Page 9 of The Bourne Ultimatum (Jason Bourne 3)

  “Get out,” insisted Gates, opening the door for the old man.

  “Thank you, Randy,” said the judge, walking out into the hallway and turning. “Don’t forget the bank check at the Boston Five in the morning. Fifteen thousand.”

  “Fifteen …?”

  “My word, can you imagine what the attorney general would say just knowing that you’d even consorted with me? Good-bye, Counselor.”

  Randolph Gates slammed the door and ran into the bedroom, to the bedside telephone. The smaller enclosure was reassuring, as it removed him from the exposure to scrutiny inherent in larger areas—the room was more private, more personal, less open to invasion. The call he had to make so unnerved him he could not understand the pull-out flap of instructions for overseas connections. Instead, in his anxiety, he dialed the operator.

  “I want to place a call to Paris,” he said.

  6

  Bourne’s eyes were tired, the strain painful as he studied the results of the computer printouts spread across the coffee table in front of the couch. Sitting forward, he had analyzed them for nearly four hours, forgetting time, forgetting that his “control” was to have reached him by then, concerned only with a link to the Jackal at the Mayflower hotel.

  The first group, which he temporarily put aside, was the foreign nationals, a mix of British, Italian, Swedish, West German, Japanese and Taiwanese. Each of them had been extensively examined with respect to authentic credentials and fully substantiated business or personal reasons for entering the country. The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency had done their homework. Each person was professionally and personally vouched for by a minimum of five reputable individuals or companies; all had long-standing communications with such people and firms in the Washington area; none had a false or questionable statement on record. If the Jackal’s man was among them—and he might well be—it would take far more information than was to be found in the printouts before Jason could refine the list. It might be necessary to go back to this group, but for the moment he had to keep reading. There was so little time!

  Of the remaining five hundred or so American guests at the hotel, two hundred and twelve had entries in one or more of the intelligence data banks, the majority because they had business with the government. However, seventy-eight had raw-file negative evaluations. Thirty-one were Internal Revenue Service matters, which meant they were suspected of destroying or falsifying financial records and/or had tax havens in Swiss or Cayman Island accounts. They were zero, nothing, merely rich and not very bright thieves, and, further, the sort of “messengers” Carlos would avoid like lepers.

  That left forty-seven possibles. Men and women—in eleven cases ostensibly husbands and wives—with extensive connections in Europe, in the main with technological firms and related nuclear and aerospace industries, all under intelligence microscopes for possibly selling classified information to brokers of the Eastern bloc and therefore to Moscow. Of these forty-seven possibles, including two of the eleven couples, an even dozen had made recent trips to the Soviet Union—scratch all of them. The Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, otherwise known as the KGB, had less use for the Jackal than the Pope. Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, later Carlos the assassin, had been trained in the American compound of Novgorod, where the streets were lined with American gas stations and grocery stores, boutiques and Burger Kings, and everyone spoke American English with diverse dialects—no Russian was allowed—and only those who passed the course were permitted to proceed to the next level of infiltrators. The Jackal had, indeed, passed, but when the Komitet discovered that the young Venezuelan revolutionary’s solution for all things disagreeable was to eliminate them violently, it was too much for even the inheritors of the brutal OGPU. Sanchez was expelled and Carlos the Jackal was born. Forget about the twelve people who had traveled to the Soviet Union. The assassin would not touch them, for there was a standing order in all branches of Russian intelligence that if Carlos was tracked he was to be shot. Novgorod was to be protected at all cost.

  The possibles were thus narrowed to thirty-five, the hotel’s register listing them as nine couples, four single women and thirteen single men. The raw-file printouts from the data banks described in detail the facts and speculations that resulted in the negative evaluation of each individual. In truth, the speculations far outnumbered the facts and were too often based on hostile appraisals given by enemies or competitors, but each had to be studied, many with distaste, for among the information might be a word or phrase, a location or an act, that was the link to Carlos.

  The telephone rang, breaking Jason’s concentration. He blinked at the harsh, intrusive sound as if trying to locate the source, then he sprang from the couch and rushed to the desk, reaching the phone on the third ring.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Alex. I’m calling from down the street.”

  “Are you coming up?”

  “Not through that lobby, I’m not. I’ve made arrangements for the service entrance, with a temporary guard hired this afternoon.”

  “You’re covering all the bases, aren’t you?”

  “Nowhere near as many as I’d like to,” replied Conklin. “This isn’t your normal ball game. See you in a few minutes. I’ll knock once.”

  Bourne hung up the phone and returned to the couch and the printouts, separating three that had caught his attention, not that any of them contained anything that evoked the Jackal. Instead, it was seemingly offhand data that might conceivably link the three to each other when no apparent connection existed between them. According to their passports, these three Americans had flown in to Philadelphia’s International Airport within six days of one another eight months ago. Two women and a man, the women from Marrakesh and Lisbon, the man from West Berlin. The first woman was an interior decorator on a collecting trip to the old Moroccan city, the second an executive for the Chase Bank, Foreign Department; the man was an aerospace engineer on loan to the Air Force from McDonnell-Douglas. Why would three such obviously different people, with such dissimilar professions, converge on the same city within a week of one another? Coincidence? Entirely possible, but considering the number of international airports in the country, including the most frequented—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami—the coincidence of Philadelphia seemed unlikely. Stranger still, and even more unlikely, was the fact that these same three people were staying at the same hotel at the same time in Washington eight months later. Jason wondered what Alex Conklin would say when he told him.

