The Bourne Objective

Idir’s family had deep ties with the Etanas reaching back centuries. The Etanas had founded the Monition Club as a way for the Severus Domna to come together in various cities across the globe without attracting attention or using the group’s real name. To the outside world, the Monition Club was a philanthropic organization involved in the advancement of anthropology and ancient philosophies. It was a hermetically sealed world in which the sub-rosa members of the group could move, meet, compare work, and plan initiatives.

Idir had had his own ideas about power and succession, but before he could act Benjamin El-Arian had moved into the power vacuum created when Jalal Essai’s brother had decamped. Now that Jalal Essai had shown his true colors, the Essai family was dead and buried as far as Severus Domna was concerned. His defection had occurred on El-Arian’s watch. Idir had already had several conversations with Marlon Etana, the organization’s top-ranking member in Europe. Together, he had told Etana, they were more than a match for Benjamin El-Arian. Etana wasn’t so sure, but then years in the West had made Etana cautious, timid, even, in Idir’s opinion. Not desirable traits in a leader. He had plans for Severus Domna-big plans-beyond the scope of anything El-Arian or Etana could conceive of. He had tried negotiations, reason, and, finally, appealing to the vanity and ego of the leaders. All to no avail. That left only the path of violence.

Satisfied with his final inspection, he locked up the house and walked away. But not too far. The show was about to begin, and he had reserved for himself a front-row seat.

The moment Arkadin had acted on his suspicions, the moment he had sliced through the tendons at the back of Moira’s knee, the idyll of his sojourn in Sonora was shattered. He saw it for the illusion it was. Not for him the slow pace and hot sun, the slinky dancers and the sad rancheras. His life led elsewhere. From that time forward he couldn’t wait to leave Mexico. He had been bitterly betrayed. Sonora had held up to him the mirror of his life, the life to which he was bound no matter how much he might long to leave it.

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.