The Bourne Objective (33 page)

Not surprisingly, she was unlike Roberto Corellos’s dismissive description of her as a piranha. She was both tough and vulnerable, a complexity to which a man like Corellos would be deaf, dumb, and blind. She had made her way in a man’s world, having run and ruthlessly expanded her husband’s business, yet she had been as terrified of her brother as she was now of Corellos and Leonid Arkadin. Moira could see that Berengária had no illusions. Her power was as nothing compared with theirs. They commanded a respect among their respective troops that she could never enjoy no matter how hard she tried.

Once again, Moira felt her mixed emotions of admiration and pity, this time because the moment Moira sailed away to her rendezvous with Arkadin, Berengária would be left to an undetermined fate. Caught between the corrosive power of Corellos and the contemptible weakness of Narsico, the future would not go well for her.

Which was why she kissed her hard on the lips and held her tight, because it would be for the last time, and Berengária deserved at least that modicum of solace, no matter how fleeting.

She ran her tongue around Berengária’s ear. “Who is the client?”

Berengária shivered and held her tighter. At length, she leaned back enough to engage Moira’s eyes. “The client is one of Gustavo’s oldest and best, which is why the delay caused such problems.”

Tears glittered in her eyes, and Moira knew she understood that tonight had been both the beginning and the end for them. This curious woman had no illusions, yes. And for an instant, Moira felt the pang of loss one feels when an ocean or a continent separates two people who had once held each other.

In a final acquiescence, Berengária bowed her head. “His name is Don Fernando Hererra.”

S
oraya awoke with the taste of the Sonoran Desert in her mouth. Assaulted by aches and pains, she rolled over onto her back and groaned. She stared up at the four men towering over her, two on each side. They were dusky-skinned, like her, and like her they were of mixed blood. It took one to know one, she thought groggily. These men were part Arab. They looked so much alike, they could have been brothers.

“Where is he?” one of the men said.

“Where is who?” she said, trying to identify his accent.

Another of the men—one on the opposite side—squatted down in the comfortable manner of a desert Arab, his wrists on his knees.

“Ms. Moore—Soraya, if I may—you and I are looking for the same person.” His voice was calm and assured, and as casual as if they were two friends finding an equitable solution to a recent squabble. “One Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”

“Who are you?” she said.

“We ask the questions,” said the man who had spoken first. “You provide the answers.”

She tried to get up, but discovered that she had been staked out—cords around her wrists and ankles were wrapped around tent pegs that had been driven into the ground.

As the first light of dawn leaked into the sky, tendrils of pink crawled toward her like a spider.

“My name isn’t important,” the man squatting beside her said. One of his eyes was brown, she noticed, the other a watery blue, almost milky, like an opal, as if it had been damaged or ravaged by disease. “Only what I want is important.”

Those two sentences seemed so absurd she felt the urge to laugh. People were known by their names. Without a name there was no personal history, no profile possible, just a blank slate, which was apparently how he wanted it. She wondered how she could change that.

“If you won’t talk to me voluntarily,” he said, “we’ll have to try another way.”

He snapped his fingers, and one of the other men handed him a small bamboo cage. No-Name took it gingerly by the handle and, swinging it past Soraya’s face, set it down between her breasts. Inside was a very large scorpion.

“Even if it stings me,” Soraya said, “it won’t kill me.”

“Oh, I don’t want it to kill you.” No-Name unlatched the door and with a pen started to prod the scorpion out. “But if you don’t tell us where Arkadin is hiding, you will begin to have seizures, your heart rate and blood pressure will rise, your vision will become blurred, need I go on?”

The scorpion was hard and shiny-black, its tail arched high over its carapace. When sunlight touched it, it seemed to glow as if with an inner power. Soraya tried not to watch it, tried to damp down the fright rising inside her. But there was an instinctual response that was difficult to control. She heard her heartbeat pounding in her ears, felt a pain beneath her sternum as the fright built. She bit her lip.

“And if you should receive multiple stings without treatment, well, who knows how badly you’ll suffer?”

As delicately as a ballet dancer the creature ventured forth on its eight legs until it stood in the valley between Soraya’s breasts. She fought back the urge to scream.

