The Bourne ultimatum (20 page)

The new Mrs. Gates, however, had several ideas that would improve the prospects of their life together. Among them was to lay aside an immediate law career—better none than with an inferior firm, or, God forbid, a private practice with the sort of clients he was bound to attract, namely, those who could not afford established attorneys. Better to use his natural endowments, which were his impressive height and a quick, sponge-like intelligence that, combined with his drive, disposed of heavy academic workloads with ease. Using her modest trust fund, Edith shaped the externals of her man, buying the correct clothes and hiring a theatrical voice coach who instructed his student in the ways of dramatic delivery and effective stage presence. The gangling graduate soon took on a Lincolnesque quality with subtle flashes of John Brown. Too, he was on his way to becoming a legal expert, remaining in the milieu of the university, piling one degree upon another while teaching at the graduate level until the sheer depth of his expertise in specific areas was incontestable. And he found himself sought after by the prominent firms that had rejected him earlier.

The strategy took nearly ten years before concrete results appeared, and while the early returns were not earthshaking, still they represented progress. Law reviews, first minor and then major, began publishing his semi-controversial articles as much for their style as for their content, for the young associate professor had a seductive way with the written word, at once riveting and arcane, by turns flowery and incisive. But it was his opinions, latently emerging, that made segments of the financial community take notice. The mood of the nation was changing, the crust of the benevolent Great Society beginning to crack, the lesions initiated with code words coined by the Nixon boys, such as the Silent Majority and Bums-on-Welfare and the pejorative
them
. A meanness was rising out of the ground and spreading, and it was more than the perceptive, decent Ford could stop, weakened as he was by the wounds of Watergate; and too much as well for the brilliant Carter, too consumed by minutiae to exercise compassionate leadership. The phrase “... what you can do for your country” was out of fashion, replaced by “what I can do for
me
.”

Dr. Randolph Gates found a relentless wave on which to ride, a mellifluous voice with which to speak, and a growing acerbic vocabulary to match the dawning new era. In his now refined scholarly opinion—legally, economically and socially—
bigger
was better, and
more
far preferable to less. The laws that supported competition in the marketplace he attacked as stifling to the larger agenda of industrial growth from which would flow all manner of benefits for everyone—well, practically everyone. It was, after all, a Darwinian world and, like it or not, the fittest would always survive. The drums went bang and the cymbals clanged and the financial manipulators found a champion, a legal
scholar
who lent respectability to their righteous dreams of merger and consolidation; buy out, take over and sell off, all for the good of the many, of course.

Randolph Gates was summoned, and he ran into their arms with alacrity, stunning one courtroom after another with his elocutionary gymnastics. He had made it, but Edith Gates was not sure what it all meant. She had envisioned a comfortable living, naturally, but not millions, not the private jets flying all over the world, from Palm Springs to the South of France. Nor was she comfortable when her husband’s articles and lectures were used to support causes that struck her as unrelated or patently unfair; he waved her arguments aside, stating that the cases in point were legitimate intellectual parallels. Above everything, she had not shared a bed or a bedroom with her husband in over six years.

She walked into the study, abruptly stopping as he gasped, swerving his head around, his eyes glazed and filled with alarm.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You always knock. Why didn’t you knock? You know how it is when I’m concentrating.”

“I said I’m sorry. Something’s on my mind and I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s a contradiction.”

“Thinking about knocking, I mean.”

“What’s on your
mind
,” asked the celebrated attorney as if he doubted his wife had one.

“Please don’t be clever with me.”

“What
is
it, Edith?”

“Where were you last night?”

Gates arched his brows in mock surprise. “My God, are you suspicious? I told you where I was. At the Ritz. In conference with someone I knew years ago, someone I did not care to have at my house. If, at your age, you want confirmation, call the Ritz.”

Edith Gates was silent for a moment; she simply looked at her husband. “My dear,” she said, “I don’t give a damn if you had an assignation with the most voluptuous whore in the Combat Zone. Somebody would probably have to give her a few drinks to restore her confidence.”

