Page 22 of The Bourne Objective (Jason Bourne 8)

  Arkadin had tied Pavel’s feet to the winch and had lowered him headfirst over the stern of the boat. He lengthened the time underwater with each plunge, so that by the end of the sixth or seventh Pavel was certain he was going to drown. Then Arkadin had cut him, slashing him under each eye. As the blood ran, he plunged Pavel back underwater. This had continued for perhaps forty minutes. Then the shark showed up. Pavel must have seen the shark. When El Heraldo hauled him up he looked mortally terrified.

  Taking advantage of the weakness, Arkadin punched Pavel three times in rapid succession as hard as he could, breaking two or three of Pavel’s ribs. Pavel began to gasp, his breathing became painfully difficult. Responding to his boss’s signal, El Heraldo lowered Pavel back into the water. The shark nosed in, curious and interested.

  Pavel began a panicked thrashing in the water. The thrashing only made the shark more interested. Sharks had poor eyesight, relying on scent and motion. This one scented fresh blood, and the thrashing led it to believe that its prey was injured. Putting on speed, it headed directly for the injured creature.

  Arkadin saw the sudden acceleration of the dorsal fin and lifted his arm, a signal to El Heraldo, who cranked the winch. Just before his head and shoulders cleared the water, Pavel’s body shuddered and swung wildly as the shark struck. When El Heraldo had Pavel dangling in the air, he gave a strangled cry and, drawing his handgun, leaned over the stern of the cigarette and pumped the magazine empty, firing shot after shot into the creature’s immense bulk.

  As the water churned wildly, turning black with the shark’s blood, Arkadin crossed to the winch, swung it, and lowered a screaming, weeping Pavel to the deck. Arkadin let El Heraldo have his fun. Ever since his younger brother had lost a leg to a tiger shark three years ago, El Heraldo got a murderous look in his eye whenever he saw a dorsal fin. El Heraldo had revealed this grisly piece of family history one night when he was very drunk and very sad.

  Arkadin turned his attention to Pavel. What the repeated near drownings had started, the shark had finished. Pavel was in very bad shape. The shark had taken a chunk of his left shoulder and cheek. He was bleeding profusely, it was the least of his problems. He’d been traumatized by the shark attack. His eyes were wide and staring, darting from place to place but not focusing. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably, and there was the stink of excrement coming off him.

  Ignoring all that, Arkadin squatted down beside his captain and, putting a hand on his head, said, “Pavel Mikhailovich, my very good friend, we have a serious problem to resolve. And only you can resolve it. Either Stepan or you has been passing information to someone outside our organization. Stepan swears it’s not him, which, I’m afraid, leaves you as the guilty party.”

  Pavel, weeping and howling in pain and terror, was unresponsive, until Arkadin bounced the back of his head off the deck.

  “Pull yourself together, Pavel Mikhailovich! Focus! Your life hangs in the balance.” When Pavel’s gaze alighted on him and stayed there, Arkadin smiled and stroked his hair. “I know you’re in pain, my friend, and good God, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig! But that will all be over soon. El Heraldo will patch you up in no time, he’s a master, believe me.

  “Look, Pavel Mikhailovich, here’s the deal. Tell me who you’re working for, what you’ve passed on, tell me everything and we’ll patch you up. You’ll be as good as new. What’s more, I’ll let it be known that Stepan was the mole. Your employer will relax, you’ll continue as before, passing on information, except you’ll be passing on only the information I feed you. How does this sound? Agreed?”

  Pavel moaned and nodded, clearly not trusting himself yet to speak.

  “Good.” Arkadin looked up at El Heraldo. “Have you finished with your fun?”

  “The sonovabitch’s dead.” El Heraldo spat in the water with some satisfaction. “And now its friends have come to feast on it.”

  Arkadin looked back down to Pavel and thought, It’s the same with this sonovabitch.

  The man with the piercing blue eyes gestured. “Please sit down, Mr. Willard, would you like something to drink?”

  “I could do with a whiskey,” Willard said.

