The Bourne ultimatum (42 page)

These days, however, with postalcoholic vacuum and various other impediments, such as high cholesterol and dumb little triglycerides, whatever the hell
they
were, he had to come up with a different solution. It came about by accident. One morning during the Iran-contra hearings, which he found to be the finest hours of comedy on television, his set blew out. He was furious, so he turned on his portable radio, an instrument he had not used in months or perhaps years, as the television set had a built-in radio component—also inoperable at the time—but the portable radio’s batteries had long since melted into white slime. His artificial foot in pain, he walked to his kitchen telephone, knowing that a call to his television repairman, for whom he had done several favors, would bring the man running to his emergency. Unfortunately, the call only brought forth a hostile diatribe from the repairman’s wife, who screamed that her husband, the “customerfucker,” had run off with a “horny rich black bitch from Embassy Row!” (Zaire, as it later turned out in the Puerta Vallarta papers.) Conklin, in progressive apoplexy, had rushed to the kitchen sink, where his stress and blood pressure pills stood on the windowsill above the sink, and turned on the cold water. The faucet exploded, surging out of its recess into the ceiling as a powerful gush of water inundated his entire head.
Caramba
! The shock calmed him down, and he remembered that the Cable Network was scheduled to rebroadcast the hearings in full that evening. A happy man, he called the plumber and went out and bought a new television set.

So, since that morning, whenever his own furies or the state of the world disturbed him—the world he knew—he lowered his head in a kitchen sink and let the cold water pour over his head. He had done so this morning. This goddamned, fucked-up morning!

DeSole!
Killed
in an accident on a deserted country road in Maryland at 4:30 that morning. What the hell was Steven DeSole, a man whose driver’s license clearly stated that he was afflicted with night blindness, doing on a backcountry road outside Annapolis at 4:30 in the morning? And then Charlie Casset, a very angry Casset, calling him at six o’clock, yelling his usually cool head off, telling Alex he was going to put the commander of NATO on the goddamned spit and demand an explanation for the buried fax connection between the general and the dead chief of clandestine reports, who was not a victim of an accident but of murder! Furthermore, one retired field officer named Conklin had better damned well come clean with everything he knew about DeSole and Brussels and related matters, or all bets were off where said retired field agent and his elusive friend Jason Bourne were concerned. Noon at the latest! And
then
, Ivan Jax! The brilliant black doctor from Jamaica phoned, telling him he wanted to put Norman Swayne’s body back where he had found it because he did not want to be loused up by another Agency fiasco. But it was
not
Agency, cried Conklin to himself, unable to explain to Ivan Jax the real reason he had asked for his help.
Medusa
. And Jax could
not
simply drive the corpse back to Manassas because the police, on federal orders—the orders of one retired field agent using appropriated codes he was not entitled to use—had sealed off General Norman Swayne’s estate without explanation.

“What do I do with the
body
?” Jax had yelled.

“Keep it cold for a while, Cactus would want it that way.”

“
Cactus
? I’ve been with him at the hospital all night. He’s going to be okay, but he doesn’t know what the hell is going on any more than
I
do!”

“We in the clandestine services can’t always explain things,” Alex said, wincing as he spoke the ridiculous words. “I’ll call you back.”

So he had gone into the kitchen and put his head under a spray of cold water. What else could go wrong? And naturally the telephone rang.

“Dunkin’ Donuts,” said Conklin, the phone to his ear.

“Get me
out
of here,” said Jason Bourne, not a trace of David Webb in his voice. “To
Paris
!”

“What happened?”

“He got away, that’s what happened, and I have to get to Paris under a cover, no immigration, no customs. He’s got them all wired and I can’t give him the chance to track me. ... Alex, are you
listening
to me?”

“DeSole was killed last night, killed in an accident that was no accident at four o’clock in the morning. Medusa’s closing in.”

“I don’t give a
damn
about Medusa! For me it’s history; we made a wrong turn. I want the Jackal and I’ve got a place to start. I can find him,
take
him!”

“Leaving me with Medusa ...”

“You said you wanted to go higher—you said you’d only give me forty-eight hours until you did. Shove the clock ahead. The forty-eight hours are over, so
go
higher, just get me out of here and over to Paris.”

