The Bourne ultimatum (101 page)

“Above all, that,” conceded Alex. “By omission and commission there’s enough sleaze to go around for everybody.”

“What about men like Burton on the Joint Chiefs, and Atkinson in London?”

“No more than messengers and fronts; they’re out for reasons of health, and believe me, they understand.”

Panov winced as he adjusted his uncomfortable wounded body in the chair. “It hardly compensates for his crimes, but the Jackal served a purpose of sorts, didn’t he? If you hadn’t been hunting him, you wouldn’t have found Medusa.”

“The coincidence of evil, Mo,” said Conklin. “I’m not about to recommend a posthumous medal.”

“I’d say it’s more than coincidence,” interrupted Panov, shaking his head. “In the final analysis, David was right. Whether forced or leaped upon, a connection was there after all. Someone in Medusa had a killer or killers using the name of ‘Jason Bourne’ assassinate a high-visibility target in the Jackal’s own backyard; that someone knew what he was doing.”

“You mean Teagarten, of course.”

“Yes. Since Bourne was on Medusa’s death list, our pathetic turncoat, DeSole, had to tell them about the Treadstone operation, perhaps not by name but its essentials. When they learned that Jason—David—was in Paris, they used the original scenario: Bourne against the Jackal. By killing Teagarten the way they did, they accurately assumed they were enlisting the most deadly partner they could find to hunt down and kill David.”

“We know that. So?”

“Don’t you see, Alex? When you think about it, Brussels was the beginning of the end, and at the end, David used that false accusation to tell Marie he was still alive, to tell Peter Holland that he was still alive. The map circling Anderlecht in red.”

“He gave hope, that’s all. Hope isn’t something I put much trust in, Mo.”

“He did more than give hope. That message made Holland prepare every station in Europe to expect Jason Bourne, assassin, and to use every extreme to get him back here.”

“It worked. Sometimes that kind of thing doesn’t.”

“It worked because weeks ago a man called Jason Bourne knew that to catch Carlos there had to be a link between himself and the Jackal, a long-forgotten connection that had to be brought to the surface. He
did
it, you did it!”

“In a hell of a roundabout way,” admitted Conklin. “We were reaching, that’s all. Possibilities, probabilities, abstractions—it’s all we had to work with.”

“Abstractions?” asked Panov gently. “That’s such an erroneously passive term. Have you any idea what thunder in the mind abstractions provoke?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Those gray cells, Alex. They go crazy, spinning around like infinitesimal Ping-Pong balls trying to find tiny tunnels to explode through, drawn by their own inherent compulsions.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“You said it yourself, the coincidence of evil. But I’d suggest another conductor—the
magnet
of evil. That’s what you and David created, and within that magnetic field was Medusa.”

Conklin spun around in the chair and wheeled himself toward the balcony and the descending orange glow on the horizon beyond the deep-green out islands of Montserrat. “I wish everything was as simple as you put it, Mo,” he said rapidly. “I’m afraid it’s not.”

“You’ll have to be clearer.”

“Krupkin’s a dead man.”

“
What
?”

“I mourn him as a friend and one hell of an enemy. He made everything possible for us, and when it was all over, he did what was right, not what was ordered. He let David live and now he’s paying for it.”

“What happened to him?”

“According to Holland, he disappeared from the hospital in Moscow five days ago—he simply took his clothes and walked out. No one knows how he did it or where he went, but an hour after he left, the KGB came to arrest him and move him to the Lubyanka.”

“Then they haven’t caught him—”

“They will. When the Kremlin issues a Black Alert, every road, train station, airport and border crossing is put under a microscope. The incentives are irresistible: whoever lets him out will spend ten years in a gulag. It’s just a question of time.
Goddamn it
.”

There was a knock on the front door and Panov called out. “It’s open because it’s easier! Come in.”

The be-blazered, immaculately dressed assistant manager, Mr. Pritchard, entered, preceded by a room-service table that he was capable of pushing while standing completely erect. He smiled broadly and announced his presence as well as his mission. “Buckingham Pritchard at your service, gentlemen. I’ve brought a few delicacies from the sea for your collegial gathering before the evening meal which I have personally attended to at the side of the chef who has been known to be prone to errors without expert guidance which I was all too happy to provide.”

