The Bourne Objective

5


THE CITY OF London, just over a mile square, is the historic core of what is now London proper. In medieval times it encompassed London, Westminster, and Southwark, guarded by a defensive wall built by the Romans in the second century, around which the modern metropolis threw its many arms like a spider extending its web. These days the City, slightly expanded, was the financial hub of London. Aguardiente Bancorp, being largely a commercial rather than a retail bank, had its one and only branch on Chancery Lane, just north of Fleet Street. From its large, stately windows, which faced southwest, Bourne could imagine rising the Temple Bar, the historic gate that a century ago linked the City, the financial center, to the road to Westminster, London’s political seat. The Temple Bar, named after the Temple Church, once home of the Knights Templar, was soberly presided over by statues of a griffin and a pair of dragons. Bourne did not, of course, look like Bourne, but rather Noah Perlis, the result of having made a number of purchases at a theatrical makeup shop in Covent Garden.
The gray stone and black marble interior of the bank was equally sober, as befitted an institution that counted as its clients a majority of the international companies doing business in the City. The ecclesiastical vaulted ceiling was so high, it seemed hazed like the sky outside—which, having delivered its burden, hovered now like the ravens in the Tower of London. Bourne crossed the softly echoing floor to the Safe Deposit desk, where a gentleman straight out of a Charles Dickens novel stood with shoulders as thin as a coat hanger, a sallow complexion, and a pair of beady eyes that looked like they had seen everything life had to offer pass them by.
Bourne introduced himself using Perlis’s passport as proof of identity. The Dickens cartoon pursed his lips as he squinted at the fine print, his liver-colored hands tilting the open passport into the light. Then abruptly he closed it, said, “One moment please, sir,” and vanished into the mysterious interior of the bank.
In the low glass barrier guarding each side of the sallow clerk’s window Bourne watched the dim reflections of the people—both customers and bank personnel—behind his back, moving about their business. As he did so, his gaze fell upon a face he had seen before. He’d glimpsed it once inside the shop on Tavistock Street earlier this morning. There was absolutely nothing unusual about it, in fact it was ordinary in every way imaginable. Only Bourne, and perhaps a handful of others with similar experiences and skills, would detect the intentness of the gaze, the way the eyes sliced and diced the vast lobby of the bank into a neat mathematical grid. Bourne watched the eyes moving back and forth in a familiar pattern. The man was figuring possible pathways to him, distances of escape routes to the exits, the placements of the bank guards, and so on.
A moment later the Dickens cartoon returned with no discernible change in his face, which remained as closed as the bank’s vault.
“This way, sir,” he said in a watery voice that reminded Bourne of a man gargling. He opened a panel in the marble half wall, and Bourne stepped through. He shut it with a soft click of a locking mechanism before leading Bourne between rows of polished wooden desks at which sat a platoon of men and women in dark, conservatively cut suits. Some were talking on phones, others addressing customers who sat on the other side of their desks. None of them looked up as the sallow clerk and Bourne passed them by.
At the end of the regiment of desks, the Dickens cartoon pressed a buzzer beside a door with a pebbled-glass panel that revealed the light from within but nothing else. The buzzer was answered, the door swung open, and the clerk stood aside.
“Straight ahead, then left. The corner office.” And then with a vicious little smile: “Mr. Hererra will receive your request.” He even talked like a Dickens character.
With a quick nod, Bourne took his left and proceeded to the corner office, whose door was closed. He rapped on it, heard the one word, “Come,” and entered.
On the other side of the door he found himself in a large, expensively furnished office with a stupendous view of the bustling City, both its historic spires and its odd post-modern skyscrapers, the past and future commingling, it seemed to Bourne, uneasily.
In addition to the usual practical office ensemble of desk, chairs, credenzas, cabinets, and the like was a clubby section off to the right dominated by a leather sofa and matching chairs, a glass-and-steel coffee table, lamps, and a sideboard set up as a bar.
As Bourne walked in Diego Hererra, looking even more like his father than he did in the photos, rose, came out from behind his desk, and with a big smile extended his hand for Bourne to shake.
