Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (3 page)

“Stop treating me like a child.”

“Then stop acting like one.” His voice softened. “I’m concerned about you and I wonder why you aren’t.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

“Now you can’t go,” he said, only half in jest. “Not until—”

She laughed, and at last her head lifted. Tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. “That’s my dilemma precisely.” Then she shook her head. “I’ll never find peace, Peter.”

“What you mean is you don’t deserve to find peace.”

She looked at him and he shrugged, a wan smile on his face. “Maybe what we need to concentrate on is explaining to each other why we both deserve a bit of happiness.”

She rose, shaking off his help, and they turned back. The homeless man had finished the breakfast Soraya had provided and was curled on his side on a bench beneath sheets of
The Washington Post
.

As they passed him they could hear him snoring deeply, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. And maybe, she thought, he didn’t.

She shot Peter a sideways glance. “What
would
I do without you?”

His smile cleared, widening as he walked beside her. “You know, I ask myself that all the time.”

"Gone?” the Director said. “In what way gone?”

Above his head was engraved the current Mossad motto, excerpted from Proverbs 11:14:
Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety
.

“She’s vanished off the grid,” Dani Amit, head of Collections, said. “Despite our most diligent efforts, we cannot locate her.”

“But we
must
locate her.” The Director shook his shaggy head, his livery lips pursed, a clear sign of his agitation. “Rebeka is the key to the mission. Without her, we’re dead in the water.”

“I understand that, sir. We all do.”

“Then—”

Dani Amit’s pale blue eyes seemed infinitely sad. “We are simply at a loss.”

“How can that be? She is one of us.”

“That is precisely the problem. We have trained her too well.” 

“If that were the case, our people, trained as she was trained, could find her. The fact that up till now they haven’t would argue for the fact that she is something more, something better than they are.” The rebuke was as clear as it was sharp.

“I’m afraid—”

“I cannot abide that phrase,” the Director said shortly. “Her job at the airline?”

“Dead end. Her supervisor has had no contact with her since the incident in Damascus six weeks ago. I am convinced he does not know where she is.”

“What about her phone?”

“She’s either thrown it away or disabled its GPS.”

“Friends, relatives.”

“Have been interviewed. One thing I know for certain is that Rebeka told no one about us.”

“To break protocol like this—”

There was no need to finish that sentence. Mossad rules were strictly enforced. Rebeka had violated the prime rule.

The Director turned, stared broodingly out the window of his satellite office on the top floor of a curving glass-faced structure in Herzliya. On the other side of the city were the Mossad training center and the summer residence of the prime minister. The Director often came here when he grew melancholy and found the Mossad’s ant-colony central HQ in downtown Tel Aviv oppressive and enervating. Here, there was a fountain in the middle of the circular driveway and fragrant flower beds all year round, not to mention the nearby harbor with its fleet of sailboats rocking gently in their slips. There was something reassuring about that forest of masts, even to Amit, as if their presence spoke of a certain permanence in a world where everything could change in the space of a heartbeat. 

The Director loved sailing. Whenever he lost a man, which was, thankfully, not all that often, he went out on his boat, alone with the sea and the wind and the plaintive cry of the gulls. Without turning back, he said rather harshly, “Find her, Dani. Find out why she has disobeyed us. Find out what she knows.”

“I don’t—”

“She has betrayed us.” The Director swung back, leaned forward, his bulk making his chair squeal in protest. The full force of his authority was explicit behind each word he spoke. “She is a traitor. We will treat her as such.”

“
Memune
, I wonder at the wisdom of rushing to judgment.” Amit had used the Director’s internal title,
first among equals
. 

The bullet and bombproof windows were coated with a film that reflected light as well as the possibility of long-range surveillance, lending the room a distinctly aqueous quality. The Director’s eyes seemed to glimmer in the office’s low lamplight like a deep-sea fish rising into the beacon of a diver’s headlamp. “It isn’t lost on me that she has been your pet project, but it is time now to admit your

mistake. Even if I were inclined to give Rebeka the benefit of the doubt, we are out of time. Events threaten to overrun us. We are old friends as well as comrades in arms. Don’t force me to call in the Duvdevan.”