  The young man whom Willard had followed vanished, only to reappear moments later with a tray on which sat an old-fashioned glass with whiskey, a tumbler of water, and another of ice.

  Someone else seemed to be walking on Willard’s legs, pulling out a chair, and sitting down at the refectory table. The young man set the three glasses in front of Willard, then went out the library door and closed it silently behind him.

  “I don’t understand how you could be expecting me,” Willard said. Then he remembered his eight hours of scouring the Internet in search of information on the Monition Club. “My computer’s ISP number is protected.”

  “Nothing is protected.” The man took hold of the book and, turning it around, pushed it over to Willard. “Tell me what you make of this.”

  Willard looked down at an illustration of a series of letters and odd symbols. He recognized the Latin letters, but the others were unknown to him. Then a little thrill rippled down his spine. Unless he was mistaken, this series was the same as the engraving in the photos Oliver Liss had showed him and Peter Marks.

  He looked up into those electric-blue eyes and said: “I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Willard, are you a student of history?”

  “I like to think so.”

  “Then you know about King Solomon.”

  Willard shrugged. “More than most, I imagine.”

  The man across from him sat back and laced his fingers over his lean stomach. “Solomon’s life and times are steeped in myth and legend. As in the Bible, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to discern truth from fiction. Why? Because his disciples had a vested interest in obscuring the truth. By far the most outrageous stories arose concerning the hoard of Solomon’s gold. Vast amounts that supposedly staggered the imagination. Historians and archaeologists now routinely ignore these stories as distorted or patently false. For one thing, where did all this gold come from? Solomon’s legendary mines? Even if the king had harnessed ten thousand slaves, he could not have amassed such a legendary hoard in his brief lifetime. So now it’s taken for gospel that there was no such thing as King Solomon’s gold.”

  He leaned forward and tapped the book illustration with his crooked forefinger. “This string of letters and symbols tells a different story. It is a clue—but, oh, more than a clue, much more. It is a key telling those who would listen that King Solomon’s gold does, indeed, exist.”

  Willard gave an involuntary chuckle.

  “Has something struck you as amusing?”

  “Forgive me, but I find this melodramatic gibberish hard to take seriously.”

  “Well, you’re free to leave whenever you want. Now, if you wish.”

  As the man was turning the open book back toward himself, Willard reached out and stopped him.

  “I’d really rather not.” Willard cleared his throat. “You were speaking of truth versus fiction.” He paused only a moment. “Perhaps it would help if you told me your name.”

  “Benjamin El-Arian. I’m one of a handful of resident scholars the Monition Club employs to deal with matters of ancient history and how it impacts the present.”

  “Again, you’ll forgive me, but I don’t for a moment believe that I was suddenly and out of the blue granted an interview with a simple scholar after trolling through the Internet for eight hours trying to find source material on the Monition Club. No, Mr. El-Arian, though you may well be a scholar, that can hardly be all you are.”

  El-Arian contemplated him for some time. “It seems to me, Mr. Willard, that you’re far too thoughtful and perceptive to find anything I say amusing.” He took the book and turned the page. “And please let us not forget that it was you who came here, seeking knowledge, presumably.” His eyes lit up in what might have been an instant of merriment. “Or were you thinking o

f seeking employment in order to infiltrate us as you did with the NSA?”

  “I’m surprised you’re aware of that, it was hardly common knowledge.”

  “Mr. Willard,” El-Arian said, “there isn’t anything about you we don’t know. Including your role in Treadstone.”

  Ah, at last we come to the crux of the matter, Willard thought. He waited, his expression perfectly neutral, but watching Benjamin El-Arian as if El-Arian were a spider sitting in the center of his web.

  “I know Treadstone is something of a hot-button issue with you,” El-Arian said, “so I’ll tell you what I know. Please don’t hesitate to correct me if I have any facts wrong. Treadstone was started by Alexander Conklin, inside Central Intelligence. His brainchild gave birth to only two graduates: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin and Jason Bourne. Now you have resurrected Treadstone, under the aegis of Oliver Liss, but almost immediately Liss is dictating to you even more than CI did to your predecessor.” He paused to give Willard time to correct him or make objections. When his guest remained silent, he nodded. “All this is prologue, however.” He tapped the open book again. “Since Liss has given you orders to find the gold ring with this engraving, it might interest you to know that he is not operating as an independent entity.”

