Eric van Lustbader: The Bourne Objective

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.”

Soraya 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.