Page 19 of The Bourne Objective (Jason Bourne 8)

  “But what if Bourne kills Arkadin? You don’t know—”

  “That’s right, Peter, we’ll be faced with an X-factor. The process will, therefore, take longer. We’ll have to study Bourne in a controlled environment. We’ll—”

  “Wait a minute. Are you talking about imprisoning him?”

  “Subjecting him to repeated batteries of psychological tests, yes, yes.” Willard sounded impatient, as if he’d made his point but Marks was too stupid to get it. “This is the essence of Treadstone, Peter. This is what Alex Conklin devoted his life to.”

  “But why? I just don’t get it.”

  “The Old Man didn’t either, not really.” Willard sighed. “Sometimes I think Alex was the only American to learn from the tragic mistakes of the war in Vietnam. It was his special genius, you see, to anticipate Iraq and Afghanistan. He saw the new world coming. He knew that the old methods of waging war were as antiquated, as certain to fail as the Napoleonic code.

  “While the Pentagon was spending billions on stockpiling smart bombs, nuclear submarines, stealth bombers, supersonic jet fighters, Alex was concentrated on building the one weapon of war he knew would be effective: human beings. Treadstone’s mission from the very first day of its inception was to build the perfect human weapon: fearless, merciless, skilled at infiltration, subterfuge, misdirection, mimicry. A weapon of a thousand faces who could be anyone, go anywhere, kill any target without remorse, and return to take on the next mission.

  “And now you see what a visionary Alex was. What he saw has, indeed, come to pass. What we create in the Treadstone program will become America’s most potent weapon against its enemies, no matter how clever they are, no matter how remote their location. Do you think I’m going to bury something invaluable? I made a deal with the devil so that Treadstone would be resurrected.”

  “And what,” Marks said, “if the devil has other ideas for Treadstone?”

  “Then,” Willard replied, “the devil will have to be dealt with in some manner.” There was a slight pause. “Arkadin or Bourne, it makes no difference to me. Only the outcome of their struggle for survival interests me. And either way, I will have them—one or the other—as the prototype for the graduates Treadstone will produce.”

  Start at the beginning,” Bourne said. “This has all the earmarks of a nightmare.”

  “The long and the short of it,” Ottavio Moreno said with a sigh, “is that you had no right to kill Noah Perlis.”

  The two men were in a safe house in Thamesmead, a small developed area directly across the river from the London City Airport. It was one of those modern crackerjack boxes being thrown up all over the sprawling suburbs that were as flimsy as they looked. They had driven there in Moreno’s gray Opel, as anonymous a car as you were likely to find in London. They’d eaten some cold chicken and pasta out of the fridge, washed it down with a bottle of decent South African wine, and then had retired to the living room where they literally threw themselves onto the sofas.

  “Perlis killed Holly Moreau.”

  “Perlis was business,” Ottavio Moreno pointed out.

  “So, I think, was Holly.”

  Ottavio Moreno nodded. “But then it became personal, didn’t it?”

  Bourne had no good reply to that, since the answer was obvious to both of them.

  “Water under the bridge,” Moreno said, taking Bourne’s silence as acquiescence. “The point that you’ve forgotten is that I hired Perlis to find the laptop.”

  “He had no laptop; he had the ring.”

  Moreno shook his head. “Forget the ring and try to remember the laptop.”

  Bourne felt as if he were sinking deeper and deeper into quicksand. “You mentioned the laptop before, but I have no memory of it.”

  “In that event I imagine you have no memory of how you stole it from Jalal Essai’s home.”

  Bourne shook his head helplessly.

  Moreno dug his thumbs into his eyes for a moment. “I see what you meant when you said start at the beginning.”

  Bourne, saying nothing, watched him carefully. The constant problem with people arising out of his past was this: Who were they really and were they telling him the truth? A man with no memory isn’t difficult to lie to. In fact, Bourne reflected, it was probably fun to lie to an amnesiac and watch his reactions.