  Willard tensed. “So who am I actually working for?”

  El-Arian’s smile held a sardonic edge. “Well, like all things in the matter, it’s complicated. The man who has been providing his funding and intel is Jalal Essai.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Nor should you have. Jalal Essai does not move in your circles. In fact, like me, Essai makes it his business to remain unknown to people like you. He’s a member of the Monition Club—or, rather, he was. You see, for some years this particular ring was presumed lost. It’s the only one of its kind, for reasons that will become clear to you momentarily.”

  El-Arian rose and, crossing to a section of the bookcases, pressed a hidden stud. The section swung outward, revealing a tea service consisting of a chased brass pot, a plate with an array of tiny powdered cakes, and six glasses, each narrow as a shot glass but perhaps three times its height. He loaded them onto a tray and brought them back to the table.

  In a ceremonial manner, he poured tea for them both, then gestured toward the plate of cakes for Willard to help himself. He settled himself, sipping and savoring his drink, which, Willard discovered, was sweet mint tea, a Moroccan staple.

  “Back to the matter at hand.” El-Arian took a sweet and popped it in his mouth. “What the ring’s engraving told us was this: King Solomon’s gold is fact, not fiction. The engraving contains specific Ugaritic symbols. Solomon employed a platoon of seers. These seers, or some of them at any rate, were versed in alchemy. They had discovered that intoning certain Ugaritic words and phrases in conjunction with scientific procedures they developed could turn lead into gold.”

  Willard sat stunned for a moment. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Lead into gold?” he said finally. “Literally?”

  “Literally.” El-Arian popped another sweet into his mouth. “This is the answer to the seemingly unsolvable mystery I proposed before, namely, how Solomon amassed such a hoard of gold in his short lifetime.”

  Willard shifted in his seat. “Is that what you people do here? Chase fairy tales?”

  El-Arian produced one of his enigmatic smiles. “As I said, you’re free to leave anytime you wish. And yet you won’t.”

  Out of sheer spite, Willard got to his feet. “How do you know that?”

  “Simply because, even if you aren’t yet convinced, the idea is too compelling.”

  Willard produced his own enigmatic smile. “Even if it is a fairy tale.”

  El-Arian pushed his chair back and crossed to the part of the bookcases where he had gotten the tea and cakes. Reaching into the shadows, he pulled something out, brought it back, and placed it on the table in front of Willard.

  Willard held El-Arian’s eyes for a moment, then dropped his gaze. He picked up a gold coin. It appeared ancient. On it was imprinted a pentagram star, along with the inscription GRAM, MA, TUM, TL, TRA in the spaces between the points. In the center of the star was a symbol so worn away as to be incomprehensible.

  “That pentagrammic star is the symbol of King Solomon, though various sources depict it as a six-pointed star, a cross engraved with Hebrew letters, even a Celtic knot. But it was the pentagrammic star that was engraved on the ring he always wore, which was said to have magic properties. Among them, it allowed him to trap demons and speak to animals.”

  Willard laughed. “You don’t believe such claptrap.”

  “Certainly not,” El-Arian said. “On the other hand, that gold coin is without doubt part of Solomon’s hoard.”

  “I don’t see how you could be certain,” Willard said. “No expert exists who could verify such a thing.”

  El-Arian’s curious smile returned. “For one thing we have verified its age. But more importantly we discovered something else,” he said. “Turn the coin over please.”

  To Willard’s surprise and bewilderment, the obverse of the coin was totally different.

  “You see, this side isn’t made of gold,” El-Arian said. “It’s made of lead, the original metal before it was transformed into gold.”

  15

  MOIRA SET OUT from Guadalajara early in the morning, driving into the heart of blue agave country in the Mexican state of Jalisco. The sky was huge, with just a few brushstrokes of cloud floating in the vivid blue. The sun was searing, and the morning grew hot very quickly. Toward noon she was obliged to roll up the windows and turn on the air conditioner. She lost cell service several times, and without her GPS she had some difficulty finding Amatitán.

