Eric van Lustbader - The Bourne Objective

To Willard’s surprise and bewilderment, the obverse of the coin was totally different.

“You see, this side isn’t made of gold,” El-Arian said. “It’s made of lead, the original metal before it was transformed into gold.”

MOIRA SET OUT from Guadalajara early in the morning, driving into the heart of blue agave country in the Mexican state of Jalisco. The sky was huge, with just a few brushstrokes of cloud floating in the vivid blue. The sun was searing, and the morning grew hot very quickly. Toward noon she was obliged to roll up the windows and turn on the air conditioner. She lost cell service several times, and without her GPS she had some difficulty finding Amatitán.

She used the time to put her interview with Roberto Corellos into its proper perspective. Why did he tell her that he’d chosen Berengária to keep her brother’s business going? Why on earth would he trust a woman to handle his livelihood? Moira had met many men like Corellos, and none of them was enlightened when it came to females. Screwing, cooking, having babies, that was the extent of their expectations of women.

She mulled these questions over for hours until at last she caught sight of Amatitán. Corellos had a burning need for revenge. In a hot-tempered man of his blood, revenge was a matter of honor. Cuckolding his cousin wouldn’t be enough for him. It made sense that Corellos would want to ensnare Narsico in the kind of life his cousin had tried so desperately to put behind him. That was revenge.

If Berengária was, indeed, heir to the drug business, then it followed a man must be running the show behind the scenes. Who? Corellos wasn’t going to tell her, and there was nothing she had to barter with except her body, which she was not about to use. But Berengária was another story. Piranha she might be, but Moira had had dealings with piranhas before. What had aroused her suspicions most was that Corellos hadn’t been concerned that whoever had stolen the laptop now had access to Gustavo’s client list. The only reason for this was that Corellos was already in business with him.

The endless fields of blue agave passed by on either side. Workers toiled in the fields, sweating and grunting with their efforts. The Skydel estancia was just ahead.

If, as she now believed, Essai’s laptop-the computer stolen from Gustavo Moreno-contained the drug lord’s client list, then there must be something else on it of great importance to her employer, and she was willing to bet that it wasn’t simply his family history, as he’d claimed. Then why had Essai lied to her? What was he hiding?

Oliver Liss has lied to you from the first day he met you,” Benjamin El-Arian said.

“I expect everyone to lie to me,” Willard said. “It’s a necessary evil of the life I lead.”

The two men were walking in the Moorish cloister outside the Monition Club library. Here they were sheltered from the wind. The sun, high in the sky, spilled its warmth onto their shoulders.

“So you’re at peace with it.”

“Of course not.” Willard inhaled deeply. There was something planted in the cloister, an herb or spice, whose scent he found pleasant and familiar. “My life is a war. I sift through the lies, I’ve trained myself to see past them. Then I act accordingly.”

“You already know that Oliver Liss has no intention of allowing you to run Treadstone as you see fit.”

“Of course, but I needed someone to get Treadstone off flatline. His agenda and mine were never going to coincide. However, it was Liss or no one.”

“Now there’s someone else,” El-Arian said. “Liss is owned by Jalal Essai. As I told you. Essai was a member of the Monition Club. Currently he’s on his own.”

“What would make him do that?” Willard asked.

“The same thing that kept you from walking out of the library.”

“King Solomon’s gold?”

El-Arian nodded. “Once he discovered that the Solomon ring wasn’t lost, he decided he wanted the gold for himself.”

Willard stopped and turned toward El-Arian. “Just how much gold are we talking about here?”

“It’s difficult to know with any degree of precision, but if I had to guess I’d put the amount somewhere between fifty and a hundred billion dollars.”

Willard gave a low whistle. “That’s enough incentive for an army to go rogue.” Then he scratched the side of his head. “What I can’t work out is why you’re telling me all this.”

“Bourne has the Solomon ring,” El-Arian said. “And Treadstone’s other graduate, Leonid Arkadin, is in possession of a certain laptop. Some years ago, Bourne was sent by Alex Conklin to steal the laptop from Jalal Essai. This he did, but for some reason unknown to us he never delivered it to his boss. For years we have searched for it, in vain. It seemed as if it had vanished completely. Then one of our moles sent us information through an agent of ours, Marlon Etana, that Arkadin was in possession of the stolen laptop. How did he obtain it? A Colombian drug lord by the name of Gustavo Moreno was killed in a raid a month or so ago, but the laptop containing his detailed client list was not found in his compound. Somehow Arkadin had it spirited away, and now he’s used it to muscle his way into Moreno’s business.”

“This is the same laptop that was stolen from Jalal Essai?”

“It is.”

“How in God’s name did it end up with Gustavo Moreno?”

El-Arian shrugged. “A mystery we have yet to solve.”

Willard mulled this over for a moment. “In any event, you can’t be interested in a list of drug distributors,” he said. “What’s so special about this particular laptop?”

“The hard drive contains a hidden file that provides a key to the location of King Solomon’s gold.”

Willard appeared startled. “Are you telling me that Arkadin knows where the gold is?”

El-Arian shook his head. “I doubt Arkadin knows of the hidden file’s existence. As I said, he stole it to get Moreno’s client list. But even if he did know of the file, he wouldn’t be able to access it. It’s protected.”

“Nothing is protected,” Willard said, “as you yourself told me.”

“Except for this file. No decryption program, no computer on earth can unlock it. There is only one way to read the file. The laptop has been fitted with a special slot. Fit the Solomon ring into the slot, an internal reader scans the engraving on the inside, and the file opens.”

“So Essai had the laptop,” Willard said. “What about the ring?”

“Jalal Essai had them both.”

“I don’t see how that makes sense. Why wouldn’t he have gone after Solomon’s gold himself?”

“Because even if he had opened the file, he wouldn’t have been able to act on it.” El-Arian, moving from sunlight to shadow, seemed to change in size as well as presence, as if there were two of him moving slightly out of sync with each other. “There is a section of the instructions missing from the file.”

“And Essai doesn’t have it.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Who does?” Willard asked.

“It resides in a special room inside a house in Tineghir, a town in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco.”

Willard shook his head. “I know it’s easy to ask after the fact, but why was Essai entrusted with the ring and the laptop?”

“His family is the oldest, the most religiously strict. It was felt that he was the best choice.”

There was a small silence as both men presumably contemplated the misjudgment that had been made.

“What I still don’t understand is why all this is happening now. At one point, you must have had both the ring and the laptop. Why didn’t you get the gold then?”