  “I’m getting the book on each of them,” said Alex, sinking into an armchair across from the couch and the printouts.

  “You knew?”

  “It wasn’t hard to put together. Of course, it was a hell of a lot easier with a computer doing the scanning.”

  “You might have included a note! I’ve been poring over these things since eight o’clock.”

  “I didn’t find it—them—until after nine and I didn’t want to call you from Virginia.”

  “That’s another story, isn’t it?” said Bourne, sitting down on the couch, once again leaning forward anxiously.

  “Yes, it is, and it’s God-awful.”

  “Medusa?”

  “It’s worse than I thought, and worse than that, I didn’t think it could be.”

  “That’s a mouthful.”

  “It’s a bowelful,” countered the retired intelligence officer. “Where do I start?… Pentagon procurements? The Federal Trade Commission? Our ambassador in London, or would you like the supreme commander of NATO?”

  “My God …!”

  “Oh, I can go one better. For size, try on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

  “Christ, what is it? Some kind of cabal?”

  “That’s so academic, Dr. Scholar. Now try collusion, down deep and elusive and after all these years still breathing, still alive. They’re in contact with each other in high places. Why?”

  “What’s the purpose? The objective?”

“I just said that, asked that, really.”

  “There has to be a reason!”

  “Try motive. I just said that, too, and it may be as simple as hiding past sins. Isn’t that what we were looking for? A collection of former Medusans who’d run to the hills at the thought of the past coming to light?”

  “Then that’s it.”

  “No, it’s not, and this is Saint Alex’s instincts searching for words. Their reactions were too immediate, too visceral, too loaded with today, not twenty years ago.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “I’ve lost myself. Something’s different from what we expected, and I’m goddamned sick of making mistakes.… But this isn’t a mistake. You said this morning that it could be a network, and I thought you were way the hell off base. I thought that maybe we’d find a few high profiles who didn’t want to be publicly drawn and quartered for things they did twenty years ago, or who legitimately didn’t want to embarrass the government, and we could use them, force them in their collective fear to do things and say things we told them to do. But this is different. It’s today, and I can’t figure it out. It’s more than fear, it’s panic; they’re frightened out of their minds.… We’ve bumbled and stumbled onto something, Mr. Bourne, and in your rich friend Cactus’s old-time minstrel-show language, ‘In the focus, it could be bigger than bo’fus.”

  “In my considered opinion there’s nothing bigger than the Jackal! Not for me. The rest can go to hell.”

  “I’m on your side and I’ll go to the wall shouting it. I just wanted you to know my thoughts.… Except for a brief and pretty rotten interlude, we never kept anything from each other, David.”

  “I prefer Jason these days.”

  “Yes, I know,” interrupted Conklin. “I hate it but I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” said Alex softly, nodding as he closed his eyes. “I’d do anything to change it but I can’t.”

  “Then listen to me. In that serpentine mind of yours—Cactus’s description, incidentally—conjure up the worst scenario you can think of and shove those bastards against another wall, one they can’t get away from unscathed unless they follow your instructions down to the letter. Those orders will be to stay quiet and wait for you to call and tell them who to reach and what to say.”

  Conklin looked over at his damaged friend with guilt and concern. “There may be a scenario in place that I can’t match,” said Alex quietly. “I won’t make another mistake, not in that area. I need more than what I’ve got.”

  Bourne clasped his hands, flesh angrily grinding flesh in frustration. He stared at the scattered printouts in front of him, frowning, wincing, his jaw pulsating. In seconds a sudden passivity came over him; he sat back on the couch and spoke as quietly as Conklin. “All right, you’ll get it. Quickly.”

  “How?”

  “Me. I’ll get it for you. I’ll need names, residences, schedules and methods of security, favorite restaurants and bad habits, if any are known. Tell your boys to go to work. Tonight. All night, if necessary.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re going to do?” shouted Conklin, his frail body lurching forward in the armchair. “Storm their houses? Stick needles in their asses between the appetizer and the entrée?”

  “I hadn’t thought of the last option,” replied Jason, smiling grimly. “You’ve really got a terrific imagination.”

  “And you’re a madman!… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that—”

  “Why not?” broke in Bourne gently. “I’m not lecturing on the rise of the Manchu and the Ching dynasty. Considering the accepted state of my mind and memory, the allusion to mental health isn’t inappropriate.” Jason paused, then spoke as he leaned slowly forward. “But let me tell you something, Alex. The memories may not all be there, but the part of my mind that you and Treadstone formed is all there. I proved it in Hong Kong, in Beijing and Macao, and I’ll prove it again. I have to. There’s nothing left for me if I don’t.… Now, get me the information. You mentioned several people who have to be here in Washington. Pentagon supplies or provisions—”

  “Procurements,” corrected Conklin. “It’s a lot more expansive and expensive; he’s a general named Swayne. Then there’s Armbruster, he’s head of the Federal Trade Commission, and Burton over at—”

  “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” completed Bourne. “Admiral ‘Joltin’ Jack Burton, commander of the Sixth Fleet.”

