The Bourne Objective (3 page)

A nurse applied a surgical pad, which she set in place with surgical tape.

“You shouldn’t feel a thing for another hour or so,” she said. “Be sure to start both your prescriptions before then.”

Oserov unwound his arms and came off the wall. He was still not looking directly at Arkadin, but his right hand was in the pocket of his trousers. Arkadin had no idea what sort of weapon he carried, but he wasn’t about to wait around to find out.

He asked the nurse to help him on with his trousers. When he’d buckled his belt and sat up, she turned to leave. A certain tension came into Oserov’s body. As Arkadin slid off the bed onto his feet he whispered in the nurse’s ear, “I’m an undercover cop. That man over there has been sent by criminals to kill me.” When the nurse’s eyes opened wide, he added, “Just do what I tell you and everything will be fine.”

Keeping her between him and Oserov, Arkadin moved to his right. Oserov matched him step for step.

“You’re heading away from the exit,” the nurse whispered to him.

Arkadin kept going, nearing the column where the surgeon had disinfected his hands from the dispenser. He could tell the nurse was becoming more and more agitated.

“Please,” she whispered, “let me call security.”

They were standing beside the column. “All right,” he said and pushed her so hard she stumbled into a crash cart, sending another nurse and a doctor tumbling. In the confusion he saw a security guard appear from the hallway and Oserov coming toward him, a wicked-looking stiletto in his hand.

Arkadin grabbed the disinfectant dispenser and ripped it free of its brackets. He swung it hard, slamming it into the head of the security guard, who skidded on the linoleum floor as he went down. Tucking the dispenser under one arm, Arkadin vaulted over the guard’s prone body and took off for the hallway.

Oserov was right behind him, gaining with every step. Arkadin realized that he had unconsciously slowed his pace, worried that he would rip out the stitches. Disgusted with himself, he shouldered past a pair of startled interns and put on a burst of speed. The hallway in front of him was clear, he dug in his pocket for his lighter, flicked on the flame. Then he pumped disinfectant out of the dispenser’s nozzle. He could hear the pounding of Oserov’s shoes, almost imagine the quickening of his breath.

All at once he turned and, in one motion, lit the highly flammable sanitizer, thrust out the dispenser, and threw it at his oncoming pursuer. He turned and ran, but the explosion caught him anyway, hurling him halfway down the corridor.

A fire alarm sounded, blasting through the cacophony of shouts, screams, running feet, flailing bodies, and flickering flames. He took off, but slowed to a walk as he rounded a corner. Two security guards and a pack of older doctors pushed by him, nearly knocking him off his feet. Blood started to trickle down his leg, hot and vital. Everything he saw was crystal clear, hard-edged, iridescent, pulsing with life. He held the door open for a woman in a wheelchair who held her baby in her arms. She thanked him and he laughed with such intensity that she laughed, too. At that moment a squad of grim-faced police came off the street through the door he was holding open, rushing right by him.

Y
ES,”
SUPARWITA
SAID
, “that is the ring Holly Marie Moreau’s father gave her.”

“This ring.” Jason Bourne held up the object in question, a simple gold band with engraving around the inside. “I have no memory of it.”

“You have no memory of many things in your past,” Suparwita said, “including Holly Marie Moreau.”

Bourne and Suparwita were sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Balinese shaman’s house deep in the jungle of Karangasem, in southeast Bali. Bourne had returned to the island to trap Noah Perlis, the spy who had murdered Holly years ago. He had pried the ring out of Perlis’s grasp after he had killed him not five miles from this spot.

“Holly Marie’s mother and father arrived here from Morocco when she was five,” Suparwita said. “They had the look of refugees.”

“What were they fleeing from?”

“Difficult to say for certain. If the stories about them are true, they chose an excellent place to hide from religious persecution.” Suparwita was known formally as a
Mangku,
both a high priest and a shaman, but also something more, impossible to express in Western terms. “They wanted protection.”

“Protection?” Bourne frowned. “From what?”

