Eric van Lustbader - The Bourne Objective

“Children?”

“Are you kidding?”

Arkadin certainly had a gift for spinning yarns, she thought appreciatively. “I’m not much of a nurturer, either,” she said, somewhat truthfully. “I’m entirely focused on my business.”

He asked her what that might be without looking up from his steak.

“Import-export,” she said. “To and from North Africa.”

His head came up slowly, but very deliberately. She felt her heart beating against her rib cage. It was, she thought, like coaxing a shark onto the hook. She didn’t want to make the slightest mistake now, and felt a little thrill pass through her. She was very close to the precipice, to the moment when her fictional self would fuse with her real self. This moment was why she chose to do what she did. It was why she hadn’t walked away from Peter when he’d recruited her for the assignment, why she had set aside the demeaning aspect of what she was expected to do. None of that mattered. What mattered was standing a hairbreadth from the precipice. This precise moment was what she lived for, and Peter had known this long before she did .

Arkadin wiped his mouth again. “North Africa. Interesting. My former partners did a fair amount of business in North Africa. I didn’t like their methods-or, to be honest, the people they were dealing with. That was one of the reasons I decided to buy them out.”

He was quick on his feet, Soraya thought, improvising like crazy. She was liking this conversation more and more.

“What line are you in?” she asked.

“Computers, peripherals, computer services, that sort of thing.”

Right, she thought, amused. She put a thoughtful expression on her face. “Well, I could connect you with some reliable people, if you like.”

“Maybe you and I could do business.”

Bite! she thought with some elation. Time to reel in the shark, but very slowly and very carefully.

“Hm. I don’t know, I’m already near capacity.”

“Then you need to expand.”

“Sure. With what capital?”

“I have capital.”

She eyed him warily. “I don’t think so. We know nothing about each other.”

He set his knife and fork down, and smiled. “Then let’s make getting to know each other our first order of business.” He lifted a finger. “In fact, I have something to show you that just might entice you into doing business with me.”

“And what might that be?”

“Ah-ah-ah, it’s a surprise.”

Calling the waiter over, he ordered two espressos without asking her if she wanted one. As it happened, she did. She wanted her senses to be on full alert because she had no doubt that at some point tonight she would have to fend off his amorous advances in a way that would lead him on, not turn him off.

They chatted amiably while drinking the espressos, finding their way toward feeling comfortable with each other. Soraya, seeing how relaxed he was, allowed herself to relax, as well, at least as far as she was able. Beneath, however, she felt the tension of steel cables singing through her body. This was a man of enormous charm, as well as charisma. She could see how so many women were magnetically drawn into his orbit. But at the same time the part of her that had pulled back, observing at an objective distance, recognized the show he was putting on, and that she was not seeing the real Arkadin. After a time, she wondered whether anyone had. He had so successfully walled himself off from other human beings that she suspected he was no longer accessible even to himself. And at that moment, he seemed to her a lost little boy, long exiled, who could no longer find his way home.

“Well,” he said as he set down his empty cup, “shall we move on?” He threw some bills onto the table and, without waiting for a reply, slid out of the booth. He held out his hand and, after a moment’s deliberate hesitation, she took it, allowing him to swing her out of her seat.

The night was mild, without a breath of a breeze, heavy as velvet drapes. The sky was moonless, but the stars blazed in the blackness. They strolled away from the water, and then north, paralleling the beach. To their right, the light-smear of Puerto Peñasco seemed part of a painting, a world apart.

Streetlights gave way to starlit darkness and then, abruptly, the lights of a large stone structure that looked vaguely religious in nature. She saw the cross set into the stone above the wood-and-iron door.

“It used to be a convent.” Arkadin unlocked the door and stood aside for her to enter. “My home away from home.”

The interior was sparsely furnished, but aromatic with incense and candle wax. She saw a desk, several armchairs, a refectory table and eight chairs, a pew-like sofa festooned with ill-matched pillows. All of it was heavy, dark wood. None of it looked comfortable.

As they walked through the living room, Arkadin lit thick cream-colored candles in iron stands of varying heights. The effect in the convent’s immense stone interior was increasingly medieval, and she smiled to herself, suspecting that he was setting the scene for romance or, in this case, seduction.

He opened a bottle of red wine and poured it into an oversize Mexican goblet, then he filled another with guara juice. Handing her the juice, he said, “Come. This way.”

He led her farther into the gloom, pausing to light candles along the way. The far wall was almost all brick fireplace, as enormous as any in an English baronial hall. She could smell the old ash and creosote coating the firebrick after decades of use and, judging by what she saw, years of neglect.

Now Arkadin lit a particularly large candle and, holding it high as one would a torch, walked toward the shadows of the fireplace. The impenetrable darkness began to give grudging way to the inconstant illumination of the flame.

As the shadows retreated, a shape took form in the fireplace, a chair. And on the chair sat a figure. The figure was bound to the chair by its ankles. Its arms, presumably bound at the wrists, were behind it.

As Arkadin brought the candle still closer, the light from the flame rose up from the figure’s ankles to legs, torso, finally revealing its face, bloody and swollen so badly that one eye had closed.

“How do you like your surprise?” Arkadin said.

The goblet of juice shattered on the floor tiles as it slipped from Soraya’s grip.

The man bound to the chair was Antonio.

It was like a chess match, Bourne staring at the old man, trying to place him as the director of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents when he had been in Oxford as David Webb, the old man staring at him more certain with every passing second of Bourne’s identity.

Chrissie was staring at them both, as if trying to figure out which would checkmate the other. “Adam, is my father right? Is your name really David Webb?”

Bourne saw a way out-the only way-but he didn’t like it. “Yes,” he said, “and no.”

“Either way, your name isn’t Adam Stone.” Chrissie’s voice held a metallic edge. “Which means you lied to Trace. She knew you as Adam Stone, and that’s how I know you.”

Bourne turned to look at her. “ Adam Stone is as much my name as David Webb used to be. I’ve been known by different names at different times. But they’re only names.”

“Damn you!” Chrissie got up, turned her back, and stalked into the kitchen.

“She’s pretty angry,” Scarlett said, watching him with her eleven-year-old face, beautiful yet not fully formed.

“Are you angry?” Bourne asked.

“You’re not a professor?”

“In fact, I am,” Bourne said. “A professor of linguistics.”

“Then I think it’s cool. D’you have a whole bunch of secret identities?”