The Bourne Objective (2 page)

Answering fire started up, sparking against the metal rungs as he spidered his way down. Then abruptly the firing stopped, and risking a glance upward, he saw at once that one of the surviving Russians had crawled out of the open hatch and swung down onto the vertical ladder, coming after him.

Arkadin paused long enough to raise his weapon, but before he could fire the Russian let go of his hold and, plummeting down, grabbed onto him, almost ripping his arms out of their sockets. He swung wildly with the added weight and the momentum from the falling body, and in that moment the Russian swatted the weapon out of his hand. It went banging down the shaft, clanging and caroming this way and that. At the same time, the elevator resumed its descent.

The Russian had one hand pressed against Arkadin’s throat, while the other ripped a K-Bar knife out of its sheath. The Russian pushed Arkadin’s chin up, exposing his throat. The thick, wicked blade arced through the air and Arkadin drove one knee upward. The Russian’s body bent like a bow, intersecting with the bottom of the elevator as it came down.

Even braced as he was, Arkadin was almost dragged into the side of the elevator as the Russian’s body was ripped from him. For a moment he dangled upside down, and only his ankles hooked through a rung of the ladder saved him. He let himself swing while he oriented himself, then he reached out, his powerful hands gripping the ladder as he unhooked his ankles and swung down until he was right-side up again. The strain on his shoulders was enormous, but this time he was prepared and did not falter. His feet found a rung below him and he resumed his downward climb.

Below him the elevator continued its descent to the ground floor, but no one poked their head out of the open hatch. Landing on the roof, he peered cautiously inside. He counted two bodies; neither one was left alive. He dropped down, stripped one of the corpses of its weapon, then hit the
BASEMENT
button.

T
he basement of the tower was a vast, fluorescent-lighted parking garage. It was not, however, well used, since most people who worked in the building couldn’t afford cars. Instead they called taxi services to take them to and from work.

Apart from his own
BMW
, two gleaming Mercedeses, a Toyota Qualis, and a Honda City, the garage was bereft of vehicles. Arkadin checked them; all were empty. Avoiding his car, he broke into the Toyota and after several moments of fiddling with the electronics managed to defeat the starter cutoff switch. Settling himself behind the wheel, he put the car in gear, drove across the bare concrete and onto the up-ramp to the street.

With a spray of sparks from the undercarriage Arkadin bounced out at the rear of the building onto the roughly paved street. Directly ahead of him lay the construction pit. So many fires flared among the rubble and the gigantic machines, the entire site seemed in danger of bursting into flame.

To either side of him he heard the throaty roar of powerful motorcycle engines as two Russians rode their mechanical beasts toward him in a pincer movement. It seemed clear that they had been waiting for him at either end of the street so that no matter which way he turned, left or right, they could head him off. Pressing the accelerator to the floor, he drove straight ahead, crossing the street, and crashed through the flimsy fence that encircled the building site.

Immediately the Toyota’s nose dipped down as the car descended almost precipitously into the pit. The shocks took most of the force of its landing, but Arkadin still bounced in his seat as the car hit bottom and, tires squealing, leveled out. Behind him the two motorcycles lifted into the air as they followed him into the pit—landing, bouncing—and took off after him.

He headed directly toward one of the fires, scattering vagrants as he went. Passing through the flames, he veered hard to his left, threading the proverbial needle between two huge machines and—just managing to avoid one of the slicks of greasy garbage—turned hard right toward another fire and another group of lost souls.

Glancing in his side mirror, he saw one of the motorcycles still on his tail. Had he lost the other one? Approaching the flames, he waited until the last minute, when the glare was at its height, then jammed on the brakes. As people ran in every direction, the motorcycle, with its driver half blinded, plowed into the rear of the Toyota, launching the Russian off the seat. Tumbling head-over-heels, he smashed into the top of the Toyota, bounced, and slid off.

Arkadin was already out of the car. He heard the rider groaning, trying to get up off the dirt, and kicked him hard in the side of the head. He was on his way back to the car when the shots struck the fender near him. He ducked; the assault rifle he’d pulled off the dead man in the elevator lay on the passenger’s seat out of reach. He tried to crab-walk to the driver’s door, but each time he was driven back by shots that plunged into the Toyota’s side.