O
liver Liss sat on a narrow bench in the weight room of his health club. His chest and arms were shiny with sweat. A towel was draped around his neck. He was on his third set of fifteen biceps reps when the redhead walked in. She was tall, with square shoulders, an upright bearing, and an epic rack. He’d seen her here a number of times before. One hundred dollars to the manager, and now he knew her name was Abby Sumner, she was thirty-four, divorced, and childless. She was one of the endless fleet of lawyers toiling for the Justice Department. He had already speculated that her long hours had resulted in her divorce, but it was this same extended work schedule that attracted him. Less time for her to get in his way once the affair started. He had no doubt that it would start, no doubt at all. It was simply a matter of when.

Liss finished his reps, put the dumbbells back in their slots, then toweled off while he made his recon assessment. Abby had gone straight for the bench press and, having selected weights, slid under the bar. That was Liss’s cue. He rose and, strolling over to the bench press, looked down at her with his actor’s megawatt smile and said, “Do you need a spotter?”

Abby Sumner looked up at him with large blue eyes. Then she returned his smile.

“Thank you. I could use one; I’ve just gone up in weights.”

“It’s a little unusual to see a woman bench-pressing, unless she’s in training.”

Abby Sumner’s smile remained in place. “I do a lot of heavy lifting at work.”

Liss laughed softly. She lifted the weights off the rests and began her reps, while he held his hands a bit beneath the bar in case she faltered. “It sounds like I wouldn’t want to get in your way.”

“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t.”

She appeared to be having little or no difficulty with the higher weight. Liss’s difficulty lay in keeping his eyes off her breasts.

“Don’t arch your back,” he said.

She pulled her spine back down to the bench. “I always do that when I increase weight. Thanks.”

She finished her first set of eight reps, and he helped her guide the bar back onto the rests. While she took a short breather, he said, “My name’s Oliver and I’d love to take you to dinner sometime.”

“That would be interesting.” Abby looked up at him. “Unfortunately, I don’t mix business with pleasure.”

Responding to his quizzical expression, she slid out from under the bar and stood up. She really was an impressive woman, Liss thought. She glanced over to the juice bar, where a clean-cut man was drinking one of those phosphorescent-green glasses of wheatgrass juice. The man drained his glass, set it down, and began to saunter toward them.

Abby brought her gym bag up onto the bench and, reaching into it, brought out several folded sheets of paper, which she handed to Liss.

“Oliver Liss, my name is Abigail Sumner. This judicial order from the attorney general of the United States authorizes me and Jeffrey Klein”—here she indicated the wheatgrass drinker, who was now standing beside her—”to take you into custody pending an investigation into allegations made against you while you were president of Black River.”

Liss gaped at her. “This is nonsense. I was investigated and absolved.”

“New allegations have come to light.”

“What allegations?”

She nodded at the papers she had given him. “You’ll find the list enumerated in the attorney general’s order.”

He opened the order but couldn’t seem to focus on the letters. He shoved the papers back to her. “This must be some kind of mistake. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Klein produced a pair of manacles.

“Please, Mr. Liss,” Abby said, “don’t make this more difficult on yourself.”

Liss turned this way and that, as if contemplating escape or a last-minute reprieve from Jonathan, his guardian angel. Where was he? Why hadn’t he warned Liss of this new investigation?

C
olonel Boris Karpov returned to Moscow with a heart of stone. His visit with Leonid Arkadin had been sobering on many levels, not the least of which was the terrible bind he was in. Maslov had suborned a number of apparatchiks inside FSB-2, including Melor Bukin, Karpov’s immediate superior. Like all of the intel Arkadin had provided him, the proof was both damning and irrefutable.

Karpov, in the backseat of the black FSB-2 Zil, stared unseeingly out the window as his driver headed into the city from Sheremetyevo Airport.

Arkadin had suggested going to President Imov with the evidence Karpov now had in his possession. The very fact that Arkadin suggested it made Karpov suspicious, but even if Arkadin had his own reason for wanting him to go to Imov, he might still do it. The stakes, however, could not be higher, both for his career and for him, personally.

