Praise for the Jason Bourne Series Praise for Robert Ludlum

Praise for the Jason Bourne series ‘A first-rate thriller with grit and intrigue to spare’ Variety ‘A rollicking blockbuster ride’ Empire ‘Ludlum has never come up with a more head-spinning, spine-jolting, intricately mystifying, Armageddonish, in short Ludlumesque, thriller than this . Every chapter ends with a cliff-hanger; the story brims with assassination, torture, hand-to-hand combat, sudden surprise and intrigue within intrigue’ Publishers Weekly ‘The story unfolds at a whirring pace’ New York Times ‘Move over 007, Bourne is back’ Daily Mirror ‘This is the most satisfying thriller of the year’ Chicago Tribune Praise for Robert Ludlum ‘Robert Ludlum is an ingenious storyteller with a wonderful and convincing imagination. His place as a bestselling novel- ist is assured’ Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather ‘Robert Ludlum has the storytelling gift’ TLS ‘Don’t ever begin a Ludlum novel if you have to go to work the next day’ Chicago Sun-Times ‘Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined’ New York Times ‘Ludlum is light years beyond his literary competition in piling plot twist upon plot twist, until the mesmerized reader is held captive’ Chicago Tribune ‘Robert Ludlum is an acknowledged superstar of the political thriller’ Amazon.co.uk Bourne Objective p.i-vi B.indd 1 03/11/2010 18:02 Robert Ludlum is one of the world’s bestselling authors and there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print. He is published in 32 languages and 50 countries. He is best known for the Jason Bourne series: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Betrayal, The Bourne Sanction and The Bourne Deception. The first three titles have been made into critically acclaimed movies, with The Bourne Ultimatum winning three Academy Awards. Visit Robert Ludlum’s website at www.orionbooks.co.uk/Ludlum. Eric Van Lustbader was born in Greenwich Village. He is the author of more than twenty bestselling novels, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Bourne Objective p.i-vi B.indd 2 03/11/2010 18:02 Also Available The Bourne Series The Matarese Series The Bourne Identity The Matarese Circle The Bourne Supremacy The Matarese Countdown The Bourne Ultimatum The Bourne Legacy Standalone Novels The Bourne Betrayal The Scarlatti Inheritance The Bourne Sanction The Osterman Weekend The Bourne Deception The Matlock Paper The Bourne Objective Trevayne The Rhinemann Exchange The Covert-One Series The Cry of the Halidon The Hades Factor The Gemini Contenders The Cassandra Compact The Chancellor Manuscript The Paris Option The Holcroft Covenant The Altman Code The Parsifal Mosaic The Lazarus Vendetta The Aquitaine Progression The Moscow Vector The Icarus Agenda The Arctic Event The Scorpio Illusion The Apocalypse Watch Road to . Series The Prometheus Deception The Road to Gandolfo The Sigma Protocol The Road to Omaha The Janson Directive The Tristan Betrayal The Ambler Warning The Bancroft Strategy Bourne Objective p.i-vi B.indd 3 03/11/2010 18:02 Also by Eric Van Lustbader Nicholas Linnear Novels Second Skin Floating City The Kaisho White Ninja The Miko The Ninja China Maroc Novels Shan Jian Other Novels The Testament Art Kills Pale Saint Dark Homecoming Black Blade Angel Eyes French Kiss Zero Black Heart Sirens Last Snow Bourne Objective p.i-vi B.indd 4 03/11/2010 18:02 Robert Ludlum’s™ THE BOURNE OBJECTIVE A New Jason Bourne Novel by Eric Van Lustbader Bourne Objective p.i-vi B.indd 5 03/11/2010 18:02 An Orion paperback First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Orion This paperback edition published in 2011 by Orion Books Ltd, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA An Hachette UK company 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © The Estate of Robert Ludlum 2010 The right of The Estate of Robert Ludlum to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-4091-1783-4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. www.orionbooks.co.uk Bourne Objective p.i-vi B.indd 6 03/11/2010 18:02 Bangalore, IndIa Night descended like a curtain of scuttling insects, com- ing alive with the setting of the sun. The noise was atro- cious, as was the stench of unwashed bodies, human excrement, rotting