The Bourne ultimatum (39 page)

“I see.” Jason did see and was suddenly alarmed,
very
alarmed. “Saint Jay told me there used to be a path behind the chapel. He said it might be overgrown, but he thought it was still there.”

“It is,” confirmed the first commando. “The help still use it to go down to the water on their off times.”

“How long is it?”

“Thirty-five, forty meters. It leads to an incline where steps have been cut out of the rocks that take one down to the beach.”

“Which of you is faster?” asked Bourne, reaching into his pocket and taking out the reel of fishing line.

“I am.”

“
I
am!”

“I choose you,” said Jason, nodding his head at the shorter first guard, handing him the reel. “Go down on the border of that path and wherever you can, string this line across it, tying it to limbs or trunks or the strongest branches you can find. You mustn’t be seen, so be alert, see in the dark.”

“Is no pro
blem
,
mon
!”

“Have you got a knife?”

“Do I have eyes?”

“Good. Give me your Uzi.
Hurry
!”

The guard scrambled away along the vine-tangled precipice and disappeared into the dense foliage beyond. The second Royal Commando spoke. “In truth, sir, I am much faster, for my legs are much longer.”

“Which is why I chose him and I suspect you know it. Long legs are no advantage here, only an impediment, which I happen to know. Also, he’s much shorter and less likely to be spotted.”

“The smaller ones always get the better assignments. They parade
us
up front and put us in boxing rings with rules we don’t understand, but the small soldiers get the plumbies.”

“ ‘Plumbies’? The better jobs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The most dangerous jobs?”

“Yes,
mon
!”

“Live with it, big fella.”

“What do we do now, sir?”

Bourne looked above at the wall and the soft wash of colored lights. “It’s called the waiting game—no love songs implied, only the hatred that comes from wanting to live when others want to kill you. There’s nothing quite like it because you can’t
do
anything. All you can do is think about what the enemy may or may not be doing, and whether he’s thought of something you haven’t considered. As somebody once said, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

“Where,
mon
?”

“Nothing. It isn’t true.”

Suddenly, filling the air above in chilling horror, came a prolonged excruciating scream, followed by words shrieked in pain. “
Non, non
!
Vous êtes monstrueux
! ...
Arrêtez, arrêtez, je vous supplie
!”

“
Now
!” cried Jason, slinging the strap of his Uzi over his shoulder as he leaped onto the wall, gripping the edge, pulling himself up as the blood poured out of his neck. He could not
get
up! He could not get
over
! Then strong hands pulled him and he fell over the top of the wall. “The
lights
!” he shouted. “Shoot them out!”

The tall commando’s Uzi blazing, the lines of floodlights exploded in the ground on both sides of the chapel’s path. Again, strong black hands pulled him to his feet in the new darkness. And then a single shaft of yellow appeared, roving swiftly in all directions; it was a powerful halogen flashlight in the commando’s left hand. The figure of a blood-drenched old man in a tan gabardine suit lay curled up in the path, his throat slit.

“
Stop
! In the name of almighty
God
, stop where you
are
!” came Fontaine’s voice from inside the chapel, the open half door revealing the flickering light of the electric candles. They approached the entrance, automatic weapons leveled, prepared for continuous fire ... but not prepared for what they saw. Bourne closed his eyes, the sight was too painful. Old Fontaine, like young Ishmael, was sprawled over the lectern on the raised platform beneath the blown-out, stained-glass windows of the left wall, his face running with blood where he had been slashed, and attached to his body were thin cables that led to various black boxes on both sides of the chapel.

“Go
back
!” screamed Fontaine. “
Run
, you fools! I’m wired—”

“Oh,
Christ
!”

“Mourn not for me, Monsieur le Caméléon. I gladly join my woman! This world is too ugly even for me. It is no longer amusing.
Run
! The charge will go off—they are watching!”

“You,
mon
!
Now
!” roared the second commando, grabbing Jason’s jacket and racing him to the wall, holding Bourne in his arms as they plummeted over the stone surface into the thick foliage.

The explosion was massive, blinding and deafening. It was as if this small corner of the small island had been taken out by a heat-seeking nuclear missile. Flames erupted into the night sky, but the burning mass was quickly diffused in the still wind to fiery rubble.

