Eric van Lustbader - The Bourne Objective

The sniper’s eyes began to water, he coughed and gagged again. Then his gorge rose up uncontrollably and he tried to vomit, but there was nowhere for it to go. He began to asphyxiate. Terror flooded his face, and he nodded as vigorously as he was able.

The moment Bourne extracted his fist, the sniper rolled over on his side and vomited, his eyes tearing, his nose running. His body shook all over. Bourne took him by the shoulders and turned him onto his back. His face was a mess; he looked like a kid who’d gotten the worst of a street fight.

“Now,” Bourne said. “Who are you and who do you work for?”

“Fa… Fa… Farid Lever.” Understandably, he was having trouble speaking.

Bourne held up the French passport. “One more lie and this gets stuffed down your throat, and I promise you I won’t pull it out.”

The sniper swallowed, wincing at the sour taste in his mouth. “Farid Kazmi. I belong to Jalal Essai.”

Bourne took a shot in the dimness. “Severus Domna?”

“He was.” Kazmi had to stop either to regain his breath or to get more saliva in his mouth. “I need water. Do you have any water?”

“Those two men you shot needed water, too. One of them is dead, the other isn’t, but neither is getting any,” Bourne said. “Continue. Jalal Essai…”

“Jalal was a member of Severus Domna. He has broken away from them.”

“That’s a very dangerous course. He must have a damn good reason.”

“The ring.”

“Why?”

Kazmi’s tongue came out, trying to moisten his dry lips. “It belongs to him. For years he thought it was lost, but now he knows that his brother stole it from him years ago. You have it.”

So Jalal Essai is Holly’s dreaded uncle, Bourne thought. The puzzle was at last taking shape. Holly the hedonist on one side, and her uncle Jalal the religious extremist on the other. What if Holly’s father had left Morocco to protect her from his brother, who would surely have clamped down on Holly’s natural tendencies, stifled her, killed her, in a manner of speaking? And then, after his death, who had stood between Holly and her uncle? But in a blinding flash of memory he knew: It was him. Holly had somehow recruited him to protect her from Jalal Essai. He had done that, but the curious relationship among Holly, Tracy, Perlis, and Diego Hererra-a relationship she had failed to tell him about-had undone her. Perlis had found out about the ring from her and had killed her to get it.

“I was to get the ring at all costs,” Kazmi said, bringing Bourne back into the present.

“No matter how many lives it took.”

Kazmi nodded, wincing with pain. “No matter how many.” Something lurked in those black eyes. “Jalal will get it, too.”

“What makes you say that?”

A look of serenity bloomed on Kazmi’s face and Bourne lunged for his mouth. But it was too late. His molars had ground open a fake tooth, and the cyanide inside was already shutting down his systems.

Bourne sat back on his haunches. When Kazmi had breathed his last, he rose and headed back toward the house.

Peter Marks lay on the ground, keeping as still as possible. Moving only caused a further loss of blood. Though well trained, he had never before been wounded in the field, or anywhere else, had never even experienced an accident like falling off a ladder or missing a stair tread. He lay as if dead, hearing his breath sawing in and out of his mouth, feeling the blood pulsing in his leg as if it had developed a second heart, but a heart that was malevolent, black as night, a heart that was close to death, or in whose chambers death had inveigled itself like a thief.

Marks felt his life was about to be stolen from him prematurely, as it had been from his sister. How close he felt to her at this moment, as if at the last instant he had snatched her from the doomed plane, holding her close while they soared through the clouds. This abrupt awareness of the tenuousness of his own life did not frighten him so much as change his perspective. He lay, helpless and bleeding, and watched an ant struggle with a freshly fallen leaf, a new leaf, a luminous green, until moments ago bursting with life. The leaf was clearly too big for the ant, but the insect was undeterred, tugging and pulling, dragging the recalcitrant leaf over pebbles and roots, the huge impediments of its world. Marks loved that ant. It refused to give up no matter how difficult its life had become. It persevered. It abided. This, too, Marks resolved to do. He resolved to look out for himself and for the people he cared about-Soraya, for instance-in a way that he could not have imagined, let alone foreseen, before he had been shot.

And so he lay for some time, hearing nothing but the occasional soughing of the wind through the woods. Which was why, when he heard Chrissie’s voice calling, he said, “This is Peter Marks. I’ve been hit in the leg. Moreno’s dead, and Adam went after the sniper.”

“I’m coming out to get you.”

“Stay where you are,” he shouted back. Dragging himself forward, he struggled to sit with his back against the Opel. “The area isn’t secure.”

But a moment later she appeared at his side, crouched down behind the safety of the car’s bullet-ridden flank.

“Stupid move,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

It was the second time someone had said that to him today and he didn’t like it. In fact, he didn’t like much of anything in his life at the moment, and he became momentarily disoriented, wondering how in the world he had allowed himself to get into this sorry state. He loved no one and so far as he knew no one loved him, not currently, anyway. He supposed his parents had loved him in their gruff overriding way, and surely his sister had. But who else? His latest girlfriend had lasted six months, just about par for the course, before she got fed up with his long hours and inattention, and walked out. Friends? A few. But like Soraya, he used them or they used him. He felt suddenly sick to his stomach and shuddered.

“You’re going into shock,” Chrissie said, understanding him better than he could imagine. “We’d better get you into the house and warmed up.”

She helped him to stand, balanced on his good leg. He put his arm around her, and she helped him toward the house. He moved shakily and, stumbling over a rock or a root, almost sent them both tumbling over.

Christ on a crutch, he thought wildly, I’m full of self-pity today, and was even more thoroughly disgusted with himself than he had been a moment ago.

Her father, who had emerged from the house, rushed to Marks’s other side and helped her with her burden. The old man kicked the door shut when they were inside.

Bourne came upon the woman almost without warning. She was half buried in crisp, dead leaves. Her face was turned away from him, eyes closed. Her long hair was streaked with blood, but from the way she lay, it was impossible to tell whether she was dead or alive. A neighbor out walking, it had been her bad luck to stumble upon Kazmi. Beneath the fall of leaves, he could make out bits and pieces of her red-and-black-checked flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. Leaves appeared to have been kicked over her with considerable haste.

He needed to return to Peter Marks and to the people in the house, but he couldn’t bypass the woman until he found out whether she was alive and, if so, how badly she was injured. Creeping closer, he put a hand out to find the pulse in her carotid artery.

Her eyes snapped open, her hand rose up, clutching a hunting knife by its handle. The point stabbed out toward his chest and, as he moved, sliced through his shirt and across the skin covering his breastbone. She sat up, coming after him. Leaves fell away from her like freshly turned earth from an animated corpse. Bourne grasped her wrist, redirecting the knife away from him, but she had a second knife in her other hand. Struggling with her, he saw it very late, and took the point on the bone of his shoulder.