The Bourne ultimatum (56 page)

“Irresistible,” agreed Conklin. “I lost my faith, and now after years of proclaiming my spiritual independence, I wonder if I’m missing something.”

“Like what?”

“Comfort, Peter. I have no comfort.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. Things I can’t control, maybe.”

“You mean you don’t have the comfort of an excuse, a metaphysical excuse. Sorry, Alex, we part company. We’re accountable for what we do, and no confessional absolution can change that.”

Conklin turned his head, his eyes wide open, and looked at Holland. “Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For sounding like me, even using a variation of the words I’ve used. ... I came back from Hong Kong five years ago with the banner of Accountability on my lance.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Forget it. I’m back on track. ... ‘Beware the pitfalls of ecclesiastical presumption and self-absorbed thought.’ ”

“Who the hell said that?”

“Either Savonarola or Salvador Dal
í
, I can’t remember who.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, cut the crap!” laughed Holland.

“Why should I? It’s the first chuckle we’ve had. And what about your two sisters? What happened to them?”

“It’s a better joke,” replied Peter, his head angled down into his chin, a mischievous smile on his lips. “One’s a nun in New Delhi, and the other’s president of her own public relations firm in New York and uses better Yiddish than most of her colleagues in the profession. A couple of years ago she told me they stopped calling her
shiksa
. She loves her life; so does my other sister in India.”

“Yet you chose the military.”

“Not ‘
yet
,’ Alex. ...
And
I chose it. I was an angry young man who really believed this country was being dumped on. I came from a privileged family—money, influence, an expensive prep school—that guaranteed me—
me
, not the black kid on the streets of Philadelphia or Harlem—automatic admittance to Annapolis. I simply figured I had to somehow earn that privilege. I had to show that people like me didn’t just use our advantages to avoid, but instead to extend, our responsibilities.”

“Aristocracy reborn,” said Conklin. “Noblesse oblige—nobility imposes obligations.”

“That’s not fair,” protested Holland.

“Yes, it is, in a very real sense. In Greek,
aristo
means the ‘best,’ and
kratia
is the word for ‘rule.’ In ancient Athens such young men led armies, their swords up front, not behind, if only to prove to the troops that they would sacrifice with the lowliest of them, for the lowliest were under their commands, the commands of the finest.”

Peter Holland’s head arched back into the top of the velvet seat, his eyes half closed. “Maybe that was part of it, I’m not sure—I’m not sure at all. We were asking so much ... for what? Pork Chop Hill? Unidentifiable, useless terrain in the Mekong? Why? For Christ’s sake,
why
? Men shot, their stomachs and chests blown away by an enemy two feet in front of them, by a ’Cong who knew jungles they didn’t know? What kind of war was that? ... If guys like me didn’t go up with the kids and say, ‘Look, here I am, I’m with you,’ how the hell do you think we could have lasted as long as we did? There might have been mass revolts and maybe there should have been. Those kids were what some people call niggers, and spics and the foul-ups who couldn’t read or write beyond a third-grade level. The privileged had deferments—deferments from getting soiled—or service that damn near guaranteed no combat. The others didn’t. And if my being with them—this privileged son of a bitch—meant anything, it was the best gig I ever did in my life.” Holland suddenly stopped talking and shut his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t mean to rough up past roads, I really didn’t. Actually, I started with my guilt, not yours. ... It’s crazy how it all dovetails and feeds upon itself, isn’t it? What did you call it? The merry-go-round of guilt. Where does it stop?”

“
Now
,” said Holland, sitting up in the seat, straightening his back and shoulders. He picked up the limousine telephone, punched two numbers and spoke. “Drop us off in Vienna, please. And when you’ve done that, go find a Chinese restaurant and bring us back the best they’ve got. ... Frankly, I’m partial to spare ribs and lemon chicken.”

Holland proved to be half right. The first hearing of Panov’s session under the serum was agonizing to listen to, the voice devastating, the emotional content blurring the information, especially for anyone who knew the psychiatrist. The second hearing, however, produced instantaneous concentration, engendered without question by the very pain they heard. There was no time to indulge in personal feelings; the information was suddenly everything. Both men began taking copious notes on legal pads, frequently stopping and replaying numerous sections for clarity and understanding. The third hearing refined the salient points further; by the end of the fourth, both Alex and Peter Holland had thirty to forty pages of notes apiece. They spent an additional hour in silence, each going over his own analysis.

