The Icarus Agenda (109 page)

“Mr. President,” broke in Kendrick softly, “I appreciate everything you’ve done for the nation, but in all honesty there are differences between us. You’ve espoused certain policies I can’t support.”

“Good
Christ
, I don’t
ask
you to!… Well, on the surface, I’d appreciate your shutting up until you talked to me about the issues. I trust you, Evan, and I won’t close you out.
Convince
me. Tell me where I’m wrong—without fear or favor—that’s what this goddamned office needs! I can get carried away on some things and know I should be pulled back. Ask my wife. After the last press conference two months ago, I walked into our kitchen upstairs in the White House and expected some kind of congratulations, I guess. Instead I got hit with ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Louis the Fourteenth with regal decrees? You made as much sense as Bugs Bunny!’ And my daughter, who was visiting us, said something about giving me a book on grammar for my birthday.… I know my limitations, Evan, but I also know what I can do when I have the
best
people to advise me.
You
got rid of the garbage! Now step in.”

“I repeat, I’m not equipped.”

“The people think you are,
I
think you are. It’s why the nomination is yours for the taking. Don’t kid yourself, you may have been forced on the ticket, but to deny you would be an affront to millions of voters, the PR people made that clear.”

“PR? Public Relations? Is that what it’s all about?”

“Far more than either of us would like, but, yes, it’s a large part of what
everything’s
about these days. To say otherwise would be to deny reality. Better it’s people like you and me than a Genghis Khan or an Adolf Hitler. Beneath our differences, we want to save, not destroy.”

It was Kendrick’s turn to study the President of the United States. “Good Lord, you
are
a charmer.”

“It’s my stock-in-trade, Mr. Vice President,” said Jennings, grinning, “That and a few honestly held beliefs.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“I do,” interrupted Khalehla, reaching for Evan’s hand. “I think Field Officer Rashad should really resign.”

“Also something else,” said President Langford Jennings, his eyebrows arched. “You
should
get married. It would be most unseemly for my running mate to be living in sin. I mean, can you imagine what all those evangelicals who deliver so many votes would do if your current status was revealed? It’s simply not part of my
image
.”

“Mr. President, sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Vice President?”

“Shut up.”

“Gladly, sir. But I should like to add a note of clarification
for the record—for God’s sake, don’t tell my wife I told you. After both our divorces we lived together for twelve years and had two children. We tied the proverbial knot in Mexico three weeks before the convention and predated the marriage. Now, that’s really a state secret.”

“I’ll never tell, Mr. President.”

“I know you won’t. I trust you and I need you. And our nation will be better off for the both of us—quite conceivably because of you.”

“I doubt that, sir,” said Evan Kendrick.

“I don’t.… Mr. President.”

The bell of the Presidential Suite rang once again. Four short, sharp half-second bursts.

Read on for an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s
The Bourne Identity

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying.

Two abrupt explosions pierced the sounds of the sea and the wind and the vessel’s pain. They came from the dimly lit cabin that rose and fell with its host body. A man lunged out of the door grasping the railing with one hand, holding his stomach with the other.

A second man followed, the pursuit cautious, his intent violent. He stood bracing himself in the cabin door; he raised a gun and fired again. And again.

The man at the railing whipped both his hands up to his head, arching backward under the impact of the fourth bullet. The trawler’s bow dipped suddenly into the valley of two giant waves, lifting the wounded man off his feet; he twisted to his left, unable to take his hands away from his head. The boat surged upward, bow and midships more out of the water than in it, sweeping the figure in the doorway back into the cabin; a fifth gunshot fired wildly. The wounded man screamed, his hands now lashing out at anything he could grasp, his eyes blinded by blood and the unceasing spray of the sea. There was nothing he could grab, so he grabbed at nothing; his legs buckled as his body lurched forward. The boat rolled violently leeward and the man whose skull was ripped open plunged over the side into the madness of the darkness below.