“Collegial?” said Alex. “I got out of college damn near thirty-five years ago.”

“It obviously didn’t take where the nuances of English are concerned,” mumbled Morris Panov. “
Tell
me, Mr. Pritchard, aren’t you terribly hot in those clothes? I’d be sweating like a pig.

“No nuances there, only an unproven cliché,” muttered Conklin.

“I do not perspire, sir,” replied the assistant manager.

“I’ll bet my pension you ‘perspired’ when Mr. St. Jacques came back from Washington,” offered Alex. “Christ almighty, Johnny a ‘terrorist’!”

“The incident has been forgotten, sir,” said Pritchard stoically. “Mr. Saint Jay and Sir Henry understand that my brilliant uncle and I had only the children’s interests at heart.”

“Savvy, very savvy,” observed Conklin.

“I’ll set up the canapés, gentlemen, and check the ice. The others should be here in a matter of minutes.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Panov.

David Webb leaned against the balcony archway watching his wife as she read the last pages of a children’s story to their son. The outstanding Mrs. Cooper was dozing in a chair, her magnificent black head, crowned by a fleece of silver and gray, kept nodding above her full chest as if she expected at any moment to hear sounds from the infant Alison beyond the half-closed door that was only feet from where she was sitting. The inflections of Marie’s quiet voice matched the words of the story, confirmed by Jamie’s wide eyes and parted lips. But for an analytical mind that found music in figures, his wife might have been an actress, mused David. She had the surface attributes of that precarious profession—striking features, a commanding presence, the sine qua non that forced both men and women to fall silent and pensively appraise her when she walked down a street or entered a room.

“You can read to me tomorrow, Daddy!”

The story was over, attested to by his son jumping off the couch and Mrs. Cooper flashing her eyes open. “I wanted to read that one tonight,” said Webb defensively, moving away from the arch.

“Well, you still kind of smell,” said the boy, frowning.

“Your father doesn’t smell, Jamie,” explained Marie, smiling. “I told you, it’s the medicine the doctor said he had to use on his injuries from the accident.”

“He still smells.”

“You can’t argue with an analytical mind when it’s right, can you?” asked David.

“It’s too early to go to bed, Mommy! I might wake up Alison and she’ll start crying again.”

“I know, dear, but Daddy and I have to go over and see all your uncles—”

“And my new grandfather!” cried the child exuberantly. “Grandpa Brendan said he was going to teach me how to be a judge someday.”

“God help the boy,” interjected Mrs. Cooper. “That man dresses like a peacock flowering to mate.”

“You may go into our room and watch television,” overrode Marie quickly. “But only for a half hour—”

“
Aww
!”

“All right, perhaps an hour, but Mrs. Cooper will select the channels.”

“Thanks, Mommy!” cried the child, racing into his parents’ bedroom as Mrs. Cooper got out of the chair and followed him.

“Oh, I can start him off,” said Marie, getting up from the couch.

“No, Miss Marie,” protested Mrs. Cooper. “You stay with your husband. That man hurts but he won’t say anything.” She disappeared into the bedroom.

“Is that true, my darling?” asked Marie, walking to David. “Do you hurt?”

“I hate to dispel the myth of a great lady’s incontestable perceptions, but she’s wrong.”

“Why do you have to use a dozen words when one will suffice?”

“Because I’m supposed to be a scholar. We academicians never take a direct route because it doesn’t leave us any offshoots to claim if we’re wrong. What are you, anti-intellectual?”

“No,” answered Marie. “You see, that’s a simple, one-word declarative.”

“What’s a declarative?” asked Webb, taking his wife in his arms and kissing her, their lips enveloping, so meaningful to each, arousing to each.

“It’s a shortcut to the truth,” said Marie, arching her head back and looking at him. “No offshoots, no circumlocutions, just fact. As in five and five equals ten, not nine or eleven, but ten.”

“You’re a ten.”

“That’s banal, but I’ll take it. ... You are more relaxed, I can feel you again. Jason Bourne’s leaving you, isn’t he?”

“Just about. While you were with Alison, Ed McAllister called me from the National Security Agency. Benjamin’s mother is on her way back to Moscow.”

“Hey, that’s
wonderful
, David!”

“Both Mac and I laughed, and as we laughed I thought to myself I’d never heard McAllister laugh before. It was nice.”

