Eric van Lustbader - The Bourne Objective

“It absolutely did not,” Willard said hotly. “Whatever happened to him, the form of amnesia he’s suffered has changed him irrevocably. Speaking of which, I want you to see a Chief Inspector Lloyd-Philips. Bourne may have been involved in a murder at the Vesper Club in the West End last night. Start looking for him there.”

Marks made several quick notes on the palm of his hand. “You’re the one who isn’t understandable.” He was standing in line for a taxi, periodically shuffling forward. Speaking in a low voice, he covered his mouth with his hand. “You went out of your way to help him in Bali, now you seem to want to examine him like a circus freak.”

“He is a freak, Peter. A very dangerous freak-he’s already murdered Noah Perlis and now he may be implicated in another death. How much more proof do you need that he’s out of control? I don’t want you to forget that fact or lose sight of our goal. The Treadstone training made him into an ultimate warrior, but then something unforeseen-a freak of fate or nature, whatever you choose to call it-altered him further. He became something unknown, something more. Which is why I’ve pitted him against Arkadin. As I’ve already explained to you, Arkadin, being the first of Treadstone’s graduates, was subjected to a form of extreme training that-well, after he escaped and disappeared, Conklin decided to modify the training, to scale it back, make it less… extreme.”

Having reached the head of the line, Marks slid into the backseat of the taxi and gave the address of a small hotel he liked in the West End.

“If Treadstone is to go forward, if it’s to be successful, if it’s to fulfill its promise, we must find out who will prevail.” Willard’s voice buzzed in Marks’s ear like a wasp beating against a windowpane. “Depending on who is left alive, we’ll know how to proceed.”

Marks stared out the window, seeing nothing. “I want to get this straight. If Arkadin prevails, you’ll go back to the initial training methodology.”

“With several minor tweaks I’ve got in mind.”

“But what if Bourne kills Arkadin? You don’t know-”

“That’s right, Peter, we’ll be faced with an X-factor. The process will, therefore, take longer. We’ll have to study Bourne in a controlled environment. We’ll-”

“Wait a minute. Are you talking about imprisoning him?”

“Subjecting him to repeated batteries of psychological tests, yes, yes.” Willard sounded impatient, as if he’d made his point but Marks was too stupid to get it. “This is the essence of Treadstone, Peter. This is what Alex Conklin devoted his life to.”

“But why? I just don’t get it.”

“The Old Man didn’t either, not really.” Willard sighed. “Sometimes I think Alex was the only American to learn from the tragic mistakes of the war in Vietnam. It was his special genius, you see, to anticipate Iraq and Afghanistan. He saw the new world coming. He knew that the old methods of waging war were as antiquated, as certain to fail as the Napoleonic code.

“While the Pentagon was spending billions on stockpiling smart bombs, nuclear submarines, stealth bombers, supersonic jet fighters, Alex was concentrated on building the one weapon of war he knew would be effective: human beings. Treadstone’s mission from the very first day of its inception was to build the perfect human weapon: fearless, merciless, skilled at infiltration, subterfuge, misdirection, mimicry. A weapon of a thousand faces who could be anyone, go anywhere, kill any target without remorse, and return to take on the next mission.

“And now you see what a visionary Alex was. What he saw has, indeed, come to pass. What we create in the Treadstone program will become America’s most potent weapon against its enemies, no matter how clever they are, no matter how remote their location. Do you think I’m going to bury something invaluable? I made a deal with the devil so that Treadstone would be resurrected.”

“And what,” Marks said, “if the devil has other ideas for Treadstone?”

“Then,” Willard replied, “the devil will have to be dealt with in some manner.” There was a slight pause. “Arkadin or Bourne, it makes no difference to me. Only the outcome of their struggle for survival interests me. And either way, I will have them-one or the other-as the prototype for the graduates Treadstone will produce.”

Start at the beginning,” Bourne said. “This has all the earmarks of a nightmare.”

“The long and the short of it,” Ottavio Moreno said with a sigh, “is that you had no right to kill Noah Perlis.”

The two men were in a safe house in Thamesmead, a small developed area directly across the river from the London City Airport. It was one of those modern crackerjack boxes being thrown up all over the sprawling suburbs that were as flimsy as they looked. They had driven there in Moreno’s gray Opel, as anonymous a car as you were likely to find in London. They’d eaten some cold chicken and pasta out of the fridge, washed it down with a bottle of decent South African wine, and then had retired to the living room where they literally threw themselves onto the sofas.

“Perlis killed Holly Moreau.”

“Perlis was business,” Ottavio Moreno pointed out.

“So, I think, was Holly.”

Ottavio Moreno nodded. “But then it became personal, didn’t it?”

Bourne had no good reply to that, since the answer was obvious to both of them.

“Water under the bridge,” Moreno said, taking Bourne’s silence as acquiescence. “The point that you’ve forgotten is that I hired Perlis to find the laptop.”

“He had no laptop; he had the ring.”

Moreno shook his head. “Forget the ring and try to remember the laptop.”

Bourne felt as if he were sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand. “You mentioned the laptop before, but I have no memory of it.”

“In that event I imagine you have no memory of how you stole it from Jalal Essai’s home.”

Bourne shook his head helplessly.

Moreno dug his thumbs into his eyes for a moment. “I see what you meant when you said start at the beginning.”

Bourne, saying nothing, watched him carefully. The constant problem with people arising out of his past was this: Who were they really and were they telling him the truth? A man with no memory isn’t difficult to lie to. In fact, Bourne reflected, it was probably fun to lie to an amnesiac and watch his reactions.

“You were given an assignment to get the laptop computer.”

“By whom?”

Moreno shrugged. “Alex Conklin, I imagine. Anyway, we made contact in Marrakech.”

Morocco again. Bourne sat forward. “Why would I contact you?”

“I was Alex Conklin’s contact there.” When Bourne gave him a skeptical look, he added, “I’m a half brother. My mother is a Berber, from the High Atlas Mountains.”

“Your father got around.”

“Make a joke, okay, it’s all right, I won’t gut you.” Ottavio Moreno laughed. “Christ, this is a fucked-up world.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Okay, look, my friend. My father had his thumb in a shitload of pies, most of them illegal, yes, I freely admit it. So what? So his business ventures took him to many places around the world, some of them strange.”

“Business wasn’t the only thing he had a healthy appetite for,” Bourne said.

Ottavio Moreno nodded. “Too true. He had an eye for exotic women.”

“Are there any other little half Morenos running around?”

Moreno laughed. “There very well might be, knowing my father. But if there are, I don’t know about them.”

Bourne decided there was nothing more to be gained by taking the subject of the elder Moreno’s love life any farther. “Okay, you say that you were Conklin’s contact in Marrakech.”