  She used the time to put her interview with Roberto Corellos into its proper perspective. Why did he tell her that he’d chosen Berengária to keep her brother’s business going? Why on earth would he trust a woman to handle his livelihood? Moira had met many men like Corellos, and none of them was enlightened when it came to females. Screwing, cooking, having babies, that was the extent of their expectations of women.

  She mulled these questions over for hours until at last she caught sight of Amatitán. Corellos had a burning need for revenge. In a hot-tempered man of his blood, revenge was a matter of honor. Cuckolding his cousin wouldn’t be enough for him. It made sense that Corellos would want to ensnare Narsico in the kind of life his cousin had tried so desperately to put behind him. That was revenge.

  If Berengária was, indeed, heir to the drug business, then it followed a man must be running the show behind the scenes. Who? Corellos wasn’t going to tell her, and there was nothing she had to barter with except her body, which she was not about to use. But Berengária was another story. Piranha she might be, but Moira had had dealings with piranhas before. What had aroused her suspicions most was that Corellos hadn’t been concerned that whoever had stolen the laptop now had access to Gustavo’s client list. The only reason for this was that Corellos was already in business with him.

  The endless fields of blue agave passed by on either side. Workers toiled in the fields, sweating and grunting with their efforts. The Skydel estancia was just ahead.

  If, as she now believed, Essai’s laptop—the computer stolen from Gustavo Moreno—contained the drug lord’s client list, then there must be something else on it of great importance to her employer, and she was willing to bet that it wasn’t simply his family history, as he’d claimed. Then why had Essai lied to her? What was he hiding?

  Oliver Liss has lied to you from the first day he met you,” Benjamin El-Arian said.

  “I expect everyone to lie to me,” Willard said. “It’s a necessary evil of the life I lead.”

  The two men were walking in the Moorish cloister outside the Monition Club library. Here they were sheltered from the wind. The sun, high in the sky, spilled its warmth onto their shoulders.

  “So you’re at peace with it.”

  “Of course

not.” Willard inhaled deeply. There was something planted in the cloister, an herb or spice, whose scent he found pleasant and familiar. “My life is a war. I sift through the lies, I’ve trained myself to see past them. Then I act accordingly.”

  “You already know that Oliver Liss has no intention of allowing you to run Treadstone as you see fit.”

  “Of course, but I needed someone to get Treadstone off flatline. His agenda and mine were never going to coincide. However, it was Liss or no one.”

  “Now there’s someone else,” El-Arian said. “Liss is owned by Jalal Essai. As I told you. Essai was a member of the Monition Club. Currently he’s on his own.”

  “What would make him do that?” Willard asked.

  “The same thing that kept you from walking out of the library.”

  “King Solomon’s gold?”

  El-Arian nodded. “Once he discovered that the Solomon ring wasn’t lost, he decided he wanted the gold for himself.”

  Willard stopped and turned toward El-Arian. “Just how much gold are we talking about here?”

  “It’s difficult to know with any degree of precision, but if I had to guess I’d put the amount somewhere between fifty and a hundred billion dollars.”

  Willard gave a low whistle. “That’s enough incentive for an army to go rogue.” Then he scratched the side of his head. “What I can’t work out is why you’re telling me all this.”

  “Bourne has the Solomon ring,” El-Arian said. “And Treadstone’s other graduate, Leonid Arkadin, is in possession of a certain laptop. Some years ago, Bourne was sent by Alex Conklin to steal the laptop from Jalal Essai. This he did, but for some reason unknown to us he never delivered it to his boss. For years we have searched for it, in vain. It seemed as if it had vanished completely. Then one of our moles sent us information through an agent of ours, Marlon Etana, that Arkadin was in possession of the stolen laptop. How did he obtain it? A Colombian drug lord by the name of Gustavo Moreno was killed in a raid a month or so ago, but the laptop containing his detailed client list was not found in his compound. Somehow Arkadin had it spirited away, and now he’s used it to muscle his way into Moreno’s business.”