“Noah,” he said with a deep hearty voice. “Welcome home!”
The moment Bourne took his hand the tip of a switchblade was pressed against his jacket in the spot over his right kidney.
“Who the hell are you,” Diego Hererra said.
Bourne’s face held no emotion. “Is this any way for a banker to act?”
“F*ck that.”
“I’m Noah Perlis, just like my passport—”
“The hell you are,” Diego Hererra said flatly. “Noah was killed in Bali by person or persons unknown less than a week ago. Did you kill him?” He dug the point of the switchblade through Bourne’s jacket. “Tell me who you are or I’ll bleed you like a pig at slaughter.”
“Lovely,” Bourne said as he wrapped an arm around Diego Hererra’s knife arm, locking it in place. When the banker tensed, he said, “Make a move and I’ll fracture your arm so badly it will never work right.”
Diego Hererra’s dark eyes blazed with barely suppressed fury. “You f*cker!”
“Calm down, Se?or Hererra, I’m a friend of your father’s.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Bourne shrugged. “Call him, then. Tell him Adam Stone is in your office.” Bourne had little doubt that Hererra’s father would recognize the alias Bourne had used when he met him in Seville several weeks ago. When Diego Hererra made no sign of acquiescence, Bourne switched tactics. His tone was now distinctly conciliatory. “I was a friend of Noah’s. Some time ago he’d delivered a set of instructions to me. In the event of his death I was to go to his apartment in Belgravia, where I would find in specific places a duplicate of his passport and the key to a safe-deposit box that resides here. He wanted me to take possession of whatever was in the box. That’s all I know.”
Diego Hererra remained unconvinced. “If you were a friend of his, how is it he never spoke of you?”
“I imagine it was to protect you, Se?or Hererra. You know as well as I do what a secretive life Noah led. Everything was neatly compartmentalized, friends and associates included.”
“What about acquaintances?”
“Noah had no acquaintances.” This Bourne had intuited from his brief but intense encounters with Perlis in Munich and Bali. “You know that as well as I do.”
Diego Hererra grunted. Bourne was about to add that he’d been a friend of Holly’s, but some sixth sense born of years of experience warned him against it. Instead he added, “Besides, I was a good friend of Tracy Atherton’s.”
This seemed to affect Diego Hererra. “Is that so?”
Bourne nodded. “I was with her when she died.”
The banker’s eyes narrowed. “And where was that?”
“The headquarters of Air Afrika,” Bourne said without a moment’s hesitation. “Seven seventy-nine El Gamhuria Avenue, Khartoum, to be exact.”
“Christ.” At last Diego Hererra relaxed. “That was a tragedy, a first-class tragedy.”
Bourne let go of his arm, and Hererra closed the switchblade, then gestured for them to cross to the clubby nook. As Bourne sat, he stood in front of the bar.
“Even though it’s early, I think we could use a drink.” He poured three fingers of Herradura Seleccion Suprema a?ejo sipping tequila into two thick old-fashioned glasses, handed one to Bourne, then sat down himself. After they’d both savored the first sip, he said, “What happened at the end, can you tell me?”
“She was delivering a painting,” Bourne said slowly. “She got caught in a crossfire when the offices were raided by Russian security forces who were after Nikolai Yevsen.”
Diego Hererra’s head came up. “The arms smuggler?”
Bourne nodded. “He was using his company, Air Afrika, to pick up and deliver the contraband.”
The banker’s eyes clouded over. “Who was she working for?”
Bourne lifted his glass to his lips, watching Diego’s face carefully without seeming to do so. “A man by the name of Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.” He took another sip of the aged tequila. “Do you know him?”
Diego Hererra frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“Because,” Bourne said slowly and distinctly, “I want to kill him.”
He’s alive, Leonid Arkadin thought. Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov didn’t burn to death in that Bangalore hospital corridor. F*ck me, he’s still alive.
He was staring down at a surveillance photo of a man the right side of whose face was horribly disfigured. But I did him some serious hurt, he thought, touching his own leg wound, which was healing nicely, that’s for certain.