He felt rushing cold water envelop him, swallowing him, sucking him under, and twisting him in circles, then propelling him up to the surface—only to gasp a single breath of air. A gasp and he was under again.

And there was heat, a strange moist heat at his temple that seared through the freezing water that kept swallowing him, a fire where no fire should burn. There was ice, too; an ice-like throbbing in his stomach and his legs and his chest, oddly warmed by the cold sea around him. He felt these things, acknowledging his own panic as he felt them. He could see his own body turning and twisting, arms and feet working frantically against the pressures of the whirlpool. He could feel, think, see, perceive panic and struggle—yet strangely there was peace. It was the calm of the observer, the uninvolved observer, separated from the events, knowing of them but not essentially involved.

Then another form of panic spread through him, surging through the heat and the ice and the uninvolved recognition. He could not submit to peace! Not yet! It would happen any second now; he was not sure what it was, but it would happen. He had to
be
there!

He kicked furiously, clawing at the heavy walls of water above, his chest burning. He broke surface, thrashing to stay on top of the black swells. Climb up!
Climb up!

A monstrous rolling wave accommodated; he was on the crest, surrounded by pockets of foam and darkness. Nothing. Turn!
Turn!

It happened. The explosion was massive; he could hear it through the clashing waters and the wind, the sight and the sound somehow his doorway to peace. The sky lit up like a fiery diadem and within that crown of fire, objects of all shapes and sizes were blown through the light into the outer shadows.

He had won. Whatever it was, he had won.

Suddenly he was plummeting downward again, into an abyss again. He could feel the rushing waters crash over his shoulders, cooling the white-hot heat at his temple, warming the ice-cold incisions in his stomach and his legs and….

His chest. His chest was in agony! He had been struck—the blow crushing, the impact sudden and intolerable. It happened again!
Let me alone. Give me peace
.

And again!

And he clawed again, and kicked again … until he felt it. A thick, oily object that moved only with the movements of the sea. He could not tell what it was, but it was there and he could feel it, hold it.

Hold it! It will ride you to peace. To the silence of darkness … and peace
.

The rays of the early sun broke through the mists of the eastern sky, lending glitter to the calm waters of the Mediterranean. The skipper of the small fishing boat, his eyes bloodshot, his hands marked with rope burns, sat on the stern gunnel smoking a Gauloise, grateful for the sight of the smooth sea. He glanced over at the open wheelhouse; his younger brother was easing the throttle forward to make better time, the single other crewman checking a net several feet away. They were laughing at something and that was good; there had been nothing to laugh about last night. Where had the storm come from? The weather reports from Marseilles had indicated nothing; if they had he would have stayed in the shelter of the coastline. He wanted to reach the fishing grounds eighty kilometers south of La Seyne-sur-Mer by daybreak, but not at the expense of costly repairs, and what repairs were not costly these days?

Or at the expense of his life, and there were moments last night when that was a distinct consideration.

“Tu es fatigué, hein, mon frère?”
his brother shouted, grinning at him.
“Va te coucher maintenant. Laisse-moi faire.”

“D’accord,”
the brother answered, throwing his cigarette over the side and sliding down to the deck on top of a net. “A little sleep won’t hurt.”

It was good to have a brother at the wheel. A member of the family should always be the pilot on a family boat; the eyes were sharper. Even a brother who spoke with the smooth tongue of a literate man as opposed to his own coarse words. Crazy! One year at the university and his brother wished to start a
compagnie
. With a single boat that had seen better days many years ago. Crazy. What good did his books do last night? When his
compagnie
was about to capsize.

He closed his eyes, letting his hands soak in the rolling water on the deck. The salt of the sea would be good for the rope burns. Burns received while lashing equipment that did not care to stay put in the storm.

“Look! Over there!”

It was his brother, apparently sleep was to be denied by sharp family eyes.

“What is it?” he yelled.

