The Bourne Objective

Arkadin loomed over her. “You’ll tell me now.”

“You might as well kill us both right here.”

Arkadin cursed her, but in the end he acceded to her demand. Hefting Moira in his arms, he carried her back to the convent. While he slid her into the backseat, Soraya went to get a shirt. She was rooting through Arkadin’s desk when he found her.

“Fuck, no,” he said and, grabbing her wrist, dragged her outside.

Half throwing her into the passenger’s seat of the car, he said, “I will kill you as soon as look at you.” Then he went around the front of the car, slid behind the wheel, and fired the ignition.

“You’re right.” Soraya kept Moira’s leg elevated as they sped through the outskirts of Puerto Peñasco. “Willard wanted me to get close to you, to report on your whereabouts and your business dealings.”

“And? I sense there’s something more.”

“There is,” she said. She knew she had to sell this part perfectly. She no longer believed absolutely in her ability to outsmart him, but this much she needed to do. “Willard has become interested in a man I’m sure you know, because he works for Maslov: Vylacheslav Oserov.”

Arkadin’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel, but his voice betrayed nothing of what he must be feeling. “Why would Willard be interested in Oserov?”

“I have no idea,” Soraya said. This much, at least, was true. “But I do know that yesterday a Treadstone agent ID’d Oserov in Marrakech. He tracked Oserov out into the Atlas Mountains, to a village called Tineghir.”

They arrived at Santa Fe General, on Morua Avenue, but Arkadin made no move to get out of the car.

“What was Oserov doing in Tineghir?”

“Looking for a ring.”

Arkadin shook his head. “Speak plainly.”

“This particular ring somehow unlocks a hidden file on a laptop hard drive.” She looked at him. “I know, I don’t understand it, either.” All of this information had been in the last text message she had received from Peter. She opened the rear door. “Can we get Moira into the ER, please?”

Arkadin got out of the car and slammed the door she had just opened. “I want more.”

“I’ve told you all I know.”

He stared into her face. “You see what happens to people who fuck with me.”

“I’m not fucking with you,” Soraya said. “I’ve betrayed a trust, what more do you want from me?”

“Everything,” he said. “I want everything.”

They rushed Moira into the emergency room. While the perso

“Let’s go,” Arkadin said the moment she disco

“I’m not leaving Moira.”

“We have further business to discuss.”

“Then we can discuss it here.”

“Back at the convent.”

“I’m not going to fuck you,” she said.

“Thank God, fucking you would be like fucking a scorpion.”

The irony of his comment made her laugh despite her worry and despair. She went to look for coffee, and he followed her.

Bourne drove to Oxford as fast as he dared without attracting the attention of the police. The city was precisely as he had left it both times he had been there. The quiet streets, the quaint stores, the lifelong denizens going about their chores, the tearooms, the bookstores, all like a miniature created by an obsessive eighteenth-century academic. Driving its streets was like visiting the inside of a snow globe.

Bourne parked near where Chrissie had left her Range Rover when they had come together, and he trotted up the steps of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. Professor Liam Giles was also right where he had been when they had last been there, bent over his desk in his voluminous office. He looked up as Bourne entered, blinking owlishly, as if he didn’t recognize him. Bourne saw that it wasn’t Giles after all, but another man of Giles’s approximate build and age.

“Where’s Professor Giles?”

“On leave,” the man said.

“I’m looking for him.”

“So I gather. May I ask why?”

“Where is he?”

The man blinked his owlish blink. “Away.”

Bourne had looked up Giles’s official bio on the way over, which was available on the Oxford University Web site.

“It’s about his daughter.”

The man behind Giles’s desk blinked. “Is she ill?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Where can I find Professor Giles?”

“I don’t think-”

“It’s urgent,” Bourne said. “A matter of life or death.”

“Are you being deliberately melodramatic, sir?”

Bourne showed the man the EMS credentials he’d lifted after the crash. “I’m quite serious.”

“Dear me.” The man gestured. “He’s in the loo, at the moment. Battling the eel pie he ingested last night, I shouldn’t wonder.”

The neurosurgeon was young, dark as an Indian, with the long, delicate fingers of a classical pianist. He had very delicate features, so he wasn’t, in fact, an Indian. But he was a hard-nosed businessman who would not proceed until Soraya had pressed a roll of bills into his hand. Then he rushed away from them, consulting with the ER doctors who had done the workup on Moira while he strode toward the OR.

Soraya drank her shitty coffee without tasting it, but ten minutes later, while she paced the hallway uselessly, it began to burn a hole in her stomach, so when Arkadin suggested they get something to eat she agreed. They found a restaurant not far away from the hospital. Soraya checked to make sure it wasn’t colonized by insects before she sat down. They ordered their food, then sat and waited, sitting across from each other but looking elsewhere, or at least Soraya was.

“I saw you without your top,” Arkadin said, “and I liked what I saw.”

Soraya snapped into focus. “Fuck you.”

“She was an enemy,” he said, referring to Moira. “What law is she protected by?”

Soraya stared out the window at a street as unfamiliar to her as the dark side of the moon.

The food came and Arkadin began to eat. Soraya watched a couple of young women with too much makeup and too little clothing on their way to work. Latinas showing off their bodies with such casualness still astonished her. Their culture was so far from hers. And yet she felt right in tune with the aura of sorrow here. Hopelessness she could understand. It had been the cultural lot of her gender from time immemorial, and was the major reason she had chosen the clandestine services where, despite the usual gender bias, she was able to assert herself in ways that made her feel good about herself. Now, for the first time, she saw those girls in their too-tight tops and too-short skirts in a different light. Those clothes were a way-perhaps their only way-to assert themselves in a culture that continually demeaned and devalued them.

“If Moira dies, or if she can’t walk-”

“Spare me the toothless threats,” he said, mopping up the last of his huevos rancheros.

That was Arkadin’s business, she thought. No matter what he might think to the contrary, he was in the business of demeaning and devaluing women. That was the subtext in everything he said and did. He had no heart, no remorse, no guilt, no soul-nothing, in short, that defined and distinguished a human being. If he isn’t a human being, she thought with a kind of irrational terror, what is he?

The men’s loo was five doors down from Professor Giles’s office. Giles was clearly being sick behind the closed door of one of the stalls. A sour stench had pervaded the room, and Bourne strode over to the window and shoved it open as far as it would go. A sticky breeze slowly stirred the stench as a witch will her bubbling pot.