“The
path
!” shouted Jason, in a hoarse whisper, as he crawled to his feet in the sloping brush. “Get to the path!”

“You’re in bad condition,
mon
—”

“I’ll take care of
me
, you take care of
you
!”

“I believe I’ve taken care of both of us.”

“So you’ve got a fucking medal and I’ll add a lot of money to it. Now, get us up to the
path
!”

Pulling, pushing, and finally with Bourne’s feet grinding like a machine out of control, the two men reached the border of the path thirty feet behind the smoldering ruins of the chapel. They crept into the weeds and within seconds the first commando found them. “They’re in the south palms,” he said breathlessly. “They wait until the smoke has cleared to see if anyone is alive, but they cannot stay long.”

“You were
there
?” asked Jason. “
With
them?”

“No problem,
mon
, I told you, sir.”

“What’s happening? How many are there?”

“There were four, sir. I killed the man whose place I assumed. He was black, so it made no matter in appearance with the darkness. It was quick and silent. The throat.”

“Who’s left?”

“ ’
Serrat’s
chief of narcotics, of course, and two others—”

“
Describe
them!”

“I could not see clearly, but one I think was another black man, tall and without much hair. The third I could not see at all, for he—or she—was wearing strange clothes, with cloth over the head like a woman’s sun hat or insect veil.”

“A
woman
?”

“It is possible, sir.”

“A woman ... ? They’ve got to get
out
of there—
he’s
got to get out of there!”

“Very soon they will run to this path and race down to the beach, where they will hide in the woods of the cove until a boat comes for them. They have no choice. They cannot go back to the inn, for strangers are seen instantly, and even though we are far away and the steel band is loud, the explosion was certainly heard by the guards posted outside. They will report it.”

“Listen to me,” said Bourne, his voice hoarse, tense. “One of those three people is the man I want, and I want him for
myself
! So hold your fire because I’ll know him when I see him. I don’t give a
damn
about the others; they can be flushed out of that cove later.”

There was a sudden burst of gunfire from the tropical forest accompanied by screams from the once floodlit corridor beyond the ruins of the chapel. Then one after another the figures raced out of the tangled brush into the path. The first to be caught was the blond-haired police officer from Montserrat, the waist-high invisible fishing line tripping him as he fell into the dirt, breaking the thin, taut string. The second man, slender, tall, dark-featured, with only a fringe of hair on his bald head, was hard upon the first, pulling him to his feet, sight or instinct making the second killer wield his automatic weapon in slashing arcs, cutting the impeding lines across the path to the ledge that led down to the beach. The third figure appeared. It was
not
a woman. It was a man, in the robes of a monk. A priest. It was
he
. The
Jackal
!

Bourne rose to his feet and stumbled out of the brush into the path, the Uzi in his hands; the victory was his, his
freedom
his, his
family
his! As the robed figure reached the top of the primitive rock-hewn staircase, Jason pressed his trigger finger, holding it in place, the fusillade of bullets exploding out of the automatic weapon.

The monk arched in silhouette, then fell, his body tumbling, rolling, sprawling down the steps carved out of volcanic rock, finally lurching over the edge and plummeting to the sand below. Bourne raced down the awkward, irregular stone staircase, the two commandos behind him. He reached the beach, raced over to the corpse, and pulled the drenched hood away from the face. In horror, he looked at the black features of Samuel, the brother priest of Tranquility Isle, the Judas who had sold his soul to the Jackal for thirty pieces of silver.

Suddenly, in the distance, there was the roar of powerful dual engines as a huge speedboat lurched out of a shadowed section of the cove and sped for a break in the reefs. The beam of a searchlight shot out, firing the barriers of rock protruding above the choppy black water, its wash illuminating the fluttering ensign of the government’s drug fleet.
Carlos
! ... The Jackal was no chameleon, but he had changed! He had aged, grown thinner and bald—he was not the sharp, broad, full-headed muscular image of Jason’s memory. Only the indistinct dark Latin features remained, the face and the unfamiliar expanse of bare skin above burned by the sun. He was
gone
!