“He wore his guilt on his sleeve—no, all over him. He sent us both to Hong Kong and he never forgave himself. Now you’re back and alive and free. I’m not sure
I’ll
ever forgive him, but at least I won’t hang up on him when he calls.”

“He’d like that. As a matter of fact, I told him to call. I said you might even ask him to dinner someday.”

“I didn’t go that far.”

“Benjamin’s mother? That kid saved my life.”

“Maybe a quick brunch.”

“Take your hands off me, woman. In another fifteen seconds I’m going to throw Jamie and Mrs. Cooper out of our bedroom and demand my connubials.”

“I’m tempted, Attila, but I think Bro’s counting on us. Two feisty individuals and an over-imaginative disbarred judge are more than an Ontario ranch boy can handle.”

“I love them all.”

“So do I. Let’s go.”

The Caribbean sun had disappeared; only faint sprays of orange barely illuminated the western horizon. The flames of the glass-encased candles were steady, pointed, sending streams of gray smoke through their funnels, their glow producing warm light and comfortable shadows around the terraced balcony of Villa Eighteen. The conversation, too, had been warm and comfortable—survivors relishing their deliverance from a nightmare.

“I emphatically explained to Handy Randy that the doctrine of stare decisis has to be challenged if the times have altered the perceptions that existed when the original decisions were rendered,” expounded Prefontaine. “Change,
change
—the inevitable result of the calendar.”

“That’s so obvious, I can’t imagine anyone debating it,” said Alex.

“Oh, Flood-the-Gates used it incessantly, confusing juries with his erudition and confounding his peers with multiple decises.”

“Mirrors and smoke,” added Marie, laughing. “We do the same in economics. Remember, Bro, I told you that?”

“I didn’t understand a word. Still don’t.”

“No mirrors and no smoke where medicine’s involved,” said Panov. “At least not where the labs are monitored and the pharmaceutical money boys are prohibited. Legitimate advances are validated every day.”

“In many ways it’s the purposely undefined core of our Constitution,” continued the former judge. “It’s as though the Founders had read Nostradamus but didn’t care to admit their frivolity, or perhaps studied the drawings of Da Vinci, who foresaw aircraft. They understood that they could not legislate the future, for they had no idea what it would hold, or what society would demand for its future liberties. They created brilliant omissions.”

“Unaccepted as such by the brilliant Randolph Gates, if memory serves,” said Conklin.

“Oh, he’ll change quickly now,” interrupted Prefontaine, chuckling. “He was always a sworn companion of the wind, and he’s smart enough to adjust his sails when he has to buck it.”

“I keep wondering whatever happened to the truck driver’s wife, the one in the diner who was married to the man they called ‘Bronk,’ ” said the psychiatrist.

“Try to imagine a small house and a white picket fence, et cetera,” offered Alex. “It’s easier that way.”

“What truck driver’s wife?” asked St. Jacques.

“Leave it alone, Bro, I’d rather not find out.”

“Or that son-of-a-bitch army doctor who pumped me full of Amytal!” pressed Panov.

“He’s running a clinic in Leavenworth,” replied Conklin. “I forgot to tell you. ... So many, so crazy. And Krupkin. Crazy old Kruppie, elegance and all. We owe him, but we can’t help him.”

There was a moment of silence as each in his and her own way thought of a man who had selflessly opposed a monolithic system that demanded the death of David Webb, who stood by the railing staring out at the darkened sea, somehow separated in mind and body from the others. It would take time, he understood that. Jason Bourne had to vanish; he had to
leave
him.
When
?

Not now
! Out of the early night, the madness began again! From the sky the roar of multiple engines broke the silence like approaching sharp cracks of lightning. Three military helicopters swooped down toward the Tranquility dock, fusillades of gunfire chewing up the shoreline as a powerful bullet speedboat swung through the reefs toward the beach. St. Jacques was on his intercom. “
Shore alarm
!” he screamed. “Grab your weapons!”

“Christ, the Jackal’s
dead
!” yelled Conklin.

“His goddamned
disciples
aren’t!” shouted Jason Bourne—no trace of David Webb—as he shoved Marie to the floor and took a gun out of his belt, a weapon his wife knew nothing about. “They were told he was here!”

“It’s insane!”