The Bourne Sanction (59 page)

At that moment Arkadin feinted right with his knife, drove left with his fist, rocking Bourne back onto his heels. At once he stabbed out with the switchblade, burying it in the meat of Bourne’s left thigh. Bourne grunted, fought the buckling of his knee, and Arkadin jammed his boot into Bourne’s wounded thigh. Blood spurted, and Bourne fell. Arkadin jumped on him, using his fist to pummel Bourne’s face when Bourne blocked his knife stabs.

Bourne knew he couldn’t take much more of this. Arkadin’s desire for revenge had filled him with an inhuman strength. Bourne, fighting for his very life, managed to counterpunch long enough to roll out from under Arkadin. Then he was up and running in an ungainly limp to the companionway.

Arkadin reached up for him as he was half a dozen rungs off the engine room deck. Bourne kicked out with his bad leg, surprising Arkadin, catching him under the chin. As he fell back, Bourne scrambled up the rungs as fast as he could. His left leg was on fire, and he was trailing blood as the wounded muscle was forced to work overtime. Gaining the next deck, he continued up the companionway, up and up, until he came to the first level belowdecks, which according to Moira was where the galley was. Finding it, he raced in, grabbed two knives and a glass saltshaker. Stuffing the shaker into his pocket, he wielded the knives as Arkadin loomed in the doorway. They fought with their knives, but Bourne’s unwieldy carving knives were no match for Arkadin’s slender-bladed switchblade, and Bourne was cut again, this time in the chest. He kicked Arkadin in the face, dropped his knives in order to wrest the switchblade out of Arkadin’s hand, to no avail. Arkadin stabbed at him again and Bourne nearly suffered a punctured liver. He backed away, then ran out the doorway, up the last companionway to the open deck.

The tanker was at a near stop. The captain was busy coordinating the hookups with the tugboats that would bring it the final distance to the
LNG
terminal. Bourne couldn’t see Moira, which was a blessing. He didn’t want her anywhere near Arkadin. Bourne, heading for the sanctuary of the container city, was bowled over as Arkadin leapt on him. Locked together, they rolled over and over until they fetched up against the port railing. The sea was far below them, churning against the tanker’s hull. One of the tugs signaled with its horn as it came alongside, and Arkadin stiffened. To him it was the siren sounding an escape from one of Nizhny Tagil’s prisons. He saw the black skies, tasted the sulfur smoke in his lungs. He saw Stas Kuzin’s monstrous face, felt Marlene’s head between his ankles beneath the water, heard the terrible reports when Semion Icoupov shot Devra.

He screamed like a tiger, pulling Bourne to his feet, pummeling him over and over until he was bent back over the railing. In that moment, Bourne knew that he was going to die as he had been born, falling over the side of a ship, lost in the depth of the sea, and only by the grace of God being brought in to a fishing boat with their catch. His face was bloody and swollen, his arms felt like lead weights, he was going over. Then, at the last instant, he pulled the shaker from his pocket, broke it against the rail, and threw the salt in Arkadin’s eyes. Arkadin bellowed in shock and pain, his hand flew up reflexively, and Bourne snatched the switchblade from him. Blinded, Arkadin still fought on, and he grasped the blade. With a superhuman effort, not caring that the edges cut into his fingers, he wrested the switchblade away from Bourne. Bourne heaved him backward. But Arkadin had control of the knife now, he had partial vision back through his tearing eyes, and he ran at Bourne with his head tucked into his shoulders, all his weight and determination behind the charge.

Bourne had one chance. Stepping into the charge, he ignored the knife, grabbed Arkadin by his uniform jacket and, using his own momentum against him, pivoted from the hip as he swung him around and up. Arkadin’s thighs struck the railing, his upper body continuing its flight, so that he toppled head-over-heels over the side. Falling, falling, falling… the equivalent of twelve stories, before plunging beneath the waves.

I
NEED
A
VACATION
, “Moira said. “I’m thinking Bali would do me quite well.”

She and Bourne were in the NextGen clinic in one of the campus buildings that overlooked the Pacific. The Moon of Hormuz had successfully docked at the
LNG

terminal and the cargo of the highly compressed liquid was being piped from the tanker to onshore containers where it would be slowly warmed, expanding to six hundred times its present volume so it could be used by individual consumers and utility and business power plants. The laptop had been turned over to the NextGen IT department, so the software could be parsed and permanently shut down. The grateful
CEO
of NextGen had just left the clinic, after promoting Moira to president of the security division and offering Bourne a highly lucrative consulting position with the firm. Bourne had phoned Soraya, each of them bringing the other up to date. He’d given her the address of Sever’s house, detailing the clandestine operation it housed.

“I wish I knew what a vacation felt like,” Bourne said when he’d finished the call.

