The Bourne Objective (Jason Bourne 8)

Bourne nodded. “He was using his company, Air Afrika, to pick up and deliver the contraband.”

The banker’s eyes clouded over. “Who was she working for?”

Bourne lifted his glass to his lips, watching Diego’s face carefully without seeming to do so. “A man by the name of Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.” He took another sip of the aged tequila. “Do you know him?”

Diego Hererra frowned. “Why do you ask?”

“Because,” Bourne said slowly and distinctly, “I want to kill him.”

He’s alive, Leonid Arkadin thought. Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov didn’t burn to death in that Bangalore hospital corridor. Fuck me, he’s still alive.

He was staring down at a surveillance photo of a man the right side of whose face was horribly disfigured. But I did him some serious hurt, he thought, touching his own leg wound, which was healing nicely, that’s for certain.

He had installed himself in an old convent, dusty and dry as an outdated philosophical text, risen on the outskirts of Puerto Peñasco, a coastal town in the northwest of the Mexican state of Sonora. But then virtually everything in Puerto Peñasco was outdated. An unlovely industrial sprawl, it was redeemed by its broad white beach and warm water.

Puerto Peñasco was off the edge of most people’s maps, but that was only one of the reasons he had chosen it. For another, at this time of the year college students poured across the border from Arizona to take advantage of the surf, the high-rise hotels, and a police force that looked the other way as long as sufficient numbers of American dollars changed hands. With so many young people around, Arkadin felt relatively safe; even if by some means Oserov and his hit squad managed to find him, as they had in Bangalore, they’d stick out like monks on spring break.

How Oserov had tracked him down in India was still a vexing mystery. Yes, Gustavo Moreno’s laptop was safe and he’d been able to reconnect with the remote server that contained the contracts with his arms clients, but half a dozen of his men were gone and, worse, his vaunted security clearly had a hole. Someone within his organization was funneling information to Maslov.

He was about to go down to the beach when his cell phone rang, and because reception was spotty in this odd backwater, he stayed where he was, staring out at tiers of clouds in the west lit like neon signs.

“Arkadin.”

It was Boris Karpov; he felt a certain satisfaction. “Did you keep your destination to yourself?” The pregnant pause was all he needed. “Don’t tell me, no one was there, everything was cleaned out.”

“Who are they, Arkadin? Who are Maslov’s moles inside my organization?”

Arkadin mused for a moment, letting the colonel feel the sharpness of the hook. “I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that, Boris Illyich.”

“What do you mean?”

“You should have gone alone, you should have believed what I told you,” Arkadin said. “Now your end of the bargain has become so much more complicated.”

“What bargain?” Karpov asked.

“Take the next international flight you can get on.” Arkadin watched the sunset splash the clouds with more and more color until they became so supersaturated, they made his eyes throb. Still, he refused to look away, the beauty was overwhelming. “When you arrive at LAX—I assume you know what that is.”

“Of course. It’s the international airport in Los Angeles.”

“When you get to LAX call the number I’m about to give you.”

“But—”

“You want the moles, Boris Illyich, so let’s not equivocate. Just do it.”

Arkadin closed the connection and walked across the sand. Bending over, he rolled up his trousers. He could already feel the wavelets break over his bare feet.

Arkadin may not have killed Tracy himself,” Bourne said, “but he’s the one responsible for her death.”

Diego Hererra sat back for a moment, his glass balanced on one knee as he held it reflectively. “You fell in love with her, didn’t you?” He held up a hand, palm outward. “Don’t even bother answering, everyone fell in love with Tracy, without even trying she had that effect.” He nodded as if to himself. “Speaking for myself, I think that was the part that made it the most devastating. Some women, you know, they’re trying so hard you can practically taste the desperation, and what a turnoff that is. But with Tracy it was another matter entirely. She had…” He snapped his fingers several times. “… what do you call it?”

“Confidence.”

“Yes, but more than that.”

“Self-possession.”

Diego Hererra considered this for a moment, then nodded vigorously. “Yes, that’s it, she was almost preternaturally self-possessed.”

“Except when she got airsick,” Bourne said, thinking of how she had vomited on the horrendous flight from Madrid to Seville.