“Not bad, bitch.”

“In that department you’re not exactly a stud, bastard.”

“Is there a point to this colloquy?”

“I think so. About an hour ago, just before you came home from your office, a man was at the door. Denise was doing the silver, so I answered it. I must say he looked impressive; his clothes were terribly expensive and his car was a black Porsche—”

“
And
?” broke in Gates, lurching forward in the chair, his eyes suddenly wide, rigid.

“He said to tell you that
le grand professeur
owed him twenty thousand dollars and ‘he’ wasn’t where he was supposed to be last night, which I assumed was the Ritz.”

“It wasn’t. Something came up. ... Oh, Christ, he doesn’t
understand
. What did you say?”

“I didn’t like his language or his attitude. I told him I hadn’t the vaguest idea where you were. He knew I was lying, but there wasn’t anything he could do.”

“Good. Lying’s something he knows about.”

“I can’t imagine that twenty thousand is such a problem for you—”

“It’s not the money, it’s the method of payment.”

“For what?”

“
Nothing
.”

“I believe that’s what you call a contradiction, Randy.”

“Shut up!”

The telephone rang. Gates lunged up from the chair and stared at it. He made no move to go to the desk; instead, he spoke in a guttural voice to his wife. “Whoever it is, you tell him I’m not here. ... I’m away, out of town—you don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Edith walked over to the phone. “It’s your very private line,” she said as she picked it up on the third ring. “The Gates residence,” began Edith, a ploy she had used for years; her friends knew who it was, others did not matter to her any longer. “Yes. ... Yes? I’m sorry, he’s away and we don’t know when he’ll return.” Gates’s wife looked briefly at the phone, then hung up. She turned to her husband. “That was the operator in Paris. ... It’s strange. Someone was calling you, but when I said you weren’t here, she didn’t even ask where you could be reached. She simply got off the line—very abruptly.”

“Oh, my
God
!” cried Gates, visibly shaken. “Something happened ... something’s gone wrong, someone
lied
!” With those enigmatic words the attorney whipped around, and raced across the room, fumbling in his trousers pocket. He reached a section of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves where the center of the chest-high shelf had been converted into a safe-like cupboard, a carved wooden door superimposed on the brown steel. In panic, as an afterthought stunned him further, he spun around and screamed at his wife. “Get
out
of here! Get out, get out, get
out
!”

Edith Gates walked slowly to the study door, where she turned to her husband and spoke quietly. “It all goes back to Paris, doesn’t it, Randy? Seven years ago in Paris.
That’s
where something happened, isn’t it? You came back a frightened man, a man with a pain you won’t share.”

“Get
out of here
!” shrieked the vaunted professor of law, his eyes wild.

Edith went out the door, closing it behind her but not releasing the knob, her hand twisted so the latch would not close. Moments later she opened it barely a few inches and watched her husband.

The shock was beyond anything she could imagine. The man she had lived with for thirty-three years, the legal giant who neither smoked nor drank a drop of alcohol, was plunging a hypodermic needle into his forearm.

Darkness had descended on Manassas, the countryside alive with nocturnal undercurrents, as Bourne crept through the woods bordering the “farm” of General Norman Swayne. Startled birds fluttered out of their black recesses; crows awoke in the trees and cawed their alarms, then, as if calmed by a foraging co-conspirator, kept silent.

He reached it, wondering, if indeed
it
would be there. A fence—high, with thick crisscrossing links embedded in green plastic, a coiled-barbed-wire addition above slanting outward. Entry prohibited.
Beijing. The Jing Shan Sanctuary
. There had been things to conceal within that Oriental wildlife preserve, so it was protected by an all but impassable government barrier. But why would a desk-bound general on military pay erect such a barricade around a “farm” in Manassas, Virginia, an obstruction costing thousands of dollars? It was not designed to fence in livestock; it was, instead, built to keep out human life.