food, and decomposing bodies. The garbage of Bangalore shifted back and forth like a sludgy tide. Leonid Danilovich Arkadin sat in a darkened room that smelled of hot electronics, stale smoke, and cooling dosas. Firing up a cigarette with his chrome lighter, he stared down at the ribbed skeleton of Phase Three, part of the ever-expanding Electronic City rising out of the slums clinging to Bangalore like a disease. Electronic City, built in the 1990s, was now the world capital of technology outsourcing; virtually every major high-tech company had IT offices here, making it the hub of the technical support industry spawned by technologies that morphed every six months. Gold from concrete, Arkadin thought, dazzled. He’d read up on the history of alchemy, because of its trans- formative nature it had become a special interest of his. At this early hour of the evening – early, that is, for the outsourcing crowd whose offices by and large filled the buildings to capacity – the lobby and corridors were as 1 quiet and still as they would be if they were in New York City at 3 am. The outsourcing crowd was geared to the workday in the United States, which made them as vir- tual as ghosts when they were at their consoles, cordless earphones wrapped around their heads. After the fiasco in Iran, when he had royally screwed Maslov, he had set up operations here, away from those he wished eventually to hunt, who were already hunting him: Dimitri Ilyinovich Maslov and Jason Bourne. From his suite of offices he had a perfect view of the block-square work site, a pit excavated out of the earth where the footings for the foundations of another office tower were being laid. Usually the site was lit by glaring floodlights, so the crews could work through the night, but work had stopped unexpectedly two weeks ago and hadn’t yet resumed. As a result the excavation had been invaded by the city’s ragtag army of beggars, whores, and gangs of young kids trying to fleece everyone who passed by. Now and again, as he let the smoke drift from his nostrils, he could hear the stealthy cat-like padding of his men strategically placed throughout the suite, but he was alone in this room with Hassan, a large, square software magician who smelled faintly of circuits and cumin. Arkadin had brought his men with him, loyal Muslims all, which presented a problem only insofar as the native Hindus hated Muslims. He’d looked into using a detail of Sikh mercenaries, but he couldn’t find it in himself to trust them. Hassan had proven invaluable. He had been the computer programmer for Nikolai Yevsen, the late and 2 unlamented arms dealer whose business Arkadin had appropriated out from under Maslov. Hassan had made a copy of all the customer, supplier, and contact data on Yevsen’s mainframe before wiping it clean. Now Arkadin was working Yevsen’s list, raking in unimaginable moun- tains of money by supplying war matériel for virtually every local warlord, despot, and terrorist organization around the globe. Hassan sat hunched over his computer, using encrypted software slaved to the remote servers Arka- din had set up in a secure location. He was a man who lived to work. In the weeks since Hassan’s defection and Yevsen’s death in Khartoum, Arkadin had never once seen him leave these offices. He slept after eating a light lunch, from one to three thirty precisely, then it was back to the computer. Arkadin’s attention was only partially on Hassan. On a sideboard nearby lay a laptop, with hot-swappable drive bays, into which he’d slid the hard drive from the laptop one of his men had stolen from Gustavo Moreno just before the Colombian drug lord was shot to death in his Mexico City compound. Turning to it, Arkadin felt his face bathed in the eerie blue electronic glow, hard as mar- ble, hard as his father’s callused fist. Stubbing out his cigarette, he scrolled through the files, which he’d already pored through again and again; he had a number of computer hacks on his payroll, but he hadn’t allowed any of them – even Hassan – to comb through this particular hard drive. He went back to the ghost file that had reluctantly shown its enigmatic face only under the duress of a powerful anti-virus program.

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