The Bourne Objective (32 page)

The elder Hererra paused for a moment. He was a handsome man, with a leonine shock of white hair, worn long over his collar in the current Catalan style, but he appeared ashen beneath his deep outdoorsman’s tan. “Did you know my son, Señor Marks?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t have that pleasure, sir.”

Hererra nodded somewhat absently. “It seemed Diego had very few male friends.” His mouth twitched in a parody of a smile. “His preference was for women.”

Marks took a step forward and held his creds up for the other to see. “Sir, I know this is a difficult time, and I apologize in advance if I’m intruding, but I need to talk to you.”

Hererra continued to look through Marks as if he hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Then he seemed to focus. “Do you know something about his death?”

“This isn’t a conversation for the street, is it, Señor Hererra.”

“No, of course not.” Hererra’s head twitched. “Please forgive my lack of manners, Señor Marks.” Then he gestured. He had very large, square hands, the capable hands of a skilled laborer. “Come inside and we’ll talk.”

Marks went up the steps, across the threshold, and into the late Diego Hererra’s house. He heard the older man coming in after him, the door close behind him, and then there was a knife blade across his throat, and Diego Hererra’s father was close behind him, holding him in an astonishingly powerful grip.

“Now, you sonovabitch,” Hererra said, “you’ll tell me everything you know about my son’s murder, or by Christ’s tears I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear.”

B
UD
HALLIDAY
SAT
in a semicircular banquette at the White Knights Lounge, a bar in an out-of-the-way area of suburban Maryland where he often came to unwind. He nursed a bourbon-and-water while he tried to clear his mind of the clutter that had built up over the long day.

His parents were Mainline Philadelphians who could trace their respective families back to Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, respectively. They had been childhood sweethearts who, with the predictability of their ilk, were divorced. His mother, a society doyenne, now lived in Newport, Rhode Island. His father, plagued with emphysema from years of inveterate smoking, rattled around the family mansion, trailed by oxygen tanks and a pair of full-time Haitian nurses. Halliday saw neither of them. He’d turned his back on the hermetically sealed golden glow of their society world when, to their horror and mortification, he had gleefully enlisted in the marines at the age of eighteen. While at boot camp he had imagined his mother fainting at the news, which gave him a great measure of satisfaction. As for his father, he’d probably chewed off the end of his cigar, blamed his wife for his disappointment, and gone off to the insurance company he owned, and which he ran with ruthless and appalling success.

Finding that he’d finished his bourbon, Halliday flagged down the waiter and ordered another.

The twins arrived at the same time as his drink, and he ordered them chocolate martinis. They sat down on either side of him. One was dressed in green, the other in blue. The one in green was a redhead, the other blond. Today, at least. They were like that, Michelle and Mandy. They liked to play off their eerie echoes of each other, but at the same time asserting their differences. They were tall, almost six feet, with figures as lush and luscious as their lips. They could have been models, or possibly even actresses, given the expert way they played roles, but were neither vain nor empty-headed. Michelle was a theoretical mathematician, and Mandy was a microbiologist at the
CDC
. Michelle, who could have had her pick of chairs at any of the top universities in the country, instead worked for DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—cooking up new cryptographic algorithms that could foil even the fastest computer, even used in tandem. Her latest used heuristic techniques, meaning it learned from every attempt to break it, as if it were a self-educating entity, changing on the fly. It required a physical key to unlock it.

Never had two more fertile minds been wrapped in such delectable and erotic packages, Halliday thought as the waiter set their chocolate martinis in front of them. They all raised their glasses in a silent toast to another night together. When they were off duty, the girls loved sex, chocolate, and sex, in that order. But they weren’t off duty yet.

“What’s your assessment of the ring?” Halliday asked Michelle.

“It would help,” she said, “if you had given me the real thing instead of a set of photos.”

“Given that I didn’t, what’s your best guess?”

Michelle took a sip of her drink as if needing time to set her thoughts in order or to figure out how to express them to Halliday, a mental midget compared with her and her twin.

“It seems likely to me that the ring is a physical key.”

Halliday got interested in a hurry. He was keeping a sharp lookout. “Meaning?”

