Eric van Lustbader - The Bourne Objective

The shower had left the room stifling. With the towel held against her, she crossed to the window to catch the benefits of whatever fitful breeze was blowing. That’s when she saw the two men leaning against the wall of the restaurant. In the illumination cast by the fluorescent bulb she saw that one of them was checking something on his PDA. She ducked back behind the faded curtain an instant before the second man glanced up at her window. She could see his face, dark and closed as a fist. He said something to his companion, which made him look up at her window as well.

The Ochoa was no longer safe. She backed up, put on her dirty clothes, and went to the door. When she pulled it open, two men rushed in. One held her hands behind her back while the other put a cloth over her mouth and nose. She tried to hold her breath, tried to work herself free of the iron grip holding her fast. She could make no headway. This silent, futile fight went on for some minutes, her thrashing only depleting her lungs’ store of oxygen. Then, despite her willpower, her autonomic system took control and she took a breath, then another. A terrible smell invaded her, she tried to cry out. Tears came to her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. She tried to take a gulp of fresh air. Then the blackness rushed in and her body collapsed into her captors’ arms.

Arkadin saw the dorsal fin cutting through the water. Judging by its size, the shark was a large one, ten or twelve feet long. It was coming straight at the stern of the cigarette. Not surprising, considering the amount of blood in the water.

Arkadin had worked on Stepan for three hours and the man was a bloody wreck, curled on his side in a fetal position, weeping uncontrollably, blood from a thousand cuts dripping in pink rivulets as it mingled with the seawater on the deck.

Pavel had witnessed this interrogation-the bloodletting and, eventually, Stepan’s screams of innocence-and then it had been his turn. He had expected Arkadin to use his gutting knife on him, as he had on Stepan, but a key part of interrogation was surprise, the terror of the unexpected.

Arkadin had tied Pavel’s feet to the winch and had lowered him headfirst over the stern of the boat. He lengthened the time underwater with each plunge, so that by the end of the sixth or seventh Pavel was certain he was going to drown. Then Arkadin had cut him, slashing him under each eye. As the blood ran, he plunged Pavel back underwater. This had continued for perhaps forty minutes. Then the shark showed up. Pavel must have seen the shark. When El Heraldo hauled him up he looked mortally terrified.

Taking advantage of the weakness, Arkadin punched Pavel three times in rapid succession as hard as he could, breaking two or three of Pavel’s ribs. Pavel began to gasp, his breathing became painfully difficult. Responding to his boss’s signal, El Heraldo lowered Pavel back into the water. The shark nosed in, curious and interested.

Pavel began a panicked thrashing in the water. The thrashing only made the shark more interested. Sharks had poor eyesight, relying on scent and motion. This one scented fresh blood, and the thrashing led it to believe that its prey was injured. Putting on speed, it headed directly for the injured creature.

Arkadin saw the sudden acceleration of the dorsal fin and lifted his arm, a signal to El Heraldo, who cranked the winch. Just before his head and shoulders cleared the water, Pavel’s body shuddered and swung wildly as the shark struck. When El Heraldo had Pavel dangling in the air, he gave a strangled cry and, drawing his handgun, leaned over the stern of the cigarette and pumped the magazine empty, firing shot after shot into the creature’s immense bulk.

As the water churned wildly, turning black with the shark’s blood, Arkadin crossed to the winch, swung it, and lowered a screaming, weeping Pavel to the deck. Arkadin let El Heraldo have his fun. Ever since his younger brother had lost a leg to a tiger shark three years ago, El Heraldo got a murderous look in his eye whenever he saw a dorsal fin. El Heraldo had revealed this grisly piece of family history one night when he was very drunk and very sad.

Arkadin turned his attention to Pavel. What the repeated near drownings had started, the shark had finished. Pavel was in very bad shape. The shark had taken a chunk of his left shoulder and cheek. He was bleeding profusely, it was the least of his problems. He’d been traumatized by the shark attack. His eyes were wide and staring, darting from place to place but not focusing. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably, and there was the stink of excrement coming off him.

Ignoring all that, Arkadin squatted down beside his captain and, putting a hand on his head, said, “Pavel Mikhailovich, my very good friend, we have a serious problem to resolve. And only you can resolve it. Either Stepan or you has been passing information to someone outside our organization. Stepan swears it’s not him, which, I’m afraid, leaves you as the guilty party.”

Pavel, weeping and howling in pain and terror, was unresponsive, until Arkadin bounced the back of his head off the deck.

“Pull yourself together, Pavel Mikhailovich! Focus! Your life hangs in the balance.” When Pavel’s gaze alighted on him and stayed there, Arkadin smiled and stroked his hair. “I know you’re in pain, my friend, and good God, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig! But that will all be over soon. El Heraldo will patch you up in no time, he’s a master, believe me.

“Look, Pavel Mikhailovich, here’s the deal. Tell me who you’re working for, what you’ve passed on, tell me everything and we’ll patch you up. You’ll be as good as new. What’s more, I’ll let it be known that Stepan was the mole. Your employer will relax, you’ll continue as before, passing on information, except you’ll be passing on only the information I feed you. How does this sound? Agreed?”

Pavel moaned and nodded, clearly not trusting himself yet to speak.

“Good.” Arkadin looked up at El Heraldo. “Have you finished with your fun?”

“The sonovabitch’s dead.” El Heraldo spat in the water with some satisfaction. “And now its friends have come to feast on it.”

Arkadin looked back down to Pavel and thought, It’s the same with this sonovabitch.

The man with the piercing blue eyes gestured. “Please sit down, Mr. Willard, would you like something to drink?”

“I could do with a whiskey,” Willard said.

The young man whom Willard had followed vanished, only to reappear moments later with a tray on which sat an old-fashioned glass with whiskey, a tumbler of water, and another of ice.

Someone else seemed to be walking on Willard’s legs, pulling out a chair, and sitting down at the refectory table. The young man set the three glasses in front of Willard, then went out the library door and closed it silently behind him.

“I don’t understand how you could be expecting me,” Willard said. Then he remembered his eight hours of scouring the Internet in search of information on the Monition Club. “My computer’s ISP number is protected.”

“Nothing is protected.” The man took hold of the book and, turning it around, pushed it over to Willard. “Tell me what you make of this.”

Willard looked down at an illustration of a series of letters and odd symbols. He recognized the Latin letters, but the others were unknown to him. Then a little thrill rippled down his spine. Unless he was mistaken, this series was the same as the engraving in the photos Oliver Liss had showed him and Peter Marks.

He looked up into those electric-blue eyes and said: “I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Tell me, Mr. Willard, are you a student of history?”

“I like to think so.”