He lay down, scrambled underneath the car as the syrupy, pungent air struck him another hammer blow. Emerging on the opposite side, he hauled open the rear door of the Toyota, and almost got his head shot off. He dived back under the car to regroup and within seconds realized that he had been given no choice but to abandon the car. Understanding that this was what his adversary wanted, he determined how to neutralize, or at the very least minimize, the mounted Russian’s advantage.

For a moment he closed his eyes, picturing where the Russian cyclist must be by the direction from which the bullets came. Then, turning ninety degrees, he pulled himself out from under the Toyota by hooking his fingers around the front bumper.

Bullets caused the windshield to shatter, but due to the safety glass it held together in a spiderweb so complex that it turned the windshield opaque, cutting off his pursuer’s view of his escape. Down low was the dense, stinking mass of the homeless, downtrodden, disaffected. He saw their faces as he ran, zigzagging madly through the morass of skeletal humanity, pale as ash. Then he heard the guttural cough of the motorcycle engine through the chatter of Hindi and Urdu. These goddamn people were moving like a sea, parting as he scrambled through their midst, and it was this movement that the Russian was following like the ping on a sonar screen.

In the near distance he could make out a support structure of metal beams attached to the deep-set concrete footings, and he ran toward them. With a throaty roar, the motorcycle broke free of the surf of people, zooming after him, but by that time he had vanished into the jungle gym structure.

The Russian slowed as he approached the beams. To his left was a temporary fence of corrugated iron, already rusting in the gluey Indian air, so he turned to the right and began a tour around the side of the metal beams. He peered down into the darkness of the abyss into which the massive footings had been set like molars. His AK-47 was at the ready.

He was halfway along when Arkadin, lying along an upper beam like a leopard, leapt onto him. As the Russian’s body twisted backward, his hand reflexively squeezed the throttle, and the motorcycle surged forward, its balance off as the momentum of Arkadin’s leap tipped its front end up. The chassis accelerated as it spun out from under them, and they were both thrown against the metal beams. The Russian’s head struck the middle of a beam, and the AK-47 flew out of his hand. Arkadin tried to lunge at him but discovered that a shard of metal had penetrated the flesh at the back of his thigh all the way to the bone. He was impaled. With a violent wrench that momentarily took his breath away, he pulled the shard out of his leg. The Russian rushed him while he was still seeing sparks in front of his eyes and his breath felt like steam in his lungs. He was pounded by a flurry of blows to the side of the head, his ribs, his sternum before he swung the metal shard around, driving it into the Russian’s heart.

The Russian’s mouth opened in surprise, his eyes looked at Arkadin with incomprehension, just before they rolled up in his head and he sank to the blood-soaked ground. Arkadin turned and walked toward the ramp to the street, but he felt as if he had been injected with a paralytic. His legs were stiff, barely responding to commands from a brain that seemed increasingly encased in sludge. He felt cold and unfocused. He tried to catch his breath, couldn’t, and fell over.

All around him, it seemed, fires burned, the city was on fire, the night sky was the color of blood, pulsing to the beat of his laboring heart. He saw the eyes of those he’d killed, red as the eyes of rats, crowding in on him.
I don’t want to share the darkness with you,
he thought as he felt himself about to plunge into unconsciousness.

A
nd perhaps it was this thought alone that caused him to pause, to take deep breaths, and then, in that moment of repose or weakness, to improbably accept water from those crowding around him, who, he saw now, weren’t the familiar dead, but the unfamiliar living. Filthy, ragged, and without hope they might be, but they recognized an underdog when they saw one, and this brought out their innate altruism. Instead of picking him clean like a flock of vultures, they had taken him into their hearts. Isn’t it the downtrodden, the ones who can least afford to give up anything, who are more willing to share what they have than the millionaires inhabiting the gated towers on the other side of the city? This was Arkadin’s thought as he took their gift of water, in return giving them a wad of rupees from his pocket. Not long after, he felt strong enough to call the local hospital. Then he ripped off an arm of his shirt and wrapped it around his leg to stanch the bleeding in his thigh. There was a pack of boys, runaways or children whose parents had been killed in one of the many sectarian skirmishes that from time to time swept through the neighborhoods, a whirlwind of hate and blood. They watched him as if he were the hero of a video game, as if he were not quite real. They were afraid of him, but they were also drawn like moths to a flame. He motioned to them and they surged forward as if each one were a leg of some giant insect. They had the Russian’s motorcycle in their midst, and he saw that they had it surrounded, that they were protecting it.