“Just what I said. It may be the algorithm I’m working on, but the odd inscription on the inside of the ring appears to me to be like the ridges of a key.” Responding to Halliday’s quizzical look, she changed tack. Taking out a felt-tip pen, she drew on Halliday’s napkin.

“Here we have a common key to a lock. It has ridges cut into it that are unique to it. Most common locks have twelve pins inside the lock cylinder, six upper and six lower. When the key is inserted in the cylinder, the ridges raise the upper pins above the shear line, allowing the shaft inside the cylinder to turn and the lock to open.

“So now consider each ideogram of the engraving inside the ring as a notch. Slip the ring into the right lock and presto, Open Sesame.”

“Is this possible?” he asked.

“Anything’s possible, Bud. You know that.”

Halliday stared at her drawing, suddenly galvanized. Her theory took a big leap of faith to believe, but the woman was a stone-cold genius. He couldn’t afford to dismiss any theory she put forward no matter how loopy it might sound on first blush.

“What’s in store for us tonight?” Mandy asked, clearly bored with this topic.

“I’m hungry.” Michelle pocketed her pen. “I haven’t eaten a thing all day, except for a Snickers I found in my drawer, and that was so stale the chocolate had turned white.”

“Finish your drink,” Halliday said.

She feigned a pout. “You know how I get when I drink on an empty stomach.”

Halliday chuckled. “So I’ve been told.”

“Well, it’s true and then some,” Mandy said. And in another voice entirely, deeper, with plenty of vibrato, a singer’s voice: “Dat li’l girl, she get freak-eee!”

“Whereas dis one,” Michelle said in precisely the same voice, “she already got her freak on!”

Both of them threw their heads back and laughed for precisely the same amount of time. Halliday, watching them, turning his head from side to side, felt a throbbing in his forehead, as if he were observing a tennis match from too close.

“Ah, there you are!” Mandy said as their foursome was about to be completed.

“We thought you might not be coming,” Michelle said.

Halliday palmed his diagram-covered napkin and hid it in his lap. Both the girls noticed but said nothing, simply smiling into the face of the newcomer.

“There is no power on earth.” Jalal Essai slid into the banquette and kissed Mandy in the place on her neck she liked best. “That could possibly have kept me away.”

P
eter Marks stood very still. The man behind him smelled of tobacco and anger. The knife he held to Marks’s throat was razor-sharp, and Marks, who certainly had enough experience in these matters, had no doubt that Hererra would slit his throat.

“Señor Hererra, there’s no need for these melodramatics,” he said. “I’ll gladly share with you everything I know. Let’s just keep calm and not lose our heads here.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” Hererra said grimly.

“All right.” Marks tried to swallow. His throat had dried up. “I’ll admit up front that what I know isn’t very much.”

“It’s got to be more than that bastard Lloyd-Shithead was willing to share. He told me to concentrate on making arrangements to bring my son back to Spain, which he said wouldn’t be possible until the medical examiner was through with him.”

Now Marks understood why Hererra was in a fury. “I agree, the chief inspector is something of a dick.” He swallowed. “But he’s of no consequence now. I want to know why Diego was murdered almost as much as you do. Believe me, I’m determined to find out.” This was true. Marks would never find Bourne without discovering what had happened last night in the Vesper Club, and why Bourne would leave with the murderer as if they were friends. Something wasn’t adding up.

He felt Hererra breathing behind him. It was deep and even, which to Marks was very frightening indeed, because it meant that despite his grief this man was in full possession of all his faculties. This spoke of a powerful personality; it would be suicidal to fuck with him.

“In fact,” Marks continued, “I can show you a photo of the man who murdered your son.”

The knife blade trembled a moment in Hererra’s huge fist, then it was withdrawn, and Marks stepped away. He turned to face the older man.

“Please, Señor Hererra, I understand the depth of your sorrow.”

“Do you have a son, Señor Marks?”

“I don’t, sir. I’m not married.”

“Then you can’t know.”

“I lost a sister when I was twelve. She was only ten. I was so angry I wanted to destroy everything in sight.”

Hererra contemplated him for a moment, then said, “So you know.”

He took Marks into the living room. Marks sat down on a sofa, but Hererra remained standing, looking at the photos of his son and, presumably, his many girlfriends that lined the mantel. For a long time, the two men remained like that, Hererra silent, Marks unwilling to disturb the older man’s grief.