He had installed himself in an old convent, dusty and dry as an outdated philosophical text, risen on the outskirts of Puerto Pe?asco, a coastal town in the northwest of the Mexican state of Sonora. But then virtually everything in Puerto Pe?asco was outdated. An unlovely industrial sprawl, it was redeemed by its broad white beach and warm water.
Puerto Pe?asco was off the edge of most people’s maps, but that was only one of the reasons he had chosen it. For another, at this time of the year college students poured across the border from Arizona to take advantage of the surf, the high-rise hotels, and a police force that looked the other way as long as sufficient numbers of American dollars changed hands. With so many young people around, Arkadin felt relatively safe; even if by some means Oserov and his hit squad managed to find him, as they had in Bangalore, they’d stick out like monks on spring break.
How Oserov had tracked him down in India was still a vexing mystery. Yes, Gustavo Moreno’s laptop was safe and he’d been able to reconnect with the remote server that contained the contracts with his arms clients, but half a dozen of his men were gone and, worse, his vaunted security clearly had a hole. Someone within his organization was funneling information to Maslov.
He was about to go down to the beach when his cell phone rang, and because reception was spotty in this odd backwater, he stayed where he was, staring out at tiers of clouds in the west lit like neon signs.
“Arkadin.”
It was Boris Karpov; he felt a certain satisfaction. “Did you keep your destination to yourself?” The pregnant pause was all he needed. “Don’t tell me, no one was there, everything was cleaned out.”
“Who are they, Arkadin? Who are Maslov’s moles inside my organization?”
Arkadin mused for a moment, letting the colonel feel the sharpness of the hook. “I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that, Boris Illyich.”
“What do you mean?”
“You should have gone alone, you should have believed what I told you,” Arkadin said. “Now your end of the bargain has become so much more complicated.”
“What bargain?” Karpov asked.
“Take the next international flight you can get on.” Arkadin watched the sunset splash the clouds with more and more color until they became so supersaturated, they made his eyes throb. Still, he refused to look away, the beauty was overwhelming. “When you arrive at LAX—I assume you know what that is.”
“Of course. It’s the international airport in Los Angeles.”
“When you get to LAX call the number I’m about to give you.”
“But—”
“You want the moles, Boris Illyich, so let’s not equivocate. Just do it.”
Arkadin closed the connection and walked across the sand. Bending over, he rolled up his trousers. He could already feel the wavelets break over his bare feet.
Arkadin may not have killed Tracy himself,” Bourne said, “but he’s the one responsible for her death.”
Diego Hererra sat back for a moment, his glass balanced on one knee as he held it reflectively. “You fell in love with her, didn’t you?” He held up a hand, palm outward. “Don’t even bother answering, everyone fell in love with Tracy, without even trying she had that effect.” He nodded as if to himself. “Speaking for myself, I think that was the part that made it the most devastating. Some women, you know, they’re trying so hard you can practically taste the desperation, and what a turnoff that is. But with Tracy it was another matter entirely. She had…” He snapped his fingers several times. “… what do you call it?”
“Confidence.”
“Yes, but more than that.”
“Self-possession.”
Diego Hererra considered this for a moment, then nodded vigorously. “Yes, that’s it, she was almost preternaturally self-possessed.”
“Except when she got airsick,” Bourne said, thinking of how she had vomited on the horrendous flight from Madrid to Seville.
This caused Diego to throw his head back and laugh. “She hated planes, all right—pity she was on them so often.” He took some more tequila into his mouth, savoring the taste before swallowing. Then he put aside his glass. “I imagine you want to get on with the posthumous assignment our mutual friend charged you with.”
“The sooner the better, I suppose.” Bourne rose and, together with Diego Hererra, went out of his office, along several corridors, hushed and shadowed, down a long ramp that ended in the open vault. Bourne took out his key, but he saw that he had no need of telling Diego the box number because the banker went right to it. Bourne inserted the key into one of the locks and Diego put his master key into the other.
“Together on the count of three.”
They both turned their keys in concert, and the small metal door opened. Diego removed the long box and took it over to a row of small curtained alcoves that ran along one side of the wall. Setting the box down on a ledge inside one of the alcoves, he said, “It’s all yours, Se?or Stone.” He gestured. “Please ring this bell when you’re finished and I’ll personally fetch you.”
