The Bourne Objective (18 page)

“Jesus,” Chrissie whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

The Range Rover was still rocking on its shocks. Bourne could no longer see the smashed-up
BMW
or the black-and-gold truck in the rearview mirror.

A
fter a crash or an accident, even a near miss, everything goes quiet, or possibly the human ear, traumatized like the rest of the organism, goes temporarily deaf. In any event, it was dead silent in the
SUV
as Bourne exited the motorway, turned off the access road as soon as he could, and rolled along streets lined with wholesalers and warehouses, where no one shouted in fear, no horns blared angrily or brakes screeched, where order still reigned and the chaos of the motorway seemed to belong to another universe. He didn’t stop until he found a deserted block and pulled over.

Chrissie was silent, her face dead white. Her hands trembled in her lap. She was near to weeping with both terror and relief.

“Who are you?” she said after a time. “Why is someone trying to kill you?”

“They want the ring,” Bourne said simply. After what had just happened she deserved at least a modicum of the truth. “I don’t know why yet, I’m trying to figure that out.”

She turned to him. Her eyes had paled, too, or perhaps that was simply a trick of the light. Bourne didn’t think so.

“Was Trace involved with this ring?”

“Maybe, I don’t know.” Bourne started the car and pulled out into the street. “But her friends were.”

She shook her head. “This is all going much too fast for me. Everything’s turned upside down, I can’t seem to get my bearings.”

She ran her hands through her hair, then noticed something odd. “Why are we heading back toward Oxford?”

He gave her a wry look as he headed toward the on-ramp of the motorway. “Like you, I don’t like people shooting at me.

“I need to get a better look at the
BMW
and our friend inside.” Noting her terrified expression, he added, “Don’t worry. I’ll get out near the crash site. Are you okay to drive?”

“Of course.”

He turned left and rolled onto the motorway, in the direction of Oxford. The worst of the rain had drifted away; only a light drizzle remained. He slowed the wipers down. “I’m sorry for the damage.”

She shuddered and gave him a grim smile. “It couldn’t be helped, could it?”

“When is Scarlett due back from your parents’ house?”

“Not until next week, but I can pick her up anytime,” she said.

“Fine.” Bourne nodded. “I don’t want you to go to your house in Oxford. Is there someplace else you can stay?”

“I’ll go back to Tracy’s flat.”

“That’s out, as well. These people must have picked me up there.”

“What about my parents’ house?”

“That’s no good, either, but I want you to pick Scarlett up from them and go somewhere else, somewhere you haven’t been before.”

“You don’t think—?”

Very deliberately, he produced the Glock he’d found in Perlis’s flat and placed it in the glove compartment.

“What are you doing?”

“We were being followed, possibly all the way from Tracy’s flat. There’s no point in taking a chance these people know about Scarlett—and where your parents live, for that matter.”

“But who are they?”

He shook his head.

“This is a nightmare, Adam.” Her voice was brittle, as if her words were made of glass. “What on earth was Trace mixed up in?”

“I wish I had an answer for you.”

Traffic on the opposite side of the motorway was at a standstill, which told him that they were nearing the crash site. Directly ahead the vehicles on their side were all but inching along, which would make it less difficult for him to get out and for Chrissie to take the wheel.

“What about you?” she asked as he put the Range Rover in neutral.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll make my way back to London.” Her worried expression revealed that she didn’t believe him. He gave her his cell number. But when he saw her dig a pen out of her handbag he added, “Memorize it, I don’t want you writing it down.”

They got out of the Range Rover and she slid behind the wheel. “Adam.” She reached out and grabbed his arm. “For God’s sake, take care of yourself.”

He smiled. “I’ll be fine.”

But she wouldn’t let him go. “Why are you pursuing this?”

He thought about Tracy dying in his arms. He carried her blood on his hands.

Ducking his head through the window, he said, “I owe her a debt I can never repay.”