“Port bow! There’s a man in the water! He’s holding on to something! A piece of debris, a plank of some sort.”

The skipper took the wheel, angling the boat to the right of the figure in the water, cutting the engines to reduce the wake. The man looked as though the slightest motion would send him sliding off the fragment of wood he clung to; his hands were white, gripped around the edge like claws, but the rest of his body was limp—as limp as a man fully drowned, passed from this world.

“Loop the ropes!” yelled the skipper to his brother and the crewman. “Submerge them around his legs. Easy now! Move them up to his waist. Pull gently.”

“His hands won’t let go of the plank!”

“Reach down! Pry them up! It may be the death lock.”

“No. He’s alive … but barely, I think. His lips move, but there’s no sound. His eyes also, though I doubt he sees us.”

“The hands are free!”

“Lift him up. Grab his shoulders and pull him over.
Easy
, now!”

“Mother of God, look at his head!” yelled the crewman. “It’s split open.”

“He must have crashed it against the plank in the storm,” said the brother.

“No,” disagreed the skipper, staring at the wound. “It’s a clean slice, razorlike. Caused by a bullet; he was shot.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“In more than one place,” added the skipper, his eyes roving over the body. “We’ll head for Ile de Port Noir; it’s the nearest island. There’s a doctor on the waterfront.”

“The Englishman?”

“He practices.”

“When he can,” said the skipper’s brother. “When the wine lets him. He has more success with his patients’ animals than with his patients.”

“It won’t matter. This will be a corpse by the time we get there. If by chance he lives, I’ll bill him for the extra petrol and whatever catch we miss. Get the kit; we’ll bind his head for all the good it will do.”

“Look!” cried the crewman. “Look at his eyes.”

“What about them?” asked the brother.

“A moment ago they were gray—as gray as steel cables. Now they’re blue!”

“The sun’s brighter,” said the skipper, shrugging. “Or it’s playing tricks with your own eyes. No matter, there’s no color in the grave.”

Intermittent whistles of fishing boats clashed with the incessant screeching of the gulls; together they formed the universal sounds of the waterfront. It was late afternoon, the sun a fireball in the west, the air still and too damp, too hot. Above the piers and facing the harbor was a cobblestone street and several blemished white houses, separated by overgrown grass shooting up from dried earth and sand. What remained of the verandas were patched latticework and crumbling stucco supported by hastily implanted pilings. The residences had seen better days a number of decades ago when the residents mistakenly believed Ile de Port Noir might become another Mediterranean playground. It never did.

All the houses had paths to the street, but the last house in the row had a path obviously more trampled than the others. It belonged to an Englishman who had come to Port Noir eight years before under circumstances no one understood or cared to; he was a doctor and the waterfront had need of a doctor. Hooks, needles and knives were at once means of livelihood as well as instruments of incapacitation. If one saw
le docteur
on a good day, the sutures were not too bad. On the other hand, if the stench of wine or whiskey was too pronounced, one took one’s chances.

Tant pis!
He was better than no one.

But not today; no one used the path today. It was Sunday and it was common knowledge that on any Saturday night the doctor was roaring drunk in the village, ending the evening with whatever whore was available. Of course, it was also granted that during the past few Saturdays the doctor’s routine had altered; he had not been seen in the village. But nothing ever changed that much; bottles of scotch were sent to the doctor on a regular basis. He was simply staying in his house; he had been doing so since the fishing boat from La Ciotat had brought in the unknown man who was more corpse than man.

Dr. Geoffrey Washburn awoke with a start, his chin settled into his collarbone causing the odor of his mouth to invade his nostrils; it was not pleasant. He blinked, orienting himself, and glanced at the open bedroom door. Had his nap been interrupted by another incoherent monologue from his patient? No; there was no sound. Even the gulls outside were mercifully quiet; it was Ile de Port Noir’s holy day, no boats coming in to taunt the birds with their catches.