As with the sanctuary in China, there would be no electric alarms threaded through the links, for the animals and the birds of the forest would set them off repeatedly. Nor would there be the unseen beams of trip lights for the same reason; instead, they would be on the flat ground nearer the house, and waist-high, if they existed. Bourne pulled the small wire cutters out of his rear pocket and started with the links at earth level.

With each scissoring cut, he again understood the obvious, the inevitable, confirmed by his heavy breathing and the sweat that had formed on his hairline. No matter how hard he tried—not fanatically but at least assiduously—to keep himself in reasonably good shape, he was now fifty and his body knew it. Again, it was something to think about, not dwell upon, and with every inch of progress not think about at all. There were Marie and the children, his
family
; there was nothing he could not do as long as he willed it. David Webb was gone from his psyche, only the predator Jason Bourne remained.

He was through
! The parallel vertical links were cut, the ground wires as well. He gripped the fence and pulled the opening toward him, making each half foot of space an ordeal. He crawled inside this strangely fortified acreage and stood up, listening, his eyes darting in every direction, scanning the darkness—which was not complete darkness. He saw—filtered through the thick branches of the tall overlapping pines bordering the tamed grounds—flickerings of light coming from the large house. Slowly, he made his way toward what he knew was the circular drive. He reached the outer border of the asphalt and lay prone beneath a spreading pine, gathering his thoughts and his breath as he studied the scene in front of him. Suddenly there was a flash of light on his far right, deep inside the grounds at the end of a straight graveled road that branched off from the circular drive.

A door had been opened; it belonged to what appeared to be a small house or a large cabin and it remained open. Two men and a woman came out and were talking ... no, they were not just talking, they were arguing heatedly. Bourne ripped the short powerful binoculars out of their Velcro recess and put them up to his eyes. Quickly he focused on the trio, whose voices grew in volume, the words indistinguishable but the anger apparent. As the blurred image sharpened, he studied the three people, knowing instantly that the medium-sized, medium-built, ramrod-straight protesting man on the left was the Pentagon’s General Swayne, and the large-breasted woman with streaked dark hair his wife, but what struck him—and fascinated him—was the hulking overweight figure nearest the open door. He
knew
him! Jason could not remember from where or when, which was certainly not unusual, but his visceral reaction to the sight of the man was
not
usual. It was one of instant loathing and he did not know why, since no connection with anything in the past came to him. Only feelings of disgust and revulsion. Where were the images, the brief flashes of time or circumstance that so often illuminated his inner screen? They did not come; he only knew that the man he focused on in the binoculars was his enemy.

Then that huge man did an extraordinary thing. He reached for Swayne’s wife, throwing his large left arm protectively around her shoulders, his right hand accusingly jabbing the space between him and the general. Whatever he said—or yelled—caused Swayne to react with what seemed to be stoic resolve mixed with feigned indifference. He turned around, and in military fashion strode back across the lawn toward a rear entrance to the house. Bourne lost him in the darkness and swung back to the couple in the light of the door. The large obese man released the general’s wife and spoke to her. She nodded, brushed her lips against his, and ran after her husband. The obvious consort walked back into the small house and slammed the door shut, removing the light.

Jason reattached the binoculars to his trousers and tried to understand what he had observed. It had been like watching a silent movie minus the subtitles, the gestures far more real and without exaggerated theatricality. That there was in the confines of this fenced acreage a
m
é
nage à trois
was obvious, but this could hardly explain the fence. There was another reason, a reason he had to learn.

Further, instinct told him that whatever it was, was linked to the huge overweight man who had walked angrily back into the small house. He had to reach that house; he had to reach that man who had been a part of his forgotten past. He slowly got to his feet, and ducking from one pine to the next, he made his way to the end of the circular drive, and then continued down the tree-lined border of the narrow graveled road.

He stopped, lurching to the ground at a sudden sound that was no part of the murmuring woods. Somewhere wheels were spinning, crushing stone and displacing it; he rolled over and over into the dark recesses of the low-hanging, wide-spreading branches of a pine tree, swinging his body around to locate the disturbance.