“Are you ready?” asked the CIA’s director from the couch, a pencil in his hand.

“Sure,” said Conklin, seated at the desk with his various electronic equipment, the tape machine at his elbow.

“Any opening remarks?”

“Yes,” replied Alex. “Ninety-nine point forty-four percent of what we listened to gives us nothing, except to tell us what a terrific prober this Walsh is. He hopscotched around picking up cues faster than I could find them, and I wasn’t exactly an amateur when it came to interrogations.”

“Agreed,” said Holland. “I wasn’t so bad either, especially with a blunt instrument. Walsh is good.”

“Better than that, but that doesn’t concern us. What he pulled out of Mo does—again with a ‘but.’ It’s not in Panov’s recapturing what he revealed because we have to assume he revealed almost everything I told him. Instead, it’s in what he repeated having
heard
.” Conklin separated several pages. “Here’s an example. ‘The family will be pleased ... our supreme will give us his blessing.’ He’s repeating someone else’s words, not his own. Now, Mo isn’t familiar with criminal jargon, certainly not to the point where he would automatically make a connection, but the connection’s there. Take the word ‘supreme’ and change it by removing one vowel and inserting another. ‘Supremo’—capo supremo, hardly a heavenly supreme being. Suddenly, ‘the family’ is light years away from Norman Rockwell, and ‘blessing’ is interchangeable with a reward or a bonus.”

“Mafia,” said Peter, his eyes steady and clear despite a number of drinks that had obviously been burned out of his system. “I hadn’t thought that one through, but I marked it instinctively. ... Okay, here’s something else along the same lines, the same lines because I also picked up on the unlike-Panov phrases.” Holland flipped through his legal pad and stopped at a specific page. “Here. ‘New York wants it all.’ ” Peter continued slapping over the pages. “Again here. ‘That Wall Street is something.’ ” Once more the DCI progressed through his legal pad. “And this one. ‘Blondie fruits’—the rest is garbled.”

“I missed that. I heard it, but it didn’t make any sense to me.

“Why should it, Mr. Aleksei Konsolikov?” Holland smiled. “Underneath that Anglo-Saxon exterior, education and all, beats the heart of a Russian. You’re not sensitive to what some of us have to endure.”

“Huh?”

“I’m a WASP, and ‘blondie fruits’ is but one more pejorative description given us by, I must admit, other trampled-upon minorities. Think about it. Armbruster, Swayne, Atkinson, Burton, Teagarten—‘blondies’ all. And Wall Street, certain firms in that originally WASP financial bastion, at any rate.”

“Medusa,” said Alex, nodding. “Medusa and the Mafia. ... Holy Christ.”

“We’ve got a
telephone
number!” Peter leaned forward on the couch. “It was in the ledger Bourne brought out of Swayne’s house.”

“I’ve tried it, remember? It’s an answering machine, that’s all it is.”

“And that’s enough. We can get a location.”

“To what end? Whoever picks up the messages does it by remote, and if he or she has half a brain, it’s done from a public phone. The relay is not only untraceable but capable of erasing all other messages, so we can’t tap in.”

“You’re not very into high tech, are you, Field Man?”
          

“Let’s put it this way,” replied Conklin. “I bought one of those VCRs so I could watch old movies, and I can’t figure out how to turn off the goddamn blinking clock. I called the dealer and he said, ‘Read the instructions on the interior panel.’ I can’t find the interior panel.”

“Then let me explain what we can do to an answering machine. ... We can jam it externally.”

“Gee willikers, Sandy, what’s next for Orphan Annie? What the hell is that going to do? Other than kill the source.”
  

“You’re forgetting. We have the location from the numbers.”

“Oh?”

“Someone has to come and repair the machine.”

“
Oh
.”

“We take him and find out who sent him there.”

“You know, Peter, you’ve got possibilities. For a neophyte, you understand, your current outrageously undeserved position notwithstanding.”

“Sorry I can’t offer you a drink.”

