The Bourne Deception (53 page)

Who knew her better,” said a voice in his head, “you or me?”

Perlis opened his eyes and, through the pain dizzying him, saw Jason Bourne.

“You! How did you know I’d be here?”

Bourne smiled. “This is your last stop, Noah. The end of the line.”

Perlis glanced around. “That girl—I saw a girl.”

“Holly Marie Moreau.”

Perlis saw his gun lying on the ground and lunged for it.

Bourne kicked him so hard, the crack of two ribs echoed off the tree branches. Perlis groaned.

“Tell me about Holly.”

Perlis stared up at Bourne. He could not keep the grimace of pain off his face, but at least he didn’t cry out. Then a thought occurred to him.

“You don’t remember her, do you?” Perlis tried to laugh. “Oh, this is too good!”

Bourne knelt down beside him. “Whatever I can’t remember you’re going to tell me.”

“Fuck you!”

Now Perlis did cry out as Bourne’s thumbs pressed hard into his eyeballs.

“Now look!” he commanded.

Perlis blinked through eyes streaming with tears and saw the girl-shadow climbing down from one of the trees.

“Look at her!” Bourne said. “Look what you’ve made of her.”

“Holly?” Perlis couldn’t believe it. Through watering eyes he saw a lithe shape, Holly’s shape. “That isn’t Holly.” But who else could it be? His heart hammered in his chest.

“What happened?” Bourne said. “Tell me about you and Holly.”

“I found her wandering around Venice. She was lost, but not in the geographic sense.” Perlis heard his own voice thin and attenuated, as if it were being transmitted through a poor cell connection. What was he doing?

That switch had been thrown, the energy flowing out of him, just like these words he’d kept inside himself for years. “I asked her if she wanted to make some quick money and she said, Why not? She had no idea what she was getting into, but she didn’t seem to care. She was bored, she needed something new, something different. She wanted her blood to flow again.”

“So you’re saying all you did was give her what she wanted.”

“That’s right!” Perlis said. “That’s all I ever gave anybody.”

“You gave Veronica Hart what she wanted?”

“She was a Black River operative, she belonged to me.”

“Like a head of cattle.”

Perlis turned his head away. He was staring at the girl-shadow, who stood watching him, as if in judgment of his life. Why should he care? he wondered. He had nothing to be ashamed of. And yet he couldn’t look away, he couldn’t rid himself of the notion that the girl-shadow was Holly Marie Moreau, that she knew every secret he had chained in the prison of his heart.

“Like Holly.”

“What?”

“Did Holly belong to you, too?”

“She took my money, didn’t she?”

“What did you pay her to do?”

“I needed to get close to someone, and I knew I couldn’t do it myself.”

“A man,” Bourne said. “A young man.”

Perlis nodded. Now that he’d embarked on this path he seemed to need to keep going. “Jaime Hererra.”

“Wait a minute. Don Fernando Hererra’s son?”

“I sent her to London. In those days, he wasn’t yet working in his father’s firm. He frequented a club—gambling was a weakness he couldn’t yet fight. Even though he was underage, he didn’t look it, and no one challenged his fake ID.” Perlis paused for a moment, struggling to breathe. His left arm, underneath his body, moved slightly as he tried to ease his suffering.

“Funny thing, Holly looked so innocent, but she was damn good at what I’d sent her to do. Within a week she and Jaime were lovers, ten days after that she moved into his flat.”

“And then?”

Perlis appeared to be having an increasingly difficult time catching his breath. He continued to stare, not at Bourne, but at the girl-shadow, which seemed to him all that was left of the world.

“Is she real?”

“It depends what you mean by real,” Bourne said. “Go on, what did Jaime Hererra have that you wanted Holly to steal?”

Perlis said nothing, but Bourne saw him curl the fingers of his right hand, pushing them into the leafy forest floor.

“What are you trying to hide, Noah?”

Perlis’s left hand, which had been lying under him, swung out, a switchblade biting through Bourne’s clothes into the flesh of his side. Perlis began to twist the knife, trying to find a way through muscle, sinew, and bone to one of Bourne’s vital organs. Bourne struck him a horrific blow to the head, but Perlis, with a burst of superhuman strength, only plunged the knife in deeper.

Bourne took Perlis’s head between his hands and, with a powerful twist, snapped his neck. At once, the life force ebbed and Perlis’s eyes grew dim and all-seeing. There was a bit of foam at the corner of his mouth, either from his excessive effort or from the madness that had begun to infect him at the end of his days.

Gasping, Bourne let his head go and drew out the blade from his side. He started to bleed, but not badly. He grabbed Perlis’s right hand and dug the fist out of the dirt. One by one, he opened the fingers. He’d expected there to be something held against the palm—whatever it was that Perlis had taken back from Holly—but there was nothing. Circling his index finger, the one he’d been so anxious to hide, was a ring. It was impossible to slip off, so Bourne used the switchblade to cut off the finger. What he held up into the emerald and sapphire light was a plain gold band, not unlike ten million wedding rings all around the planet. Could this be the reason Perlis had killed Holly? Why? What might have made it worth a young woman’s life?

He turned it over and over, tumbling it between his fingers. And then he saw the writing on the inside. It went all the way around the circumference. At first he thought it was Cyrillic, then possibly an ancient Sumerian language, long-dead and forgotten except by the most esoteric specialists, but in the end the characters were unfathomable. A code, then, surely.

As Bourne continued to hold the ring aloft, he became aware of the girlshadow approaching. She stopped a number of paces away, and because he could see the fear on her face, he rose with a grunt of pain and walked over to her.

“You’ve been very brave, Kasih,” he told the Balinese girl who had led him to the bullet casing in the village of Tenganan, where he’d been shot.

“You’re bleeding.” She pressed a handful of aromatic leaves she had gathered to his side.

He took her hand and together they began their trek back to her family compound at the top of the terraced rice paddy not far from Tenganan. His free hand pressed the poultice of herbs to his fresh wound, and he could feel the blood coagulating, the pain receding. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,”

he said.

“Not when you’re here.” Kasih threw one last glance over her shoulder.

“Is the demon dead?” she asked.

“Yes,” Bourne said, “the demon is dead.”

“And he won’t come back?”

“No, Kasih, he won’t come back.”

She smiled, content. But even as he said it, he knew it for a lie.