The Bourne Objective

Without a word being exchanged between them, he herded her back to his car, and soon enough they set off back to the convent.

“What do you want from me now?” she asked him in a dull voice.

“The same thing you want from me,” he said. “Destruction.”

The moment they entered the convent, Arkadin began to pack. “While you were going through your hand-wringing, I made reservations for us.”

“For us?”

“Yes,” he said without missing a beat. “You and I are going to Tineghir.”

“If I go anywhere with you I’ll be sick to my stomach.”

He paused and turned to face her. “I think you’ll be useful to me when I get to Morocco, so I don’t want to kill you. But I will if you give me no other choice.” He went back to his methodical packing. “Unlike you, I know when to cut my losses.”

It was at that moment that Soraya caught sight of the laptop, which, for her, had taken on a mythical significance. He was right, in his own way, she thought. As right as Moira had been. It was time to get past her personal abhorrence at his actions. It was time to return to acting like a professional. Time to cut her losses.

“I’ve always wanted to see the High Atlas Mountains,” she said.

“You see?” He tucked away the laptop. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

Jalal Essai, sitting in an anonymous car he had boosted early this morning, watched Willard emerge from the Monition Club. As Essai observed, he did not move as if he had been defeated by the receptionist, or had waited in vain to be seen by a member of the club. Rather, he descended the stairs as Fred Astaire might, lightly and trippingly, as if to music playing in his head. This jaunty attitude disturbed Essai. It also raised the hackles on the back of his neck, which was far worse.

Essai, whose life was in constant jeopardy ever since his home had been invaded by Severus Domna, knew from being on the other side that a passive response, such as flight, would only result in his eventual death. The organization would come after him again and again, until someway, somehow, somewhere it succeeded in terminating his life. Under these extreme circumstances, there was only one way to stay alive.

Willard turned a corner and stopped, looking to flag down a taxi. Essai pulled over to the curb and rolled down the passenger’s-side window.

“Need a lift?” he said.

Willard, startled, drew back as if affronted. “No, thank you,” he said, and returned to sca

“Mr. Willard, please get into the car.”

When Willard looked back, he saw the man holding a wicked-looking EAA 10mm Hunter Witness pistol, aimed at his face.

“Come, come,” Essai said, “let’s not make a scene.”

Willard opened the door and slid into the passenger’s seat without a word.

“How, may I ask, are you going to drive this vehicle and at the same time keep me under control?”

In answer, Essai slammed the barrel of the Hunter Witness against the side of Willard’s head just above his left ear. Willard sighed as his eyes rolled up. Essai leaned the unconscious body against the window and returned the pistol to its shoulder holster. Then he put the car in gear, waited for a gap, and slid out into traffic.

He drove south through the district. At some invisible demarcation, the massive government buildings vanished, replaced by local businesses, cheap retail outlets, fast-food chains, storefront missions, and corner bars. Outside the bars, young men in hoodies loitered, exchanging small packets of dope for wads of bills. Old men sat on stoops, head in hands or leaning back against the gray stone steps, eyes half closed, heads nodding. Caucasians grew rare as hen’s teeth, then disappeared altogether. This was a different Washington, one tourists never saw. Congressmen, either. Patrol cars were few and far between. When one did appear, it rolled at speed, as if its occupants couldn’t wait to be elsewhere, anywhere but here.

Essai pulled the car over in front of something that passed for a hotel. Its rooms went by the hour, and when he dragged Willard inside, supporting him, the whores assumed Willard was a drunk, passed out on his feet. They showed Essai their flyblown wares. He ignored them.

He placed a doctor’s black bag on the scarred counter of the attendant’s foul-smelling cubbyhole and slid a twenty across. The attendant was whey-faced, slim as a twig, neither young nor old. He was watching porn on a portable TV.

“What,” Essai said, “no concierge?”

The attendant laughed but didn’t turn his glassy eyes from the TV screen. Without looking he unhooked a key from a pegboard and dropped it on the counter.

“I don’t want to be disturbed,” Essai said.

“Everyone wants the same thing.”

He slid across another twenty, the attendant snapped it up, selected a different key, and said, “Second floor in the back. You could die in there and no one would know.”

Essai took the key and the black bag.

There was no elevator. Getting Willard up the stairs proved something of a chore, but Essai managed. A grime-laden window at the far end of the narrow hallway let in light that seemed both leaden and exhausted. A bare bulb burned halfway down, highlighting the constellations of obscene graffiti scrawled on the walls.

The room looked like a jail cell. The bare-bones furnishings-a bed, a dresser with a drawer missing, a rocking chair-were either gray or colorless. The window looked out on an air shaft, where it was always nighttime. The room smelled strongly of carbolic and bleach. Essai did not want to think of what had gone on there in the past.

Dumping Willard on the bed, he set down the doctor’s bag, opened it, and placed a number of items in a neat line on the stained coverlet. This bag and its contents were always with him, a habit that had been ingrained in him at an early age, when he had been in training to move to America, to insinuate himself into the lives of the people Severus Domna selected. He had no idea how the group came up with Bud Halliday’s name or how it suspected that he would rise so quickly into the firmament of American politics, but then he was used to Severus Domna’s unca

Using a box cutter, he stripped off Willard’s clothes, then unwrapped a Depends and fitted it around his loins. He slapped Willard’s cheeks lightly enough to rouse him slowly out of his unconscious state. Before Willard was fully conscious, he elevated his head and shoulders, and tipped a bottle of castor oil down his throat. At first, Willard choked and gagged. Essai eased off, then fed the viscous liquid to him more slowly. Willard swallowed it all.

Disposing of the bottle, Essai slapped Willard hard on one cheek, then the other, sending blood rushing into his head. Willard started awake, his eyes blinking rapidly. Then he looked around.

“Where am I?” His voice was thick and furred.

When his tongue ran around his lips, Essai reached for the roll of duct tape.

“What’s this taste?”

As Willard started to retch, Essai slapped a length of tape across his mouth.

“If you vomit, you’ll suffocate. I advise you to clamp down on your gag reflex.”

He sat on the chair, rocking slowly as Willard struggled to regain his equilibrium. When he saw his prisoner wi