The Bourne ultimatum (88 page)

“
Certainly
I was!” shouted the Jackal. “What you don’t understand is that I have extraordinary
control
. It’s why I’m trusted,
needed
by the leaders of world Marxism!”

“That’s not even fashionable,” mumbled the middle-aged, grayish-blond woman whose expertise was in personnel files; she also stood up.

“What are you
saying
?” Carlos’s voice was now a harsh, condemning whisper, rising rapidly in intensity and volume. “I am the monseigneur from Paris. I have made your lives comfortable far beyond your miserable expectations and now you
question
me? How would I know the things I know—how could I have poured my concentration and my resources into you here in this room if I were not among the most privileged in
Moscow
? Remember who I
am
!”

“But we don’t know who you are,” said another man, rising. Like the other males, his clothes were neat, somber and well pressed, but there was a difference in that they were better tailored, as though he took considerable pains with his appearance. His face, too, was different; it was paler than the others and his eyes were more intense, more focused somehow, giving the impression that when he spoke he weighed his words with great care. “Beyond the clerical title you’ve appropriated, we have no knowledge as to your identity and you obviously do not care to reveal it. As to what you know, you’ve recounted blatant weaknesses and subsequent injustices in our departmental systems, but they are rampant throughout the ministries. You might as well have picked a dozen others like us from a dozen other divisions, and I dare say the complaints would have been the same. Nothing new there—”

“How
dare
you?” screamed Carlos the Jackal, the veins in his neck pronounced. “Who are you to say such things to
me
? I am the monseigneur from Paris, a true son of the Revolution!”

“And I am a judge advocate in the Ministry of Legal Procedures, Comrade Monseigneur, and a much younger product of that revolution. I may not know the heads of the KGB, who you claim are your minions, but I know the penalties for taking the legal processes in our own hands and personally—secretly—confronting our superiors rather than reporting directly to the Bureau of Irregularities. They are penalties I’d rather not face without far more thorough evidentiary materials than unsolicited dossiers from unknown sources, conceivably invented by discontented officials below even our levels. ... Frankly, I don’t care to see them, for I will not be compromised by gratuitous pretrial testimony that can be injurious to my position.”

“You are an insignificant
lawyer
!” roared the assassin in priest’s clothing, now repeatedly clenching his hands into fists, his eyes becoming bloodshot. “You are all twisters of the truth! You are sworn companions of the prevailing winds of
convenience
!”

“Nicely said,” said the attorney from Legal Procedures, smiling. “Except, comrade, you stole the phrase from the English Blackstone.”

“I will not
tolerate
your insufferable insolence!”

“You don’t have to, Comrade
Priest
, for I intend to leave, and my legal advice to all here in this room is to do the same.”

“You
dare
?”

“I certainly do,” replied the Soviet attorney, granting himself a moment of humor as he looked around the gathering and grinned. “I might have to prosecute myself, and I’m far too good at my job.”

“The
money
!” shrieked the Jackal. “I’ve sent you all
thousands
!”

“Where is it recorded?” asked the lawyer with an air of innocence. “You, yourself, made sure it was untraceable. Paper bags in our mail slots, or in our office drawers—notes attached instructing us to burn them. Who among our citizens would admit to having placed them there? That way lies the Lubyanka. ... Good-bye, Comrade Monseigneur,” said the attorney for the Ministry of Legal Procedures, scraping his chair in place and starting for the door.

One by one, as they had arrived, the assembled group followed the lawyer, each looking back at the strange man who had so exotically, so briefly, interrupted their tedious lives, all knowing instinctively that in his path were disgrace and execution. Death.

Yet none was prepared for what followed. The killer in priest’s clothing suddenly snapped; visceral bolts of lightning electrified his madness. His dark eyes burned with a raging fire that could be extinguished only by soul-satisfying violence—relentless, brutal, savage vengeance for all the wrongs done to his pure purpose to kill the unbelievers! The Jackal swept away the dossiers from the table and lurched down to the pile of newspapers; he grabbed the deadly automatic weapon from beneath the scattered pages and roared, “
Stop
!
All
of you!”

None did, and the outer regions of psychopathic energy became the order of the moment. The killer squeezed the trigger repeatedly and men and women died. Amid screams from the shattered bodies nearest the door, the assassin raced outside, leaping over the corpses, his assault rifle on automatic fire, cutting down the figures in the street, screaming curses, condemning the unbelievers to a hell only he could imagine.