“Well…” Moira smiled at him. “You’ve only to ask.”

Bourne considered for a long time. Vacations were something he’d never contemplated, but if ever there was a time to take one, he thought, this was it. He looked back at her and nodded.

Her smile broadened. “I’ll have NextGen make all the arrangements. How long do you want to go for?”

“How long?” Bourne said. “Right now, I’ll take forever.”

On his way to the airport, Bourne stopped at the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where Professor Sever had been admitted. Moira, who had declined to come up with him, was waiting for him in the chauffeured car NextGen had hired for them. They’d put Sever in a private room on the fifth floor. The room was deathly still, except for the respirator. The professor had sunk deeper into a coma and was now unable to breathe on his own. A thick tube emerged from his throat, snaking to the respirator that wheezed like an asthmatic. Other, smaller tubes were needled into Sever’s arms. A catheter attached to a plastic bladder hooked to the side of the bed caught his urine. His bluish eyelids were so thin Bourne thought he could see his pupils beneath them. Standing beside his former mentor he found that he had nothing to say. He wondered why he’d felt compelled to come here. Maybe it was simply to look once more on the face of evil. Arkadin was a killer, pure and simple, but this man had made himself brick by brick into a liar and a deceiver. And yet he looked so frail, so helpless now, it was difficult to believe he was the mastermind of the monstrous plan to incinerate much of Long Beach. Because, as he’d said, his sect couldn’t live in the modern world, it was bound to destroy it. Was that the real reason, or had Sever once again lied to him? He’d never know now.

He was abruptly nauseated by being in Sever’s presence, but as he turned away a small dapper man came in, allowing the door to close at his back.

“Jason Bourne?” When Bourne nodded, the man said, “My name is Frederick Willard.”

“Soraya told me about you,” Bourne said. “Well done, Willard.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Please don’t call me sir.”

Willard gave a small, deprecating smile. “Pardon me, my training is so ingrained in me that’s all I am now.” He glanced over at Sever. “Do you think he’ll live?”

“He’s alive now,” Bourne said, “but I wouldn’t call it living.”

Willard nodded, though he seemed not at all interested in the disposition of the figure lying in the bed.

“I have a car waiting downstairs,” Bourne said.

“As it happens, so do I.” Willard smiled, but there was something sad about it. “I know that you worked for Treadstone.”

“Not Treadstone,” Bourne said, “Alex Conklin.”

“I worked for Conklin, too, many years ago. It’s one and the same, Mr. Bourne.”

Bourne felt impatience now. He was eager to join Moira, to see the sherbet skies of Bali.

“You see, I know all of Treadstone’s secrets-all of them. This is something only you and I know, Mr. Bourne.”

A nurse came in on her silent white shoes, checked all of Sever’s feeds, scribbled on his chart, then left them alone again.

“Mr. Bourne, I thought long and hard about whether I should come here, to tell you…”

He cleared his throat. “You see, the man you fought on the tanker, the Russian who went overboard.”

“Arkadin.”

“Leonid Danilovich Arkadin, yes.” Willard’s eyes met Bourne’s, and something inside him winced away. “He was Treadstone.”

“What?” Bourne couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Arkadin was Treadstone?”

Willard nodded. “Before you-in fact, he was Conklin’s pupil just before you.”

“But what happened to him? How did he wind up working for Semion Icoupov?”

“It was Icoupov who sent him to Conklin. They were friends, once upon a time,”

Willard said. “Conklin was intrigued when Icoupov told him about Arkadin. Treadstone was moving into a new phase by then; Conklin believed Arkadin was perfect for what he had in mind. But Arkadin rebelled. He went rogue, almost killed Conklin before he escaped to Russia.”

Bourne was desperately trying to process all this information. At last, he said,

“Willard, do you know what Alex had in mind when he created Treadstone?”

“Oh, yes. I told you I know all of Treadstone’s secrets. Your mentor, Alex Conklin, was attempting to build the perfect beast.”

“The perfect beast? What do you mean?” But Bourne already knew, because he’d seen it when he’d looked into Arkadin’s eyes, when he understood that what he was seeing reflected there was himself.

“The ultimate warrior.” Willard, one hand on the door handle, smiled now. “That’s what you are, Mr. Bourne. That’s what Leonid Danilovich Arkadin was-until, that is, he came up against you.” He scrutinized Bourne’s face, as if searching for a trace of the man who’d trained him to be a consummate covert operative. “In the end, Conklin succeeded, didn’t he?”

Bourne felt a chill go through him. “What do you mean?”

“You against Arkadin, it was always meant to be that way.” Willard opened the door.

“The pity of it is Conklin never lived to see who won. But it’s you, Mr. Bourne. It’s you.”