“They’ll want to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“Peter Holland, Casset, whoever else they bring in ... the attorney general, Christ, the President himself.”

“About
what
?”

“You spoke at length with Armbruster, with Swayne’s wife and that sergeant, Flannagan. I didn’t. I just used a few code words that triggered responses from Armbruster and Ambassador Atkinson in London, nothing substantive. You’ve got the fuller picture firsthand. I’m too deniable. They’ll have to talk to you.”

“And put the Jackal on a back
burner
?”

“Just for a day, two at the most.”

“Goddamn it,
no
. Because it doesn’t work that way and you know it! Once I’m back there I’m their only material witness, shunted from one closed interrogation to another; and if I refuse to cooperate, I’m in custody. No
way
, Alex. I’ve got only one priority and he’s in Paris!”

“Listen to me,” said Conklin. “There are some things I can control, others I can’t. We needed Charlie Casset and he helped us, but he’s not someone you can con, nor would I want to. He knows DeSole’s death was no accident—a man with night blindness doesn’t take a five-hour drive at four o’clock in the morning—and he also knows that
we
know a lot more about DeSole and Brussels than we’re telling him. If we want the Agency’s help, and we need it for things like getting you on a military or a diplomatic flight into France, and God knows what else when you’re there, I can’t ignore Casset. He’ll step on us and by his lights, he should.”

Bourne was silent; only his breathing was heard. “All right,” he said. “I see where we’re at. You tell Casset that if he gives us whatever we ask for now, we’ll give him—no,
I’ll
give him; keep yourself cleaner than me—enough information for the Department of Justice to go after some of the biggest fish in the government, assuming Justice isn’t part of Snake Lady. ... You might add that’ll include the location of a cemetery that might prove enlightening.”

It was Conklin’s turn to be silent for a moment. “He may want more than that, considering your current pursuits.”

“Oh ... ? Oh, I see. In case I lose. Okay, add that when I get to Paris I’ll hire a stenographer and dictate everything I know, everything I’ve learned, and send it to
you
. I’ll trust Saint Alex to carry it from there. Maybe a page or two at a time to keep them cooperative.”

“I’ll handle that part. ... Now Paris, or close by. From what I recall, Montserrat’s near Dominica and Martinique, isn’t it?”

“Less than an hour to each, and Johnny knows every pilot on the big island.”

“Martinique’s French, we’ll go with that. I know people in the Deuxième Bureau. Get down there and call me from the airport terminal. I’ll have made the arrangements by then.”

“Will do. ... There’s a last item, Alex. Marie. She and the children will be back here this afternoon. Call her and tell her I’m covered with all the firepower in Paris.”

“You lying son of a bitch—”

“
Do
it!”

“Of course I will. On that score and not lying, if I live through the day, I’m having dinner with Mo Panov at his place tonight. He’s a terrible cook, but he thinks he’s the Jewish Julia Child. I’d like to bring him up to date; he’ll go crazy if I don’t.”

“Sure. Without him we’d both be in padded cells chewing rawhide.”

“Talk to you later. Good luck.”

The next day at 10:25 in the morning, Washington time, Dr. Morris Panov, accompanied by his guard, walked out of Walter Reed Hospital after a psychiatric session with a retired army lieutenant suffering from the aftereffects of a training exercise in Georgia that took the lives of twenty-odd recruits under his command eight weeks before. There was not much Mo could do; the man was guilty of competitive overachievement, military style, and had to live with his guilt. The fact that he was a financially privileged black and a graduate of West Point did not help. Most of the twenty dead recruits were also black and they had been underprivileged.

Panov, muddling over the available options with his patient, looked at his guard, suddenly startled. “You’re a new man, aren’t you? I mean, I thought I knew all of you.”

“Yes, sir. We’re often reassigned on short notice, keeps all of us on our toes.”

“Habit-oriented anticipation—it can lull anybody.” The psychiatrist continued across the pavement to where his armor-plated car was usually waiting for him. It was a different vehicle. “This isn’t my car,” he said, bewildered.

“Get in,” ordered his guard, politely opening the door.