B
ourne vaulted over the median onto the other side of the rain-slick motorway. As he approached the crash site his mind was racing, taking in the welter of ambulances, emergency vehicles, and police cars. The personnel had come from all over the surrounding area, which was a stroke of luck for what he had in mind. The crash site had not yet been cordoned off. He saw a body laid out on the ground, covered by a tarp. A squad of forensics personnel patrolled the area adjacent to the corpse, taking notes or digital photos, marking out small bits of forensic evidence with numbered plastic cones, and conferring among themselves. Each fragment of evidence—drops of blood, shards of a broken taillight, bits of shredded fabric, the litter of a shattered car window, an oil slick—was being photographed from several angles.

Bourne moved to the side of one of the emergency vehicles and unobtrusively slipped into the cab, rooting through the glove compartment for a form of ID. Finding nothing there, he moved on to the sun visors. One of them had a rubber band around it. Pulling it down, he found several cards, one of which was an expired ID. It always amazed him that people grew so attached to their own history, they were reluctant to part with any tangible evidence of it. Hearing someone approaching, he grabbed a pair of latex gloves, slid over and out the other side. As he did so, he clipped the ID to his coat and walked purposefully into the melee of official personnel trying to make sense of the mess left on the smeared tarmac of the motorway.

He squinted at the BMW; the guardrail had finally impaled it like a harpoon, wrecking it entirely. Bourne saw where he’d driven Chrissie’s car into the corner of the rear bumper. Squatting down next to it, he vigorously scrubbed off the few flecks of paint from her vehicle. He had just finished memorizing the plate number when a local police inspector crouched down beside him.

“What d’you reckon?” He was a whey-faced man with bad teeth and breath to match. He looked as if he had been raised on tepid beer, bangers and mash, and treacle.

“The speed must have been fantastic in order to do this damage.” Bourne spoke in a hoarse voice, using his best South London accent.

“Cold or allergies?” the local inspector said. “Either way, you should take care of yourself in the bloody-minded weather.”

“I’ll need to see the victims.”

“Righto.” The inspector rose on creaky knees. The backs of his hands were chapped and reddened, the result of a long, hard winter stuck in an underheated office. “This way.”

He led Bourne through the knots of people to where the corpse was still laid out. He lifted the tarp for Bourne to have a look. The body was broken up. Bourne was surprised to see that the man was older, he guessed in his late forties or early fifties—extremely odd for an executioner.

The inspector’s wrists rested on his bony knees. “With no ID, it’ll be a bitch trying to notify his wife.”

The corpse wore what appeared to be a gold wedding band on the third finger of his left hand. Bourne thought that interesting, but he wasn’t about to share his opinion, or anything else for that matter, with the inspector. He had to get a look at the inside of the ring.

“I’m going in,” Bourne said.

The inspector guffawed.

Bourne slipped off the ring. This ring was far older than the one he already had. He held it up to see more clearly. It was scratched and worn, thinned out over time. It took gold maybe a hundred years or more to get this thin. He tipped the ring. It was engraved on the inside. He could make out the Old Persian and Latin, yes. He peered more closely, rotating the ring between his fingers. There were only two words,
Severus Domna.
The third one,
Dominion,
was missing.

“Find anything?”

Bourne shook his head. “I thought maybe there’d be some sort of engraving—’To Bertie, from Matilda,’ something of that sort.”

“Another dead end,” the inspector said sourly. “Christ on a crutch, my knees are killing me.” He stood up with a little groan.

Now Bourne knew what
Severus Domna
must stand for: a group or a society. Whatever you wanted to call them, one thing was clear—they had gone to great lengths to keep themselves secret from the world at large. And now, for whatever reason, they had surfaced, risking their secretive status—all for the ring engraved with their name and the word
Dominion.

O
LIVER
LISS
,
STRIDING
down North Union Street in Alexandria’s Old Town, checked the time and, a moment later, stepped into one of those large chain drugstores that carried most everything. He went past the dental hygiene and foot care sections, picked out a cheap cell phone with thirty prepaid minutes, and took it up to the checkout counter where an Indian woman rang it up, along with a copy of
The Washington Post.
He paid cash.