  “You were given an assignment to get the laptop computer.”

  “By whom?”

  Moreno shrugged. “Alex Conklin, I imagine. Anyway, we made contact in Marrakech.”

  Morocco again. Bourne sat forward. “Why would I contact you?”

  “I was Alex Conklin’s contact there.” When Bourne gave him a skeptical look, he added, “I’m a half brother. My mother is a Berber, from the High Atlas Mountains.”

  “Your father got around.”

  “Make a joke, okay, it’s all right, I won’t gut you.” Ottavio Moreno laughed. “Christ, this is a fucked-up world.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Okay, look, my friend. My father had his thumb in a shitload of pies, most of them illegal, yes, I freely admit it. So what? So his business ventures took him to many places around the world, some of them strange.”

  “Business wasn’t the only thing he had a healthy appetite for,” Bourne said.

  Ottavio Moreno nodded. “Too true. He had an eye for exotic women.”

  “Are there any other little half Morenos running around?”

  Moreno laughed. “There very well might be, knowing my father. But if there are, I don’t know about them.”

  Bourne decided there was nothing more to be gained by taking the subject of the elder Moreno’s love life any farther. “Okay, you say that you were Conklin’s contact in Marrakech.”

  “I don’t say it,” Ottavio Moreno said with a slight frown, “I was that man.”

  “I suppose you can’t produce any canceled checks from the Treadstone account.”

  “Ha, ha,” Moreno said, but it wasn’t a laugh. He took out a pack of Gauloises Blondes, shook one out, and lit up. He stared at Bourne while he blew smoke at the ceiling. At length, he said, “Am I wrong in thinking we’re on the same page?”

  “I don’t know. Are we?”

  Bourne got up and went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of cold water. He was angry at himself, not Moreno. He knew he was at his most vulnerable at this juncture. He didn’t like being vulnerable. More to the point, in his line of work he couldn’t afford to be.

  Returning to the living room, he sat down on an armchair facing the sofa where Ottavio Moreno still sat smoking slowly, as if in meditation. In Bourne’s absence he’d turned on the TV to the BBC news. The sound was off, but the images of the Vesper Club were all too familiar. Lights were flashing off the tops of emergency vehicles and police cars. Personnel emerged from the club’s front door carrying a stretcher. The body on it was draped in a cloth that covered its face. Then the scene switched to a newsreader in the BBC studios, mouthing whatever had been written for him moments before. Bourne gestured and Moreno turned up the volume, but there was nothing for them in the story, and Moreno muted the sound again.

  “It will be harder than ever to get out of London now,” Bourne said shortly.

  “I know more ways to get out of London than they do.” He gestured at the cop being interviewed on the screen.

  “So do I,” Bourne said. “That isn’t the issue.”

  Moreno leaned forward, stubbed out the butt in an ugly free-form ashtray, and lit another. “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “Too late for apologies,” Bourne said. “What’s so important about the laptop?”

  Moreno shrugged.

  “Perlis had the ring,” Bourne said. “He killed Holly to get it.”

  “The ring is a symbol of the Severus Domna, all members wear it or carry it unobtrusively.”

  “That’s it? If there’s nothing else important about it, why did Perlis murder Holly for it?”

  “I don’t know

. Maybe he thought it would somehow lead him to the laptop.” Again Moreno stubbed out his cigarette. “Look, is all this distrust because Gustavo was my half brother?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” Bourne said.

  “Yeah, well, my big brother was a fucking thorn in my side ever since I can remember.”

  “Then it’s a good thing for you he’s dead,” Bourne said drily.

  Moreno eyed Bourne for a moment. “Jesus Christ, you think I’ve taken over his drug business.”

  “I’d be a fool if the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  Moreno nodded morosely. “Fair enough.” He sat back and spread his hands wide. “Okay, then, how can I prove myself?”

  “Up to you.”

  Moreno crossed his arms over his chest and thought a moment. “What do you remember about the four of them: Perlis, Holly, Tracy, and Diego Hererra?”