“Thank you, Se?or Hererra.” Bourne entered the alcove, closed the curtain, and sat in the wooden armchair. For a moment, while he listened for Diego Hererra’s soft footfalls receding into the distance, he did nothing. Then, leaning forward, he opened the safe-deposit box. Inside was a small book and nothing more. Lifting it out, Bourne opened it to the first page. It seemed to be a kind of diary or, reading a bit farther, a history of sorts, accumulated one incident at a time, from various sources, it appeared. Bourne came to the first of the names and the hairs on his arms stirred. Involuntarily, he glanced around the cubicle, though there was no one around but him. And yet there was a distinct stirring, a restless energy as the ghosts and perhaps goblins emerged from Perlis’s very private notes, accumulating around his feet like starving dogs.
Leonid Arkadin, Vylacheslav Germanovich Oserov—or Slava, as Perlis called him—and Tracy Atherton. With a line of sweat appearing at his hairline, Bourne began to read.
Damp sand and salt water squooshed between Arkadin’s toes, girls in tiny bikinis and thin dudes in surfer shorts down to their bony knees played volleyball or jogged up and down the beach, just above the high-tide line, beer cans clutched in their hands.
Arkadin was brimming with rage at the corner Maslov and, especially, Oserov had backed him into. He had no doubt that Oserov had convinced Maslov to go after him directly. A frontal assault wasn’t Maslov’s style; he was more cautious than that, especially in times so fraught with danger for him and the Kazanskaya. The government was gunning for him, just waiting for him to make a mistake. So far, with a combination of indebted friends and Teflon guile, he had managed to stay one step ahead of the Kremlin—neither its inquisitors nor its prosecutors had been able to manufacture charges against him that would stick. Maslov still had too much dirt on enough key federal judges to stave off those forays.
Without having thought about it consciously, Arkadin had waded out into the ocean, so that the water rose above his knees, soaking his trousers. He didn’t care; Mexico afforded a breadth of freedom he’d never before tasted. Maybe it was the slower pace or a lifestyle where pleasure came from fishing or watching the sunrise or drinking tequila long into the night while you danced with a dark-eyed young woman whose multicolored skirts lifted with each twirl she made around you. Money—at least the amounts of money he was used to—was irrelevant here. People made a modest living and were content.
It was at that moment that he saw her, or thought he saw her, emerging from the surf like Venus lifted on her gleaming pink shell. The red sun was in his eyes and he was obliged to squint, to shade his eyes with one hand, but the woman he saw emerging was Tracy Atherton: long and sleek, blond and blue-eyed with the widest smile he’d ever seen. And yet it couldn’t be Tracy, because she was dead.
He watched her coming toward him. At one point she turned and looked directly at him and the resemblance fell apart. He turned away into the last of the canted sunlight.
Arkadin had met Tracy in St. Petersburg, at the Hermitage Museum. He had been in Moscow two years, working for Maslov. She was there to view the czarist treasures, while he was there for an onerous rendezvous with Oserov. But then all his meetings with Oserov were onerous, often ending in violence. Maslov’s chief assassin at the time had killed a child—a little boy no more than six years old—in cold blood. For this obscenity, Arkadin had beaten his face to a pulp and dislocated his shoulder. He would have killed him outright if his friend Tarkanian hadn’t intervened. Ever since that incident the resentment between the two men continued to build until most recently igniting in Bangalore. But Oserov, like a vampire, could not be easily killed. With an ironic laugh, Arkadin decided that next time he’d pound a wooden stake through Oserov’s heart. That Dimitri Maslov had continually forced them to work together, Arkadin was convinced, was a deliberate act of sadism for which Maslov would one day pay.
That icy winter’s morning in St. Petersburg he had arrived early to ensure that Oserov hadn’t set up some arcane form of trap. Instead he found a tall slim blonde with huge cornflower-blue eyes and an even wider smile contemplating a portrait of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. The blonde wore an ankle-length deerskin coat with a high collar dyed an improbable sky blue, beneath which, just peeking out, was a blood-red silk shirt. Without preamble she asked him what he thought of the portrait.