  “One and the same. Formerly the scourge of the South China Sea, now the largest of the large brass.”

  “I repeat,” said Jason. “Tell your boys to go to work. Peter Holland will get you all the help you need. Find me everything there is on each of them.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What?”

  “I can get us the books on our three Philadelphians because they’re part of the immediate Mayflower project—that’s the Jackal. I can’t touch our five—so far, five—inheritors of Medusa.”

  “For Christ’s sake, why not? You have to. We can’t waste time!”

  “Time wouldn’t mean much if both of us were dead. It wouldn’t help Marie or the children either.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Why I’m late. Why I didn’t want to call you from Virginia. Why I reached Charlie Casset to pick me up at that real estate proprietary in Vienna, and why, until he got there, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get here alive.”

  “Spell it out, field man.”

  “All right, I will.… I’ve said nothing to anyone about going after former Medusa personnel—that was between you and me, nobody else.”

  “I wondered. When I spoke to you this afternoon you were playing it close. Too close, I thought, considering where you were and the equipment you were using.”

  “The rooms and the equipment proved secure. Casset told me later that the Agency doesn’t want any traceable records of anything that takes place over there, and that’s the best guarantee you can ask for. No bugs, no phone intercepts, nothing. Believe me, I breathed a lot easier when I heard that.”

  “Then what’s the problem? Why are you stopping?”

  “Because I have to figure out another admiral before I move any further into Medusa territory.… Atkinson, our impeccable WASP ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in London, was very clear. In his panic, he pulled the masks off Burton and Teagarten in Brussels.”

  “So?”

  “He said Teagarten could handle the Agency if anything about the old Saigon surfaced—because he was very tight with the top max at Langley.”

  “And?”

  “ ‘Top max’ is the Washington euphemism for maximum-classified security, and where Langley is concerned that’s the director of Central Intelligence.… That’s also Peter Holland.”

  “You told me this morning he’d have no problem wasting any member of Medusa.”

  “Anyone can say anything. But would he?”

  Across the Atlantic, in the old Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, an old man in a dark threadbare suit trudged up the concrete path toward the entrance of the sixteenth-century cathedral known as the Church of the Blessed Sacrament. The bells in the tower above tolled the first Angelus and the man stopped in the morning sunlight, blessing himself and whispering to the sky.

  “Angelus domini nuntiavit Mariae.” With his right hand he blew a kiss to the bas-relief crucifix atop the stone archway and proceeded up the steps and through the huge doors of the cathedral, aware that two robed priests eyed him with distaste. I apologize for defiling your rich parish, you tight-assed snobs, he thought as he lit a candle and placed it in the prayer rack, but Christ made it clear that he preferred me to you. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’—what you haven’t stolen of it.

  The old man moved cautiously down the center aisle, his right hand gripping the backs of successive pews for balance, his left fingering the rim of his outsized collar and slipping down to his tie so as to make sure the knot had not somehow come apart. His woman was s

o weak now that she could barely fold the damn thing together, but, as in the old days, she insisted on putting the finishing touches on his appearance before he went to work. She was still a good woman; they had both laughed, remembering the time she swore at his cuff links over forty years ago because she had put too much starch in his shirt. That night, so long ago, she had wanted him to look the proper bureaucrat when he went to the whore-mongering Oberführer’s headquarters on the rue St. Lazare carrying a briefcase—a briefcase that, left behind, had blown up half the block. And twenty years later, one winter afternoon she’d had trouble making his stolen expensive overcoat hang properly on his shoulders before he set off to rob the Grande Banque Louis IX on the Madeleine, run by an educated but unappreciative former member of the Résistance who refused him a loan. Those were the good times, followed by bad times and bad health, which led to worse times—in truth, destitute times. Until a man came along, a strange man with an odd calling and an even odder unwritten contract. After that, respect returned in the form of sufficient money for decent food and acceptable wine, for clothes that fit, making his woman look pretty again, and, most important, for the doctors who made his woman feel better. The suit and shirt he wore today had been dug out of a closet. In many ways he and his woman were like the actors in a provincial touring company. They had costumes for their various roles. It was their business.… Today was business. This morning, with the bells of the Angelus, was business.

  The old man awkwardly, only partially, genuflected in front of the holy cross and knelt down in the first seat of the sixth row from the altar, his eyes on his watch. Two and a half minutes later he raised his head and, as unobtrusively as possible, glanced around. His weakened sight had adjusted to the dim light of the cathedral; he could see, not well but clearly enough. There were no more than twenty worshipers scattered about, most in prayer, the others staring in meditation at the enormous gold crucifix on the altar. Yet these were not what he was looking for; and then he saw what he was seeking and knew that everything was on schedule. A priest in a priestly black suit walked down the far left aisle and disappeared beyond the dark red drapes of the apse.