He had two choices: He could take the evidence against Bukin to Viktor Cherkesov, the head of FSB-2. The problem there, however, was that Bukin was Cherkesov’s creature. If the evidence against Bukin was made public, Cherkesov would, by association, come under suspicion. Whether or not he knew of Bukin’s perfidy, he’d be finished, forced to resign in disgrace. Rather than allow that to happen, Karpov could envision him eliminating the damning evidence against his friend—and that would include Karpov himself.

He had to admit that Arkadin was correct. Going to President Imov with the evidence was the safest choice, because Imov would be only too happy to bring down Cherkesov. In fact, he very well might be so grateful that he’d name someone inside FSB-2 he could trust—like Karpov—as the new head of the agency.

The more Karpov thought this through the more sense it made. And yet lurking in the background was the niggling voice that told him once this scenario came to pass, he would owe a great debt to Arkadin. That, he knew instinctively, was not a great position to be in. But only if Arkadin was alive.

He laughed a little as he told his driver to take a detour to the Kremlin. Sitting back, he punched in the number of the president’s office.

Thirty minutes later he was admitted into the president’s residence, where a pair of Red Army guards showed him into one of a number of chilly, high-ceilinged anterooms. Over his head, like a frozen giant spider’s web, an ornate crystal-and-ormolu chandelier hung, giving off faceted light that struck the similarly ornate Italianate furniture, upholstered in silks and brocades.

He sat while the guards, at opposite ends of the chamber, watched him. A clock on a spotted marble mantel
tick-tocked
mournfully, chiming the half hour, then the hour. Karpov went into a form of meditation he used to pass time during the many lonely vigils he’d had to endure over the years in more foreign countries than he cared to count. Ninety minutes after his arrival a young steward sporting a sidearm appeared to fetch him. Karpov was instantly alert. He was also refreshed. The steward smiled, and Karpov followed him down so many halls and around so many corners, he had difficulty in placing himself within the immense residence.

President Imov was sitting behind a Louis
XIV
desk in his comfortably furnished study. A cheerful fire was burning in the hearth. Behind him the magnificent domes of Red Square could be seen rising like strange missiles toward the mottled Russian sky.

Imov was writing in a ledger with an old-fashioned fountain pen. The steward withdrew without a word, soundlessly closing the double doors behind him. After a moment Imov looked up, removed his wire-rimmed glasses, and gestured to the single armchair set in front of the desk. Karpov crossed the carpet and seated himself without a word, patiently waiting for the interview to begin.

For a time, Imov regarded him with his slate-gray eyes, which were narrow, slightly elongated. Perhaps he had some Mongol blood in him. In any case he was a warrior, having fought to elevate himself to the presidency, then fought even harder to stay there against several fierce opponents.

Imov was not a large man, but he was impressive just the same. His personality could fill a ballroom when it suited him. Otherwise, he was content to let the stature of his office suffice.

“Colonel Karpov, it strikes me as odd that you have come to see me.” Imov held his fountain pen as if it were a dagger. “You belong to Viktor Cherkesov, a
silovik
who has openly defied Nikolai Patrushev, his opposite number at
FSB
, and by extension me.” He twirled the pen deftly. “Tell me, then, is there a reason why I should listen to what you have to say, since your boss has sent you here instead of coming himself?”

“I did not come at the behest of Viktor Cherkesov. In fact, he has no idea I’m here, and I’d rather it stayed that way.” Karpov placed the cell phone with the incriminating evidence against Bukin on the desk between them and withdrew his hand. “Also, I belong to no man, Cherkesov included.”

Imov’s gaze remained on Karpov’s face. “Indeed. Since Cherkesov stole you away from Nikolai, I must say that’s welcome news.” He tapped the end of the pen against the desktop. “And yet I can’t help but take that statement with a grain of salt.”

Karpov nodded. “Perfectly understandable.”

When his eyes moved to the cell phone, Imov’s followed. “And what have we here, Boris Illyich?”

“Part of FSB-2 is rotten,” Karpov said slowly and distinctly. “It has to be cleansed, the sooner the better.”