Invoking the specter of the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite strike unit caused a blade of anxiety to knife through Amit. It was a measure of Rebeka’s extreme importance to Israeli security that the Director would even use the threat of the Duvdevan to induce Amit to do what the Director knew full well he was reluctant to do.

“Who will you use?” The Director said this conversationally, as if he were asking after Amit’s wife and children.

“What about her unique skills, her usefulness—”

“Her betrayal has trumped everything, Amit, even those extraordinary skills. We must assume that what she discovered has sent her to ground. What if her intent is to sell that knowledge to the highest—”

“Impossible,” Amit flared.

The Director contemplated him for a moment from beneath halfclosed eyelids. “And I daresay up until today you would have said her disappearing off the grid was impossible.” He waited. “Am I wrong?”

Amit hung his head. “You’re not.”

“So.” The Director knit his fingers together. “Who will it be?”

“Ilan Halevy,” Amit said with a heavy heart.

“The Babylonian.” The Director nodded, seemingly impressed. Ilan had garnered his operations name by almost single-handedly shutting down the Iraqi Babylon Advanced Weapons Project. He had killed more than a dozen enemy operatives in that pursuit. “Well, now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.”

TheDirectorlovednothingbetter;it was one of his many admirable traits. His inflexibility was not. However, it was his iron hand on the tiller that for the past five years had guided them successfully through the rough seas of international espionage, clandestine forays into the territories of their enemies, and state-sanctioned executions while keeping their casualties to a minimum. He felt the deaths of his people like body blows, which was why, when they occurred, he needed to take to the sea. Out there, he buried his sorrow and cleared his head.

“You’ll start him—”

“Immediately,” Amit said. “He knows Rebeka well, better than most.”

“Except you.”

Amit knew what the Director was implying but as yet he was unwilling to engage the notion. “I will brief the Babylonian myself. He will know everything I know.”

That was a lie, and Amit suspected his old friend knew it, but mercifully the Director remained silent. How could he tell the Babylonian everything he knew about Rebeka? That was a betrayal he was not about to commit, even to curry favor with the Director. He had lied to forestall the possibility of being given a direct order to divulge all he knew to the Babylonian. Such a moral choice might possibly spell the end of him or, at the very least, his effectiveness within Mossad.

The chair squealed again as the Director returned to his survey of the port city. Who knew what he was thinking? “Then it’s settled.” He said this as if he were speaking to himself. “It’s done.”

Amit rose and silently departed. There was no need for the two men to continue the conversation.

Out in the hall, the air-conditioning was fierce. For a moment, Amit stood immobile, as if lost. Occasionally, when it was appropriate, the Director requested that Amit go sailing with him, mourning side by side the man or woman they knew well who had delivered up their life to keep their country secure. Amit imagined this necessary ritual would come again after Rebeka was dead.

WHEN HE AWOKE, he was still swimming through frigid water, black as night. It had already infiltrated his nostrils, burning them, threatened to surge down his throat and inundate his lungs. Drowning, he was drowning. He kicked off his shoes, scrabbled in his pockets, divesting himself of keys, wallet, a thick roll of krona, anything that might have been weighing him down. Still he spiraled downward.

He would have screamed, but he was terrified that opening his mouth would let the water gush in, filling him up. Instead, he rose off the bed and, his torso shaking, his limbs spasming, shook himself violently as he tried to claw his way up through the icy water to the surface.

Something grabbed his arms, trying to restrain him, and he opened his eyes into aqueous semi-darkness. His dread bloomed anew. He was at the bottom of the sea, hallucinating as he drowned.

“It’s okay,” someone said. “You’re safe. Everything’s all right now.”