Bryce Ogilvie, of the law firm Ogilvie, Spofford, Crawford and Cohen, was dictating a highly complex reply to the Justice Department’s antitrust division when his very private telephone line rang; it rang only at his desk. He picked up the phone, pressed the green button and spoke rapidly. “Hold on,” he ordered, looking up at his secretary. “Would you excuse me, please?”
                      

“Certainly, sir.” The secretary got out of her chair, walked across the large impressive office and disappeared beyond the door.

“Yes, what is it?” asked Ogilvie, returning to the phone.

“The machine isn’t working,” said the voice on the sacrosanct line.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. All I get is a busy signal.”

“That’s the best equipment available. Perhaps someone was calling in when
you
called.”

“I’ve been trying for the past two hours. There’s a glitch. Even the best machines break down.”

“All right, send someone up to check it out. Use one of the niggers.”

“Naturally. No white man would go up there.”

It was shortly past midnight when Bourne got off the
métro
in Argenteuil. He had divided the day into segments, splitting the hours between the arrangements he had to make and looking for Marie, going from one arrondissement to another, scouting every café, every shop, every large and small hotel he could recall having been a part of their fugitive nightmare thirteen years ago. More than once he had gasped, seeing a woman in the distance or across a café—the back of a head, a quick profile, and twice a crown of dark red hair, any of which from a distance or in a café’s dim light might have belonged to his wife. None of these had turned out to be Marie, but he began to understand his own anxiety and, by understanding it, was better able to control it. These were the most impossible parts of the day; the rest was merely filled with difficulty and frustration.

Alex
! Where the hell was
Conklin
? He could not reach him in Virginia! Because of the time difference, he had counted on Alex to take care of the details, swiftly expediting the transfer of funds, primarily. The business day on the eastern seaboard of the United States began at four o’clock, Paris time, and the business day in Paris stopped at five o’clock
or
before,
Paris
time. That left barely an hour to release and transfer over a million American dollars to one Mr. Simon at his chosen bank in Paris, and
that
meant said Mr. Simon had to make himself known to the aforementioned, as yet unchosen, Paris bank. Bernardine had been helpful. Helpful,
hell
! He had made it possible.

“There’s a bank on the rue de Grenelle that the Deuxième frequently uses. They can be accommodating in terms of hours and the absence of an authentic signature or two, but they give nothing for nothing, and they trust no one, especially anyone associated with our benevolent socialist government.”

“You mean regardless of the teletypes, if the money’s not there you don’t get it.”

“Not a sou. The president, himself, could call and he would be told to pick it up in Moscow, where they firmly believe he belongs.”

“Since I can’t reach Alex, I’ve bypassed the bank in Boston and called our man in the Cayman Islands, where Marie put the bulk of the money. He’s Canadian and so’s the bank. He’s waiting for instructions.”

“I’ll make a phone call. Are you at the Pont-Royal?”

“No. I’ll call you back.”

“Where are you?”

“I suppose you could say I’m an anxious and confused butterfly going from one vaguely remembered place to another.”

“You are looking for her.”

“Yes. But then that wasn’t a question, was it?”

“Forgive me, but in some ways I hope you do not find her.”

“Thanks. I’ll call you back in twenty minutes.”

He had gone to yet another point of recall, the Trocadéro, and the Palais de Chaillot. He had been shot at in the past on one of the terraces; there had been gunfire and men running down the endless stone steps, intermittently obscured by the huge gilded statues and the great sprays of the fountains, disappearing into the formal gardens, finally out of sight, out of range. What had happened? Why did he remember the Trocadéro? ... But Marie had been there—
somewhere
. Where had she been in that enormous complex? Where? ... A terrace! She had been on a
terrace
. Near a statue—
what
statue? ... Descartes? Racine? Talleyrand? The statue of Descartes came to his mind first. He would find it.

He had found it and there was no Marie. He had looked at his watch; it had been nearly forty-five minutes since he had talked to Bernardine. Like the men in his inner screen, he had raced down the steps. To a telephone.

“Go to the Banque Normandie and ask for Monsieur Tabouri. He understands that a Monsieur Simon intends to transfer over seven million francs from the Caymans by way of voice authorization through his private banker in the islands. He is most happy to let you use his phone, but believe me, he’ll charge you for the call.”