At length, Hererra turned and, crossing to where Marks sat, said, “I’ll see that photo now.”

Marks dug out his
PDA
, scrolled to the media section, and brought up the photo he’d gotten from Lloyd-Philips’s IT tech.

“He’s on the left,” Marks said, pointing to the as-yet-unidentified man.

Hererra took the
PDA
and stared down at the screen for so long that Marks thought he had turned to stone.

“And the other man?”

Marks shrugged. “An innocent bystander.”

“Tell me about him, he looks familiar to me.”

“Lloyd-Shithead told me his name is Adam Stone.”

“Is that so.” Something slithered across Hererra’s face.

Marks impatiently pointed again. “Señor, this is important. Do you know the man on the left?”

Hererra thrust the
PDA
back into Marks’s hand, then went to the bar setup and poured himself a brandy. He drank half straight off, then, in an effort to compose himself, set the glass carefully down. “Christ almighty,” he murmured under his breath.

Marks rose and came over to where he was standing. “Señor, I can help you if you’ll let me.”

Hererra looked over at him. “How? How can you help me?”

“I’m good at finding people.”

“You can find my son’s murderer?”

“With some help, yes, I believe I can.”

Hererra appeared to consider this for some time. Then, as if making up his mind, he gave a little nod. “The man on the left is Ottavio Moreno.”

“You know him?”

“Oh, yes, señor, I know him very well. Since he was a little boy. I used to hold him in my arms when I was in Morocco.” Hererra picked up his brandy and drained the glass. His blue eyes looked bleak, but Marks caught the storm of anger far back in the shadows beneath the intelligent brow.

“Are you telling me that Ottavio is the half brother of Gustavo Moreno, the late Colombian drug lord?”

“I’m telling you that he’s my godson.” The anger boiled forward into the set of his jaw, the slight tremor of his hand. “That’s why I know he couldn’t have killed Diego.”

M
oira and Berengária Moreno lay entwined in each other’s arms. The plush owner’s cabin smelled of musk, marine oil, and the sea. Beneath them, the yacht rocked gently as if wanting to lull them to sleep. They knew, each in her own way, that sleep was out of the question. The yacht was due to leave the dock in less than twenty minutes. Slowly, they rose, their bodies love-bruised, their senses on overload, as if they had slipped out of time and place. Wordlessly, they dressed, and minutes later emerged from belowdecks. The velvet sky arched over them with what seemed like protective arms.

After she had a brief talk with the captain, Berengária nodded to Moira. “They’ve completed all the tests. The engine is in perfect running order. There should be no more delays.”

“Let’s hope not.”

Starlight spangled the water. Berengária had flown them in Narsico’s single-engine Lancair
IV-P
to Lic. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport on the Pacific coast. From there it was a short drive to the surfer’s paradise of Sayulita, where they met the yacht. All told, the trip took just over ninety minutes.

Moira stood next to Berengária. The crew, busy preparing to get under way, paid them no mind. It only remained for Berengária to debark.

“You’ve called Arkadin?”

Berengária nodded. “I spoke to him while you were freshening up. He’ll be there to meet the boat just before dawn. Of course after the delay, he’s going to want to board and check the entire shipment himself. You must be ready for him before then.”

“Don’t worry.” Moira touched her arm and produced in the other woman another little tremor. “Who is the recipient?”

Berengária slid her arm around Moira’s waist. “You don’t really need to know that.”

When Moira said nothing, Berengária leaned against her and sighed deeply. “My God, what a fucking snake pit this has turned out to be. Fuck men. Fuck them all!”

Berengária smelled of spice and salt spray, scents Moira liked. She found it intriguing to seduce another woman. There was nothing repellent about it, it was simply part of the job, something different, a challenge for her in every sense of the word. She was a sexual creature but, apart from one pleasant but inconsequential college experiment, had always been heterosexual. There was an edge of danger to Berengária she found attractive. In fact, making love to her was far more satisfying than it had been with a number of men she had bedded. Unlike those men—and excepting Bourne—Berengária knew when to be fierce and when to be tender, she took the time to seek out the secret places that touched Moira’s pleasure centers, concentrating on them until Moira convulsed over and over again.