Arkadin, who had taken absolutely no notice of the painting or of anything else of a decorative nature in the vast rooms, peered at the portrait and said, “That was painted in 1758. What possible meaning could it have for me?”
The blonde turned, contemplating him with the same disarming intensity she had given to the painting. “This is the history of your country.” She pointed with a slim, long-fingered hand. “Louis Tocque, the man who painted this, was one of the leading artists of the day. He traveled all the way from Paris to Russia at the behest of Elizabeth Petrovna to paint her.”
Arkadin, ignoramus that he was, shrugged. “So?”
The blonde’s smile widened even more. “It’s a measure of Russia’s world status and power that he came. In those days France was quite enamored with Russia and vice versa. This painting should make all Russians proud.”
Arkadin, about to make an acerbic retort, instead bit his tongue and returned his gaze to the regal woman in the painting.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” the blonde said.
“Well, I’ve never met anyone remotely like her. She doesn’t seem real.”
“And yet she was.” The blonde made a gesture as if to guide his eyes back to the empress. “Imagine yourself in the past, imagine yourself in the painting standing next to her.”
And now, as if looking at the empress for the first time, or through the blonde’s eyes, Arkadin heard himself agree. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose she is beautiful.”
“Ah, then my time here has been a success.” The blonde’s smile hadn’t faded one iota. She extended her hand toward him. “I’m Tracy Atherton, by the way.”
For a moment Arkadin considered giving a false name, which he did almost by rote. Instead he’d said, “Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”
The air had suddenly been perfumed with the tincture of history, a spicy, mysterious scent of rose and cedar. Much later he’d worked out what it was that drew him as well as shamed him. He felt like a student, too ignorant or truant to have learned his lessons. Around her he’d always felt his lack of formal education, like a nakedness. And yet, even from that first meeting, he sensed a use for her, that he could absorb what she had learned. He learned from her the value of knowledge, but part of him never forgave her for the way she made him feel, and he used her mercilessly, treated her cruelly, as he bound her ever closer to him.
This clarity came later, of course. At the moment all he felt was an onrush of anger and, without a word, he whirled away from her, stalking off to find Oserov, whose company, for the moment, seemed preferable to this creature’s.
But finding Oserov did nothing to allay his sudden discomfort, so he insisted on changing protocol, removing them from the Hermitage altogether. They walked out onto Millionnaya Street, where he found a café before their lips and cheeks grew too chapped from the icy wind.
Snow had begun to fall with an odd dry rustle like predators snuffling in the underbrush, and Arkadin would never forget how Tracy Atherton had materialized out of it. Her deerskin coat swayed about her ankles like icy surf.
In those days, directly after Dimitri Maslov had sent Oserov and Mischa Tarkanian to liberate him from the prison of his hometown of Nizhny Tagil, Oserov was his superior, a fact that Oserov lorded over him. Oserov was in the middle of lecturing him on how to properly kill a politician, the reason for their trip to St. Petersburg. This particular politician had stupidly aligned himself against Maslov, and so had to be eliminated as quickly and efficiently as possible. Arkadin knew this, and Oserov knew he knew it. Nevertheless, the shit gleefully drove home his points with mind-numbing repetitiveness, as if Arkadin were a backward and insolent five-year-old.
Not many people would have dared interrupt Oserov, but Tracy did. Entering the café, she spotted Arkadin, strode confidently up to their table, and said, “Why, hello, fancy meeting you here,” in her soft British accent.
Oserov, pausing in mid-rant, looked up at her with a glare that would turn most people to stone. Tracy merely widened her smile and, pulling up a chair from a nearby table, said, “You don’t mind if I join you, do you?” She sat down and ordered a coffee before either of them uttered a word.
The moment the waiter left, Oserov’s face darkened ominously. “Listen, I don’t know who you are or why you’re here, but we’re in the middle of important business.”
“I saw that,” Tracy said blandly, waving a hand. “Go ahead, don’t mind me.”
Oserov pushed his chair back with a teeth-grinding scrape. “Hey, f*ck off, lady.”