“Traitors! Filth!
Garbage
!” screamed the crazed Jackal as he leaped over the dead bodies, racing to the car he had commandeered from the Komitet and its inadequate surveillance unit. The night had ended; the morning had begun.

The Metropole’s telephone did not ring, it erupted. Startled, Alex Conklin snapped open his eyes, instantly shaking the sleep from his head as he clawed for the strident instrument on the bedside table. “Yes?” he announced, wondering briefly if he was speaking into the conically shaped mouthpiece or into the receiver.

“Aleksei, stay put! Admit no one into your rooms and have your weapons ready!”

“Krupkin? ... What the hell are you talking about.”

“A crazed dog is loose in Moscow.”

“
Carlos
?”

“He’s gone completely mad. He killed Rodchenko and butchered the two agents who were following him. A farmer found their bodies around four o’clock this morning—it seems the dogs woke him up with their barking, downwind of the blood scents, I imagine.”

“Christ, he’s gone over the edge. ... But why do you think—”

“One of our agents was tortured before being killed,” broke in the KGB officer, fully anticipating Alex’s question. “He was our driver from the airport, a protégé of mine and the son of a classmate I roomed with at the university. A fine young man from a rational family but not trained for what he was put through.”

“You’re saying you think he may have told Carlos about us, aren’t you?”

“Yes. ... There’s more, however. Approximately an hour ago in the Vavilova, eight people were cut down by automatic fire. They were slaughtered; it was a massacre. One of the dying, a woman with the Ministry of Information, a
direktor
, second class, and a television journalist, said the killer was a priest from Paris who called himself the ‘monseigneur.’ ”

“
Jesus
!” exploded Conklin, whipping his legs over the edge of the bed, absently staring at the stump of flesh where once there had been a foot. “It was his cadre.”

“So called and past tense,” said Krupkin. “If you remember, I told you such recruits would abandon him at the first sign of peril.”

“I’ll get Jason—”

“
Aleksei
, listen to me!”

“What?” Conklin cupped the telephone under his chin as he reached down for the hollowed—out prosthetic boot.

“We’ve formed a tactical assault squad, men and women in civilian clothes—they’re being given instructions now and will be there shortly.”

“Good move.”

“But we have purposely
not
alerted the hotel staff or the police.”

“You’d be idiots if you did,” broke in Alex. “We’ll settle for taking the son of a bitch here! We’d never do it with uniforms prowling around or clerks in hysterics. The Jackal has eyes in his kneecaps.”

“Do as I say,” ordered the Soviet. “Admit no one, stay away from the windows and take all precautions.”

“Naturally. ... What do you mean, the windows? He’ll need time to find out where we are ... to question the maids, the stewards.”

“Forgive me, old friend,” interrupted Krupkin, “but an angelic priest inquiring at the desk about two Americans, one with a pronounced limp, during the early morning rush in the lobby?”

“Good point, even if you’re paranoid.”

“You’re on a high floor, and directly across the Marx Prospekt is the roof of an office building.”

“You also think pretty fast.”

“Certainly faster than that fool in Dzerzhinsky. I would have reached you long before now, but my commissar
Kartoshki
over there didn’t call
me
until two minutes ago.”

“I’ll wake up Bourne.”

“Be
careful
.”

Conklin did not hear the Soviet’s final admonition. Instead, he swiftly replaced the telephone and pulled on his boot, carelessly lashing the Velcro straps around his calf. He then opened the bedside table drawer and took out the Graz Burya automatic, a specially designed KGB weapon with three clips of ammunition. The Graz, as it was commonly known, was unique insofar as it was the only automatic known that would accept a silencer. The cylindrical instrument had rolled to the front of the drawer; he removed it and spun it into the short barrel. Unsteadily, he got into his trousers, shoved the weapon into his belt and crossed to the door. He opened it and limped out only to find Jason, fully dressed, standing in front of a window in the ornate Victorian sitting room.

“That had to be Krupkin,” said Bourne.

“It was. Get away from the window.”

“
Carlos
?” Bourne instantly stepped back and turned to Alex. “He knows we’re in Moscow?” he asked. Then added, “He knows where we
are
?”