This caused Diego to throw his head back and laugh. “She hated planes, all right—pity she was on them so often.” He took some more tequila into his mouth, savoring the taste before swallowing. Then he put aside his glass. “I imagine you want to get on with the posthumous assignment our mutual friend charged you with.”

“The sooner the better, I suppose.” Bourne rose and, together with Diego Hererra, went out of his office, along several corridors, hushed and shadowed, down a long ramp that ended in the open vault. Bourne took out his key, but he saw that he had no need of telling Diego the box number because the banker went right to it. Bourne inserted the key into one of the locks and Diego put his master key into the other.

“Together on the count of three.”

They both turned their keys in concert, and the small metal door opened. Diego removed the long box and took it over to a row of small curtained alcoves that ran along one side of the wall. Setting the box down on a ledge inside one of the alcoves, he said, “It’s all yours, Señor Stone.” He gestured. “Please ring this bell when you’re finished and I’ll personally fetch you.”

“Thank you, Señor Hererra.” Bourne entered the alcove, closed the curtain, and sat in the wooden armchair. For a moment, while he listened for Diego Hererra’s soft footfalls receding into the distance, he did nothing. Then, leaning forward, he opened the safe-deposit box. Inside was a small book and nothing more. Lifting it out, Bourne opened it to the first page. It seemed to be a kind of diary or, reading a bit farther, a history of sorts, accumulated one incident at a time, from various sources, it appeared. Bourne came to the first of the names and the hairs on his arms stirred. Involuntarily, he glanced around the cubicle, though there was no one around but him. And yet there was a distinct stirring, a restless energy as the ghosts and perhaps goblins emerged from Perlis’s very private notes, accumulating around his feet like starving dogs.

Leonid Arkadin, Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov—or Slava, as Perlis called him—and Tracy Atherton. With a line of sweat appearing at his hairline, Bourne began to read.

Damp sand and salt water squooshed between Arkadin’s toes, girls in tiny bikinis and thin dudes in surfer shorts down to their bony knees played volleyball or jogged up and down the beach, just above the high-tide line, beer cans clutched in their hands.

Arkadin was brimming with rage at the corner Maslov and, especially, Oserov had backed him into. He had no doubt that Oserov had convinced Maslov to go after him directly. A frontal assault wasn’t Maslov’s style; he was more cautious than that, especially in times so fraught with danger for him and the Kazanskaya. The government was gunning for him, just waiting for him to make a mistake. So far, with a combination of indebted friends and Teflon guile, he had managed to stay one step ahead of the Kremlin—neither its inquisitors nor its prosecutors had been able to manufacture charges against him that would stick. Maslov still had too much dirt on enough key federal judges to stave off those forays.

Without having thought about it consciously, Arkadin had waded out into the ocean, so that the water rose above his knees, soaking his trousers. He didn’t care; Mexico afforded a breadth

of freedom he’d never before tasted. Maybe it was the slower pace or a lifestyle where pleasure came from fishing or watching the sunrise or drinking tequila long into the night while you danced with a dark-eyed young woman whose multicolored skirts lifted with each twirl she made around you. Money—at least the amounts of money he was used to—was irrelevant here. People made a modest living and were content.

It was at that moment that he saw her, or thought he saw her, emerging from the surf like Venus lifted on her gleaming pink shell. The red sun was in his eyes and he was obliged to squint, to shade his eyes with one hand, but the woman he saw emerging was Tracy Atherton: long and sleek, blond and blue-eyed with the widest smile he’d ever seen. And yet it couldn’t be Tracy, because she was dead.

He watched her coming toward him. At one point she turned and looked directly at him and the resemblance fell apart. He turned away into the last of the canted sunlight.

Arkadin had met Tracy in St. Petersburg, at the Hermitage Museum. He had been in Moscow two years, working for Maslov. She was there to view the czarist treasures, while he was there for an onerous rendezvous with Oserov. But then all his meetings with Oserov were onerous, often ending in violence. Maslov’s chief assassin at the time had killed a child—a little boy no more than six years old—in cold blood. For this obscenity, Arkadin had beaten his face to a pulp and dislocated his shoulder. He would have killed him outright if his friend Tarkanian hadn’t intervened. Ever since that incident the resentment between the two men continued to build until most recently igniting in Bangalore. But Oserov, like a vampire, could not be easily killed. With an ironic laugh, Arkadin decided that next time he’d pound a wooden stake through Oserov’s heart. That Dimitri Maslov had continually forced them to work together, Arkadin was convinced, was a deliberate act of sadism for which Maslov would one day pay.