  “Virtually nothing,” Bourne said.

  “I imagine you asked Diego about them. What did he tell you?”

  “I know about their friendship, their romantic entanglements.”

  Moreno frowned. “What romantic entanglements?”

  When Bourne told him, he laughed. “Mano, your boy Diego dropped one steaming pile of shit on your doorstep. There was no romance among the four of them. There was only friendship—until, that is, Holly started wearing the ring. One of them, maybe Tracy, I don’t know, became interested in the engraving on the inside. The more interested she became in it, the more Perlis’s curiosity was piqued. He took a photo of the engraving and brought it to Oliver Liss, his boss at the time. This led directly to the tragedy of Holly’s death.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I worked for Black River until Alex Conklin recruited me as a Treadstone agent in place. That gave the old boy a good deal of satisfaction—he despised Liss, as corrupt and exploitative an individual as you’re likely to meet in this business. He feasted off other people’s misery, hosed the government mercilessly, and directed his operatives to commit crimes and atrocities the government dared not do itself. Until you helped sink Black River, Liss was about the most successful modern-day agent of chaos, and believe me that’s saying a lot.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how—”

  “Back in the day, Perlis reported to me, before Liss took charge of him directly and used him to carry out private missions.”

  Bourne nodded. “The ring was one of those private missions.”

  “It became one. Perlis needed help, so he came to me. I was the only one he trusted. He told me that the moment Liss saw the ring he flipped out. That was when he ordered Perlis to find the laptop.”

  “The one you helped me steal from Jalal Essai.”

  “That’s right.”

  Bourne frowned. “But what happened to it?”

  “You were supposed to deliver it to Conklin personally, but you didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You discovered something about the laptop—something, you told me, that it was probable Conklin didn’t want you to know. You took it upon yourself to change the mission on the fly.”

  “What did I discover?”

  Moreno shrugged. “You never told me, and I was too well trained to ask.”

  Bourne was sunk deep in thought. The enigma of the ring was growing with every moment. Considering Liss’s reaction when he saw the ring, it seemed likely that it was in some way connected to the laptop. That was if Moreno was telling him the truth. He felt as if he were in a hall of mirrors, each reflection distorted in a different way so that it was no longer possible to discern reality from carefully constructed fantasy, truth from cleverly worded fiction.

  On the TV screen the newsreader had gone on to other stories, in other lands, but the images of Diego Hererra’s corpse being taken out of the Vesper Club continued to flicker through Bourne’s mind. Had it been necessary to kill him, as Moreno had said, or did Moreno have another, darker motive he was keeping from Bourne? The only way to find out the truth was to keep Moreno close to him, and to continue questioning him as subtly as possible until a chink in his armor appeared—or until he proved himself truthful.

  “What do you know about Essai?” Bourne asked.

  “Besides being a member of the Severus Domna ruling council, not much. He comes from an illustrious family, which dates back all the way to the eleven hundreds, if I’m not mistaken. His ancestors took part in the Moorish invasion of Andalusia. One of them ruled there for a number of years.”

  “What about in more modern times?”

  “These days no one’s interested in the Berbers or the Amazigh, which we call ourselves.”

  “And what of Severus Domna itself?”

  “Ah, well, there I can be of some help. First off, I should point out that very little is known about the group. They fly so far below the radar that whatever footprints they leave are all but invisible or easily wiped away. No one knows how large the group is, but members are scattered in virtually every corner of the globe, all in positions of power in governments, businesses, media, and criminal activities. Any industry you care to name they’re in.”

  “What’s their aim?” Bourne was thinking of the word Dominion inscribed on the inside of his ring. “What do they want?”

  “Power, money, control of world events. Who knows, but that’s a better guess than any other. It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?”

  “If you’re a student of history,” Bourne conceded.

  Ottavio Moreno laughed. “So many aren’t.”