“The odds are yes to both questions.” In short concise statements, Conklin related Krupkin’s information. “Does all this tell you something?” asked Alex when he had finished.

“He’s blown apart,” answered Jason quietly. “It had to happen. The time bomb in his head finally went off.”

“That’s what I think. His Moscow cadre turned out to be a myth. They probably told him to pound sand and he exploded.”

“I regret the loss of life and I mean that,” said Bourne. “I wish it could have happened another way, but I can’t regret his state of mind. What’s happened to him is what he wanted for me—to crack wide open.”

“Kruppie said it,” added Conklin. “He’s got a psychopathic death wish to return to the people who first found out he was a maniac. Now, if he knows you’re here, and we have to assume that he does, the obsession’s compounded, your death replacing his—giving him some kind of symbolic triumph maybe.”

“You’ve been talking to Panov too much. ... I wonder how Mo is.”

“Don’t. I called the hospital at three o’clock this morning—five o’clock, Paris time. He may lose the use of his left arm and suffer partial paralysis of his right leg, but they think he’ll make it now.”

“I don’t give a goddamn about his arms or his legs. What about his
head
?”

“Apparently it’s intact. The chief nurse on the floor said that for a doctor he’s a terrible patient.”

“Thank
Christ
!”

“I thought you were an agnostic.”

“It’s a symbolic phrase, check with Mo.” Bourne noticed the gun in Alex’s belt; he gestured at the weapon. “That’s a little obvious, isn’t it?”

“For whom?”

“Room service,” replied Jason. “I phoned for whatever gruel they’ve got and a large pot of coffee.”

“No way. Krupkin said we don’t let anyone in here and I gave him my word.”

“That’s a crock of paranoia—”

“Almost my words, but this is his turf, not ours. Just like the windows.”

“
Wait
a minute!” exclaimed Bourne. “Suppose he
is
right?”

“Unlikely, but possible, except that—” Conklin could not finish his statement. Jason reached under the right rear flap of his jacket, yanked out his own Graz Burya and started for the hallway door of the suite. “What are you
doing
?” cried Alex.

“Probably giving your friend ‘Kruppie’ more credit than he deserves, but it’s worth a try. ... Get over there,” ordered Bourne, pointing to the far left corner of the room. “I’ll leave the door unlocked, and when the steward gets here, tell him to come in—in Russian.”

“What about you?”

“There’s an ice machine down the hall; it doesn’t work, but it’s in a cubicle along with a Pepsi machine. That doesn’t work either, but I’ll slip inside.”

“Thank God for capitalists, no matter how misguided. Go
on
!”

The Medusan once known as Delta unlatched the door, opened it, glanced up and down the Metropole’s corridor and rushed outside. He raced down the hallway to the cut-out alcove that housed the two convenience machines and crouched by the right interior wall. He waited, his knees and legs aching—pains he never
felt
only years ago—and then he heard the sounds of rolling wheels. They grew louder and louder as the cart draped with a tablecloth passed and proceeded to the door of the suite. He studied the floor steward; he was a young man in his twenties, blond, short of stature, and with the posture of an obsequious servant; cautiously he knocked on the door. No Carlos he, thought Bourne, getting painfully to his feet. He could hear Conklin’s muffled voice telling the steward to enter; and as the young man opened the door, shoving the table inside, Jason calmly inserted his weapon into its concealed place. He bent over and massaged his right calf, he could feel the swelling cluster of a muscle cramp.

It happened with the impact of a single furious wave against a shoal of rock. A figure in black lurched out of an unseen recess in the corridor, racing past the machines. Bourne spun back into the wall. It was the
Jackal
!

Madness
! At full force Carlos slammed his right shoulder into the blond-haired waiter, propelling the young man across the hallway and crashing the room-service table over on its side; dishes and food splattered the walls and the carpeted floor. Suddenly the waiter lunged to his left, spinning in midair as, astonishingly, he yanked a weapon from his belt. The Jackal either sensed or caught the movement in the corner of his eye. He whipped around, his automatic weapon on rapid fire, savagely pinning the blond Russian into the wall, bullets puncturing the waiter’s head and torso. At that prolonged, horrible moment, the enlarged sight line on the barrel of Bourne’s Graz Burya caught in the waistline of his trousers. He tore the fabric as the eyes of Carlos swept up centering on his own, fury and triumph in the assassin’s stare.