Eric van Lustbader - The Bourne Objective

She almost spit in his face, but she realized that would make him even happier, because it would indicate just how close he’d come to the bone.

All at once something seemed to change in him. He reached out and ran his fingertips along the line of her jaw. Then, indicating Antonio with the tip of the switchblade, “Go ahead, untie the stubborn fucker.”

As she entered the hearth one last time and knelt to free Antonio, he added, “I don’t need him anymore. I have you.”

This is how it happened.” Chrissie was standing in the kitchen, facing the window over the sink. There was nothing to see, except the grayness of dawn creeping through the treetops like gauze. She had said nothing when Bourne walked into the room, but she started when she felt him beside her.

“How what happened?” Bourne said into the silence.

“How I came to lie to you.” Chrissie turned on the hot water and, placing her hands in the stream, began to wash them as if she were Lady Macbeth. “One day,” she said, “a year or so after Scarlett was born, I looked in the mirror and said to myself, You have a body that’s been abandoned. Perhaps a man can’t understand. I had abandoned my body to motherhood, which means I had abandoned myself.”

Her hands moved in the water, washing, washing. “From that moment, I began to hate myself, and then, by extension, my life, which included Scarlett. Of course, that was something I couldn’t tolerate. I fought against it and immediately fell into a dreadful depression. My work began to suffer, so obviously that the department chair suggested and then gently but firmly insisted I take a sabbatical. Finally, I agreed, I mean I hadn’t a choice, had I? But when I locked my office door behind me, when I drove out of Oxford, drowsing like Avalon in the mist, I knew something drastic had to be done. I knew it was no coincidence that I had locked myself away in a place that never changed. Like my father, I was safe in Oxford, where everything is pre-planned, pre-ordained, even; where there’s no possibility of even the slightest deviation. That’s why he reacted to Trace’s life choices the way he did. They terrified him, so he lashed out at her. It wasn’t until that day, leaving Oxford behind, that I understood that family dynamic and how it had affected me. It occurred to me that I might have chosen my safe life for him, not for myself.”

She turned off the water and dried her hands on a dish towel. The backs were red and raw looking. “I need to get my family out of here.”

“As soon as a friend shows up we’ll leave,” Bourne said.

“Scarlett.”

“She’s with your father.”

She looked back, almost wistfully, through the doorway into the living room. “Scarlett, at least, loves my parents.” She sighed. “Let’s go outside. I’m finding it difficult to breathe in here.”

Through the kitchen door they emerged into the dewy morning. The air was chill, and when they spoke little puffs of steam emerged from their mouths. The bases of the trees were still black, as if the roots were holding on to the dead of night. Chrissie shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.

“What happened?” Bourne said.

“Nothing that made sense, it was simply blind luck that I met Holly.”

Bourne was startled. “Holly Marie Moreau?”

She nodded. “She was looking for Trace and found me instead.”

Everything in this puzzle seems to return to Holly, he thought. “And you became friends?”

“More than friends, and less,” she said. “I know that doesn’t make much sense.” She shrugged. “I went to work for her.”

Bourne frowned. He felt like a miner inching along a tunnel without lights, but nevertheless knowing by instinct which way to turn. “What was she doing?”

Chrissie gave a little embarrassed laugh. “She was what she euphemistically called a stocker. Now and again she traveled to Mexico for two or three weeks at a time. At a client’s request, she’d stock a narcorrancho. Narcorranchos are shell estates owned by the Mexican drug lords out in the desert somewhere, usually in the north, in Sonora, but sometimes in a more southerly state like Sinaloa. Apart from a caretaker and maybe a guard or two, no one lives in them full-time.

“Anyway, she took me to Mexico City, to the after-hours clubs, the brothels, where she chose from a list she kept updated weekly, like a calendar or a day planner. We took the girls to whichever narcorrancho was owned by the current client. There were only a handful of Mexicans there when we arrived, some peons, and heavily armed soldiers who sneered at us even while they drooled over the girls. My job was to spruce up the interior and settle the girls in their various bedrooms. The peons did the heavy lifting.

“Gradually, the cars would come-Lincoln Town Cars, Chevy Suburbans, Mercedeses, all with blacked-out windows, wallowing under their armor plating. The security forces would set up a strict perimeter as if we were in an army bivouac during wartime. Then the provisioners would arrive with fresh meat, fruit, cases of beer, crates of tequila, and, of course, mountains of cocaine. The barbecuing of beef and the spit-roasting of whole pigs and lambs would begin. Salsa and disco music blared louder and louder. The roasters stank of sweat and beer so you couldn’t let them near you. Then the bosses arrived with their bodyguards and it was like the Day of the Dead, a festival beyond all festivals.”

Bourne’s mind was racing at a pace that dizzied even him. “One of Holly’s clients was Gustavo Moreno, wasn’t it?”

“Gustavo Moreno was her best client,” Chrissie said.

Yes, Bourne thought, it had to be. Another missing piece of the puzzle.

“He spent more than any of the others. He loved to party all night long. The later it got, the louder and wilder the partying.”

“You were a long way from Oxford, Professor.”

She nodded. “A long way from civilization, too. But then so was Holly. She lived a double life. She said she’d had plenty of practice growing up in Morocco because her family was very strict, very religious, devout, even. A woman had few rights, a girl even fewer. Apparently her father broke away from the rest of the family-which was led by his brother, Holly’s uncle. According to Holly, they had a terrible falling-out. He took her and her mother away to Bali, a place that was the opposite of their village in the High Atlas Mountains. She told no one else about her secret life in Mexico.”

Untrue, he thought. She told me, or I found out, somehow. Which must be how the laptop ended up in Gustavo Moreno’s hands. I must have given it to him. But why? In this puzzle, he thought, there’s always another blank to fill in, another question to answer.

Chrissie turned to him. “I take it you knew Holly.”

When he didn’t reply, she said, “You must be shocked by what I’ve just told you.”

“I’m sorry you lied to me.”

“We lied to each other.” Chrissie couldn’t keep an edge of bitterness out of her voice.

“I have too much experience in lying.” He had a feeling that he’d asked Holly to take him to Mexico on one of her trips. Or had he coerced her into it?

“Why did you quit?” he said.

“You could say that I had an epiphany in the Sonoran Desert. It’s not surprising we hooked up. She and I were both running away from our former lives, from who we were. Or, rather, we had lost our way in our lives, we no longer knew who we were or who we wanted to be. We were intent on rejecting who we were expected to be.” She stared down at her reddened hands as if she didn’t recognize them. “I had thought that the life I’d left-the cloistered sanctuary of Oxford-wasn’t real. But after a time I realized that it was Holly’s life that wasn’t real.”