Back out on the street, the paper tucked under one arm, he pulled apart the plastic blister pack and walked back beneath a dull and starless sky to where he’d parked his car. He got in and attached the phone to his portable charger, which would give it a full charge in less than five minutes. While he waited, he put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He hadn’t had much sleep last night or, for that matter, any night since he’d agreed to fund the resurrected Treadstone.

Not for the first time he wondered whether he had done the right thing, and then he tried to recall the last time he’d made a business decision of his own free will. More than a decade ago he’d been approached by a man who called himself Jonathan, though Liss soon enough surmised that wasn’t his name at all. Jonathan said that he was part of a large multinational group. If Liss played his cards right, if he pleased Jonathan and, therefore, the group, Jonathan would ensure that the group became Liss’s permanent client. Jonathan had then suggested to him that he found a private risk management firm under cover of which the business could become a private contractor for the US armed forces in overseas hot spots. That was how Black River had been formed. Jonathan’s group had provided the seed money, just as Jonathan had promised, and brought in the two partners. It was this same group that, through Jonathan, had given him advance warning of events taking place that would blow Black River out of the water sooner rather than later. The group had extricated him without him being implicated in any future investigation, congressional hearings, the filing of criminal charges, trials, and the inevitable incarcerations.

Then, only weeks after his parachute to safety, Jonathan had presented another suggestion, which wasn’t a suggestion at all, but an order: provide seed money for Treadstone. He hadn’t even heard of Treadstone, but then he’d been given an enciphered file detailing its creation and workings. That was when he’d learned that only one member of Treadstone remained alive: Frederick Willard. He contacted Willard and the rest had unfolded just as predicted.

Every once in a while he allowed himself the luxury of wondering how this group possessed such a staggering wealth of classified information. What were its sources? It seemed irrelevant whether the information was about American, Russian, Chinese, or Egyptian secret service agencies, to name just a few. The intelligence was always of the highest caliber and always correct.

The most mysterious aspect of this entire chapter of his life was that he’d never met any of these people face-to-face. Jonathan made suggestions, via the phone, to which he acceded without the faintest hint of a protest. He was not a man who enjoyed being enslaved—but he did savor every moment of being alive, and without these people he long ago would have been a dead man. He owed everything to Jonathan’s group.

Jonathan and his colleagues were hard taskmasters—utterly serious, intent on their goals—but they were generous with their rewards. Over the years the group had recompensed Liss beyond his wildest dreams—and that was another aspect of its existence that only added to the mystery: the group’s seemingly limitless wealth. Just as importantly, the group protected him, a promise Jonathan had made to him, a promise borne out when he had been extracted from the disaster that landed his two former Black River partners in federal penitentiaries for the rest of their lives.

A low beep alerted him that the cell phone was fully charged. Disconnecting it from the charger, he turned it on and punched in a local number. After two rings, the line connected and he said: “Delivery.” There was a short pause, then an automated female voice said, “Ecclesiastes three: six-two.”

It was always a book of the Bible, he had no idea why. He disconnected, picked up the paper. “Ecclesiastes” referred to the sports section. “Three: six-two” meant third column, sixth paragraph, second word.

Running his forefinger down the specified column he discovered today’s code word:
steal.

He picked up his cell and punched in a ten-digit number. “Steal,” he said when the line engaged after one ring. Instead of a voice he heard a series of electronic clicks and pops as the complex network of servos and switchers rerouted his call again and again to a remote location that was God alone knew where. Then the icy sound of encrypting devices being engaged and, at last, a voice said:

“Hello, Oliver.”

“Good afternoon, Jonathan.”

The enciphering slowed the speech down, stripping it of emotion and tone, rendering it unrecognizable, closer to the voice of an automaton.

“Have you sent them on their way?”

“They took off an hour ago, they’ll be in London early tomorrow morning.” It was the voice that had sent him the dossier on the ring in the first place. “They have their orders, but…”