Eric van Lustbader - The Bourne Objective

As the scarred man reached for his knife Bourne gripped his wrist. “Let’s have none of that,” he said. “Give me answers.”

“I would never harm you, Jason, you know that.”

“Why did you kill Diego?”

“He’d been told to bring you to the club at a certain time tonight.”

Bourne remembered Diego looking down at his watch and saying, “Now’s the time to take ourselves to Knightsbridge.” An odd way to put it, except if this man was telling the truth.

“Who told Diego to bring me there?” But Bourne already knew.

“The Severus Domna got to him-I don’t know how-but they gave him precise instructions on how to betray you.”

Bourne remembered Diego picking at his food as if he had something important on his mind. Had he been anticipating the betrayal? Was Ottavio right?

The scarred man stared into Bourne’s face. “You really don’t know me, do you?”

“I told you I didn’t.”

“My name is Ottavio Moreno.” He waited a beat. “Gustavo Moreno’s brother.”

A tiny tremor of recognition raced through Bourne as the veils of his amnesia stirred and tried to part.

“We met in Morocco.” Bourne’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Yes.” A smile creased Ottavio Moreno’s face. “In Marrakech, we traveled into the High Atlas Mountains together, didn’t we?”

“I don’t know.”

“Good God!” Ottavio Moreno’s face registered surprise, perhaps even shock. “And the laptop? What about the laptop?”

“What laptop?”

“You don’t remember the laptop?” He grabbed Bourne by the arms. “Jason, come on. We met in Marrakech in order to get the laptop.”

“Why?”

Ottavio Moreno frowned. “You told me it was a key.”

“Key to what?”

“To the Severus Domna.”

At that moment they heard the familiar high-low wail of police sirens.

“The mess we left behind in the Empire Suite,” Moreno said. “Come on, let’s go.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Bourne said.

“But you must, you owe me,” Ottavio Moreno said. “You killed Noah Perlis.”

In other words,” Secretary of Defense Bud Halliday said as he scanned the report in front of him, “between retirements, normal attrition, and requests for transfer-all of which, I see, have been not only granted but expedited-a quarter of the Old Man’s CI has moved on.”

“And our own personnel have moved in.” DCI Danziger did not bother to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. The secretary appreciated confidence as much as he disliked indecision. Danziger took back the report and carefully folded it away. “It will be only a matter of months, I believe, before that number will increase to fully a third of the old guard.”

“Good, good.”

Halliday rubbed his large, square hands over the remnants of his Spartan lunch. The Occidental was abuzz with the jawing of politicos, reporters, flacks, power brokers, and industry influence peddlers. All of them had paid their respects to him in one circumspect manner or another, whether it was with a slightly terrified smile, an obeisant nod of the head, or, as in the case of the elderly and influential Senator Daughtry, a quick handshake and a down-home how-dee-do. Swing-state senators accumulated power even during non-election years, both parties seeking to curry favor. It was simply standard operating procedure inside the Beltway.

For some time, then, the two men sat in silence. The restaurant began to thin out as the denizens of the DC political pits straggled back to work. But soon enough their place was taken by tourists in striped shirts and baseball caps they’d bought from the vendors down by the Mall imprinted with CIA or FBI. Danziger returned to his lunch, which, as usual, was more substantial than Halliday’s unadorned strip steak. All that was left on the secretary’s plate were several pools of blood, clotted with congealed fat.

Across the table Halliday’s mind had drifted to the dream he couldn’t remember. He had read articles that dreams were a necessary part of sleep-REM sleep, the eggheads called it-without which a man would, eventually, go insane. On the other hand, it was certainly true that he couldn’t recall a single dream. His entire sleeping existence was a perfect blank wall on which nothing was ever scrawled.

He shook himself like a dog coming out of the rain. Why did he care? Well, he knew why. The Old Man had once confided in him that he suffered from the same strange illness-that’s what the Old Man called it, an illness. Strange to think that the two of them had once been friends, more than friends, come to think of it-what had they called it then? Blood brothers. As young men they had confided all their little tics and habits, the secrets that inhabited the dark corners of their souls. Where had it all gone wrong? How had they become the bitterest of enemies? It might have been the gradual divergence of their political views, but friends often dealt with disagreement. No, their separation had to do with a sense of betrayal, and in men such as they were, loyalty was the ultimate-the only-test of friendship.

The truth was they had betrayed what they had built as young men, as their idealism was burned away in the crucible of the nation’s capital, where they had both chosen to serve lifetime sentences. The Old Man had been an acolyte of John Foster Dulles while he had attached himself to Richard Helms-men with wildly divergent backgrounds, methodologies, and, most importantly, ideologies. And since they were in the business of ideology and that business was their life there was no recourse but to turn on each other, to try with every fiber of their being to prove the other wrong, to bring him down, to destroy him.

For decades the Old Man had outwitted him at every turn, but now the tables were turned, the Old Man was dead, and he had the prize he’d set his gaze on so long ago: control of CI.

Danziger clearing his throat brought Halliday back from the chasm of the past.

“Is there anything we’ve failed to cover?”

The secretary regarded him as a child studies an ant or a beetle, with the curiosity reserved for a species so far below him that it seemed inconceivably distant. Danziger was far from a stupid man, which was why Halliday had chosen him as his knight to move back and forth across the chessboard of the American clandestine services. But apart from his usefulness on the board, he viewed Danziger as entirely expendable. Halliday had closed himself off the moment he felt the Old Man’s betrayal. He had a wife and two children, of course, but he scarcely thought of them. His son was a poet-good Christ, a poet, of all things! And his daughter, well, the less said about her and her female partner the better. As for his wife, she had betrayed him as well, giving birth to two disappointments. These days, apart from formal functions where the strict code of Washington family values required her to be on his arm, they lived entirely separate lives. It had been years since they had slept in the same room, let alone the same bed. Occasionally they found themselves having breakfast together, a minor torture Halliday escaped as quickly as he could.

Danziger was leaning forward confidentially across the table. “If there’s anything I can help you with, you only have to-”

“I think you’ve confused me with a friend,” Halliday snapped. “The day I ask for your help is the day I put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”

He slid out of the booth and walked away without a backward glance, leaving Danziger to pay the check.

Alone for the moment while Boris Karpov slept inside the convent, Arkadin poured himself a mescal and took the drink out into the steamy Sonora night. Dawn would soon be scything through the stars, extinguishing them as it went. The shorebirds were already awake, flocking out of their nests to sweep along the beachfront.