The boat’s motors screamed in unison as the craft breached a precarious opening in the reef and burst out into open water. Then the words in heavily accented English, metallically spewing from the distant loudspeaker, echoed within the tropical cove.

“
Paris
, Jason Bourne! Paris, if you
dare
! Or shall it be a certain minor university in Maine,
Dr. Webb
?”

Bourne, his neck wound ripped open, collapsed in the lapping waves, his blood trickling into the sea.

Steven DeSole, keeper of the deepest secrets for the Central Intelligence Agency, forced his overweight frame out of the driver’s seat. He stood in the deserted parking lot of the small shopping center in Annapolis, Maryland, where the only source of light was the storefront neons of a closed gas station, with a large German shepherd sleeping in the window. DeSole adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses and squinted at his watch, barely able to see the radium hands. As near as he could determine, it was between 3:15 and 3:20 in the morning, which meant he was early and that was good. He had to adjust his thoughts; he was unable to do so while driving, as his severe night blindness necessitated complete concentration on the road, and hiring a taxi or a driver was out of the question.

The information was at first ... well, merely a name ... a rather common name.
His name is Webb
, the caller had said.
Thank you
, he had replied. A sketchy description was given, one fitting several million men, so he had thanked the informer again and hung up the phone. But then, in the recesses of his analyst’s mind, by profession and training a warehouse for both essential and incidental data, an alarm went off. Webb, Webb ...
amnesia
? A clinic in Virginia years ago. A man more dead than alive had been flown down from a hospital in New York, the medical file so maximum classified it could not even be shown to the Oval Office. Yet interrogation specialists talk in dark corners, as often to relieve frustration as to impress a listener, and he had heard about a recalcitrant, unmanageable patient, an amnesiac they called “Davey” and sometimes just a short, sharp, hostile “Webb,” formerly a member of Saigon’s infamous Medusa, and a man they suspected of feigning his loss of memory. ... Loss of memory? Alex Conklin had told them that the Medusan they had trained to go out in deep cover for Carlos the Jackal, an agent provocateur they called Jason Bourne, had lost his
memory
. Lost his memory and nearly lost his life because his controls disbelieved the story of
amnesia
! That was the man they called “Davey” ... David. David Webb was Conklin’s Jason Bourne! How could it be otherwise?

David Webb! And he had been at Norman Swayne’s house the night the Agency was told that poor cuckolded Swayne had taken his own life, a suicide that had not been reported in the papers for reasons DeSole could not possibly understand! David Webb. The old Medusa. Jason Bourne. Conklin.
Why
?

The headlights of an approaching limousine shot through the darkness at the far end of the parking lot, swerving in a semicircle toward the CIA analyst, causing him to shut his eyes—the refracted light through his thick lenses was painful. He had to make the sequence of his revelations clear to these men. They were his means to a life he and his wife had dreamed of—
money
. Not bureaucratic less-than-money, but
real
money. Education at the best universities for their grandchildren, not the state colleges and the begged-for scholarships that came with the government salary of a bureaucrat—a bureaucrat so much better than those around him it was pitiful.
DeSole the Mute Mole
, they called him, but would not pay him for his expertise, the very expertise that prohibited him from going into the private sector, surrounding him with so many legal restrictions that it was pointless to apply. Someday Washington would learn; that day would not come in his lifetime, so six grandchildren had made the decision for him. The empathetic new Medusa had beckoned with generosity, and in his bitterness he had come running.

He rationalized that it was no more an unethical decision on his part than those made every year by scores of Pentagon personnel who walked out of Arlington and into the corporate arms of their old friends the defense contractors. As an army colonel once said to him, “It’s work now and get paid later,” and God knew that one Steven DeSole worked like hell for his country, but his country hardly reciprocated in kind. He hated the name Medusa, though, and rarely if ever used it because it was a symbol from another time, ominous and misleading. The great oil companies and railroads sprang from the chicanery and the venality of the robber barons, but they were not now what they were then. Medusa may have been born in the corruption of a war-ravaged Saigon, its early funding may have been a result of it, but that Medusa no longer existed; it had been replaced by a dozen different names and companies.