Eric van Lustbader: The Bourne Objective

In Morocco he was back in his element, a shark moving through deep and dangerous waters. But for thousands of years sharks have been bred to survive dark and dangerous waters. So, too, Leonid Arkadin.

Armed and never more dangerous, he drove out of Marrakech with Soraya, a woman he found perplexingly complicated. Until he had been gulled by Tracy, he had been used to dominating women in every sense imaginable. Conveniently forgotten was his own mother, who had controlled him completely by keeping him locked in a closet where rats had eaten three of his toes before he fought back, first by ragefully biting off their heads, then by killing his mother. He despised her so thoroughly that he had expunged her from both his consciousness and his memory. What glimpses remained were scenes from a cheap and grainy film he had seen when young.

And yet it had been his mother who had led him to view women through a particular lens. He flirted relentlessly. He felt only contempt for those who succumbed to his masculine charms. These he chewed up and threw away the moment he became bored with them. On those rare occasions when he encountered resistance-Tracy, Devra, the DJ he had met in Sevastopol, and now Soraya-he reacted differently, less surely, and doubt in himself had crept in like a fog, resulting in failure. He had failed to see through Tracy’s facade; he had failed to protect Devra. And with Soraya? He didn’t yet know, but he could not stop thinking about what she had said about his life being a struggle to be a man, not an animal. There was a time when he would have laughed at anyone who made such an accusation, but something had changed in him. For better or for worse he had become self-aware, and this self-awareness lent him the certainty that what she said wasn’t an accusation at all, but a statement of fact.

All this went through his mind as he and Soraya drove to Tineghir. It had been chilly enough in Marrakech, but here in the snowbound High Atlas an icy wind knifed through the canyons, flooding the wadi with frozen air.

“We’re coming to the end of the road,” he said.

Soraya did not reply; she hadn’t said a word for the entire car ride.

“Have you nothing more to say?”

His tone was deliberately mocking, but she just smiled at him and looked out the window. This abrupt change in her demeanor disturbed him, but he was unsure what to do about it. He couldn’t seduce her and he couldn’t browbeat her. What was left?

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tall figure-too tall to be Berber-in a black-and-brown-striped thobe. The hood shadowed his face, but as the car moved past, he could see that there was no disfigurement. The figure moved with Oserov’s gait, but how could it be him?

“Soraya, do you see that man in the black-and-brown thobe ?”

She nodded.

He stopped the car. “Get out here and approach him. Do whatever you have to do. I want you to find out if he’s Russian, and if he is, whether his name is Oserov. Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov.”

“And?”

“I’ll be sitting right here, watching. If it’s Oserov, give me a signal,” he said, “so I can kill him.”

She gave him an enigmatic smile. “I was wondering when I’d see it again.”

“What?”

“Your rage.”

“You don’t know what Oserov has done; you don’t know what he’s capable of.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She opened the car door and climbed out. “I’ve seen what you’re capable of.”

Soraya carefully picked her way through the teeming street toward the tall man in the black-and-brown thobe. The key for her, she knew, was to remain calm and to keep her wits about her. Arkadin had outmaneuvered her once; she wasn’t going to get caught out like that again. There were a number of times during the drive to Tineghir when she had calculated she had a chance of escaping, but for two reasons she never made the move. The first was that she had no real confidence that she could elude Arkadin. The second, and more important, was that she had vowed to herself that she would not abandon Jason. He had saved her life more than once. No matter what malicious stories recirculated within CI about him, she knew she could count on him for anything and everything. Now that his life was in imminent danger, she would not run away and hide. More to the point, she had to do something to change Arkadin’s immediate trajectory.

Approaching the man, she began to speak to him in Egyptian-inflected Arabic. At first, he ignored her. It was possible that in the street hubbub he did not hear her, or thought she was speaking to someone else. She moved around so that she stood squarely in front of him. She spoke to him again. He kept his head slightly lowered and did not respond.

“I need some help. Do you understand English?” she said.

When he shook his head, she shrugged, turned, and made to walk away. She whirled around and said in Russian, “I recognize you, Vylacheslav Germanovich.” His head came up. “Aren’t you a colleague of Leonid’s?”

“You’re a friend of Arkadin’s?” His voice was thick and clotted, as if there were something in his throat he hadn’t completely swallowed. “Where is he?”

“Right over there.” She pointed to the car. “Sitting behind the wheel.”

Everything happened at once. Soraya backpedaled, Oserov swung around in a semi-crouch. Beneath the thobe he had concealed an AK-47 assault rifle. In one fluid motion he raised the AK-47, aimed it, and fired at the car. People, screaming, scattered in every direction. Oserov kept firing as he advanced across the street, drawing closer and closer to the car, shuddering on its shocks as it was sprayed with bullets.

When he came abreast of the car, he stopped. He tried to open the driver’s door, but it was so distorted it would not budge. Cursing, he reversed the AK-47, using the butt to knock out what was left of the window. He peered inside. It was empty.

Whirling, he leveled the AK-47 at Soraya. “Where is he? Where is Arkadin?”

Soraya saw Arkadin slither out from beneath the car, rise up, and wrap his arm around Oserov’s neck. He pulled backward with such force that Oserov’s feet left the ground. Oserov tried to slam the rifle’s butt into Arkadin’s rib cage, but Arkadin eluded each attack. Oserov whipped his head back and forth in an attempt to keep Arkadin from gaining a stranglehold. As he did so, his mask began to slip; becoming aware of this, Arkadin ripped it off, revealing the swollen, hideously disfigured face beneath.

Soraya crossed the now empty street, approaching the two antagonists with slow, deliberate steps. Oserov dropped the AK-47 and drew out a wicked-looking dirk. Soraya could see that it was out of Arkadin’s line of sight, he was unaware that Oserov was about to plunge it into his side.

Arkadin, absorbed in his life-or-death struggle with his hated enemy, breathed in the stench of an open sewer and realized that it was coming from Oserov, as if the people he had murdered had clawed their way out of the ground, twining about him like deeply rooted vines. Oserov seemed to be rotting from the inside out. Arkadin pulled him tighter as Oserov continued to struggle, continued to try to find a way out of the vise he was in. But once engaged, neither of them would let go or relinquish a hold on the other, as if their epic struggle was of one person becoming two. Two people fighting for dominion, battling in the abyss of unthinking and unreasoning rage. The conflict was not only against Oserov’s crimes, but against Arkadin’s own inhuman past, a past he daily tried to shove out of his mind, to bury as deeply as he could. And yet, zombified, it kept rising from its grave.

“That’s your life,” Soraya had said, “the struggle to be a man, not an animal.”