Suparwita was a handsome man of indeterminate age. His skin was a deep nut brown, his smile wide and devastating, revealing two rows of white, even teeth. He was large for a Balinese, and exuded a kind of otherworldly power that fascinated Bourne. His house, an inner sanctum surrounded by a lush, sun-dappled garden and high stucco walls, lay in deepest shadow so that the interior was cool even at noontime. The floor was packed dirt covered by a sisal rug. Here and there odd items of indeterminate nature—pots of herbs, clusters of roots, bouquets of dried flowers pressed into the shape of a fan—sprouted from floor or walls as if alive. The shadows, which filled the corners to overflowing, seemed constantly in motion as if formed from liquid rather than air.

“From Holly’s uncle,” Suparwita said. “It was from him they took the ring in the first place.”

“He knew they stole it?”

“He thought it was lost.” Suparwita cocked his head. “There are men outside.”

Bourne nodded. “We’ll deal with them in a minute.”

“Aren’t you concerned they’ll burst in here, guns drawn?”

“They won’t show themselves until I’ve left here; they want me, not you.” Bourne touched the ring with his forefinger. “Go on.”

Suparwita inclined his head. “They were hiding from Holly’s uncle. He had vowed to bring her back to the family compound in the High Atlas Mountains.”

“They’re Berbers. Of course,
Moreau
means ‘Moor,’ ” Bourne mused. “Why did Holly’s uncle want to bring her back to Morocco?”

Suparwita looked at Bourne for a long time. “I imagine you knew, once.”

“Noah Perlis had the ring last, so he must have murdered Holly to get it.” Bourne took the ring in his hand. “Why did he want it? What’s so important about a wedding ring?”

“That,” Suparwita said, “is a part of the story you were trying to discover.”

“That was some time ago. Now I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Perlis had flats in many cities,” Suparwita said, “but he was based in London, which was where Holly went when she traveled abroad during the eighteen months before she returned to Bali. Perlis must have followed her back here to kill her and obtain the ring for himself.”

“How do you know all this?” Bourne asked.

Suparwita’s face broke into one of his thousand-watt smiles. All at once he looked like the genie conjured up by Aladdin. “I know,” he said, “because you told me.”

S
oraya Moore noticed the differences between the old Central Intelligence under the late Veronica Hart and the new CI under M. Errol Danziger the moment she walked into CI headquarters in Washington, DC. For one thing, security had been beefed up to the point that getting through the various checkpoints felt like infiltrating a medieval fortress. For another, she didn’t recognize a single member of the security personnel on duty. Every face had that hard, beady look only the US military can instill in a human being. She wasn’t surprised by this. After all, before being appointed as
DCI
by the president, M. Errol Danziger had been the NSA’s deputy director of Signals Intelligence, with a long and distinguished career in the armed forces and then in the DoD. He also had a long and distinguished career as a brass-balled sonovabitch. No, what startled her was simply the speed with which the new
DCI
had installed his own people inside CI’s formerly sacrosanct walls.

From the time that it had been the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the agency had been its own domain, entirely free of interference from either the Pentagon or its intelligence arm, the
NSA
. Now, because of the growing power of Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday, CI was being merged with
NSA
, its unique
DNA
being diluted. M. Errol Danziger was now its director, and Danziger was Secretary Halliday’s creature.

Soraya, the director of Typhon, a Muslim-staffed anti-terrorist agency operating under the aegis of CI, considered the changes Danziger had instigated during the several weeks she had been away in Cairo. She felt lucky that Typhon was semi-independent. She reported directly to the
DCI
, bypassing the various directorate heads. She was half Arab and she knew all her people, had in most instances handpicked them. They would follow her through the gates of hell, if she asked it of them. But what about her friends and colleagues inside CI itself? Would they stay or would they go?

She got off at the DCI’s floor, drenched in the eerie green light filtered through bullet- and bombproof glass, and came up against a young man, reed-thin, steely-eyed, with a high-and-tight marine haircut. He was sitting behind a desk, riffling through a stack of papers. The nameplate on his desk read: LT. R.
SIMMONS
READE
.

“Good afternoon, I’m Soraya Moore,” she said. “I have an appointment with the
DCI
.”