It took moments—moments that felt like an eternity. Intense anxiety clamped him in its tenacious grip. He heard the words spoken again, but they still made no sense: the brightness, the fact that he could breathe, the sight of two faces in front of him, breathing quite normally, which was inexplicable because they were all under water.

“The light,” a second voice said. “He thinks... Turn up the lights.” A sudden blaze made him squint. Could there be such a dazzle on the sea floor? The third time he heard the words repeated, they began to seep through cracks in the armor of his anxiety, and he realized that he was breathing as normally as they were, which must mean that he was no longer in danger of drowning.

With that dawning came the realization of the pain in his head, and at the next pulse, he winced. But at least his body relaxed; he ceased fighting against the hands that held him. He let them lay him back down. He felt something soft beneath him, dry and solid—a mattress—and knew he wasn’t on the floor of the sea, there to die while he stared up helplessly into swaying nothingness.

He sighed deeply, and his legs relaxed, his arms came down to his sides and were released. He stared up into the face swimming above him, shuddering at the recurring thought of the water closing over him. He’d never go out on a boat again or even plunge through breakers as he used to do when he was a child. He frowned. Had he really done that? With an enormous effort to focus himself, he realized that he couldn’t remember his childhood. His frown deepened. How was that possible?

He was distracted by the face above him speaking to him. “My name is Christien. What is yours?” Christien repeated the question in a number of languages, all of which he understood, though he had no idea how he understood them. He had no memory of learning any language.

After Christien had finished, he said automatically, “My name is—” and then stopped.

“What is it?” Christien said. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know.” He looked around the room, almost in panic. “I can’t remember my name.”

Christien, who had been leaning over, now stood up and, turning, said something he couldn’t make out to a shadowy figure behind and just to the right of him. He strained to make out the face, but then the figure stepped into the light.

“You can’t remember your name?” the second man said.

He shook his head, but that caused a fierce throbbing.

“What do you remember?”

He took a moment, but this only made him break out into a cold sweat as, his brow deeply furrowed, he strained to recall anything— even a single memory.

“Relax,” the second man said. He seemed to have taken over from Christien.

“Who are you?” he said.

“My name is Jason. You’re in a private clinic in Stockholm. Christien and I were out fishing when you surfaced. We pulled you into our boat and flew you here. You were suffering from hypoxia and hypothermia.”

He thought,
I should ask Jason what those words mean
, but to his shock, he already knew. He licked his lips and Christien, leaning over, poured water from a carafe into a plastic cup and stuck a bendy straw in it. Christien stepped on a pedal, and his head and torso were raised to a modified sitting position. He took the cup gratefully and sipped the water. He felt parched, as if his thirst would never be slaked.

“What... what happened to me?”

“You were shot,” Jason said. “A bullet grazed the left side of your head.”

Automatically his left hand went to the side of his head, felt the thick layers of bandages. He had identified the source of his headache.

“Do you know who shot you? Why you were shot?”

“No,” he said. He drained the cup, held it out for more.

While Christien refilled it, Jason said, “Do you know
where
you were shot, where you went into the water?”

At the mention of going into the water he shuddered. “No.”

Christien handed him the cup. “It was Sadelöga.”

“Do you remember Sadelöga?” Jason said. “Does the name sound familiar?”

“Not in the least.” He was about to shake his head again, but stopped himself in time. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I remember.”

This seemed to interest Jason. “Nothing at all?” he said.

He stopped sipping his water. “Not where I was born, who my parents are, who I am, what I was doing in—where did you say?”

“Sadelöga,” Christien said.

“Maybe I was fishing there,” he said hopefully, “like you.”

“I very much doubt that fishing involves being shot, and there’s no hunting to speak of there,” Jason said. “No, you were in Sadelöga for another reason entirely.”

“I wish I knew what it was,” he said sincerely.

“There’s another thing,” Jason said. “You had no identification on you—no wallet, passport, keys, money.”

He thought a moment. “I threw them all away, along with my shoes, to lighten myself. I was desperate to get back to the surface. They must all be at the bottom of the sea now.”