  Bourne took a breath and let it out slowly. He wondered what it was he’d found out about the laptop that had led him to change the mission. He wasn’t aware of changing any of the Treadstone missions he’d been sent on, if only because he remembered that up until Conklin’s murder he and the Treadstone boss had been on good terms, even friendly ones.

  When he mentioned this, Moreno said, “You told me to tell Conklin that Essai didn’t have the laptop, that you didn’t know what had happened to it.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you do that? Treadstone was paying your salary, Conklin was your boss.”

  “I’m not altogether certain,” Ottavio Moreno confessed. “Other than there’s a fundamental difference between field and office personnel. The one doesn’t necessarily understand the motives of the other, and vice versa. Out here, if we don’t have each other’s backs, we’re dead meat.” He put the pack of Gauloises away. “When you told me you’d found something fundamental enough to change the mission I believed you.”

  So you have come to see the famous Corellos.”

  Roberto Corellos, Narsico Skydel’s cousin, smirked at Moira. He sat in a comfortable armchair. The room, spacious, filled with light, with its deep-pile rug, porcelain lamps, paintings on the walls, looked like someone’s living room. But as Moira was about to discover, Bogotá’s prisons weren’t like any others in the world.

  “The American press wants to speak with the famous Corellos, now that he’s in La Modelo, now that it’s safe.” He drew a cigar from the breast pocket of his guayabera shirt and with great fanfare bit off the end and lit up, using an old Zippo lighter. With another smirk, he said, “A present from one of my many admirers.” It wasn’t immediately clear whether he meant the robusto or the Zippo.

  He blew a cloud of aromatic smoke toward the ceiling and crossed one linen-clad leg over the other. “What newspaper are you with again?”

  “I’m a stringer for The Washington Post,” Moira said. These credentials had been presented to her by Jalal Essai. She didn’t know where he had obtained them and she didn’t care. All that concerned her was that they would hold up under scrutiny. He assured her that they would, and so far he’d been right.

  She had arrived in Bogotá less than twenty-four hours ago and had obtained immediate permission to interview Corellos. She was mildly surprised that no one seemed to care one way or the other.

  “It’

s fortunate that you came now. In a week or so I’ll be out of here.” Corellos stared at the glowing tip of the cigar. “This has been something of a vacation for me.” He waved a hand. “I have everything I could want—food, cigars, bitches to fuck, anything and everything—and I don’t have to lift a finger to get them.”

  “Charming,” Moira said.

  Corellos eyed her. He was a handsome man, in a rough, hard-muscled way. And with his dark, smoldering eyes and intense masculine presence, he was certainly charismatic. “You have to understand something about Colombia, Señorita Trevor. The country isn’t in the hands of the government, no, no, no. In Colombia power is split between FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and the drug lords. Left-wing guerrillas and right-wing capitalists, something like that.” His laugh was as raucous and as joyful as a macaw’s cry. He seemed completely relaxed, as if he were at home, instead of in Bogotá’s most notorious prison. “FARC controls forty percent of the country, we control the other sixty.”

  Moira was skeptical. “That seems something of an exaggeration, Señor Corellos. Should I take everything you tell me with a grain of salt?”

  Corellos reached behind him and placed a Taurus PT92 semi-automatic pistol on the table between them.

  Moira felt sucker-punched.

  “It’s fully loaded, you can check it if you want.” He seemed to be enjoying her shocked reaction. “Or you can take it—as a souvenir. Not to worry, there’s plenty more where that came from.”

  He laughed again. Then he pushed the Taurus to one side. “Listen, señorita, like most gringos I think you’re a bit out of your league here. Just last month we had a war in here—the FARC guerrillas against the, uh, businessmen. It was a full-scale conflict, complete with AK-47s, fragmentation grenades, dynamite, you name it. The guards, such as they are, backed away. The army surrounded the prison but wouldn’t venture inside because we’re better armed than they are.” He winked at her. “I’ll bet the justice minister didn’t tell you about that.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “I’m not surprised. It was a bloody fucking mess in here, let me tell you.”