said in true Catalan style.

Diego may be living in London,
Bourne thought,
but his heart is still in Seville.

“I need to get this man out of your bank and onto the street before I leave. A fire alarm would do nicely.”

Diego nodded. “Consider it done.” He lifted a finger. “On the condition that you come to my house tomorrow evening.” He gave Bourne an address in Belgravia. “We have friends in common, it would be rude of me not to offer my hospitality.” Then he grinned, showing even, white teeth. “We’ll have a bite to eat, then, if you fancy a flutter, we’ll go out to the Vesper Club on the Fulham Road.”

Diego had a take-charge attitude that was more no-nonsense than egotistical, again very much like his father. This was in line with the profile he’d gleaned from his Web search some weeks ago, but the Vesper Club, a members-only casino strictly for high-rollers, was not. Bourne stuck the anomaly in the back of his mind and prepared to go into action.

T
he fire alarm went off in Aguardiente Bancorp. Bourne and Diego Hererra watched as the guards swiftly and methodically herded everyone out the front door, Bourne’s tracker among them.

Bourne emerged from the side entrance of the bank, and as the clients milled around the sidewalk, unsure what to do next, he located his tail, keeping the crowd between them. The man was watching the front entrance for Bourne, all the while in a position to check out the bank’s side entrance.

Slipping through the crowd, which had now doubled in size due to curious pedestrians and drivers gawking from their stopped cars, Bourne came up behind the tracker and said: “Walk straight ahead, up the road toward Fleet Street.” He dug his knuckle into the small of the man’s back. “Everyone will think a silenced pistol shot is a lorry backfiring.” He slammed the heel of his hand against the back of the man’s head. “Did I tell you to turn around? Now start walking.”

The man did as Bourne ordered him, snaking into the fringes of the crowd and picking his way, more quickly now, up Middle Temple Lane. He was broad-shouldered with a dirty-blond crew cut, a face empty as an abandoned lot, with rough skin as if he had an allergy or had been in the wind for too many years. Bourne knew he’d try something, and sooner rather than later. A businessman, lost on his cell phone, hurried toward them, and Bourne felt Crew-Cut leaning toward him. Crew-Cut deliberately bumped against the businessman, allowed himself to be jostled sideways by the collision, and was in the process of turning back on Bourne, his right arm bent, his fingers coming together to form a cement block, when Bourne slammed him behind the knee with the sole of his shoe. At almost the same instant Bourne caught his right arm in a vise created by his elbow and forearm, and cracked the bone.

The man buckled over, groaning. When Bourne bent to lift him to his feet, he would have driven his knee into Bourne’s groin, but Bourne sidestepped and the knee struck him painfully, if harmlessly, on the thigh instead.

At that point Bourne became aware of a car racing the wrong way down the street, too fast in fact to slow down, let alone stop before it hit them. He threw the man’s body into the path of the oncoming vehicle and, using the man’s shoulders as a base, vaulted over the hood. With a screech of brakes, the car tried valiantly to decelerate. The moment his shoes hit the top of the car bullets pierced it from the interior, trying to find him, but he was already sliding down the trunk.

Behind him he heard the liquid
thunk!
as the car slammed into the body, then the stink of burning rubber flayed off the tires. Risking a glance over his shoulder he saw two men emerge, armed with Glocks—the driver and the shooter. As they turned toward him, the huge knot of patrons and staff that had been standing outside Aguardiente Bancorp came streaming up the street, voices raised, cell phone cameras clicking like a forest of cicadas, trapping the two men, pinning them in place. Now curious pedestrians appeared from Fleet Street. Within moments the familiar high-low clamor of police klaxons filled the air, and Bourne, worming into the midst of the throng, slipped quietly away, turned the corner onto Fleet Street, and melted into the city.

I
‘VE
LOST
TOUCH
with him,” Frederick Willard said.

“You’ve lost touch with him before,” Peter Marks pointed out, he thought helpfully.

“This is different,” Willard snapped. He was wearing a conservatively cut chalk-striped suit, a starched blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, and a navy-blue bow tie with white polka dots. “Unless we’re both careful and clever, this is liable to become permanent.”

Since coming aboard the resurrected Treadstone, Marks had learned quickly that it was a mortal sin to mistake Willard’s age for a loss of vigor. The man might be in his sixties but he could still outrun half the field agents at CI, and as for critical brain function—the ability to think through a problem to its best solution—Marks thought him as good as Alex Conklin, Treadstone’s founder. On top of all that, he possessed the uncanny ability to ferret out his adversary’s weak spots, finding the most novel ways of exploiting them. That Willard was something of a sadist, Marks had no doubt, but that was nothing new in their line of shadow work where sadists, masochists, and every other psychological variant congregated like flies on a rotting corpse. The trick, Marks had found, was discovering the quirk of each person’s personality before he used it to bury you.

They had arranged themselves on a sofa in the foyer of a members-only—and from the looks of things men-only—organization to which Oliver Liss belonged.

“The Monition Club,” Marks said during his hundredth glance around. “What the hell kind of place is this?”

“I don’t know,” Willard said waspishly. “I’ve been trying to find out all day without discovering a scrap of information about it.”

“There must be something. Who owns this building, for instance?”

“A holding company in Grenada.” Willard grunted. “Clearly a shell corporation, and the trail gets more convoluted after that. Whoever these people are they definitely don’t want to be known.”

“No law against that,” Marks said.

“Perhaps not, but it strikes me as both strange and suspect.”

“Maybe I should look into it further.”

The interior was as echoey as a cathedral and, with its stone-block walls, Gothic arches, and gilded crosses, resembled an ecclesiastical institution. Thick carpets and oversize furniture abetted the oppressive hush. Now and again someone strode by, spoke briefly to the uniformed woman behind the high desk in the lobby’s center, then passed into the shadows.

The atmosphere reminded Marks of the prevailing mood of the new CI. From what he’d gleaned from his former colleagues, a new set of unsmiling faces in the support staff and an almost bitter level of gloom infected the hallways. This toxic tone somewhat assuaged the guilt he’d been feeling about bailing on CI, especially because he hadn’t been there for Soraya when she’d returned from Cairo. On the other hand, Willard had assured him that he’d be of more help to her now that he’d moved on.
“This way your wisdom and advice will seem more objective and therefore have more weight,”
Willard had said. As it turned out, he’d been right. Marks was quite sure that he was the only one who could have persuaded her to join Treadstone.

“What are you thinking?” Willard said unexpectedly.

“Nothing.”

“Wrong answer. Our number one priority is to figure out a way to reestablish clandestine contact with Leonid Arkadin.”

“What makes Arkadin so important? Besides, of course, the fact that he’s Treadstone’s first graduate and the only one that got away.”

Willard glared. He didn’t care for his own words being thrown back in his face, especially by an inferior. That was the problem with Willard—one of his many quirks—as Marks, as quick a study as had ever entered CI’s ranks, had come to understand: Willard was convinced of his superiority, and he treated everyone accordingly. That there might be a grain or two of truth to his belief only solidified his fierce control. In fact, Marks guessed that this arrogance was what had allowed Willard to infiltrate and maintain his position as steward inside the
NSA
for so many years. It had to be so much easier to take orders from your masters when you knew you were in the process of fucking them over.