“What?” A pair of hands from inside the car grabbed him and a uniformed man pulled him into the backseat as the guard followed, sandwiching Panov between them. The two men held the psychiatrist as the one who had been inside yanked Mo’s seersucker jacket off his shoulder and shoved up the short sleeve of his summer shirt. He plunged a hypodermic needle into Panov’s arm.

“Good night, Doctor,” said the soldier with the insignia of the Medical Corps on the lapels of his uniform. “Call New York,” he added.

The Air France 747 from Martinique circled Orly Airport in the early evening haze over Paris; it was five hours and twenty-two minutes behind schedule because of the severe weather patterns in the Caribbean. As the pilot entered his final approach the flight officer acknowledged their clearance to the tower, then switched to his prescribed sterile frequency and sent a last message in French to an off limits communications room.

“Deuxi
è
me, special cargo. Please instruct your interested party to go to his designated holding area. Thank you. Out.”

“Instructions received and relayed” was the terse reply. “Out.”

The special cargo in question sat in the left rear bulkhead seat in the first-class section of the aircraft; the seat beside him was unoccupied, on orders of the Deuxième Bureau in cooperation with Washington. Impatient, annoyed and unable to sleep because of the constricting bandage around his neck, Bourne, close to exhaustion, reflected on the events of the past nineteen hours. To put it mildly, they had not gone as smoothly as Conklin had anticipated. The Deuxième had balked for over six hours as phone calls went back and forth feverishly between Washington, Paris And, finally, Vienna, Virginia. The stumbling block, and it was more of a hard rock, was the CIA’s inability to spell out the covert operation in terms of one Jason Bourne, for only Alexander Conklin could release the name and he refused to do so, knowing that the Jackal’s penetrations in Paris extended to just about everywhere but the kitchens of the Tour d’Argent. Finally, in desperation and realizing it was lunchtime in Paris, Alex placed ordinary, unsafe overseas telephone calls to several cafés on the Rive Gauche, finding an old Deuxième acquaintance at one on the rue de Vaugirard.

“Do you remember the tinamou and an American somewhat younger than he is now who made things a little simpler for you?”

“Ah, the tinamou, the bird with hidden wings and ferocious legs! They were such better days, younger days. And if the somewhat older American was at the time given the status of a saint, I shall never forget him.”

“Don’t now, I need you.”

“It
is
you, Alexander?”

“It is and I’ve got a problem with D. Bureau.”

“It is solved.”

And it was, but the weather was insoluble. The storm that had battered the central Leeward Islands two nights before was only a prelude to the torrential rain and winds that swept up from the Grenadines, with another storm behind it. The islands were entering the hurricane season, so the weather was not astonishing, it was merely a delaying factor. Finally, when clearance for takeoff was around the chronological corner, it was discovered that there was a malfunction in the far starboard engine; no one argued while the problem was traced, found and repaired. The elapsed time, however, was an additional three hours.

Except for the churning of his mind, the flight itself was uneventful for Jason; only his guilt interfered with his thoughts of what was before him—Paris, Argenteuil, a café with the pro vocative name of Le Coeur du Soldat, The Soldier’s Heart. The guilt was most painful on the short flight from Montserrat to Martinique when they passed over Guadeloupe and the island of Basse-Terre. He knew that only a few thousand feet below were Marie and his children, preparing to fly back to Tranquility Isle, to the husband and father who would not be there. His infant daughter, Alison, would, of course, know nothing, but Jamie would; his wide eyes would grow larger and cloud over as words tumbled out about fishing and swimming ... and Marie—
Christ
, I can’t think about her! It hurts too much!

She’d think he had betrayed her, run away to seek a violent confrontation with an enemy from long ago in another far-off life that was no longer
their
life. She would think like old Fontaine, who had tried to persuade him to take his family thousands of miles away from where the Jackal prowled, but neither of them understood. The aging Carlos might die, but on his deathbed he would leave a legacy, a bequest that would hinge on the mandatory death of Jason Bourne—David Webb and his family.
I’m right, Marie! Try to understand me. I have to find him, I have to kill him! We can’t live in our personal prison for the rest of our lives!