The Bourne Deception - By Robert Ludlum & Eric van Lustbader Page 0,6
up, exited, and went into the tented market.
He was immediately seized by a score of pungent odorsblack shrimp paste, chilies, garlic, karupuk, cinnamon, lemongrass, pandan leaf, galangal, kencur, Salam leafand raised voices selling everything from fighting cocks, their plumage dyed pink and orange, to live piglets trussed and tied to bamboo poles for easy transport.
As he passed a stall filled with widemouthed baskets of spices, the proprietor, an old woman with no upper lip, dug her claw-like hand into a vat of roots, held a palmful out to him.
Kencur, she said. Kencur very good today.
The kencur, Arkadin saw, looked something like ginger, only smaller. Repelled by both the root and its hideous seller, he waved away the kencur and pressed on.
It was to one of the pig stalls he headed. Halfway there, he was stopped by an insistent tapping on his arm, like the dry scratch of a chickens foot. He turned to see a young woman holding a baby in her arms, her eyes beseeching while her brown fingers continued to tap his arm as if it was all they were good for. Ignoring her, he pushed on through the crowd. Aware that if he gave her anything, hed be immediately besieged by a multitude of others.
The middle pig dealer was a wide man, squat as a frog, with glittering black eyes, a moon face, and a pronounced limp. After Arkadin spoke the specified phrase in Indonesian, the man led him back through the ranks of trussed piglets, their bodies quivering, their terrified eyes staring straight ahead. In the shadows at the rear of the tent were two stacks of hogs, gutted, skinned, ready for the spit. From the belly cavity of one the man drew out a Remington 700P, which he tried to palm off on Arkadin, until Arkadin refused enough times for him to go on to Plan B, which turned out to be precisely what Arkadin wanted: a Parker Hale M85, a super-accurate bolt-action, heavy-barreled rifle. It had a guaranteed first-round-hit capability up to seventy-eight yards. To this, the vendor added a Schmidt & Bender Police Marksman II 4-16x50 rifle scope. The price for both seemed a bit high even after some vigorous bargaining took it down from the stratosphere, but this close to his prey he wasnt in any mood to nitpick. Besides, he was getting top-of-the-line product all the way. He got the pig man to throw in a box of full-metal-jacket .30-caliber M118 cartridges and called it a success. He paid and the dealer broke down the rifle, boxed it and the scope into a hard-sided case.
On the way out, he bought himself a bunch of milk bananas, and ate them slowly and methodically as the taxi made its painfully slow way out of Denpasar. Once on the highway, their speed increased dramatically. The lack of heavy traffic made it easier to get around the trucks that clogged the road.
In Gianyar he saw an open-air market on his left and told the driver to pull over. Despite the bananasor perhaps because of themhis stomach was growling for some real food. At the market, he ordered a plate of babi guling, roast suckling pig, and, served on a broad vivid green banana leaf, lawar, coconut and strips of spiced turtle. Its sauce of un-cooked blood appealed to him particularly. He rent the succulent meat of the piglet between his teeth, swallowing quickly to take another bite.
Because of the clamor of the market, he periodically checked his cell phone. The longer he waited, the greater his tension, but he needed to be patient because it would take some days for his man to be sure of Bournes comings and goings. Still, he was uncharacteristically on edge. He put it down to being this close to Bourne, but that only caused him more discomfort. There was something about Bourne that had gotten under his skin, that had become an itch he couldnt scratch.
In an effort to control himself, he turned his thoughts to the recent events that had led him here. Two weeks ago Bourne had thrown him off the side of the LNG tanker. It was a long way down into the Pacific, and he had prepared himself by turning his body into a spear, keeping it perfectly vertical so that when he hit the water he wouldnt break his back or his neck. He went in feetfirst, the force of the fall pushing him so deep the world fell into twilight and he was