“I won’t take the bike away from you, it’s yours,” he said in Hindi. “Help me out to the street.”

By then the sound of a siren had become a wail, and with the lost boys supporting him he limped out of the pit into the arms of the medical team, who bundled him into the back of the ambulance, where they laid him down, one of them taking his pulse, checking his heart, while the other began to assess the wound.

Ten minutes later he was being wheeled into the emergency room on a collapsible gurney, then transferred facedown to one of the ER’s beds. The arctic air woke him as if from a high fever. He watched the comings and goings in the ER as he was given an injection of local anesthetic, then a surgeon washed his hands in the disinfectant gel from a dispenser affixed to a column, snapped on gloves, and began the process of cleaning, disinfecting, and suturing the wound.

The procedure allowed Arkadin time to reflect on the raid. He knew that it was Dimitri Ilyinovich Maslov who had ordered the assault. Maslov was the head of the Kazanskaya, the Moscow mafia, known colloquially as the
grupperovka.
Maslov was his onetime employer, from whom Arkadin had taken the illegal arms business. This business was critical to Maslov because the Kremlin was coming down hard on the
grupperovka,
slowly yet inexorably stripping the families of the power base they had built up since glasnost. But over the years Dimitri Maslov had proved himself different from the heads of the other
grupperovka,
who were all either losing power or already in prison. Maslov prospered, even in these difficult times, because he still had the political muscle to defy the authorities or at least keep them at bay. He was a dangerous man and an even more dangerous enemy.

Yes,
Arkadin thought now, as the surgeon cut the suture cords,
Maslov surely ordered the raid, but he didn’t plan it.
Maslov had his hands full with political enemies closing in on all sides; besides, it was a long time since he’d been on the streets and he’d lost that keen edge only the streets can provide. Who, Arkadin asked himself, had he given this job to?

At that moment, as if by divine intervention, he received his answer because, there, standing in the shadows of the ER, unseen or ignored by the hurrying staff and groaning patients, was Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov, Maslov’s new underboss. He and Oserov had a long, vengeful history reaching back to Arkadin’s home city of Nizhny Tagil; nothing but hatred and venom lay between them. Still vivid in his memory was their most recent encounter—a nasty incident in the highlands of northern Azerbaijan where he was training a raiding party for Maslov while scheming to double-cross him. He’d called Oserov out, almost beaten him to a pulp—the latest in a long line of violent responses to the atrocities Oserov had perpetrated many years ago in Arkadin’s hometown. Of course Oserov was the perfect man to plan the raid, which, he was certain, included his own death whether or not Maslov had ordered it.

Oserov, who stood in the shadows, arms crossed over his chest, appeared to be looking at nothing, but in fact he was observing Arkadin with the single-minded concentration of a hawk tracking its prey. The face was pocked and scarred, the knotty evidence of murders, street brawls, and near-death encounters, and the corners of his wide, thin-lipped mouth turned up in the familiar hateful smile that seemed both condescending and obscene.

Arkadin was shackled by his trousers. They were rucked around his ankles because it had been too awkward to get them off him completely. He felt no pain in his thigh, of course, but he didn’t know how the shot he’d received would affect his ability to sprint or run.

“That’s it,” he heard the surgeon say. “Keep the wound well dry for at least a week. I’m prescribing an antibiotic and a painkiller. You can pick them up from the pharmacy on your way out. You’re lucky, the wound was clean-edged and you got here before any infection could set in.” Then the surgeon laughed. “No marathons for a while, though.”