Lt. R. Simmons Reade glanced up and gave her a neutral look that nevertheless seemed to hold the hint of a sneer. He wore a blue suit, a starched white shirt, and a red-and-blue regimental striped tie. Without glancing at his computer terminal he said, “You
had
an appointment with Director Danziger. That was fifteen days ago.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I was in the field, cleaning up the loose ends of the mission in northern Iran that had to be—”

The light’s greenish tint made Reade’s face seem longer, sharper, dangerous, almost like a weapon. “You disobeyed a direct order from Director Danziger.”

“The new
DCI
had just been installed,” she said. “He had no way of knowing—”

“And yet Director Danziger knows all he needs to know about you, Ms. Moore.”

Soraya bristled. “What the hell does that mean? And it’s
Director
Moore.”

“Not surprisingly, you’re out of date, Ms. Moore,” Reade said blandly. “You’ve been terminated.”

“What? You’ve got to be joking. I can’t—” Soraya felt as if she were being sucked down a sinkhole that had just appeared beneath her feet. “I demand to see the DCI!”

Reade’s face got even harder, like a pitchman for the “Be All You Can Be” slogan. “As of this moment, your clearance has been revoked. Please surrender your ID, company credit cards, and cell phone.”

Soraya leaned forward, her fists on the sleek desktop. “Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”

“I’m the voice of Director Danziger.”

“I don’t believe a word you say.”

“Your cards won’t work. There’s nowhere to go but out.”

She stood back up. “Tell the
DCI
I’ll be in my office when he decides he has time to debrief me.”

R. Simmons Reade reached down beside his desk and lifted a small, topless cardboard box, which he slid across to her. Soraya looked down and almost choked on her tongue. There, neatly stacked, was every personal item she’d had in her office.

I
can only repeat what you yourself told me.” Suparwita stood up and, with him, Bourne.

“So even then I was concerned with Noah Perlis.” It wasn’t a question and the Balinese shaman didn’t treat it as such. “But why? And what was his connection to Holly Marie Moreau?”

“Whatever the truth of it,” Suparwita said, “it seems likely they met in London.”

“And what of the odd lettering that runs around the inside of the ring?”

“You showed it to me once, hoping I could help. I have no idea what it means.”

“It isn’t any modern language,” Bourne said, still racking his damaged memory for details.

Suparwita took a step toward him and lowered his voice until it was just above a whisper. Nevertheless, it penetrated into Bourne’s mind like the sting of a wasp.

“As I said, you were born in December, Siwa’s month.” He pronounced the god Shiva’s name as all Balinese did. “Further, you were born on Siwa’s day: the last day of the month, which is both the ending and the beginning. Do you understand? You are destined to die and be born again.”

“I already did that eight months ago when Arkadin shot me.”

Suparwita nodded gravely. “Had I not given you a draft of the resurrection lily beforehand, it’s very likely you would have died from that wound.”

“You saved me,” Bourne said. “Why?”

Suparwita gave him another of his thousand-watt grins. “We are linked, you and I.” He shrugged. “Who can say how or why?”

Bourne, needing to turn to practical matters, said, “There are two of them outside, I checked before I came in.”

“And yet you led them here.”

Now it was Bourne’s turn to grin. He lowered his voice even further. “All part of the plan, my friend.”

Suparwita raised a hand. “Before you carry out your plan, there is something you must know and something I must teach you.”

He paused long enough for Bourne to wonder what was on his mind. He knew the shaman well enough to understand when something grave was about to be discussed. He’d seen that expression just before Suparwita had fed him the resurrection lily concoction in this very room some months ago.

“Listen to me.” There was no smile on the shaman’s face now. “Within the year you will die, you will need to die in order to save those around you, everyone you love or care about.”

Despite all his training, all his mental discipline, Bourne felt a wave of coldness sweep through him. It was one thing to put yourself in harm’s way, to cheat death over and over, often by a hairbreadth, but it was quite another to be told in unequivocal terms that you had less than a year to live. On the other hand, he had the choice to laugh it off—he was a Westerner, after all, and there were so many belief systems in the world that it was easy enough to dismiss 99 percent of them. And yet, looking into Suparwita’s eyes, he could see the truth. As before, the shaman’s extraordinary powers had allowed him to see the future, or at least Bourne’s future.
“We are linked, you and I.”
He had saved Bourne’s life before, it would be foolish to doubt him now.