“Calm down,” Arkadin began.
“And you, shut the f*ck up.” Oserov stood, leaning over the table. “If you don’t leave now—right this f*cking second—I’m going to throw you out on your pretty little ass.”
Tracy stared up at him without blinking. “There’s no need for that kind of language.”
“She’s right, Oserov. I’ll escort her—”
But just at that moment Tracy took hold of the end of Oserov’s tie, which was threatening to dip into her coffee, and Oserov lunged at her, grabbing at the collar of her coat and hauling her to her feet. Her silk shirt ripped, the violent action bringing them unwanted attention from the café’s patrons and staff. Their mission was supposed to be under the radar, and Oserov was ruining that.
Arkadin, on his feet, said softly, “Let her go.” When Oserov maintained his grip, he added, even more quietly, “Let her go, or I’ll knife you right here.”
Oserov looked down at the point of a switchblade that Arkadin had aimed at his liver. His face darkened further, and something malefic bloomed in his hard, glinting eyes.
“I won’t forget this,” he said in an eerie tone as he released her.
Since he was still staring into Tracy’s face it was unclear to whom Oserov was speaking, but Arkadin suspected he was addressing both of them. Before anything worse happened Arkadin came around the table and, taking Tracy by the elbow, walked her out of the café.
The snow was swirling down with singular intent, and almost immediately their hair and shoulders were coated with it.
“Well, that was interesting,” she said.
Arkadin, searching her face, could find no fear in it. “You’ve made a very bad enemy, I’m afraid.”
“Go back inside,” Tracy said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Without your coat you’re liable to freeze to death.”
“I don’t think you understand—”
“Do you know Doma?”
He blinked. Did she never listen to what anyone said to her? But the tide she rode was taking him farther and farther from the known shore. “The restaurant on the Hermitage embankment? Everyone knows Doma.”
“Eight o’clock tonight.” She gave him one of her patented smiles and left him there in the snow, observed by the glowering Oserov.
The girl whom he’d mistaken for Tracy was long gone, but Arkadin could still make out the damp traces of her narrow footprints in the sand beyond the high-tide line. There were jellyfish in the water now, opalescent and glowing. In the distance a Mexican woman sang a sad ranchera from the speakers of a radio. The jellyfish seemed to be swaying to the music. Night was falling, a black sky studded with stars heading his way. Arkadin returned to the convent to light candles instead of switching on the electric lights, listen to sad rancheras instead of turning on the TV. Seemingly overnight Mexico had seeped into his blood.
I’m beginning to understand why Arkadin and Oserov are mortal enemies, Bourne thought as he looked up from Perlis’s notebook. Hate is a powerful emotion, hate makes normally smart people stupid, or at least makes them less vigilant. Perhaps I’ve finally found Arkadin’s Achilles’ heel.
He’d read enough for the moment. Closing the lid on the safe-deposit box, he pocketed the book and rang the bell to indicate that he was finished. While on the surface it seemed odd that Perlis would use such an old-fashioned method to record what he obviously considered vital intelligence, on further consideration it made perfect sense. Electronic media were all too prone to hacking in so many forms that a handwritten copy was the answer. Kept in a vault, it was perfectly secure, and if the need arose it could be irrevocably destroyed with nothing but a match. These days going low-tech was often the best defense against computer hackers, who could infiltrate the most sophisticated electronic networks and retrieve even supposedly deleted files.
Diego Hererra pulled aside the curtain, took the metal box, returned it to its numbered niche, closed the door behind it, and the two men secured the box with their respective keys.
As they walked out of the vault Bourne said, “I need a favor.”
Diego glanced at him expectantly, but noncommittally.
“There is a man who has been following me. He’s in the bank, waiting for me to return.”
Now Diego smiled. “But of course. I can show you to the door used by customers who require, shall we say, a higher degree of discretion than is the norm.” They were almost at his office when a ripple of concern crossed his face. “Why is this man following you, may I ask?”
“I don’t know,” Bourne said, “though I seem to collect people like him like flies.”
Diego gave a low laugh. “Noah often said more or less the same thing.”