That icy winter’s morning in St. Petersburg he had arrived early to ensure that Oserov hadn’t set up some arcane form of trap. Instead he found a tall slim blonde with huge cornflower-blue eyes and an even wider smile contemplating a portrait of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. The blonde wore an ankle-length deerskin coat with a high collar dyed an improbable sky blue, beneath which, just peeking out, was a blood-red silk shirt. Without preamble she asked him what he thought of the portrait.

Arkadin, who had taken absolutely no notice of the painting or of anything else of a decorative nature in the vast rooms, peered at the portrait and said, “That was painted in 1758. What possible meaning could it have for me?”

The blonde turned, contemplating him with the same disarming intensity she had given to the painting. “This is the history of your country.” She pointed with a slim, long-fingered hand. “Louis Tocque, the man who painted this, was one of the leading artists of the day. He traveled all the way from Paris to Russia at the behest of Elizabeth Petrovna to paint her.”

Arkadin, ignoramus that he was, shrugged. “So?”

The blonde’s smile widened even more. “It’s a measure of Russia’s world status and power that he came. In those days France was quite enamored with Russia and vice versa. This painting should make all Russians proud.”

Arkadin, about to make an acerbic retort, instead bit his tongue and returned his gaze to the regal woman in the painting.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” the blonde said.

“Well, I’ve never met anyone remotely like her. She doesn’t seem real.”

“And yet she was.” The blonde made a gesture as if to guide his eyes back to the empress. “Imagine yourself in the past, imagine yourself in the painting standing next to her.”

And now, as if looking at the empress for the first time, or through the blonde’s eyes, Arkadin heard himself agree. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose she is beautiful.”

“Ah, then my time here has been a success.” The blonde’s smile hadn’t faded one iota. She extended her hand toward him. “I’m Tracy Atherton, by the way.”

For a moment Arkadin considered giving a false name, which he did almost by rote. Instead he’d said, “Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”

The air had suddenly been perfumed with the tincture of history, a spicy, mysterious scent of rose and cedar. Much later he’d worked out what it was that drew him as well as shamed him. He felt like a student, too ignorant or truant to have learned his lessons. Around her he’d always felt his lack of formal education, like a nakedness. And yet, even from that first meeting, he sensed a use for her, that he could absorb what she had learned. He learned from her the value of knowledge, but part of him never forgave her for the way she made him feel, and he used her mercilessly, treated her cruelly, as he bound her ever closer to him.

This clarity came later, of course. At the moment all he felt was an onrush of anger and, without a word, he whirled away from her, stalking off to find Oserov, whose company, for the moment, seemed preferable to this creature’s.

But finding Oserov did nothing to allay his sudden discomfort, so he insisted on changing protocol, removing them from the Hermitage altogether. They walked out onto Millionnaya Street, where he found a café before their lips and cheeks grew too chapped from the icy wind.

Snow had begun to fall with an odd dry rustle like predators snuffling in the underbrush, and Arkadin would never forget how Tracy Atherton had materialized out of it. Her deerskin coat swayed about her ankles like icy surf.

In those days, directly after Dimitri Maslov had sent Oserov and Mischa Tarkanian to liberate him from the prison of his hometown of Nizhny Tagil, Oserov was his superior, a fact that Oserov lorded over him. Oserov was in the middle of lecturing him on how to properly kill a politician, the reason for their trip to St. Petersburg. This particular politician had stupidly aligned himself against Maslov, and so had to be eliminated as quickly and efficiently as possible. Arkadin knew this, and Oserov knew he knew it. Nevertheless, the shit gleefully drove home his points with mind-numbing repetitiveness, as if Arkadin were a backward and insolent five-year-old.

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 ee

rie 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.

The 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.