Bourne realized that this was as close as Diego Hererra was going to get to asking him if he worked for Perlis’s outfit. He was beginning to like Diego as much as he liked his father, however, that was no reason to tell him the truth. He nodded as if in tacit answer to Diego’s unspoken question.
“I don’t know who he is, either, but it’s important I find out,” Bourne said.
Diego spread his hands. “I am at your service, Se?or Stone,” he said in true Catalan style.
Diego may be living in London, Bourne thought, but his heart is still in Seville.
“I need to get this man out of your bank and onto the street before I leave. A fire alarm would do nicely.”
Diego nodded. “Consider it done.” He lifted a finger. “On the condition that you come to my house tomorrow evening.” He gave Bourne an address in Belgravia. “We have friends in common, it would be rude of me not to offer my hospitality.” Then he grinned, showing even, white teeth. “We’ll have a bite to eat, then, if you fancy a flutter, we’ll go out to the Vesper Club on the Fulham Road.”
Diego had a take-charge attitude that was more no-nonsense than egotistical, again very much like his father. This was in line with the profile he’d gleaned from his Web search some weeks ago, but the Vesper Club, a members-only casino strictly for high-rollers, was not. Bourne stuck the anomaly in the back of his mind and prepared to go into action.
The fire alarm went off in Aguardiente Bancorp. Bourne and Diego Hererra watched as the guards swiftly and methodically herded everyone out the front door, Bourne’s tracker among them.
Bourne emerged from the side entrance of the bank, and as the clients milled around the sidewalk, unsure what to do next, he located his tail, keeping the crowd between them. The man was watching the front entrance for Bourne, all the while in a position to check out the bank’s side entrance.
Slipping through the crowd, which had now doubled in size due to curious pedestrians and drivers gawking from their stopped cars, Bourne came up behind the tracker and said: “Walk straight ahead, up the road toward Fleet Street.” He dug his knuckle into the small of the man’s back. “Everyone will think a silenced pistol shot is a lorry backfiring.” He slammed the heel of his hand against the back of the man’s head. “Did I tell you to turn around? Now start walking.”
The man did as Bourne ordered him, snaking into the fringes of the crowd and picking his way, more quickly now, up Middle Temple Lane. He was broad-shouldered with a dirty-blond crew cut, a face empty as an abandoned lot, with rough skin as if he had an allergy or had been in the wind for too many years. Bourne knew he’d try something, and sooner rather than later. A businessman, lost on his cell phone, hurried toward them, and Bourne felt Crew-Cut leaning toward him. Crew-Cut deliberately bumped against the businessman, allowed himself to be jostled sideways by the collision, and was in the process of turning back on Bourne, his right arm bent, his fingers coming together to form a cement block, when Bourne slammed him behind the knee with the sole of his shoe. At almost the same instant Bourne caught his right arm in a vise created by his elbow and forearm, and cracked the bone.
The man buckled over, groaning. When Bourne bent to lift him to his feet, he would have driven his knee into Bourne’s groin, but Bourne sidestepped and the knee struck him painfully, if harmlessly, on the thigh instead.
At that point Bourne became aware of a car racing the wrong way down the street, too fast in fact to slow down, let alone stop before it hit them. He threw the man’s body into the path of the oncoming vehicle and, using the man’s shoulders as a base, vaulted over the hood. With a screech of brakes, the car tried valiantly to decelerate. The moment his shoes hit the top of the car bullets pierced it from the interior, trying to find him, but he was already sliding down the trunk.
Behind him he heard the liquid thunk! as the car slammed into the body, then the stink of burning rubber flayed off the tires. Risking a glance over his shoulder he saw two men emerge, armed with Glocks—the driver and the shooter. As they turned toward him, the huge knot of patrons and staff that had been standing outside Aguardiente Bancorp came streaming up the street, voices raised, cell phone cameras clicking like a forest of cicadas, trapping the two men, pinning them in place. Now curious pedestrians appeared from Fleet Street. Within moments the familiar high–low clamor of police klaxons filled the air, and Bourne, worming into the midst of the throng, slipped quietly away, turned the corner onto Fleet Street, and melted into the city.